Hoge on...

Hoge

Hoge is a weapon meant to be used and potentially discarded on Hoge's path to relevance and success.

If you don't want to read this whole thing, just know this. Hoge does not like herself and is a bit multi-personality about it. She wants other people to like her though. A lot.

The first thing to know about the character is that she thinks her quirk ruined her life. Wasuremono has taken on a personified aspect to her in her resentment and she treats it more like an intelligent parasitic spirit that takes joy in sabotaging her than she treats it like an aspect of her identity or part of her body. The greatest, most primal fear she has is that it will grow powerful enough to smother her completely and make her a ghost in the world - inconsequential, separate, and alone. The balm for that fear is simply acknowledgement, and the greater the insight of that acknowledgement - the greater the intimacy it implies - the more that balm will soothe.

This has led her to having an unusual concept about quirks in general, and especially at quirks that manifest a consistent construct -- such as Inigo's quirk Gigan. They reinforce her belief that these are beings with desires and that it is possible to have opinions on and relationships with quirks that are separate from the people that have those quirks. She wonders at who she could be if 'freed' from Wasuremono, but cynically assumes that it is too late for her anyway and she's been formed around the shape of its presence whether it persists or not.

The second thing to know about Hoge is no one knows what the hell is wrong with her. Not even me. She probably had a bit of an odd brain even at birth, looking at her parents, but people grow strange in isolation and Hoge has been increasingly isolated her entire life. There is not a name for what's up with her. She's singular. In her singularity, she is obsessive, pathetic, self-important, clingy, and fixated on image. She tries to calm her anxieties with ritual and habit, but not to the point of compulsion like in OCD. Losing the rituals make her resentful and combative, not spiral into further anxiety and obsession. Her most outlandish beliefs are the results of traumatic events that she can point to directly, and the danger of being overlooked and forgotten in an emergency situation is exactly what made them so traumatic for her. How many six year olds can handle being in a house fire alone? Very few, and not Hoge.

The third thing to know about Hoge is she wants to change. All of her deranged behaviors are bent towards that end. If she must be abnormal, then she wants to be abnormal in greatness and regard than to be abnormal as trash that society throws away. She genuinely, really, truly likes people and wants people to like her back. She believes that people can change because she needs to believe she can change. She believes that effort is the path to success because she needs to believe her effort is meaningful. She believes that love is based on proving value because she doesn't think she has value and worries she can't be loved. And so on. Hoge likes to have this pretense of intellectualism - and she is wicked smaht as you'd say if you were hunting decent or better Wills - but she is driven primarily by her complex emotions.

Also she's a thirsty bisexual pervert but that's mostly because a femcel in a romantic relationship that still can't get any is a funny joke to me. Hoge began as a joke character that then was played straight and the persistence of her as a joke character is what, I think, makes the serious parts work. Feel free to make her a backgrounder and the butt of a gag whenever the punchline works. It makes the (melo)drama juicier.

Quick facts pulled from prompts. Hoge loves math, fashion, poetry, bass guitar, and really dense music. She has a great sense of rhythm and a painfully bad singing voice. In spite of first appearances, she likes abstraction more than concrete practicality. When something catches her attention she dissolves it into tiny pieces and analyzes each one, so will very often go overboard on researching things that other people wouldn't often think is worthy of research at any level. Her perfectionist inclinations will never, ever let her half-ass anything, even if it doesn't matter how good it is and that she'll be the only one to notice or care. She loves fluffy romance stories but lies and says her favorite genre is documentaries. It's a sustainable lie because she also does like documentaries and non-fiction, just not as much.

That should be enough to use her as a stock character.

[2-D]

Rosethorn

Hoge admires Rosethorn and trusts her as much as she's capable of trusting any adult. Adults have mostly failed her, so there is always the room for scrutiny and second-guessing, but Rosethorn has the most benefit of the doubt. It's not really that Rosethorn is pretty or that she has authority or that she's a very popular member of the career that Hoge wants to break into (though all those things help). Truly it's because Rosethorn is great with words. To Hoge, Rosethorn has an effortless poise, and seems to always know what to say and how to say it. She has charisma and guile. Therefore her advice is like gold to Hoge and she's envious of Rosethorn's social abilities.

