Mao (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deposityourheart) wrote2012-10-24 04:19 am
deposityourheart) wrote2012-10-24 04:19 am
Entry tags:
App for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
a_facility
OOC Information:
Name: Gingey
Age: 19
AIM: gingerveer
MSN: illusionaryorgans@hotmail.com
Y!M: nope.jpg
E-MAIL: illusionaryorgans@hotmail.com
Are you new? If not, list your current characters: Accelerator, Reiko Date, Felicia Hardy
IC Information:
Name: Mao
Fandom: Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice
Timeline: After his defeat of the Super Hero in the Normal Ending, but before he actually gets to talk to his father's spirit.
Age: 1578 years old, making him a teenager(he's a freshman in demon high school) by demon standards. Generally you get a rough estimate of where a Disgaea demon is physically in human terms by dividing their age by 100.
Appearance: Mao is a fairly short demon(he's about 4'4, 4'9 if you count his hair sticking up) with spiky white hair and red eyes. Hidden under his bangs he has a crescent shaped scar on his forehead and, being a demon, he also has fangs and pointed ears. He dresses like this.
Abilities:
Mao's a pretty powerful demon--Aurum, who has fought many Overlords and evil gods, even said that he believed Mao could become the strongest Overlord to ever live. What's Mao's capable of can be kind of vague, but his threat to destroy the human world is taken pretty seriously and in the Human World ending, he accidentally destroys the entire universe while attempting to get rid of the human world. However, even without nerfs it's unlikely for him be able to tap into that power as he is.
Mao displays a few personal battle abilities in the game, which include:
Blast Finger - Essentially, Mao charges up some green energy, throws himself towards his opponent, and blasts it in their face.
Shine Beam - Mao creates a bunch of blinding white energy beam/laserthings that continue to intersect and grow larger until they finally disappear.
Vasa Aergun - Basically consists of Mao turning into a giant monster("wouldn't fit in the station" big) and shooting energy beams at people.
the TL;DR version of all of these attacks is: "Mao is good at shooting really vague destructive energy beams at things."
He's also pretty decent at ice magic, and has been shown to be able to drop huge chunks of ice on people and freeze them solid. He can be equipped with a variety of weapons in the game(sword, spear, axe, and a magic staff--but he's capable of performing his ice spells regardless of the weapon he's using), so it's fair to assume that he at least knows the basics of wielding all of them. He's shown to favor a sword above other weapons.
Another notable thing is Mao's heart. Demons in this particular Netherworld can utilize what is known as a "Heart Bank," which is where most demons store memories and feelings that would inhibit them from doing whatever immoral things they please. The thing about Mao is that he tries so hard to force himself to be what he feels a demon "should" be, that he's crammed more of his heart into the bank than any other demon in history.
Depositing one's heart into the bank gives the demon the ability to visit the Heart Bank and literally walk through their heart; which seems to be like its own little world, complete with residents. Many of the residents of a demon's heart are alternate versions of people they know or palette-swapped versions of themselves that represent certain aspects of their personality. The latter can be anywhere from very important things to extremely small details--for example, there are multiple Maos in his heart that can only say the word "Daddy" due to his issues with his father as well as Maos that exist to express his love of hot sauce. The two most notable residents of Mao's heart, Dark Mao(who is basically just a ball of hatred and cruelty, describing himself as pure evil) and Mao's True Heart(an embodiment of all of Mao's real feelings), have shown themselves to be able to manifest outside of it. While they can exist alongside Mao outside of his heart for a limited span of time, it is also apparently possible for at least Dark Mao to take over Mao's body completely.
Hearts are very fragile, and making changes while inside one can alter a person--defeating the hot sauce loving Maos, for example, made Mao grow to hate the stuff. The heart however, cannot handle a change too great--Almaz's attempt to remove the version of Mao's father in his heart made Mao regress mentally into an infant until Almaz put things back as they had been originally.
While we rarely see the results, he's very good at science. He describes his intelligent by claiming to have a "1.8 mil EQ"--whatever that means. He also likes to talk about giving people things like rocket launcher boobs all the time. Because Beryl or someone else usually stops him before he can actually do anything to anyone, the only time we really see him do any of the things he talks about is when he brainwashed Aurum into acting as Geoffrey again in the Raspberyl Mode DLC.
Personality:
Mao is boy who's very concerned with being like a demon "should" be. Having been raised for 200 years to be the perfect evil Overlord, this behavior has always been encouraged. He tries to present himself as everything demons value and tries to hide less socially acceptable emotions--like sadness--but has never really succeeded at this completely, as those close enough to him will notice. Still, Mao goes to sometimes disturbingly great lengths to preserve his image. He's very intelligent, but he's not very mature.
Socializing is definitely not one of Mao's priorities--one of the main plot points of the game is that Mao needs to open his heart, after all. He has no problem with hiding in his room and avoiding others unless he has a need for them--because as far as he's concerned, demon's are supposed to have servants, not friends. Any positive feelings he has towards anyone are vehemently denied and quickly covered up with excuses. This ideal demon Overlord behavior in Mao's mind, and he backs it up with personal experience. Having "studied" numerous manga, anime, and video games detailing the Super Hero's exploits, Mao saw him consistently portrayed as a proponent of the power of friendship. And if that's what a hero had? Then a demon had to have the opposite. Furthermore, when the Super Hero showed up to defeat Mao's father, he deemed Mao his "friend for life" in what Mao hadn't realized at the time to be a mocking fashion after Mao gave him his father's whereabouts. Seeing a glimpse of what the Super Hero really was after his father was killed made Mao even more bitter towards the concept of friendship because he associated it with him.
Mao has, however, made progress in his relations with other people, despite still being unable to admit that he has friends. He's become much better at acting like a leader, despite still having trouble with his personal relationships with others. While he originally denies any care for the lives of those in his party and is scolded by Master Big Star for being a terrible leader, he eventually becomes somewhat more comfortable with caring about them(though he still won't admit to that), and even takes damage for their sake. When questioned about it, he justifies it with the fact that he considers all of them his servants, so their lives belong to him and he has to look after his things. Besides, they're no use to him if they're dead. Mao also shows how upset he is over Almaz's death after he defeats Dark Mao, and before Almaz is revived he has a conversation with Mao's True Heart where he tells him that he helped Mao learn to trust others. This ends up being what opened Mao's heart, and he spends the rest of the game denying all of his friends claims that he's learned the power of friendship.
