Personality
Slightly trimmed and/or reworked from how it was submitted, mostly because I edit obsessively to tidy and clarify. I marked the significant changes with brackets.
Please give us a detailed description of your character's personality:
Mello is primarily driven by his ambition and dissatisfaction. He's not insecure in a general sense-he's conceited about his intelligence and abilities-but he is insecure in relation to Near. Growing up embroiled in a competition in which he was perpetually in second place made him determined to succeed at any cost, to prove himself worthy using any method available to him. He always wants to be better, have more power, do more to complete his plans. He won't hesitate to kill, or step outside the law in other ways, to reach his goals. Mello is confident to the point of arrogance, partly to hide (even from himself) that deep sense of inferiority. He carries in his mind a kind of personal mythology to build himself up. He’s not deluded about his abilities, but admitting an error in strategy or a mistake in forming a conclusion is all but unthinkable to him. He has to believe that he deserves the power he craves.
His response to frustration is action, even if it's the wrong thing to do. He'll act out of emotion, but can adapt and improvise quickly enough that his recklessness usually gets him the outcome he wants, even if it doesn't happen exactly the way he intended. When circumstances change quickly, he immediately begins assessing how he can turn things to his advantage. His plans account for all possibilities and show an ability to accurately predict other people's moves.
This is not to say he's humorless or all business all the time. He's sarcastic and given to gallows humor. He's also an extrovert, though it's hard for him to find time to socialize, or people he considers worth the effort of befriending. He doesn't seem to have any friends or confidants in the Mafia. They're a means to an end for him, more tools than people.
The most influential relationships in his life have been with L and Near, and it would be difficult to overstate the importance of either. Both were powerful, and very different, influences on Mello from an early age.
L was Mello’s idol, the only person he ever truly respected, and the person he’s been striving to be good enough to replace for almost his entire life. The time Mello and L talked is one of Mello’s most cherished memories. He had dreamed that the great detective might one day see him as a peer, even a friend, and though Mello knows L would not be swayed by personal connections, he can’t help but feel hurt that he was never outright named his successor. Still, he thinks of L as one of the only truly great people in the world, and it’s not an exaggeration to say he feels the world as he knew it ended when L died.
If L was the goal to which Mello aspired, Near was the obstacle between him and that goal. Mello certainly hates Near, but it’s more complex than that. A large part of Mello’s enmity is jealousy of how easy everything always seemed for Near, when Mello has spent his whole life pushing himself just to keep up. Near’s absolute calm and seeming indifference are salt in the wound for Mello-he’s never able to get a reaction out of Near, no matter how hard he tries. The years of being second to Near made Mello obsessive about the younger boy; he studied him constantly, looking for weaknesses. He’s aware of the fixation, and resents it, but can’t get past it. As long as Near is right there in front of him-in his way-Mello has to focus on him. His success in the contest with Near is inextricably linked to his self-image.
Mello is, inherently, someone who pushes people. If he were ever in a romantic relationship, he’d be likely to constantly test his partner, wanting more and more proof of his or her devotion. If he did succeed in pushing him or her away, he’d take it as confirmation that no one’s good enough for him and that relationships are a waste of time. He has probably had a number of sexual partners, though, both male and female-he thinks interesting people are rare enough that gender doesn’t really matter. But he won’t allow himself to get close to anyone emotionally. A lover would be a potential liability, and Mello needs to be free from distractions. He can’t afford to worry about anyone else’s well-being.
[Here's my biggest edit. I think this earlier version of the above paragraph said everything better than the one I ended up sending in, where I think the space I used up in trying to make sure to justify conclusions didn't really do the trick, and also gave the topic a misleading relative weight. In a nutshell: while I think of Mello as a passionate person, and think being considered attractive is important (and often useful) to him, I also believe he thinks giving a damn about anyone else is almost always not worth the effort.]
This is one reason he was unwilling to involve Matt in his plans until he was acting on his own: he didn’t want his oldest friend mixed up in the Mafia. Many fans seem to think that Mello sees Matt as a subordinate, but I believe they had a friendship strong enough that Mello could call on Matt years after leaving the House and know Matt would come to help him without question.
While fanon tends to portray Mello as a randomly violent hothead with no self-control, I don't think that's the whole story. I believe he deliberately cultivated a reputation for being unhinged while in the Mafia: if the skinny, girly-looking blond kid is crazy, people aren't going to mess with him. While we see him use a gun to coerce people's cooperation in the manga, he never fires it, and only pulls it once in anger, when Near's pushing his buttons.