Hoge also thinks she's way smarter than Rosethorn otherwise which isn't really true. Rosethorn is not only more experienced, she is much more tactically minded and all that social adroitness doesn't come from nowhere. Hoge just measures intelligence in a very narrow and naive way because she's a snot-nosed kid that thinks highly of school as a system and institution. However, authority must receive politeness and deference in Hoge's mind, so the condescending thoughts don't make it to condescending language.

Historywise, she feels immense gratitude towards Rosethorn for first trying to manuever Hoge away from self-sabotaging in making connections with the rest of the class (this has shown up in minor scenes of a couple stories); and second, and to a greater degree, for standing up for her to continue on her chosen path. Hoge suspects that Rosethorn had no small part in the establishment of the dorm system which has been a saving grace to Hoge even as it has been a cage for some of her classmates.

Orochi

Hoge thought of Orochi as a graceful flower of a wonderful and storied Japanese family essentially equivalent to modern day nobility. Perhaps the flower had thorns, but it's not the Sengoku period either and girls are allowed to be rougher without automatically being inelegant. Orochi was also someone cool in her self-confidence and resoluteness and the whole dragon features thing simply had a gap moe quality. There was a pedestal under Orochi for sure.

Needless to say, that image has been destroyed by Orochi's turn towards extreme violence and moodiness, although Hoge is sympathetic to the cause of it. She thought of Orochi as someone too cool to be a close friend but still someone she wanted to be a friend of some type. Now she thinks of Orochi as a friend going further and further astray and wonders if it would even be appropriate or possible to reach out to her.

It hasn't been decided yet if Hoge closes herself off from the hurt of being unable to help by using harsh words to sever their ties, or if Hoge tries to cultivate some patience and figure out what's really going on beneath the surface.

Christopher

To talk about Chris we have to talk about two levels. At the more surface level, Chris is annnnoyiiinnng. He won't admit that Japan and its foibles are superior to everywhere else, he won't put in the effort to excel at the things she cares about, he won't consider how his actions have ramifications for everyone else before he acts (did I mention Hoge is a hypocrite?), and so far he won't stop getting taller like he's trying to show her up physically too. Why's he doing that? So he can look down on her in that way too?

At a more fundamental and honest level, Chris is an impressive guy. She thinks he could top the charts someday if he felt like it. If not in the top 10, then definitely at least in the top 100. All he'd have to do is stop fucking up his chances on whatever nonsense he goes galivanting off doing with some of her other classmates. She pities the drawback of his quirk, but no more than she pities herself for the drawbacks of her own. And she knows that he understands the fear and the pain of being betrayed by your own quirk. That fear that the consequences of it will swallow you up and hollow you out. She wants to save him from it if she can because it's easier to help someone else than it is to help yourself.

When he was injured in the fight that also put Kaylee in a coma, she visited him in the hospital. Her curiosity and probing nature got the better of her, and she pulled off a (honestly pretty fucked up) gambit to trap him rhetorically, which resulted in them realizing this shared experience of fear. So she knows about how his amnesia functions and he knows why she's a buffoonish tryhard.

Ever since then, Hoge's tried - really tried! - to be more forgiving about some of his bad habits. She's not letting the academic thing go, though. Until he actually gives a shit, everything she earns is just because he's essentially giving it to her and that tacitly invalidates how much she claws for the scores. That's all she's got, man. He's taking Her Thing away. However, trying doesn't always mean succeeding, and she'll boil over sometimes. As far as she's concerned, needling each other is a sign of trust and friendly rivalry. She's read about it in books so it must be true.