Mao can be very secretive, often enough in an attempt to hide emotions he doesn't want to own up to. He uses his heart bank more than any other demon ever has, storing all of his emotional pain in there in hopes of never having to deal with it again. Furthermore, he goes out of his way to and manages to hide his father's death from everyone else for 200 years, despite his father being the ruler of their Netherworld. He doesn't take well to others learning about this stuff, unsurprisingly, but has had to deal with quite a few people poking around in his heart lately.
One of the things Mao has gone out of his way to hide is the massive sense of guilt he has over his father's death, though he will pretty eagerly tell you all about his modified version of his father issues. Because he supplied the Super Hero Aurum with his father's location and weakpoints(under the assumption that the Aurum would just beat him up a little, because heroes aren't supposed to kill), he convinced himself that his father must hate him for being the indirect cause of his death. As mentioned above, he goes so far to hide this that he pretends his father is still alive and spends most of his time plotting to defeat and overthrow him out of spite towards him. This guilt has become such a huge part of Mao that there's a version of his father living in his heart that constantly talks about how "it's all Mao's fault." Mao has come clean about what happened and how he feels about it to his party at this point, but has yet to actually confront his father's ghost and learn that his father had never blamed him for what happened.
Mao rarely allows himself to express sadness, and instead allows any negative emotions to become anger and even hate. All his sadness over his father's death, for example, is buried under his hatred of the Super Hero. Mao does this on his own, but it's also assisted by Aurum(posing as Geoffrey), who fed these emotions constantly and brought Dark Mao into existence. Almaz notices this and points it out to him shortly before his death, which Mao does actually end up expressing sadness over in the end.
Mao is pretty big on revenge. He has a huge ego and thus reacts very poorly to slights against him, plus as far as he's concerned his vengeful urges all fall within in commendable demon behavior. Lashing out at others is very easy for him, and he can hold grudges for a pretty long time. While he often becomes very irrational while seeking out revenge, with effort his friends have been able to talk him out of some of his worse ideas--like destroying the human world to make Aurum suffer.
Mao is very interested in science. While we don't see many of the the results of his experiments, he talks about giving people things like rocket launcher boobs very frequently. Mao gets perhaps too excited by this kind of stuff(usually, he ends up breathing heavily and drooling), but doesn't seem to take any notice of how uncomfortable that might make others--not that he'd really care, anyway. Even if it's something that would hinder or upset him, he'll always take the time to be distracted by and admire, say, a good brainwashing.
Mao has no concept of personal space. While he would rather not socialize with others, he often finds himself fascinated by them. It's an extension of his scientific curiosity, and one those around him aren't all that fond of. He doesn't seem to see any problem with touching people without their consent, after all...it's for science. This has earned him quite the reputation as a creep and a pervert.
Strangely enough, Mao is very interested in heroes and owns lots of manga, video games, and the like about them. He claims it's all "research" so can properly defeat them, but takes it surprisingly far--he even excitedly asked for the Super Hero's autograph when he first met him. He's also both fascinated with and disgusted by the idea of love--and thus treats it with morbid curiosity. He questions Almaz on how it works and how it feels on multiple occasions, and gets very frustrated when he can't seem to measure it scientifically.
Being a demon, Mao's moral compass doesn't quite line up with humans. He lives in a society where immoral acts are encouraged and never having gone to class makes him an honor student, after all. Petty pranks, theft, unethical experiments...doing that kind of stuff doesn't bother Mao in the slightest. After his defeat of Aurum, he's expected to either kill or let Aurum go...but ends up keeping Aurum alive so he can use him as a test subject, and sees nothing wrong with doing so. Likewise, he tends to act disgusted by "delinquent" things, such as doing volunteer work and being polite to others.
History:
Mao grew up the son of his Netherworld's Overlord--supposedly the strongest of any Overlord in the Disgaea multiverse, but this claim has been made about at least three characters by now. In addition to being the Overlord, his father also served as the Dean of Maritsu Evil Academy, a school for young demons. While it's never outright stated, it's likely that Mao has lived at the school his entire life. Despite this, however, Mao never attended a single lesson in his entire life--by demon standards, this made him the greatest honor student at the Academy. Mao instead spent his days causing trouble and bickering with his rival, a delinquent demon(AKA one that did all of her homework and spent her free time volunteering) named Raspberyl.
200 years before the events of Disgaea 3, the Super Hero Aurum came to challenge Mao's father. Tired of years of fighting various "evil" beings, he wanted to get the ultimate demon Overlord out of the way and retire. Mao, who was secretly a huge fan of Aurum and angry at his father for accidentally destroying his Slaystation, ran into Aurum and ended up exchanging his father's location and weaknesses for an autograph(that he never actually got). Mao just assumed his father was going to get kicked around a bit--because heroes always defeat evil Overlords, but a hero was also surely too noble to kill his enemies.
Mao's assumptions, however, proved horribly wrong. Aurum did kill Mao's father, but it wasn't as satisfying as Aurum thought it would be. The Overlord would have been able to defeat him if he had unleashed his full power...but had held back and allowed himself to be killed, because he would've harmed Mao in the process of defeating Aurum. Aurum couldn't fathom the idea of a demon being capable of parental love, and in his dissatisfaction didn't know what to do with himself--until he saw a grief-stricken Mao reveal a glimpse of the potential power he had within him. Aurum immediately began planning to make use of that.
