June 10th, 2024
Keiichi's anger is a simmering, boiling thing. It seethes just below the surface, waiting for a chance to spit out and leap from the pot in a cascade of lava-hot fury.
This means that while his temper is longer, the heat of it builds. When he is faced with irritation, he shunts it aside and buries it with ease, but repeated barbs slowly and patiently stoke the furnace of his anger, building the ambient levels of offense until they tremble on the brink of explosion.
Or, sometimes –like seeing the inky purple marks on Satoko's limbs, the dead dull despair in Rena's eyes– the anger hits flashpoint all at once, injustice and love and anger mixed in a swirling, seething cauldron of rage that catapults him instantly into action.
Like many of his emotions, Keiichi uses his anger as an impetus, a spurring point to some future destination. The way he holds it deep and quiet makes him liable to sudden, blind explosions of rage that soon fade back into rational thought, and he is not always pleased with the actions he takes in the interim.
Mion's anger is a long, slow, glacial thing. For too many years, she has been trained to harness and control her feelings, and so anger, too, is carefully reeled in and stored for a later time.
She still feels it, of course. But she crushes her anger down deep, flattening it under the weight of reason and duty, creating layer after layer and strata after strata of long-ago hurts. Her mask never cracks, never falters. Duty first.
Of course, she is also still young, and no mind is impervious to hurt. For all her efforts at crushing it down into thin layers, sometimes her anger bursts out of her, and becomes a thundering, roaring tide that sweeps away all in its path. She uses that, sometimes; for intimidation purposes, for throwing her enemies off their game, and sometimes simply because her life is on the line and rage fills her at the thought of any but herself suffering for her actions.
But more often than not, sorrow is the emotion Mion reaches for instead of anger. She has been trained to see every side, consider every option, and too often that washes away any personal offense she feels in the tide of public opinion.
Shion's anger is dark and bitter, like poison. It is a rotten, curling, coiling snake that wraps around her ribs and sinks fangs deep into her heart.
She wants to make others hurt for her hurts –and she understands how terribly easy that is. She knows how to wield her words like a knife; knows how to wield knives too, if it comes to that. Her anger burns at her without ceasing, until she eases it with the pain of others.
How dare they. How dare they.
In her rational state she knows better, in a calm mind she would never –but when her anger comes it is like acid eating holes in her brain. It is too easy, too easy, to turn her hurt outwards and bare her own fangs, vicious and slick with poison, rather than examine the sources of her anger.
It is what she has been taught. In the Sonozaki household, hurt is a family heirloom passed down through the generations, and Shion has understood her childhood lessons all too well. No responsibility must be yours; it is others' mistakes, others' grief, others' foolishness. Your anger is right and just –their anger is base and clumsy– and none, none may question you.
The hypocrisy of it only fuels her rage.
Satoshi's anger is a crumpled, beaten thing. It is the helpless, furious despair of one who has been kicked too many times to know that displaying anger will do anything but bring more pain.
But his anger is ever-present, for all that. He is a child forced to shoulder so very many burdens, and there are none to help him, and so, so many to hurt. He lives under the crushing burden of constant resentment, from within and without.
The Sonozakis declare the whole family outcast, and he hates them for their needless cruelty. The villagers spit insults, and he hates them for leaving him and his sister in the dust. The village itself turns away, and he hates it for blaming them for their parents' sins. His parents die, and he hates them for abandoning their responsibilities. His sister sees him for the single spider's thread of hope she has, and he hates her for clinging to him like a parasitic vine and insistently instigating their aunt and uncle's wrath.
Satoshi is a gentle soul, deep down, but an exhausted, bitter resentment seethes in him constantly nonetheless, and when the flames are stoked high enough, long enough, it bursts out of him in one brilliant, final flare of bloody defiance.
Rena's anger is a natural thing –not that she lives gladly in it, not that she succumbs to it frequently, but that her anger is red in tooth and claw, that it is the fierce and feral thing of any wild creature, and that, when the time comes, she can slip into it oh, so easily.
She is, by nature and desperate effort, a naturally cheerful individual –but when her joy is threatened, when her friends are threatened, when she is threatened– she casts off any pretense of civilization and digs down deep, into the primordial rage that fuels berserkers. Her fury is incandescent, volcanic, unstoppable.
She does not forget. She may forgive, but she does not, ever, forget. She does not forget, and one eye is always on the offender, one tooth bared, talons ready to slide free. Annoyance and frustration pass quickly, as they are a waste of time and valuable emotional resource. Only true, deep feelings are allowed to remain.
Her heart is a welcoming thing, but what it welcomes, it keeps, and she will not tolerate any threats on what is hers. Her friends are hers. Her joy is hers. Her life is hers. Any attempt to steal what is hers will be met with all the fires and fury of the Earth's mantle, and Rena will not ever back down.
Rika's emotions have been flattened by the long ceaseless unrolling of time, and it has been so very, very long since she has been truly angry.
Frustrated, yes. She lives in her frustration, and the amount she has ground her teeth would probably require dental surgery if it all happened to the same body. Everything is so deeply, incredibly unfair, and no matter how many times she tried to warn people, no matter who she tries to warn, her concerns are always swept aside like so much dust.
Sometimes she wants to grab people by the ears and shake them and scream at them to believe, to understand, but she can't. She is too short, and the lesson won't stick anyways. So what's the point?
Oh, how frustrating that knowledge is.
Sometimes, even more rarely, her temper snaps. She is one girl, one immortal who has never grown up, and she simply cannot take what she is forced to endure. She does scream at them then, and it is with a dizzying, lungs-filling sense of superiority. She is derided and ignored as a child, but she knows how they will suffer, how they will die. She shrieks these prophecies at them in the terrible, giddy knowledge that just before they die, they will remember that she had always been right.
Satoko's anger is a spiky and dangerous thing, like the thousand poisoned spines of a sea urchin. Like her brother, she has been crushed beneath enough heels to know that visible displays are unwise; unlike her brother, she is not meek about it.
If she is going to be hurt, she will hurt preemptively –in the hopes that if she hits hard enough, the expected blows will never come. She will make it clear that unwelcome ones are not welcome from the very start; she will defend herself with each and every trick and trap she has learned over all her years, making their lives a misery.
Scorched earth.
Satoko cannot be hurt if she destroys what is about to hurt her. She will shake the thing that possessed Keiichi from the bridge and kill it, because it is better dead than possessing the one person who tried to heal the gaping hole in her life. When she recovers her heart, she will spew insults at her uncle –so much larger and stronger than she is– heedlessly, because he is a canker sore, an abomination in the home that has become a shrine to her brother's memories.
When something offends her, she works to erase it with extreme prejudice. That is how Satoko has learned to live her life, and that is how she wields her anger. If she is hit, when she is hit, she needs to hit twice as hard to make sure she is never hit again.
Hanyuu knows better than to allow herself to feel anger.
She will not become what they made of her.
Not ever again.
11.50 AM, USA Central Time