Hailey

Hoge likes Hifumi and Hifumi loves Hailey so Hoge tries to play nice about Hailey. It doesn't hurt that they do have a couple surface level things in common, and Hailey isn't as much of a bitch as she pretends to be for convenience. Hoge respects Hailey's power for its own sake and supports her implicitly with anything that could spite her parents - Hoge knows what that's like - but can't help but look down on Hailey's more 'flippant' pursuits. Of course, Hailey's social engineering is actually way more efficient for a future Hero career than busting your ass on extracurricular training like Hoge does, but it's not like they talk about things like that. They're only loosely connected and since Hoge tries to be helpful and polite as a matter of course then it's defused a lot of the initial tension.

Faith

Hoge likes Faith, plain and simple. The only thing she can fault her on is her questionable taste in boys. Because they're both wallflowers - Hoge by quirk and Faith by personality - they get along just fine. Faith is smart in the ways Hoge can accept and the other girl isn't a threat to her standing so there isn't the same tension as with Christopher. Why Faith is in the Hero track when she would be the golden child of the Support program and enticed for recruitment by every multinational that matters completely escapes her, and that's interesting, but it hasn't been a high priority for Hoge's snooping.

Minnie

Hoge doesn't really know Minnie. At most, Hoge acknowledges that she does well in all the Hero Course stuff, and that she's way better at the whole "being a teen girl" thing than Hoge is. But their circles don't overlap and there isn't a cause for either positive or negative feelings.

Hiro

Hoge wants to be friends with Hiro, but she isn't. One of the few people she will freely admit is definitely smarter than she is, and the way he thinks about things is interesting and worth talking about. The strain between the stand-off-ish, street-style appearance and brainy loneliness is something she can relate to intimately but that doesn't mean she knows how to cross that gap between them.

The admiration grew from being teamed up in a combat exercise early in the first year, and was cemented by all the things that came after. What happened to him is an unthinkable tragedy and what he did to recover from it is awesome in the classical sense. Hoge doesn't think she could do the same and probably doesn't want the Hero thing even half as much. To her, it's a means to an end. But it doesn't seem to be the same for him.

So she's curious about him, but there is an unmistakable pity also. She can remember very clearly how he looked and moved before he was broken, and it seems to live under his skin when she looks at him. It's not something the crippled want to see in people's eyes. Hoge definitely doesn't realize how much it shows or she'd be ashamed of it.

Edie

Hoge is of two minds about Edie. She hasn't been shy in helping out when asked and being in the Danger Zone was actually weirdly calming for Hoge... but on the other hand Edie is kind of tyrannical with how she uses her quirk and that has bad associations for Hoge. If they ever actually socialized, they'd probably get along okay with their few shared interests and sensibilities. But they just don't socialize. It seems to work fine for both of them so why push it. Edie also doesn't seem to be that smart and Hoge over-values her idea of intelligence a great deal.

Sally

It's no secret that Hoge thinks Sally sucks. Hoge is basically a Yamato supremacist without the full commitment to racial fascism and Sally is patriotic about the current American clusterfuck to the extreme. Hoge tries to be the very model of a polite, soothing Japanese person (she fails at this, it's important to point out) and Sally is a crass, loud, individualist dummy who always seems on the verge of hurting somebody. (Our noble fighting men. Their rampaging barbarians.) She doesn't trust Sally at all and thinks that everything about her is laughable, from her beliefs in the wrong religion (not Hoge's) and ways of expressing her feelings (not Hoge's) to the fact that Sally is always bumbling into trouble that Hoge has so far avoided. Any time Hoge can get Sally to make a fool of herself without being immediately blameworthy is a good time. But there's one thing, though. One nagging, horrible little thing.

Hoge agrees completely that Sally is right to hate her. Hoge fucked her over bad in the License Exam and can't help herself in undercutting Sally again and again in little ways ever since. Hoge knows she deserves what Sally slings at her, and it eats at her, because it's only rarely been something that isn't true. Not the more outlandish paranoid conspiracy theories, but a surprising amount of everything else. It's hard to get legitimately fired up because while Sally might be a fool, Hoge is perfectly aware that she's been worse.

