Speed Grapher/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


As usual with character pages, SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

Characters from Speed Grapher include:

Tatsumi Saiga

Voiced by Yuji Takada (JP), Christopher Sabat (EN)

An Intrepid Reporter who used to be a war photographer and is renowned for the quality of his shoots. An interesting byproduct of his job is that he is sexually aroused by taking his photos. Despite being jaded and cynical, he is still passionate about his job and works for a regular magazine. It's during an infiltration mission that he sets foot in the Roppongi Club, a depraved secret society of wealthy hedonists whose primary goal is to indulge in their basest desires.

He ends up captured and is given a Spit Trail Kiss by a hypnotized young girl named Kagura Tennozou, the club's "Goddess" whose ethereal beauty captivates him instantly. He was supposed to die, but the kiss triggered the "Euphoria Factor" in him instead. Apparently a latent gene that only people known as "Euphorics" have, this virus know grants him the power to make the targets of his photo shoots explode and makes him practically invulnerable to conventional injury. Using his newfound abilities, he escapes, taking Kagura as a hostage.

Both grow quickly close as Kagura comes to her senses. She realizes just what had been done to her and breaks down in tears, begging her abductor to take her away with him. (And considering how fucked up her life has been until then, she's got all the reason in the world to wish for that). Saiga decides to free Kagura from the Roppongi club and her unkind mother's clutches.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Kagura Tennozu

Voiced by Kei Shindou (JP), Monica Rial (EN)

A sweet, demure and innocent young girl who lives sheltered in a high skyscraper in Tokyo. Abused and mistreated by her horrible mother, she still endures it quietly, hoping that one day her courage may pay off and that her mother might grow to genuinely love her. Besides this, she is unwittingly the object of worship of the depraved secret society of Roppongi and is known as "The Goddess".

When Saiga abducts her to save himself, she eventually realizes how she's been manipulated and used by her entourage and begs Saiga to take her away with him. Captivated by the purity of Kagura, he complies.

Kagura's growth has been artificially stalled so that she may not loose her catalytic powers that trigger the Euphoria virus in the carriers of the gene. Since she is under constant medication, she also runs a risk of dying if she doesn't go through intensive rehab due to how intoxicated her body is with the drugs she was force-fed back in the days.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Chouji Suitengu aka Ueno Takeshi

Voiced by Toshiyuki Morikawa (JP), Chris Ayres (EN)

A mysterious and enigmatic figure, known to the public only as the right hand man of Shinzen Tennozu. To the wealthy and powerful, he has another side, that of the master of the ultra-exclusive Roppongi Club, a black club where the elite can satisfy any fetish, perversion or delight they may have, no matter how depraved or the cost in human life.

In reality, Suitengu despises the wealthy and powerful amongst whom he walks, and while he outwardly seems to revel in the obscene amounts of wealth he has access to -- chainsmoking long cigarettes rolled in 1000 yen notes, which he tends to casually discard when they are only halfway burnt, is the most obvious of his vices -- the reality is that he has no greater desire than to see them all torn down for their corruption and decadence.

As a child, Choji Suitengu was known as Ueno Takeshi, the son of wealthy parents and older brother to a young sister, Yui Takeshi, that he adored. Until the morning he woke up and found his parents had hanged themselves. That was when Kamiya appeared and took him and his sister as slaves to pay off the debts that their parents had owed. Ueno was sold to a mercenary group, becoming a Child Soldier; on the very last mission that he needed to undertake to be freed, he found himself raiding a bio-organic weapons lab, which self-destructed. He survived, and was rescued by surviving scientists from the lab. Though they in turn were killed by a government strike squad, Ueno Takeshi had already become the first of the Euphorics.

Returning to Japan, Ueno swore revenge on the corrupt elite whose reverence of money over human life had seen his family destroyed. Discovering his sister had been sold into sex slavery, an experience that had left her too brain-damaged to recognize anything except how to pleasure people and the desperate need to gather money, forcing her to Mercy Kill her, was the final straw. Reinventing himself as Choji Suitengu, he seduced, manipulated and murdered his way into the Tennozu Group and, from there, into creating the Roppongi Club.

A Euphoric, Suitengu's power is to manipulate his own blood.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Hibari Ginza

Voiced by Takako Honda (JP), Clarine Harp (EN)

A very proactive, sultry and shrewd Rabid Cop, Hibari is also Saiga's Stalker with a Crush who wants to have him for herself. Dressed in a red jumpsuit to highlight her knock-out body, she uses her golden-plated guns as a weapon and is far from being a by-the-book cop.

Able to hold her own in a fight, she usually doesn't hesitate to use physical force to get the info she needs and isn't big on morality either. Seeing Kagura as a wedge between her and Saiga, she coldly gives her back to her horrible mother in exchange of having her way with an unconscious Tatsumi.

