Strengths/Weaknesses: ✔ DETERMINATOR Ishimaru's favorite life motto (and he has many, many life mottos) is "simplicity and fortitude," and it's the one that best embodies the life he's trying to lead. He wants to prove to the world that hard work and discipline can be just as valuable as any sort of inherited or genetic 'genius,' and his life goals explicitly involve trying to change the country through sheer strength of will. He's incredibly focused and driven, and he holds himself to standards that are just as high (if not higher) than those he holds everyone else to. He has ridiculous amounts of shounen spirit and he never gives up, no matter what; even if he temporarily loses faith, he finds some way to regain it eventually.
✔ DETERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY As the Super High-School Level Hall Monitor, Ishimaru's sense of justice is very strong. He holds order and regulations in very high esteem, and he has a very firm sense of right and wrong; however, he won't take his idea of justice to extremes - he's very fair, and he doesn't believe in punishing people beyond what they deserve. He also doesn't judge people unless they're actively doing something negative - in Hope's Peak, he takes all of the students' ideas and thoughts into account, and if the ideas are valid he'll acknowledge them as such, regardless of how little he may agree with the student on a personal level.
✔ FIRST DO NO HARM Ishimaru is generally a pacifist; he sees resorting to violence before using one's words as a sign of weakness, and he refuses to harm his fellow students even if it means a shot at saving his own life. He sees no reason for directly hurting anyone to ever be justified, and killing is even less justifiable in his eyes; while he understands that punishment is sometimes necessary, he prefers things like "detention" over "corporal punishment." About the only exception to this is if he's having one of his...er, stranger moments, detailed below - but even then, that's aimed at himself, not any of the other students.
✔ RIDICULOUS AMOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE IN AREAS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT MATTER After so many years of doing nothing but studying, Ishimaru is incredibly book-smart; he was top of his class in a famous upscale academy before attending Hope's Peak, and he was known for being a model student. He's pretty much a facts-and-trivia-spouting machine if he knows a topic well enough, and he doesn't hesitate to bring up random obscure references if he can (he...seems to think this is how one actively participates in group discussions, which is another matter entirely, but still); he's particularly skilled in the areas of logic and debate, and he's far more observant than he seems to be - while he has difficulty understanding people's behavior, he's usually the first to point out physical oddities or contradictions dealing with their surroundings.
✔/✘ LEADERSHIP SKILLS, BOTH ACTUAL AND PERCEIVED Ishimaru is without a doubt a natural leader, and he's very good to have around in a crisis for this reason; he's capable of organizing people and seeing what needs to be done to keep everything running reasonably smoothly, and he's very authoritative and able to structure gatherings easily. He's also responsible and generally dependable as a whole, and is capable of planning for both the short- and long-term. However, he's also often stubborn and he doesn't like admitting when he's wrong; if he has a point he tends to harp on it endlessly until he's agreed with. He stops well short of flat-out bullying others to get his way, but he doesn't back down very gracefully, either, and he basically doesn't understand when it might be a good idea to shut up and take a seat. Or perhaps take several seats.
✔/✘ UNDYING FAITH IN PEOPLE Ishimaru always strives to see the best in people; he refuses to believe that any of the students in Hope's Peak are capable of flat-out murder, and he tends to have difficulty directly accusing anyone because his idealism quite frankly tends to get in the way. This can obviously be a massive double-edged sword - he trusts too easily and tends to have far too much faith in people that may not deserve it, and he doesn't seem to realize that while he holds himself to a strict moral code, not everyone else feels the same way.
✘ SUPER HIGH-SCHOOL LEVEL SOCIAL FAILURE Between near-constant studying and his duties with the disciplinary committee, Ishimaru is very, very poorly socialized; as such, he doesn't really understand basic social cues - most of them seem to go over his head, unless they're particularly obvious. He seems to get along better with people who either speak to him very bluntly or directly, or otherwise are very animated; on the other hand, he seems to forget that Kirigiri - a student who is very closed-off and difficult to read - even exists half the time, given that it always needs to be pointed out to him when she's absent from a meeting.
Along with the basic social difficulties above, Ishimaru himself admits that he has no idea how idle conversations work; he pretty much expects everything to be either a debate or some sort of official business, and if it's not then he tends to have some difficulty providing topics that aren't "school" or "basic merits of following the rules."