Mao, on the other hand, didn't know how to handle the guilt he felt over the death of his father. To make matters worse, his father's spirit stuck around the Academy instead of passing on--Mao assumed this was because his father was angry with him for getting him killed, but it was actually out of concern for Mao. In order to escape from emotions Mao felt he, as a demon, shouldn't be feeling, Mao locked more of himself away in the Heart Bank than any other demon in history. Mao kept his father's death a secret, pretending that he was still alive so thoroughly that he spent a good deal of his time obsessively planning to kill him and take his place as Overlord when he actually wanted to put his father to rest.
Not long after the death of Mao's father, a butler named Geoffrey came to work for Mao. Geoffrey did his best to raise Mao to be the evilest child possible, and provided Mao with anything he needed or wanted. Though Geoffrey constantly told Mao to trust no one, not even him, Mao did grow to trust his seemingly faithful butler.
200 years after his father's death, Mao decided he'd have to become a hero to defeat his father, because again--the hero always beats the evil Overlord. Rather than doing any good deeds to earn that title, Mao decided he was just going to have to steal the title from someone else--in a very literal sense, as Disgaea game mechanics dictate that every character have a title. Geoffrey located the nearest hero, and Mao wasted no time mugging him for his title.
That "hero," a human named Almaz, had come to the Netherworld to defeat the Overlord for the sake of the princess of his land--because all evil Overlords obviously want to kidnap princesses. Mao decided to force Almaz to be his servant, and Almaz gained the title "demon-in-training," which led to him starting a slow transformation into a demon. Mao felt little sympathy, and was instead excited to get to watch Almaz's transformation.
Feeling confident, Mao headed to the Dean's office to "challenge his father"--or at least, his father's spirit. After his plan backfired, Mao confronted Almaz, who admitted to not actually being a hero, instead having made the hero title for himself because he was a wanna-be and fanboy. A furious Mao dragged Almaz to the heart bank to retrieve the hero title from his heart, and unfortunately discovered that it had been stashed in the very center of his heart--his heart's vault. Upon finding the vault, another Mao stopped them. This resident of Mao's heart represented his "True Heart" and thus embodied all of Mao's true feelings. Mao's True Heart denied them access to the vault, informing them that they would be unable to get the hero title until Mao opened his heart.
Opening the heart of someone as repressed as Mao would be no easy task, and Mao claimed it would be impossible for a demon. However, Mao and Almaz heard a rumor that eating a dragon egg sunny-side up would open one's heart, and were desperate enough to try it. Something like that would be crazy enough to work in a Disgaea game if this whole plotline hadn't been about character development. Geoffrey located the egg for them, and Mao and Almaz set off after it. The two were quickly joined by Mao's rival, Raspberyl, and her lackeys.
When they finally found the egg, it was being guarded by a group of Home Ec students. They were quickly defeated, but once the group had their hands on the egg they realized they couldn't crack it. Beryl hypothesized that the only person who could crack it would be Mr. Champloo, the Home Ec teacher, so the group set out to find the mysterious Home Ec room. It took them awhile, but when they finally got there, Mr. Champloo challenged Mao to a fight--and the winner not only had to win, but also had to crack the egg first.
Mao defeated Champloo and somehow finally managed to crack the egg, so Champloo, a gracious loser, cooked it for him. Assuming his heart would be open now that he'd eaten it, Mao rushed to the Heart Bank...and after defeating a group of Maos that existed to express his love of hot sauce, Mao found his vault was still closed. In his frustration he began to lament the fact that he ate the egg with hot sauce and not salt and pepper, leading Almaz to believe that defeating those Maos had changed Mao's opinions.
Mao's quest to open his heart was then interrupted by the annual student elections. Geoffrey insisted that Mao must become Class Leader because no one had been Overlord without having been their Class Leader, and in the Netherworld...becoming Class Leader means beating up all of your classmates. At the same time, the PTA(Perfectly Trained Assassins) kidnapped Raspberyl, planning to brainwash her into being an honor student. Her lackeys sought out Mao, pleading with him to go rescue her. While he originally elected to fight for the position of Freshmen Class Leader, Almaz managed to convince him that beating up the PTA would be the ultimate honor student act, so Mao agreed to abandon the competition and save Beryl.
After Mao and his allies defeated them and freed Beryl(though Mao continued to refuse to admit to actually wanting to save Beryl), Mao was surprised to discover that he had become Freshman Class Leader after all--his classmates were so impressed with him for going against the PTA and saving her that they gladly gave him the title. With all of that resolved, Mao was free to focus to on opening his heart again.
After a discussion with Almaz, Mao decided getting a crush on someone might open his heart(he, however, really didn't understand the concept, just thinking of "crush energy" as what heroes run on). After interrogating Almaz on what having a crush should be like, Mao decided he needs to learn to captivate people--thus wanted to attend a class on the subject.
Because Mao had never attended class in his life, many tried to stop him to keep his record in place. Fighting their way through, Mao and Almaz ran into the princess from Almaz's land--Princess Sapphire, who had decided to come to the Netherworld to kill the Overlord before he could kidnap her...as Overlords, of course, always kidnap princesses. With Sapphire joining them, Mao and Almaz finally made it to the class. After the Succubus teacher taught them some...questionable methods to capture people's hearts, Mao once again decided his heart must be open from that "lesson in crush energy" and made a beeline for the Heart Bank.
Sapphire followed Mao and Almaz into the Heart Bank, and accidentally stumbled upon something--memories of Geoffrey experimenting on Mao that Geoffrey had taken from him. Mao did his best to shrug off how betrayed he felt as more Maos showed up, this time ones who were only capable of saying the word "Dad." After their defeat, Almaz convinced Mao to fight his heart's version of his father, hoping that doing so would fix whatever wound in Mao's heart it was that was keeping it closed. Winning the battle, however, was not enough--it regenerated because of how large the issues Mao had with his father were.
Luckily, Almaz found the power source for it--and literally unplugged the version of Mao's dad living in his heart. This managed to force the vault open, so Almaz quickly reclaimed his title, ignoring Mao's True Heart as he tried to warn him that forcing it open like that was going to have major consequences. It didn't take long, however, for Almaz to realize the consequences of his actions on his own--it was too drastic of a forced change for Mao to take, the incident with his father was such a major part of him that Mao mentally regressed into an infant.
