Player Name: Madb Personal Journal:madb E-mail: TwinTailKitsune@gmail.com AIM/MSN: twintailmadb Timezone: Pacific (-8 GMT) Current Characters in Route: None
Character Name: Minamimoto Sho Series: The World Ends With You Timeline: Post-canon Canon Resource Links:Wiki page
Personality: He's a cheerful megalomaniacal sociopathic mathematical genius with psychotic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a maths fetish. He's arrogant as hell, and smart enough not to show it most of the time. He'll happily play with people's heads until he's bored and then might or might not hurt them physically.
His megalomania is shown primarily in his desire to topple Joshua and take over the role of Composer for himself; he gives every indication of not giving a damn about the Game except as it allows him to get closer to Joshua. His mathematical genius is a canon point, most of his quotes are somehow related to mathematics and he is completely obsessed over making jokes that only a mathematician would notice, let alone understand. Psychotic tendencies are expressed in his apparent detachment from the reality of his situation in many aspects, including but not limited to the fact that he refuses to allow the other Reapers to Erase Players despite the fact that without doing so they will die. His OCD shows up both in his irrational, obsessive "sculptures" made out of trash - which he claims are a "precisely calculated form of art" and his habit of breaking into pi at random (specifically in the middle of his own monologue).
Sho repeatedly shows his arrogance, he blows off his superiors, he ignores his underlings, he spends more time toying with Neku (and Josh) than he does actually fighting them. Some of that is to put his Taboo Noise plan into action, but some of it is just the feeling that he's that much better than everyone else.
It'd be easy to say that Sho doesn't realise his rather unique problems, but the truth is he does...he just doesn't care. While, in a vague way, he'd like to 'get' what people see in emotional relationships it's not a big focus in his life and is easily and often buried under his short attention span and overwhelming curiosity. He can't stand not knowing something that other people know, to the point where he will throw himself into stupidly dangerous (and just stupid) situations in order to gather the information if it's not offered. He tends to trust to his powers to keep him safe. His ego won't admit anything else. That's going to trip him up a lot, not having those powers.
The truth of the matter is that Sho rarely interacts with anyone directly in canon. The first time he's shown it's a brief scene where he blows off orders and insults his peers. He calls Kitaniji Megumi, the head Reaper, "Megs", he calls the first Game Master a "bulldozer" and says that Higashizawa will eat the players rather than Erase them, and when his superiors attempt to convince him that Higashizawa is an excellent Reaper, Sho's response is "Cooperation is garbage", and then he leaves...before Megumi even begins the meeting. It is apparently not unheard of, as Megumi says to just let him go.
Later, when handed control of a weeks worth of Reaper's Game and command of all the basic Reapers he prefers to work alone to the point where some of his underlings complain about being bored. They don't have any idea of what he wants to have happen. The majority of Reapers are shown to have some form of kinship with each other, forming working partnerships or at least spending time with each other and talking about their plans. Sho does none of this. This refusal to work with others is one of his primary traits.
Joshua even remarks on Sho's lackluster treatment of the rules; "Day 1, and the GM's already putting in an appearance? Not one for tradition, are you?"
Sho even cuts off contact entirely with his superiors, and again it's dismissed as being perfectly normal for him, and even when he commits treason by summoning Taboo Noise Megumi allows it to pass by.
He does, however, show a certain twisted sort of fairness in his dealings with other people; when he stole 777's microphone he left his beloved megaphone in it's place. He also helps Neku and Josh when they are over-matched, although that appears to be more so that he can have his plans fall out his way rather than winning by default - for Sho the point of the Game is not to Erase all of the players, but to kill Josh. In addition, his willingness to listen to Hanekoma shows that he's capable of listening to others if they have information he needs or wants.
Unlike Higashizawa, and theoretically unlike other Game Masters if we take Josh's comment about tradition as correct, Sho is constantly poking his nose into what Neku and Josh are doing. This may be an attempt to keep an eye on his target, but Josh implies that it's because Sho is an attention whore. It's not enough to be the best, he also wants to be known as the best.
He does show himself to be adaptable; when Josh and Neku show up at Pork Tower, rather than where Sho intended to fight them, he rolls with it. Upon being defeated, he shows that his obsession still rules him: he uses a level i Flare to attempt to take out Josh and himself, although the sigils that he has set up allow him to be reborn as Taboo Noise himself. This, and the fact that his wings break, seem to imply that even his status as a Reaper doesn't matter in the face of his quest to win. "Fear 'n' mercy are garbage" he says.
