if you didn't want to hear some of my personal master chief characterization thoughts in no particular order it's too late because here they are:
- The Chief treats himself as an instrument he can use to provide for and safeguard others. He is, unfortunately, notoriously hard on his equipment.
- Anxiety is a part of the character, he's just a very productive and effective anxious person who is mostly good at managing himself. John didn't become the Spartan in charge because he is the smartest or the most dominant personality. He did it because the way he handles worry is to get the parts of the situation he can control on lock, he got pretty good at knowing his team and making that the part he could control, and the rest of them noticed. Spartan training took John's capacity for anxiety and honed it into a blade.
- The competitiveness has survived to adulthood as incredibly high standards for himself. He thinks about things in circles over and over a lot (How could I have done that better? How could I have prevented the bad thing from happening? If I were somehow smarter would things be better now?) and lies to himself to say he doesn't.
- Big "you little shit" energy. John likes to drop the oneliners. He likes to be this incredible, unflappable, wildly competent bastard that will facerush hell itself and still come back to fight again with an insane plan you never expected, and something calm and deadpan to say about it. He likes what this can let him be for people, he likes that he can support others and make them feel hope and security because he's there. This is his personality, but it's also a very important service he is consciously trying to provide. When someone shakes their head and calls him "you crazy son of a bitch" with that note of exasperated amazement, it makes John feel genuinely, unambiguously good about being who he is. He only acknowledges that it's important for practical morale reasons, but it's also very important to his heart, bro!
- Quiet. He doesn't like conversation, he knows he's not good at it and it's full of traps he can't figure out that will out him as a Weird Not Normal Person. When he inevitably gets uncomfortable and isn't sure what to say, he will usually 1) just stop talking or, if that is not viable, 2) direct it back to whatever The Mission is.
- Noninvasive to an extreme. He doesn't generally ask personal questions because he hates when people ask him personal questions, why not extrapolate that to everyone he meets???? Flawless strategy. Plus the war was horrifying on an incredible scale and just about everyone suffered or lived in terror of near future suffering. It would be rude to trip over the unmarked graves.
- Secretive. John is a Spartan, so it follows that he's poorly socialized and semi-feral. BUT, critically, he's also a grown adult with a lot of experience at being poorly socialized and semi-feral. He notices how other human beings react to him and tries to modify his behavior to produce the results he wants. (Mostly: Being left alone to do his job, being trusted that he is competent to do his job and you are in good hands with him here.) He can't fake a normal history, so he just avoids situations that expose his lack of normal experiences. He usually has a basic surface understanding of what behavior other people will tolerate as plausibly normal, and it's because there were times when he failed to meet normalcy expectations and that was dangerous. He has big secrets to protect. ONI was invested in him not fucking this up, and he is a fast learner. He learned to be careful. John cannot pass as a normal person if you get in close with him in detail and trap him in personal conversation for long enough, and he solves this problem by not letting anyone in close if he can help it.
- G E N T L E N E S S. John can make hard calls if he has to, but John cares about other people and does not want to hurt them unnecessarily if he can avoid it. The fact that we repeatedly see John take a moment to show gentleness to other people, despite how hard things have been for him and how often it would be expedient to just do something fast and get out of there, speaks volumes about him. He also knows he's not an ideal person to give care and gentleness. He'd prefer to hand that off to someone qualified. But if he's in a situation where no one else will do it, and especially if someone he cares for is involved...
- Self-isolating. He is protecting secrets, and he doesn't like hurting people. He doesn't want others getting attached to him, because getting attached to him means inevitable hurt when he has to reject attempts at bonding, fails at being a normal person for them, and (inevitably) must move on or possibly die. In his mind he's not a person that you can know, he's a deadly piece of ordnance with a specific application that can harm you if you approach it wrong. The courteous thing to do here is to keep other people out! John considers this the caring and compassionate answer.
- The job is everything. When John doesn't have a mission, he doesn't know who he is or what he wants. He is so used to having no control of his future anyway because his future is going to be the same as his present: spending all his time trying to prevent awful things from happening until it, one day, will kill him. He doesn't actually know what he'd do with free time, and he doesn't know what he'd want to do if he could have another future. Such considerations feel impossible, but also unacceptably selfish. How could he live any other way, given that so much terrible stuff is happening at all times and he's capable of doing something about it???? The world is always on his shoulders and he's so tired and worried but if he stops, who will be him? Every time he ends up at the center of stopping some incredible world-ending threat, it reinforces his fear that if he ever falters, something Horrible is going to happen.
- HUGE cognitive dissonance about sacrifice. Sacrificing one innocent life for the possibility it will save many others is a thing he has canonically decided is not okay (Sgt. Johnson in First Strike.) He also, however, would insist that it's fine that he was an innocent life treated as an acceptable sacrifice. He likes being what he is. He has no regrets about being a Spartan, he likes being useful and capable and wouldn't change it if he could. He has not reconciled these ideas and honestly, he probably isn't ready to. If he were confronted with this, he'd bail the fuck out of that conversation.
- John is cute sometimes, always without meaning to be. If you are afraid to let the Master Chief have a little moment where he slips and is accidentally cute or a little vulnerable every once in a while, it's okay to loosen up. John wants to be a more perfect machine that never misses a beat ever, but that's his goal and not his reality. It would be honestly terrible for him if he were to succeed.
- Please John go to therapy, you are astonishingly functional while hurting yourself in this way and that's sort of admirable but please.
