Characters / Takotsubo

The character sheet for Takotsubo: The story of a superhero.

Humans

Cord Cai / The Tin Man

The Chinese-American protagonist of the story, a troubled young man whose fiance's death drives him to start the East 13 gang as the Tin Man.

• Arc Words: He repeats his name and how Roland died several times throughout the prologue. "My name is Cord Cai. My fiance got shot for his car, and nobody gave a fuck except me."
• Affectionate Nickname: He likes giving people nicknames; Blake is "Captain America / Cap," and Juliana is "Elphaba / Elphie." For his part, Roland calls him "shug" a lot.
• Alliterative Name: Played With. The script's notes state that Americans pronounce Cord's name as if it's alliterative, but traditional Mandarin speakers would pronounce it as "Cord Tsai."
• Berserk Button: He hates being Mistaken for Gay because he's bisexual. Even when mock-flirting with Detective Blake, he remarks that Blake gets two more mistakes of accidentally calling him gay since the first time was clearly a joke.
• Cosmic Plaything: Cord's last monologue in the prologue implies that he thinks this. He says the city "eats you" if you try too hard to get out.
• Deadpan Snarker: He spends the Bridge-Building stories snarking the shit out of everything, and is also very snarky in the script proper.
• Despair Event Horizon: Rockets alllll the way past this in both Gunsmoke and the script's prologue.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Equal Opportunity Gangster: Cord tries to keep Juliana from joining East 13 not because she's a woman, but because she's Asian and he doesn't want her to be a stereotype like he is. He gives up and takes her on because he knows she's just going to keep getting herself in trouble, and he might as well watch her. He also says if people call her names because of her magic, she should punch them in the face.
• Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind: Cord is very nice (if snarky) and enjoys nicknaming people. As the Tin Man, he wears pounds of jewelry, punk spikes, and a giant white great-coat. However...
• Good Is Not Soft: He's not above roughing a guy up and is notorious for shooting a man in the head.
• Harmful to Minors: He's in his early twenties and his life is a long string of hardships since eight years old.
• Internalized Categorism: His characterization runs on this. In Gunsmoke, Cord's narrative mentions that he and Roland are the "Asian not-gangsters-anymore," and he calls himself a failure a lot.
  • Stop Being Stereotypical: Invoked Trope. Cord is extremely expressive, which is an aversion of the Inscrutable Oriental stereotype. Then Cord and Roland used to be gangsters, but they tried to go clean. Key word is "tried."
  • In Takotsubo's prologue, he calls himself a fag despite being bisexual. According to him, everyone else does it. In Bridge-Building, he mentions that being bisexual means "'gay' to straight people and 'straight' to gay people."
  • Cord is artistic, but views his talents as useless. He designed his broken-heart chest tattoo in Gunsmoke, which is on the poster's concept. When Thad tells him that he has a gift with language, Cord retorts that nobody wants him to do poetry unless he fits an Asian stereotype, and he'll never get anywhere with it.
• Interrupted Suicide: He tries to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but he gets stopped by a cop. The Golden Gate is infamous for being a suicide hotspot.
• Nice Guy: Sure, he's in a gang, but they're basically a second police force. Of course, this is also why Roland's death hits him so hard.
• Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Cord's monologues are noted by Thad to be unusually long and eloquent. Especially since he just got admitted for a suicide attempt.
• Shrouded in Myth: Early in the story, people say the Tin Man broke someone's neck and cursed Harry Lamont's house.
• Tin Man: Invoked Trope. The open, expressive Cord takes "Tin Man" from The Wizard of Oz as his alias, wears a giant red heart necklace, and uses broken-hearts as his gang's tags.
• Tattoo as Character Type: In Gunsmoke, there's a massive tribal broken heart dominating his chest. It plays into the Asian-gangster stereotype, but it's also an obvious sign of how much he hurts after Roland dies. Broken hearts also become East 13's gang sign.
  • When he helps Thad get his stuff back from a mugger, he makes a show of taking off his jacket to reveal an accumulated sleeve of hearts, one partial sleeve, and several neck tattoos, which instantly freaks the mugger out. Cord later mentions he can't wear short sleeves anymore without getting stopped by police.
• Tragic Villain: Cord frequently tells people that he's "not good enough for anything else." He only shoots Harry Lamont because the police force fucked up, and he doesn't even care about getting put in jail for murder.
  Cord: I was going there anyway! At least now it's fair!
• Twofer Token Minority: A bisexual Chinese-American.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The author mentions that while Cord thinks he's a villain due to Internalized Categorism, he acts heroic and the story is how he moves past his self-hate to acknowledge that he's a superhero.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: His parents were put in prison when he was eight, he was constantly bullied and ended up in street gangs to cope with it, and then he and Roland got engaged and try to go clean. They graduate high school... and then they get carjacked.

Juliana Juarez / The Witch

A Filipino-American young woman who calls the Tin Man for help when a guy follows her on the way home, setting up the prologue's flashback, then joins East 13 as their Wicked Witch after her parents get killed in a drive-by.

