#Both of them were essential to Dazai's journey

[thedarkdisgrace]

This is my thread from twitter on Dazai’s promise to Oda, how I believe Dazai tries to keep that promise & Dazai’s interactions with the PM + why Oda last words were what they were. I kinda had written this in response to some particular claims over there. Mostly around Dazai returning to the mafia.

Not gonna lie, this might be long for some, I actually cut out alot lol I kinda got carried away. These are just my interpretations, take them as you will. I also didn’t edit this from twitter so, sorry if there are spelling mistakes lol

I want to start out by saying that if you are viewing BSD in a “everything is either black or white” lens, I feel you are missing the entire point of BSD & a major theme. This story is entirely morally gray & every character is a different shade of gray.

There is no pure good or pure evil within BSD, even if some characters might get close to the extreme of one side or the other. Now, going into the rest of this with that mindset let’s start with EXACTLY what Oda said to Dazai.

“Be on the side that saves people. If both sides are the same, then choose to become a good person. Save the weak, protect the orphaned. You might not see a great difference between right & wrong but… saving others is just a bit more wonderful.” The Dark Era.

Oda is essentially saying that “sides” don’t matter, what matters is him choosing to be a good person. THAT is what Dazai promises to Oda. His promise is to become a good person. That is the goal he works towards everyday. Oda didn’t make him promise to leave the mafia.

It makes no difference what /side/ Dazai is on or who he interacts with. No matter where Dazai is or who he is with it doesn't change HOW he chooses to approach the world. As long as Dazai continues to do whatever good he can, to work towards being a better person, he is keeping

his promise to Oda. His interactions with the mafia or the people within it don’t affect the fact he is still choosing to try to be better everyday (which again, is keeping his promise). Whatever the mafia does is separate from Dazai even if he is interacting with the members.

Hell, even if Dazai ends up in the PM again with the upcoming trade, it doesn’t negate all the progress he made NOR does it break his promise. Dazai isn’t /completely/ different BUT he /is/ different than he was back then. His perceptions have changed, whether he admits it or not

That won’t change if he goes back. He will continue to be different if he had to rejoin the mafia. He’s fully capable of keeping his promise even then. There are all different levels & types of “doing good”. Dazai is still capable of doing good in the mafia, just not in the same-

exact ways he can in the ADA but all the organization's play important roles in protecting the city. People seem to forget that even the mafia members are mostly morally gray, they still have the capacity to do good, even if they also do bad. Chuuya is a good example as he has-

saved the entire city a minimum of twice, he loves his city & would give his life to protect it. On a smaller scale, Kouyou agreed to assist Dazai in getting Kyoka free from the PM & the government. Plus don’t forget Oda himself was a mafia member & ex assassin yet many describe-

him as a good person. Besides, the ADA has needed the PMs help countless times at this point, the ADA would’ve been screwed without them. Point is, Dazai can continue to chose to be a better person no matter what organization he’s with or whom he chooses to interact with.

His individual journey is up to him, but if he continues doing better that’s all that matters. But since I know people will disagree about what that promise means, let’s get to the root of WHY Dazai’s promise to Oda was to choose to become a good person.

So, why were Oda’s last words what they were? As we all know Oda was similar to Dazai in some ways when he was younger. As a child assassin, he was pretty much disconnected from the world around him emotionally & just going through the motions until Natsume came along.

Natsume gave Oda the book he had been looking for, the last installment of his favorite series. Reading that book is the key moment that altered Oda’s path. In Oda’s own words, “the world I’d known before completely changed. Before that all I had was killing.” The Dark Era.

But the copy Natsume provided was missing specific pages around why the assassin character in the book stopped killing, Natsume obviously did this on purpose. Before providing Oda with the last book, Natsume had told him “Then you write what happens next”.

Oda decides to take those words to heart later on & write about why the assassin stopped killing himself. This is where one of the most important lines is.

