→ IC
□ Name: Gou Matsuoka
□ Journal: omfriggengeedeltoids
□ Series: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club/High*Speed Light Novel
□ Canon point: Post-season 1
□ History: Very little is mentioned of Gou's personal history and she barely appears in High*Speed, the prequel to Free! Thus, of pre-Free! timeline what exists are only things pieced together with brief references and Rin's history. Gou was born in Iwatobi, and lived there until the death her father, when she was probably 4 or 5. Because he was a fisherman, he was never home long enough for someone at her age to remember him at all. After his death, they move away to the Sano school district, presumably due to being unable to afford to remain in Iwatobi. Somewhere in December or January of Gou's fifth year, one of her grandmothers die and she, her brother, and her mother inherit a house and things in Iwatobi. At that point, her brother began speaking of transferring to Australia to study abroad, and Gou and Rin are shown to wear designer clothing. Thus, it's reasonable to assume the grandmother had a reasonable amount of wealth she passed down to them...and considering they didn't live with her prior to her death it's also reasonable to assume this grandmother was on Gou's father's side.
At some point shortly before Gou's eleventh birthday, her older brother swam in a relay and placed first with his friends in the swim club. Although she met his friends in the team, Haruka Nanase, Makoto Tachibana, and Nagisa Hazuki, this meeting was brief and quickly forgotten except by Haruka. Shortly after this, Rin left her and her mother to study in Australia. Most of what Gou remembers of that event is the smile that she saw on his face afterward. This is particularly so because, in the years afterward whenever he would visit home on New Years, he would never smile like that again. Although she worried over this sudden lack of enthusiasm it wasn't until the age of 16 that she made a move to help him. When he moved to a boarding school in Iwatobi and refused to visit or even answer any of her texts (although he did seem to read them, as he went to the old swim club when she told him it was getting torn down, he simply refused to ever answer them), Gou turned to his old friends in the hope of getting through to him.
When she discovered that Rin's middle-school swimming club friends Haruka, Makoto, and Nagisa, were forming a new swimming club in her school she quickly asked to become the manager of the club. It was her hope that getting Rin to join the club as well (as he hadn't joined the club in his school) would restore his old personality. She wasn't discouraged when he immediately joined his school's club instead, though, and forged onward to help Iwatobi's swim club improve in the hopes that swimming against them might still give them the opportunity to influence her brother for the better. It also doesn't hurt that joining the club gave her the chance to ogle attractive and half-dressed muscular men, either.
Despite the somewhat impulsive reasons for volunteering to manage the club, Gou proved herself an excellent manager for the team, first setting up a joint practice with Samezuka, Rin's school, and then finding an old training regimen her brother made for himself and modifying it for their use. Under her supervision, they manage to teach someone to swim competitively in a week despite great difficulty on his part to swim at all.
Her first idea as club manager was to get the school to pay for a gym which would allow them to swim inside during the Winter months, but this option was rejected by the school without proof of the swimming club's abilities. Thus, it was decided they would have to place in the Prefecturals coming up to be able to qualify for the indoor gym, which encouraged Haruka to start swimming competitively again.
She decided to encourage the club with pressure, drawing up a little flip calendar counting down the days first to the Prefecturals and then to the Regionals. After teaching their newest member, Rei Ryugazaki, to swim she found an old pamphlet for the past Iwatobi swim club's summer training camp. Together with the help of the rest of the club members and an old swimming coach from the club the boys used to swim in she helped set it up so that they could also go to the training camp and improve the endurance they'd lost after years without swimming competitively.
Throughout her time helping to manage the club and encouraging the boys she continued to try to communicate with her brother, but with little effect. The only times she seemed to encounter him were by chance or with Haruka, and his continual decline in personality only alarmed and distressed her more the longer she saw it. Although there were brief moments where she saw moments of her brother's old personality under his cold exterior, such as when he encountered her on the island training camp and walked her back to the lodge she was staying in, most of the time she saw him only encouraged her more to try to find a way to fix him again.
When the Prefecturals rolled around and Gou witnessed the race between Haruka and Rin, she realized that just swimming against each other wasn't enough. When Rin beat Haruka, she realized that wasn't the kind of smile she wanted to see on her brother after all. Instead, she wanted to see them swim together, no matter how hard it seemed like that would be to arrange. Still, her resourcefulness and thinking ahead meant that she signed the team up for a medley race ahead of time, so when each of their skills proved insufficient to advance on their own, her intervention allowed for them to have a second chance--one which ultimately allowed them to place in the tournament and move on.
