A Wild Headcanon Meme Appears!

[usedlaserbeam]

✭ A HEADCANON/QUESTIONS MEME ✭
Because there's never a wrong time for headcanon.

→ Post with a list of your characters.
→ Comment to other people asking them questions about their lineup. Ask anything you can think of: questions about personal headcanon, thoughts on your CR, hypothetical situations, off-screen interactions, future plans, serious business, random crack, whatever!
→ Respond to the questions you receive!
→ LEARN NEW THINGS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE'S CHARACTERS THAT YOU NEVER KNEW BEFORE.
→ Discover things your characters have in common and forge excellent CR and shenanigans accordingly.
→ Repeat steps 2-5 forever.
→ Holy Voltorbs.

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[rapid_dash]

>Carmen: has she ever thought doing any other profession? What made her get into her current one?
>Yagyuu: What got him into tennis?

[doitrockapella]

Okay, well, Carmen's answer is about two-thirds headcanon and one-third Actual Canon, so for the purposes of style and flow, I'll outline the Actual Canon first and then jump into the headcanon from there.

It's established canon in Carmen's universe that before she was a thief, Carmen was the top agent at the same detective agency, ACME, who currently pursues her as a thief. Episode 33 of Carmen's canon includes an extended flashback to what her life was like back then, and from a lot of other bits of information provided sporadically throughout in combination with that, I've roughly pieced together that Carmen spent the majority of her teen years working for ACME — we're given an explicit age in that we know she'd solved more cases than any other detective in the agency's history by age seventeen, so she had to have been with them at least that long. We also know that during one caper where she returns to ACME and uses her old ID to get in, she's been gone from the agency "ten years, three months, and seven days". We also know she has at least one birthday in canon, and that in the series finale she is not yet thirty years old.

So basically, putting all this together and drawing on what we know from the flashback episode, what made Carmen get into the thieving business is essentially that she worked a case against the toughest rival she'd ever had to face, Dr. Gunnar Maelstrom (voiced by the unparalleled Tim Curry, I might add). Maelstrom gave Carmen a run for her money as a detective; she had to chase him a lot and he was constantly managing to escape from her — effectively, he was her "Carmen Sandiego" for a good length of time. The problem was, Maelstrom is a psychopath and he had absolutely no qualms about being really villainous in Carmen's general direction, which meant that unlike her own capers that are generally safe and intellectual, he was actively trying to kill her on pretty much every occasion that they crossed paths.

The problem is that Carmen is ambitious, focused, and a little bit obsessive, particularly when challenged. Maelstrom took advantage of that, and at one point actually sort of mindfucked her a little (as mindfuckery as you can get in a children's edutainment TV show, that is) — by performing a light Hannibal Read on her, telling her that she's a "thief at heart" and exactly like him no matter how she tries to deny it, and (it's implied) basically putting the idea in her head that someday she would become a thief herself. Young Carmen is pretty angry and driven and it's kind of sad to watch her in action because you just feel so sorry for her. At least I do.

So anyway, that's canon. The headcanon goes something like this:

After catching Maelstrom, the higher-ups at ACME caught sight of the fact that the case had messed Carmen up pretty badly and that she was having these anger issues and throwing herself at her work to the point of being really unhealthy, so they assigned her a partner, Suhara, who happened to be a zen master (Suhara and the zen thing are both canon). Thanks to Suhara's intervention, she started to chill the fuck out and it was basically a really really necessary thing, because she would've gotten to the point of being flagrantly self-destructive pretty fast if he hadn't gotten there when he did. This is how she learned to become a zen master herself (she is one - it's canon), but ultimately she never quite got Maelstrom's remarks out of her head. Coupled with this was the fact that she was getting bored at the agency — she was the best, and she just kept on winning, but there was no challenge for her anymore — and eventually she got to the point of thinking, well...what if I were a thief. I could do it better. I bet I could commit a theft that no one could catch me at. Maybe I am a thief at heart.

Maybe I should stop denying what I am.

It's worth pointing out here, as a side note, that I'm pretty sure this is intentionally analogous to something that came up with regard to Sherlock Holmes, which was that if it weren't for the fact that he were on the side of justice, he'd make the most magnificent criminal in the world. Carmen's backstory seems to be a pretty direct nod to that — she takes the choice that Sherlock never did.

So at this point Carmen's about eighteen, she leaves the agency and ends up sending her partner into a depression born of guilt for ten years because of it (canon), and sets off to form her own league of evildoers and become the greatest thief of all time. Because she was bored.

Yeah.

So there's actually a couple of answers to "what made her get into her current one". Dr. Gunnar Maelstrom is definitely one of them, because he provided a lot of the manipulation that sort of pushed her in that direction in the first place. But Carmen hates the thought of letting Maelstrom have that kind of power over her, so she's adamant that all he really did was point out something that was probably true about her all along (maybe) — that she's a thief, she's always been a thief, and so becoming a thief was really just a matter of being true to herself. (Maybe.)