Despite her initially obstructive behaviour, she eventually becomes intrigued with the Roppongi club and eventually understands that her enemy isn't necessarily the one she believes....

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Shinzen Tennozu

Voiced by Gara Takashima (JP), Pam Dougherty (EN)

The ruthless, domineering and abusive mother of Kagura. A former actress who used to have some success back in her prime, she is now the head of the Tennozu Foundation, a powerful financial company that oversees the political and monetary landscape of Japan, often corrupting politicians and businessmen through the promise of indulgence in their basest desires in the Roppongi club.

She highly resents her daughter for being a constant reminder of her father and how he let her down and is kind of a bitch in general.

She is involved with Suitengu but she knows that there is no love between them and unapologetically indulges in her lustful desires with him. Still good-looking for a woman her age, she doesn't waver in personally corrupting those who may obstruct her schemes or who just want to protect her daughter from her.

Her only weakness seems to be the fondness she has for her former mentor,Gotokuji, now a disabled and delirious old woman. She is eventually killed by Suitengu himself, realizing that she was foolish to believe that she could handle someone like him and dies in her dauthger's arms.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Tsujido, Makabe, Niihari & Kikukawa

Voiced by Hiro Yuki (Tsujido), Hisao Egawa (Makabe), Kenjiro Tsuda (Niihari), Kaoru Fujita (Kikukawa) (JP), Greg Ayres (Tsujido), Bob Carter (Makabe), Robert McCollum (Niihari), Brina Palencia (Kikukawa) (EN)

Tsujido, Makabe and Niihari are Suitengu's most loyal minions, a trio of gangsters he rescued from death at the hands of their superiors when he coincidentally chose to kill off those superiors so that he could take over their turf. Tsujido, noseless from the incident, is also a Euphoric; his fetish for smells has given him an incredibly sharp nose and the ability to track people by scent. It also allows him to transform into a wolf.

Kikukawa is Shinzen Tennozu's right-hand woman, confidently handling any tasks her mistress presents her with and content to stay in the background. When Suitengu kills Shinzen and assumes control of the Tennozu group, she survives and emotionlessly transfers her loyalty to him.

Tropes exhibited by these characters include:

Bob

Voiced by Kouji Ishii (JP), Antimere Robinson (EN)

A flamboyantly gay American man whose passport was invalidated, trapping him in Japan, Bob runs a massage parlour out of his apartment and lives in the same building as Saiga. The two are friends, and Bob is a good person, so he regularly tries to help Saiga as he gets more caught up in the mess with Suitengu and his Roppongi Club. Bob has a sister (a male-to-female transgender) named David, who runs "Le Pub David", a cabaret staffed by male-to-female transgenders.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Genba Ryogoku

Voiced by Rikiya Koyama (JP), Kent Williams (EN)

A doctor that was responsible for operating on and saving the life of Saiga after he was pulled from the rubble of the bioweapons lab where he unknowingly contracted the Euphoria Virus. Afterwards, he got married and settled down in a private clinic in Japan, until his wife died of cancer. After Saiga becomes a Euphoric and rescues Kagura, he comes to Genba for assistance in finding out what is wrong with the both of them.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Miharu Shirumaku

Voiced by Maya Okamoto (JP), Laura Bailey (EN)

One of the Roppongi Club's assassins, a Euphoric with the power to manipulate water and turn herself into a mermaid-like creature. As a child actress, her stage-mom tried on several occasions to commit a double-suicide by drowning the both of them; finally, she died but Miharu survived, being left mute. A number of relationships with men followed; all went sour and they invariably tried to drown her and themselves at once, though she always survived.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:


Kazuya Shirogane

Voiced by Takehito Koyasu (JP), J. Michael Tatum (EN)

A great ballet dancer, but obsessed with flexibility (and, by extension, rubber) to the point of insanity. First seen breaking a would-be pupil's arm for not being flexible enough, he later becomes the first Euphoric to be seen in the series. His power is to become living rubber, a talent he uses to serve as an assassin for the Roppongi Club.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:

Kamiya

Voiced by Takehiro Koyama (JP), John Swasey (EN)

The Prime Minister of Japan, and involved in the Roppongi Club up to his eyeballs, with plans to seize control of the club from Suitengu and place it under government control. A Euphoric, his fixation on food and eating gave him the power to mutate into a huge head-creature with acidic saliva, so he could more easily eat anything he pleased.

When he was just a lowly Minister in the Japanese Cabinet, the Takeshi family found themselves deeply in debt to him. When they hanged themselves because they couldn't pay up, he sold the children Ueno and Yui into slavery to "work off the debt". Yui went insane as a sex slave, while Ueno became Suitengu.

Tropes exhibited by this character include:
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