58 and a Half Hours/Natsu Underwood
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Personal Info |
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Gender |
Female |
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Birth Date |
July 7, 1982 |
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Physical Age |
34 Years |
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Relationship to Yuu |
Mother |
Natsu is Yuu's mother. She is, of course, also the mother of Rika, Minako, Faye, and Miku.
Personality
Natsu's main focus in life for a little over the last decade has been raising her children. Even so, she does maintain a social life, as she has a fairly close relationship with her older sister, as well as having a circle of friends from high school that she gets together with on irregular fridays, whenever their schedules allow. She also remains close with her former in-laws, who all still like her. Their main attitude is that, while they still care about her former husband since he is still their family, they also recognize that he was the one at fault for the divorce.
Natsu has been an avid gamer her whole life, with a variety of genres she likes. These include platformers, RPGs, strategy, and adventure games, just to name a few. She's gotten, and hung on to, every major console release since the 80's.
She never really dated anyone besides her ex-husband when she was young, and now that she's been single has found that she really doesn't like the singles scene. It escapes her just how her sister likes it so much.
Her biggest weakness is a tendency to get defensive when in an argument with someone. As the story progresses, it is a tendency she starts actively trying to overcome, due to the way that, for a long time, it poisoned her relationship with her oldest daughter.
History
The younger of two siblings, Natsu spent her earliest years living with her sister and mother at her grandmother's house. Neither she or her sister ever met their father, nor did they ever hear anything about him.
When she first started middle school, she met and fell in love with a boy named Richard that she shared some classes with. In many ways they seemed like star-crossed lovers, so much that when she became pregnant for the first time shortly after, they decided to stay together and raise their child. They continued to date, and had another child together, for the next several years, until they ended up getting married in their senior year of high school, while she was pregnant with their third child. As a wedding present, Natsu's mother bought them a house.
Unfortunately, after they got out of school, things began to get rocky. Richard ended up developing a gambling habit that slowly grew worse and worse. By the time their fourth child was born, their fights were regular enough to give their oldest daughter nightmares. Despite both of them working, they ended up having to frequently borrow money from Natsu's mother just to get by. The last straw that ended their marriage was when he bet the house on what he later insisted was a sure thing. Natsu found out afterward, when he tried making a show of newfound wealth for her birthday. In her mind, however, though he had won the bet, it didn't make up for the fact that he had bet their house.
Natsu filed the divorce papers the next day. As they worked their way through divorce proceedings, she discovered that she was pregnant once again; likely from the final time they had been together before she found out about his bet. Richard already felt like he wasn't being treated fairly (at one point, he said, "I don't see what the big deal is; I won, didn't I?"), and finding out seemed to make him only angrier at the situation. He ended up giving up trying to split their assets, instead instructing his lawyer to figure out how much their assets were, counting the money he had won, and then just give her all of the physical assets and enough money from the winnings to split total value down the middle. He then took the money he had left, and left for the Bahamas. Natsu never heard from him again.
In the years since, she has been taking care of her kids while working as a secretary. On the rare occasion she thinks about it, she realizes just how bad Richard's problem was when she considers that they are living much more comfortably now on her single income than they were under both their incomes. Regardless, she has, each year on the week of her birthday, gone on a drinking binge alone. She insists that it's a 'celebration' of the end of her marriage. Nobody buys it.
A couple years after her divorce, her oldest daughter became pregnant, at the same age Natsu had been when she became pregnant the first time. This ultimately caused a rift between them due to Natsu's defensive tendencies when she was in a fight, which her daughter had inherited from her. Natsu was upset because she was scared for her daughter; she knew she could not provide nearly as much support as she had received from her mother, former husband, and mother in law when she was that age.
Character Conception
From the start, I wanted Natsu to be a child of the 80's, with a love for all the stuff that typically pops up in modern 80's nostalgia. The truth is, I based that part of her, as well as a lot of her social life, mainly on myself.
I didn't hit on, right away, the reason that Yuu's father wasn't in the picture. While I never really wanted Yuu's father to be around in the first place, I also didn't want Natsu to be cheating on him, which set that decision in stone. I didn't want to make her a widow either; maybe it's my own experiences with my father, but I didn't really want him to be fondly remembered either. Divorce left a bitter taste that I preferred to color everyone's thoughts about him.
I did not like any of the ideas I initially had to get him out of the picture. Cheating was obviously the first thing that came to mind, and was just as quickly ruled out; it seemed weird to me that she'd leave him over cheating on her, and then later join a harem. Making him an alcoholic also occurred to me, but ultimately it seemed hypocritical for her to leave him over it when, even though she doesn't drink often, she gets completely hammered when she does. And I didn't want to go dark with abuse for a couple reasons. I didn't want Richard in jail, because I want Yuu to eventually have some closure with him, though probably not reconciliation. There's also the fact that they'd likely have to have moved to get away from him, which would throw a wrench into Valen's character. It was my wife who suggested gambling, and once I came up with the 'betting the house' story, came to really like the idea.