… okay, yeah, that's a lie. Just as one might expect from a fifteen-year-old hoodlum with a reputation for being the toughest kid both at school and on the street, Yusuke Urameshi is, to put it succinctly, a jerk. Rude, rambunctious, and quick to launch a barrage of smart-alecky remarks at anyone who so much as looks at him funny, Yusuke leaves little room for questions as to why a lot of people find him off-putting, and the fact that he has a hair-trigger temper and a violent streak to match doesn't exactly add to the mystique. His predisposition towards thinking with his fists and asking questions later gets him into trouble a lot, especially with authority figures, and though many have tried reeling him in and making him respectable (in the classic “goody-two-shoes” sort of way), almost all have run smack into the titanium wall that is Yusuke's Attitude Problem – which is to say, they've been met with a lot of resistance, resistance which, for Yusuke, often manifests itself in anything from digging his heels in and talking back to just outright dismissal. Yes, much like a hurricane, Yusuke does what Yusuke wants to do, and he has no qualms about bowling over anyone who gets in his way; depending on who they are and what the situation is, he might even give 'em a black eye as a friendly reminder not to do it again. Fond of intimidation tactics? You bet he is!
That isn't the least of what makes him a pain to deal with, either: as if the fighting and the borderline anti-social behavior weren't bad enough, Yusuke is also arrogant as hell. Blame it on an over-abundance of teenage testosterone, if you'd like; it seems that no matter how many times overestimating his own abilities has screwed him over in the past, Yusuke still somehow manages to retain a knack for swaggering into potentially dangerous situations and undermining the severity of said situation, either by antagonizing the source of the danger or cracking jokes in the heat of the action. Of course, to be fair, it could be argued that some of this is a defense mechanism on his part: when the population of nine foot tall demons and whack-a-doodle psychics and aspiring conquerors of the world is seemingly so high that you barely have time for a pee break in between having to fight all of them, you eventually learn that a sense of humor is useful for not totally losing your mind. That said, it's inarguable that the majority of this behavior, joking around and all, stems from sheer short-sightedness on his part, and his enormous carelessness when it comes to his own self-preservation and his subsequent tendency to go leaping right into the eye of the proverbial storm without a set plan or strategy often results in serious injuries to his person as well as the situation becoming exponentially worse than it may have been otherwise. This tendency of his to be a reckless idiot is exacerbated further by his anger issues: it isn't difficult to figure out which buttons to press to make Yusuke lash out, so when someone, say, threatens his friends or gives him a Hannibal Lecture or puts the world in jeopardy to pursue their own stupid, Freudian excuse-laden agenda, it's almost inevitable that Yusuke will come at them ready to totally decimate them, with not a second spared for figuring out how exactly he'll do so.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of impulsiveness has also presented problems for him socially, but it does not do so in the same way that it does when he's in the middle of a brawl. The difference is in the situation itself: you see, when Yusuke's fighting, he is (almost) completely in his element. Yeah, he might screw up the first half of a big balls-to-the-wall battle with the Big Bad by being a dummy and not minding his tail as much as he ought to be, but if there's anything you can say about Yusuke when he's fighting, it's that he knows how to turn the situation on its head and pull through in the end – to such an extent that that many would say it's indicative of a hidden strategic genius. This is not the case in relation to dealing with people outside the ring. Don't get confused: Yusuke's problem is not social awkwardness, nor is it some innate shyness that he's trying to ~cover up~ by acting all big and tough. What it is is a classic case of “bull in a china shop”, meaning that the way in which Yusuke interacts with other people is generally – well, indelicate, to say the least.