That said, Ishimaru does try to spend time with others; however, his idea of how one should spend time tends to be strange at best. He usually talks at people rather than talking to them, and he usually uses his hall monitor duties as an excuse to check on them, but when he wants to just spend free time with them...well. The results are often a little mixed. This probably has something to do with the fact that he likes to either immediately launch into some sort of lengthy debate about something literally no one but him would care about at the moment, or he approaches them in a hallway and demands that they take their clothes off.
Yes, really.
What he means is that he wants to spend time in the sauna with them, but he extends the invitations in the most bizarrely awkward way possible, complete with shouting about how the best way to know if you can trust people is to see them naked.
So he tries to solve his problems! He just does it in some really...unconventional ways.
✘ ISHIMARU PLS Ishimaru's reactions to emotional stimuli tend to be...uh, really intense, for lack of a better term. As mentioned in the personality section, he cries at the drop of a hat, pretty much (and when he cries, he cries - he is pretty much the physical embodiment of uglycrying, we are talking tears and sweat and snot and dear god it's kind of impressively gross); outside of that, however, he also tends to have strange reactions to things going negatively, often believing them to be his fault somehow even if there's no way that it's possibly the case. And when he perceives things to be his fault, he tends to react...very badly. He doesn't lash out at others, he takes it to the other extreme: he immediately begins tearing up and carrying on about how much of a failure he is, and on at least one occasion during a fit like this he starts yelling about how much he deserves to be hit for his shortcomings - and he doesn't stop right away, either, continuing to scream and begging people to hit him until someone finally tells him to shut up, claiming that if he has the time and energy to make that much noise about it, he can just do it himself. That said, however, he's very easily soothed, and he calms down from these massive fits almost as quickly as he throws himself into them; it's not unheard of for him to be crying one minute, and laughing and thanking the person he's talking to for helping him figure something out the next.
However, though it seems contradictory given how open he is with most of his feelings, Ishimaru also has trouble presenting himself honestly when it comes to his problems - namely, he thinks he needs to handle everyone else's problems with absolutely no complaints of his own. It's not simply a matter of thinking he needs to suffer in silence such as not to be a burden to people - it's generally more severe than that. If anyone notices that he's having problems, he's quick to cry and insult himself repeatedly, calling himself things like "disgusting," "repulsive" and "deplorable" for not keeping his own negativity in check and completely hidden; he legitimately thinks he deserves to be punished for complaining to anyone about very real problems and issues that he's having, and he seems afraid that others will judge him harshly for not being able to handle everything by himself.
✘ NO BUT REALLY GUYS HOW DO I PEOPLE Ishimaru is very book-smart, as was mentioned above, and he can be incredibly observant most of the time, but he doesn't possess a lot of common sense when it comes to dealing with others. Not only is he blunt to the point of being completely tactless and coming across as far more insensitive than he really is, but his interpersonal problem-solving skills seem to be a little on the unique side. He legitimately tries to get one of the students to confess to murder using a variant of the "raise your hand if you're stupid" game ("Everybody close your eyes - Mr. Culprit! Please raise your hand!") and he's generally just an oddball that seems to have some bizarre vision of the world that no one else quite shares.
It doesn't help that Ishimaru apparently has no idea what "fun" is - while there's nothing wrong with studying for fun, that's literally all he really knows how to do. He studies at school, then he goes home and studies to pass the time; he expresses confusion as to why people would watch television, play video games, just generally hang out, have idle conversations with people and the like. Everything has to have some sort of "deeper purpose" with him - basically, it has to help with some sort of fundamental life skill, or he wants next to nothing to do with it. This sort of mindset is a good part of the reason why he's so poorly-socialized to begin with; he doesn't let himself relax, and so he has nothing in common with his fellow students because he does nothing for pleasure's sake. When this is pointed out to him, he...well, he cries for a while first, but then he immediately perks up and says he's going to "study" television and video games for a while. It's...a start, though admittedly not a very good one...
✘ BERSERK BUTTONS IN WEIRD PLACES You can refer to Ishimaru as a hard worker, a model student, a tactless idiot, a social moron...hell, you can even flat-out call him retarded and he literally won't care. However, don't call him gifted unless you want the temperature in the room to suddenly drop by about fifty degrees, and calling him a genius is only a good idea if you really aren't partial to the current union between your head and your body. Due to the issues with his grandfather and his family, he has serious problems with people who are considered prodigies and geniuses, and he hates being called one himself. Needless to say, what with the lack of complaining about his own issues described above, these sorts of things can cause a bit of an explosive reaction due to him having no outlet for them, and he's obviously not going to express exactly where the problem areas are lying until you've already tripped over them and he's in the process of flipping a table at you.
no subject
✔ DETERMINATOR
Ishimaru's favorite life motto (and he has many, many life mottos) is "simplicity and fortitude," and it's the one that best embodies the life he's trying to lead. He wants to prove to the world that hard work and discipline can be just as valuable as any sort of inherited or genetic 'genius,' and his life goals explicitly involve trying to change the country through sheer strength of will. He's incredibly focused and driven, and he holds himself to standards that are just as high (if not higher) than those he holds everyone else to. He has ridiculous amounts of shounen spirit and he never gives up, no matter what; even if he temporarily loses faith, he finds some way to regain it eventually.
