Personality

[seeyousuffer]

"I have no ideals or desires, so why was I chosen to fight in this battle?"

At his current canon point, Kirei is a grave, outwardly calm man who hides deep feelings of depression, emptiness, and despair behind a mask of propriety and piety. He may not be an extrovert or a man likely to be termed "friendly", but he is not at all timid, and he is not unwilling to speak or express his opinion. He can be straightforward to the point of bluntness, for he sees no reason to soften his speech. Now and then, a glimmer of wry humor does almost surface in him, not that anyone realizes it, as it is suppressed along with his emotions. It is, perhaps, a precursor of things to come.

The quiet Kirei is a dangerous man. Having been trained to serve as one of the Church's Executors, or Mage-and-Heretic-Killers, Kirei is skilled in physical as well as magical combat. Relentless and remorseless, he thinks nothing of dispatching those duty dictates he eliminate, but he is much more than mere muscle. He was the top student at his theological college, some might say a prodigy, and he is quite intelligent, more than able to discuss the finer points of theology and philosophy.

Kirei's father is a priest (though the Holy Church of F/Z is loosely based on the Roman Catholic Church, they don't require celibacy of their priests), and all his life, Kirei has tried to be a dutiful son as well as a man of faith, to do what is asked of him as well as what is expected. To an extent, thus far, he has been successful. Both his father and the Church see him as just what he has striven to become, believing in the façade he's created. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Church, but while doing what was expected of him, he hasn't acted in his own interests so much as in others'. He doesn't care about his accomplishments. He feels empty inside, and he is searching for meaning in his life. He still believes in God, but he no longer believes that the love of God will save or transform him, so there is an element of hopelessness and desperation in that belief.

That is why, when he is chosen to serve in the Grail War, Kirei is taken aback. Firstly, because as a man of the Church, he hadn't expected to be asked to serve in a battle between magi, and secondly, because he is informed that the Grail chooses only those with a great need for it. His father believes he is a man of great faith, but as far as he's concerned, he has no desires and no ideals. No one is aware of what Kirei's wish might be, not even Kirei.

His father and Tokiomi Tohsaka assume that he was simply chosen to aid Tokiomi, the candidate the Church approves of. They are very wrong. For as long as he can remember, Kirei has been plagued by his own nature. He has never pursued one course for long, no matter how he excels. He transferred from department to department within the Church, never remaining long enough to attain top rank, although he easily could have. He is a man who is seeking something. His emptiness, or lack, is a lack of normal, desirable feelings, but it is not true nothingness. It may be a void, but it is one that desires to be filled.

"Pleasure? You’d ask me to commit something so sinful and corrupt? Pleasure is another thing that I lack. I seek for it but cannot find it."

Kirei holds within him an awful secret.

He cannot find satisfaction or true self-actualization, because every time an inkling of self-realization comes to him, he pulls away from it, labels it a sin. The things he is capable of feeling, which bring him pleasure, are strange and unpleasant. Throughout his life, he has tried to hide from himself, to teach himself to feel normal emotions instead.

Desperately, he has prayed for God to save him, thrown himself into his work. He tortures himself, allowing himself to suffer pain and perform any penance, in an attempt to purify himself, but in vain. His austere and masochistic way of life strengthens him and causes other to admire his piety, but does not change him in the way he would like. He strikes some as passionately devoted, but as his manner is so cold, some question this. Tokiomi, for instance, initially thinks he has a nihilistic air rather than a passionate one. Yet Kirei's actions are so convincing that Tokiomi amends that thought, coming to mistakenly believe Kirei is loyal. When he later dies at Kirei's hand, he is unable to comprehend what has happened. Kirei's father, at one point, says that Kirei would throw himself in a fire if the Church ordered him to. This is true, but not for the reason his father believes. He would throw himself into the fire not because of his ideals, but because of his inability to have them.