The truth of the matter is that canon doesn't say why Sho acts the way he does. We are given his actions, but no context to fit them in. We see Sho through Joshua's eyes, and we know that Josh is an unreliable narrator due to the fact that he's lying from the moment he opens his mouth on Week 2 Day 1.
To go more deeply into the facets that make me believe that he has the specific mental disorders that I see in him I've included some research into them, and how they can be seen in Sho.
The megalomaniac believes that they are convinced of their own superiority to a level that may even include a belief that they are omnipotant. The megalomaniac has a lack of empathy towards anything that does not feed his own belief in himself. This does not mean that they are completely incapable of empathy, but rather that they develop connections to things that make them feel better about themselves. Megalomania often comes paired with narcissism. Narcissism is often a reaction to a poor self-esteem based on a neglectful or otherwise unhealthy childhood. We obviously do not know what Sho's childhood was like, but it is likely considering the symptoms that he shows during the game that he has the narcissism-megalomania pairing. Megalomaniacs do not usually believe that other people are on their level, however they need other people around; when entirely alone they are at the mercy of their low self-esteem and cannot 'prove' that they are the best. While the low-charismatic megalomaniac will work badly with people, he will still need at least one person around to show off to.
Sho is also a sociopath. “Sociopath” is the common name for a person suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder. This, again, is characterized by a lack of empathy – however many sociopaths are quite capable of holding down relationships over decades of time. Some people are born sociopaths, however in some people this is a learned protective quality. In the “learned” sociopath not all of the APD symptoms are present, notably the learned sociopath is far more capable of making genuine emotional connections under certain sets of circumstances. Anger and stress management classes, psychotherapy, and medication can all help the sociopath walk closer to normal. As I have no reason to believe that Sho was born a sociopath, and I prefer to play a character who is capable of emotional growth, I am stating that for the sake of the ability to build positive CR that Minamimoto Sho is a learned sociopath.
Psychosis, or psychotic episodes, are more a symptom of other things than a diagnosis of their own. These are very different from psychopathic behaviour – which Sho does not show evidence of. Psychotic episodes are passing, they come and go and between them the person is as normal as they ever are. Psychotic episodes are sometimes linked to sufferers of schizophrenia, although not always. During a psychotic episode there are many different experiences that can be had; Sho's list contains disorganized speech patterns, difficulty with spoken communication, confusion, emotional volatility, and rapidly changing moods as well as delusions. Psychosis often dissolves when other disorders suffered by the patient are treated.
Now the giant collection of “How I Assume Sho's Mind Works”, starting with the psychotic break because regardless of how a break is started the result is a drastic, traumatic, shift in perception and view of life. Even if the break lasts a few hours, rather than weeks or months, it leaves scars that can last a lifetime. More on that in a bit. I see the three most likely places for this psychotic break to have come from one of three points: 1) His death and entrance into Reaper's Game. 2) Upon finding out the stakes of Reaper's Game (not just life, but what is most precious) or 3) Upon finding out that Reapers must continue to Erase (or “kill”) others in order to prolong his own life. (See: “Konishi: Sigh... Since I can't reverse evolution and speak your language, I'll keep this brief. You may be a Player now, but you still broke Reaper rules. Which means you have a penalty coming. They explained to you that a Reaper's points determine his or her lifespan?” and “Konishi: As you wish. 0 points. That leaves you with about five days to live, including today.”
With the exception of the narcissism and OCD, which I touched on above, I believe that the shift in reality due to the psychotic break created new pathways in his mind on a chemical level.
As stated earlier, I choose to believe that he has a learned sociopathic response for the sake of being able to have positive CR rather than merely shades of negative CR, which I also attribute to the knowledge that his life now depends on the repeated and continual death of other people; people who are just like he was when he was first thrown into the Game.
This itself could have lead into the development of what was a simple “narcissism” into the level of “megalomania”; the knowledge that killing the Composer is a possibility, and one which (we can assume) lifts one out of being a Reaper and needing to continue the violent cycle could make that transition even easier. If his thought processes were; “I am good at mathematics (and secretly fear not being good enough at anything else)” then bolstering his own ego with the concept of others being worthless and useless, and in comparison himself being king- or god-like, makes sense.
It's also interesting to me to note that, aside from releasing the Taboo Noise into the Game, Sho does not target any player pairing except the one that contains Josh. No missions are ordered, and the Reapers are told to stand down and not interefere.
It is, to me, a very, very intriguing note. It could mean that he knows this is an “all or nothing” Game for him and doesn't care about prolonging his life even farther, it could mean that he's got enough time stocked up that one week without kills won't matter much to him, it could mean that he is trying to sabotage the other Reapers and keep them from gaining more time and possibly weeding out some of the least active ones if they will die before the next Game without those kills, or maybe – just maybe – he is looking out in a twisted, hands-off kind of way for the kind of people that he used to be. Kariya says; “Three weeks in a row? That's a first, even for me.” which implies that having Games back-to-back is at best rare, possibly unheard of.
