Tenshi Fukushima-Yves

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

Name: Tenshi Marie Anastasie Fukushima-Yves
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Singing and music, vocaloid, shojou manga and anime, ASL, fashion, crocheting

Appearance: Tenshi stands at five feet and five inches, with a fairly average weight at 146 pounds, and a rectangular body type. Her complexion is fair with warm undertones, and she puts a lot of effort into keeping her skin clear and even. She has a rounded face with monolid eyes coloured a dark brown, a small nose, and a small mouth - her lips are thin, and light compared to her face's colour. Tenshi wears light makeup on a regular basis, generally using blush and highlighter to give a glow to her face. Tenshi also pays a lot of attention to hair care. Her hair is thick, soft, wavy, and coloured a medium brown. It has currently grown to mid-back length, and she prefers to wear it loose. Her voice is high pitched and a bit nasally, and she is a soprano singer. Also, she wears on-the-ear hearing aids on both ears, which are usually hidden under her hair.

Tenshi usually dresses in solid, bold, or bright colours. Her outfits are more on the simple side, and accompanied by light accessorizing with jewelry. Clothing articles she typically wears include turtlenecks, long sleeved or sleeveless, skirts of varying length, knee-length or thigh-length stockings, flats or low heeled shoes, and (in the colder months), long coats, long scarves, and knee-high boots. As for accessories, she usually wears a few solid-coloured hairclips to match with her outfit, and bracelets on one or both wrists.

On the day of the abduction, Tenshi wore a beige, wool turtleneck sweater over a white tank top, with a red a-line skirt that ended just above the knees, knee-length white socks, and black Mary Janes. In her hair, she wore a row of red snap clips on one side. She also wore a stack of gold bangle bracelets on her left wrist, and a thin gold bracelet on her other wrist that has various matching, heart-shaped, red clip-on charms attached to it.

Biography: Tenshi was born in Tokyo, Japan to Eliza Yves and Taro Fukushima. Eliza was a French-Filipino travel writer, who met Taro, a Japanese man who was an executive in a communication technology company, while they were both visiting Salem during Halloween season. They would keep in touch, and after several months of a long distance relationship, Eliza would move to Japan to marry him. As Eliza traveled a lot for work, it took them a few years to start a family - on July 7th, 2004, they had their first and only child, Tenshi.

By virtue of her parents' work, Tenshi spent much time in her early childhood traveling. She most regularly traveled to spend vacations with her mother's side of the family in France, who doted on the couple and their child, but also regularly visited Salem as part of an annual tradition for her parents' wedding anniversary. When Tenshi was four, Eliza was offered a more permanent position with a magazine based in Boston - so, she and Tenshi moved to the United States. However, Taro would remain in Japan for much of the year for his own work, and spent time with his family in the USA whenever he had enough time off to travel there. Eliza moved to Boston around the same time as some of her relatives, who would help her raise Tenshi.

In the third grade, Tenshi's music teacher recommended she join the music choir, which she did. Throughout the rest of elementary school, choir was Tenshi's favourite and most consistent extra-curricular, with most of her friends from that time being those she met in choir. She would take private lessons in addition to choir, hoping to one day pursue singing as a career.

Though her teachers sometimes chastised her for apparent inattentiveness in class, and Tenshi sometimes had to ask her friends, classmates, and teachers to repeat things they said to her, they and her parents had no serious concerns at first. However, Tenshi began having more trouble hearing in the fifth grade, and her grades, as well as her confidence, suffered, which prompted her parents to take her to a doctor, where it was discovered that Tenshi was progressively losing her hearing. The news was devastating for Tenshi, who feared that it would eventually render her unable to pursue music.

Tenshi would get hearing aids, which she continues to wear - though as her hearing loss progressed over the years, she has had to change them a couple of times. She would continue to attend choir in fifth grade and middle school, and it would become a source of comfort as well as anxiety for her. Singing continues to be Tenshi's main passion, though she did notice having hearing aids changed her perception of music - at first it introduced distortions into music, and while these were mostly fixed with proper programming shortly after, it did cause her to think and worry more about how she would relate to and experience music going forward.

Another source of anxiety was how other children would call attention to her hearing aids. Their attitudes would range from teasing to sympathy, but Tenshi didn't want to have her hearing brought up at all. These incidents made Tenshi feel isolated from her peers for being different, and also lead her to resent her condition more.

Around the time Tenshi got her hearing aids, Eliza and Taro's careers began to slow down. Eliza settled into an editing role at her workplace, and Taro wished to spend more time with his family, rather than overseas. The couple agreed they would move somewhere quieter, and decided on Salem for sentimental reasons, which is where Tenshi would start 6th grade, in a private school.