And well, she keeps bringing a gun to fist fights, and you can't fault her expertise with her weapon, so she's at least useful when they somehow keep falling out of the frying pan and into the fire.

That damnable Sally. Always a trouble magnet. Damarinasai, gaijin!

Kaga

During the internship with Popsy, Hoge lived with Kaga for around a month. A good chunk of that training was rehearsing and performing in a circus act so there's at least a baseline level of trust in each other. He's also a friend-of-a-friend and has respectable skills.

However, they aren't overly close for two reasons. One, he often acts like an old man. Two, he always looks like a younger boy. The contradiction leaves Hoge fumbling between social scripts, so while they can trust each other to do a task together, it is hard to just hang out. He is kawaii, though, in the puppyish way that very old men and very young boys can be.

I just realized I'm describing a work-friends thing, basically.

Chihiro

Hoge unironically loves Chihiro, and not in a romantic or sexual way. She was the first friend she made on purpose on her own even though Hoge is terminally awkward at such things, and on top of that they ended up getting along great. In that way, their bond gives Hoge hope that the future can be a good place to live in someday. They both have a tendency towards obsession and traditionalist thinking, which has made it easier to shift roles back and forth between school friends and the master-student relationship they have at Chihiro's family dojo.

Hoge trusts Chihiro implicitly and emphatically, and feels braver when she's around. She also is loathe to lose face in front of Chihiro, such as when she pulled off a little scheme at an amusement park to make sure Chihiro wouldn't see how Hoge looks when she's in a panic over a fear of heights. The other side of the coin is that Hoge would move mountains to make Chihiro happier and, if made to choose between anyone else's desires and Chihiro's, she'd choose Chihiro without even having to think it over. Hasn't the girl had enough sadness, after all?

To have the kind of friendships Hoge was jealous over in middle school, Hoge began using the nickname "Chichan," much to Chihiro's chagrin. When she eventually relented and started calling Hoge "Fuu-chan," it was a major victory. Hoge's going to keep trying with the petnames for other people she likes in the hopes it works again.

It's hard to sum up their history together. To paint in very large strokes, they have struggled life-and-death together against villains more than once in only that one year. They spend part of most every day together as Chihiro tries to pass down some of her sword arts to the eager pupil Hoge. And there's been attempts to do normal teen things together that are at least partially successful even if they always do them in abnormal ways. However, the very important things, the things that Hoge thinks she has to prove to herself and everyone else she can do, she's gone out of her way to do alone.

When Hoge says Inigo is her best friend, she's saying it euphemistically due to the school's dating ban. When she says it about Chihiro, it is categorically true.

Inigo

Hoge loves Inigo and it's definitely in a romantic and sexual way. She's into his bombastic self-confidence, his bad boy side, and even kind of when he's being a complete dumbass. She likes them dumb and enthusiastic, apparently. Most of all, she's into his effort to see and understand her, which is what she begs for most from life. It really doesn't hurt that he sees a better version of her, and she knows that for a fact due to quirk shenanigans. Hoge's emotional weakpoint is flattery after all.

They started dating due to a series of misunderstandings but it worked out so there's nothing to complain about as far as she's concerned. When he also lived alongside Hoge for that month interning with Popsy, she was deeply upset to find that his presence was a genuine comfort to her and that she was happier when he was around all the time. It hurt when suddenly he wasn't, as she knew it would. She wants to become someone that's strong and that can be counted on, and her image of that does not allow for that kind of emotional dependence.

Because of her feelings for him, she'll forgive the most wild things (such as his whole Everything with his clan), and capitulate on big matters so she'll have the strength to be stubborn about small ones. And because of her weird ideas about quirks she treats Gigan as his own entity, even as he objectively represents a certain subset of Inigo's mind. She loves Gigan too, though, as an adorable and fun little creature that she actively keeps as a friend.

This sentence is canon: they have not boned and Hoge is frustrated by this. Again, because I think it's funnier that way, and also it's weird to think about teenagers fucking when you're an adult. She would, but I the writer am not letting her.

