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snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
snowblindmods) wrote2015-04-06 10:43 pm
Application
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Personality: If you'd just meet Haku normally, it'd be hard to get a good impression of him.
Not that Haku's unsociable necessarily. He knows how to strike up chats and have conversations in general. He can be entirely useful when he's being serious or while talking about business. It's not that he's some sort of quiet wallflower that you just don't notice - no, it's more just since he's so aloof. You could be talking to Haku for hours, and you would probably only realise by the time you walked away from the conversation that you haven't learned a single thing about him in the course of it. For someone who might seem rather open in how easily he speaks, Haku is actually really closed off. He knows how to avoid things and talk around them, how to switch topics to things that are easy for him to talk about, how to avoid anything about him other than surface interests that anyone could notice. You'd be hard-pressed to see Haku being very open in any way; even emotionally he seems to show very little reaction to most things, staying calm even in some dangerous situations and generally not generating expressions that are a whole lot more over the top than the expression equivalent of "oh" at best.
Not that there aren't exceptions to this rule. Haku's very well capable of smiling and grinning, especially when he's teasing people - apparently one of his favourite activities, considering he spends half of his time annoying his Messiah to high hell and back. While it's half since he's so aloof and teasing is a good way to keep people away from him if they get riled up easily, it's clear that Haku also just genuinely enjoys teasing people. He often ends up smiling and grinning victoriously whenever he ends up getting Eiri to jump and stomp his feet at things he's saying or doing. The fact that Haku is relatively shameless sure helps with the teasing. He can drag Eiri into his bed without a second thought, get all up in other people's personal space-- hell, he even moves in for a kiss at one point just to get the other all worked up, and it works perfectly well. Using his height to lean all over other people or use them as arm rests works pretty well for this too, to a point where he sometimes seems to almost unconsciously do it.
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call his tendency to tease (and especially the joy he seems to get from it) childish. Hell, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call Haku childish in general. Even aside from the teasing habits he also has troubles getting out of the bed in the morning (in the typical "five more minutes mom" style when anyone tries to drag him out), he's constantly seen eating candy rather than anything actually nutricional, he leaves the wrappers of said candy all over the place instead of cleaning them up, he's constantly drinking a juice box even in the middle of the most dangerous of missions where it might be a good idea to actually have two hands readily available to do stuff. To not even start about his childish refusal when he's told to get out of someone's bed and back to his own.
Some signs of this already show in his aloofness (like him casually eating candy while important things are going down), but if you get to know him a little better, it's very likely you'll soon start to understand that he's more like a five year old despite his height and age. And it's not too strange for him to be that way to begin with considering his circumstances. As a young child he was left all alone and then taken in by Sakura - not exactly the best way for anyone to grow up, honestly. It left Haku unable to mature without any sort of parental force to guide him, which means he's indeed still like a kid in a lot of ways, or at least more than a little bit developmentally stunted.
It also shows in the way Haku can go from his usual aloof sort of teasing self to a more serious mode. Of course he can't always fool around during missions, since they're often a matter of life and death (and Haku, having lost two Messiah already during them, knows this better than anyone) so he does get a lot more serious and business-like during those. Sure, he'll still drink from his juice box and all, but at least he won't stray from the topic of the mission and be more generally serious. The change is always a little jarring though, like he has to mentally click himself into a more serious state rather than just letting it be another facet of himself. It's possible that because he grew up in such a strange way - a case where he didn't mature but still realised there were some moments that were Important enough to be serious during, so he just adopts a different mindset altogether during those moments.
So even though Haku seems really calm and pretty put together most of the time, that's actually not the case at all. He ended up really stunted because of the way he grew up, and that's not even touching the fact that he's actually not all that happy as he might seem at times. Losing contact with his brother and then experiencing two of his Messiah dying really messed with Haku - and it's what made him go from a pretty normal cheerful kid to the aloof kind of person he is now. He seems afraid of getting close to people again thanks to his "jinx" that makes all of his Messiah die eventually, so he's prone to keeping people at an arm's length, even if they might not consciously realise he's doing it. And you can see the cracks in his aloof facade the moment a few specific topics come up - his jinx, one of the important people to him like his brother or Eiri.. the moment anyone important to him is jeopardized, Haku's emotions seem to show up at all force all of a sudden. It's then that it's shown he's capable of freaking out just like any other person, he usually just surpresses it until he really can't take it anymore.
(It helps that Haku is good at adopting personas because his own personality is so stunted - he's amazing at imitating people, to a point where he can get all of a person's mannerisms and voice pretty much down pat and he's always the one disguising himself if a mission requires one of them to be disguised.)
In fact, he might be even more emotionally volatile than most people. Sure, Haku might not show emotions easily, but when he does, he really goes all the way. The two most promiment cases are in Dou no Shou and Hisui no Shou - in the former Haku seems to shut down fully the moment Higayama has information about his brother's whereabouts, not responding to anything anymore and instead just blankly staring into the distance. And in Hisui, while Eiri is pretending to have died and Haku assumes it really happened, he's noticably more grumpy and tense, to a point where the slightest thing could set him off. He's basically dangerous to interact with during that point because of it. It's obvious that he could be extremely dangerous if left unchecked - it's most likely for this reason that the Northern Union initially tried to recruit him, realising that Haku could be a ruthless and cruel person if pushed in the right direction.
Most of these emotional moments have to do with Eiri (either Eiri or his brother, really), and that's no surprise. Despite his attempts to push the other away at first, Eiri is incredibly important to him and practically a part of him - after Eiri is shot in Dou no Shou, Haku even says that Eiri can't die or a part of his soul would die along with him. At this point Haku has fully accepted Eiri into his life as his Messiah, and it's the most important thing in his life. Eiri balances him out, calms him down, makes him feel like he has a place - there's little he wouldn't do for the other, and he tends to get fiercely protective over him whenever Eiri's life is threatened. (In a movie that's technically not part of the canon timeline, Haku actually grabs a sniper's rifle while it's aimed at Eiri with his bare hands and threateningly says to not kill his Messiah.)
It's no wonder then that Eiri is what Haku gets the most emotional over. And that, combined with just how broken he is from losing so many important people in his life, all come together in one of the final scenes of Hisui no Shou. Haku decides that it'd be better to just shoot himself in the head and kill himself rather than risk letting his jinx run rampant and having Eiri eventually die from it - he breaks down and cries with his own gun pointed to his temple, saying that he doesn't want to see anyone else die because of him anymore.
And this is the true Haku, underneath all the aloofness and teasing - a lonely, sad child, that has already experienced far too much pain and just wants that to end, but doesn't know how to make it stop.
Not that he'll show that easily, though.