She does sometimes miss being a detective, though, and certainly misses the agency — she's an orphan, and it was one of the first and only "homes" she's ever had. Plus, she loves the Chief enough that she named her starter after him (because her starter pokemon is "her partner", and so was he, once), and the Chief kind of loves her a whole lot back, so they're very It's Complicated.

Honestly, she's never really thought of doing anything else. She went straight from the orphanage into crime-solving with ACME, and from there straight into thievery. I submit that she'd probably make an excellent doctor if she put her talents at stealing toward curing people instead, but Carmen's problem is that she lives for the game and the thrill of the chase, and she always wants to do it on her own terms. So the job she has is probably the one that's best-suited to her, and in the grand scheme of things, maybe that's kind of how it should be, you know?

Also I bet she and Rufus Shinra would get along really well, just saying.

[usedlaserbeam]

SO WHAT GOT YAGYUU INTO TENNIS.

Short answer: his mom and golf.

More thorough answer: Yagyuu has Dad Issues. The way I play him, a large part of Yagyuu's determination to present the sort of socially perfect upstanding "Gentleman" image that he does is because of pressure, direct or implicit, from his dad at home. His dad is a doctor, whom I headcanon to work long hours at the hospital/clinic/etc because he is a Devoted and Hardworking Man and Provider For His Family, and Yagyuu's got a mom and a younger sister which I think ended up casting him as this sort of Man Of The House from a very young age. He wanted to be like his dad, he missed his dad because of how comparatively little he saw of him, and when he did see his dad, his father was instilling pretty strong family and social values — be a man, work hard, do this, do that, behave this way, etc.

The problem is, Yagyuu is smart, kind of introverted, sort of a loner, and can have the most fucking ridiculous determinator-martyr complex the world has ever seen. He feels a lot of pressure to be the Perfect Son, and a lot of times he gets frustrated because he feels as though his dad's already got his whole life planned out for him because of it. He'll get through school, go to med school, become a doctor, work at the same hospital as his dad, carry on the family tradition, marry a nice girl, have kids of his own, perpetuate the cycle. Bam. He's fourteen and he already knows how the entire rest of his life is supposed to go, and he feels trapped and resentful and miserable about it.

BUT. That's not actually the question. So golf; Yagyuu picked that up from his dad as a way of being like him and giving them something they could do to spend time together in his dad's rare leisure moments. They'd go golfing together. It was cool. Equally awesome is the fact that Rikkaidai Fuzoku has a nationally-ranked golf team, so he could join the golf club, earn a great line on his resume, after school extracurriculars, all that shit.

Somewhere along the way he discovered tennis, possibly because of Yukimura and how good he was. Yukimura kind of has that Jesus-like ability to inspire the soul of tennis in people. Regardless, Yagyuu got sort of interested in tennis, tried it out, turned out to be pretty good at it, this became a thing. Also not really a problem because Rikkai's tennis club was nationally-ranked, too.

The problem arose when Yagyuu went home and was discussing over the dinner table his inability to choose between the two clubs, because his dad was under the impression that it was always destined to be Golf All The Way, but now here was this tennis business and what's all this about. But Yagyuu's mom could see that Yagyuu was developing this interest in tennis, and he'd spent so much of his life suppressing his own interests and the stuff he wanted for the sake of what his dad thought was right anyway, and moreover Little Yagyuu didn't really have that many friends (if any) and his mom was entertaining this secret hope that maybe if he were on a tennis team, that'd be more of a team-oriented atmosphere than being the loner on a golf course, and maybe Hiroshi would make a friend or two and it would be good for him. Because she worries.

So his mom encouraged him to pick tennis club over golf club, and Yagyuu really really kind of wanted to play tennis, so he got up his courage and went out for it, and apparently ended up being really good, since canon states that of the seven third-year regulars we see out of Rikkai during the series, only four of them were regulars in their second year as well. Three of them were, of course, the Big Three, who'd been regulars since they were first years because they're just that boss.

But Yagyuu was canonically a regular in his second year of tennis club, and he's the only one of the remainder (Niou, Marui, and Jackal) who was. Which is pretty impressive! Given the fuss over Akaya being the second-year ace, it's kind of a big deal at Rikkai to be a regular and not in your third year. So he's pretty boss.

As additional commentary, he started out playing singles because he liked the thought of it better (one man against one opponent striving for victory), but given his favored playing style, he's objectively a better doubles player than he is at singles. Niou is a good match for him because Niou is a flashy, tricky attention-grab for their opponents, who tend to spend so much time worrying about OH GOD WHAT IS NIOU UP TO that they sort of forget that Yagyuu's just chilling at the baseline, waiting for the chance ball that'll let him get off his Laser — his favorite method of point-scoring, and the most reliable one in his arsenal. Yagyuu would be happy to just sit at the baseline and hit Lasers all day, and with Niou drawing attention off him during doubles, he gets a lot of opportunities to do exactly that.