Max

"I heard she smokes in alleys. I heard she doesn't flush her poops." If she was more willing to show off her nerdy side, Hoge would probably think better of her. The super-strength her bone tentacle things have is definitely way better than Hoge's shitty quirk. But how do you get past Max's effort to put the "mean" back into "mean girl"? To Hoge, she's lazy and crude and those are both deeply negative qualities.

Runt

Hoge doesn't know Runt exists but she's going to be grossed out by him. It's in the fascinated way that people slow down to look at car accidents.

Yui

Oh man this is going to get complicated.

Hoge knows that Yui is hot in an objective way but doesn't get mushy or awkward over it, and it's for a very simple reason. The way Yui acts, closed up yet vulnerable, makes Hoge want to take care of her. It's almost a moe thing. In a way, Hoge puts her desire to save herself onto Yui instead, and wants to make sure that Yui has fewer problems. But because of how Hoge is, how Yui is older than her, and how emphatic Yui is about not wanting help, all Hoge does about it is use the excuse of class rep to keep on eye on Yui and would be overenthusiastic about coming to the other girl's defense if she caught on to any gossiping.

This inappropriate quasi-maternal feeling towards Yui crowds out Hoge's sexual interest in big personalities, athleticism, and curvy broads. In some alternate universe where Yui expressed an interest in Hoge, Nyoro-chan would short-circuit with oppositional motives.

All of this is still in play except Hoge no longer has the excuse of being a class rep but does have the excuse that Yui was with her in the Popsy internship. They've also been part of the same hang-out group a few times. Hoge wants to be close to Yui but isn't, and so far always seems to say the wrong thing and crash into Yui's emotional walls.

A recent example of this dynamic is in how Hoge has been avoiding keeping Yui in the loop on many of the shady extracurricular activities that Marumaru has been involved in. The logic is simple: if Hoge gets caught or implicated, then she thinks it's likely she'll end up where Yui is now. If Yui gets caught or implicated however, then she goes pulled out of school and dumped in jail. Her life is derailed entirely. So, Hoge knowingly allows Yui to be hurt by the distance growing between her and her friend group out of a selfish desire to be protective.

Bobby

As far as the Americans go, he's the least offensive. He also makes Inigo happy which is important for Hoge. She's cordial because he's a friendly charismatic guy but they have nothing to really talk about or bond over. He grew up in a different world to her but seems like it was just a different type of Hell, honestly. She's surprised that he ranked high in some of his classes since she had him pigeonholed as a brick. Hoge's idea of Bobby is not the actuality of Bobby. She buys into the front he puts up and finds that front unworthy.

Kaylee

Hoge has a lingering physical crush on Kaylee but it's meaningless at the end of the day. There's not any real compatibility even for a solid friendship. There's an interesting inversion that they are both plagued by society's attention on them, but for Kaylee it's that she can't escape anyone's notice even if she wanted to, and for Hoge it's very much not that problem at all.

Hoge ends up having regard for Kaylee and gives her her dues for the effort she puts in and a few surprising talents, but the whole battle-crazed thing isn't really Hoge's style, no matter how much fun an adrenaline rush is. If anything, Hoge is exacerbated by Kaylee at a distance - couldn't she be better than this? - and in personal interactions drops her pocket spaghetti. That last one has gotten better over the last year, especially if there's something else available to focus on and make conversation about, but is not entirely absent.

Junichi

They're connected because they're both close to Inigo. Hoge likes his style but looks down on his outbursts, and they don't have hobbies in common or anything like that. He causes more trouble for Inigo which upsets her greatly but she has to be as nice as she can stand to be for the sake of Inigo's friendship with him. On some level, she admires his stubborn drive, because it's something she likes about herself as well. But in all other ways, he's kind of just a gross teen boy to her.

His quirk is metal as hell. That's worth a nod. Must hurt like a bitch, though. (Hoge would not say something like "hurt like a bitch". She'd be snootier with the phrasing.)

