User Profile

RP journal played by napkins for avoria_academy

Your Name (Or what you tend to go by): Chira or Kuroi
Personal LJ: crazy_kuroi
AIM, MSN, Y!M, or E-mail address: (whoo my AIM actually works these days!) kuroi rps or slytherclawgirl, and archergirl14@hotmail.com for MSN. Email tis is wings.of.darkness2@gmail.com
Character's full name (western style): Megumi Noda/Nodame (her name only makes sense in Japanese order whut)
Your character's series: Nodame Cantabile
What your character is going to be (ie. student, citizen--if student, what high school year/college status): Citizen
IN-DEPTH Background/personality info on your character, as well as any character development that occurs during the series (Include any changes to fit into the Avoria world~):

Ever have those music lessons as a little kid that your parents forced you into? Ever been good at them? Like extremely good? There are a lot of people like that.

Nodame was not one of them. In her hometown in the Fukuoka prefecture, she took the obligatory piano lessons, and was taught by a rather famous but demanding teacher. The teacher was very strict and stuck by the rules, while Nodame, who was very free-spirited and just short of uncontrollable, refused to play. So the teacher told her to "go abroad". Having no idea what that meant, Nodame then started taking lessons from another teacher with two other kids. The teacher was very young and inexperienced at teaching, so was not very strict with them. Because of this, Nodame fooled around a lot, choosing to nap or make up songs about cat poo than touch the piano at all for three months. One day, the teacher, incredibly frustrated with her students (you would be too if all one did was bring in cat poo, the other yelled and banged at the keys, and the last cried every time she messed up), broke down and cried. After the teacher fell asleep, Nodame, feeling slightly sorry, started to play the piece their teacher always played for them, Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. And lo-and-behold, Nodame is able to play a song that should be far, far beyond the level of someone who has never taken piano seriously, perfectly. And thus her talent for playing things completely by ear and in entirely her own style is known.

Flash forward about fifteen years. Nodame is a piano student at a music college in Tokyo, but still does not take piano very seriously. She studies under Tanioka, who has a reputation for taking drop-out students. She spends all her time composing the "Moja Moja Class Songs", for her future as a preschool teacher, and none of it practicing seriously. She has, of course, retained her incredibly ear, so she's still able to play any piece she's heard. However, she plays everything in a cantabile style, which is very free-flowing and dependent on the player's whim. Thus we end up with sloppy Shuberts and pink Mozarts and haphazard Beethovens.

Then, one day, Nodame sees a gorgeous young man slumped over drunk outside her apartment. So, of course, she drags him inside of her own apartment and lets him sleep there. The young man is Shinichi Chiaki, piano prodigy extrodinaire, and the love of Nodame's life. She falls instantly head-over-heels for him. Of course, he sees her as a weirdo girl who lives in the midst of garbage and filth (she doesn't take out the trash and takes showers/baths quite infrequently). In the morning, when Chiaki wakes up and freaks out (I mean, who wouldn't, waking up surrounded by garbage bags), he runs outside and finds out that Nodame lives right next to him. And so their romance is set into motion.

Nodame often barges into Chiaki's apartment to take advantage of his excellent cooking skills, as she has none (her idea of a meal is charcoal-looking fish with mayonnaise spread on top). She also takes sort-of piano lessons from him, as he has become Tanioka's newest student; a fact which Chiaki is rather irked about. He tries to teach her to play more within the bounds of the music, while she teaches him to play more out-of-bounds, which is especially useful, as what he really wants to do is conduct.

Nodame will literally do anything for Chiaki, including dress in summer clothes in the middle of winter, simply because she thinks it makes her look sexy, and that Chiaki will notice her more. (Of course, it works, but completely in reverse, because she comes down with a cold, and he has to take her place accompanying Mine) She also participates in a bet with Masumi, a percussionist who is madly in love with Chiaki, under the terms that whomever can get Chiaki to go out with them for Christmas will win and the other must give up. (backfiring and neither winning of course occurs) Soon, Nodame has wormed her way into Chiaki's life, and he doesn't really think twice about her falling asleep in his apartment, or her antics around him.

And along comes Streseman, aka Milch. A famous conductor from Germany, he instantly latches onto Nodame. Or maybe it's the other way around. Of course, no one knows he's a famous conductor until after the two have become best friends (Nodame just kinda picks up everyone, from drunk guys outside her apartment to random hobo-ish people wandering the street), and she's determined to call him Milch, and he call her Nodame-chan (complete with hearts at the end). Streseman takes Chiaki as his pupil in conducting, which is completely unheard of for him, as he's infamous for being flaky, and more than a little perverted, as everyone learns first-hand.

Nevertheless, Chiaki learns to conduct, and Nodame is there every step of the way, whether it to be just simply cheering the S-orchestra on from the back of the auditorium, making onigiri for Chiaki, or being the S-orchestra mascot. Chiaki's progress as a conductor, combined with the piano concerto he performed with Streseman, motivates her to want to become a better pianist.

