Mao Osaragi

personality

In a word, Mao is vibrant. He has a tendency to act haughty and above others. Basically, it’s not uncommon for someone to meet him and walk away feeling like he thinks he’s better than them. Despite this, though, he makes it obvious when he is fond of people—probably due in no small part to having struggled with the subtle cues of human interaction over the years.

He is not very secretive about the fact that he thinks he is some kind of noble demon, and while he may not directly say it unless he knows he’s in amicable company, most people who meet him can tell there’s just something he’s got going on with him. Mao is just a little too good at monopolizing conversations, a little too bad at reading the mood in a conversation, and so forth. He tends to be okay with idle chatter, but it’s obvious that he would prefer to skip formalities if he’s out alone in public. He’s much more talkative around his friends or over text/social media, which is partially why he has taken to the internet to garner sales and brand revenue.

Mao very much enjoys being looked up to, both in the sense of genuine admiration and in the sense of someone believing him when he says that he is a demon king. He’s surprisigly good with children, capable of softening and tamping his persona so as to be more approachable and gentle around them. 

When he is around a very select few individuals, Mao will partially drop his persona. In these cases, he is much more timid and hesitant. He also clearly does not think very highly of himself, and has a bad habit of second-guessing himself, apologizing, and demurring.

backstory

Mao is the older of two siblings. His brother is significantly younger than him; for a long period of his childhood, he was an only child. His home life was nothing out of the ordinary, even after his brother was born. He and his parents got along, and they doted on him heavily. They always supported his deep, near-obsessive interests, whatever they may have been. 

At school, however, things were different. There, Mao was confused and distressed as he tried to figure out why all of his classmates were so strange to him. They seemed to expect him to just know things, and he felt like he was, perhaps, the odd one out for not understanding. The initial distress wore off as the social ostracizing transformed into outright bullying as Mao and his classmates aged. Unable to figure out just what he was doing wrong, he started to create a persona for himself, both to shield his own heart from the cruelty and to at least have a concrete reason he could mentally point to to justify the treatment. If he wasn’t human, but a demon, then it was no wonder the other children thought he was weird. It was no wonder he didn’t understand them.

As Mao grew up, he sunk deeply into exploring demonology and the occult. He found it fascinating, and ended up realizing that it would be easy to learn to create things that he could then sell to others who shared his interests. As his interest in the occult grew, so too did his cultivation of his demonic persona. Through something like auto-suggestion, Mao grew more and more convinced that he might really be a demon, or, at the very least, that him acting like he was would be his only chance at navigating the strange idiosyncrasies of human society.

trivia

• Despite being incredibly well-versed in demonology, Mao keeps which particular king of hell he claims to be vague. He just makes sure that people know he is more important than them, that's all.
  • i just dont want to have to figure out how he matches next to belial fuck granblue fantasy
• Mao does a single card reading for himself daily, and will do more extensive readings for his friends if they ask.
• He tries to avoid using both religious oaths (he refuses to say "Oh my God", for instance) or anything that even approaches positioning goodness as something to appeal to ("gracious me" is fine, "goodness gracious" is not).