rhodochrosite | i have been aware of THE KILLER since birth

my life has not been the same ever since i saw <THIS VIDEO> and then <THIS TWEET> so in this post i will go through some of my favourite Killers per my personal use of the term as it has evolved. not all people who kill are The Killer, it has a very specific set of connotations to me including: wealth, charm, beauty, severe psychological issues, beauty, generosity, manipulativeness, reliance on persona, association with predator animals, being a top, general sociopathy, and also beauty. it's also a gender neutral term but since i exclusively read trashy supernatural het romance young adult fiction i lack examples of girls who are The Killer (suggestions welcome). i AM basically using The Killer as shorthand for a general type of ya love interest which you will probably recognise instantly if you have even a passing familiarity with the genre.

anyway here are The Killers in question, i thought this would be a list of fictional characters who remind me of jaemin but not all of them ended up on here:

NA JAEMIN (NCT)
you know what he looks like

clearly rich as hell considering his rotation of fuckoff expensive and exclusive luxury watches (collecting watches is inherently a rich person trait imo) and his habit of generously showering other members with $$$ gifts, though he claims not to be which is just such a blatant LIE it is only further proof of Killerism
bermuda triangle face so handsome it's unreal he doesn't need to clock in because his face does it for him. his face is effortlessly hitting every kpi on its own his face has won employee of the month for like 3 years running. even if i wanted to be mad i couldn't be because every time i see him i instantly forget whatever just happened due to the dark sorcery powering his appearance. gets kinda unnerving sometimes
extremely You Are Not Coming In, incredible ability to say a lot while divulging literally nothing about himself, these days doesn't even bother to dress up the fact that he is deflecting
obsessively possessive over his inner circle, gets sulky and jealous when he perceives that he's being neglected but also gets uncomfortable when people are emotionally sincere at him, because he has serious control issues and dislikes not being able to dictate his own image. he doesn't want to react he only wants to initiate
i've talked about jaemin idolsona 5000 times but the Conceal Everything persona stuff is all basically visible from space. another manifestation of his control issues
fansign boyfriendisms impeccable, diverting every interview into Love For Czennies treatise #54984845 impeccable
conscious habit of staring people in the mouth instead of the eyes is definitely a sign of Killerism as well
seems to have daddy issues (never mentions him, only ever speaks warmly about his mother) which i didn't initially think was a trait of The Killer but for some reason pops up repeatedly in this list? so i guess it is
happy baby snake face and also unhinges jaw to eat prey whole
1.0
mansplain manipulate malewife

YOO JUNG (CHEESE IN THE TRAP)

megarich chaebol heir, also happens to have a watch-collecting hobby
SOOOOOOO SO SO HANDSOME and fashionable, extremely popular with boys and girls alike but especially girls it seems
straight up a sociopath, near-flawlessly models social courtesy and generosity in order to evade suspicion and stay well-liked so he can orchestrate his schemes when he wants to, but has no actual moral compass (until he meets seol and decides to set her as his new moral compass)
cold and manipulative as fuckkkkkk you never know whether he says/does something because he means it or because it's what he thinks the other person wants to hear or because he's setting someone up to do his dirty work for him but without ever lifting a finger or saying anything that could outright be traced back to him
possessive, only likes the people he likes and will go to great lengths to secure their affection, hates the people he hates so much he will ruin their lives over the smallest things via indirect manipulation of others. no remorse whatsoever for actions causing severe physical and psychological harm to others even if it turns out he was wrong
mostly uses other people to enact his revenge plans but one time he personally beat the shit out of a guy who was stalking seol and nearly killed him, then promptly flipped into caring attentive boyfriend mode when he saw seol, and did not realise this was disturbing behaviour at all. he is so The Killer it's unreal
strong association in-story with predator animals, particularly snakes: "he will eat me up whole," anyone?
can get childish and sulky especially when his favourite people (it's really just seol) aren't paying attention to him
a really really good boyfriend after the toxicity between him and seol starts clearing up (and honestly even when they were at their peak toxicity)
loves his mother, hates his father
1.0
LITERALLY A BUSINESS MAJOR can i make it any more obvious

ECHIZEN RYOGA (PRINCE OF TENNIS)

doesn't come from old money like most of the rest of this list but is clearly involved in shady criminal dealings that fund his international wanderer lifestyle, even outside of the gambling fraud he was committing in cruise the movie. the echizens obviously aren't poor by any stretch of the term either
echizen ryoga is a very handsome young man. super charming and flirty also. 2021 tenirabi valentine's event has killed more people than all the volcanoes on earth combined
hasn't explicitly committed any murders that we know of but i wouldn't be surprised, considering that in cruise he was working for a guy who didn't hesitate to shoot real actual bullets at middleschoolers and didn't bat an eye the whole time. i think in terms of literal crime he's more of a con artist type, but in terms of tennis he has probably the most indiscriminately destructive superpower ever because he eats other people's superpowers, causing them to permanently lose the ability to play. relatedly(?) his presence in any team causes it to begin destabilising because his existence is inherently corrosive or something. he doesn't even need to TRY in order to be The Killer. not that he displays any remorse over his actions, intended or not
inner circle consists of one person (his brother) and his complex in that direction is insane, he truly doesn't care about anything else. he sabotaged his own gambling operation for ryoma, he saved seigaku for ryoma, he came to u17 for ryoma, he defected to team usa and then to team spain for ryoma
in fact has like 2 personality traits outside of his obsession with ryoma (liking oranges, liking naps). The Killerism...
serious serious daddy issues... nanjiro took him in because he had tennis talent but only if he promised not to play ryoma at full strength until ryoma had finished developing as a player, because nanjiro didn't want ryoga to eat ryoma. and yet ryoga doesn't bear any resentment towards ryoma for being the favourite, he's just totally devoted to him
i think he has a bit of a fixation on not owing things / reciprocating? eg 2021 tenirabi valentine's event "don't worry, i'll repay you sixfold on white day," leaving team usa for spain to prevent their team from disintegrating and only eating his ex-captain instead of the whole team out of gratitude for their care for ryoma. in that sense he's really generous but he's generous in a way that's like, umm... dubcon... if you know you know
speaking of 2021 tenirabi valentine's event the manipulationskdfjsgkjfgkjsfdgdfkhjgf Again if you know you know
a shark... TO ME
1.0 though i think he might be open to pegging since he seems pretty adventurous. but like, seriously megachad megatop