In accordance with my earlier assumptions and views on Sho as a whole, I like the possibility that it's all three. A “damn the torpedoes” situation where he was going to either win and change things to suit himself, with new Reapers who followed his ideas, or go out in a blaze of glory and perhaps take other mass-killers like himself out of the equation. After all, just because “Erasing” doesn't mean that the energy is gone, it does mean that it's no longer who it once was unless something drastic is done to it. (See Rhyme being turned into a pin.)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a very poorly understood disorder which people often assume that they know very well from the portrayal in films and other forms of media. OCD is a pairing of cause and effect that short-circuit the rest of the brain. An obsession generally related to an anxiety will form, which leads to the compulsion to do something in a specific manner in order to ease that anxiety. There are no logical reasons for the obsessions which form, nor are there ways to stop the compulsions easily. The standard Hollywood OCD person generally has an obsession with germs, however that is not an omnipresent symptom. Sho's obsessions revolve around his other disorders; proving that he is the best and proving that he is worthwhile to himself. This leads to compulsive building of large sculptures – something that cannot be ignored based entirely on their size. It should be noted that Sho's canonical obsession with Josh/the Composer, is not related to Josh as a person, but rather as a trophy: by beating the Composer, Sho would be the Composer. In Route there is absolutely no reason to go after Josh. He's just another trainer, after all. Beating him here wouldn't mean anything.
My feeling is that Sho's trash-heap sculptures; due to the quantity of them that he makes, are a presentation of OCD behaviour. If he made one or two I could see it as just being a quirk, but you find them spread across the game as a whole during his week. While his ego demands that he puts some kind of grandiose meaning behind them, in accordance with my belief that he's got something approaching a normal set of emotions how could he not be anxious about the fact that he was going to be challenging the Composer? Building the heaps allows him to soothe that anxiety while also giving him a way to attempt to elevate himself. We do not, after all, see any heaps prior to Sho's week, and if he just did them for the hell of it I'd assume that you'd see at least one of them around.
((Aheh, this was too long for just one comment. -.-))
Sho Minimimoto| The World Ends With You | No reserve (REAPP)
Player
Name: Madb
Personal Journal:
E-mail: TwinTailKitsune@gmail.com
AIM/MSN: twintailmadb
Timezone: Pacific (-8 GMT)
Current Characters in Route: None
Character
Name: Minamimoto Sho
Series: The World Ends With You
Timeline: Post-canon
Canon Resource Links: Wiki page
Personality: He's a cheerful megalomaniacal sociopathic mathematical genius with psychotic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a maths fetish. He's arrogant as hell, and smart enough not to show it most of the time. He'll happily play with people's heads until he's bored and then might or might not hurt them physically.
His megalomania is shown primarily in his desire to topple Joshua and take over the role of Composer for himself; he gives every indication of not giving a damn about the Game except as it allows him to get closer to Joshua. His mathematical genius is a canon point, most of his quotes are somehow related to mathematics and he is completely obsessed over making jokes that only a mathematician would notice, let alone understand. Psychotic tendencies are expressed in his apparent detachment from the reality of his situation in many aspects, including but not limited to the fact that he refuses to allow the other Reapers to Erase Players despite the fact that without doing so they will die. His OCD shows up both in his irrational, obsessive "sculptures" made out of trash - which he claims are a "precisely calculated form of art" and his habit of breaking into pi at random (specifically in the middle of his own monologue).
Sho repeatedly shows his arrogance, he blows off his superiors, he ignores his underlings, he spends more time toying with Neku (and Josh) than he does actually fighting them. Some of that is to put his Taboo Noise plan into action, but some of it is just the feeling that he's that much better than everyone else.
It'd be easy to say that Sho doesn't realise his rather unique problems, but the truth is he does...he just doesn't care. While, in a vague way, he'd like to 'get' what people see in emotional relationships it's not a big focus in his life and is easily and often buried under his short attention span and overwhelming curiosity. He can't stand not knowing something that other people know, to the point where he will throw himself into stupidly dangerous (and just stupid) situations in order to gather the information if it's not offered. He tends to trust to his powers to keep him safe. His ego won't admit anything else. That's going to trip him up a lot, not having those powers.
