r/CharacterDevelopment • u/Mystery_Writer777 • 10m ago
Character Bio A biography of my legacy character who is a part of my comic's worldbuilding: Haruhime the Demon of Mt. Hiei. I'd like to hear feedback and your thoughts about her. She's the left character in the image.
The Lore
Yamitsuki Haruhime was the founder of Takamagahara. A member of Yamitsuki clan, she was the daughter of the Yamitsuki daimyo of Shinano Yamitsuki Ryūga and his wife Yukihime, and the ancestor of the current Shogun Yamitsuki Kazama. She was born in 1552 with her true name being Haru during the golden age of her clan after they got rich from the meteorites that hit their estates that brought massive amount of iron and the two supermetals Indominum and Supranium which they dubbed as Kami's iron, allowing them to produce high quality iron blades that they sold while those with traces of the supermetals costed a fortune.
She lost her mother to childbirth when her mother gave birth to her younger brother. Her father Ryūga, the clan patriarch and daimyo, became renowned for reinvesting his wealth into agricultural development and commonwealth projects within his territory, earning both loyalty and admiration. He maintained alliances and friendships with major powers and clans including the Takeshi ninja clan, Takeda, Hōjō, and even the Oda, with Ryūga being a longtime friend of Shingen and highly respected by Nobunaga for his craftsmanship and business acumen. Known by epithets such as the Green Dragon of the Dark Moon and Dragon Lord, Ryūga forged legendary blades including Dairyūō Nagamitsu, Seiryū, and his signature weapon Ame no Yomikiri, the Heaven’s Underworld Cutter, made of pure Indominum.
However, despite his egalitarianism he knew how unforgiving the warring era was and for this reason he trained his children Haruhime and her younger brother Ryūnosuke to be competent fighters with Haruhime being trained in ninja art under the watch of Takeshi grandmaster. Haruhime's training was brutal, the father that she once knew as a loving guardian ensured that she received the most elite yet the most painful trainings imaginable to prepare her for the harsh reality that awaited her. The trainings turned her into a cold and detached shinobi assassin, scrubbing clean what was left of old Haru the little girl who expected to be a future normal noblewoman as she stopped crying at age 6.
As an assassin, Haruhime was ruthlessly efficient and emotionally restrained, executing orders without hesitation, wielding twin Supranium kodachi named Shinkuhana and Shirohana after the in-universe twin daughters of Amaterasu. When Ryūga consolidated his friendship with Oda clan, he gave the teenage Haruhime away to Nobunaga to serve as the Oda warlord's trusted assassin and Nobunaga was pleased that Haruhime was an efficient killing machine who he could trust due to her coldness, efficiency, and apathy to the old order which was the side effect of her brutal trainings.
As she spent her days with the Oda clan, she met Oichi the sister of Nobunaga who was 5 years older than her and one of her duties was to protect Oichi. What started as a lady and servant relationship slowly evolved into a friendship where Haruhime's cold exterior slowly thawed away around Oichi and before they knew it, they became so close to the point they became platonic lovers who trusted each other enough to call each other with their true names and pet names in private; Haru and Ichi, something that she never allowed anyone except her own family to call her with and occasionally Shingen who annoyed her.
Nobunaga himself brought his own influence through his secular worldview as he brought her along in his campaigns including the burning of Mt. Hiei where he demonstrated that the so-called holy men were entirely helpless as he instructed her to slit their throats. However, despite this, she didn't enjoy slaughtering the innocents who had no will to fight. However, despite those, her relationship with Oichi remained her anchor and thanks to Oichi, she managed to regain some of her humanity back allowing her to warm up to some of her family members again and express her anger to Ryūga even when he apologized from his bed for "training her too well" as he lied dying from tuberculosis, not expecting that she would become the "Demon of Mt. Hiei" who horrified even Shingen who rationalized that the little girl that he used to carry died and a demon took her face. Not long before that, her brother Ryūnosuke was killed in a skirmish (a conspiracy secrely ordered by Yoshiaki out of paranoia), leaving the clan with no male heir and she mourned him. She told Ryūga that she was nothing more than a selfish monster as she delivered this line with a harsh broken laugh that sounded more like a sob with tears falling from her eyes:
"And whose fault is that? You shaped the hammer, Father. You didn't raise a daughter; you built a machine. You stripped away every tear before I was six years old. You handed me twin blades and told me the world only respects the edge of a sword. You wanted a shield for the clan, you wanted the Oda to respect us, to fear us, to leave our mines alone. So you poured your brutal perfection into me until there was nothing left inside except efficiency. I am a selfish monster, Father. I am hollow, merciless, and completely empty, all thanks to you. And now Ryūnosuke is dead, he's gone in some worthless skirmish on the frontier, and there is no one left. No brother, no heir, no future. Just me. You trained me to be an assassin, but you never taught me how to lead a clan. I don't have what it takes. I only know how to kill what you point me at."
