@wieldbrave asked : bougainvillaea, cadmium yellow, silk
⇢ colourful headcanons | accepting.
bougainvillaea: would your muse consider themselves as blunt, or do they beat around the bush instead?
Shi-Long is absolutely blunt and knows he is. In his line of work, beating around the bush and umming and aah-ing over words only gets people killed and lets true perpetrators get away, but he is even blunter than one might typically expect. His first introduction in the game exposes this with:
Lang: You should've contacted the police from the very beginning.
Edgeworth: I'm sorry that this happened because of a lapse in judgement. However, I humbly request that you please help me out of here posthaste.
Lang: ......Sorry, no can do.
Lang: We're hunting the kidnapper now, and I haven't got any hands to spare. As I said, my pack moves as one. You're the one who wanted to go it alone, so good luck to you... Mr. Prosecutor. Oh, and once we do catch the kidnapper, rest assured we'll come find you... eventually.
At this point, Edgeworth is trapped in a locked room with no way out and while Shi-Long doesn’t know the exact specifics of Edgeworth’s situation, he knows that Edgeworth was knocked unconscious and his police escort lost sight of him, but at this point Edgeworth is not a priority. In Shi-Long’s eyes, it’s Edgeworth’s fault he got into that particular mess ( “Lang Zi says: "The pack that runs together, stays together." You catch my drift? You caused quite a ruckus by running blindly into a situation and then getting caught.” ) and it’s not his job to come fix that. At this point, his priority is solving the kidnapping of Lance Amano and any extraneous factor, like rescuing Edgeworth, is going to have to wait until after the case is solved. It is important to note, however, that Shi-Long is aware Edgeworth is a prosecutor and does treat him with additional scorn for this ( “This isn't your neatly trimmed Courtroom of Eden, you know. You're out in the wilderness now, Mr. Prosecutor, and way out of your league. No hard feelings, but why don't you go on back to your courtroom now, pretty boy?” ). His manner of speaking, at least to Edgeworth, is always going to be filtered through his hatred of courts and prosecutors and so will always appear extremely blunt for it, but even when he’s not speaking directly to Edgeworth, there’s a certain decisiveness to the way he speaks that shows he’s not one to unnecessarily mince words or beat about the bush.
Lang: I'll take it from here. Yeah, that guy's really dead. Hey! You waiting for an invitation? Hurry up and detain the suspect, now.
Edgeworth: (Suspect? Who...?)
Lang: Officer Meekins, is it? You're coming with us.
Lang: Hey, you! Your squad's not even supposed to be in this area, right? What were you doing neglecting your duties and loafing around here?
Lang: Don't you dare give me some lame excuse like, "I found myself taking a walk."
Meekins: But sir... I really did take a walk, sir!
Lang: You're a disgrace. How dare you take your pack obligations so lightly?
Shi-Long does not believe in wasting time on anything. Considering his family was disgraced 12 years beforehand and has lost all honour in Zheng Fa, this urgency and belief in not wasting time is directly rooted in his family: the more time he spends successfully policing and solving cases quicker, the more he restores honour to his family name. He’s the agent with the highest successful arrest rate in Interpol, true, but he’s not going to rest on his laurels and bandy about playing nice with indirect words and unnecessary niceties; he’s going to hunt down the truth as fast as he is able and seize it by the throat. The only time he’ll ever be long-winded is if he’s reciting a quote from Lang Zi, but they will always be appropriate to the matter at hand and will never be any longer than necessary. He won’t be blunt with his subordinates or anyone he deems ‘pack’ outside of work, but when working, Shi-Long will be blunt -- respectful, true, but blunt.
cadmium yellow: what subjects or topics does your muse avoid, because they bring up harmful / painful memories?
He will not talk about the fall of the House of Lang with anybody he’s not incredibly close to. In-game, Edgeworth asks Shih-na why Shi-Long hates prosecutors so much and while she does tell him briefly, enough to give the player a hint of his backstory, Edgeworth would never have heard it from Shi-Long himself. He is not embarrassed of his family -- he is incredibly family-orientated and incredibly proud to be a son of the Lang family -- but remembering their fall from grace, remembering the SS-5 Incident that not only had his father demoted and replaced as the President’s personal bodyguard, but also removed all esteem from the Lang name across Zheng Fa and ultimately drove his father to an early grave, and revealing all that pain to someone else who doesn’t have his trust, who isn’t considered one of his closest friends, bites at Shi-Long like nothing else. Outside of the people who eventually learn about SS-5 in canon and help to solve it, only Emily (@mindlaw) currently knows about SS-5 and what it means to Shi-Long.
Following the end of Investigations, Shih-na’s betrayal is also something he doesn’t like to discuss with anyone. While she was his responsibility and he stands firmly by his choice to bring her in alive to repent and face true justice, even in the face of him getting shot for it, the idea of people gossiping idly about it without knowing the full gravity of the situation and the knowledge he had a mole in his ranks for years, right under his nose, without noticing is incredibly painful to him. He depended on Shih-na, leant on her as his right hand -- he’s close to his subordinates enough to consider them family ( “Lang Zi says: all men are brothers, and friends become family. Hmph. So you see, my people are my family, and their families are my family too.” ), but Shih-na was his closest friend. She knew him inside and out, knew about the weight of SS-5 on him personally where his subordinates only knew ‘SS-5 involved Shifu’s family’; he told her about his personal struggles, leant on her when he had doubts about ever being good enough to restore his family name, about whether he could do it as the last member of the Lang family, and she betrayed him. She took his trust and spat it back at his feet, and he hates that he couldn’t see it before Turnabout Ablaze.
silk: does your muse care about appearances much? do they spend a lot of time on their own appearance, or do they just go with the flow each day?
Absolutely not. Shi-Long believes it is the heart of the person that counts, not the outward appearance -- a fact that makes Shih-na’s betrayal, where he thought he knew her at least partly as he knew him, even worse. He won’t spend copious amounts of time getting ready in the mornings: his clothes are laid out the night before, close enough he can be dressed in a matter of minutes, and his hair naturally falls in the ‘wolf ears’ people believe are styled. A stranger might believe he is arrogant about his appearance, given the ridiculous fur ruff on his jacket and his overt style of dress, but he couldn’t care less about his outward appearance -- he falls within Interpol dress code, is at least smart, able to give chase easily if a suspect flees, and is certainly comfortable in his clothing. He knows who he is inside and that is the most important thing to him.
The only aspect of himself he will be prideful about are the seven scars on his chest in the shape of the constellation Orion. While they do not map out the full constellation, he is proud of them as marks of survival and would gladly show them off to anyone who so much as asked about his scars (mostly anyone, at least; prosecutors who ask would get only a curt admission he has some). If he was to sustain an injury on his chest that would scar and disrupt the pattern, he would be furious beyond words.
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