Gou continued to support the swim club on the way to the Regionals, attending a hot pot of 'good luck' before the tournament and finding photos of the old swim club, including Rin, in the process. Seeing his happier self once more, her resolve to find a way to bring that version of himself back redoubled. One way or another, she decided she'd find a way to make him the way she remembered again.
After the Summer festival that she attended with her school friend Chigusa Hanamura, the Regionals finally arrived, and she traveled to the stadium with the club and now others from the school to support their efforts. Despite being an Iwatobi student, she also cheered Rin on in his race. Unfortunately, when it came time for Rin to swim, he performed horribly. Not being a registered member of one of the competing teams she wasn't allowed in the swimming area, so she was forced to remain seated in the stands, watching and worrying while the other members of Iwatobi went to investigate Rin's emotional distress.
For a short time, it looked as if Iwatobi swim club would be disqualified after all their efforts by missing their race, and she worried over what must have happened to both them and Rin, before they finally returned just as their heat was lining up to swim. Although she was confused and bewildered to see Rin swimming in the medley instead of Rei, she adapted quickly and cheered on her brother with the team. Working with Rin, the team placed first in the race, and in the celebration afterward Gou finally saw the smile on her brother's face that she hadn't seen there in such a very long time.
Although they were disqualified for the inappropriate roster change, and therefore they and herself were a little disappointed by not making it to Nationals (and Gou had to endure the scolding of the scandalized tournament directors), she found she didn't really mind. After all, more important than where the swim club placed, the tournament had finally brought back the brother she remembered and feared she had lost.
With the improved relationship between Samezuka and Iwatobi through their mutual connection to Rin, the two teams began to have regular joint practices during the off season. When Prefecturals roll around again and they compete for Nationals the two teams will be rivals once again...but until then, Gou is happy to finally see her brother back to the way he was.
□ Personality: Gou is a very normal girl. Her dreams, if she has them, aren't as grand or loud as the others around her, and her interests seem to usually take a back-seat to studying or her friends and family. Gou never shows any sign of interest in any of the other clubs in the school, and even the swim club she decides to join as manager for the dual reason of enjoying watching the boys swim and to find a way to help her brother with the team, rather than any interest in swimming. Despite her father and her brother both being competitive swimmers with dreams of the Olympics, Gou herself can only swim as well as any other student her age might, and she shows no interest in improving her skills beyond what they are now.
This isn't to say that Gou has no ambition; in fact she sometimes seems to show more ambition than the rest of the team, deciding they should go to the Prefecturals, pushing them to train and place even though the only benefit for winning is getting to (maybe) swim inside a gym during off hours. She's the main drive behind their training and a large part of the reason they make it to the Regionals, even though Iwatobi swim club succeeding in tournaments wouldn't guarantee they'd get to swim with Rin more (and ultimately making first place in the Regionals was irrelevant to Rin's return). Once she joins the club, she's driven to see it succeed and surpass the previous Iwatobi swim club's 'storied' records. Thus, it's likely Gou still has her family's competitiveness and lofty goals, but before joining the club seemed to have nothing she wanted to direct it toward.
Gou is much more the 'father' of the swim club than she is the mother, being strict and demanding of the members. She doesn't tend to do much to nurture or support the emotions of the members outside of club decisions, instead she provides structure, goals, and direction for the members; finding them a gym they'll be able to swim indoors in, organizing a joint swim practice with Samezuka, suggesting the Prefectural tournament as a feat to test and prove the club's skills, and pushing them to train harder before the Regionals. One lingering sign of motherliness is her tendency to worry. She worries constantly over Rin, from when he first suggested transferring out to Australia to when he returned distant and embittered over something he refused to talk about. It's not just Rin, though. She also worries over Haruka going missing after the Prefecturals, and over Rei when he misses practice and when he eventually gives up his spot in the medley to Rin.
Gou is somewhat self-conscious about her masculine name, preferring that people pronounce it as the alternate (feminine) 'Kou' instead. Despite the fact that she used to tease her brother about his girly name and the way schoolmates called him 'Rin-chan', she can be very insistent that people refrain from calling her 'Gou', and irritated when people combine Gou and '-kun'. Even when people insist on calling her 'Gou', she generally insists on 'Kou' right back at them, particularly with Nagisa and the Samezuka team captain, Seijuro Mikoshiba. Still, she seems to care more about it on principle than out of a deep emotional connection to it: When she's in Elementary School she gives no indication of wanting people to call her Kou, she eventually gives up on insisting Nagisa call her Kou, and she doesn't seem to have a problem with Rin calling her Gou instead. Likely her hang-up on the name is simply because she feels it's an inappropriate name for a high school girl, and thus an attempt to seem cute and attractive.