✔ DETERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY
As the Super High-School Level Hall Monitor, Ishimaru's sense of justice is very strong. He holds order and regulations in very high esteem, and he has a very firm sense of right and wrong; however, he won't take his idea of justice to extremes - he's very fair, and he doesn't believe in punishing people beyond what they deserve. He also doesn't judge people unless they're actively doing something negative - in Hope's Peak, he takes all of the students' ideas and thoughts into account, and if the ideas are valid he'll acknowledge them as such, regardless of how little he may agree with the student on a personal level.
✔ FIRST DO NO HARM
Ishimaru is generally a pacifist; he sees resorting to violence before using one's words as a sign of weakness, and he refuses to harm his fellow students even if it means a shot at saving his own life. He sees no reason for directly hurting anyone to ever be justified, and killing is even less justifiable in his eyes; while he understands that punishment is sometimes necessary, he prefers things like "detention" over "corporal punishment." About the only exception to this is if he's having one of his...er, stranger moments, detailed below - but even then, that's aimed at himself, not any of the other students.
✔ RIDICULOUS AMOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE IN AREAS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT MATTER
After so many years of doing nothing but studying, Ishimaru is incredibly book-smart; he was top of his class in a famous upscale academy before attending Hope's Peak, and he was known for being a model student. He's pretty much a facts-and-trivia-spouting machine if he knows a topic well enough, and he doesn't hesitate to bring up random obscure references if he can (he...seems to think this is how one actively participates in group discussions, which is another matter entirely, but still); he's particularly skilled in the areas of logic and debate, and he's far more observant than he seems to be - while he has difficulty understanding people's behavior, he's usually the first to point out physical oddities or contradictions dealing with their surroundings.
✔/✘ LEADERSHIP SKILLS, BOTH ACTUAL AND PERCEIVED
Ishimaru is without a doubt a natural leader, and he's very good to have around in a crisis for this reason; he's capable of organizing people and seeing what needs to be done to keep everything running reasonably smoothly, and he's very authoritative and able to structure gatherings easily. He's also responsible and generally dependable as a whole, and is capable of planning for both the short- and long-term. However, he's also often stubborn and he doesn't like admitting when he's wrong; if he has a point he tends to harp on it endlessly until he's agreed with. He stops well short of flat-out bullying others to get his way, but he doesn't back down very gracefully, either, and he basically doesn't understand when it might be a good idea to shut up and take a seat. Or perhaps take several seats.
✔/✘ UNDYING FAITH IN PEOPLE
Ishimaru always strives to see the best in people; he refuses to believe that any of the students in Hope's Peak are capable of flat-out murder, and he tends to have difficulty directly accusing anyone because his idealism quite frankly tends to get in the way. This can obviously be a massive double-edged sword - he trusts too easily and tends to have far too much faith in people that may not deserve it, and he doesn't seem to realize that while he holds himself to a strict moral code, not everyone else feels the same way.
✘ SUPER HIGH-SCHOOL LEVEL SOCIAL FAILURE
Between near-constant studying and his duties with the disciplinary committee, Ishimaru is very, very poorly socialized; as such, he doesn't really understand basic social cues - most of them seem to go over his head, unless they're particularly obvious. He seems to get along better with people who either speak to him very bluntly or directly, or otherwise are very animated; on the other hand, he seems to forget that Kirigiri - a student who is very closed-off and difficult to read - even exists half the time, given that it always needs to be pointed out to him when she's absent from a meeting.
Along with the basic social difficulties above, Ishimaru himself admits that he has no idea how idle conversations work; he pretty much expects everything to be either a debate or some sort of official business, and if it's not then he tends to have some difficulty providing topics that aren't "school" or "basic merits of following the rules."