ATOBE KEIGO (PRINCE OF TENNIS)

horrifically rich heir to the Atobe Conglomerate. basically runs hyotei academy, has a private helicopter, literally owns a castle in england, styles himself King of Hyotei and actually pulls it off with his leadership and tennis skills, every exaggerated rich person trope ever applies to him
i think using oresama 1pp is a Killer trait
very handsome and arrogant, has a large fanclub in-universe and still regularly ranks very highly in yumejoshi lists irl despite being from a franchise over 2 decades old
control issues manifest in ostentatious displays of generosity and magnanimity eg: helping seigaku train and mentoring ryoma as a favour to tezuka (and then just becoming obsessed with ryoma anyway), multiple gifts of training equipment to fudomine, all the luxury renovations to hyotei for the benefit of the entire school, the whole movie atobe's gift, etc etc
being a highranker on the tenipuri competitive circuit automatically makes you a killer even if not a capital K killer and definitely means there are a lot of things wrong with you psychologically speaking, but atobe also likes to fuck with his opponents by forcing them into drawn-out stamina competitions intended to destroy their physical health potentially permanently, so he's especially Killeristic. see: pushing tezuka into a near career-ending injury in his first onscreen match in the funniest and deadliest manifestation of pulling your crush's pigtails on the school playground ever
as the atobecorp heir he's been media image trained since birth probably and he has a very tight grip on his projected persona of faultless dominating king
hyotei is cliquey as hell, the most private school girls team out of the entirety of tenipuri imo, though atobe is a pretty fair king and still allocates attention to his other subjects. it's pretty obvious he has tennis team favouritism tho
1.0
being a libra man is inherently Killeristic

KIRYU KYOSUKE (YUGIOH 5DS)

not rich, is in fact actively seeking to kill the rich
still handsome though
super charismatic leader who steadily grew more and more unhinged until he went totally off the rails, killed a guy for real, got murdered by police, came back to life as the vessel of an omnicidal god in order to enact revenge with a side of genocide and apocalypse wreaking. the psychological issues speak for themselves. also one of the few Killers who did actually kill someone onscreen
overwhelming desire for control and power is what led to the splintering of team satisfaction, who were happy to go along with his vision and leadership until he got too obsessive and pushed too hard and crow and jack were no longer willing to follow (yusei too martyr complexed and head over heels in love to leave at this point)
loved his team so so much until he perceived that they had betrayed him and then hated them so so much it fuelled his resurrection
since we only ever see his flawless persona control era in flashback and in the current timeline he's either fully vengeance-blinded maniac or despairingly stricken with guilt and ptsd, he doesn't come off as persona savvy as some other Killers on this list but i do think he always had the murderousness he just used to be better at hiding it. i also think that post second resurrection the sadism is still there even tho he's "reformed"
we literally know NOTHING about his past before he showed up in satellite one day and was like Hey wanna form a vigilante team and change the world with me? to yusei/crow/jack, so people are definitely Not Coming In
around a 0.9 though i don't think anyone in 5ds is topping him since it's a bit of a Whoops All Bottoms cast
being a scorpio man is also inherently Killeristic

ALEC (TWILIGHT)

this is my list so i will put whoever i want on it including random minor characters from vampire romance ya fiction. as if it's my fault alec from the volturi was classically The Killer in all the reneslec fic i read on ffn when i was 11
in canon his two personality traits are that he's a member of the volturi (so a literal cold blooded killer) and super super beautiful
probably really rich since vampires are all rich and since he's part of the vampire royalty cabal that doubly applies. probably really arrogant for the same reasons
his superpower is sensory deprivation so i think it is not a stretch to read control issues into that
this passage from my sacred reneslec text 'dusk' by seph meadowes: Even though I was already quite comfortable with him, that lightheaded feeling always seemed to be there when in his presence and that feeling of danger and fear I knew was never going to go away. Everything about Alec just seemed to scream predator. He wasn't the type of predator that charged at you with fangs and claws out ready to draw blood. He was like a snake, just coiled and ready to spring at the right time.
unknown if daddy issues but like, probably
1.0 WHATEVER

JOHN QUINN (NIGHT WORLD)

probably rich since he is vampire royalty
really handsome, uses physical attractiveness and somewhat unhinged charm to lure human prey in so he can run a slave trade for vampires
known for being particularly ruthless, uptight and cold even among other vampires
obviously kills people for real, no moral qualms about it
his dad killed his vampire fiancee back in the 1600s but also like father-in-law issues since said fiancee's dad was the one who turned him into a vampire and has been his boss/king ever since then. until he illegally falls in love with a human lol
1.0 why not

well that was long as fuck but thanks for reading... if you know of any other killers feel free to let me know ^__^

pt 2 now here!!