If Gou has any hobby or interest at all, it's muscles. Although it may not be at the level of a fetish, she's definitely an enthusiast, and always takes the time to appreciate them when she sees a well-sculpted figure on display. Initially, she puts up a front of being disinterested, believing it's inappropriate for girls 'her age' to ogle half-naked men, but her protests crumble...without any intentional actions by said half-naked men. Over time she becomes more open about her appreciation of muscles, commenting that Rei's incredible figure was reason enough to recruit him, and openly appreciating the other swimmers at the tournaments. Despite her enthusiasm, she still doesn't have endless patience with it; accompanying the team to watch them try out new swimsuits is fun...at first. Before too long, as they constantly cycle between the ridiculous and suits so similar to what they already wear that it's impossible for anyone but them to tell, even Gou gets tired out and wanders off for a break, carrying a new-found sympathy for men dragged off on fitting room adventures.
Gou is resourceful, able to adjust a swim routine of her brother's to suit an entire team including one person who's never swam before, and able to set up joint practices with Samezuka in the hopes of scouting out their team. In fact, before the Prefecturals, she finds the time to scout out all of the teams attending, marking down notes on the nicknames, strengths, weaknesses, and muscle-mass of all the rival participants. Of the last, though, she feels that notes do not do justice to them...so those are probably for her benefit alone.
While Gou is an enthusiast of muscles, she doesn't seem particularly interested in relationships. She's happy just to ogle all the attractive men, trying to net one seems far from a priority to her. So far, in fact, that she seems completely oblivious and occasionally in denial over the blatant attraction Samezuka's swim captain shows for her, neither exploring it in earnest nor using it for her own benefit. When Nagisa suggests she used her sex appeal (on multiple occasions) she denied the concept as if it were ridiculous, not out of some form of guilt or shame over it.
When it comes to the swim club or her name she can be very stern, requiring Rei to learn to swim in a week and even once shutting down Nagisa when she wasn't in the mood to hear him call her Gou (of course, Nagisa being Nagisa this only lasted for that one encounter). However, in matters not dealing with those, Gou is fairly easy going and easy to get along with. As she appears not to have any strong drives beyond those dealing with the club and her family, it's difficult to find ways to rile her up outside of family, her name, or the club. As she seems to have some beliefs about what's appropriate (or perhaps attractive) for high school girls, it's likely she tries to be non-confrontational in most areas, and it's likely then that if she were trying to impress she would cook. So far, however, she's never been shown with anyone she's taken a romantic interest in, and outside of that sphere it's clear she's not all that interested in cooking.
Overall, Gou's relaxed nature in comparison to most of the people she hangs out with makes her fairly friendly and approachable (except when the swim club or her name causes her sterner side to show through) and seems to make friends easily. Even Nagisa, who insists on calling her a name that irritates her, generally seems to be on friendly terms with her when they're not fighting over her name or some other thing he's teasing her about. While Gou is curious, digging up old photographs at other people's houses and asking questions without considering permission first, she's never been shown to dig too deeply at personal questions when a person seems unwilling to give answers. As such, Gou really is one of the most mature people on the swim-team, second only to Makoto or perhaps Miss Miho Amakata, the teacher and adviser in the club. Still, her insistence on a feminine version of her name despite her respectable namesake, and the way she gets carried away watching muscles, shows that she still has her lingering remnants of childishness too.
Ultimately, her greatest priorities in life are the club and Rin. Between the two, Rin edges out, as she's happy he received what he needed in the medley despite the fact that it disqualified Iwatobi and she had to sit through a lecture. Even when Haru lost the race to Rin, she was more concerned that it didn't help Rin than over Haru not advancing or the disappointment he might feel (at least until Haru left and was nowhere to be found for the rest of the day). However, Iwatobi is clearly close behind in those priorities, given she has no problem rooting for Rin and her team at the same time, even when they're competing against each other.
