You know something? I really wish that Weiss Kreuz badficcers would at least have the sense to back the Hell off fucking about with Persia.

Yes, it's rant time again. More Weiss Kreuz meta by me. Oh yay. Today's rant, I hope, will at least have the advantages of brevity (well, compared to my usual TL;DR). You see, it has recently occurred to me that out of all the bad fanon portrayals I have come across, up to and including the utterly inexcusable act of character derailment that is Rapist!Youji, the one that strikes me as most unworkable by far is the fanon version of Persia... at least for this week. Let me explain why.

For those of you as have managed to spare yourselves from the hideousness that is Weiss Kreuz Suefic - and the sudden manifestation of Persia a la Idiot Fanon is, in my experience at least, almost exclusively a Sueficcer's problem - Persia, in these fics, is often portrayed as something rather akin to a kindly uncle... at least as far as the resident Mary Sue goes. He is often presented as taking a friendly interest in her placement on the team and her progress as an assassin, watching over her to see how she does - and over Weiss, to see that they treat her the way she deserves. Sometimes he even goes as far as to welcome the 'new girl' to Weiss on her first briefing tape, a favor I highly doubt he extended to any of the others because there'd be no point. They're a team of assassins, not an after-school club.

All too often, this is because she is somehow related to him. Sometimes, though, it's because she's just that special and important - so special and important, indeed, that he'd send a team of assassins to go and rescue and play bodyguard for her, or recruit her for Kritiker, when they should be getting on with assassinating people. Um, doesn't he have people for that? Like, I dunno, Manx?

Note that Omi, who Persia canonically believes to be his nephew, doesn't come in for anything like that level of mollycoddling in canon - and often doesn't get it in the fanfics either. The Mary Sue, however? She does.

That's not the problem, though. It's annoying that some girl we the readers never heard of should be given the kind of love and attention from Persia that Omi - Persia's own son, which he might well have realized before if he had only been capable of counting backward from nine without his big brother helping - never gets, but that's all it is. It's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

The problem is that Persia is Shuuichi Takatori.

That is to say, he is a Takatori and, like almost all the men in his family, he is a bastard.

Yeah. Persia is ruthless, cynical, manipulative, desirous, Machiavellian, arrogant, jealousy-prone and not, when one gets down to it, at all nice. He has a lot more in common with his brother and father than a lot of the fandom appears to believe. For all he may have rather more noble intentions than they do, his methods suck and the man is still a Takatori through and through. End result? He's a bastard.

One of the first proofs that the man is a bastard is the existence and makeup of Weiss itself. For the chief of police, he has no faith in the rule of law, or the ability of the men he commands - the police force, not Weiss - to do their jobs. Of course, the job may well have jaded him and left him unsure of his own power to truly change anything. That doesn't change the fact that he's going outside the law in order to uphold it... and turning ordinary young men who have committed no offense themselves into the worst of criminals on his behalf, without any trace of compunction.

Rather than rely on the system he's supposed to be responsible for upholding, this man solves his problems by killing them - or, more precisely, by getting other men to kill them for him. Young men. If we are to follow Drama CD canon, Persia deliberately chose young men around the age of 20, the Japanese age of majority, to serve as his assassins simply because young men are more likely to be obedient, and not try and do risky things (for Persia) like question orders, think for themselves, or go rogue. Ken was no more than seventeen when Persia approached him - and he was probably even younger, as the timeframe mentioned in Kapitel just isn't long enough to fit in everything that happened to Ken before he could even join Weiss - and compared to Omi, Ken has it easy.

Then there's his choice of agents. Weiss, in its present incarnation, consist of four young men who managed to completely wreck their lives in less than twenty years. They're a bunch of fuckups who've failed at life, at least in part, because they've been rash or thoughtless or just plain stupid. These are not stable or even particularly sensible people. The last thing anyone who wasn't a total bastard who didn't give a damn about anything other than their own ends would do is give them lethal weapons and tell them to kill.

And then, of course, there is Omi.

Ah, yes. Poor, mind-fucked Omi. Even before we consider the familial complications, Persia's treatment of Omi after rescuing him is utterly indefensible. Of course he can't send the boy back to his father, for obvious reasons - his father has abandoned him. So what does Persia do instead? Take him in and give him a decent life? Find him good, loving adoptive parents? No, of course he doesn't. Instead he raises the boy to become an assassin, in the hope that one day he will be able to send Omi to kill his father. Not, at this stage, because Reiji Takatori is evil - but because he had an affair with his brother's wife, and blames Reiji for her suicide. That's it. That is his motivation. Not justice, not the safety of the nation. He wants revenge for his dead girlfriend, and to that end he's turned his girlfriend's child into a walking weapon so the boy can kill his own father. And, if Omi hadn't found out that he was Takatori's child himself, Persia would probably never have told him.

Even when he's lying dying, his last act is not to tell his horrified son (who still believes that he's his uncle!) that he is his father. No. Persia is so set on having his revenge that with his last breaths, he orders his pet assassins to kill his brother. His revenge, even in extremis, is all he cares about. It's more important to him that Reiji dies than Omi knows the truth about his parentage.

Chip away the veneer of good intentions and Persia, let's face it, is a bastard to the core.

Remove that core of selfishness and callousness, arrogance and bitter jealousy to make him into a genuinely well-intentioned man who just wants the best for Weiss, any or all of them, and he's no longer Persia... and without Persia there's no Weiss, no Kritiker, no story.

This is a man who is quite prepared to knowingly and deliberately send a brainwashed child to murder the man he believes is the child's own father, for the sake of a woman who's been dead a decade. He sends men half his age to kill for him without so much as batting an eyelid. A man who, if his dog dies, will simply buy another - the current Weiss, by Drama CD canon, is the third team to have borne that name. The first Weiss were killed. He formed another. The second Weiss defected. He formed another. He is incapable of understanding, too, that his love for Kikuno made her life no better and actually made it a lot worse: made it so much worse, in fact, that she lost her youngest child and took her own life. Persia is a sociopath who has no more regard for the people he manipulates and the lives he wrecks than Reiji does, as long as he gets his own way in the end - if he wasn't, he would never have formed Kritiker. Never have done the things he did.

Turning him into a Mary Sue's cuddly, avuncular confidante who is deeply concerned about her wellbeing simply doesn't work. If he was concerned about her, he wouldn't send her off to kill and die for him. He doesn't care about your Sue - no, not even if she is his daughter. He orders the deaths of his brother and nephews; he shows no real care whatsoever for Omi, the son of the woman he claims to have loved. The only person he has ever shown any sign of real care for, aside from the dead woman he's using as his excuse, is Manx - and even for her it comes in the decidedly equivocal form of a punch to the gut.

Persia is Shuuichi Takatori and Shuuichi Takatori is a bastard, and that's where it ends.