Heading back into Mao's heart yet again, they found that the residents of Mao's heart didn't want things set back to normal--after all, Mao was safe from all of his emotional pain if he was mentally an infant. Setting things as they were would just force him to experience it again. Another set of Maos even showed up to oppose them, but they managed to fight their way to the center, where Almaz plugged the cord back in and returned the Hero title of hero to the vault, saying he didn't deserve to retrieve it if he was just going to be a coward and not help Mao open his heart the proper way. Essentially, the group was back to square one--but they did now have Raspberyl and her lackeys by their side, as they had become the school's first graduates and didn't have to worry about their studies anymore.
Mao returned to his normal self to find the school in chaos--the seniors were brainwashing the freshmen to make them into delinquents bent on overthrowing the Overlord. Mao and his group began to investigate--and were soon joined by Mr Champloo--only to get caught up in a war between the sophomores and the seniors. Assisting the sophomore class, they soon discovered that a legendary group of seniors known as the Diez Gentlemen were behind everything.
After defeating a group of the Diez Gentlemen, one of them--Salvatore--tried to shoot Mao, but Geoffrey took the bullet for him. In his anguish, Mao almost unleashed some great, unknown power, but was stopped at the last minute. The bell rang, so Salvatore and her comrades fled--because they were posing as delinquents, thus had to go to class.
While mourning Geoffrey's supposed death, the group was shocked to discover that Geoffrey had faked it, and was indeed still alive. He immediately cooked up a plan to make Mao more powerful--sending him back into his heart to fight his subconscious. Mao gladly took his group and did so, but once his subconscious had been properly beaten into submission, Mao found himself face to face with a resident that looked exactly like the Super Hero Aurum. Mao fought with and defeated his heart's Aurum, but he respawned just like Mao's dad had. Nonetheless, the group left.
Having gone a bit crazy from his new power, Mao decided to face the seniors. While no one really knew where their classrooms were, Geoffrey somehow managed to locate them and send the group after them. Eventually they ran into Salvatore, and Mao demanded she take them to her leader. Upon her refusal, Mao and his party got in a fight with and defeated her once more. However, afterwards Salvatore admitted to not knowing where her leader actually was.
Conveniently enough, Geoffrey suddenly appeared, and when Mao demanded he find the Senior Class Leader...Geoffrey revealed himself to be the Super Hero Aurum in disguise, having posed as Mao's butler and the Senior Class Leader for years. Aurum was unable to die like he'd wanted when he defeated Mao's father(due to heroes often getting revived), and due to finding him to be a disappointing opponent, decided to raise Mao to become the perfect one someday. However, rather than fighting him, he told Mao the time had not come yet and disappeared.
A very upset Mao wasted little time deciding what to do about this. He was going to make Aurum to get revenge for all the ways Aurum made him hurt. Aurum was human, so Mao decided destroying the human world would have the best psychological effect on him. Trekking through space to get there, his party followed to try and convince him to stop. Once they'd gotten close, Mao's anger caused a dark version of Mao from within his heart to attempt to surface. Beryl initially stopped it, and Almaz began to talk Mao down, confronting him about his anger. However, in the middle of this, Almaz suddenly died, having spent a good while merely laughing off all the symptoms of having been poisoned earlier.
Dark Mao finally appeared here, and attempted to take over Mao's body. Once he was defeated, Mao was finally convinced to give in and let himself show how upset he was about Almaz's death. Doing so ended up opening Mao's heart, and Almaz was revived as a human with his Hero title. With this, Mao finally listened to his friends' pleas and headed back to the academy to face Aurum. Aurum, however, lectured Mao on how much of a failure he was and decided that he wasn't good enough for him to kill himself, sending his lackeys to take care of him instead.
Making his way through all of them with the help of his party, which ended up being joined by Master Big Star and Salvatore, Mao finally got Aurum to fight him himself, and defeated him using what his friends claimed to be the power of love and friendship(though Mao spend the entire time complaining that they were embarrassing him and that was not the case). Aurum, however, revealed that like any good final boss, he had yet another form for them to have to defeat. Aurum's final form consisted of parts stolen from the various Overlords and evil gods he'd fought over the years, and his title itself even changed from "Super Hero" to "Evil God."
After his defeat, Aurum claimed to regret what he'd become and apologized for no longer being the hero everyone admired. He requested that Mao kill him, but Mao refused--death was too kind for Aurum, and he'd make an excellent test subject. He then left to finally face his father and hopefully put him to rest.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
I don't know why you guys are all so worked up about this place...I mean, it's absolutely magnificent! [This weirdo's starting to drool and breath funny. Oh boy...] All these experiments...I can't help but stop to appreciate it!
[He takes a second to calm down a bit, wiping spit off his chin.]
Unfortunately, I have business to attend to elsewhere, so I'm going to have to blow my way out and damage it. Perhaps I can return in the near future for further inspection...
If only I could stay and poke around for a bit...but no, I can't afford to get distracted at a time like this. Stay out of my way unless you want to get hurt, humans!
This game includes horrible mental and physical torture of your character. After reading the rules/faq for clarification, how do you expect your character to handle this and continue to function?
Mao's doesn't deal with pain in a very healthy manner, but he has handled a great deal of it. His main coping mechanism is to pretend things don't bother him as much or the way they do, so he'll probably keep that up.
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.
BLAME DESH GIVING ME PERMISSION TO APP A FOURTH FOR THIS MONSTROSITY OF AN APP
Name: Gingey
Age: 19
AIM: gingerveer
MSN: illusionaryorgans@hotmail.com
Y!M: nope.jpg
E-MAIL: illusionaryorgans@hotmail.com
Are you new? If not, list your current characters: Accelerator, Reiko Date, Felicia Hardy
IC Information:
Name: Mao
Fandom: Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice
Timeline: After his defeat of the Super Hero in the Normal Ending, but before he actually gets to talk to his father's spirit.