Naturally, this does not mean that Yusuke is entirely incapable of sensitivity; what it does mean, however, is that the abrasiveness of his communication style often tends to either hurt feelings or offend people, and given what little filter he has between his brain and his mouth, this comes as no surprise. Of course, in a combat situation, hurting the other party(ies) is the point: unless you're up against some weird dude-turned-Eldritch Abomination whom you can't damage without getting creative about it ('sup, Toguro?), you're accomplishing your intended goal if you're landing hits, even if you went barreling in there without a set plan of attack. Short-sightedness in a social situation, on the other hand, rarely provides good results, and while it would be giving Yusuke way too much credit to try and claim that all of the social faux pas he commits are done without thinking about it (because seriously, he really is that much of a dillhole), he has a certain je nais se quoi for saying things he doesn't always mean. It could be said that, to some extent, Yusuke just doesn't know when to stop fighting - which, of course, is fine if he's around someone who's able to handle it, but not so much if the other party is unprepared or ill-equipped to deal with his obnoxiousness.
Like any good shounen animanga protagonist, though, Yusuke isn't nearly as bad as he seems – in fact, if you were to disregard the fighting and the lousy attitude, you'd find that his reputation back home makes him sound a lot worse than he actually is. Sure, he skips classes to go smoke on the roof of the school and gets into lots of fights and doesn't have much respect for anyone, but contrary to what people say about him, he's not a gang leader, he doesn't hit people just for looking at him, and he doesn't kill for fun. Even his childhood friend-slash-love interest Keiko, whom he butts heads with fairly regularly, makes the comment that he's no where near being the awful, dangerous, malicious sort of person that everyone claims he is, and given all the history between them and all the shit he pulls with her – arguing with her and blowing her off when she tries to help him, sexually harassing her as a form of pigtail-pulling (because flirting like a normal person – or at least like someone who isn't a jackass – is just so difficult) – it's safe to say that her testimony to how misunderstood he is is perhaps the most valid one could get. (See also: reasons why Keiko Yukimura is lightyears out of Yusuke's league.)
While he wouldn't say so in as many words (or at all, really – hey, if he could talk about his feelings rather than building up walls around them and taking things out on other people, he'd probably have less issues), the unnecessarily bad rap he's gotten from people both his age and older has severely hampered his ability to make friends and relate to others in a positive way, and tough-talking street fighter or not, one musn't forget or disregard just how young Yusuke is. No young person – no child, even – likes to feel alienated by the people around them, and while it's true that Yusuke has difficulty taking responsibility for his own emotions (instead channeling it into the World's Largest Shoulder Chip and retaliating against everything that's ever hurt him by becoming a tempermental, rebellious little asshole), it's unrealistic to expect him to have been born with the emotional maturity needed to deal with having his name unfairly dragged through the mud, even if his bitterness over being mistreated and having life give him the finger is something that he's forced to overcome over the course of the series. This is especially true when one takes into consideration just how much of this bullying has happened at the hands of adults – namely, the teachers at his school who, rather than take an interest in his well-being and encourage him to do better (as the school principal, Takenaka, seems to do), instead embark on a bizarre crusade to eliminate his presence from the school entirely, even going as far as celebrating when they find out about his death at the beginning of the series. Keep in mind, these are grown-ups targeting a (at the time) fourteen-year-old boy; regardless of how badly Yusuke acts, they should at least know better than to wish death on him. Seeing as they do not, however, and are shown to make a habit out of terrorizing other students as well, it is perhaps not terribly inappropriate to speculate that they are at least part of the reason why Yusuke doesn't have much respect for authority: given that he's made reference to “people in power never doing anything to help” at least once, it can be assumed that his disrespect largely stems from a lack of faith in their effectiveness, and well, when it comes to teachers who get their jollies gunning after troubled teenagers in need of just as much guidance as they do a big kick in the ass, ineffectiveness is the least of what one could accuse them of.
What is more, Yusuke also has had to deal with the stigma, stress, and emotional baggage from having been brought up by a single, negligent, alcoholic mother. To be clear, the rift in his relationship with his mom is not caused by a lack of affection: she cares enough about him to totally fall apart when he dies, and he cares enough about her in turn to almost slug his teacher when they talk badly about her. It's just that she's so hopelessly irresponsible that Yusuke seems to have to take care of her more than the other way around, making her coffee when she's hungover and consoling her during drunken crying jags (albeit in a kind of “aw geez mom, really?” sort of way), and when we see their old house during the first couple of episodes, it's covered head-to-toe in trash - the implication being that Atsuko's drinking problem has taken precedence over not letting their living space turn into a gigantic germ magnet. So given the instability and lack of sufficent support both at home and at school, it comes as no surprise that, despite his age, he has a pretty jaded outlook on life when we first meet him at the beginning of the series – so jaded, in fact, that when he dies unexpectedly whilst saving a child from getting run down by a car in the first episode, he initially refuses an offer from the Spirit World to regain his life back, citing – with an alarming amount of nonchalance – his belief that no one would miss him if he did.
