Tsueno

Tsuneo Sasaki
Also known as:	Menacing Student Strange Student Tsu-chan
Japanese Name:	佐々木 恒雄
Romaji:	Sasaki Tsuneo
First Appearance:	Persona 2: Innocent Sin
Weapon:	Flail/Morningstar
Date of Birth:	July 2 c. 1983
Age:	15
Zodiac:	Cancer
Height:	177.8 cm (5’ 10”)
Weight:	TBA
Arcana:	Hermit
Secondary Arcana:	TBA
Persona:	Hephaestus
Japanese Voice:	TBA
English Voice:	TBA

”I didn’t ask to join your fucking gang! I didn’t want anything to do with any of this! Stop dragging me into your childish plans!”
―Tsuneo, Persona 2: Innocent Sin

Tsuneo is a Persona 2 fancharacter. He’s a first-year at Seven Sisters High School.

Appearances

-Persona 2: Innocent Sin
-Persona 2: Eternal Punishment
-Persona 3
-Persona 5

Design

Tsuneo is tall and fairly athletically built. He has medium brown eyes, and chocolate brown hair that he bleaches blonde. Since he doesn’t care for the roots, most of the time his hair is a mixture of blonde and brown. He usually wears it short, in a layered, choppy a hairstyle. He has pierced ears and sometime wears earrings. A tattoo of a snake wrapping twice around his arm and biting into his arm is on his upper right arm. When he’s not in school - or can’t be bothered to go - he wears a sleeveless black shirt with a broken-glass pattern, washed-out ripped jeans, and black boots. When he can find the energy to go to school, he wears the Sevens uniform pants, and throws the school jacket over his shirt. When he feels driven out of school he removes the school jacket as he leaves campus. He usually has bags under his eyes, but tires to hide this by wearing black eyeshadow around his eyes. There’s usually a cuff, thick bracelet, or watch around his left wrist, even when he’s wearing long sleeves. During Persona 2 it hides a bandage that covers half-healed cuts. From Persona 3 onwards, it hides fading scars from those wounds.

Personality

Tsuneo has a certain reputation among the Sevens students, and people from the surrounding area. He’s a punk, a thug, a dangerous delinquent that you really don’t want to get involved with. He’s a dangerous loner that picks with fights people and deals drugs for a local gang - he might kill you if you get near him! He never comes to school, and even the teachers are secretly relieved because how would they deal with someone like that in class?
Half the students claim they know a friend of a friend that ‘barely’ got away from him, though what he was trying to do do them is always left vague. Even the girls will back up that thread, claiming that he had cornered a friend at some point or other, though no one actually knew anyone he had done anything to.
In reality, the boy at the heart of rumors is a stressed, lonely teenager who has no idea how his life had turned out like this. He’s fairly isolated from his peers, annoyed and angry at everyone who just believes what they hear, but wanting desperately for someone to listen to him for once, but at the same time a part of him has just given up on that every actually happening.
Far from being violent, Tsuneo very rarely initiates fights. It’s just that since the rumors about him being a violent punk started going around, he’s had guys showing up to fight him It was either run, or defend himself, and he quickly got tired of running. He had no desire to get beat up to prove a point though, so he fought back. No one has ever believed his attempted explanation of events, making him feel increasingly stressed, depressed, and frustrated at everything. School has become equally stressful so he avoids it, then feels guilty about it.
He’s been told repeatedly by adults in his life that he’s a menace, ungrateful, dangerous, and eventually he decided he would just give up. Clearly no one was going to listen. Maybe the adults were right. Even the teachers at school acted skittish around him, like they expected him to start stabbing people, so he stopped going. What was the point when everyone hated him? It’s not like he could learn anything with all of them staring at him On some of the worst days he would try drugs to try dulling the pain, but he always felt incredibly guilty after it it. Experiments with alcohol proved to have the same results. He stopped initiating conversations with people after a while, since no one was listening to him, though sometimes he finds himself watching people at the park, jealous of how easily the interact.
Underneath all the rumors, Tsuneo is actually intelligent and rather sensitive. He he’s loyal and has a highly developed sense of responsibility. Ironcily he’s actually rather calm and steady, easily able to avoid being riled by those that come looking for fights. Even he’s willing to admit that he’s not the most charismatic person, and sometimes prefers silence. He just doesn’t see the need for mindless chatter, though he talks a bit more when around people he’s close with. He prefers actions to words, often becoming more physically affectionate with friends he’s familiar with; bumping shoulders, or a hand a shoulder, or ruffling someone’s hair. He’s sometimes slightly sarcastic, though most of his humor is deadpand and he can be blunt. Tsuneo is honestly fairly straight forward about most things, if people take the time to talk with him.
It becomes even more pronounced with someone he’s romantically interested in, even though his attempts at flirting are usually slightly clumsy at first, and embossing, but once he’s made his interested clear he generally doesn’t shy away from it.
The cuts his cuff hides were something he apparently did to himself while he was high. He has no memory of it, and he’s terrified about what his messed-up through process was behind it, which is why he’s very self-conscious and doesn’t want others to see it. Was it just a bad trip that caused him to cut himself? Or was some part of his mind following the darker thoughts that had been appearing and attempting something more permanent? Not knowing makes him more anxious than anything else, something Shadow Tsuneo is quick to point out.