Age: 1578 years old, making him a teenager(he's a freshman in demon high school) by demon standards. Generally you get a rough estimate of where a Disgaea demon is physically in human terms by dividing their age by 100.
Appearance: Mao is a fairly short demon(he's about 4'4, 4'9 if you count his hair sticking up) with spiky white hair and red eyes. Hidden under his bangs he has a crescent shaped scar on his forehead and, being a demon, he also has fangs and pointed ears. He dresses like this.
Abilities:
Mao's a pretty powerful demon--Aurum, who has fought many Overlords and evil gods, even said that he believed Mao could become the strongest Overlord to ever live. What's Mao's capable of can be kind of vague, but his threat to destroy the human world is taken pretty seriously and in the Human World ending, he accidentally destroys the entire universe while attempting to get rid of the human world. However, even without nerfs it's unlikely for him be able to tap into that power as he is.
Mao displays a few personal battle abilities in the game, which include:
Blast Finger - Essentially, Mao charges up some green energy, throws himself towards his opponent, and blasts it in their face.
Shine Beam - Mao creates a bunch of blinding white energy beam/laserthings that continue to intersect and grow larger until they finally disappear.
Vasa Aergun - Basically consists of Mao turning into a giant monster("wouldn't fit in the station" big) and shooting energy beams at people.
the TL;DR version of all of these attacks is: "Mao is good at shooting really vague destructive energy beams at things."
He's also pretty decent at ice magic, and has been shown to be able to drop huge chunks of ice on people and freeze them solid. He can be equipped with a variety of weapons in the game(sword, spear, axe, and a magic staff--but he's capable of performing his ice spells regardless of the weapon he's using), so it's fair to assume that he at least knows the basics of wielding all of them. He's shown to favor a sword above other weapons.
Another notable thing is Mao's heart. Demons in this particular Netherworld can utilize what is known as a "Heart Bank," which is where most demons store memories and feelings that would inhibit them from doing whatever immoral things they please. The thing about Mao is that he tries so hard to force himself to be what he feels a demon "should" be, that he's crammed more of his heart into the bank than any other demon in history.
Depositing one's heart into the bank gives the demon the ability to visit the Heart Bank and literally walk through their heart; which seems to be like its own little world, complete with residents. Many of the residents of a demon's heart are alternate versions of people they know or palette-swapped versions of themselves that represent certain aspects of their personality. The latter can be anywhere from very important things to extremely small details--for example, there are multiple Maos in his heart that can only say the word "Daddy" due to his issues with his father as well as Maos that exist to express his love of hot sauce. The two most notable residents of Mao's heart, Dark Mao(who is basically just a ball of hatred and cruelty, describing himself as pure evil) and Mao's True Heart(an embodiment of all of Mao's real feelings), have shown themselves to be able to manifest outside of it. While they can exist alongside Mao outside of his heart for a limited span of time, it is also apparently possible for at least Dark Mao to take over Mao's body completely.
Hearts are very fragile, and making changes while inside one can alter a person--defeating the hot sauce loving Maos, for example, made Mao grow to hate the stuff. The heart however, cannot handle a change too great--Almaz's attempt to remove the version of Mao's father in his heart made Mao regress mentally into an infant until Almaz put things back as they had been originally.
While we rarely see the results, he's very good at science. He describes his intelligent by claiming to have a "1.8 mil EQ"--whatever that means. He also likes to talk about giving people things like rocket launcher boobs all the time. Because Beryl or someone else usually stops him before he can actually do anything to anyone, the only time we really see him do any of the things he talks about is when he brainwashed Aurum into acting as Geoffrey again in the Raspberyl Mode DLC.
Personality:
Mao is boy who's very concerned with being like a demon "should" be. Having been raised for 200 years to be the perfect evil Overlord, this behavior has always been encouraged. He tries to present himself as everything demons value and tries to hide less socially acceptable emotions--like sadness--but has never really succeeded at this completely, as those close enough to him will notice. Still, Mao goes to sometimes disturbingly great lengths to preserve his image. He's very intelligent, but he's not very mature.
Socializing is definitely not one of Mao's priorities--one of the main plot points of the game is that Mao needs to open his heart, after all. He has no problem with hiding in his room and avoiding others unless he has a need for them--because as far as he's concerned, demon's are supposed to have servants, not friends. Any positive feelings he has towards anyone are vehemently denied and quickly covered up with excuses. This ideal demon Overlord behavior in Mao's mind, and he backs it up with personal experience. Having "studied" numerous manga, anime, and video games detailing the Super Hero's exploits, Mao saw him consistently portrayed as a proponent of the power of friendship. And if that's what a hero had? Then a demon had to have the opposite. Furthermore, when the Super Hero showed up to defeat Mao's father, he deemed Mao his "friend for life" in what Mao hadn't realized at the time to be a mocking fashion after Mao gave him his father's whereabouts. Seeing a glimpse of what the Super Hero really was after his father was killed made Mao even more bitter towards the concept of friendship because he associated it with him.
Mao has, however, made progress in his relations with other people, despite still being unable to admit that he has friends. He's become much better at acting like a leader, despite still having trouble with his personal relationships with others. While he originally denies any care for the lives of those in his party and is scolded by Master Big Star for being a terrible leader, he eventually becomes somewhat more comfortable with caring about them(though he still won't admit to that), and even takes damage for their sake. When questioned about it, he justifies it with the fact that he considers all of them his servants, so their lives belong to him and he has to look after his things. Besides, they're no use to him if they're dead. Mao also shows how upset he is over Almaz's death after he defeats Dark Mao, and before Almaz is revived he has a conversation with Mao's True Heart where he tells him that he helped Mao learn to trust others. This ends up being what opened Mao's heart, and he spends the rest of the game denying all of his friends claims that he's learned the power of friendship.
Mao can be very secretive, often enough in an attempt to hide emotions he doesn't want to own up to. He uses his heart bank more than any other demon ever has, storing all of his emotional pain in there in hopes of never having to deal with it again. Furthermore, he goes out of his way to and manages to hide his father's death from everyone else for 200 years, despite his father being the ruler of their Netherworld. He doesn't take well to others learning about this stuff, unsurprisingly, but has had to deal with quite a few people poking around in his heart lately.
