Personality: To understand Shiki as she is today, you have to understand how she was in the past—back when she still had the personality called SHIKI within her. The Ryougi family has the supernatural ability to be born with a second personality, one male and one female. Ever since SHIKI awoke within Shiki, she has never known loneliness, never known what it was like to be without someone else. However, it also meant that as a child, when she should have had a naive and unwavering faith in other people, she knew how ugly they could be. It was this that made her grow to dislike other human beings, and herself for being one, and why she didn't interact with people all that much. SHIKI outright states that he and Shiki both hate other humans, and that certainly seems apparent given how distant and cold Shiki appears to be. That wasn't to say they disliked each other; rather than think of them as separate people, they're just two faces of the same person, just with different priorities. Shiki, who did not want to be harmed, could only "affirm" things while SHIKI, who only knew of harm, could only "deny" things. SHIKI represented all of Shiki's repressed thoughts and desires, things that could potentially open her up to other people. As they put it themselves, Shiki killed SHIKI over and over within herself. That's why SHIKI only knows of murder.
Due to the nature of having such a complicated split personality, there is a history of family members who inherit this trait going insane. By attempting to masquerade at a somewhat normal life, Shiki thought she could deal with her abnormalities like that. However, once she met Mikiya Kokutou, things began to change. Rather than just pretending to have normal "happiness," she began to understand what it meant to truly have it. She who was so far removed from normality, who at first glance could be called abnormal, began to understand what it meant to be normal. Unfortunately, this created a contradiction within Shiki that she couldn't resolve—with a heart that could only "affirm" things, she wanted to deny this chance at a normal life because she whole-heartedly believed that she couldn't attain it. Denying was the "domain" of SHIKI though, and it caused the two to become more and more out of sync. Both of them could see that continuing to interact with Mikiya would only cause insanity; to resolve this, Mikiya had to die. However, Shiki couldn't bring herself to do it. To destroy her own dream with her own hands—that's just too cruel, right? So instead she took the only option she saw available to her; she took herself out of his life by letting herself get run over.
Skip to two years in the future though, and it turns out that getting run over by a truck landed her in the hospital in a coma! Who knew? But more frightening than that was the fact that Shiki could no longer feel SHIKI. He was gone, had disappeared—he was dead. For the first time in her entire life Shiki knows what it means to be alone, and if that wasn't bad enough her eyes began to see strange things, lines that could make something break apart and die with a single touch. Frightened, confused, and utterly alone, she attempted to gouge her eyes out in a fit of terror. Fortunately for her though, that was when a woman by the name of Touko Aozaki stepped into Shiki's life and offered to teach her how to actually use her eyes. Not wanting to fall back into the empty void she had been seemingly floating around in for the last few years, Shiki decided to take her up on that offer.
Which finally brings us to the Shiki of today: a cold, apathetic, and sarcastic young woman with a rather awful liking for murder. With SHIKI dead she can't help but feel a distinct separation between the her of the present and the her of the past; she views her own memories like one would view a movie, as part of the audience and completely uninvolved. While she does recognize herself and knows that that girl is her, she can't help but not feel like that's true. However, to make up for the lack of SHIKI's presence, she takes up speaking like him while preserving her own self by acting as she did. That is to say, she speaks in a distinctively masculine way and is as blunt as they come, but also acts reserved and distant to those around her. She can be hard to approach, that's for sure.
Shiki is very apathetic, to a rather frightening degree even. Most sights that would disturb or scare other people don't get much more other than a passing glance from her. Ah, a body just landed in front of her after jumping off a building you say? Not her problem, Shiki's just going to walk around it. Wait, what do you mean her arm is being broken and twisted irreparably? It's okay, she let that happen on purpose so she could get an opening to strike, she'll take care of that later. Even if someone was to tell her something like they killed their own parents, rather than react with horror or disgust, she merely questions it instead. However, she can also come off as rather insensitive, such as saying that if a bunch of girls wanted to go ahead and kill themselves, they should have done it in a way that wouldn't bother anyone like jumping off a building. While it has to do with her rather strange view on death, it's also because, well she really doesn't care—as stated before, she isn't fond of human beings to begin with.
That's not to say that Shiki is impossible to get along with though. While she is indeed hard to approach and difficult to get along with, there are a good number of people she interacts well with. She's not above teasing someone or picking on them in a friendly nature, finishing their punchlines, or saying something absurd just to get a reaction out of them. With the right people, Shiki just comes off as rather whiny and sarcastic. She can seem like a bit of a party-pooper or even downright pouty. She likes asking people out-of-nowhere questions and getting a good laugh out of them, not in a mean or mocking way, but in the way a good friend always has something to tease about you. Perhaps it was due to how she was raised, but she can be especially sour if she doesn't get her exact way, enough to do something just for spite or payback. Look, she really wanted to take a look at her katana, so Touko saying she couldn't was just asking for trouble! It's not like taking the Harley with the sidecar just because Touko said not to was that bad or anything, right? Shiki is also very much a creature of whim; she might save someone from attacks out of boredom, or become somewhat upset that she's not allowed to feed some fish in a tank. She can be a bit unpredictable.