Oda says “I decided to write it myself. I would become a novelist & write a story about why the man stopped killing. But to become a novelist, I needed to sincerely know what it meant to live. So I stopped killing.” The Dark Era.

Oda admits here that he hadn’t really lived, hadn’t known what it /meant/ to live. To experience life in the way most people do. This is where he & Dazai connect. Neither of them had really lived & they couldn’t see a reason to do so.

Oda even says in the Untold Origins light novel, “I don’t need forgiveness. There is no forgiveness in this world. There is only retaliation- revenge against those who betray you.”

That was Oda’s mentality before but then Oda makes his choice to stop killing.

It’s only then that he starts to actually truly interact with the world around him & the people in it. /Especially/ the people. He starts to help people & through doing so he begins to understand living. Oda says he continued to think about one particular line from the novel-

“People live to save themselves. It’s something they realize right before they die.”

Oda believes Natsume knew he was an assassin. That he gave him the book with the torn out pages & that singular line left untouched to tell Oda to save himself. I believe Oda is right.

Natsume wanted Oda to save himself. As for exactly why Natsume did so, I couldn’t say as of right now.

But why is all that important?

Well, because that’s what Oda ends up telling Dazai with his last words.

Yes, Oda tells Dazai to become a good person, those are the words he uses & that is Dazai’s promise to him. But the message beneath the words themselves? /Save yourself./ Oda is telling Dazai the same thing Natsume told him. /Save yourself./

Oda wanted Dazai to save himself. He tells Dazai to become a good person, to save people, because that’s how he, himself, found an understanding of living. It’s how he experienced living for the first time & how he was trying to save himself a well.

He encourages Dazai to follow the path he did because they are similar & saving others was the only thing Oda could see that worked. & Dazai listens /because/ he knows Oda actually walked that path himself.

Oda would not care who Dazai associates with or where he goes as long as Dazai continues to try to save himself. To keep trying to be a better person for his own sake as well as others. Again, I repeat the line Oda kept coming back to. “People live to save themselves”.

So, if Dazai was hanging out with Chuuya (or anyone else in the PM or in the dark) or even started dating Chuuya, as long as Dazai continues working to save himself & saving others, Oda would be happy for him.

Dazai is also pretty clear with how he feels about Chuuya, given he never calls him ‘ex partner’ he only ever calls him his partner. I think what he says at the end of the lovecraft fight is an accurate description, “we’re enemies of the bad guys.”

Regardless of sides, their relationship hasn’t changed, they’ve proven that 3 times over already, & I doubt it will. Sides don’t matter because they’ve always only been themselves with each other. Dazai has still kept up trying to be better since reuniting with Chuuya,

That’s not going to change if he spends more time with Chuuya. Dazai is his own person & is more than capable of continuing to keep his promise no matter where he ends up or who he’s with.

Not to mention every single time Dazai & Chuuya have worked together again, it was for a good purpose. To save Kyu & prevent another Guild attack, Chuuya fought a dragon to save the city (without even talking about the plan beforehand) & with no guarantee Dazai would be alive

(aside their soulmate thing where they always know) & now they worked together to defeat Fyodor to save the world (hopefully saved it). So, obviously being close to Chuuya again hasn’t changed Dazai’s goals & he is still keeping his promise.

But tbh, at this point, I don’t think his promise is the /only/ thing keeping Dazai in the light & trying to become a better person anymore. Dazai in DA says “You were right, Odasaku. It’s certainly wonderful to be on the side that saves others. If you plan on living, that is.”

While Oda was right when he told Dazai being on the side of light wouldn’t be able to fix his loneliness, it’s clear by now Dazai sees the value in being there & he understands why Oda told him what he did. I think through the ADA, he has found more & more reasons to keep going.

In conclusion, Oda simply wanted Dazai to save himself by choosing to become a better person. Dazai is his own person & is more than capable of keeping his promise to Oda no matter where he is & who he’s interacting with.

BSD is a morally gray story & all the characters are various levels of gray, pretending the mafia is /all/ bad is just objectively incorrect given all they’ve done for the city.

