Sanctum app
Player Information:
Name: ellie
Age: old enough to rent a car
Contact info: Plurk is best: malyce
Characters currently played at Sanctum, if any: None!
Character Information:
Name: Mihael "Mello" Keehl
Canon: Death Note (manga)
Canon point: 25 January 2010, the night before he kidnaps Takada
Age: 20
Appearance:
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 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 English with a very faint British accent, and several other languages.
Background: http://deathnote.wikia.com/wiki/Mello
Personality:
Mello has a combination of a superiority and inferiority complex, and is primarily driven by his ambition and dissatisfaction. He grew up embroiled in a competition in which he was perpetually in second place. This 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. He will 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, he immediately begins assessing how he can turn things to his advantage. His plans account for many 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, and has the best social skills of any of the Wammy's students (including L), but 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, and completely expendable. One person he does consider a friend is Matt, whose death is one of the only things Mello expresses regret over.
The most influential relationships in Mello's 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 him 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 one time Mello and L met is Mello's most cherished memory, and his entire life changed the day he heard about L's death. Succeeding L is personal for Mello in a way it isn't for Near, and he'll go to any extreme to win the contest.
If L was the goal to which Mello aspired, Near is 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.
Mello is confident to the point of arrogance, partly to hide (even from himself) his deep sense of inferiority. 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 needs 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's more than intelligent enough to be self-aware, but is not particularly introspective. His subconscious fear of not being good enough is something he has little desire to examine too closely. He's aware that he's smarter and more capable than almost anyone else. That "almost" is the goad that drives him.
Mello's drive to catch Kira consumes him from the time he's fourteen until his death. Revenge against the person who killed his mentor is certainly high on the list of why it's so important to him, but his primary concern is the race against Near, so much so that he tends to underestimate the abilities of the other people involved. Because of Kira, and because he was raised knowing his true identity has to be a closely-guarded secret, he has the sort of paranoia that comes from people really being out to get him. He'll go to great lengths to keep his name and face from becoming public knowledge.
Mello is 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 inhabits a moral grey area himself, but sees the world in black and white.
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, and that only when Near's pushing his buttons.
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 (after having used the death to his advantage, of course). 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 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. Like L, he's addicted to sweets, and is seldom without a bar of chocolate. He's 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.
In short, Mello is a creature of contradictions: brilliant but reckless, calculating but often controlled by his emotions, and egotistical but still deeply insecure.
Sexuality: Note that this is entirely headcanon and/or educated guesses, since Death Note doesn't exactly portray sex and romance.
Mello's bisexual, but sex has never been much of a priority for him, and love has never been a priority at all. To say he has intimacy issues would be a vast understatement; it's not safe for him to get close to people in his world. I imagine he's had a few one-night stands, mostly with women, and mostly because not doing so would've made him stand out as unusual with his Mafia allies. It seems unlikely to me that he'd ever actively seek a romantic partner, but if he did, their intelligence would be more important than almost any other quality (this is part of why I think he's probably bi). As in every other area of his life, Mello would need to feel in control in a sexual relationship or encounter. I believe being perceived as attractive is important to him, because of its usefulness, and his arrogance extends to being vain about his looks. But I also headcanon that he was raised Catholic before Wammy's House, and probably has a subconscious belief that sex is dirty. This won't keep him from using sex, or especially sex appeal, when it suits his purposes. For the most part, he'll see any relationship in terms of what he can gain from it, and won't easily become emotionally attached.
Skills and Powers:
At Wammy's House, Mello 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 U.S. president. He definitely speaks English and Japanese. It's probable that Wammy's kids learned Romance languages, Latin, and German, so I'm assuming Mello can at least get by in French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Mihael is a Slovenian name, so I tend to assume he speaks Slovene as well.
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 manages 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'll survive the bomb that destroys the hideout, my belief is that he designed and placed the explosives himself.
Items: Mello will have his usual black leather outfit (vest and pants), his rosary, and his gun, a Sig 9mm. However, he's probably going to lose the gun right away, because he's not going to arrive quietly. :D