Moreeee Ren things. This time a bit more on his quirk + emotions!
Ren isn’t very expressive normally- its usually only when hes feeling something enough for his quirk to activate. Once it does he’s pretty expressive, regardless of what the emotion is. (This isn’t to say he doesn’t make faces at all before his quirk activates, he just has a bit of a resting ._. Face normally)
When Ren is trying to push down how he feels, you can definitely tell. Like if hes sad about something but trying not to cry, you can see a dark blue aura fading in and out until he cant take it anymore, then it would become a solid color and he would start sobbing. Its not only emotionally draining for him to do this- cause of his quirk, its physically exhausting and maybe even a little painful to try and force it down.
When Ren gets embarrassed he gets reallllly red. Like neck ears and face red.
Certain strong emotions have additional effects on his body- getting too scared (like a panic attack or near death experience) makes his vision blur and he starts hearing static. Being super mad starts making him overheat, etc. its Not Fun. Positive emotions would probably have nice effects tho!
When someone else spends a lot of time feeling a certain way, their “at rest” aura can start taking on one color. So like, normally if Ren is looking at you and you aren’t feeling any specific way, it shows up as a bunch of different colors kinda blurring together. But on someone like, say Bakugo, it would generally be more red with how often he feels irritated and angry.
Ren can very much tell when most people lie to him- even when someone’s good at lying they have other types of tells, like being happy when you fall for a lie. He’s not very easy to trick because of this.
Ren doesn’t like forcing people to talk about their emotions- usually it just makes someone more upset when he pesters them for answers- but he does sometimes speak before he thinks? Like he’s definitely seen Toshinori enter a room with a sad aura and been like “are you ok?” Before he says anything else. Sometimes it can probably get a little freakily close to mind reading if he knows a person well enough. He could start sensing a confused/frustrated aura and go “your keys are on the counter next to the fridge” and you start wondering if his quirk really is reading your mind (but he just knows your on the way to work so he would have a good guess).
He’s bad at explaining exactly how he knows certain things or what exactly counts as an emotion or what exact colors are what emotion. Like trying to get him to explain the different shades of pink different kinds of love have- even if you give him a bunch of paints he’s like “its kinda like this one? Oh but like; its slightly darker if the person is also feeling sad about it. But that could also mean they’re unhappy with something else if its more this color.” Its kind of like asking someone how they breath- its so normal for him that sometimes he forgets its part of his quirk and not something everyone sees.
While he doesn’t like his quirk- If he lost his quirk he would have a hard time adjusting to not knowing how people are feeling anymore and would probably constantly ask. He would get really stressed trying to keep up in conversations, and if he’s in a relationship he’d get really insecure about it really fast. (Is this a potential plot point for his pro hero AU. Perchance.)
