starwatches | ✘ character information

"you just do what you're told. like you always do."

TATTOO & SIGN: Scorpio. An ♏ near his abdomen, close to the edge of his hip.

PERSONALITY:

Hei is a lie folded into another lie--- a man who is never who he seems, and whose true identity is perpetually elusive and obscured. In some cases, he’s Hei a ruthless Contractor, assassin and syndicate agent whose prodigious skill has made him infamous, earning him the nickname of Black Reaper. Then there is Li Shenshung, a sheepish and shy exchange student from China—Hei’s undercover identity, whose false face may, in fact, clue us into who Hei—or Li—truly is. Neither is his true face; each is an exaggeration fashioned for utilitarian purposes: the killing mask and the everyday disguise.

But at the heart of the man is an individual who gave up his life—his childhood, his family and his innocence—to protect the sister he loves.

To begin to understand Hei, we must first comprehend his world:

Fourteen years ago, the stars and the moon disappeared.

Their disappearance followed the creation of two areas of anomalous and chaotic space in Brazil and Tokyo, born in a supernatural explosion that destroyed the surrounding landscape and snuffed out the stars in the same breath. Given the names Heaven’s Gate and Hell’s Gate, they were inaccessible territories from which originated a myriad of mysterious phenomena.

The Gates’ presence altered the course of humanity forever. Within a week of their appearance, people began to become something other than human. Randomly and indiscriminately, men and women lost their human hearts, emotional capacity replaced by pure rationality and supernatural abilities.

A young girl confesses to her high school crush and at the end of the day, they are together; but when she wakes up the next day, she’s lost her heart—she does not love him because it does not make sense to her, procreation at her age isn’t logical, and she kills him when he refuses to leave her alone. A mother abandons her child because there’s no point in taking care of another human being.

For some, they become Dolls. And just like their name implies, they are shells of who they once were. They appear to lose any semblance of identity and agency, becoming passive mediums with the ability to send out observer spirits—extensions of themselves—to watch and track the world around them.

But the dangerous ones are the Contractors. Their name comes from the fact that Contractors must complete a remuneration every time they use their powers, an involuntary action they perform every time they use their powers, ranging from eating flowers, de-aging, spilling their own blood, or even breaking their own fingers. For each Contractor born, a false star appears in the sky. Akin to dolls, they also become shells of themselves, but whereas Dolls are passive, Contractors have no problem fighting for their own self-interest. They are self-serving by nature, in such that Contractors are purely rational, capable of disregarding emotions in any given situation. It’s not to say they are truly and utterly emotionless, as many humans believe, but rather that their natural and automatic state is that of unmitigated rationality and reason. Community, love, friendship, procreation—it just doesn’t make sense to most of them.

However, Hei’s world can’t be divided into simplified binaries. It’s not a matter of bad and good, with Contractors as the evil enemy and the humans as the victims. No, humans are as akin to monsters as the Contractors they fear. With countries and secret organizations vying for control over the Gates, and for the substances and research smuggled from them, the world has become a terribly dark and vicious place. Contractors and Dolls are treated as tools, even traded as commodity. Children who become contractors are taken in by government and secret agencies, the memories of their parents and their own wiped; then they’re shaped them into weapons for the selfish goals of powerful men and women. Contractors are experimented on, bred together in laboratories to produce specific powers. Dolls are used by governments and organizations alike as spies—placed into glass tubes and used to track information and people—or they act as decoys, “programmed” with false memories and personalities of other humans. In one episode, Huang tells Hei that without the Syndicate, he’d just be a killing machine, and yet, he kills only because he is ordered by the syndicate. In a world where Contractors and Dolls are urban legend, Contractors can either hide, fight or be used.

Hei’s own story begins a world away when the sky was still lit by real stars. While some older brothers tease their sisters, or want nothing to do with them, Hei had doted on his younger sister, Xing. He had taught her how to watch the stars, how to wish on them—and after doing so, she once declared, in her tiny voice, how she was going to be a nurse one day, no, a nurse that would travel into space.

But one day, the stars disappeared, and soon after, Xing became a Contractor.