Mello's drive to catch Kira consumes him from the time he's fourteen until his death. His motivations are many and varied; revenge against the person who killed his mentor is certainly high on the list. Another primary concern is the race against Near. If Mello could kill or capture Kira first, he would prove his superiority once and for all. Finally, the idea of a human playing God and taking the power of life and death for himself would be offensive to him. In some ways, the war against Kira is a holy war for him.
Mello's religious beliefs are open to interpretation. I think that he's not a devout Catholic ["Lapsed" is the word I should have used here, tbh. Told you I edit obsessively! XD], but that his early exposure to the faith would have instilled in him a belief that right and wrong are absolutes, and that everyone will be judged for their deeds in the end. However, he’s something of a hypocrite in his moral standards, with a lot of mental loopholes in his moral code to allow him to continue to think of himself as a good person. He knows not all his reasons for wanting to defeat Kira are admirable, but I believe he would focus on the nobler ones when justifying his actions to himself, or if asked to justify them to others. Mello inhabits a moral grey area himself, but sees the world in black and white.
Though Mello manipulates people, he's straightforward about it. His approach to making people do what he wants is to deal from a position of power and lay out: "Here's what I want you to do, and here's why you have to do it." For example, he doesn't lie to Soichiro Yagami when he's negotiating with him during Sayu's kidnapping, even volunteering the information that his group didn't kill the original hostage. This is in contrast to L, and later Near, who both lie frequently as a way to trick people or make them trap themselves. Mello is more about skillfully applying force than working from within to coax cooperation or confession. It's not that Mello never lies-he won't hesitate to if it furthers his goals-but in general, he's not subtle. He's impatient, for one thing; for another, he projects, partly but not entirely by design, an attitude of being able to openly call the shots.
He swears a lot, which is partly a conscious decision to add to his tough persona, and partly a result of the company he keeps and his own aggression. He habitually sprawls when he sits, taking up as much space as possible, and will often sit on the back of a couch, or on a desk rather than in the chair, for the same effect. He’s very physically attractive, and knows it, and is somewhat vain about his appearance, possibly even more so after the explosion that left him scarred. A lot of his style is calculated to unsettle people with the contrast between the pretty, gothy kid exterior and the sharp, unforgiving mind within.
Mello doesn’t use drugs, and almost never drinks. Being alert at all times is too vital to his self-preservation for him to want to chemically alter his perceptions. He does ride a pretty constant sugar high because he eats almost nothing but chocolate, which is both a tribute to L’s devotion to sweets, and the perfect energy source for someone as impatient as Mello. (He’s probably pretty snobby about the brands he’ll eat, too. Give him the deepest, darkest Ghirardelli or Scharffen Berger there is.)
He doesn’t eat or sleep much; those are distractions he’d do away with entirely if he could. Sex is also a secondary concern, and romance not a concern at all. By the time he’s an adult, it’s become part of his self-image that he’s beyond many of the purely physical concerns that preoccupy normal (i.e., lesser) people. He likes nice things, of course, and has expensive taste, but has needed to be too mobile to indulge in belongings that aren’t easily replaced. He’s perfectly able to sleep on the streets or squat in a filthy abandoned warehouse if the need arises.
In short, Mello is a creature of contradictions: brilliant but reckless, calculating but often controlled by his emotions, and egotistical but still insecure.
Please give us a detailed physical description of your character:
Height: 5’6”
Weight: 114 lbs
Skin: Pale with gold undertones.
Hair: Light gold blond, cut in a pageboy that’s seen better days, so it’s shaggy: shoulder-length and with bangs that fall below his eyebrows.
Health: He’s in good physical shape, and stronger than his size suggests.
Ethnicity: A mix of German, Russian, and Slovenian.
Features: Blue eyes with a slight upward slant at the outer corners, straight nose that turns up at the tip, a wide mouth. His face is very expressive, and can appear almost feral at times.
Clothing: He has a sort of glam/goth style, usually wearing black leather pants and a matching vest and gloves, tall boots, and often a dark-brown coat with a feathered collar. He wears a rosary around his neck, and his pants and belt are also decorated with crosses.
Other: He has a large burn scar that covers most of the left half of his face and runs all the way down to that shoulder. The explosion also left him with impaired sight in his left eye, a sensitivity to light, and almost no peripheral vision on that side, and he wears dark-tinted sunglasses that cover most of his face. He speaks accentless English.
What point in time are you taking your character from when he/she appears at Landel's?:
I'm pulling Mello from canon towards the end of the series and the last steps of the fight against Kira, before he contacts Near or Matt. He dozes off in Hal Lidner's apartment and wakes up in Landel's.
