"How has your character developed?" The Man, The Meme, The Legend

[beknightedheroine]

Because introspection is fun.

Basically, exactly as stated - how has your character developed throughout their time in the tower, from their state upon application? Feel free to be as TL;DR: as you want, because I want to read all of it this is a writing based hobby, words are what we're here for!

ARBITRARY RULES:

->Post your characters as a header
->Reply to your comment with explanation!
->???
->spam sad emotes at everyone else's downward spirals

Comments

Re: Jin Shirato | Persona 3 [AU]

[morituramfides]

In his source material, Jin gets little to no character development himself. This is because he's the least important charcter in a trio of three minor, borderline ineffectual antagonists that the plot writers forgot about in favor of the world-ending eldritch abomination. What we see of him is as a condescending, easily irritated and insufferably intelligent nihilist. He sympathizes with no one and is a crazy loyal follower of Takaya, the leader of Strega, while he waits to die. At his canon point in his AU, not much is different, sans the fact that Minato's more calm exterior and caring inner-personality let Jin's own volatility surface more often, and allow him to be more impulsive since he doesn't have to be the sane one of the group as in the OU.

This is the state in which he came to Animus in February 2012. A completely and total anti-social cynic who hated everyone that wasn't Strega (especially the Persona-users, eventually coming to hold particular vitriol for Yu Narukami, the Minato that led SEES, and both Female Protagonists of P3.) Initially, he and his roommate Shinjiro were on speaking terms, but other than that he tottered around the Tower, screwing around on the network and arguing with people. The news that he could die, but that this death wasn't permanent has had a more long-lasting effect on him than he realized; though he still doesn't fear it, isn't afraid to kill people, and in fact sees death as a tool to help him get ahead, he doesn't really quite consider it "death." In a weird way, he simply sees his life ahead of him almost like that of an immortal, and though initially he was distraught, this fact no longer bothers him. He never saw death as a release, only as an inevitability that he accepted. Now "death" isn't really a thing anymore. At least, not in the distant or near future.

But before all that, he cultivated an instant hatred for the tower admins for pulling him here, and basically didn't care. Needless to say, he wasn't phazed by the monsters, and being outside of the limits of the Dark Hour meant he let go of his attachment to it and the Tower of Demise pretty fast. Most people he talked to were on the network (hell, that's how he met Sayaka), and he kept a pretty low profile.

The Labyrinth event was the first time anything really happened to him. He teamed up with Strega, ended up killing Minako, the Handmaid, and Ken at the end when he was losing control of Moros, and almost got killed by Shinjiro before getting killed by Chidori. None of these deaths he really cared about or held against anyone personally (nor took responsibility for). The nightmares as a consequence of losing struck a nerve, but his philosophy of "live in the moment" kept him from worrying about it too much. He completely fell out with Shinjiro after that, on account of Jin killing his girlfriend and Jin also being spiteful that Shinjiro's persona had ascended and he was still stuck with a murdersona. But, whatever, Shinjiro sucked anyway and he was dead in Jin's universe. Who cares.

And then the Infighting event happened.

Being in Jason's pod was practically a return to his childhood, which Jin had never been able to quite repress or forget despite the trauma. At first it wasn't so bad; dare he say, it was tolerable. Though he didn't fancy having brain surgery again, the chips that Jason gave him were able to keep Moros in line, and for the first really memorable time in his life, he remembered what it was like for his mind to be quiet, to not have a murderous harbinger of doom constantly whispering in the back of his mind about imminent demise. He didn't even care that his thought process was more mechanical-- and it's actually made him better at programming in the aftermath, though it leaves a bad taste in his mouth to think back on it now. For three weeks, his volatility and anger was gone, and he was actually something much more close to his canon self; the sane one, relatively calm, though his snark was pretty eased away. If it wasn't for the last week, he actually would've gotten along very well with his podmates afterwards. He already mentally cuts them some slack and gives them more credit, because they actually know what Strega's life was like, if only for about a month.