In middle school, Tenshi would start spending more of her free time on the internet, through which she was introduced to anime, manga, and vocaloid, through online fan communities and YouTube. Though she was interested in these, her friends at the time were quite vocal about either being negative or dismissive towards people who liked things like anime. Instead, Tenshi indulged in secret, reading manga available at the library, and listening to vocaloid songs and covers after school. Her taste in anime and manga leaned heavily to the light, romantic, and slice-of-life side, while most vocaloid music she listened to and enjoyed were energetic and rhythmic.

When it came time for high school, Tenshi enrolled in John Endecott Memorial Academy. Eliza had learned that some people she'd met in the Philippines now lived in Salem and were going to enroll their children there, and since she and Taro didn't like any of their options for private high schools nearby, they decided to send Tenshi to JEM as well. Through the families of her mother's old acquaintances, Tenshi would meet a number of her close high school friends.

She would continue choir and her singing lessons, but would also gain a new interest in fashion. High school was when she was given more free reign to move around town and spend her allowance the way she wanted, and the main thing Tenshi would spend or save money for was new clothes. While Tenshi had been very image conscious for a while, she became very appearance conscious in her teenage years, spending a lot of time on hair care, skin care, and makeup, as well as looking up beauty and fashion guides online. This is also when she began deliberately covering up her hearing aids regularly, usually under her hair, or hair accessories.

Tenshi has been teaching herself ASL since the beginning of high school. She anticipates that if she does fully go deaf, even if she gets cochlear implants, learning a sign language would be tremendously helpful. She also finds it currently helpful, especially if she can't use her hearing aids for whatever reason.

In junior year, Tenshi started up a YouTube channel where she posts her song covers, mainly of vocaloid songs. While the channel started as, and mostly still is, a passion project, she hopes that putting her singing online for all to find can help her get started on an actual career in music. Over time, the quality of Tenshi's videos has gotten better, both in the quality of its covers, and in editing and presentation. The channel has a small number of viewers outside Tenshi's real-life circle of friends and family, but those viewers are invested in Tenshi's work, and vocally hope to see the channel grow and improve further. Currently, Tenshi is redoing her oldest videos and uploading the new versions.

One hobby she's recently begun dabbling in is crocheting, which one of her current friends introduced her to. Tenshi finds it relaxing to come home after a long day and work on a crocheting project. She hasn't yet completed anything, but likes the idea of wearing an article of clothing she made herself, and hopes to finish a scarf before winter break.

Tenshi can be rather self-centered, but not terribly aware of this. She acts and speaks in a loud and highly animated way, though most of it isn't deliberate, rather learned from the way her middle school friends acted, and continued into high school because it made her hard to ignore. She's extremely sensitive to rejection, both real and perceived, and tends to act up whenever she's feeling ignored. Towards her friends, she acts magnanimous and slightly clingy.

Being raised in a fairly affluent family, Tenshi never lacked anything, and had doting parents who gave her whatever she asked for - in the present, she takes being able to get whatever she wants for granted, and while she knows that not everyone is as fortunate as her, she has very little idea behind why, or what it's like. Both her mother and father are very supportive of her, especially her interest in music, though due to distance, Tenshi is closer to her mother, alongside her other relatives living in the USA. Tenshi understands that her parents want her to live a happy and successful life, but feel like her hearing loss hangs over their relationship. Her mother has strongly urged Tenshi to get cochlear implants when her hearing loss gets severe enough to qualify for them, but Tenshi feels conflicted about this. In particular, she believes that the implants' additional distorting effects on listening to music are worse than not being able to hear it at all.

After high school, Tenshi plans to pursue singing full time. In school, she does well in music, but gets middling to below average grades in all her other classes. Her default attitude to academic matters is disinterest, and while she puts in the effort to pass with acceptable grades, she hopes that her planned path in life wouldn't require academic expertise.

Advantages: Tenshi is very social, and has many friends. Her self-interest in a dangerous situation could lead to a strong sense of self-preservation.
Disadvantages: For starters, if Tenshi's hearing aids were separated from her or stopped working for any reason, she wouldn't be able to hear very well, which would cause a whole host of problems - it would mean she couldn't understand the announcements, and her ability to hear danger coming would be hampered. In addition, even her friends outside of her friend group, there's little reason for anyone to take her on as an ally - she's well known in school, but for being a spoiled and annoyingly dramatic person more than anything.

[VoltTurtle]

Heya Blizz! I'm the staffer that's critiquing Tenshi, and there are some things that need to be edited before she can be approved.

