Details

Personality

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Fumi is a cheerful young woman overflowing with positive energy. She's an optimist who does her best to cheer up others around her, even when she's not wanted. A natural born pacifist, she dislikes conflict and confrontation, doing her best to avoid it at all cost. Fumi is also seen as a people pleaser, trying to make sure everyone is comfortable and content in her presence even if it goes against her own wishes. She does her best to keep her problem to herself, and doesn’t like getting others involved with them. Her father often taught her that her problems are her own, and if she expects anyone else to deal with them then she’ll only end up hurting herself. Taking this lesson to heart, she does not ask for people to assist her, but is more than willing to give herself up to help someone else.

Although she appears to be in a constant state of happiness, she has a hard time dealing with her other emotions. Because of that, she tends to shove them down, allowing them to pile up inside her while hiding behind her overpowering optimism. However, no one is made up of a single emotion, and she knows this, yet, she refuses to acknowledge them and keeps them hidden which has made her sick on quite a few occasions and sparked numerous panic attacks. It has always been easier for her to bear through her problems with a smile opposed to dealing with it directly. She has a huge fear of rejection and, despite her positive demeanor, she suffers from anxiety of being alone.

Aesthetic

Summary

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Nothing was ever truly perfect. No matter how much time and effort one put into something, the fact that it was made by mortal hands had already stripped itself of the right to be perfect. This was only a simple truth that all animals understood on some fundamental level. It was something that most should understand. So why couldn’t he?

Fumi was raised by her father in an upper middle-class household. Her father, Bojing, was a successful businessman, working as the head sale’s specialist for her grandfather’s pharmaceutical company. The man didn’t know what it meant to take a break. If faced with the option of a full day's work or an all paid trip to a fancy hotel, Bojing didn’t hesitate to put on his suit and head into the office. If anything, he was a dedicated man who would give his life to his craft if he could. Though, the same couldn’t be said for his daughter. The child only knew her father by name, spending most of her time with her tutor, a young alpaca hand picked by her father to raise Fumi into the perfect child. Most days were spent isolated in her room with pencil and paper in hand, dealing with a barrage of questions from her tutor. When she wasn’t in her room, she was at ballet classes, practicing her posture, piano lessons, tea ceremony classes, gymnastics, and a host of other extracurricular activities that kept her exhausted. Like her father, Fumi wasn’t familiar with the concept of a break either, but unlike the former, she had no choice in the matter.

The only time she was able to meet her father was at night after he came home from work and she had finished all her assignments for the day. Though their conversation never amounted to much more than awkward hellos and questions about each other’s day. However, the only time her father did talk to her in depth were on two occasions: the results of her studies and her mother. Fumi didn’t know much about her mother outside of the fact that she wasn’t there. To Fumi, a mother was someone who was kind and sweet. When she was sad and lonely, a mother would always be there to cheer her up. If she did good, a mother would be the one to praise her and shower her with kisses and tell her “I love you”. A mother was everything her father wasn’t, and she hoped her mother would be the same. However, those dreams were crushed before they even had a chance blossom. The story went that her parents had settled for a divorce right after her birth, choosing to be with another man rather than her husband and newborn child. So her mother hadn’t wanted her at all. The fantasies she had made up in her head faded one by one, the realization that not even her mother wanted her tore her apart. This coupled with the stress of her overbearing schedule and her father’s unrealistic expectations for her caused her to take up eating as a coping mechanism. This continued and would only get worse during her middle and high school years.

As Fumi grew, so did her father’s need for perfection. Everything she did was monitored by him. The way she ate, how she carried herself around the house, and even how she left her shoes at the front door. To him, even her weight gain proved to be a problem, conflicting with his idea of perfection. Home felt much like a prison for her, and school didn’t fare any better. She attended one of the best private schools that money could buy. There, she was made to take rigorous courses and participate in extracurricular activities of her father’s choosing. A polite and optimistic person,, Fumi was never very competitive and did her best to avoid conflict if she could. Because of this, many took advantage of her. It all started off small initially. She would be asked to hand in a few assignments for other classmates, or help a group with homework assignments. From there, their request only began to grow larger and more frequent. She’d be asked to take up other’s cleaning duties, pick up their lunches, and much more. Soon, even the teachers would ask for her assistance with managing class materials. To her teachers and peers, all of these were just requests that Fumi could easily refuse had she wanted too. However, to Fumi, saying no was never an option given to her. Not much scared the red panda more than rejection, her thoughts always falling back to the stories of her father told about her mother. If her own mother didn’t want her for just being born, then why should anyone else? If saying yes meant she could be liked by others, then she would gladly do so.

Over time, the stress of wanting to please her father, her classmates, and the school’s faculty ate away at her mental health. Had she not been introduced to fashion design and sewing, she would have continued down an irreversible path. The advisor of the design club for the theater department, a middle-age giraffe woman, had asked Fumi to help her move some fabric across campus. Of course, everyone knew by now that Fumi would never refuse a request, so she did as was asked of her and followed the hoofed mammal to their destination. What she found there was fascinating. Animals of all shapes and sizes were working together in cutting off pieces of long fabric, transforming a sheet of cloth into a lovely ball gown. Then, that same cloth could become a cape, or a pair of pants. If the design team could imagine it, then it was possible to make it. Her interest must have shown on her face as the Giraffe asked her if she would be interested in joining the theater’s design team. Initially she refused, knowing her father wouldn’t allow her to do something he considered a ‘waste of time’. After a few more days, for the first time, she gave in to her own desires and joined the club. It was here that she fell in love with making clothes and decided she would pursue a career in fashion design, unbeknownst to her father who believed she would be going to college for business.