In his quest to save himself, Kirei even marries and tries to start a family. He believes that being a husband and father might help him to feel normally, to connect to others. This attempt goes horribly wrong. His wife is eventually driven to suicide in an attempt to make him feel something. He abandons his daughter completely, leaving her with his wife's relatives. Although he weeps over his wife's death, he is overcome, and appalled, by the fact that he simultaneously wishes he had been the one to kill her. For Kirei does have a wish, a great desire, unrecognized by himself because he has spent his life denying it: he takes pleasure in the suffering of others. Others' pain is his bliss. This is the buried wish that the Grail chose him for. He is stated to have been born with that desire, but due to his upbringing and his wish to serve and be saved by God, he has managed to avoid his nature and his fate for more than 20 years.

His wish, though not quite an emotion, does surface, as not a desire, but an echo of one, or a desire for desire. It gives him a grim yet perverse curiosity, for he both denies and is drawn toward his inner self. Kirei is capable of feeling a strange fascination for certain people. They are people who he believes, on some level, can teach him something about himself. Notably, during the Grail War, he becomes interested in Kiritsugu Emiya and Kariya Matou, believing the former to be a man like him, and interested in the latter because of the sheer intensity of his suffering, which he finds fascinating.

"If I seek the Holy Grail for my own desire, that will mean that I have betrayed my own teacher and mentor."

It's impossible to examine Kirei's present character without considering his future. Even if there are certain choices he has not made yet, certain things he has not done, the fact is that the potential to do them resides within him, and it is this potential that is an immensely important aspect of his character, because it defines him. All his actions revolve around his simultaneous awareness and rejection of his true self and the potential that resides within him.

Is it possible that Kirei could have escaped his self-realization and managed to repress his desires for the remainder of his life? It might have been. He has managed to do so for this long, well into his twenties. It would have been difficult, but not impossible. He does not have that chance, as the Grail War creates the perfect environment in which his delight in suffering can bloom and flourish. It is a bloody, violent battle between magi, in which many participants will certainly die. It is impossible for him to avoid encountering extreme suffering of various kinds. He is further encouraged in his desire by the Servant of his own tutor: Archer, aka. Gilgamesh. He may be an intelligent, strong-willed man, but he is not immune to manipulation, especially that which encourages to take the path of least resistance, which leads him toward pleasure.

If not for the Grail War and the urging of Gilgamesh, he may have managed to continue to resist. This is a very particular and unusual series of events, and even within them, Kirei refuses the darker truth of his nature again and again before finally relenting.

When he does allow himself to behave according to his nature at last, he will accept that his "bliss" lies only in others' suffering. He'll be able to enjoy himself, in his own way. He will aim to create pain for others and suffering on a grand scale. He will delight in betrayal, chaos, and misery. He will betray his teacher and try to attain the Grail, and it will show him what it is he truly longs for. Yet at the same time, he will not be content to simply become and remain this person who delights in evil. Aware of his own monstrosity, he will still remember his desire to be like others. He'll envy them, as he wonders why he cannot be like them, even as he plots their destruction.

In the next Grail War, he will not seek the Grail for himself, but he will try to make sure that another uses it. The Grail is tainted, and he decides he wants to see it come into being because he believes it is like himself. He thinks its creation can tell him something about himself, just as, in the course of his first Grail War, he will seek Kiritsugu Emiya for the same answer, before realizing, with disgust, that Kiritsugu does not hold the answers he desires but is an idealist with what Kirei sees as a simplistic, impossible wish.

"Conflict is humanity's primal instinct. Eliminating it would mean eliminating humanity itself."

Unlike his counterpart/foil Kiritsugu Emiya, he does not believe that peace or the "salvation" of humanity is possible. He is a man with a negative view of humanity, untouched by idealism because of the simple fact that he has no ideals.

Kirei is a man who was born what most would consider a monster. He's never found any pleasure except in seeing others suffer, in causing that suffering. He is aware of that fact on some level even when he is denying it, yet he fights against it. He is a man of conflict, of action. He struggles against his fate, and even when he no longer denies it, he struggles to understand it.

Kirei is an asker of questions, a seeker of answers. This is not necessarily a bad thing to be, but in his case, the answers and the means to find them are dangerous, if not fatal, to others.