What kinds of magical/special/crazy powers does your character have, if any?: Nothin'!
If present, how do you plan to tweak those powers to make him/her appropriately hindered in the setting of Landel's?: N/A
Does your character have any other non-magical skills or abilities that we should know about?:
Mello is definitely a genius, though not quite as intelligent as L or Near. At Wammy's House, he would have studied subjects likely to be useful to someone who might eventually have become L, such as criminology, procedural detective work, and psychology. He's good at applying this knowledge practically, particularly in coercing the cooperation of Soichiro Yagami and the US president. He definitely speaks English and Japanese, and because of the background I've decided on for him, he also speaks Slovene. It's probable that Wammy's kids learned Romance languages and German, so I'm assuming Mello can at least get by in French, Italian, Spanish, and German.
He's proficient with computers, having a multiple-machine setup similar to the ones L and Near are shown using. This suggests that, like them, Mello is good at multitasking. He also sets up surveillance for several different sites, including the apartment Misa Amane and Light Yagami share, and evades security to get into Hal Lidner's apartment.
He's a good shot with his gun, and is well-versed in explosives. Though he's never shown actually shooting anyone in the manga, he's clearly comfortable with firearms, and I believe it's a skill he would have practiced, particularly once he identified the Mafia as potential allies. It's not explicitly stated that Mello set up the bombs he detonated during his confrontation with the NPA, but that's the sort of task he seems unlikely to have left to anyone else, and given that he never appears to be in doubt that he will survive the bomb that destroys the hideout, my belief is that he designed and placed the explosives himself.
Mello probably never formally studied any martial arts, but learned to hold his own in a fight after leaving Wammy's House at not quite fifteen years old. He wouldn't have been able to establish himself with the Mafia without some physical prowess to back up his brains, especially at first, when he would have been an unknown quantity to the Mafia men. Because he's relatively physically delicate, he probably fights dirty and takes full advantage of the reputation he cultivated for being less than balanced. However, he probably prefers to talk his way out of situations or intimidate people into doing what he wants over a contest of outright physical supremacy. We don't see him engaged in physical combat in the course of the series.
How about improbable appendages?:
Does the feather boa count? No? None, then. :-)
Please give us an idea of where you'd like to take your character within the scope of the Landel's Damned RP:
Mello will be extremely anxious to get back to New York and may well try to escape if an opportunity presents itself. He'll probably try to form alliances with the other patients to have support in this goal. He's paranoid enough that he'll try to get information from other people without revealing too much about himself. Running into L, who's been dead for years in Mello's timeline, will unsettle him and probably initially make him even more suspicious. As far as clubs and organizations go, Confidential Services seems like something he would consider useful to be involved in, as does the History Club. [I'm also deeply amused by the thought of him trying to find a way to dye his shirts black. XD]
What kind of psychological effect do you see Landel's Institute having on your character?:
Mello has plenty of self-esteem issues, but his entire life, pretty much, has been dedicated to building sturdy walls to hide the very existence of those issues. He's stubborn and arrogant, and "not likely to be receptive to 'therapy'" is probably an understatement. :-)
He'll be impatient and angry, especially because he's coming in from a point in the Kira case at which he feels he has a lot left to do, and also that he has the upper hand on Near, but knows this perceived advantage will be short-lived. He'll be much more likely to believe someone is trying to mess with him than that Landel's is what it appears to be. He has utter faith in his own intelligence and powers of observation, and calling either into question, even by implication, will not go over well.
Given that this RP takes place in an unsettling and outright horrific environment, how do you justify your character as being appropriate in both body and mind for this kind of setting?:
Mello has dealt with the horrific and supernatural, having dedicated his life from the age of fourteen to catching a killer of hundreds of thousands whose powers come from a god of death. He's even met a shinigami in person, and found it less than impressive. He's no stranger to violence himself; to secure the trust of the Mafia allies he'd chosen, he presented them with the head of a rival boss he had killed. He also certainly had to kill as he worked his way up through the ranks. Finally, he sustained serious injuries in the explosion, and more than likely administered the first aid himself. He is not a squeamish character.
ETA: In case anyone's curious about the journal username, it's from a Screaming Trees song (which comes from, and I swear to god I'm not making this up, the only album I can think of off the top of my head that uses a mellotron), this part in particular:
Come January I swear this world
Won't be the one
That we once lived on
Took an oath
For a promise sworn and broken
All that's gone before
Has changed