[ CHIRON ] what does your muse do to cope ? are their coping mechanisms healthy, or do they lean into bad habits to get through tough times ?
astrological headcanon meme !
So, Ryusei is someone who kind of copes with issues before they ever actually happen by just going overboard with his preparation. He takes "prepare for the worst, hope for the best" to the extreme by considering how everything can go wrong and what he can do to both manage the possibility and maybe avoid the situation in its entirety.
Emotionally, this kind of puts him through the wringer the way it would for someone with anxiety, in that it causes him a bunch of stress over hypotheticals. However, when it comes to actually managing that stress, he defaults to one of his hobbies, like reading or cooking or playing some silly mobile game to chill out in a healthy manner. Then, if the worst does come to pass, he’s already mentally been through it and processed it, so he can approach the issue in a calm manner.
On the other hand, if something goes wrong that he somehow hasn’t planned for, everything kind of falls apart, and he doesn't cope. In his mind, if the issue hasn’t already mentally been solved, then it can’t be solved, and all he can do is avoid it entirely going forward, so he sort of shuts down about it and isolates until the worst of it rolls over. Then, he can get to work fixing the aftermath.
Case in point, this thing where there was a literal attempt on his life that he obviously didn't prepare for, and in panicking and shutting down about it afterwards ( plus, you know, the grief ), he focused so much on fixing what came after that, he never properly let the initial issue settle. So, he ends up with the belief that in order to manage future situations like it, he has to completely remove despair as an option, resulting in his tendency to default to euthanization for despair-minded folks since that’s how he had to handle his sister and it's the only way he can define and manage that particular issue. …There’s also a case to be made for the idea that if he lets himself think others affected by despair can be saved, then he killed his sister for no reason, but that’s a whole other topic for another day-
TL;DR, he just plans for and emotionally manages everything in advance, which is stressful and probably not a great thing, but at least he copes with what he plans for in a healthy way.