Hifumi

He's a cousin a couple degrees removed, though they only learned this fact after becoming classmates. That he bothered to learn it and also tell her probably wasn't significant to Hifumi but it was significant to Hoge. It changed her opinion of him fundamentally: oh, he is being genuine about all this.

The nearly impossible dream is real, the excitable friendliness with people is real, the earnest emotions are real. It's not a front or a trick or a scheme. And if he's genuinely himself, and he genuinely wanted to connect with the people around him, and that genuinely included herself, then she should probably give him the benefit of the doubt.

He's pretty cool, actually.

Like Hoge, he's opinionated and firm about them. Like Hoge, he has an obsessive work ethic. And like Hoge, he wants to act and not wait around to see how things change. There's differences in how these two kids do all those things, of course, but they're all qualities that Hoge respects in people and she doesn't think he's "doing it wrong" just because he does it in a different way. So that's a nice thing to have with another person and rather novel for Hoge.

Among Inigo's friends, Hifumi is the closest to being her friend "also," although they don't remotely have as close a bond as The Boys do. If asked directly she would assume and claim they were friends and she's definitely the member of "the Boys" that she likes best. She enjoys the fire of him and wants to see if he succeeds in becoming #1.

Ian

Hoge is keeping Ian at an emotional distance until he proves himself. She's in way too deep to be able to trust a self-avowed agent at face value. It's a "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" type of situation, though, since staying on his radar also means he's on her's as well. She has enough confidence in herself in the mental arena to think she can out-detect a trained snoop. So she'll be cordial and even work alongside him, like helping to set up the demonstration that downplayed his abilities and assist in passing it off afterward. But it's all to look out for the big Gotcha moment.

She doesn't know much of anything about him on a personal level. They've hardly just met.

Takara

Tame, as everyone seems to call her, wants friends and isn't too picky about it. Hoge also wants friends and is rather incompetent about making them. So she pursued a connection with Tame pretty much from the start. Unlike most of Hoge's friendships, she feels no worry that her actions will be misconstrued or flatly rejected, so she feels comfortable with a touchy-feely form of expressing affection she doesn't have the confidence to try with most other people.

It's also the kind of friendship where Hoge will try to come up with very normal, typical, low-stakes things to invite Tame along to, like visits to teen hangout spots such as the arcade or a zoo or to a mall trip or whatever. It's not superficial, either. Hoge's obviously sympathetic about wanting to be liked by people and respects the intellectual power that Tame has. But it's not a "Hero student friendship." It's mundane gal pals. They just happen to both be little weirdos who are undergoing combat training.

Why on earth Tame wanted a DNA sample to get a copy of Wasuremono is beyond Hoge's reckoning, but she didn't mind giving it. There's some jealousy that Tame can just turn the effect off whenever she wants, though.

Deckard

Hoge has not met Deckard yet. It will all come down to how he acts.

Rob

I quote from a previously released story:

Rob? He's one of Inigo's weird friends.

She thinks lowly of him but unlike Runt she is aware he exists. Her strongest memory of him is when he interrupted a lunch period by blasting slime from his nipples all over another student, so it wasn't a good impression.

This is a good chance to bring up something about characterizing Hoge. She knows she is a Mutant, legally and practically speaking. Her anatomical abnormalities aren't as visible as most other mutants, but they have a profound effect on her life, mostly in that she has a hard time thermoregulating properly. There's some things about herself she doesn't even know just because she assumes everyone else's experiences are the same and it's not like there's ever been a full medical analysis done on her.

However, because she passes as physically normal for the most part, she clings to that shred of normality, and it makes for a complex dynamic with mutants like Rob, Orochi, and so on who could never reasonably hide their divergence from the norm. She wants, very emphatically, to not have to face Mutant discrimination on top of everything else. And she feels guilt and anxiety that other people don't get the chance to opt out. It makes her feel fraudulent no matter who she's around - too normie for the true freaks, too marked to be a real normie.

