Basil [Omori]

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Chi
Contact: winterbolt
Age: 28
Other Characters: Sparkling Cookie, Adrian Cinnabar

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Basil
Age: 16
Canon: Omori
Canon Point: After Aubrey pushes him into the lake
Character Information: Basil on the Wiki!

Personality:
On a surface level, Basil can be categorized as a shy yet kind, caring young boy. Though he is far from the rock that comprises his main friend group- that being his friends Mari, Hero, Kel, Aubrey, and his best friend Sunny- he's a character that seems to just always be there, a permanent fixture that completes the puzzle and rounds everyone out. Though not predisposed to being able to make friends easily on his own, needing the help of Aubrey to introduce him to his friends in the first place when they were younger, Basil considers his friends to be his everything. He doesn't have much else in quite the literal sense, as his parents are unfortunately absent, and his home life is strained as his grandmother- who raised him- is ill and unable to care for herself or Basil, which means Basil now has a caretaker named Poppy who looks after both his and his grandmother's needs. For these reasons, Basil has struggled for most of his life with the sense that he's a burden to those around him, so most of the time he focuses his energy outward onto those he cares most about. He's considerate to a fault, even if perhaps to his own detriment, opting to put another's needs before his own.

Since Basil's life has been categorized by so much instability and uncertainty, it's resulted in him becoming a heavily sentimental person. He puts a lot of value in the things he has, developing strong emotional attachments to them as they tend to represent important points or moments of his life that he doesn't want to forget, or have muddied by circumstances of the present. One of his biggest hobbies is photography, as he considers the memories he makes with his friends to be his greatest treasure, wanting to preserve and "permanently capture the moment". Because of the sentimental value he tends to ascribe to objects, Basil is reluctant to discard anything, even if most others might consider it worthless. The same is true with the plants that he enjoys taking care of, as they mean so much to him that he considers each of the types he keeps to represent one of his friends based on their meaning.

Despite Basil's insistence and fixation on certain things, he remains humble to a fault. Circling back to the idea of his fear of being considered a burden, Basil tries his best to live modestly and often downplays his own achievements, knowledge (despite having huge hosts of knowledge about plants, for example), and has a habit of not really being able to see self worth the same way his friends do in themselves. He would much rather build them up and see them succeed rather than himself, and while a lot of this is just baked into Basil's personality in general, it seems that he behaves this way in part because he also doesn't want to lose the friends he's made. Because of this, he's not at all a combative type of personality- he's a self-proclaimed pacifist- and would rather compromise or at worst defer to someone else's judgement rather than attempt to stand up for himself or- god forbid- fight.

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CW: Spoilers for Omori as well as discussions of death, suicide, depression, disassociation, hallucination, and heavy themes.
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Out of his friends, Basil is undoubtedly one of the most sensitive of them all. He seems to feel his emotions very strongly, and a lot of this he struggles with from a very young age. He cares so much about everyone and everything, and often times when he's unable to help or spin a situation into a more positive one, he considers it a failing on his part. He worries about things chronically and overthinks, falling into the habit of getting so wrapped up in his own thoughts and perception of a situation that he struggles to see the greater picture. This sensitivity and anxiety has always manifested in Basil since he was little, but as he's grown it's transformed into something much darker and harder for Basil to handle.

It isn't hard to see why Basil might tend to worry about stability, his own self worth, and struggle generally with depression due to his environment. But from age 12 on to the present, a terrible tragedy in the form of a member of his friend group taking their own life would exacerbate these issues in Basil for unfortunately very personal reasons, on a much deeper level than it would even affect the rest of his friends who knew her. As it turns out, Basil would become involved in a cover-up of Mari's death, an attempt to protect and absolve Sunny- who had accidentally pushed her down the stairs- from any involvement. Basil had already considered Sunny to be his friend, one of his best friends even, so the idea of anything changing rocked him to his core. The fear of being left behind and alone, on top of worry for his friend's wellbeing, ultimately forced Basil's hand. This incident would be one that would haunt Basil for the following four years, resulting in his worst attributes being exacerbated, and his ability to cope with them eroding over time as Sunny would become a recluse, Hero and Kel would distance themselves, and Aubrey would ultimately become Basil's own bully as she turned her grief to anger.

Basil's dedication towards protecting Sunny and keeping the status-quo in check became so great that he would continue to keep the secret for years, doing whatever it took even if it meant having to witness how badly the lie affected not only his closest friends, but all of the people who ever knew Mari. It would turn Basil into a nervous wreck, wracked with guilt yet trapped in a situation of his own making, unable to find an out while grappling with the reality that telling the truth would ultimately be risking the thing he fears the most: losing those he cares about, and once more being left alone. It's why Basil's reaction to learning Sunny is to be moving away soon is so dramatic, because not only had he been left to deal with the aftermath on his own, now he was to be faced with the notion that nothing could ever be fixed. Sunny was leaving, and he would have nothing. No one.

Analyzing this situation in particular brings to light just how deeply Basil had been troubled even before it occurred, as somehow he knew how to construct a noose at the age of 12 to fabricate the lie of Mari's 'death' in the first place. The fact he would jump to covering it up rather than go find help shows this as well, his own insecurities simply too great for him to have seen value in any other solution. Worse still is the fact that on into his teen years as Basil bore the burden of guilt, his own worries and delusions about what had actually happened would manifest in hallucinations, this "Something" that Basil has convinced himself is the true perpetrator of Mari's death, the real cause behind the ruination of his beloved peace and happiness with his friends. So confident in the character of Sunny- to an undoubtedly flawed degree- had Basil become that he'd begun to blur reality and fiction, just as Sunny had been doing for the last four years. There is even a bad ending that involves Basil taking his own life, which underscores just how deeply the trauma goes.

In the end, Basil is a boy who is deeply affected by the circumstances of what ultimately was a terrible accident, and his deep desire to help someone he cared about so deeply resulted in him doing something terrible that would affect him from that point on. Though Basil has undoubtedly been changed by the incident, as had all of their friends, it doesn't change the fact that his positive traits are still present, and there's every possibility that Basil would be able to recover and return to some semblance of the previous life he enjoyed with his friends, given the more hopeful future that the true ending implies. Basil is just, unfortunately, someone who was already dealing with a lot of confusing and upsetting emotions at such a young age with no one to really help him understand any of it, leaving him to develop tendencies that- while stayed true to his overall kind and passive nature- would lead him down a dark and unfortunate path.

5-10 Key Character Traits:
+ Kind
+ Considerate
+ Sentimental
+ Humble
+/- Pacifist
+/- Sensitive
- Worrywart
- Co-dependent
- Gloomy
- Insecure

Would you prefer a monster that FITS your character’s personality, CONFLICTS with it, EITHER, or opt for 100% RANDOMIZATION? Conflicts!
Opt-Outs: Vampire, Manticore, Shade, Slime, Goblin, Nephilim, Arachne, Lich

Roleplay Sample:

Basil on the TDM!
Thread with Aerith