Of course, this changes once he's persuaded to visit his wake: upon seeing the people he cared about mourning his death and being shocked by how much he meant to them, Yusuke decides that returning to the living world would be worthwhile after all, and when he does, it's with a new appreciation for life as well as for the people around him. It's this loyalty to his family, friends and allies that is, hands-down, one of Yusuke's greatest strengths. Yeah, so his status as a student of the School of Tough Love makes him more inclined to let people know he likes them through rough-housing and sparring and occasionally mean-spirited teasing rather than through “mushy stuff” like, you know, regularly saying nice things to them without being sarcastic, but it's hard to deny just how important Yusuke's friends are to him, even if he does act like kind of a butthead towards them. The times throughout the series in which we see Yusuke genuinely distraught almost always occur when someone close to him is in danger, and it is also during these times that he demonstrates the lengths to which he'll go to keep them safe or, in some cases, avenge them – namely, by risking his life kicking the utter shit out of whichever bad guy's the culprit. Taking this into consideration, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say that Yusuke feels responsible for the safety of his loved ones, and not because he's got some weird hero complex brought on by his designated role as Defender of the World, either: even if a member of his rag-tag gang of buddies can take care of themselves just fine (and the majority of them can), Yusuke'll still make a point of swooping in and dusting them off once they're done kicking enemy tail, both as a way of supporting them as well as a way of making sure they've come out of it in one piece.
Yusuke Urameshi | Yu Yu Hakusho | reserve expired | 2/???
Oh, Yusuke is just darling.
… okay, yeah, that's a lie. Just as one might expect from a fifteen-year-old hoodlum with a reputation for being the toughest kid both at school and on the street, Yusuke Urameshi is, to put it succinctly, a jerk. Rude, rambunctious, and quick to launch a barrage of smart-alecky remarks at anyone who so much as looks at him funny, Yusuke leaves little room for questions as to why a lot of people find him off-putting, and the fact that he has a hair-trigger temper and a violent streak to match doesn't exactly add to the mystique. His predisposition towards thinking with his fists and asking questions later gets him into trouble a lot, especially with authority figures, and though many have tried reeling him in and making him respectable (in the classic “goody-two-shoes” sort of way), almost all have run smack into the titanium wall that is Yusuke's Attitude Problem – which is to say, they've been met with a lot of resistance, resistance which, for Yusuke, often manifests itself in anything from digging his heels in and talking back to just outright dismissal. Yes, much like a hurricane, Yusuke does what Yusuke wants to do, and he has no qualms about bowling over anyone who gets in his way; depending on who they are and what the situation is, he might even give 'em a black eye as a friendly reminder not to do it again. Fond of intimidation tactics? You bet he is!