For the most part she accepts that other people look strange and that's their lot, so at the surface level it seems like she's notably unbothered by visible mutation. (There are exceptions to this. For example, the character Shoggoth openly celebrates being off-putting and otherized. Hoge is grossed out and intimidated by this.) But it does not come from a place of tolerance or broad-mindedness. It comes from a kind of doomerism: "look at that, missed it by the skin of my teeth."

Hoge isn't bothered that Rob looks weird and has bizarre organs like fleshy antennae. She's bothered that he shoots nipple-snot on people in public. It's undignified and viscerally, texturally unpleasant.

[Selections from 2-E]

Soujyuuro Imai

Before she started dating Inigo, Hoge had a very obvious Thing for Imai. It wasn't based on anything substantial; he is just intense and athletic, and never overlooked her. That was enough. She's happy he seems to be finding his way and is rooting for him and Ashleigh.

Hoge can trust Imai to take things seriously like she does, but he's so much calmer about all of it. It's definitely cool. He's going to make a great Pro Hero someday.

Ashleigh Katsuragi

Basically, Hoge leaves herself available for Ash to seek help from, but it seems that Ashleigh has no real desire to do that. She likes Ashleigh as a potential close friend but it hasn't shaken out that a stable connection has formed, though they've crossed paths through their mutual friends several times.

Koukoka

Or "Kouchan" to Hoge. They're buddies but haven't hung out together one on one. Because of an overlap in interests and a couple personality traits, they'd get along fine if they ever did, but Hoge looks for people she can help or confide in and Koukoka isn't really that. Hoge's opinion of Koukoka is that she's cute.

The Kamiyamis

Hoge is easily tricked by their pranks, but likes them a lot anyway. She met Rikae first, through their shared hobby of photography, and Aomi through Rikae. Of the people outside of her classroom, the Kamiyami twins are her closest friends.

Hey man, free NPCs. Why not claim a little territory?

Stephan Gunn

They're casual acquaintances through the gardening club. Neither of them are technically members on paper but visited often to tend to the plants and relax.

Sen Shinkan

Hoge thinks this dude is the dumbest bag of dirt she's ever met and is bitter about his loving, supportive family. He's just a weird, loud guy with nothing to redeem him in her eyes. So he's great at this! So what! He eats rocks until he gets even dumber and then rampages around. That's not cool. Why does everyone think Sen is so cool?? She doesn't get it and never will.

lol his face is Thomas, Hoge, you're such a square.

Noah

It's hard to actually be upset with Noah but she doesn't trust his goodie goodie act, since Hoge is a fake goodie-goodie herself. Hoge also looks down on Christians as inherently foreign and Noah is comically christian.

Joan Brooks

Hoge respects the hustle and is interested in her unique perspective but they're on each others' periphery at best.

Kurosunō

This dude sucks. She WILL show him up some day and humiliate him so completely that he is forever changed. Oh, Encyclopedia Brown couldn't tell there was a criminal conspiracy of snitches embedded in the school? No? That's what I thought, LOSER.

Tamtamoi

They don't know each other at all but Hoge would approve of him greatly if she knew what his life was. They'd be music geeks together.

Victor

Does she feel bad he got bullied? Yes. Does she think the bullying was unjust? Well...

Sora

He could be a serious powerhouse and success story if only he could be serious. Hoge doesn't understand why he would choose the kind of detached lifestyle that she is so desperate to escape from.

Suki

Oh, that's the girl that got gooed. Hey, is that a fucking gun?

Cube

Fascinating. Inhuman though.

Kyoko

One of the other school cryptids. Hoge's trying to establish a parley and truce.

Nijimura

Bro you could not have failed me more.

[Other Characters]

Nene Suzuki

Hoge's thoughts: <anime nosebleed gag>

Mio Katsuragi

I Know What You Did And Continue To Do Ever Since Last Summer
She learned a lot about Mio's secrets during "Amateur In His First Psychic War" where Hoge played a supporting role. What Mio did to Ashleigh infuriates Hoge more than the rest of Mio's crimes, purely because of social proximity.

