hi 8 months later
- i think (unpossessed) kazumi and satoru are basically at the same level of skill with vanguard (which says a lot about kazumi because satoru is a fuckin branch chief) so they tend to fight each other a lot at friend meetups, and if satoru is asked to do a cards exhibition and tasked with picking the opponent he always has kazumi on his shortlist of possible fighters. like he loves tokoha and kumi to death and then undead again but kazumi is a much more even matchup, so he likes turning to him if FIVA has an event that needs him to do a show fight. because they're evenly skilled (and at an extremely high skill level, at that) the imeeji from their fights tends to be much more intense and vivid than fights they have that are more one-sided in their favor; this means kazumi tends to keep a less composed face (in favor of his evil-lookin bloodthirsty grin that is actually just how he shows max excitement) and laughs and smiles/generally just seems to be having a lot of fun comparatively to his other matchups, while satoru noticeably amps up the theatrics of his imeeji (bc their fight imeeji is default nighttime i have this very specific image of satoru entering his final/game-deciding turn with a little monologue about "dawn is rising, and our encounter is coming to a close. can you survive this last vampiric frenzy?" with the battlefield imeeji going from pure night to that pre-dawn red glow) and he also (like kazumi) tends to get a competitive smirk or smiles without noticing at particularly high-stakes moments. it's like, they still love fighting everyone else, but fights just hit particularly different when you're precisely evenly matched (see:shion and chrono) and the way they have fun with each other pushes the others (like kazuma or kumi) to be like OOOHHH JUST YOU WAIT IM GONNA GET THERE ONE DAY!!! anyway this entire point was very validated by the dialogue in the zero event which made me so happy :^) i think they also have a ridiculously even win-lose score, like neither of them ever get more than 2 wins ahead of the other in their record, and they both keep track of this/know the score at all times off the top of their head even though it's less of a competitive thing and more of an injoke to smile about

• satoru has a tendency to grab someone's hand to guide them without it even being a romantic thing (him and his friend in the hospital did it for each other a lot on days where one of them was weak and needed support to walk around, he didn't grow up in an environment that was like UHMMM THATS KIND OF ROMANTIC and only figured out it's kind of weird to do from tokoha after he did it to her and her bi ass got flustered by it (if he did it to lunam or kumi before they were 100% unaffected)) but ANYWAY kazumi is also so deeply not immune to this + tends to be notably bad with directions without any assistance from a map or GPS. so sometimes satoru will spot him like 2 blocks from where he's expected to be and he's like "oh it's okay, follow me" and TAKES HIS HAND and kazumi's like ((UNCHARACTERISTICALLY SILENT BECAUSE HE HAS JUST BEEN TRIPLE CRITICAL'D)) and when they show up satoru lets go of his hand and kazuma looks at him in a I Know What You Are way while taiyou is like "onimaru-san do you need some water? your face is a little red :O"

• both of them have the capacity to stay up late if the situation needs it (work, college), but kazumi is the one who can stay up late into the night even when it's just for something leisurely like video games, while satoru tends to doze off around 1~2AM if there isn't a sense of urgency that requires him to stay up. he'll usually wake up when kazumi's getting ready to go to the bedroom and walk back to bed with him, but sometimes if he's particularly sleepy kazumi thinks it's cute to carry him to bed princess-style. satoru usually nuzzles his face closer to kazumi's chest when kazumi does this bc mmm warmnn and unlike the handholding thing he is aware he's being romantic/endearing when he does this, but does it purposefully bc he knows kazumi's heart melts at it. their late-night walks back to the bedroom are some of their most tender time spent together

• vague nsfw one for the road but theyre Absolutely the trope of "kazumi is generally louder/more talkative and satoru is quieter/more reserved but they flip those tendencies in bed" this is written in scripture actually. don't fact check me