Nodame is always there for Chiaki to mess his life up in some way, or at the very least, make sure it isn't dull. As Chiaki graduates from music school and Nodame becomes a 4th year student, he forms his own orchestra, along with others. Nodame becomes a student of Harisen (whose real name escapes me), Chiaki's former teacher, infamous for carrying a paper harisen with which he hits students when they don't perform according to his directions. And so Nodame starts to receive proper piano instruction.

As the Rising Star Orchestra (the orchestra Chiaki started and conducts) becomes more and more famous, Chiaki's desire/need to go study abroad becomes more prominent. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that due to a plane accident, Chiaki is near-deathly afraid of airplanes and ships. He's afraid of being in water, being in the air, afraid of heights, yeah. So Nodame takes things into her own hands, as she has decided that he needs to get over it. She also realizes that there's only so far that he can go if he can't go to Europe, where basically all the famous people are. So, true to her own style of doing things, she hypnotizes him. And basically cures him of his fear of flying.

Chiaki flies to Hokkaido, under much stress and freaking out (not to mention clinging to his cousin, who may never regain the use of his arm), and Nodame starts living at Harisen's house in order to take intensive lessons so as to be able to compete in a piano competition. The main prize for this competition is $20,000 and a scholarship to study abroad. She's doing this for Chiaki, of course. After much stress, delivery of crabs (courtesy of Chiaki, who was hypnotized into doing so by Nodame :D), and escape attempts, Nodame actually makes it to the final rounds of the piano competition. Although her style is often haphazard and twists the meaning of the music, under the direction of both Chiaki and Harisen (mostly Chiaki, but Harisen, once she forced him to give up the use of the harisen helped a lot too), she learns to play more true to the written music, while still keeping the emotion-evoking sensation of her original style. Thus she's won the hearts of the audience and the judges at the competition.

But the competition wasn't over just yet. At the finals of the competition, Nodame is madly trying to memorize her third piece (they have to perform memorized pieces in each stage, one for the prelims, two for the semis, and three for the finals), and everyone is on edge because she's been having trouble getting it down. While she's rehearsing in air, another of the contestants approaches her. It turned out that once of the other finalists was one of her fellow classmates from piano lessons earlier in life. The boy is a little asshole, and a complete mama's boy (no seriously, she's like his other half, it's really freaky), and unfortunately, he knows just the right buttons to push to make Nodame fall apart. He reminds her of those lessons, where she was forced to play a certain style and hit if she didn't, and was basically told she had no ability to play. At the time, the insult was so great and jarring that she didn't touch the piano for almost two years. Almost a decade later, it's still a jarring enough memory to make her lose composure.

She performs the first two pieces of her entry perfectly, perfectly enough to have the audience give her a standing ovation after only her second piece. However, on the third piece, she forgets the music part-way through, as while she was practicing on the train to the center, a cell phone rang, and the melody embedded itself in the middle of the piece. She tries to work around it, but it is still changing her original piece, which is pretty much disqualification. Even worse, Chiaki was there, watching it.

After the contest, she leaves early (there was no first prize awarded, coughcoughhinthint), and runs into Chiaki, who congratulates her. Close to tears and still carrying the memory of her distressing piano lessons, she is closed and distant and denies that she ever had fun playing the piano. Chiaki invites her to come along with him to study abroad in Europe, which he had to gather up courage to say, oh my, but she refuses him, asking him what the point was if all people were going to do was tell her to play in a certain style a certain way and yell at her for playing it her own way. (still carrying memories from old piano lessons D:) She runs off, leaving Chiaki thoroughly confused.

She runs back to her home in Fukuoka, where she apparently hasn't been in two years. Her family is very surprised she doesn't play the piano at all while she's there (flashbacks/references to the earlier events) and wonder what happened. Meanwhile, back in Tokyo, Chiaki is wondering what the hell is going on, but ends up going down to Fukuoka to find her anyways. Meanwhile, Harisen is trying to get in touch with Nodame to tell her that she was recommended to a music graduate school in Paris.

After many tries, Chiaki finally gets a hold of Nodame via cell phone, and as he's talking to her (the taxi is driving to her hometown), he sees her outside the window and tells the taxi to stop. As he walks toward her, she tells him that she's decided to study abroad in France and that she wants to continue performing on the piano, as she wants to be able to perform with him as her conductor. He finally catches up with her and hugs her tightly. Of course, Nodame's father is on a boat on the river along which this takes place, so he yells at them. But all is well, and they head off to study abroad together in Paris. The manga covers them studying in Paris and their exploits out there, but I'll be taking Nodame from where the anime ends, which is basically there.

Nodame is incredibly odd, preferring to live in filth because she's too lazy/unobservant to pick up her trash. She's also invented a font for Chiaki's computer that is near-unreadable, and comes up with the strangest ideas. At one point in time, she also took to calling herself Chiaki's wife, which led to so much confusion. Of course, everyone already thought she was his girlfriend, an assumption to which he objects adamantly. She loves the show Puri Gorota, which is a children's show- she's slightly obsessed with it, as well as making everything seem cute, though her definition of cute is sometimes odd. The best word to describe her is eccentric.

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