shearmalice | Application

Characters Name: Maria
Age: unknown, late 20s is a safe bet
Canon Point: post Bridge x Bridge
Species: human
Gender: female
Orientation: She has stated in the series that she names her sheep after the men who were her lovers once. She answered the question on what kind of man is her type with a description of a man. Her perverse and sexually charged comments are only targeted towards men. The series pairs her up with Sister, which may or may not be one-sided. I'd say Maria's heterosexual.

History: Wiki
Appearance: here
Personality:

At first glance, Maria's given name seems to fit her. She's a single, young woman who takes care of the livestock for the community that lives under Arakawa Bridge. She moves with the grace of a lady. Her smile is warm and kind. She hardly raises her voice.

But Maria is evil. Most of the men who've interacted with Maria would attest to that. She's known as a sadist whose idea of mere teasing involves telling people to die in creative ways. She's cruel with her words without losing her kind smile and cheerful tone. And she truly takes pleasure in seeing men lose their will to live, though not as much as she enjoys how some of them come back for more. She's not physically violent, but perhaps that just makes things feel worse.

When asked about her type of man, Maria's answer was "a man who'd come climbing back up after being shoved off a cliff" as her bare minimum.

On the other hand, the men's opinions are the men's opinions. To most of the girls in Arakawa, Maria is like a big sister. And to the children, especially to Stella, Maria's like a mother. She offers decent (and brutal) advice when it's needed, and she's able to handle everyone's absurdities with a calm reproach and a sensible solution. For example, when Nino wanted to cut off all her hair to turn into a stomach warmer, Maria explained how that would make Nino's head cold instead in a manner that did not imply thinking Nino's idea was stupid. She offered to make Nino a stomach warmer with the wool they got from her sheep instead. And she doesn't mind that Stella wants her for a mother. She just doesn't like the idea of having Sister as the father for that family.

Speaking of Sister, the man who's clearly in love with Maria and who Maria abuses every chance she gets, even he doesn't believe that Maria is truly evil. She might have had a hard life. After all, the two of them met in the battlefield. And she's cruel, yes. But she's not entirely evil. She wouldn't be so close to her animals, the women and the children if she were.

Maria only loses her usual cool three times throughout the series. The first time was when she had to go for six days without teasing anyone because she believed that she was supposed to be polite to all the girls. She tried to bail out on that challenge to stay with the other girls in an enclosed space for a week, had P-ko not insisted that she stayed. So she took it out on P-ko instead. This shows that she does and can make an effort to be nice, though her self control is limited. The second time was when she found out during the King's Game that Sister was fighting her while wearing a handicap. She still won that fight, but it was because she went back to verbally abusing the man. The third time was when Recruit admitted that he was afraid when she won the King's Game because he thought Maria would give an order like "turn the Arakawa river red with blood".

She was obviously ticked but she didn't react violently towards that remark. It was then that the audience finds out how much the Arakawa community means to Maria. She called it the place where she been at her happiest. She protects and takes care of the community in her own way. Looking back to her bare minimum requirements for ideal man, and her brutal teasing, it can be seen that while she can be brutal, she has never pushed any citizen of Arakawa to the point where they couldn't climb back up if they wanted to. And while everyone had their own selfish wishes that they wanted granted when they joined the King's Game, Maria joined for the fun of it. (Though Recruit retorts that that was dangerous in its own way.) The order she gave when she won was for everyone to help her with the farm work, something that the whole community can benefit from. The girls were made to make clothes that would warm her sheep up during the chilly weather, and the boys were made to herd the sheep (albeit as dogs).

So Maria isn't all sadism and abuse. She's kind and motherly too.

But yeah, she's still scary and dangerous.

Abilites:

Maria has no supernatural abilities.

She's a powerful fighter, having experience in the battlefield where she was called the "Beautiful Infiltrator" and the "Poison Tongue Carpet Bomber". She's fast. She's stealthy. She's not as powerful as Stella and Sister, but she makes up for it with her ability to get under her opponent's skin with her words. Even her special move, Sazae's Father, was made to humiliate her opponent by giving them a stupid hair style. Her weapon of choice is her shears, followed by her knives.

She's also good with handling animals, as she handles the livestock in the underbridge community. She shears her sheep with the same speed she uses to fight. She also knows how to sew clothes, offering to make Nino a stomach warmer from the wool that they got from her sheep.

Other: Not much is known about the past of the characters from Arakawa Under the Bridge, except for Recruit's. Everyone tossed away their original identities before living there. What we know about Maria is that she's possibly British, that she fought against Sister during a war, she had a lot of lovers in the past and that she had a pretty rough life.