Profile

Tsunos’s parents died when he was twelve, leaving him and his four year-old brother Kiyoshi alone. They lived with their grandfather for a year or so until the old man grew sick and couldn’t look after them anymore. Their other relatives argued over who would have to take them on next, no one really wanting to have to care for two more children. Eventually, their mother’s younger sister agreed to take the younger brother, since he was still very young. Tsuneo was against them being seperated and blew up about it, but he was snapped and told to stop acting like a child. He had no idea what burden it was to care for a child. This was the best thing for his brother, and he was going to ruin it if he kept acting out.
After his brother was taken away, Tsuneo was passed through a series of relatives. At first he tired to keep in contact with his brother. He called him several times, and even got to spend his sixth birthday with him. After that though, he lost contact with him and no one was willing to help him. He tried his best to live his life, but it was hard when he was worried about his brother The relatives themselves didn’t help either. They were distant at best, and abusive at worst. Eventually he was taken in by a cousin of his father’s and his wife, who he was told to call Aunt and Uncle.
His new ‘Aunt’ was not thrilled about him being there. Or, to be more accurate, she loathed the fact that he was there. She made it very clear from the moment he set foot in the house that she already disliked him, and her husband was only doing this out of some sort of familial duty. When he proved closed off at first, and not appropriately ‘grateful’ she grew angry.
His Aunt abused him, and perhaps to justify that or just in an attempt to get him out of the house, started the rumors about him. How bad and dangerous he was, how she feared for her life even though he had carefully never struck back at her because he knew exactly who his Uncle would believe. It was bad enough when it was just around his neighborhood, but then somehow the rumors reached his highschool and things blew up.
Now everyone ‘knew’ about him, people were picking fights, and suddenly the rumors were fact as far as everyone in the school knew. He tried to get answers at first, talking to people in an effort to figure out why the rumors had spread so far and why everyone was so willing to believe them. It felt off to him and he felt there had to be something more to this. Just...no one was willing to talk. They either avoided him, ran away, or refused to talk. They clearly knew something, but as one person said, they didn’t want him to have access to ‘something’ like that.
The school was growing more and more hostile, as was his homelife. He started skipping because he couldn’t concentrate in that sort of environment, and felt very guilty about it. His Uncle believed the rumors, and told him repeatedly he should be turned in or should ‘think about how this affects us, not just yourself!’. Attempts to explain about the rumors only brought tearful denials from his Aunt and his Uncle yelling at him for even suspecting it. He started avoiding going home whenever he could, and tried to find other places to sleep. None of them proved to be very secure, so he always ends up back at their house. The tense atmosphere made it hard for him to sleep well and he was constantly tired.
He never wanted to join a gang - there were just suddenly rumors that he was dealing drugs for one. Denials of that, and that no one ever had any proof of it, were ignored as before. Eventually, members of the gang would occasionally try to talk to him, rival gang members challenged him, and it became like he had always been a part of the gang. As if, as far as everyone else was concerned, he had always been a gang members. It frustrated him near tears but eventually after trying a few more times to figure out what was going on...he gave up.
He was tired. No one was going to listen to him. He might as well become what they all said he was.
He delt drugs for the gang. He bleached his hair. Got a tattoo because that would piss people off. He started smoking even though he knew it was bad, because he really didn’t care anymore. After all, unless something changed no one was ever going to listen. Becoming what they believed was far less exhausting than fighting against it, even though it made him feel foul.