Still, as said before, Shiki really isn't someone you want to mess with. One of the conditions in working for Touko was being allowed to kill. Along with adopting SHIKI's way of speech, she adopted his own taste for murder as his own. That is to say, Shiki is a somewhat violent person. She knows how to act proper and behave in proper society, but she also won't hesitate to use force and violence if something stands in her way. Given a good enough opponent, she's never one to turn down a fight. However, despite her violent tendencies, she also has a great respect for death. Part of it is from being able to see death with her eyes, but it's also partly because of her grandfather's last words to her. He told her that a person could only kill one person in their entire life: themself. To kill another person is to kill yourself because you can't go back to the way you were before after what you've done. Since then, she's kept those words close to her heart, and because of them, her views on killing are a bit different from the norm. Murder, massacre, and slaughter are all completely different things in her mind, only one of them being even remotely close to acceptable. Though she would claim otherwise, she takes very special care not to kill humans. Everything else is fair game though—whether you're a spirit or a magus that was once human, she doesn't care. Granted, that doesn't mean she's going to go out of her way to save people; watching someone kill themselves doesn't particularly bother her, nor does seeing others get attacked.
Above all, Shiki truly loves Mikiya Kokutou. Sure, she's now capable of interacting and befriending other people—even liking them—but almost everything she does is in one way or another for him. While her deep respect for death is certainly a factor, she tries not to kill people so as not to disappoint Kokutou. Most of the times we see her actually lose her cool are not when experiencing great pain or anything like that, but when something is somehow or someway threatening Mikiya. She tells Kirie, the spirit that was making girl commit suicide, that she was killing her not because of the suicides but because she dared to try and take Mikiya away from her. When Satsuki Kurogiri tells her that he'll bring back her forgotten memories, she attacks him because she does not want them back—she is very well aware of the fact that they could destroy the peace she has managed to create with Mikiya. More than anything, she does not want to disappoint the undying faith he has in her, despite being unsure if she even deserves it. While she doesn't come to understand her own feelings for a long time, Shiki loves Mikiya and would do anything to see him safe and out of harm's way.
Shiki Ryougi | Kara no Kyoukai
Character Name: Shiki Ryougi
Character Series: Kara no Kyoukai
Canon Point: post Paradox Spiral
Preferred Housing: N/A
Background: Shiki @ the TYPE-MOON wiki
Personality: To understand Shiki as she is today, you have to understand how she was in the past—back when she still had the personality called SHIKI within her. The Ryougi family has the supernatural ability to be born with a second personality, one male and one female. Ever since SHIKI awoke within Shiki, she has never known loneliness, never known what it was like to be without someone else. However, it also meant that as a child, when she should have had a naive and unwavering faith in other people, she knew how ugly they could be. It was this that made her grow to dislike other human beings, and herself for being one, and why she didn't interact with people all that much. SHIKI outright states that he and Shiki both hate other humans, and that certainly seems apparent given how distant and cold Shiki appears to be. That wasn't to say they disliked each other; rather than think of them as separate people, they're just two faces of the same person, just with different priorities. Shiki, who did not want to be harmed, could only "affirm" things while SHIKI, who only knew of harm, could only "deny" things. SHIKI represented all of Shiki's repressed thoughts and desires, things that could potentially open her up to other people. As they put it themselves, Shiki killed SHIKI over and over within herself. That's why SHIKI only knows of murder.
Due to the nature of having such a complicated split personality, there is a history of family members who inherit this trait going insane. By attempting to masquerade at a somewhat normal life, Shiki thought she could deal with her abnormalities like that. However, once she met Mikiya Kokutou, things began to change. Rather than just pretending to have normal "happiness," she began to understand what it meant to truly have it. She who was so far removed from normality, who at first glance could be called abnormal, began to understand what it meant to be normal. Unfortunately, this created a contradiction within Shiki that she couldn't resolve—with a heart that could only "affirm" things, she wanted to deny this chance at a normal life because she whole-heartedly believed that she couldn't attain it. Denying was the "domain" of SHIKI though, and it caused the two to become more and more out of sync. Both of them could see that continuing to interact with Mikiya would only cause insanity; to resolve this, Mikiya had to die. However, Shiki couldn't bring herself to do it. To destroy her own dream with her own hands—that's just too cruel, right? So instead she took the only option she saw available to her; she took herself out of his life by letting herself get run over.