So, to address the elephant in the room, there are some pretty extreme difficulties that come from being a deaf person that is also so heavily involved in music. The biggest issue insofar as I see it is that you seem to misunderstand the limitations that come with cochlear implants. Cochlear implants are admittedly pretty wondrous devices that can help restore some sense of hearing to the severely hearing impaired and deaf, and are particularly helpful for young children, but the keyword there is "some". Implants are designed to primarily help with speech and other critical sounds (like alarms) but are not a suitable replacement for regular hearing when it comes to music.

For some reading on the topic, you can look at this article:
https://theconversation.com/heres-what- ... ant-112457

And you can listen to this video for an idea of what music would sound like to Tenshi:
https://youtu.be/57WXFrnjzcU

Most music would sound like garbled noise to Tenshi due to the limitations of the device, and certain things (like pitch) would be nigh-impossible for her to interpret. As a result, the vast majority of music would be very hard for her to enjoy and it'd be very difficult to find success in things like choir. Most deaf musicians such as Mandy Harvey were individuals who lost their hearing relatively late in life, often after spending years practicing and learning to sing and play music. I find it very hard to believe that somebody who lost her hearing at such a young age (4-5) would later go on to join choir, find success in it, and generally have such a passionate interest in music while only being able to hear through her very limited implants.

There are a few ways that this can be addressed, as I see it:
1. You can drop either her interest in music or the deafness (with the latter seeming to be less essential to her character, going by my reading of her profile and how you handle the implants). This would be the simplest solution, but would still require much of the profile to be rewritten.
2. You can completely rework the timeline as to how Tenshi lost her hearing. Making her lose her hearing much later in life (likely while in high school) after learning to love music and singing would enable her to continue the interests, though this would still be with great difficulty (you can hear about some of the challenges involved via Mandy Harvey). This would require much more extensive rewriting and research (and would likely lead to a few rounds of edits still being required), but would preserve both aspects, which might be what you want.
3. You can contest my assessment with counter-examples/evidence, should you be able to find any. I don't purport myself to be the leading expert on cochlear implants or deafness, this is just my reading going by the research that I have done (both for this profile and in the past on this subject).

...now, with that out of the way, here are the random, minor issues that I spotted unrelated to the above:

Tenshi stands at five feet and five inches, with a fairly average weight and a rectangular body type.

What weight specifically?

By virtue of her parents' work, Tenshi spent much time in her early childhood traveling, most regularly to spend vacations with her mother's side of the family in France, who doted on the couple and their child, and an annual tradition of visiting Salem for her parents' wedding anniversary.

This reads a little weirdly with "spent much time in her early childhood traveling [...] and an annual tradition". I'd suggest adjusting this to read:

"By virtue of her parents' work, Tenshi spent much time in her early childhood traveling. She most regularly traveled to spend vacations with her mother's side of the family in France, who doted on the couple and their child, but also regularly visited Salem as part of an annual tradition for her parents' wedding anniversary."

When Tenshi was four, the family moved from Tokyo to Boston, since Eliza got a more permanent job offer from a magazine based there.

How did this affect her father's job? Executive positions typically involve a lot of travel, but I can't imagine it can be done completely remotely. Did he move with them, or did he have to remain overseas most of the time? Did he do something entirely different? You mention him wanting to spend more time with his family a bit later, is that related to this? Feel free to edit this however you see fit.

Tenshi is very social, and has many friends=.

I don't think this = is supposed to be here.

Other than that, she doesn't have many advantages.

This line isn't needed, so feel free to cut it.

--

...and that's all!

I know that's a lot to take in. Tenshi is almost certainly going to need pretty extensive rewriting regardless of what you decide to do, but don't feel discouraged! I'll be here with you every step of the way, so whenever you think you have addressed everything, post back here and I'll give Tenshi another look in round two. :3

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

draft 2 sent in for review

[VoltTurtle]

Heya Blizz! Tenshi's looking a lot better this go around, and there's nothing major that still needs to be addressed. However, there are a few more minor things:

School: JEM

The school should be fully written out as "John Endecott Memorial Academy" here.

most consistent extra-cirricular, with

Typo; "extra-curricular".

addition to choir, hoped to one day pursue

Tense issue; "hoping".

though as her hearing loss progresses over the years

Tense issue; "progressed".

When it came time for high school, Tenshi enrolled in JEM.

Minor, but it should also be spelled out at least once as "John Endecott Memorial Academy" in the biography to make sure there's no ambiguity. The other "JEMs" you use are fine, though.

Also, was there any particular reason she enrolled in public school after being in private school? It's not as if her parents are lacking for money.

from the Philipines she'd met

Typo; "Philippines".

started up a youtube channel

Minor, but it's generally denoted as "YouTube" and not "youtube".

hearing loss get severe enough

Typo; "gets".

--

...and that's it! Post back here when you've got all that handled and Tenshi should be good to go!

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

draft 3 sent in for review

[VoltTurtle]

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