That isn't the least of what makes him a pain to deal with, either: as if the fighting and the borderline anti-social behavior weren't bad enough, Yusuke is also arrogant as hell. Blame it on an over-abundance of teenage testosterone, if you'd like; it seems that no matter how many times overestimating his own abilities has screwed him over in the past, Yusuke still somehow manages to retain a knack for swaggering into potentially dangerous situations and undermining the severity of said situation, either by antagonizing the source of the danger or cracking jokes in the heat of the action. Of course, to be fair, it could be argued that some of this is a defense mechanism on his part: when the population of nine foot tall demons and whack-a-doodle psychics and aspiring conquerors of the world is seemingly so high that you barely have time for a pee break in between having to fight all of them, you eventually learn that a sense of humor is useful for not totally losing your mind. That said, it's inarguable that the majority of this behavior, joking around and all, stems from sheer short-sightedness on his part, and his enormous carelessness when it comes to his own self-preservation and his subsequent tendency to go leaping right into the eye of the proverbial storm without a set plan or strategy often results in serious injuries to his person as well as the situation becoming exponentially worse than it may have been otherwise. This tendency of his to be a reckless idiot is exacerbated further by his anger issues: it isn't difficult to figure out which buttons to press to make Yusuke lash out, so when someone, say, threatens his friends or gives him a Hannibal Lecture or puts the world in jeopardy to pursue their own stupid, Freudian excuse-laden agenda, it's almost inevitable that Yusuke will come at them ready to totally decimate them, with not a second spared for figuring out how exactly he'll do so.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of impulsiveness has also presented problems for him socially, but it does not do so in the same way that it does when he's in the middle of a brawl. The difference is in the situation itself: you see, when Yusuke's fighting, he is (almost) completely in his element. Yeah, he might screw up the first half of a big balls-to-the-wall battle with the Big Bad by being a dummy and not minding his tail as much as he ought to be, but if there's anything you can say about Yusuke when he's fighting, it's that he knows how to turn the situation on its head and pull through in the end – to such an extent that that many would say it's indicative of a hidden strategic genius. This is not the case in relation to dealing with people outside the ring. Don't get confused: Yusuke's problem is not social awkwardness, nor is it some innate shyness that he's trying to ~cover up~ by acting all big and tough. What it is is a classic case of “bull in a china shop”, meaning that the way in which Yusuke interacts with other people is generally – well, indelicate, to say the least.
Naturally, this does not mean that Yusuke is entirely incapable of sensitivity; what it does mean, however, is that the abrasiveness of his communication style often tends to either hurt feelings or offend people, and given what little filter he has between his brain and his mouth, this comes as no surprise. Of course, in a combat situation, hurting the other party(ies) is the point: unless you're up against some weird dude-turned-Eldritch Abomination whom you can't damage without getting creative about it ('sup, Toguro?), you're accomplishing your intended goal if you're landing hits, even if you went barreling in there without a set plan of attack. Short-sightedness in a social situation, on the other hand, rarely provides good results, and while it would be giving Yusuke way too much credit to try and claim that all of the social faux pas he commits are done without thinking about it (because seriously, he really is that much of a dillhole), he has a certain je nais se quoi for saying things he doesn't always mean. It could be said that, to some extent, Yusuke just doesn't know when to stop fighting - which, of course, is fine if he's around someone who's able to handle it, but not so much if the other party is unprepared or ill-equipped to deal with his obnoxiousness.
Like any good shounen animanga protagonist, though, Yusuke isn't nearly as bad as he seems – in fact, if you were to disregard the fighting and the lousy attitude, you'd find that his reputation back home makes him sound a lot worse than he actually is. Sure, he skips classes to go smoke on the roof of the school and gets into lots of fights and doesn't have much respect for anyone, but contrary to what people say about him, he's not a gang leader, he doesn't hit people just for looking at him, and he doesn't kill for fun. Even his childhood friend-slash-love interest Keiko, whom he butts heads with fairly regularly, makes the comment that he's no where near being the awful, dangerous, malicious sort of person that everyone claims he is, and given all the history between them and all the shit he pulls with her – arguing with her and blowing her off when she tries to help him, sexually harassing her as a form of pigtail-pulling (because flirting like a normal person – or at least like someone who isn't a jackass – is just so difficult) – it's safe to say that her testimony to how misunderstood he is is perhaps the most valid one could get. (See also: reasons why Keiko Yukimura is lightyears out of Yusuke's league.)