I DO ACTUALLY but uh preliminary warning of heavy topics and suicide mentions because, spoiler alert, i don't think they're alive.
my hc for them is that they were a young couple (late 20s or so) who were very deeply in love and were (especially on the mom's part) very excited to have a son together. for appearance, i hc his dad as a very plain (not unattractive, but just a bit boring. you'd forget about him in a lineup of people) man, while his mom i hc as an extremely pretty woman who basically just looks like him as an adult but with a smaller frame, rounder eyes, and long hair. so yea they were a very loving couple who were ecstatic when they realized they were having a child, spent all 9 months buying new things for the baby and preparing a comfortable family home. unfortunately tho, after satoru was born, within the first year of his life it became apparent that he wasn't a healthy baby. as an upper middle class family, the parents did everything they could to keep satoru's life comfortable and to fund tests and research into what could be wrong, but obviously it was very mentally taxing for them after years of little progress. at some point, they find out that satoru's condition was a result of a recessive gene carrying over from the mom, which devastates her; she begins to struggle with mental health, still doing her best to keep her health in check (therapy, medication. etc) with her husband's full support, but all of the self-care taken doesn't stop her from spiraling into a very depressive state that centers around her guilt in being the cause of satoru's suffering, and she eventually commits suicide unexpectedly while the father wasn't home. the father was already struggling (a son weak in the hospital and a wife who he loved dearly struggling every day), but his wife's suicide completely destroyed him, and within a few months of his wife's funeral he gets into a deadly traffic accident in which he was intoxicated and it was unclear whether it was intentional or accidental on his part. so satoru's an orphan fairly young, around age 5 or so. the last memory he has of his father is of him sobbing at his bedside after the funeral, and he struggles to remember his mother's face as anything that wasn't clearly sorrowful. as a child, he was told that both of his parents died in accidents, but later in life (as a teenager, after he was released from the hospital and began sorting through his parents' things) he read his mom's death certificate and found out it was a lie, which he understood was just to not have to explain the idea of suicide to a child, but did "confirm" suspicions in his head that his parents would have been happier if he'd never been born. he can only remember what both of them looked like in happiness by one family picture of them together when he was an infant.

after release from the hospital, satoru was taken care of by non-immediate relatives (mostly his grandmother until her passing) and friends of the family, who all promised him that his parents loved him very much and would be proud of him, but satoru could never shake the idea that his parents would still be alive, and the people who loved them (and him, by proxy of loving them) would be happier if he'd never been born at all -- exacerbating the thought that his friend's death was also his fault.

so like.. counting his grandmother, satoru experiences 4 heavily significant deaths before like, age 16. yada yada tragic widow who is followed by death imagery, he is currently trying to separate himself from the thought that he was a burden to all of them or somehow caused their deaths, but it's one of the deepest anxieties that scratches at his brain.

all of the branches have canon managers! the three you listed don't have canon names but they do have somewhat formed personalities. zoo's is a motherly lady who loves to eat and considers everyone who comes to her branch her children, but is also somewhat intense and eccentric, for direct reference see episode 9 girs crisis. the megallanica branch manager is an idol manager-type guy, huge fan/supporter of idols and kind of a nerd? see episodes 2-3 girs crisis for him. and the star gate one appears to be a gaming/gundam nerd who's negligent with his duties in favor of playing video games; he appears in passing in episodes 12-13. i really recommend watching girs crisis if you are writing something like that, it's a fun season that really goes further into how fiva operates + you get to meet am and luna which is always good. another rec would be episodes 1 and 2 of gz, they all gather for a meeting in those -- they also all appear in episode 50 of stride gate but they're fairly generic/stock appearances with the exception of satoru for obvious reasons. hope this helps?

as his story exists in canon i'd ship him the most with jaime (i do like migetoko but a bit more on the side of the ahsha/antero connection, i could see it as a mutual crush that doesn't end up going far because they're hard-focused on growing their career paths with relationships as a lesser priority), i think miguel is like just the right balance of goofy and serious that would play well off of jaime's personality + they have good history together. if miguel had lived it would've been a slightly different story because we would've seen him interact with more people. i assume he's probably great friends with verno which is how a team ended up forming between team ogre (verno being an international traveler and kazumi+miguel assumedly being more stationed in their respective areas), he was probably really good friends with kazumi too but all meaningful interactions we saw between them were actually antero+shiranui so it's hard to say what their dynamic was. all of team ogre give me a similar vibe to what i'd see miguel-tokoha as where even if there was some romantic attraction they're foremost each other's best friends and rivals with a romantic relationship as a latter thought. in terms of just pure crapshooting based on aesthetics ur damn right i'd probably ship him with satoru just because they have a very similar vibe (flower knights, one light one dark) but we all expect that from me and are right to