Chuuya & Dazai’s relationship is one built on unyielding trust & his presence in Dazai’s life isn’t gonna affect Dazai choosing to be better everyday. It already hasn’t changed anything since they’ve ben working together again. I doubt his presence would ever change it.

Reminder to everyone, these are my interpretations & opinions. Take what you want from it, if you made it this far thank you for reading. i hope you guys liked it.

#bsd spoilers #bsd analysis #bsd manga #bungou stray dogs #dazai osamu #chuuya nakahara #oda sakunosuke #bsd #soukoku

[kikizoshi]

The Trap of Gogol as Raskolnikov

Okay... maybe it’s a bit of an overserious title, but I find it to be fitting.

So, I’ve seen the idea of comparing Gogol to Raskolnikov come up more and more, and I wanted to give my personal take on it.

My take: it’s a folly.

Now, make no mistake, I’m not saying that the comparison can’t be used for good in small doses. There are some comparisons that are beneficial to consider (i.e. both kill to reach a higher ‘something’).

However, I also believe that relying too heavily on the comparison for characterisation is essentially using crutches made of webbed glass--one small misstep and your characterisation comes crashing down, crippling you for a time (in my experience, at least).

Raskolnikov is reaching to be someone great amongst society, to become a Napolean and prove to himself and others that he can achieve greatness (and, I’m sure, to get a better life). He genuinely believes for a time that he’s capable of it, and thus starts his journey.

Gogol, on the other hand, isn’t trying to prove greatness. He doesn’t feel a need to. His “freedom” (going against society), isn’t to be great or prove power, the only thing he’s proving is his free will. To be free from the brainwashing of society. It’s just to escape his cage.

For my understaning of Gogol, I first had to understand the key to BSD’s character development. After reading multiple original source materials, I noticed that Asagiri has created each character to mirror a character in literature, but with one vital difference--he included the element that each BSD character needed to transcend the limitation (implied by the author) that caused the literary character to fail.

The key to Gogol’s character is realising what made Akaky Akakievich (protagonist of “The Overcoat”) fail--his intensively brainwashed compliance--and going against it. Akaky Akakievich followed the strictures of his society, even to his death. Gogol therefore actively rejects the ‘brainwashing’ of society altogether, as to him that equals freedom.

Raskolnikov isn’t “going against ALL society”, as far as I remember. He’s still operating within it, only against it for a time before it realises that he’s right. He’s working within it to prove greatness, and maybe bending some rules of his own society, but, overall, a freedom from society isn’t the point. Being accepted is. 

As far as freedom can go, Raskolnikov needs a freedom from innate morality, to be extraordinary, like BSD Dostoyevsky. Raskolnikov needs to have the qualities that will one day bring him greatness, that one day everyone will understand.

Gogol, on the other hand, goes completely against society. He doesn’t want to be accepted. He wants to be as unaccepted as possible, to prove his free will from the brainwashing instilled by society. He wants to go against the grain like Raskolnikov, but the end goal isn’t anywhere near a societal realisation. He doesn’t need anyone to understand, even if it’s lovely that Dostoyevsky does.

BSD characters tend to have what their book counterparts were lacking (in my experience, which is very limited, but I feel like it, at least, applies to Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Dazai, Pushkin and Goncharov). They have what it takes to succeed where their predecessors failed.

And so, I firmly believe that it’s vital to mention that Raskolnikov is Dostoyevsky’s character. And Akaky Akakievich is Gogol’s. Both are distinct and towering authors in their own right, and I don’t believe Asagiri would do one of them the disservice of basing such vital character depth in another author’s work. He wouldn’t make Gogol’s Ability “Crime and Punishment” just as he wouldn’t make Dostoyevsky’s Ability “Dead Souls”.

Therefore, Raskolnikov cannot be considered as a base source for Gogol. If you want to understand Gogol, then you’ll have to refer Gogol’s works.