The truth of the matter is that Sho rarely interacts with anyone directly in canon. The first time he's shown it's a brief scene where he blows off orders and insults his peers. He calls Kitaniji Megumi, the head Reaper, "Megs", he calls the first Game Master a "bulldozer" and says that Higashizawa will eat the players rather than Erase them, and when his superiors attempt to convince him that Higashizawa is an excellent Reaper, Sho's response is "Cooperation is garbage", and then he leaves...before Megumi even begins the meeting. It is apparently not unheard of, as Megumi says to just let him go.
Later, when handed control of a weeks worth of Reaper's Game and command of all the basic Reapers he prefers to work alone to the point where some of his underlings complain about being bored. They don't have any idea of what he wants to have happen. The majority of Reapers are shown to have some form of kinship with each other, forming working partnerships or at least spending time with each other and talking about their plans. Sho does none of this. This refusal to work with others is one of his primary traits.
Joshua even remarks on Sho's lackluster treatment of the rules; "Day 1, and the GM's already putting in an appearance? Not one for tradition, are you?"
Sho even cuts off contact entirely with his superiors, and again it's dismissed as being perfectly normal for him, and even when he commits treason by summoning Taboo Noise Megumi allows it to pass by.
He does, however, show a certain twisted sort of fairness in his dealings with other people; when he stole 777's microphone he left his beloved megaphone in it's place. He also helps Neku and Josh when they are over-matched, although that appears to be more so that he can have his plans fall out his way rather than winning by default - for Sho the point of the Game is not to Erase all of the players, but to kill Josh. In addition, his willingness to listen to Hanekoma shows that he's capable of listening to others if they have information he needs or wants.
Unlike Higashizawa, and theoretically unlike other Game Masters if we take Josh's comment about tradition as correct, Sho is constantly poking his nose into what Neku and Josh are doing. This may be an attempt to keep an eye on his target, but Josh implies that it's because Sho is an attention whore. It's not enough to be the best, he also wants to be known as the best.
He does show himself to be adaptable; when Josh and Neku show up at Pork Tower, rather than where Sho intended to fight them, he rolls with it. Upon being defeated, he shows that his obsession still rules him: he uses a level i Flare to attempt to take out Josh and himself, although the sigils that he has set up allow him to be reborn as Taboo Noise himself. This, and the fact that his wings break, seem to imply that even his status as a Reaper doesn't matter in the face of his quest to win. "Fear 'n' mercy are garbage" he says.
The truth of the matter is that canon doesn't say why Sho acts the way he does. We are given his actions, but no context to fit them in. We see Sho through Joshua's eyes, and we know that Josh is an unreliable narrator due to the fact that he's lying from the moment he opens his mouth on Week 2 Day 1.
To go more deeply into the facets that make me believe that he has the specific mental disorders that I see in him I've included some research into them, and how they can be seen in Sho.
The megalomaniac believes that they are convinced of their own superiority to a level that may even include a belief that they are omnipotant. The megalomaniac has a lack of empathy towards anything that does not feed his own belief in himself. This does not mean that they are completely incapable of empathy, but rather that they develop connections to things that make them feel better about themselves. Megalomania often comes paired with narcissism. Narcissism is often a reaction to a poor self-esteem based on a neglectful or otherwise unhealthy childhood. We obviously do not know what Sho's childhood was like, but it is likely considering the symptoms that he shows during the game that he has the narcissism-megalomania pairing. Megalomaniacs do not usually believe that other people are on their level, however they need other people around; when entirely alone they are at the mercy of their low self-esteem and cannot 'prove' that they are the best. While the low-charismatic megalomaniac will work badly with people, he will still need at least one person around to show off to.
Sho is also a sociopath. “Sociopath” is the common name for a person suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder. This, again, is characterized by a lack of empathy – however many sociopaths are quite capable of holding down relationships over decades of time. Some people are born sociopaths, however in some people this is a learned protective quality. In the “learned” sociopath not all of the APD symptoms are present, notably the learned sociopath is far more capable of making genuine emotional connections under certain sets of circumstances. Anger and stress management classes, psychotherapy, and medication can all help the sociopath walk closer to normal. As I have no reason to believe that Sho was born a sociopath, and I prefer to play a character who is capable of emotional growth, I am stating that for the sake of the ability to build positive CR that Minamimoto Sho is a learned sociopath.
Psychosis, or psychotic episodes, are more a symptom of other things than a diagnosis of their own. These are very different from psychopathic behaviour – which Sho does not show evidence of. Psychotic episodes are passing, they come and go and between them the person is as normal as they ever are. Psychotic episodes are sometimes linked to sufferers of schizophrenia, although not always. During a psychotic episode there are many different experiences that can be had; Sho's list contains disorganized speech patterns, difficulty with spoken communication, confusion, emotional volatility, and rapidly changing moods as well as delusions. Psychosis often dissolves when other disorders suffered by the patient are treated.