The Syndicate, a front for a global organization with interest in the Gates’ powers, took her into custody as Xing was both dangerous and useful. But even if she was a Contractor, Hei was still devoted to his sister, and when they came for her, he realized that the only way he could protect his sister, never mind keep his memories of her, would be to come with her. Maybe they expected him to die quickly, and thought why not---let the kid try. And so, the syndicate took two children that night, erasing their parents’ memories, and destroying their childhoods.

Xing—or Pai, as was her codename—became an agent of the Syndicate, and Hei followed suit. They were still young children when they started killing, sent on jobs as a team. Even without abilities Hei survived. Then came the Heaven’s Gate War: a war between countries vying for control of the Heaven’s Gate in Brazil. It was the first war fought with Contractors, and Hei and Pai were soon sent as child soldiers to participate in the conflict. They were practically raised by the war, in the heat and danger of jungles infested with remorseless Contractors, all determined to get their job done. But the two of them still managed to survive—Pai, with her ability to generate electricity, and Hei, even without supernatural abilities, by force of sheer will and skill.

But the Contractors in the war realized that the Syndicate had ulterior motives for their involvement, and that they ultimately sought to destroy the Heaven’s Gate in order to eliminate all Contractors and Dolls. Destroying one Gate would destroy the other as they were connected. Working with another Contractor, Amber, Pai realized that the only way they could prevent the Gates' destruction, was to prevent anyone from accessing them through her abilities. Generating electricity was merely the tip of the iceberg, Pai could alter the molecular structure of objects and individuals, and in this case, she could render the area around the Gate inaccessible by changing its subatomic structure. To the human eye it would merely disappear.

Amber and Pai obtained a rare substance from the Gate that could augment her powers, and without telling Hei, his sister would sacrifice herself to save her kind—one of the most UnContractor-like things a Contractor could do, but as Amber would later say: they were growing, changing as people.

However, Pai wouldn’t let herself simply die. Using the same power molecular manipulation, she transferred her powers into Hei, leaving him with a part of herself. Perhaps it was out of sentiment, of wanting to be with her brother, who she still loved even after losing her heart; or perhaps it was also a matter of practicality, realizing that her powers might be needed again. In the aftermath of Pai’s sacrifice, the world lost an entire continent, and Hei lost his sister. Left in the dark by Pai, Hei didn’t realize that she was truly gone, and that what was left of her was inside him. Even after the war, Hei would spend years seeking her whereabouts and the mystery about her disappearance.

To say that Hei loves his sister is an understatement. He was willing to give up his whole life to protect her. And during the war, she was the only emotional connection he had as a human amongst contractors.

After the events of the Heaven’s Gate War, Hei believed that he has become a Contractor. His new powers would suggest so, but by his behavior, we see how utterly untrue that was. A Contractor, and certainly a newborn Contractor, thinks of only self-interest. Even after the war, he still lived for his sister, allowing himself to be controlled by the Syndicate in order to investigate her disappearance.

Now, don’t get me wrong--- Hei isn’t a nice a person

Hei can be ruthless, duplicitous and even downright cruel when it comes to doing what he needs to do to get the job done. He’s a quick and remorseless killer, for he has spent his life killing people on command. Even nowadays, he will easily end a life if it’s necessary, though he refuses to harm innocents. Understandably, Hei has no patience for bullshit. When he’s on the job, he has no problem slapping people around, or even breaking their fingers to make them talk or to keep them in control. When he speaks, he’s markedly acerbic, saying only what needs to be said even if it cuts a person down to the bone.

He can be extraordinarily selfish at times. His single-minded focus on finding his sister blinds him to his own injustices. When Havoc, an old comrade of Hei’s, turns up as a Regressor—a Contractor who has reverted back to a human—he pressures her into entering the area around Hell’s Gate, when she tells him that it may reveal her forgotten memories. He does this despite knowing that Havoc may turn her back into a Contractor when brought into close proximity to the gate, and despite knowing that she truly cherishes her renewed humanity.

