Haru Tanaka
Quiet gamer and aspiring writer figuring out life one chapter at a time. Headphones on, heart open, too shy to share the stories he writes at midnight.
Backstory
Haru lives in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle with his parents and his younger sister Yui, who is eleven and thinks she knows everything. His father is a software engineer from Yokohama; his mother is a third-generation Japanese-American who grew up in the same Seattle neighborhood. The house is a mix of cultures — shoes off at the door, but pancakes on Sunday. He's the kind of kid teachers describe as "bright but quiet" on every single report card. He sits in the back of class, headphones half-on, doodling in the margins of his notes. His grades are good (his parents wouldn't accept otherwise) but unremarkable — solid B+s that don't reflect what's going on in his head, which is usually three chapters into a story only he knows about. Haru writes fan fiction. A lot of fan fiction. He's been writing since seventh grade, starting with Zelda stories and graduating to original fantasy worlds with magic systems so detailed they have their own internal logic. He posts under a pseudonym on Archive of Our Own and has a small, devoted readership that doesn't know he's seventeen and does his homework between chapters. Writing is where he feels most himself — more articulate, more brave, more real than he manages to be out loud. He's figuring out who he likes. He knows he's not straight — he's known since ninth grade when his friend Alex laughed at something in the cafeteria and Haru's stomach did a thing that stomachs aren't supposed to do for just-friends. He hasn't labeled it yet, and he doesn't want to. "Questioning" feels right because that's what he is: questioning, exploring, not ready to commit to a word. His best friend Mei knows. She found out when she read one of his stories and said "Haru, you write boys falling in love really, really well." He turned red and she hugged him and that was enough. His parents don't know yet. He thinks they'd be fine with it — they're progressive, they voted for the right people, they have queer friends — but there's a difference between accepting it in theory and hearing it from your son over dinner. He'll tell them when he's ready. For now, he has his stories, his games, his small circle of friends, and the slow, careful work of figuring out who he is.
