I know I've established myself as the Ouma Munchausen Guy, but I was rolling Byakuya around in my head today because like... I already got that request from an anon in the first few days of the blog and made the Your Fave post and everything, but it compels me.
Like here's this guy who has been put on top of the world and has such high expectations of him on account he is to inherit this huge conglomerate and that's literally all he exists for. (Encounter with Gojo got me thinking sue me.) He's stressed to hell and back the man cannot catch a break the grind never stops. Even just to get where he is, he had to go through this whole battle royale-esque competition at 13 just to secure his spot as the family's heir.
The grind TRULY never stops and on top of that I doubt Papa Togami ever really gave his kids all that much attention growing up outside of like. Enforcing expectations, y'know? Then, as if that wasn't enough, it's like. Established that this is so normal for the family that he doesn't even realize how fucked up it is or that it's seriously fucking HIM up in the process.
That is the perfect disaster for him to have a moment where he suddenly falls ill as a kid and is forced to stop, and suddenly it's okay because he's sick and now all these people are tending to his needs because that's what you do when someone's sick, especially when someone important is sick, and just. That unknowable something to just clicks in his brain:
If he wants a break, he needs an excuse.
If he wants a break, he needs to be injured or ill.
Boom. Munchausen Syndrome.
God and like maybe at first as a little kid he tries the whole faking thing, lies that his stomach hurts or something, but under the scrutiny of the Togami name and expectations and shit that would IMMEDIATELY fall apart I think. No, it has to be REAL. Whatever it is, he has to make it REAL, so he'd quickly learn to opt for the inducing flavor, and even then it can't just be ANYTHING. It has to be serious enough that he's literally incapacitated because he's a Togami bro he can't handle a little cold? A sprained ankle? Walk it off, that's pussy shit!
Like god can you imagine him deliberately overworking himself hoping one day he'll collapse from some mysterious Ailment so he can finally rest for once in his goddamn life? You think he's ever needlessly reckless with his life choices hoping that it'll fuck him over later? He can't just stop, he's a fucking Tomagi, he needs something to MAKE him stop.
He needs something to happen so it's OKAY to stop and NOT be okay for a minute.
I wonder if part of why he studies true crime and stuff is to learn about all sorts of ways he could discreetly hurt himself for a break. Those horror stories about poisoned food and the victim slowly gets sicker and sicker? I wonder if he ever thought about replicating that. Not to die, but to take a break. I wonder if being sick like that feels more like a vacation to him than the actual vacations he goes on, so performative and always tangled up in social niceties.
And that's just the precedent I haven't even gotten to the killing game yet like!
Glossing over his history at Hope's Peak the first go-round because that's a tragic-ass character study fic in itself but like. He's suddenly in the killing game where now more than ever he has to lock the fuck in, he's gotta get a grip, but he's stressed more than ever because how the fuck can you not be in a situation like that? You can see it in his sprites, the way he goes fucking blue in the face, but he has to be poised and everyone buys it.
And it's like... he can't induce illness in a killing game that's just going to make him an easy target so what the fuck is he supposed to do?
Or maybe he did and it didn't even work. Didn't he say something or other about finding canned foods in the warehouse? Does he know for sure whether that stuff is good or not compared to the stuff in the kitchen? Maybe he's eating it lowkey hoping to get food poisoning.
Either way, though, he's going to have to get attention another way. Everyone's stuck on the killing game so he just starts stirring up the most inane shit to try to distract himself.
Do you think when the chem lab opened up he had a mini-crisis? Here are all these poisons he may or may not know about because of the true crime stuff. Stuff he might've used before to induce illness in himself, and it's like... if the food poisoning was one thing, that's another thing entirely. That really IS making him an easy target, he can't risk that...
... Or maybe he did, but man this post is long enough.
