peterpanic: (look at his stupid haircut)
peterpanic ([personal profile] peterpanic) wrote in [personal profile] havenmods 2013-09-27 02:59 am (UTC)

shiroe ray seki | toward the terra | reserved (2/3)

Background/History: Series, episode summaries, aaand here it go:

Shiroe was born in a city called Energeia and given (yes, given) to a couple deemed suitable for parenthood, as is the customary child-rearing practice under SD (Superior Dominance) Government rule. His parents are a government worker and a housewife, and they are Good Parents, for all intents and purposes. They live normally, safe and happy under the guidance of the computers that dictate human life, and Shiroe is a good kid. He loves Peter Pan and his father often tells him that someday he'll be able to go to a place even better than Neverland: to Terra! Then, when Shiroe is about 10, his latent psychic powers awaken and he unwittingly contacts the series' protagonist, Jomy Marcus Shin, another psychic (Mu) who then comes to visit him. Shiroe asks him if he's Peter Pan and is quite happy to see him until Jomy tries to take him back to the Mu mothership, at which point Shiroe's powers attack Jomy until he's forced to leave. Shiroe's childhood progresses normally from there, and when he turns 14 his memories are erased before he's released into the adult world.

Totally normal. Shiroe winds up on a space station school called Station E-1077, where he quickly asserts himself as the best and brightest of his new freshman class and challenges Keith Anyan, 4 years older and the top student in the station's history, saying he'll beat all his grades and take his spot as top student!! Very ambitious. Shiroe's fixation on Keith becomes pathological really quickly, and he wastes no time in besting an assortment of Keith's academics and flouncing around the station showing off. He spends a fair amount of time asking people weird things about Keith, as well, as he becomes more and more obsessed with unraveling the mystery he assumes must be behind Keith's abnormal success. He pisses off a lot of people in the process because he's a rude snob.

The breaking point in the "rivalry" is, somehow, a video game, in which Keith beats Shiroe and then refuses to face him again. Shiroe provokes him until Keith actually hits him, at which point his fixation gets even worse and he starts hacking into protected files and sneaking into hidden areas to get to the bottom of the Keith Mystery. What he finds is The Truth About Keith Anyan (notably that he is a clone, literally grown by "Mother Eliza," the AI that runs the station, to be the perfect human). This, naturally, gets him in a lot of trouble; he's captured and subjected to tests that painfully evaluate him for the Mu gene, because clearly anyone who is doing things they shouldn't be is a mutant psychic and not just a rulebreaker. He escapes and runs into Keith, who takes him back to his room to get his health under control (psychic tests give you a fever, who knew). Just as Shiroe is about to reveal The Secret, guards burst in and arrest him again. He escapes again, this time after a complete mental break and full activation of his Mu powers. Then he wanders the station in a fugue state until he steals a ship and flies away. Keith is sent to follow him, and Shiroe is deliriously reciting Peter Pan scenes and hallucinating when, uh, when Keith blows up his ship.

And that's Shiroe's short life.

Personality: Mix 3 parts smug self-importance with 2 parts unyielding will, 2 parts genius, and 1 part desperate, clawing fear. Blend until infuriating. Pour into school uniform and bake for as long as it takes to want to hit your ingredients in the face. Let cool before hitting again. Enjoy your Shiroe fresh.

So he's a jerk, but we'll get there. Shiroe is, at his core, a boy with a lot of issues. He's a mama's boy in a society that brainwashes children and makes them forget their parents - Peter Pan's quintessential Lost Boy, for more reasons than one. What's important to keep in mind is that he's very young, only 14, and so the issues he's trying to deal with have hit him at the exact maturity phase at which he cannot deal with them at all. His center is a very deep love, surrounded by fear of losing that love. Like all teenagers in the series, Shiroe underwent a memory wipe when he was 14 that erased the memories he had until that point. However, he is desperate to hold on to what fleeting snippets of feeling he has left from his childhood, especially those about his mother, and this has made him very, very bitter. It angers him that he can watch documentaries about his hometown without feeling any emotion, because he knows that he should feel something, but the system took it from him.

What this fosters is a problem child in the system, essentially. He hates it, he resents it, and he resents all the other people in it, who live without questioning the way machines control their lives and make them into perfect society members without memories or feelings or anything Shiroe considers "human." He clings to the vague memories of his mother and his childhood love of Peter Pan because he feels lost and alone in reality. On the surface, of course, he presents himself as pompous and rude, actually telling his peers that they're pathetic sheep and he's better than they are. He understands more, and knowledge is the only power left that he can access, so to know is to have an advantage. It helps, then, that he is something of a prodigy; in fact, he has all the makings of an elite member of society, if only he would stop being so angry.

He does not stop being angry. It turns out that when someone very smart and very stubborn decides to protest the makeup of society, it becomes a problem for the people in charge. Shiroe is just one boy, but any dissenter must be crushed by the decree of the SD system, so poking his nose into things and being careless and dismissive of the rules will get him in serious trouble eventually. He knows this and he doesn't really care, because he doesn't agree with the rules and so he won't obey them. Nothing is too forbidden or too secret for Shiroe, especially when combining his intelligence with his strong will.

That strong will, as it happens, makes an almost emotionless senior student punch him in the face and knock him down. When Shiroe taunts, he doesn't stand back and stick out his tongue, no way--he digs in with nails and shoves himself under the skin, to the point where hitting him seems like the only way to get rid of him. It's not that he's particularly mean (he is mean, smug-mean), but he has an uncanny ability to know just what to say to really grind someone's gears, and he delights in being right. Because he considers his mind to be superior to anything someone might throw at him, he lacks a lot of self-preservation like this, too. If getting hit in the face is what it takes to get the reaction he wants, he'll deal with it. Other times he's so confident in himself that he assumes he won't be caught stepping out of line, and is surprised when he is.

His biggest gripe, and an actual obsession, is with Keith Anyan, station star! Shiroe resents his peers for blindly and ignorantly accepting being brainwashed and forced into lives they don't really get to choose, and when he gets to the station he meets Keith, who is favored by the machines Shiroe resents most of all. Keith appears even more flawless and unfeeling as the regular people who get brainwashed into servitude, too, so it's a double-edged sword: he's seems more brainwashed, but at the same time he's the favorite, so there must be something unique and special about him. And it drives Shiroe crazy. For a while he's content to provoke Keith and insult his friends, until it becomes a full-blown fixation and he risks his safety repeatedly to get down to the truth. Shiroe's feelings about Keith are complicated at best - he resents him, but recognizes him as superior; wants to uncover the truth to shame him, but tells him where to find it for his own benefit. He acts like Keith is a thing rather than a person, but he definitely does see him as a person even after he discovers The Secret. It's complicated!!

Other people mean very little to him. His peers are brainwashed vessels waiting to be filled with orders from the government machines, and the only other person who ever made an impact on him is Jomy, who he doesn't actually remember. It wasn't a positive impact, anyway, as Jomy tried to take him from his mother. He's not cruel but he is condescending, and unapologetic about it.

Underneath all his rudeness and smarter-than-thou bragging, he's a sad kid. He's deeply afraid of losing his precious things, and is haunted by an oppressive loneliness. Because of the way he acts and the way he thinks, he has consciously isolated himself--even Keith, who's practically robotic, has more positive relationships than he does. It's a constant source of stress, but he does his best to ignore it. At one point he says to Keith that you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep (at the time attempting to dual-insult Keith and his friend Suena), and, well. You can tell a lot about a person by the company they don't keep, too, when they won't keep any at all.

He also might be a hair's breadth away from total mental collapse with the right catalyst, but that's a risk one has to take.

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