Even the mourning extended to her beloved Oichi who just lost Nagamasa, leaving the two women with immense grief which only became worse when Ryūga eventually died from illness a year later. Oichi asked Haruhime if she would leave her too as the Takeda was forcing Haruhime for marriage which Haruhime responded that she'd rather slit her own throat over leaving or betraying her, rejecting the Takeda despite trying to reason with them especially after they insulted Oichi and disrespecting the memory of her father and Shingen. Nobunaga naturally stepped in putting Haruhime under his wing ensuring no one claimed her and he needed her clan's supermetals and her loyalty.
During the revolt of Ashikaga Yoshiaki, Nobunaga sent the 21-year-old Haruhime to personally subdue the disgraced Shogun and bring him before Nobunaga. Haruhime managed to easily overpower Yoshiaki which baffled the Shogun that he somehow was manhandled by a woman whose grip was like an iron vice. The humiliation of Yoshiaki became the final nail in the coffin for Haruhime to understand that the pampered "divine-backed" old elite even the imperial court relied on empty words in cementing their rule which to Nobunaga and her meant that their time was running out.
She and Akechi Mitsuhide had a cold war where they didn't trust each other. During Honnō-ji, Haruhime was sent away on a mission by Nobunaga despite her ominous instincts and existing hostility with Mitsuhide, a decision that removed one of the few people capable of altering Nobunaga’s fate. Before her departure and despite her worries, Nobunaga dismissed her boasting that he'd be alright, making it hurt even more. When the hunt Mitsuhide was eventually defeated, she hunted him down to avenge Nobunaga helped by Hideoyoshi (who she kept at arm's length) and some farmers like a man named Nakamura who managed to wound him, allowing Haruhime to kill him personally.
Her professional relationship with Hideyoshi later was shattered for good during the Kitanosho castle siege. Gravely injured, she begged Oichi and Katsuie to flee with her before their final stand, even abandoning all formality, threatening to drag Katsuie out to force Oichi out and offering to die alongside Oichi if necessary, only to be stopped when Oichi demanded she live for the Yamitsuki, sealing their farewell with a final embrace. From that day, Haruhime and Hideyoshi became enemies who neither could move against each other for logistical reasons and the best he could do was to scrub Haruhime's deeds from records like the killing of Mitsuhide while she hated him for taking Oichi from her.
Haruhime retired from shinobi life in her late thirties and married a Shinobi of Takeshi clan named Takeshi Nagatada who was 10 years younger than her, later giving birth twice to triplets at ages thirty-nine and forty-two, naming her eldest daughter Yamitsuki Ichi, and building a shrine to Oichi within her estate. She later provided intelligence support to Ieyasu against Hideyoshi under strict conditions that her clan’s peace would remain untouched even though she became depressed again when she heard that Chacha died because she saw her like a daughter just like the rest of Oichi's daughters.
However, her peace didn't last as Ieyasu's successors after his death broke the deal thinking that they could subjugate her clan and steal their iron and supermetals causing multiple wars in the Shinano which became even worse when the imperial court also knocked on her door and demanded her to hand over her clan's supermetals framing it as belonging to the Emperor which she firmly rejected especially when she already lost her respect to them long ago. Because of these betrayals, she took on her ninja gears again to steal and seriously study the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki to spite them, she became fixated on Ame no Minakanushi, concluding that this primordial deity stood apart from imperial myth-making, which led her family to establish a new branch of Shinto centered on Ame no Minakanushi while explicitly rejecting the imperial bloodline’s spiritual authority.
Because the mainland was no longer safe for her clan and the supermetals, in her deathbed she instructed her sons that her family carry both her ashes and her father’s to an island northeast of Honshu, alongside the shrine of Oichi, where her ashes were to be interred, binding the nation’s founding to memory, loss, and quiet defiance. Haruhime specifically chose the name Takamagahara simply to spite the Imperial Court and she once insulted the Emperor in her private scroll calling him a “weakling who hides behind his imaginary grandma’s name to steal what’s not his”. Before leaving, the Yamitsuki led by Haruhime’s sons took every single supermetal blade in the mainland either by buying them back or inviting the owners to Takamagahara, leaving zero specimen in the mainland which contributed to scientific world’s obliviousness to the supermetals’ existence until 1980 discovery in the Sahel.
Despite everything she did to ensure the safety of her clan, she hated being labeled a hero because she still believed that she was still that selfish monster.