One of the things Mao has gone out of his way to hide is the massive sense of guilt he has over his father's death, though he will pretty eagerly tell you all about his modified version of his father issues. Because he supplied the Super Hero Aurum with his father's location and weakpoints(under the assumption that the Aurum would just beat him up a little, because heroes aren't supposed to kill), he convinced himself that his father must hate him for being the indirect cause of his death. As mentioned above, he goes so far to hide this that he pretends his father is still alive and spends most of his time plotting to defeat and overthrow him out of spite towards him. This guilt has become such a huge part of Mao that there's a version of his father living in his heart that constantly talks about how "it's all Mao's fault." Mao has come clean about what happened and how he feels about it to his party at this point, but has yet to actually confront his father's ghost and learn that his father had never blamed him for what happened.
Mao rarely allows himself to express sadness, and instead allows any negative emotions to become anger and even hate. All his sadness over his father's death, for example, is buried under his hatred of the Super Hero. Mao does this on his own, but it's also assisted by Aurum(posing as Geoffrey), who fed these emotions constantly and brought Dark Mao into existence. Almaz notices this and points it out to him shortly before his death, which Mao does actually end up expressing sadness over in the end.
Mao is pretty big on revenge. He has a huge ego and thus reacts very poorly to slights against him, plus as far as he's concerned his vengeful urges all fall within in commendable demon behavior. Lashing out at others is very easy for him, and he can hold grudges for a pretty long time. While he often becomes very irrational while seeking out revenge, with effort his friends have been able to talk him out of some of his worse ideas--like destroying the human world to make Aurum suffer.
Mao is very interested in science. While we don't see many of the the results of his experiments, he talks about giving people things like rocket launcher boobs very frequently. Mao gets perhaps too excited by this kind of stuff(usually, he ends up breathing heavily and drooling), but doesn't seem to take any notice of how uncomfortable that might make others--not that he'd really care, anyway. Even if it's something that would hinder or upset him, he'll always take the time to be distracted by and admire, say, a good brainwashing.
Mao has no concept of personal space. While he would rather not socialize with others, he often finds himself fascinated by them. It's an extension of his scientific curiosity, and one those around him aren't all that fond of. He doesn't seem to see any problem with touching people without their consent, after all...it's for science. This has earned him quite the reputation as a creep and a pervert.
Strangely enough, Mao is very interested in heroes and owns lots of manga, video games, and the like about them. He claims it's all "research" so can properly defeat them, but takes it surprisingly far--he even excitedly asked for the Super Hero's autograph when he first met him. He's also both fascinated with and disgusted by the idea of love--and thus treats it with morbid curiosity. He questions Almaz on how it works and how it feels on multiple occasions, and gets very frustrated when he can't seem to measure it scientifically.
Being a demon, Mao's moral compass doesn't quite line up with humans. He lives in a society where immoral acts are encouraged and never having gone to class makes him an honor student, after all. Petty pranks, theft, unethical experiments...doing that kind of stuff doesn't bother Mao in the slightest. After his defeat of Aurum, he's expected to either kill or let Aurum go...but ends up keeping Aurum alive so he can use him as a test subject, and sees nothing wrong with doing so. Likewise, he tends to act disgusted by "delinquent" things, such as doing volunteer work and being polite to others.
History:
Mao grew up the son of his Netherworld's Overlord--supposedly the strongest of any Overlord in the Disgaea multiverse, but this claim has been made about at least three characters by now. In addition to being the Overlord, his father also served as the Dean of Maritsu Evil Academy, a school for young demons. While it's never outright stated, it's likely that Mao has lived at the school his entire life. Despite this, however, Mao never attended a single lesson in his entire life--by demon standards, this made him the greatest honor student at the Academy. Mao instead spent his days causing trouble and bickering with his rival, a delinquent demon(AKA one that did all of her homework and spent her free time volunteering) named Raspberyl.
200 years before the events of Disgaea 3, the Super Hero Aurum came to challenge Mao's father. Tired of years of fighting various "evil" beings, he wanted to get the ultimate demon Overlord out of the way and retire. Mao, who was secretly a huge fan of Aurum and angry at his father for accidentally destroying his Slaystation, ran into Aurum and ended up exchanging his father's location and weaknesses for an autograph(that he never actually got). Mao just assumed his father was going to get kicked around a bit--because heroes always defeat evil Overlords, but a hero was also surely too noble to kill his enemies.
Mao's assumptions, however, proved horribly wrong. Aurum did kill Mao's father, but it wasn't as satisfying as Aurum thought it would be. The Overlord would have been able to defeat him if he had unleashed his full power...but had held back and allowed himself to be killed, because he would've harmed Mao in the process of defeating Aurum. Aurum couldn't fathom the idea of a demon being capable of parental love, and in his dissatisfaction didn't know what to do with himself--until he saw a grief-stricken Mao reveal a glimpse of the potential power he had within him. Aurum immediately began planning to make use of that.
Mao, on the other hand, didn't know how to handle the guilt he felt over the death of his father. To make matters worse, his father's spirit stuck around the Academy instead of passing on--Mao assumed this was because his father was angry with him for getting him killed, but it was actually out of concern for Mao. In order to escape from emotions Mao felt he, as a demon, shouldn't be feeling, Mao locked more of himself away in the Heart Bank than any other demon in history. Mao kept his father's death a secret, pretending that he was still alive so thoroughly that he spent a good deal of his time obsessively planning to kill him and take his place as Overlord when he actually wanted to put his father to rest.
Not long after the death of Mao's father, a butler named Geoffrey came to work for Mao. Geoffrey did his best to raise Mao to be the evilest child possible, and provided Mao with anything he needed or wanted. Though Geoffrey constantly told Mao to trust no one, not even him, Mao did grow to trust his seemingly faithful butler.
