Karate Tigress
NAME: Karate Tigress
ARCHETYPE: Scrapper
ORIGIN: Natural
REAL NAME: Kari King
AGE: 29
HEIGHT: 5'8
WEIGHT: 120lbs
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Black
OCCUPATION: Superhero, martial arts instructor
BIRTHPLACE: Paragon City, Rhode Island
POWERS: Olympic-level athlete, black belt in multiple forms of karate
Karate-dō: the way of the empty hand. A martial art with a lineage that stretches back hundreds of years, from its initial beginnings in the traditional Okinawan fighting arts to the modern styles that have spread all throughout the world. One such place karate has founds its way to: Kings Row, Paragon City. The Tiger's Den Karate Dojo has stood for decades as a place where anyone from the community can come to learn self-discipline, self-knowledge and self-satisfaction at eventually being able to punch through a stack of bricks and do the cool stuff with the nunchaku. The King family (no relation) has run the Tiger's Den for generations, with current owner and instructor Kari King having inherited the dojo from her father.
Kari's journey in the martial arts began at a young age when her father, Kenneth, began instructing her in the basics of the style that his own father had taught him. He made one addition to the traditional teachings, though - as well as running his daughter through forms and kata, Kenneth King made sure to run her through his sizeable collection of 80s and 90s martial arts B-movies (most of which were absolutely not age-appropriate). Capping off an evening of training by watching some former-kickboxing-champ-turned-actor defend their home/neighborhood/America via copious amounts of jumping roundhouses turned karate into a lifelong devotion, and by the time Kari took over as head instructor of the Den, she was a black belt in several disciplines. And yes - she could punch through a stack of bricks, and do the cool stuff with the nunchaku.
Whilst within the dojo the continuous journey of self-improvement was going pretty well, however, outside the doors of the Den things were taking a turn for the worse. Paragon City's crime rate could never be accused of being low, and despite the huge number of crimefighters in the City of Heroes, none of them can be everywhere at once: the Skulls had arrived in Kings Row, and soon Kari's neighborhood was one of many where the gang was making their presence felt. Businesses up and down the Row received a "visit" from the Skulls, until it was eventually the Den's turn - a small group of them burst in during a lesson looking to make trouble. With the outer calmness befitting a karate master and the inner fury befitting a teacher having their class disrupted, Kari asked her students to stand back and watch closely: they were about to see a quick crash course in the art of high-impact kicking. Moments later, the Skulls were spilling out into the street, only some of them consciously. Kari had driven them off this time, but now she had a problem - reprisal was sure to follow, and the rest of the community would undoubtedly get caught in it. She soon came to a decision: karate is for defense, so it was time to start being really proactive about defense. It was time to strike fast and hard (defensively). She resolved to swiftly drive the Skulls out of the neighborhood permanently, and quickly put together a suitably fearsome (yet stylish) costume. Now, she would just need to come up with a name for her new crimefighting identity.
A casual glance at her DVDs brought a smile to her face. It was obvious, really. There on the shelves was the crown jewel of her inherited collection - eleven imported DVDs of mostly-unrelated martial arts movies, released in European language markets as a series under one title: the Karate Tigress franchise. A grouping that contained some of Kari and her father's favorite masterpieces of B-movie cinema. That would do nicely.
In keeping with the spirit of her art, Kari's battle for her neighborhood was short and decisive - after the local Skull ringleaders all eventually fell to severe cases of spinning roundhouses to the head, the gang was driven from the area for good. She couldn't stop there, however - the rest of Kings Row was still plagued by Skulls and, from what she was hearing, worse. It was time for her to join the rest of the masks and capes fighting to clean up the streets. It was time for the bad guys of Paragon at large to feel the fury of the ferocious Karate Tigress!
- Kari holds black belts in various styles and hybrid forms of karate, including Kyokushin, Shotokan, Gōjū-ryū, Shitō-ryū, Taidō, Tang Soo Do, and American Kenpo. Tiger's Den students are taught a hybrid style of the King family's creation named Tora-ryū, which emphasizes karate as spiritually a defensive art, but prioritizes speed and power training and has a heavy focus on sparring, during which everyone forms a ring around the combatants and chants "kumite" until someone gets hit in the face.
- Kari was a success in local kickboxing competition in her younger years, but the combined demands of academic life and helping run the dojo meant she never competed on a wider level. She still goes as a spectator when she has the time, though!
- The first lesson at the Tiger's Den is free. Sign up!
- You can't borrow any of Kari's Karate Tigress home video collection, but you can watch them under her supervision on request. The complete series, in all its glory:
- Karate Tigress lives in a fictional world with completely different music to ours, but if she lived in this one, her theme song might sound a lot like this.