Ichise

Ichise
Information
Kanji Name	櫟士
Kana Name	いちせ
Age	19
Affiliation	Organo, Lux
First Appearance	ROGUE: 01 Stranger
Final Appearance	ROGUE: 22 Myth
Voiced by	Satoshi Haga (Japanese) Justin Gross (English)

“

But I'm still doing the same thing. What I'm about to do... is also what I've been doing, just to survive.

”

Ichise is the main protagonist of the series, Ichise is an extremely quiet 19 year old prize-fighter who was orphaned at an early age. After getting his arm and leg chopped off by his former promoter, he is selected by Eriko Kamata to be the subject of her greatest experiment.

Appearance

He is a slim and well-built young man. Ichise has black hair of medium length. He usually wears a fringe on his forehead, but in one episode he had his hair slicked back. He has pale skin and blue eyes with an extremely cold and empty look. His facial expression almost always seems to be completely unmoved and devoid of any feelings. In the beginning, he was dressed in ordinary, indistinctive clothes. He often wore a long coat. In the later episodes, he wears a very nice black suit as part of the Organo.

Personality

Ichise is tough, cool and violent. He has an odd tendency to go berserk at very inopportune times. Whenever something has angered him, he channels nearly all his energy in an effort to destroy whatever it is that has crossed him. He's not a typical main character because of his disposition. While not actively out to hurt anyone, he has little to no qualms about hurting people for even stopping him in the street. He shows little hesitance or guilt in caving in a man's skull with his bare hand, and is attached to the people around him purely out of personal interest or even because they asked him to, rather than any idealism or heroism. Ichise proves immovably determined to stay alive time and time again. Even Doc and Keigo Oonishi remark on this, the first with amusement, the second with irritation because Ichise refuses to die in the first couple of episodes when he really could have.

He is very quiet and rarely speaks. He is generally calm and chill when not being bothered and rarely engages in socialization. This attitude however, stems from the quiet hell that is his life, having lost his parents at a young age, and growing up as an ostracised outsider with participation in vicious pit fights being his only means of existence. Throughout the course of the series, he becomes a little more open, but still remains fairly reserved unless someone directly asks him a question.

One key aspect of Ichise’s character developed in this episode is his attachment to the past. It has been even shown with Ichise struggling through the city holding onto his lost limbs. Ichise’s attachment to the past is perhaps more strongly shown in his attachment to the vial containing his deceased mother’s cells. This is demonstrated by his reaction to seeing the emptied vial, his facial expression conveying a whole range of emotions from despair to pure anger. It is clear that his attachment to the vial wasn’t just one of sentimentality but one that is even existential, something that he clings to in order to get through life.

In the first episode it is prevalent the clear indication of Ichise’s lack of freedom. One example of this is his flashback of him standing naked before his owner, seemingly being examined physically to see if he’s fit to fight. The nudity throughout much of the first half of the episode reflects Ichise’s vulnerability. Combine this with his cold, detached expression at the start and you get the impression of someone indifferent to their job, someone who has little control over their own life. After angering one of the game managers, he has his arm and leg cut off and is left to die. At some point Ichise decides to join Keigo Oonishi, because he admits that he does not know what to do with himself. He says he doesn't want to go back to his previous life, but at the same time he has nowhere else to go. Thanks to Oonishi, he learned what loyalty is. He was always treated like some kind of inferior subject and never had his own place in the world, and Oonishi was probably the first person who saw value in him and wanted to give his life a new meaning. Also, Hirohisa Gotoh is one of the few people in the organization to treat Ichise with any sort of respect. Thanks to him, Ichise starts considering his own needs and desires.

The relationship between Ichise and Doc is very ambiguous and forces the viewer to develop his own theories on the subject. It is unknown whether the affection from Doc to Ichise is mutual or one-sided on her part and whether the relationship is akin to lovers, siblings or mother and son. It may be bit of each, but also none of the above. It is also unknown why Ichise left Doc on the surface. He possibly did it because he never really cared about her, or because he realized he couldn't get her out of her funk no matter how hard he tried.