200 years after his father's death, Mao decided he'd have to become a hero to defeat his father, because again--the hero always beats the evil Overlord. Rather than doing any good deeds to earn that title, Mao decided he was just going to have to steal the title from someone else--in a very literal sense, as Disgaea game mechanics dictate that every character have a title. Geoffrey located the nearest hero, and Mao wasted no time mugging him for his title.
That "hero," a human named Almaz, had come to the Netherworld to defeat the Overlord for the sake of the princess of his land--because all evil Overlords obviously want to kidnap princesses. Mao decided to force Almaz to be his servant, and Almaz gained the title "demon-in-training," which led to him starting a slow transformation into a demon. Mao felt little sympathy, and was instead excited to get to watch Almaz's transformation.
Feeling confident, Mao headed to the Dean's office to "challenge his father"--or at least, his father's spirit. After his plan backfired, Mao confronted Almaz, who admitted to not actually being a hero, instead having made the hero title for himself because he was a wanna-be and fanboy. A furious Mao dragged Almaz to the heart bank to retrieve the hero title from his heart, and unfortunately discovered that it had been stashed in the very center of his heart--his heart's vault. Upon finding the vault, another Mao stopped them. This resident of Mao's heart represented his "True Heart" and thus embodied all of Mao's true feelings. Mao's True Heart denied them access to the vault, informing them that they would be unable to get the hero title until Mao opened his heart.
Opening the heart of someone as repressed as Mao would be no easy task, and Mao claimed it would be impossible for a demon. However, Mao and Almaz heard a rumor that eating a dragon egg sunny-side up would open one's heart, and were desperate enough to try it. Something like that would be crazy enough to work in a Disgaea game if this whole plotline hadn't been about character development. Geoffrey located the egg for them, and Mao and Almaz set off after it. The two were quickly joined by Mao's rival, Raspberyl, and her lackeys.
When they finally found the egg, it was being guarded by a group of Home Ec students. They were quickly defeated, but once the group had their hands on the egg they realized they couldn't crack it. Beryl hypothesized that the only person who could crack it would be Mr. Champloo, the Home Ec teacher, so the group set out to find the mysterious Home Ec room. It took them awhile, but when they finally got there, Mr. Champloo challenged Mao to a fight--and the winner not only had to win, but also had to crack the egg first.
Mao defeated Champloo and somehow finally managed to crack the egg, so Champloo, a gracious loser, cooked it for him. Assuming his heart would be open now that he'd eaten it, Mao rushed to the Heart Bank...and after defeating a group of Maos that existed to express his love of hot sauce, Mao found his vault was still closed. In his frustration he began to lament the fact that he ate the egg with hot sauce and not salt and pepper, leading Almaz to believe that defeating those Maos had changed Mao's opinions.
Mao's quest to open his heart was then interrupted by the annual student elections. Geoffrey insisted that Mao must become Class Leader because no one had been Overlord without having been their Class Leader, and in the Netherworld...becoming Class Leader means beating up all of your classmates. At the same time, the PTA(Perfectly Trained Assassins) kidnapped Raspberyl, planning to brainwash her into being an honor student. Her lackeys sought out Mao, pleading with him to go rescue her. While he originally elected to fight for the position of Freshmen Class Leader, Almaz managed to convince him that beating up the PTA would be the ultimate honor student act, so Mao agreed to abandon the competition and save Beryl.
After Mao and his allies defeated them and freed Beryl(though Mao continued to refuse to admit to actually wanting to save Beryl), Mao was surprised to discover that he had become Freshman Class Leader after all--his classmates were so impressed with him for going against the PTA and saving her that they gladly gave him the title. With all of that resolved, Mao was free to focus to on opening his heart again.
After a discussion with Almaz, Mao decided getting a crush on someone might open his heart(he, however, really didn't understand the concept, just thinking of "crush energy" as what heroes run on). After interrogating Almaz on what having a crush should be like, Mao decided he needs to learn to captivate people--thus wanted to attend a class on the subject.
Because Mao had never attended class in his life, many tried to stop him to keep his record in place. Fighting their way through, Mao and Almaz ran into the princess from Almaz's land--Princess Sapphire, who had decided to come to the Netherworld to kill the Overlord before he could kidnap her...as Overlords, of course, always kidnap princesses. With Sapphire joining them, Mao and Almaz finally made it to the class. After the Succubus teacher taught them some...questionable methods to capture people's hearts, Mao once again decided his heart must be open from that "lesson in crush energy" and made a beeline for the Heart Bank.
Sapphire followed Mao and Almaz into the Heart Bank, and accidentally stumbled upon something--memories of Geoffrey experimenting on Mao that Geoffrey had taken from him. Mao did his best to shrug off how betrayed he felt as more Maos showed up, this time ones who were only capable of saying the word "Dad." After their defeat, Almaz convinced Mao to fight his heart's version of his father, hoping that doing so would fix whatever wound in Mao's heart it was that was keeping it closed. Winning the battle, however, was not enough--it regenerated because of how large the issues Mao had with his father were.
Luckily, Almaz found the power source for it--and literally unplugged the version of Mao's dad living in his heart. This managed to force the vault open, so Almaz quickly reclaimed his title, ignoring Mao's True Heart as he tried to warn him that forcing it open like that was going to have major consequences. It didn't take long, however, for Almaz to realize the consequences of his actions on his own--it was too drastic of a forced change for Mao to take, the incident with his father was such a major part of him that Mao mentally regressed into an infant.
Heading back into Mao's heart yet again, they found that the residents of Mao's heart didn't want things set back to normal--after all, Mao was safe from all of his emotional pain if he was mentally an infant. Setting things as they were would just force him to experience it again. Another set of Maos even showed up to oppose them, but they managed to fight their way to the center, where Almaz plugged the cord back in and returned the Hero title of hero to the vault, saying he didn't deserve to retrieve it if he was just going to be a coward and not help Mao open his heart the proper way. Essentially, the group was back to square one--but they did now have Raspberyl and her lackeys by their side, as they had become the school's first graduates and didn't have to worry about their studies anymore.