Persona 2

Tsuneo can actually be seen outside Seven Sisters before the boss battle with Principal Hanya. He’s either on the map where he’ll respond with silence if spoken to, or in Honmaru Park where he’ll respond with a rude ‘need something?’ if spoken with.
After Principal Hanya’s defeat, the part sees Tsuneo lingering outside the school and watching the commotion before leaving. Lisa notices, commenting something about it being ‘that guy’ and that of course he didn't’t care. Eikichi wonders who ‘that guy’ was, because he looked vaguely familiar.
Lisa responds by calling him a thug, and repeating some of the rumors about him, then wonders if he had something to do with what happened. Since he usually hangs out at the nearby Honmaru Park, they decide to stop there first before going to Peace Diner. There they find Tsuneo, who is initial hostile since he knows Tatusya and Eikichi by reputation and assumes they’re here to pick a fight with him. When Tatsuya acts uninterested in actually fighting, Tsuneo is wary, but agrees to talk, though warns them that he probably doesn’t know anything. Over the course of the conversation, Tsuneo reveals that most of his reputation is founded on rumors and he never willingly joined a gang, he was forced into it. Maya wonders if Tsuneo’s situation has anything to do with what’s going on, and after some persuasion, Tsuneo ends up joining the part in search of answers.
During the search for information about the Masked Circle, the party goes after the lieutenant of the gang that had recruited Tsuneo in an attempt to figure out why people suddenly thought he was a gang member. The lieutenant reveals that he’s a member of the masked circle. He joined after he graduated high school and realized that being the delinquent boss of a single school meant nothing. He wanted to become the leader of a gang that the whole city feared! He’d dragged Tsuneo into after hearing his reputation, thinking that if he got to him first then he would be able to recruit a ton of strong guys and be unstoppable. Tsuneo is less than pleased with this, and the man couldn’t really tell them anymore about the first set of the rumors, the ones that labeled Tsuneo as a thug in the first place.
At some point after that, Lisa finally asked Tsuneo about a sarcastic ‘senpai’ he’d thrown at Tatsuya during their first meeting. A confused Tsuneo points out that it’s Lisa and Tatsuya are his upperclassmen, shocking Lisa because she hadn’t realized that he was only a first year. This causes Eikichi to teasingly response with ‘So Tsu-chan’s the youngest then?’. Tsuneo says he’s not exactly a kid either, but doesn’t otherwise object to the nickname.
WIP

Persona 3

Tsuneo has graduated college and is currently working as a teacher a middle school. After the events of Persona 2, he had started sending letters to Kiyoshi, but only received a reply from him now that his brother was a third year in high school. Kiyoshi asked him to meet in Iwatodai, the city he was living in. In an attempt to help establish their relationship, Tsuneo head over and is shocked to find out his brother is also a persona-user.

Persona 5

By Persona 5 Tsuneo, Eikcihi, and Miyabi have moved to Tokyo in order to avoid uncomfortable questions about their group relationship back home and raise their daughter together in peace. Eikichi opened a branch of Gatten Sushi in the city where they all live.
For a while before the start of the game, Tsuneo had worked at Shujin Academy as a school counselor. When Kamoshida arrived, Tsuneo wasn't initially suspicious of him, but his behavior and comments eventually put his hackles up. Tsuneo became very critical of him and his training methods, and didn't bother to keep this quiet, much to the annoyance of Principal Kobayakawa. He was scolded for stirring up 'needless drama among the staff' and accused of just being jealous several times, but refused to back down.
Kamoshida shared Tsuneo's animosity, although he hid it better. Things came to a head one day when, while looking for a student he needed to speak with, Tsuneo found the boy limping out of Kamoshida's office with fresh bruises. The student was to scared to give a real answer about what had happened, but he said enough that Tsuneo was able to figure things out and snapped. The encounter between him and Kamoshida ended with Tsuneo putting his fist through the wall a foot from Kamoshida's head.
Kobayakwa seized the chance to fire him, and the only reason he didn't press any sort of charges or black-list him with the school boards was because he was afraid of the sort of fuss someone like Tsuneo would kick up. Tsuneo was however banned from Shunjin grounds and barred from talking with any of the students.
During Persona 5 itself it’s revealed that he was hired at Kosei and is currently a school counselor there. He reveals himself as a Persona-user later on in the game, and can be found at Gatten Sushi as a confidant.
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Contracts>

Solo Contracts

• Indimidation:Tsuneo attempts to intimidate the enemy
• Opinion:Tsuneo make a blunt obsveration about the enemy .
• Discuss Rumors: Tsuneo talks about how harmful gossip is .
• Magic Trick:Tsueno makes a flower disappear and reappear

Group Contracts

WIP

Battle Qutoes

WIPs.

Trivia

• He actually carries a photo of him and his brother from back when they were living with their grandfather in his wallet. He wants to meet his brother again, but knows that he’s messed up right now, and in no shape to be any sort of role model. He wants to get his own life sorted out before he finds his brother..
• Finds Eikichi almost shockingly weird at first, but at the same time fascinating and someone he can’t take his eyes off him. Secretly finds him really cute. .
• Taught himself how to do simple magic tricks to amuse and distract Kiysohi after their parents died. Still remembers how to do most of them. .
• Actually fond of sports, but hasn’t had the opportunity to be on any teams since middle school. .
• Doesn’t scare easily but is actually terrified at the thought of haunted mirrors because of a movie he saw.
• Stops bleaching his hair when he’s older, insteading for his natural brown but putting natural-looking blond highlights in at Eikichi’s insistence.
• (Tsuneo started off as an AU version of Luca until i changed him around to be his own character)