The meeting with Ran changed him a lot. Ichise somehow felt a fascination with her and it is possible that he even started to feel a kind of love for her. He acquires something of a heart during the time he is associated with her. He learns to be concerned about one other human being besides himself, and learns more about himself in knowing her. But in fact, he doesn't know almost anything about her personality, about her being who she is. However, thanks to her, he also wanted to change himself and his behaviour to stop hurting people. At the end of the series he even told her that he wanted to take her to the Surface just because nobody has to hurt themselves there.

Unfortunately, everything eventually led to the situations where Ichise was being forced to hurt many lives in Lux anyway, according to Ran's prophecy and no matter how much he wanted to change his life for her and himself. He is also forced to watch as the few people he cares about end up broken or dead. The last scenes of the series portrays Ichise dying, the last human being in Lux, having lost anyone and everyone he ever cared about. He curls into a ball, bleeding out and with his Texhnolyzed limbs running out of energy, calmly accepting his slow death. However, as the power of his Texhnolyzed limbs almost dissipates completely, his arm projects an image of a flower onto the ground, which makes someone think about how the end of his life should actually be treated in terms of whether he managed to change himself.

Biography

When he was younger, his father, Ikuse, was killed for what Ichise believes was betraying his friends. A short time after, his mother also died. All he was left with was a vial that contained some of his mother's cells. Soon after, he began his life as a fighter in an underground arena, and proved to be quite formidable.

The first episode opens with an Ichise walking along a corridor, the ambient hum of machinery and running of pipes in the background. He looks into a mirror and his face is shown to be covered with blood. Flashbacks reveal that he is some sort of prize fighter, who has just won a brutal and bloody fight. Judging from his lifeless expression, he takes no joy in these fights, as if they are merely a means to survive. A woman enters while he is showering, offering him an envelope of money and whispering in his ear. We can assume that this is probably his promoter's woman, who coerces him into sex in order to receive his payment. The following sex scene is passionless and lacking intimacy. The fighter lies there unreactive, almost like a doll. The only time he reacts is when the woman places her nail into his eye. Here, it seems his primal instincts come into play, and he knocks his sponsor's woman off the bed onto the ground.

We next see the fighter outdoors in the city. It is clear he is running away from his employers, with the woman looking for revenge for his insubordination. We see him resting by a sewage pipe by the water, carrying with him his only possessions (including a mysterious vial), and later he finds an abandoned-looking factory to sleep the night. He is unable to hide for long, however, as he is soon located by armed bodyguards who open fire through the walls of the building. He tries to run, but is shot in the leg and captured. He is brought before a man wielding a sword, Kyosuke Ishii. The man is seen cutting off one of his arms as an act of revenge. Ichise screams in pain, onlooked by the woman from earlier. In a state of pure rage, he charges at the woman, his fist flying towards her. Before he can reach her, his left leg is cut off by the bodyguard. Shortly after, Keigo Oonishi, the Organo leader, arrives and gives the fighter the chance to continue to live.

Later, Ichise struggles through Lux, his dismembered limbs dragged behind him tied with string. He attempts to use a stick to walk, only to collapse onto the ground. It is clear he hasn’t adapted to his loss of limbs, as when he falls, he instinctively goes to put out his phantom arm, only to land flat on his face. He is presented as an animal, crawling through the streets, insects flocking around his face. Importantly it is shown that he protectively carries with him a vial containing an unknown liquid (this is significant later in the show). Despite the struggles endured by the fighter, he refuses the help of others to survive. When a local shopkeeper offers him a bowl of soup out of sympathy, the fighter ignores it and turns away.

At one point we see two younger texhnolyzed individuals, who are discussing the politics of the city (in particular the conflict between the Organo and the Salvation Alliance), confront the fighter, one of them kicking him to the ground. These two characters are Shinji, the Racan leader, and Hal, his friend. Later, sitting at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, the fighter sees a hallucination of himself walking up them and looking back down upon him, as if both literally and metaphorically. Suddenly, the mysterious Doc walking past the fighter, who sees him and stops to gaze upon him.