And then Ruana was a bitch, and the last week of the Infighting event after Jason was disqualified, it was Jin's job to do the surgeries on his podmates.

Besides the fact that he was under some fucked up form of more than mind control (which is less of a problem for him than you'd think-- with his loyalty streak, he's already less inclined to make his own decisions), he was doing the most reprehensible thing he could think of to not just other people, but people he had actually grown to have respect for, and what's more, people that he was close to. Yes, that kind of scientific experimentation is more reprehensible to him than death or torture, and it is basically the one line he would have never crossed of his own volition. Unfortunately, he did, and he didn't even get any memory loss for his troubles. To this day, he still remembers every operation he did on everyone, which has both given him a pretty good understanding of human (and troll and other species') anatomy, but also makes him absolutely sick of himself.

Recalling those memories still makes him sick, and for a long time afterwards, seeing any of the ones he operated on summoned this sick reflex. Because of that, he avoided most of them, and the only ones he had been able to safely speak to without triggering a gag reflex were Sayaka and Dave. For basically the first time in his life, he felt shame and remorse for his actions. At first, it was because he was the one who did it, and he didn't consider the other human side of the equation, though he was sure everyone would feel angry (he certainly would've). After talking to more people from the event, and them not blaming him for what happened (particularly Minato, Dave and Gamzee (go figure)), he even started to feel guilt over what he did. He simply couldn't stop dwelling on what had happened in the pods, completely throwing his previous life philosophy out the window.

But before he was properly able to feel remorse and shame, Minato was mind-controlled by Bluekat, and they went on a murder spree. In the pod, Jin had stopped taking suppressants, as he hadn't needed to; so once he got out, Moros was making his life absolutely hell. He couldn't take responsibility for what he had done, and he was freaking the fuck out about it. So they just went on a murder spree! He'd feel worse about this later, but mostly that just compounded the beginning of his gradual identity loss and loss of control the Infighting Event started. He was killed by Yu, and didn't really care. What bothered him more were Yu's words before his neck was cracked by that fateful Bus Stop Sign: "After all of this, you can't stand up on your own."

Jin had never been one for his own decisions-- again, he was the fiercely loyal type-- so that'd never really bothered him. But now he couldn't really bring himself to look at the rest of Strega, and without a leader, he was kind of lost. He spent a lot of time talking to no one, talking to Moros, hiding from anyone he could, and started doing a lot of work to keep himself busy. He built a lot of bombs and explosives in the mean time, and began stockpiling them (which he still has), worked on some more programs on his laptop, and thankfully Sayaka came along with a project to gather information on the network, which he's been using to distract himself as well. He'd done plenty of distracting himself before, but now he'd taken it to the max to avoid dealing with anything.

Some talks with Minato and Yu led to him slowly being able to talk to people from the Infighting event again, but it was still hard. Ken's persona ascended with little fanfare from Jin's side, and he got bitched out for being a wimp by Gamzee and it was really weird.

Sayaka and Jin's Return of OP-kun anonymous information project was greeted by Zo on the advent of September, and when Jason showed up to interrupt them, Jin'd had enough. They both stepped up to Zo's defense (rather uncharacteristic of Jin, but he had his strategic reasons. Unlike Sayaka he actually had his wits about him when it happened), and he was turned into a monstrous cat thing and forced to kill and attack one of his best friends, among others.

Oddly enough, it didn't...hurt his mental state as much as you'd think. It continues adding to the slow and steady destruction of his own personal identity, but he didn't care-- it was the last straw that broke the camel's back, and the last numeral on the despair counter before he hit 255. It was a really weird sort of release, and for whatever reason, it made him run out of fucks to give. The transformation was painful and he doesn't like the memories of being a blood thirsty monster, but compared to the Infighting event, it wasn't that bad. Another bought of inevitability clicked in his head; the admins were gonna screw with them, but he wasn't going to die, nothing was going to be permanent, and you know what? They'd actually gotten somewhere, despite the monster thing. Stagnation was the norm for him, and progress was different.