That said, Ishimaru does try to spend time with others; however, his idea of how one should spend time tends to be strange at best. He usually talks at people rather than talking to them, and he usually uses his hall monitor duties as an excuse to check on them, but when he wants to just spend free time with them...well. The results are often a little mixed. This probably has something to do with the fact that he likes to either immediately launch into some sort of lengthy debate about something literally no one but him would care about at the moment, or he approaches them in a hallway and demands that they take their clothes off.
Yes, really.
What he means is that he wants to spend time in the sauna with them, but he extends the invitations in the most bizarrely awkward way possible, complete with shouting about how the best way to know if you can trust people is to see them naked.
So he tries to solve his problems! He just does it in some really...unconventional ways.
✘ ISHIMARU PLS
Ishimaru's reactions to emotional stimuli tend to be...uh, really intense, for lack of a better term. As mentioned in the personality section, he cries at the drop of a hat, pretty much (and when he cries, he cries - he is pretty much the physical embodiment of uglycrying, we are talking tears and sweat and snot and dear god it's kind of impressively gross); outside of that, however, he also tends to have strange reactions to things going negatively, often believing them to be his fault somehow even if there's no way that it's possibly the case. And when he perceives things to be his fault, he tends to react...very badly. He doesn't lash out at others, he takes it to the other extreme: he immediately begins tearing up and carrying on about how much of a failure he is, and on at least one occasion during a fit like this he starts yelling about how much he deserves to be hit for his shortcomings - and he doesn't stop right away, either, continuing to scream and begging people to hit him until someone finally tells him to shut up, claiming that if he has the time and energy to make that much noise about it, he can just do it himself. That said, however, he's very easily soothed, and he calms down from these massive fits almost as quickly as he throws himself into them; it's not unheard of for him to be crying one minute, and laughing and thanking the person he's talking to for helping him figure something out the next.
However, though it seems contradictory given how open he is with most of his feelings, Ishimaru also has trouble presenting himself honestly when it comes to his problems - namely, he thinks he needs to handle everyone else's problems with absolutely no complaints of his own. It's not simply a matter of thinking he needs to suffer in silence such as not to be a burden to people - it's generally more severe than that. If anyone notices that he's having problems, he's quick to cry and insult himself repeatedly, calling himself things like "disgusting," "repulsive" and "deplorable" for not keeping his own negativity in check and completely hidden; he legitimately thinks he deserves to be punished for complaining to anyone about very real problems and issues that he's having, and he seems afraid that others will judge him harshly for not being able to handle everything by himself.
✘ NO BUT REALLY GUYS HOW DO I PEOPLE
Ishimaru is very book-smart, as was mentioned above, and he can be incredibly observant most of the time, but he doesn't possess a lot of common sense when it comes to dealing with others. Not only is he blunt to the point of being completely tactless and coming across as far more insensitive than he really is, but his interpersonal problem-solving skills seem to be a little on the unique side. He legitimately tries to get one of the students to confess to murder using a variant of the "raise your hand if you're stupid" game ("Everybody close your eyes - Mr. Culprit! Please raise your hand!") and he's generally just an oddball that seems to have some bizarre vision of the world that no one else quite shares.
It doesn't help that Ishimaru apparently has no idea what "fun" is - while there's nothing wrong with studying for fun, that's literally all he really knows how to do. He studies at school, then he goes home and studies to pass the time; he expresses confusion as to why people would watch television, play video games, just generally hang out, have idle conversations with people and the like. Everything has to have some sort of "deeper purpose" with him - basically, it has to help with some sort of fundamental life skill, or he wants next to nothing to do with it. This sort of mindset is a good part of the reason why he's so poorly-socialized to begin with; he doesn't let himself relax, and so he has nothing in common with his fellow students because he does nothing for pleasure's sake. When this is pointed out to him, he...well, he cries for a while first, but then he immediately perks up and says he's going to "study" television and video games for a while. It's...a start, though admittedly not a very good one...
✘ BERSERK BUTTONS IN WEIRD PLACES
You can refer to Ishimaru as a hard worker, a model student, a tactless idiot, a social moron...hell, you can even flat-out call him retarded and he literally won't care. However, don't call him gifted unless you want the temperature in the room to suddenly drop by about fifty degrees, and calling him a genius is only a good idea if you really aren't partial to the current union between your head and your body. Due to the issues with his grandfather and his family, he has serious problems with people who are considered prodigies and geniuses, and he hates being called one himself. Needless to say, what with the lack of complaining about his own issues described above, these sorts of things can cause a bit of an explosive reaction due to him having no outlet for them, and he's obviously not going to express exactly where the problem areas are lying until you've already tripped over them and he's in the process of flipping a table at you.