It appears that Doc has brought Ichise to her lab with her, where he is sleeping on some sort of hospital bed. In his sleep he has a flashback which reveals key information about his past. It depicts Ichise as a child, being dragged along by his distressed mother. They push through a large crowd where they see Ichise’s father hanged in front of them, like a spectacle. Ichise’s mother is distraught, but young Ichise can only watch his mother with concern. The flashback cuts to his mother’s deathbed. While clearly only a short time has passed, she is looking old and frail. Her final words to her son are: "don’t…don’t look…Ichise." After flashbacks to the events of the preceding episodes, Ichise wakes up; it is shown he has a tube down his throat and is wrapped up tightly. Doc, who has been calmly eating steak, is shocked to notice Ichise is awake; she accidentally knocks over her beaker of wine, which spills on the ground like the image of a pool of blood.

Later, we see Doc constructing a pair of Texhnolyzed limbs, smiling to herself while doing so. Ichise repeatedly asks for water, to which Doc replies that he must ask please. Fetching a flask of water, she pours it onto Ichise’s face from height, leaving it out of reach beside him. Ichise, trying to reach for the flask with his mouth, falls off his bed onto the floor, watching the water spilling from the flask beside him.

Ichise tries to crawl away, only for Doc to ask where he will go to: “back to that dump?” She throws before him Ichise’s decapitated limbs which he had been dragging behind him; they are pale and lifeless. She mocks him for keeping them with him as a memento, informing him that the cells are long dead and that not even Raffia could reattach his "mummified arm". Ichise is angered by this; he pushes a table at Doc flings himself at her, pinning her down by the throat with his remaining hand. He tells her that he’s "got nothing to do with that 'Raffia' thing."

Then, remembering the mysterious vial that he’d been carrying with him this time, he demands to know where it is. Doc turns his attention to the now emptied vial on her desk. She tells him that she didn’t throw it away, correctly guessing that inside the vial were the cells of his deceased mother. She tells him that she has put the contents into the Texhnolyzed limbs that she’s made for him: “That unit has become a living being.” With Ichise distracted with shock, she knocks him round the head with the metal flask. She tells him that the Texhnolyzed limbs will be his new arm and leg. As if blackmailing him, she says that to reject them would be killing his own mother. Ichise in a state of pure rage flings himself towards Doc fist raised. Before he can attack her, Oonishi, who has just arrived to inform Doc of the damage to his leg, intervenes by striking down Ichise with the flat side of his sword. He acknowledges that a normal being would have been killed by that blow, to which Doc responds: "To have such an obsession to live, isn’t it great?"

In the last episode, Ichise finds Ran on a theatre stage with Kano as a director and Shapes as the unwilling audience. Her body is removed and her head is placed on a two-headed dummy. Ichise kills Kano and gives Ran a "mercy killing".

Abilities

Ichise is very strong physically. He took part in underground matches and can fight very well. His primary fighting style is simple boxing jabs. When his arm and leg became Texhnolyzed, his combat fighting skills became even better and more effective. For example, he effortlessly takes out a gang of hitmen while almost completely unarmed in Episode 14. When he gets really angry, he's almost unstoppable, especially after becoming Texhnolyzed.

He has an incredible will to survive. This attribute is also very visible when he loses two limbs but does not give up and constantly struggle to survive. In the first episode, he even continues charging at his opponents after getting his arm cut off.

At some point in the series, when Ichise joins Organo, he also starts using katana. As it turns out, he can attack extremely effectively and precisely with his sword. This is shown very well in the scene in which Ichise fights Haruhiko Toyama, who was changed into the Shape. Toyama seems to have more experience in using the katana than Ichise, also his body is stronger, and yet Ichise kills him with one precise cut. In some scenes it can be also seen how Ichise uses guns, which also does not seem to be something new to him. It is unknown if Ichise has ever had any training in weapons combat (perhaps after joining Organo, but such scenes have never been shown). It is possible that his ability to using weapons is just largely comes from his nature, which is closely related to his fighting instinct. It can also be said that Ichise simply has an unbelievable talent for quickly learning everything about fighting and violence.

Gallery

Trivia

• He doesn't say anything until episode 3, and after that is practically mute unless spoken to by someone he respects like Doc, Oonishi, Toyama, or Ran.
• Ichise is very similar in appearance and in the way of being to Killy from the BLAME! manga series.