oh I would love to hear your take on Iyami having adhd 🐀💜
Oh, neat!!! OK, so this is going to be a bit lengthy and encompass all of his incarnations, but basically Iyami gives me BIG ADHD vibes, especially if we’re talking the predominantly hyperactive kind.
First, of all, he’s really, really restless. In -kun, you barely ever see him walk normally, he either skips or dances his way from point A to point B. He also walks on his toes, which is something I’ve done all my life (even wore those orthopedic shoes to ‘fix’ it when I was a kid) and literally JUST learned it’s an ADHD thing, like, a few days ago. He also sings loudly to himself and talks to himself a lot. Basically, he’s bursting with energy 24/7.
He’s also really impulsive! There’s one manga story where he makes his New Year’s resolution to be less of a pain in the ass and it reveals that his random acts of terribleness are basically just him acting out every shitty thought that passes through his head.
It’s like, you know how sometimes we see, something someone painstakingly made and there’s this little thought on the back of our head that’s like “I could just… destroy this. Just smash it to pieces.” but we don’t because that’s bad and we have a minimal amount of self-control? He just does it! And it PAINS him to try to stop himself, he saw a man boarding a bus with a loose thread hanging from his sweater and having to stop himself from tying it to the bus stop made him incredibly frustrated.
In 80s -kun, he gets in trouble more than once for drinking/eating things that he shouldn’t without thinking twice about it. It crosses his mind, he does it. Another neat 80s -kun thing that comes to mind is the Iyami germs story, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for him not being all that neurotypical, if you’re generous. Basically, it reveals Iyami’s uncontrollable drive to cause trouble and say whatever crosses his mind, no matter how shitty it is, is caused by those little germs who live inside him and, once they get out of his system, he immediately sobers up and realizes the impact his actions have on people, which makes him feel terrible and act incredibly apologetic, eventually going to church to ask God for forgiveness (after all, he IS a good catholic boy… in theory.)
Oh! And… my theory on why he’s such a crook in the first place? Honest jobs bore him. In -kun, he’s always bouncing from career to career, the first episode of 80s -kun is basically just him moving to Akatsuka district to try to make an honest living as a door to door salesman of… some sort of toilet brush with a bar of soap attached to it that he invented but when he goes to the Matsuno’s house and realizes their parents are out for the day his immediate thought is “You know, it would be much more easier to just rob them!”
But I think -san shows it even better in Ep. 6 of season 2. Before he comes beg the Matsunos for food, all battered up, it shows us that he tried four different honest jobs and ended up either ruining them due to his own lack of foresight (he tried to juggle swords without knowing how to and almost killed a man and opened this… establishment where he promised men they would get serviced s*xually by pretty women and when it came to it, he would be the one doing the services) or because he got so bored he ended up sabotaging himself (he spray painted the house of the person he was supposed to deliver packages to when in an Amazon-style job and ended up just drawing his own face on the heroine of the anime he was working as an animator in).
And yet! If he has a clear, set goal in mind, he goes above and beyond what’s expected of him to accomplish it! You can see it perfectly in Iyami Alone in the Wind, in which, upon meeting an orphaned girl who lost her vision but whose condition is completely treatable if only she had the means to, he immediately abandons his life as an unemployed samurai (or just a regular bum in the -san version) and decides to work his ass off to help her! Like, not even the prospect of starving to death was enough to get him moving before, but helping someone else he met once and was nice to him? Then he’s willing to work himself sick and literally go to jail just to help her! This is immensely relatable to me, because I too, have trouble dedicating myself to anything at all unless it’s personally interesting/important to me, then I’ll dedicate my whole life to it. Like, I’m either completely blasé about something or it’s all that matters to me, and it looks like he’s like that too! Another thing I find relatable is that I, too, have trouble doing things for myself, but as soon as I have to do something for someone else, it’s like a switch is flipped on my brain. If someone else depends on me? The mental block disappears completely!
Of course, he doesn’t only use these hyperfixation powers for good. Actually, he mainly uses it for nefarious purposes. It’s Iyami we’re talking about. In an episode of 80s -kun, when his phony health clinic loses all of its clients because Dekapan opened a real clinic and was actually treating the patients instead of giving them flour pills (ahem, medication imported from France) so they would keep coming back, Iyami locks himself up for an entire week in his laboratory developing a morphing potion so he would be able to impersonate Dekapan and do lots of shitty things as him so people wouldn’t trust him anymore. I should note he has no real medical or pharmaceutical expertise in this episode, he’s just a con man, but he somehow manages to create such a thing. His only explanation? “When it comes to coming up with evil plans, I become an expert!”
In fact, you could say his obsession with France itself is an hyperfixation of his. It literally came out of nowhere. The manga explains he randomly decided it was the best country in the world because he met a French beggar who shared his baguette with him. That’s right, that was all it took for him to decide to “become French”. And this took place just one year before the events of -kun!
Other, smaller things about him that I can personally relate to are the fact he doesn’t have many friends his age. I mean, his younger “friends” end up disliking him too, with the exception of Chibita, who’s ride or die but he gets along way better with younger people and animals than with the other, more “serious” adults of the show that are closer to his own age and that he has a little compulsion for sticking non edible things in his mouth just because. Not eat them (even though he does eat weird things) but just… nibble on them for a while.
Another thing I’ve always related to is his to poor body image. I can’t speak for him, but one of the things that worsened mine was being bullied as a kid. Kids are bad at distinguishing exactly why they hate someone so they just insult what’s more tangible to them, which is usually appearances, but I have no doubt what bothered them the most about me wasn’t that I was “ugly”, it was that I was “weird” (aka, not neurotypical).
Aaand this became way longer than I thought it would be… oops. I’m sorry about that. Have Iyami sitting in weird ways (relevant!) to make up for it:
