Day 8:

—

What are some of your character’s more notable merits and flaws (including physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc.)? How did they develop? How has this helped or hindered them in the past?

—

Merits:

• Physical: Hakuba, despite being on the thin side for his height and body type, is strong. I’m not sure if it’s the stubbornness or what, but he’s got crazy endurance; definitely more of a marathon runner than a sprinter. This is why he’s got those amazing thighs, though. He jogs every morning he has the chance, and will play tennis for hours at a time when able. As Spider said, the detective is persistent~ (yes, please imagine Hakuba and Spider playing tennis against each other in those cute little shorts, it’s an amazing visual.) 
• Mental: Like many INFJs (which is what I’ve typed my interpretation as), Hakuba is very good at connecting even obscure and abstract pieces of information together and using them to come up with some very unusual solutions. He manages to maintain a ridiculously successful balance between Occam’s Razor and intense hypothetical deductive/inductive reasoning for the problems he faces, and it’s served him very, very well… even if most people can’t follow the logic train along with him most of the time, since it probably left 3.22~ days ago, before anyone knew there was a need for it.
• Emotional: Despite popular belief, Hakuba cares immensely for people, how they feel, what’s going on in their lives, what motivates them, what pains them, etc. He’s a humanist and he’s far too invested in idealist attitudes for it to be healthy, but it makes him very compassionate. He won’t show this openly, of course, but underneath all of that armor, he’s a bleeding heart who invests a good deal of his time attempting to make the world a better place, even if it’s just providing some semblance of closure, one case at a time. 
• Spiritual: Sort of related to the previous topic, Hakuba tends to be fairly open-minded about most things, even if he doesn’t say so. He’s already straddling the line between the Western and Eastern world, and has to admit that he has strong ties to both, even though he’ll identify as a Christian first and foremost. His travels and experiences with a huge variety of people have made him more pliant when it comes to accepting different ideas and beliefs. This extends, even, to things of a supernatural nature. Of course, he applies logic to it, preferring to approach it from a scientific angle, but in the end it becomes more of a matter of “well, we can’t disprove that it exists, so I suppose that it might,” rather than “we can’t prove it’s real, therefore it cannot exist.” He feels it best to err on the side of caution, anyway. 
• Etc: This is really just reiterating from the above, but I’ve wanted to put this into writing for a long time. Thus: unlike some other detectives, Hakuba refuses to see someone as nothing but a criminal. A crime is an act that a person commits, but it is not who they are. "So a person steals something,“ he says, "but does that negate the entire rest of their existence? What of their other talents? Hopes? Dreams? What of their families and friends? Recompense is in order, certainly, but a person’s life is far more complex to base their worth or value on their crimes alone.”

Flaws:

• Physical: Hakuba could probably go on and on and on about his “flaws” when it comes to his body, but let’s talk about how he doesn’t take care of himself. He tries, from time to time, but he’s just not consistent enough. It’s only a matter of time before his lack of care turns into hypoglycemia and then diabetes. He pushes himself too far, too fast, and doesn’t give his body enough rest or the calories that he needs. Also holy crap cut down on the drinking, man… your liver is not industrial strength like you seem to think it is. 
• Mental: Depression and anxiety are something that he has severe struggles with. I realize that this is more of a disease than a flaw, but I’m listing it here, anyway. He’s high-strung and easily gets worked up, and since he’s very privately introspective about his thought process, he often comes off as being very cold, callous, calculating, and cruel. It’s usually just that by the time he’s forced to relay information that he doesn’t want to share, it’s been boiled down to its most precise and harsh form, and that often presents itself like a slap in the face. 
• Emotional: Hakuba tends to be very reactive to people when it comes to expressing his emotions. Again, he’s intensely private about his thoughts and feelings (except when it comes to harmless – and oftentimes pointless – trivia), so he will share or not largely based on how others around him conduct himself. He’s a veritable chameleon in most situations, changing himself so that he’s able to drift from scene to scene without being noticed unless he wants to be. This is a double-edged sword, though, and he doesn’t even realize that he does it. On the one hand, if someone is polite and civil toward him, even in an intense situation, he will respond in kind. On the other, if someone blows up over something that he sees as insignificant and yells or gets violent, Hakuba is very quick to SNAP and pull out the big guns (in the form of words specifically designed to tear the person apart) in retaliation. Hence the whole thing with Heiji during the Koushien.Though, this does mean that if you’ve seriously hurt him, he’ll be very receptive if you act submissive to him. He finds it exceptionally difficult to be intentionally rude to someone who is being kind to him, which… often leads him right into trouble. 
• Spiritual: Double-standards abound. It’s fine for everyone else to be godless heathens, and sin is just a social construct (within reason), but he holds himself to an incredibly high standard and easily finds reason to loathe himself for any occasion. Basically, he believes he’s going to Hell, there’s no saving him, and he deserves to suffer, while everyone else, he’s quite sure, will be just fine and dandy in heaven or nirvana or in their next lives, and are perfect sunflowers just the way they are.
• Etc: Hakuba is far too good at explaining away behaviors and justifying things as long as he has any sort of reason to. As such, he has far too many little ‘Boscombe Secrets’ lying around, and if it were to come to light, he would… uh… probably be an accessory to far more crimes than he even wants to think about. Oops.

[source]