Worst of all, he has no problem lying to your face, beguiling you with a pleasant demeanor and words that he knows you’ll want to hear, for the sake of maintaining his own cover. And he’s a consummate actor, able to read your wants and dreams—to glean the emotion in your voice, because he is ultimately human, despite claiming to be a Contractor. He understands human emotion because he shares in it. But in a way, his disguise as Li Shenshung is an exaggeration of who he used to be, and who he could have been. He is a façade—a caricature of a person—but like the Jester in Shakespeare’s play, the fool is often the one who speaks the truth. In certain moments, we have to wonder if it is Li Shenshung who’s speaking or if it’s whoever Hei truly is. When he meets Nick, a scientist at the PANDORA research facility who takes him stargazing, Hei tells him, as Li Shenshung, how he used to gaze at the stars a long time ago. And when Nick reveals himself as a Contractor, asserting that he worked as a double agent to his dream of restoring the true night sky, Hei tells him that “Contractors don’t dream.” An admission spoken in such a broken manner that it couldn’t be a lie.

Despite the blood on his hands and the lies on his tongue, Hei always goes out of his way to protect the innocent. When he’s ordered to kill Huang for betraying the Syndicate, he refuses and lets him escape. And when Yin is discovered and taken away by an old friend who knew her as a human, he gives her the option to choose her own path, even with orders to kill her. For a child neglected by her father, he spends a whole night as her surrogate brother, turning on an amusement park with his powers and taking her out for ice cream. Even if he was acting as Li Shenshung, he hadn’t needed to go that far. Hei is extremely protective of children—children who, like his sister and him, risk being thrown into a violent and corrupted world. One of these telling moments is in the second season, when Hei cradles a dying girl named Suou against his chest, letting her know that she isn’t alone as she passes away.

The only question left to answer is the question we started with: Who is Hei, or Li Shenshung, when you pull away his masks?

When Hei is truly himself, he still comes off as cold, callous and eternally severe. It’s only natural to mistrust him or to perceive him as dangerous at first. From a child learning to murder, to an adult still caught in the same killing game, he’s had to learn to steel his heart and repress his emotions to become as rational as the Contractors he faces. It’s easier just to convince himself that he’s a Contractor, which is ironic considering how much he despises Contractors—especially those that indulge in their self-serving nature. But even though he may call himself a Contractor throughout the series, human compassion undermines his cold demeanor. You just have to be patient to see it.

In a world that has become increasingly selfish, where important and corrupt people individuals wield dangerous powers in global game of increasing risks—Hei, for all his skill as a Contractor, wants nothing of it. Wealth, glory, power—it all means nothing to Hei, who only dreams of protecting the people he cares for, and perhaps one day, living in peace.

POWER: Hei’s signature power is his ability to generate and control electricity: he can shut off the power in a building, light an amusement park, or kill people by electric shock, either by touching them or transmitting his power through a conduit like metal or blood. But this power is just part of his ability to alter objects and beings on an atomic level. Pai used the same power to destroy South America with the help of a meteor shard to augment her abilities. It’s also said that he can potentially change humans into Contractors through this power. Clearly , Hei won’t be able to do either of those things in Zodion. It seems fair that his power be limited to generating electricity.

Beyond that, Hei is adept at fighting—fandom calls him The Electric Chinese Bat Man. His knowledge of martial arts lends to prodigious feats, such as jumping off skyscrapers, dodging a volley of supernatural attacks, or moving at speeds fast enough to be missed by the human (or Contractor) eye. It’s not that he posses any special powers. He’s a top-class agent because he was once a human who had to fight against Contractors, which forced him to hone the only ability he had--- his ability to fight. Even nowadays, he relies mainly on his fighting ability before he resorts to using his powers.

SUITABILITY:

Hei is good at taking orders and doing what it takes to survive. Even if he’s not particularly interested in sex, he’s going to be pragmatic about it. If sex is what it takes to stay clear-minded and strong, then he’ll have sex. I doubt that Hei possesses the same sense of embarrassment that society ingrains in normal people. It’s not demeaning to fuck a stranger; it’s just a human function, one that he’s likely had before.