• Conspicuous Gloves: She wears them because she can't control her psychometry. If she touches people, it knocks them out.
• Deadpan Snarker: She mockingly says "Me Love You Long Time" to a random guy who grabbed her hair. She accidentally makes him mad.
• Death by Origin Story: After the prologue, her parents get killed in a drive-by shooting from the Gatewalkers.
• Fantastic Racism: Her powers aren't even that dangerous, but she didn't get adopted until she was thirteen.
• Genre Savvy: She knows that the Tin Man is a good person.
• I Will Find You: She's trying to find the South Wind.
• The Napoleon: Constantly referred to as tiny, but mouths off when she shouldn't and tries to beat up the gangsters that killed her parents.
• Orphan's Ordeal: She was shuttled around the foster-care system until she was thirteen because "nobody wants a kid with powers."
• Psychic Powers: She has psychometry and sees spirits, such as the Queen of Names and Lady Fury. She can't turn off her psychometry, though.
• Twofer Token Minority: A Filipino-American mage.
• Wicked Witch: Invoked Trope. She wore an all-black outfit when she beat up the Gatewalkers for killing her parents, and when they found out she had magic, they immediately left her alone. She later becomes East 13's "witch" because all the black reminded Cord of Elphaba.

Martel Alvarez

Juliana's Mexican-American foster-brother and a weather-mage.

• Fantastic Racism: He was born with weather-magic, wound up in foster-care, and he scared people at ten years old by accidentally burning a blanket.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Uses several Spanish phrases.
• Orphan's Ordeal: It's heavily implied that he aged out of the foster-care system because nobody wanted him.
• Twofer Token Minority: A Latino weather-mage.
• Weather Manipulation: Caused a lot of problems when he was growing up in foster-care.

Officer Henderson

A black police officer. She worked on Cord's case when Roland was murdered, and is currently working with East 13. Her new partner is Detective Blake, replacing her former partner Gerald.

• By-the-Book Cop: Inverted Trope. Henderson is the older partner who follows street rules out of respect, while Blake is younger and tries to insist on following police rules due to naivete. This is also implied to be because he's white, since Henderson is a person of color and has a solid knowledge of street law.
• The Commissioner Gordon: To the Tin Man and East 13.
• Got Me Doing It: She accidentally calls Blake "Cap" after hearing the Tin Man do it so gleefully.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Respects the normal law and gives Blake a crash-course on street law.
• Twofer Token Minority: A black female cop.

Detective Blake

A new police officer in Oakland, playfully nicknamed "Captain America" by the Tin Man.

• Deadpan Snarker: Glinda remarks that he's fine with Cord's Bisexual Bravado. Blake points out that he's not insecure enough to piss off a gangster just because he's afraid of "catching the gay."
• Fair Cop: Cord calls him "Cap" because he's pretty.
• Naïve Newcomer: He doesn't know the rules in Oakland yet.
• Reasonable Authority Figure

Spirits

Roland Fujii

Cord's Japanese-American fiance, who was shot in a botched carjacking by Harry Lamont.

• Affectionate Nickname: He calls Cord "shug" ("sugar").
• Nerves of Steel: Roland laughs in Lamont's face when he and Cord are getting carjacked, because Lamont clearly doesn't have the nerve to actually shoot them. When Lamont finally manages to, Roland not only slashes him with his knife, he laughs that Lamont isn't used to fighting.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: Played With. Roland has a knife and Harry Lamont has a gun, but Roland basically taunts him into shooting, then shoves through the pain and cuts Lamont, who runs away immediately. Lamont technically "wins" since he killed Roland, but he didn't even manage to steal the car and he's clearly outclassed by two former gangsters. And later on, a grieving Cord tracks Lamont down and shoots him execution-style.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Thanks to the story being Cord's Superhero Origin.
• Post Humous Character: Literally. He appears as a spirit after his death, half-dressed in filmy white gauze. He shows up in the prologue when Cord's getting dragged off the Golden Gate Bridge, and he still lives in his and Cord's abandoned house.
• Twofer Token Minority: An LGBT Japanese-American.

The Four Winds

Four Asian-appearing men who are individually called the East, West, North, and South Winds.

• Breaking the Fourth Wall: They perform set-changes, help with costumes, and act in the play.
• Tattoo as Character Type: The South Wind is Filipino and has indigenous tattoos.
• I Will Find You: The South Wind knows Juliana's looking for him, but can't seem to talk to her.

The Queen of Names

A dark-skinned woman who watches over foster-care children. She has dozens of names tattooed in white ink from her hands to her face.

• Ambiguously Brown: Referred to as dark-skinned, and three characters address her in Spanish.
• Freaky Fashion, Mild Mind: Her face and arms are tattooed with white names. She watches foster-children.
• Good Is Not Dumb: She suspected immediately that Juliana was getting into gang trouble, so she called the Tin Man.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Spanish and Filipino foster-children call her "La Reyna/Reina de los Nombres," which is the Spanish translation for "the Queen of Names." Martel also speaks Spanish when performing the ritual offering to her.
• Nice Girl: Cord said that he couldn't refuse a spirit asking for help, especially a NICE one.
• Tattoo as Character Type: She has names in white ink from her hands to her face, and wears a sleeveless dress to show them accordingly.
• The X of Y: The Queen of Names.

Lady Fury

An Asian-appearing woman who watches over foster-children in a more physical way than the Queen of Names.

• Action Girl: She's "built like a wall" and wears boxing hand-wraps. She beats up child-abusers.
• Handwraps of Awesome: She wears them.
• Mama Bear: She beats up child-abusers, keeps Juliana from trying to go inside her parents' house after they were targeted in a drive-by, and goes with her to beat up the Gatewalkers for killing Juliana's foster-parents. The Gatewalkers also say that she curses people.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: "Lady Fury" isn't the most soothing name around.
• Number Two: To the Queen of Names.
• Restraining Bolt: She can only curse the attackers of foster-children if the children are under eighteen. For adults, she's "limited" to beating people up.