□ Age: 16
□ Gender: Female
□ Appearance: In a setting filled to the brim with heavily muscular men and a (very risque) swimsuit model, Gou's frame is slight and very...average. She's petite and small, probably no more than 5'3'', with breasts that aren't particularly notable in any kind of loose clothing. While she has a healthy tan from spending lots of time outside, she doesn't make a concerted effort to get an even or dark tan, and unlike those around her she's usually mostly clothed in the sunlight. Her frame is not as athletic or muscular as those around her, instead only being fit. Her eyes are a burnt orange-red like her brother, and her hair is a deep burgundy that spills down to about the small of her back when she isn't tying it up into a pony tail (which is rare). When it is tied up, it reaches about mid-back.
She's often seen in her school uniform, with a blazer top and pleated miniskirt bottom and calf-length socks. Outside of her uniform, she likes loud colors in her clothing but not often clashing ones. Generally speaking she tends to be up on the latest fashions and designers and can be seen in samples of those when not in one uniform or another.
□ Abilities/Powers: Gou is a perfectly normal human girl. She's not especially gifted in athletics or swimming (in fact she's terrible at swimming and poor at running), she has no special abilities beyond that which your average human might have, and she has no particularly remarkable specialized training. Music is one of her best subjects, but nothing is said to imply her skills are beyond what is to be expected with a sixteen year old girl. She practices calligraphy as a hobby, but there are again no implications that she has any particular talent at it.
What she is good at though, is management and creative thinking. She isn't a coach because she doesn't have the knowledge to impart and back up her training regiments with, but she's capable of coming up with effective regimens by modifying one old regimen she found. She's creative and continuously comes up with methods to encourage the club members to train harder or with new ways for them to train. She's the one who does the research and finds an indoor gym where the club can practice in that's within the school's budget (although not the club's), she is the one who discovers the old training camp used by the past swim club and decides to suggest they attend their own version of it before the Prefecturals, and she's the one who calculates the time frame in which Rei has to learn to swim to have the time to actually train and prepare for the tournament. She's also the one who decides to enter the team into the medley secretly, which is what gives them the second chance to make it to the Regionals when their individual skills prove insufficient to advance on their own.
She's also a reasonable student, who seems to get good or at least decent grades in all of her subjects, and according to some can wield her own sexual attraction to get things from other people. She denies this, however, and so far the only sign of this happening is with the Samezuka swim club manager, which she seems unaware of even after Nagisa points it out to her.
It can be presumed that she has at least some mediocre skill at cooking, and her organizational skills imply that she is moderately skilled at cleaning, but she never mentions nor shows this to be either true or untrue.
She absolutely definitely doesn't possess the secret super power to identify the differences between Haruka's different swimsuits. They all look identical to her.
□ Personal Items:
1 - White button up short-sleeved shirt
1 - Calf length blue socks
1 - Pleated olive miniskirt
1 - Frilly red bow tie with white polka-dots
1 - Pair dark brown loafers
1 - White and red polka-dot bra
1 - Red satin panties
1 - Blue hair tie
1 - Light gray vest
1 - Yellow, white, and brown striped one-piece swimsuit
□ First Person Sample: [The image might be a little hard to make out at first, given the blurriness and darkness of her fingers pressed up in front of her eyes. After a moment or two though, they part just enough to allow her to peer through them and display what caused her to show up on the network at all.
Two men are currently entangled in the apartment hallway, one well built and clearly naked, and the other partly so. Even if it isn't obvious what they were doing by looking, the sounds they're making should make it very obvious.
After a moment or two, she squeaks and retreats back around the corner of the wall, staring at the far wall of her apartment 'foyer' instead.]
Even closing the door doesn't help, I can still hear them in here! [Indeed, they are probably breaking some noise pollution rule somewhere, given their volume.] And they're in the way! I can't get out! [And...really...two men going at it just outside her door isn't what she needs when she already lives with a school whose curriculum headlines all its sex ed and in a city where she's always getting bombarded by images of muscular, naked men in her subconscious.
This is just cruel, and trapping her here to force her to listen or watch is...deviously cruel.]
Someone should probably break them up, but...[for one, the chip makes compelling arguments to let them keep going, and for another a high school girl like her can't just go up to two fully grown, naked men!
Well, not strangers, anyway.] Do you think it'd be safe to crawl out the window? I can't just drown it out with the television, that just makes it worse! [Somehow she never expected to be surrounded in so much porn she actually had to actively flee from it. There's nothing impressive about a derring-do committed to escape other people having sex.
Though it can't really be seen, she presses her hands against her ears. No dice, it doesn't really help at all.
She sighed.]
...Maybe someone should come up and break them up after all?
□ Third Person Sample:
http://theloonybin.dreamwidth.org/13231.html?thread=6376623#cmt6376623 (Test Drive threads)
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