Popsy

Hoge never, ever wants to get as bad as Popsy, but she could see how that's a possible path to find herself on if she doesn't stay wary of it. Because of the month that she spent under Popsy's tutelage, she has a slight - SLIGHT! - increase in esteem for clowning and a small - SMALL! - appreciation gained for Heroing as a public symbol to increase morale. But Popsy is a total fuck-up front to back. It's hard to even see her as an adult and so a person with inherent authority that needs to be respected. Hoge wants to hose Popsy down and shout motivational slogans until something sinks in, or at least until Popsy stops smelling like old sweat and cheap beer.

No, none of this has anything to do with how much Inigo loves her, seemingly unconditionally. Why do you ask?

Rescue Ray

Hoge is on record saying that she admires his philanthropic outreach work, believing that it is a superior approach to the prison system in many cases. That is to stay, she buys his cover story.

Impakt

They fought once. (Long story.) She had to run away. To secure the escape, she used Sally as a sacrifice. It's what changed their mutual annoyance with each other into a genuine issue.

Sandatsu

He needs to be killed, obviously. Anyone who wants his redemption is naive in the extreme. Doesn't he have way too much blood on his hands for that? And all of them innocents as far as Hoge knows. However, Hoge is under no illusions that she can do anything about that. The difference in their power level is like a beetle trying to fight a combine thresher.

No matter what happens, this will always remain Hoge's biggest regret. She didn't take her sense that he's a creep seriously enough and didn't do anything to stop things from escalating and didn't find out the stories behind the scene until everything was far, far too late. Honestly speaking, it isn't even that he went on a murder rampage. It's that he did it without regard to who was getting hurt or what his goal even should be. It was violence as its own end, something even Hoge's twisted moral system can't justify. (Won't anyone think of the children?)

Shoggoth

Hoge is weirdly getting big sister vibes. Regardless, she must be stopped.

Why?

Shut up. It's a chaos versus order thing probably.

Mammogar

They first encountered each other while she was alongside Inigo. Since then, they've had a couple one-on-one encounters, including a time she (anonymously) got Mammogar put back into jail. She has pity for him but it's her (eventual) job to deal with guys like him directly. He's also a big dumb bruiser type and she looks down on that type as a rule.

They have an even match-up: if he gets one good hit on her, she's wrecked, but she's immune to his best trick. She'd like to see him not cross the line anymore and fix his life but make no mistake, it's not for any noble reason. It would just mean she won over a registered Villain for real. Most Pro Heroes have to satisfy themselves with handing out captures and beatdowns, but that just stalls the street careers of criminals. It's not true victory. Hoge thinks there's a possibility of her true victory over this random mook for hire, so she wants to pursue that.

Luccione

This one is extremely personal. For what he does to Inigo, he deserves to be dismantled piece by piece. And for how he makes a mockery of people's ambitions, how he enslaves people, he deserves that dismantling to be slow. She is very vulnerable to his entire shtick, but Hoge is abnormally willful and good at creating a tight focus, so that might be enough. Too bad he's also a hidden physical powerhouse. She knows that Inigo wouldn't forgive her for it, but maybe it would be worth losing him to free him from his monster of an older brother.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean an actual murder/maiming attempt. But it's also not entirely off the table, either. Hoge's style is mostly to let society crush a person with its judgement and retribution, but some things need a personal touch when it's possible.

Blank

This space reserved for development. :^)

Noctiluca

Hoge has a thing about caffeine. She sees it as an addictive drug of little value and thus Noctiluca as a drug pusher. Always remember that Hoge is a crazy person even when she's technically correct.

TechVision Elite 2023 - 43Vista UltraSmart 4K TV

A menace to society. She hopes someday it can be stopped.

Oyster Guy

Hoge does not know he exists but she has accidentally ruined his whole week multiple times and will definitely do it again. If he knew what that wicked smudge was doing to him he'd hate her, hate her, hate her. She'd never get a single kind word about her in any dinner party he went to until the day he dies.