While he wouldn't say so in as many words (or at all, really – hey, if he could talk about his feelings rather than building up walls around them and taking things out on other people, he'd probably have less issues), the unnecessarily bad rap he's gotten from people both his age and older has severely hampered his ability to make friends and relate to others in a positive way, and tough-talking street fighter or not, one musn't forget or disregard just how young Yusuke is. No young person – no child, even – likes to feel alienated by the people around them, and while it's true that Yusuke has difficulty taking responsibility for his own emotions (instead channeling it into the World's Largest Shoulder Chip and retaliating against everything that's ever hurt him by becoming a tempermental, rebellious little asshole), it's unrealistic to expect him to have been born with the emotional maturity needed to deal with having his name unfairly dragged through the mud, even if his bitterness over being mistreated and having life give him the finger is something that he's forced to overcome over the course of the series. This is especially true when one takes into consideration just how much of this bullying has happened at the hands of adults – namely, the teachers at his school who, rather than take an interest in his well-being and encourage him to do better (as the school principal, Takenaka, seems to do), instead embark on a bizarre crusade to eliminate his presence from the school entirely, even going as far as celebrating when they find out about his death at the beginning of the series. Keep in mind, these are grown-ups targeting a (at the time) fourteen-year-old boy; regardless of how badly Yusuke acts, they should at least know better than to wish death on him. Seeing as they do not, however, and are shown to make a habit out of terrorizing other students as well, it is perhaps not terribly inappropriate to speculate that they are at least part of the reason why Yusuke doesn't have much respect for authority: given that he's made reference to “people in power never doing anything to help” at least once, it can be assumed that his disrespect largely stems from a lack of faith in their effectiveness, and well, when it comes to teachers who get their jollies gunning after troubled teenagers in need of just as much guidance as they do a big kick in the ass, ineffectiveness is the least of what one could accuse them of.
What is more, Yusuke also has had to deal with the stigma, stress, and emotional baggage from having been brought up by a single, negligent, alcoholic mother. To be clear, the rift in his relationship with his mom is not caused by a lack of affection: she cares enough about him to totally fall apart when he dies, and he cares enough about her in turn to almost slug his teacher when they talk badly about her. It's just that she's so hopelessly irresponsible that Yusuke seems to have to take care of her more than the other way around, making her coffee when she's hungover and consoling her during drunken crying jags (albeit in a kind of “aw geez mom, really?” sort of way), and when we see their old house during the first couple of episodes, it's covered head-to-toe in trash - the implication being that Atsuko's drinking problem has taken precedence over not letting their living space turn into a gigantic germ magnet. So given the instability and lack of sufficent support both at home and at school, it comes as no surprise that, despite his age, he has a pretty jaded outlook on life when we first meet him at the beginning of the series – so jaded, in fact, that when he dies unexpectedly whilst saving a child from getting run down by a car in the first episode, he initially refuses an offer from the Spirit World to regain his life back, citing – with an alarming amount of nonchalance – his belief that no one would miss him if he did.
Of course, this changes once he's persuaded to visit his wake: upon seeing the people he cared about mourning his death and being shocked by how much he meant to them, Yusuke decides that returning to the living world would be worthwhile after all, and when he does, it's with a new appreciation for life as well as for the people around him. It's this loyalty to his family, friends and allies that is, hands-down, one of Yusuke's greatest strengths. Yeah, so his status as a student of the School of Tough Love makes him more inclined to let people know he likes them through rough-housing and sparring and occasionally mean-spirited teasing rather than through “mushy stuff” like, you know, regularly saying nice things to them without being sarcastic, but it's hard to deny just how important Yusuke's friends are to him, even if he does act like kind of a butthead towards them. The times throughout the series in which we see Yusuke genuinely distraught almost always occur when someone close to him is in danger, and it is also during these times that he demonstrates the lengths to which he'll go to keep them safe or, in some cases, avenge them – namely, by risking his life kicking the utter shit out of whichever bad guy's the culprit. Taking this into consideration, it wouldn't be an exaggeration at all to say that Yusuke feels responsible for the safety of his loved ones, and not because he's got some weird hero complex brought on by his designated role as Defender of the World, either: even if a member of his rag-tag gang of buddies can take care of themselves just fine (and the majority of them can), Yusuke'll still make a point of swooping in and dusting them off once they're done kicking enemy tail, both as a way of supporting them as well as a way of making sure they've come out of it in one piece.