i mean he kind of spells it out but it's primarily because shion is someone who defies his expectations. like shinonome sees the world as a plate of pristine ceramic but any little crack or divet that he couldn't predict is interesting to him, and shion just goes the extra mile by picking up the plate and shattering it on the floor. it was definitely more of a cat and mouse interest initially but then shion fought back and carved out his own future and shouma was thrilled. shion's the one person who can fight him on his terms and win, and on top of that shion ended up saving him from death which only surprised and delighted him more. they couldve written their relationship on slabs of gold and sold them for millions and instead we got it in stride gate for Free

if i went into minutia or like changes starting in the latter half of next that would affect gz i would be here angry for like 5 hours so im not doing that but the tl;dr is i'd make all the g characters more prominent and q4 like supporting characters at most. there's several ways to make tokoha/kumi/amluna more directly involved in the plot but my way of choice is to diffride mamoru and satoru and have them be apostles (mamoru specifically would also fuck up ibuki which is fun). i think gyze!chrono is a superior choice to kazuma bc they literally could have just worked in the same conflict they had while chrono was fighting gyze ("should i have never encountered vanguard??") and made it more corrupted ("would everyone be happier if vanguard didn't exist"), also the kzkr "i know you're in there" fight i feel would have been more compelling the other way around (tho i did like how it was done regardless). i'd make the apostles more hardy because making them disappear upon one loss with using a zeroth dragon was nutso as a writing decision when these are supposed to be our final Big Bads of the series. i'd let arata and makoto fight CBD as their character arc was leading to. i think a lot of gz's problems honestly stemmed from a lack of episodes to tell a fulfilling narrative + the main writer's insane choice to focus og characters within the limited amount of time available + the fact that they switched main writers between nx->gz in the first place; i really think gz could've been good if it was 48 episodes instead of 24. everything was just too rushed and the priorities were misplaced within that limited time.

it changes depending on what role he has in whatever story im coming up with but i usually have him as a kid who was generally friendless and lonely in elementary/middle school for Obvious Reasons or like if he had friends it would be a "you know, you're actually pretty cool" kind of situation. dude whose best friend was his fenrir card that he had a Connection with and had a whole chuuni "i can't understand other people" phase, probably dyed his hair or got piercings in some meaningless act of defiance that he immediately decided was stupid and stopped keeping up with in a year. i think he finally started getting a sense of belonging with vanguard where people didn't care if he was chuuni or smug or talked about his psychic abilities because that was just kind of the status quo of vanguard locals, so vanguard cemented a meaningful place in his life near like the end of middle school/8th or 9th grade; then he got into high school and decided to just LARP being a normal adjusted kind guy with normal interests and he became generally popular among his peers as a reliable and smart guy, so he just kept it up even if it bored him and if his internal monologue skewed more like "these people are so easy to manipulate it's disgusting"; then like halfway through the school year his school gets a MYSTERIOUS TRANSFER STUDENT (enishi) who he's asked to show around due to being the local reliable clubless guy -> he expects this to be a totally normal and boring encounter with some vapid pretty boy who transferred schools for normal reasons but then satoru hits him with the whole "this is my first time ever being in a school, because i was hospitalized for my childhood" thing as well as just being generally Odd and hard to predict and therefore interesting to shouma as some sort of distraction from the monotony of everyone else; so shouma starts hanging around him, and quickly figures out he plays vanguard (or has History with vanguard anyway even if he seems reluctant to play) which just makes them closer. and then obviously later on satoru gets scouted by ryuzu as a member of company, which i think shouma follows him into out of a desire to have something interesting happen, and then they generally split into separate paths because satoru begins working towards becoming a branch chief to aid with ryuzu's plan while shouma joins team demise. badabing badaboom shouma enters the shion era of his life and then it's off to the races

i am not proofreading this at all and im sure i rambled mercilessly but that's just la vie