Thinking about William again (what else) and his flair for the dramatic, and I just really love how it’s done. So often in fiction, things will be dramatic for drama sake, because fiction is drama, and things with drama have more emotional weight to them. It’s…it’s what “Drama” is.
But in Yuukoku no Moriarty, William is not just dramatic because the confines of being a fictional character demand him to be dramatic at times. William is dramatic because he is dramatic.
He knows he is reenacting Shakespeare’s play as a child. He knows he is orchestrating a ridiculous farce and that it will make the best story if he does things the way he does. He knows plays and has them memorized.
He outright compares his Plan to a play and the people in it to characters and roles. He discusses things in terms of plot and story structure: and he does so openly. It’s not even as an authorial mouthpiece. It’s not tongue in cheek. It doesn’t break the fourth wall. It’s what he himself in the story itself is attempting, directly. It’s the way he thinks of his own actions and his own plans.
He is over the top and exciting to watch because he knows it will attract the attention he wants to what he is doing. He is playing with it and aware the entire time of this aspect of what he is doing (and possibly his personality, although I’m not sure he realized it was his personality and not a requirement for his goals).
It’s such an integral part of him to so many aspects. It comes out in the way he talks about things and thinks about things. It comes out in the things he’s read and quotes. It comes out in how he arranges things, and not only how he plans, but what he plans. It’s obviously intentional rather than a silly byproduct of existing in his story. It’s who he is, and who the author wrote him to be.
And it’s so interesting that a trait that could be one note or nothing at all really ends up permeating all the layers of his character and is shown in so many ways: William loves theatre. William loves drama. William loves fiction.
He also loves math, and math also changes the way he thinks about things and plans things and what he plans, what he's read and what he quotes. The way he thinks is ordered around the way fiction works, but also the way math works.
It's easy, you know, to keep a character trait confined to one part of them or one or two specific things they do. But Liam's aren't containable that way: they define him. And instead of trying to deepen his character by throwing in a different hobby or something, the authors simply took his personality traits necessary for the story and bled them through every part of him until they can't be cut out from his fundamental self.
It's a very different kind of character generation than a lot of people attempt, but I think it's one I tend to like more.
Liam is a freaking menace Shakespeare fanboy with theatre brain rot. Liam is a freaking menace mathematician with an obsession for balancing equations and counting numbers and sins.
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