He might be spry and youthful of body, but anyone who knows him is well aware of the fact that Shepard Lowery is a crotchety old man. He does not try new things, he complains bitterly against all change, everything is a conspiracy, ‘kids these days’ is an actually phrase in his vocabulary. Shep has a truly wry sense of humor and finds more or less everything to be an irritant and he always sees things in the worst possible light.
In college, Shep was a fun loving kid who was constantly pranking everyone and named ‘the class clown.’ In high school he’d been that guy who did everyone’s science homework and always screwed up the grading curve for everyone else. In elementary school he’d been a sweet, outgoing little kid with an obsession for fast cars. In a way, Shep has explored every nuance of his personality at one point or another and the people who care about him like to claim that his more sour interludes are just another phase. The problem is, it was a phase that set in after college, when his degree got him exactly…zilch.
This wasn’t Shep’s first run-in with crippling despair: he’d been fighting it off, tooth and claw, since his parents’ divorce but he’d promised himself he’d do it all again, do it better than they had. He’d just lost all hope of that somewhere along the way and – to his way of thinking – learned that life was a “black mire of stinking rot.”
believes basically any and every conspiracy you can think of: Loch Ness monster, UFOs, the Mayan Apocalypse, zombies, certainly ANY political scheme you can think of
Speaking of politics, he believes in justice: he hates all parties equally
He has a problem with the government (any government) and would happily incite a revolution
When asked to describe himself on a form for a job interview, he simply put, “warrior poet”
This is definitely how he thinks of himself
He does write poetry, sometimes. Bad poetry. It usually starts out whining, ends up ranting about the fact that love is a lie, gets erotic, and finally comes out as nonsensical rambles in philosophy
He cites John Donne as his greatest inspiration
He’s waiting to be discovered
Also, fuck the system
He can be pretentious as hell
He actually does have a very, very high IQ but he makes absolutely no use of it and, even when he does make a show of using it, he’s too lazy to actually do so, meaning it comes out in stupid
When he was a teenager, he walked in on his new step-sister showering. Now it’s weird (that’s right: he lacks the emotional maturity to have gotten over it and feels victimized by it – but mostly he feels that his sister is hot. He gets defensive when people criticize Jaime Lannister.)
He cried in the theatre when he watched Man of Steel. Still has not owned up to it.
Freaking LOVES comics
Has a huge crush on comic book heroines
Hates government work but (secretly) mostly because his father is a government worker
Shep says this makes no sense: taxation (which he believes to be repugnant, in and of itself), including income tax, are the governmental revenue which pay for government work. When government workers receive their pay, coming out of said funding, they must pay income tax. So, he claims, government workers literally pay themselves. He will tell this, repeatedly, to anyone who will listen.
To listen to him talk, his father is Satan himself
His father is actually the most innocuous accountant to ever crunch numbers
His father is like Christopher Reeves’ Clark Kent without the superpowers
His mother was a drama queen
She was a ballerina who fell, broke her leg, and became embittered by the loss of her career
Shep detests her as well but he usually doesn’t talk about her
He usually acts like a freshman girl when he gets drunk and overuses the word ‘naughty’
Loves ‘girl drinks’ too
Reads his horoscope every damn day and believes it too
Usually assumes the horoscope is subtly predicting his death
But fortunately he’s cleverly escaped death so far
One of his favorite books is Atonement
Loves history
Has a looooong list of historical crushes, a few of whom are: Cleopatra, Aspasia, Joan d’Arc, Elizabeth I…
He’s been caught reading history books and crying over accounts of their deaths
Loves pointing out flaws and inaccuracies in works of entertainment
Despite believing in conspiracies, does not believe in the Easter bunny and judges anyone who does
Including little kids
He often tells them that their parents are lying to them
Also he HATES kids and is terrified of babies and disease
Stuck in a mindless, dead end job which he loathes
It’s basically the same job his dad had except it’s in the private sector so he can pretend to have some dignity
But mostly he just wants to jump off a cliff
He likes getting a paycheck though because he does NOT want to move back in with either of his parents so he keeps working