Reasons why Psychonauts is officially the best thing ever (and some venting)
Imagine your traditional summer camp horror story, complete with mutated lake monsters and crazy people who enjoy taking part in lobotomies, only the summer camp is actually a secret goverment training facility for kids with psychic powers and you have to run around finding everyone's brains because they've been stolen to power super tanks.
That's Psychonauts.
The protagonist is a reckless trapeez artist who ran away from the circus instead of joining it and snuck into the camp to be trained as a Psychonaut. He can enter read the minds of others and can't swim because of an ancient curse that tries to drown him anytime he strays too close to water. You level up by running around the mindscapes of your instructors unlocking new abilities, collecting mental cobwebs, reuniting emotional baggage with their tags and finding the occasional bit of nightmare fuel left over from their tragic pasts.
It borrows from the setting of Total Drama Island, along the gameplay and artistic direction of Tak and the Power of Juju. Both were thrown in a creative mixing pot with some elements and concepts from Coraline and left to simmer. Mix in the nightmare fuel and dark undertones of Invader Zim and you get this game. Or something close. The game defies genre and I fucking love it.
Anyways, between making squirrels spontaneously combust, terrorizing and laying waste to an entire city of sentient fish Godzilla vs. King Kong style, and trying to stabilize the mind of a milkman gone mad, I've been on the hunt for what good Soul Eater Fanfiction remains, and not in terms of writing or paragraph structure, in terms of character development. I've also reread Soul Eater.
See, as of recently, I've read a lot of fanfiction involving Death the Kidd. We all know he's our favorite bicycle character for shipping. Everyone is shipped with him. I think it's hilarious and awesome for crack, but if you're gonna take it seriously, it's really hard to.
Now, there is a ton of beautiful fanfiction out there for Soul Eater. You have to dig it up most of the time, but there's also some good recent ones. However, as much as I think that the fanfiction is well written and the whatnot, the characterization for Kidd kills me a little on the inside every time.
The ship doesn't matter, be it Kidd/Chrona, Kidd/Liz, Kidd/Patti, Kidd/Black*Star, almost all of it is horrible and it rubs me the wrong way.
Because as I reread Soul Eater, the more I realized that almost every single fanfiction has Kidd either smooth and swuave, or depressed and angsty, when he isn't any of these things at all.
He is a spoiled brat that throws tantrums whenever he doesn't get his way.
It leads me to believe he may not even have OCD. People with OCD seek help because they are aware that they have a problem. Kidd never looks for help and makes no effort to improve his character. He stays in a comfort zone of what he believes to be perfection. That is more like autism than it is OCD, but I don't think he has autism either.
I do know people who have OCD really bad and they it does greatly interfer with their lifestyle, but if Kidd does have such crippling OCD like a lot of people make him out to be, then he'd barely go out in public, never spend any time with anyone of his friends because of their asymmetry and probably would have rejected Liz and Patti as weapons, but probably still wouldn't have left them out on the streets. He isn't that heartless.
But he has done unforgivable things, as well. Because of his issue with symmetry he was hindered from helping Soul, Maka, Black*Star, and Tsubaki out with the battle against Stein even after thinking they would die without his help. And in the incident with the factory, he couldn't find an entrance that was symmetrical and left Soul and Maka to battle the clown alone.
If he did have OCD then he wouldn't even BE in a position of power because he'd make a horrible god. His emotional growth was stunted because he was allowed to have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. I don't think Shinigami-sama knew how to raise a kid properly because he's 1000 years old and never probably had a kid. He clearly loves kids as he went as far as to change his look to not scare them, and clearly if Kidd asked for something he would be hard pressed to deny it.
TL;DR: Kidd is a spoiled brat, one of the worst characters in Soul Eater, and people pass off his issues as OCD because he is the son of a god and they don't want to insult him.