Skip to two years in the future though, and it turns out that getting run over by a truck landed her in the hospital in a coma! Who knew? But more frightening than that was the fact that Shiki could no longer feel SHIKI. He was gone, had disappeared—he was dead. For the first time in her entire life Shiki knows what it means to be alone, and if that wasn't bad enough her eyes began to see strange things, lines that could make something break apart and die with a single touch. Frightened, confused, and utterly alone, she attempted to gouge her eyes out in a fit of terror. Fortunately for her though, that was when a woman by the name of Touko Aozaki stepped into Shiki's life and offered to teach her how to actually use her eyes. Not wanting to fall back into the empty void she had been seemingly floating around in for the last few years, Shiki decided to take her up on that offer.
Which finally brings us to the Shiki of today: a cold, apathetic, and sarcastic young woman with a rather awful liking for murder. With SHIKI dead she can't help but feel a distinct separation between the her of the present and the her of the past; she views her own memories like one would view a movie, as part of the audience and completely uninvolved. While she does recognize herself and knows that that girl is her, she can't help but not feel like that's true. However, to make up for the lack of SHIKI's presence, she takes up speaking like him while preserving her own self by acting as she did. That is to say, she speaks in a distinctively masculine way and is as blunt as they come, but also acts reserved and distant to those around her. She can be hard to approach, that's for sure.
Shiki is very apathetic, to a rather frightening degree even. Most sights that would disturb or scare other people don't get much more other than a passing glance from her. Ah, a body just landed in front of her after jumping off a building you say? Not her problem, Shiki's just going to walk around it. Wait, what do you mean her arm is being broken and twisted irreparably? It's okay, she let that happen on purpose so she could get an opening to strike, she'll take care of that later. Even if someone was to tell her something like they killed their own parents, rather than react with horror or disgust, she merely questions it instead. However, she can also come off as rather insensitive, such as saying that if a bunch of girls wanted to go ahead and kill themselves, they should have done it in a way that wouldn't bother anyone like jumping off a building. While it has to do with her rather strange view on death, it's also because, well she really doesn't care—as stated before, she isn't fond of human beings to begin with.
That's not to say that Shiki is impossible to get along with though. While she is indeed hard to approach and difficult to get along with, there are a good number of people she interacts well with. She's not above teasing someone or picking on them in a friendly nature, finishing their punchlines, or saying something absurd just to get a reaction out of them. With the right people, Shiki just comes off as rather whiny and sarcastic. She can seem like a bit of a party-pooper or even downright pouty. She likes asking people out-of-nowhere questions and getting a good laugh out of them, not in a mean or mocking way, but in the way a good friend always has something to tease about you. Perhaps it was due to how she was raised, but she can be especially sour if she doesn't get her exact way, enough to do something just for spite or payback. Look, she really wanted to take a look at her katana, so Touko saying she couldn't was just asking for trouble! It's not like taking the Harley with the sidecar just because Touko said not to was that bad or anything, right? Shiki is also very much a creature of whim; she might save someone from attacks out of boredom, or become somewhat upset that she's not allowed to feed some fish in a tank. She can be a bit unpredictable.
Still, as said before, Shiki really isn't someone you want to mess with. One of the conditions in working for Touko was being allowed to kill. Along with adopting SHIKI's way of speech, she adopted his own taste for murder as his own. That is to say, Shiki is a somewhat violent person. She knows how to act proper and behave in proper society, but she also won't hesitate to use force and violence if something stands in her way. Given a good enough opponent, she's never one to turn down a fight. However, despite her violent tendencies, she also has a great respect for death. Part of it is from being able to see death with her eyes, but it's also partly because of her grandfather's last words to her. He told her that a person could only kill one person in their entire life: themself. To kill another person is to kill yourself because you can't go back to the way you were before after what you've done. Since then, she's kept those words close to her heart, and because of them, her views on killing are a bit different from the norm. Murder, massacre, and slaughter are all completely different things in her mind, only one of them being even remotely close to acceptable. Though she would claim otherwise, she takes very special care not to kill humans. Everything else is fair game though—whether you're a spirit or a magus that was once human, she doesn't care. Granted, that doesn't mean she's going to go out of her way to save people; watching someone kill themselves doesn't particularly bother her, nor does seeing others get attacked.
Above all, Shiki truly loves Mikiya Kokutou. Sure, she's now capable of interacting and befriending other people—even liking them—but almost everything she does is in one way or another for him. While her deep respect for death is certainly a factor, she tries not to kill people so as not to disappoint Kokutou. Most of the times we see her actually lose her cool are not when experiencing great pain or anything like that, but when something is somehow or someway threatening Mikiya. She tells Kirie, the spirit that was making girl commit suicide, that she was killing her not because of the suicides but because she dared to try and take Mikiya away from her. When Satsuki Kurogiri tells her that he'll bring back her forgotten memories, she attacks him because she does not want them back—she is very well aware of the fact that they could destroy the peace she has managed to create with Mikiya. More than anything, she does not want to disappoint the undying faith he has in her, despite being unsure if she even deserves it. While she doesn't come to understand her own feelings for a long time, Shiki loves Mikiya and would do anything to see him safe and out of harm's way.
Sample Entry: Sample here!
Notes: Nothing to say over here.