Rena Houjou

**(WARNING: This page contains information about Eating Disorders and mentions Panic Attacks. If you are uncomfortable with this, don't continue reading)**

## Rena Houjou

I love her. Can someone bring a child welfare officer in this family, please?

### Relatives

* Tarou Houjou (father) - deceased
* Yui Houjou (maiden's name - Tone) - mother - deceased
* Miho Houjou - half-brother
* Koishi Amasagi - adoptive father

### Occupation

* Middle-school student
* Figure skater

## Appearances

### Portrayed by

cyanide bottle's OCPlaceholder is Hanyuu Furude

## Appearance

Rena is a tall (at least for her age) girl with sickly pale skin, amber eyes and light brown hair, that are tied in two braids. She’s extremely skinny, you can see her ribs and spine perfectly.

## Profile

*Tarou and Yui Houjou’s beloved daughter, who had to grow up too fast to keep up with her parents’ ambitions. Cold and distant. Extremely concerned about her appearance, especially her weight.*

## Personality

At first, Rena might come off as cold distant, seemingly only caring about her success and not caring about people she might hurt on a way to her goal. However, that’s not entirely true. Rena is able to repress her emotions while he has to, breaking down to full-length panic attacks once she’s on her own. She experiences too much pressure from her parents, especially her mother, since Yui is trying to achieve a dream she couldn’t reach through Rena – becoming a Figure Skater.

Rena doesn’t want to be a figure skater herself, but she doesn’t have much choice, since she’s afraid of getting disowned and possibly even experiencing the same verbal and physical abuse her brother Miho gets.

Rena comes off as somewhat airheaded, often losing herself in thoughts and completely ignoring stuff, that's going on around her. That also can happen if aftermath from her starving kicks in. She shows interest in hired killers.

Rena is suffering from **Bulimia\***, which started because figure skating favors shorter, lighter athletes with slightly shorter limbs *(The average American female figure skater, for example, is a petite 5'3" and 108 pounds).* But, obviously, since Rena reached puberty age, her body began to change and Yui was displeased with it. Rena tried to eat less and exercise more, but eventually came to a better solution in her mind – eat whatever she likes and then purge it.

Currently, Rena is the only one in her family who keeps contact with her older brother, Miho.

## Backstory

Rena is the child of Tarou in Yui Houjou and a younger sister of Miho Houjou, Yui’s son from her first relationships. Giving up on her son because he was disorganized boy, stuck in his fantasies, Yui fully focused on Rena and saw her as opportunity to realize her dreams, that she was forced to throw away because Yui had a child at young age. To put it simply, Rena became a ‘trophy’ for her mother to show off in front of her friends and other moms at school – a perfect grader, who makes big progress in figure skating.

The biggest problem with children’s sports is that sportsmen have very early expiration date, especially in artistic ways, like figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics. To stay in this sport, you have to stay petite and thin, but that is very hard when you hit puberty, which is exactly what happened to Rena. She started to gain weight and look a little ‘shapeless’, Yui was majorly displeased with it. Rena tried to fix the situation by not eating for days and exercising more, but that only brought more problems to her since she started randomly collapsing from undereating. That’s when she got a new idea – she doesn’t have to refuse the food, but she also doesn’t have to keep it inside. And well, while it made her condition a little better, she quickly lost weight and now she was called creepy, because of the way her bones were shown more, her naturally pale skin became sickly pale and her hair became more this and more and more.

Currently, Rena is at her limit, close to having a full force mental breakdown from everything that’s going on around her.

After her parents died and she was adopted by Koishi, Rena is doing somewhat better. She's still very concerned about her appearance, but not to the point of starving herself - she's still shy to eat much, especially in front of other people and show her body, like when she's on a beach.

## Relationships

### Koishi Amasagi (OC)

(Played by Medicine)

They have potential to be friends. Koishi showed great concern about Rena's well-being, but never pursued it too far to actually make her uncomfortable. He also made her tea and while drinking it, they had a chat about butlers, who are trained to be assassins for their emploeyrs. She showed interest in cost of hiring one.

As you might know, Rena went to search for Koishi for help, but couldn't tell him much, due to passing out from starvation. However, it seems Koi understood everything and straight-up killed her parents and offered to be become Rena's legal guardian. In conclusion - Koi is amazing. As much as Rena likes Koishi as a father figure, she's scared of his violent persona. She's highly curious how we ended up like that.

## References

* **Bulimia nervosa, also known as simply bulimia,** is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by purging; and excessive concern with body shape and weight. The aim of this activity is to expel the body of calories eaten from the binging phase of the process. Binge eating refers to eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time. Purging refers to the attempts to get rid of the food consumed. This may be done by vomiting or taking laxatives.

## Trivia

* Name 'Rena' is of Hebrew origin, that means "joy" or "melody"
* **Houjou (also spelled as Hōjō)** can be written as **"法城" where "法" means "law" and "城" means "castle"**
* Her birthday falls on 03/03. In Japan, the day is called *Hinamatsuri* or simply - Doll's Day or Girls' Day
* VA: Yukari Tamura (voice of Rika Furude from Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni)
	+ If I make her teen/adult version, she'll have the same voice actress, but will sound like Bernkastel from Umineko no Naku Koro Ni
* Music theme: Orange Juice by Melanie Martinez (i chose the wrong song the first time i'm so sorry)
* Playlist for my favourite OC
	+ ~~I tried to make it non-repetitive, but it ended up having the most overused songs cuz they fit perfectly~~