Mao returned to his normal self to find the school in chaos--the seniors were brainwashing the freshmen to make them into delinquents bent on overthrowing the Overlord. Mao and his group began to investigate--and were soon joined by Mr Champloo--only to get caught up in a war between the sophomores and the seniors. Assisting the sophomore class, they soon discovered that a legendary group of seniors known as the Diez Gentlemen were behind everything.
After defeating a group of the Diez Gentlemen, one of them--Salvatore--tried to shoot Mao, but Geoffrey took the bullet for him. In his anguish, Mao almost unleashed some great, unknown power, but was stopped at the last minute. The bell rang, so Salvatore and her comrades fled--because they were posing as delinquents, thus had to go to class.
While mourning Geoffrey's supposed death, the group was shocked to discover that Geoffrey had faked it, and was indeed still alive. He immediately cooked up a plan to make Mao more powerful--sending him back into his heart to fight his subconscious. Mao gladly took his group and did so, but once his subconscious had been properly beaten into submission, Mao found himself face to face with a resident that looked exactly like the Super Hero Aurum. Mao fought with and defeated his heart's Aurum, but he respawned just like Mao's dad had. Nonetheless, the group left.
Having gone a bit crazy from his new power, Mao decided to face the seniors. While no one really knew where their classrooms were, Geoffrey somehow managed to locate them and send the group after them. Eventually they ran into Salvatore, and Mao demanded she take them to her leader. Upon her refusal, Mao and his party got in a fight with and defeated her once more. However, afterwards Salvatore admitted to not knowing where her leader actually was.
Conveniently enough, Geoffrey suddenly appeared, and when Mao demanded he find the Senior Class Leader...Geoffrey revealed himself to be the Super Hero Aurum in disguise, having posed as Mao's butler and the Senior Class Leader for years. Aurum was unable to die like he'd wanted when he defeated Mao's father(due to heroes often getting revived), and due to finding him to be a disappointing opponent, decided to raise Mao to become the perfect one someday. However, rather than fighting him, he told Mao the time had not come yet and disappeared.
A very upset Mao wasted little time deciding what to do about this. He was going to make Aurum to get revenge for all the ways Aurum made him hurt. Aurum was human, so Mao decided destroying the human world would have the best psychological effect on him. Trekking through space to get there, his party followed to try and convince him to stop. Once they'd gotten close, Mao's anger caused a dark version of Mao from within his heart to attempt to surface. Beryl initially stopped it, and Almaz began to talk Mao down, confronting him about his anger. However, in the middle of this, Almaz suddenly died, having spent a good while merely laughing off all the symptoms of having been poisoned earlier.
Dark Mao finally appeared here, and attempted to take over Mao's body. Once he was defeated, Mao was finally convinced to give in and let himself show how upset he was about Almaz's death. Doing so ended up opening Mao's heart, and Almaz was revived as a human with his Hero title. With this, Mao finally listened to his friends' pleas and headed back to the academy to face Aurum. Aurum, however, lectured Mao on how much of a failure he was and decided that he wasn't good enough for him to kill himself, sending his lackeys to take care of him instead.
Making his way through all of them with the help of his party, which ended up being joined by Master Big Star and Salvatore, Mao finally got Aurum to fight him himself, and defeated him using what his friends claimed to be the power of love and friendship(though Mao spend the entire time complaining that they were embarrassing him and that was not the case). Aurum, however, revealed that like any good final boss, he had yet another form for them to have to defeat. Aurum's final form consisted of parts stolen from the various Overlords and evil gods he'd fought over the years, and his title itself even changed from "Super Hero" to "Evil God."
After his defeat, Aurum claimed to regret what he'd become and apologized for no longer being the hero everyone admired. He requested that Mao kill him, but Mao refused--death was too kind for Aurum, and he'd make an excellent test subject. He then left to finally face his father and hopefully put him to rest.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
He was finally going to confront his father.
All those years of planning, waiting...finally about to come to an end...
Or at least, that's what he'd thought before he woke up in the Alpha Omega's med bay. It had taken him a good while to stop being distracted by things and get to thinking about serious matters, and even then he'd assumed he could escape easily. He was a demon, and this appeared to be a human creation. It should be easy...
So he was shocked to find that he was just as stuck here as everyone else. All the power of the son of a great Overlord, and yet...it did absolutely nothing. "What an annoying setback..." Mao muttered to himself, sighing and roughly throwing himself onto a nearby bench.
And yet...part of Mao was almost relieved. Sure, it left things unresolved even longer, which made him anxious...but he'd already waited for 200 years. And this meant that he had a very good reason to delay facing his problems for awhile. As much as he would say it didn't bother him, he dreaded hearing his father's spirit condemn him for mistakes.
So he was stuck here, with the pleasure of observing a new experiment nearly every week. Without any of his servants...but it wasn't like he absolutely needed them...they were just convenient. And hey, without them around he could do whatever he wanted without any interference...or at least, any he actually cared about. The people that lived here weren't going to put a stop to any of his honor student behavior, that's for sure.
Mao smiled. Thinking about that gave him an idea...to get his mind off of things, he was going to pull a prank.
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
I don't know why you guys are all so worked up about this place...I mean, it's absolutely magnificent! [This weirdo's starting to drool and breath funny. Oh boy...] All these experiments...I can't help but stop to appreciate it!
[He takes a second to calm down a bit, wiping spit off his chin.]
Unfortunately, I have business to attend to elsewhere, so I'm going to have to blow my way out and damage it. Perhaps I can return in the near future for further inspection...
If only I could stay and poke around for a bit...but no, I can't afford to get distracted at a time like this. Stay out of my way unless you want to get hurt, humans!
This game includes horrible mental and physical torture of your character. After reading the rules/faq for clarification, how do you expect your character to handle this and continue to function?
Mao's doesn't deal with pain in a very healthy manner, but he has handled a great deal of it. His main coping mechanism is to pretend things don't bother him as much or the way they do, so he'll probably keep that up.
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.
BLAME DESH GIVING ME PERMISSION TO APP A FOURTH FOR THIS MONSTROSITY OF AN APP