Now the giant collection of “How I Assume Sho's Mind Works”, starting with the psychotic break because regardless of how a break is started the result is a drastic, traumatic, shift in perception and view of life. Even if the break lasts a few hours, rather than weeks or months, it leaves scars that can last a lifetime. More on that in a bit. I see the three most likely places for this psychotic break to have come from one of three points:
1) His death and entrance into Reaper's Game.
2) Upon finding out the stakes of Reaper's Game (not just life, but what is most precious) or
3) Upon finding out that Reapers must continue to Erase (or “kill”) others in order to prolong his own life. (See: “Konishi: Sigh... Since I can't reverse evolution and speak your language, I'll keep this brief. You may be a Player now, but you still broke Reaper rules. Which means you have a penalty coming. They explained to you that a Reaper's points determine his or her lifespan?” and “Konishi: As you wish. 0 points. That leaves you with about five days to live, including today.”
With the exception of the narcissism and OCD, which I touched on above, I believe that the shift in reality due to the psychotic break created new pathways in his mind on a chemical level.
As stated earlier, I choose to believe that he has a learned sociopathic response for the sake of being able to have positive CR rather than merely shades of negative CR, which I also attribute to the knowledge that his life now depends on the repeated and continual death of other people; people who are just like he was when he was first thrown into the Game.
This itself could have lead into the development of what was a simple “narcissism” into the level of “megalomania”; the knowledge that killing the Composer is a possibility, and one which (we can assume) lifts one out of being a Reaper and needing to continue the violent cycle could make that transition even easier. If his thought processes were; “I am good at mathematics (and secretly fear not being good enough at anything else)” then bolstering his own ego with the concept of others being worthless and useless, and in comparison himself being king- or god-like, makes sense.
It's also interesting to me to note that, aside from releasing the Taboo Noise into the Game, Sho does not target any player pairing except the one that contains Josh. No missions are ordered, and the Reapers are told to stand down and not interefere.
It is, to me, a very, very intriguing note. It could mean that he knows this is an “all or nothing” Game for him and doesn't care about prolonging his life even farther, it could mean that he's got enough time stocked up that one week without kills won't matter much to him, it could mean that he is trying to sabotage the other Reapers and keep them from gaining more time and possibly weeding out some of the least active ones if they will die before the next Game without those kills, or maybe – just maybe – he is looking out in a twisted, hands-off kind of way for the kind of people that he used to be. Kariya says; “Three weeks in a row? That's a first, even for me.” which implies that having Games back-to-back is at best rare, possibly unheard of.
In accordance with my earlier assumptions and views on Sho as a whole, I like the possibility that it's all three. A “damn the torpedoes” situation where he was going to either win and change things to suit himself, with new Reapers who followed his ideas, or go out in a blaze of glory and perhaps take other mass-killers like himself out of the equation. After all, just because “Erasing” doesn't mean that the energy is gone, it does mean that it's no longer who it once was unless something drastic is done to it. (See Rhyme being turned into a pin.)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a very poorly understood disorder which people often assume that they know very well from the portrayal in films and other forms of media. OCD is a pairing of cause and effect that short-circuit the rest of the brain. An obsession generally related to an anxiety will form, which leads to the compulsion to do something in a specific manner in order to ease that anxiety. There are no logical reasons for the obsessions which form, nor are there ways to stop the compulsions easily. The standard Hollywood OCD person generally has an obsession with germs, however that is not an omnipresent symptom. Sho's obsessions revolve around his other disorders; proving that he is the best and proving that he is worthwhile to himself. This leads to compulsive building of large sculptures – something that cannot be ignored based entirely on their size. It should be noted that Sho's canonical obsession with Josh/the Composer, is not related to Josh as a person, but rather as a trophy: by beating the Composer, Sho would be the Composer. In Route there is absolutely no reason to go after Josh. He's just another trainer, after all. Beating him here wouldn't mean anything.
My feeling is that Sho's trash-heap sculptures; due to the quantity of them that he makes, are a presentation of OCD behaviour. If he made one or two I could see it as just being a quirk, but you find them spread across the game as a whole during his week. While his ego demands that he puts some kind of grandiose meaning behind them, in accordance with my belief that he's got something approaching a normal set of emotions how could he not be anxious about the fact that he was going to be challenging the Composer? Building the heaps allows him to soothe that anxiety while also giving him a way to attempt to elevate himself. We do not, after all, see any heaps prior to Sho's week, and if he just did them for the hell of it I'd assume that you'd see at least one of them around.
((Aheh, this was too long for just one comment. -.-))