Eurobeatjester wrote:As far as Misha goes, I think she's really struggling internally not so much because of that, but because she's trying very hard to deal with the fact she doesn't have much of an identity outside of Shizune. You see it in Shizune's route a lot and in some of the others. In fact, it can be argued that being rejected by Shizune caused her to become the person she is now, and not in a positive way. She reinvented herself as the person she wanted to be, without many cares or worries or doubts, but I don't think that identity is healthy because Shizune features as such a prominent part of it.
After graduation, I see Misha becoming a very different person, maybe more like her original self before coming to Yamaku.
I've observed sometimes the 'social chameleon' phenomenon in which some people actually have a rather flexible self-concept which adapts readily to their social surroundings. We tend to think that we have a fairly rigid core personality, especially if acculturated to think of individuality as a specific and laudable virtue. But this isn't the universal case. Misha's 'rigid' personality is actually her exoskeleton, so to speak — uncompromising good cheer. Her real core is relatively plastic, it responds adaptively to her environment; when the exterior slips, you see that she's equal parts self-determination (drastic hairstyle changes, for example) and confused determination (she is easily troubled, but also has a lot of will-power to proceed along some line of action), but normally oriented towards her relationships with others.
She might never have had a clearly-defined 'original self' at that age — most people actually don't have one until they're at least sixteen, and by twenty, it's mostly begun to form a core. Prior to sixteen, the core is extremely mutable in most cases. In a culture that is less individualistic, it takes longer to form a core unless the person is more isolationist, more introspective, more prone to separation from society.
However, I do agree with large parts of your analysis, especially in relation to Shizune. That's why I wrote Misha's arc the way I did. She does have a personality. She says she hasn't a life nor a story of her own, but by the end, we know she does. She just pretends she hasn't.
I dare say, you've just given me a decent plot device in my more serious fanfic... cheers!