Lastly--and most blatantly--Asagiri is clearly a lover of literature and loves the literary characters with such a passion that he’s created two manga series to portray them. It does him a disservice to say that he would confuse the character development between two such distinct and well-known authors.

And so, I don’t feel that, in good faith, I can as of now agree with the idea that Gogol is anything like Raskolnikov in more than a few surface-level ways.

Thanks for reading <3

#bsd #bsd nikolai gogol #nikolai #gogol #nikolai gogol #bsd gogol nikolai #gogol nikolai #bsd nikolai #bsd gogol #bsd analysis #bungo stray dogs analysis #bungou stray dogs analysis #bungo sd #bungou sd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #gogol analysis #nikolai analysis #nikolai gogol analysis #gogol nikolai analysis #anathe #thoughts

[joeys-piano]

☀️, CFCS

☀️- Was there symbolism/motifs you worked in? 

Catching Fire & Chasing Smoke was a fun little project over the summer~!(I say “little”, but it’s like 50k+ words of pure Japanese mythology and folklore + historical feudalism during the Kamakura period, set in the year 1287)

I had an entire section in my outline for the fic, solely devoted to the themes and motifs I wanted to integrate into the story. Loosely inspired by Journey to the West and the sheer length of said journey, I followed a similar framework in terms of how freakin’ long the story would be and there was a lot of room to just add and explore different motifs/themes depending on which arc of the story you were currently in.

There were 3 arcs. I’d say that the first and third were my favorite because there was a tengu vs. exorcists war in the first one and the main cast got to fight and seal away a demonic dragon from the netherworld as the grand finale.

THEMES

Journey & Travel

Oda can foresee future tragedies and wants to save people; Dazai is a four-tail kitsune that attracts tragedy no matter where he goes

Both are on a quest to find the fabled land of Paradise, a wondrous land flowing in alcohol and good food and a place where they can simply be themselves

Humanity

An interesting observation that most characters draw from Dazai is that he’s more human than youkai; considering he’s spent about 200 years living with humans and hiding the fact that he’s a kitsune, there’s more going on than meets the eye

Born as the vessel for a banished deity, Chuuya often grappled with the concept of humanity and the toed the line of where he truly belonged. From a human and youkai perspective, he is both and yet neither at the same time.

Identity

Both Oda and Dazai are outcasts to their respective groups and are traveling together in search of peace and to confront very personal and very real fears that have about themselves

Death & Resurrection

This was explored in the second arc when you learn more about Dazai’s past and the peculiar connection he has to a certain wandering priest by the name of Atsushi

In a metaphorical sense, death & resurrection applies to a number of characters because it signals change or growth or redemption, and there’s plenty of that

Family

Lots of found-family feels in this story; Kouyou basically raised Chuuya since he was seven and helped him learn how to control Arahabaki’s power and prepared him for later in life when he would have to follow the path of the minor god and help it hunt down four-tail kitsune.

When Kyouka lost her family, Kouyou and Chuuya took her in, comforting and helping her readjust to her new life as a vessel for a swordsman demon and the noticeable fragile health that followed.

Chuuya learned he had a long-lost little brother when he was in a village about a mountain away from the Ozaki Manor and came across a family heirloom from the Nakahara family. Although Chuuya has no recollection of his family (mostly because those memories were sealed away by said family when he was abandoned), he does recognize the name as being his own. When he bought the heirloom and inspected it, he saw a message scribbled into it that signified that his parents had another child. When Chuuya inquired about the Nakahra family, he learned that his family and several other families up North had perished due to a severe drought that claimed many lives. If there was a sliver of a chance that Chuuya’s younger sibling did survive, there was no way of knowing where they were.

By the same token, an adolescent by the name of Karma had come to visit a shrine near where his parents used to live before they moved up North a few years ago. He came to pay his parents  respects, letting them know how his life had changed since he heard about their death and to apologize that he couldn’t help them sooner. He had left the village during the drought to find work and to bring money back to help his parents survive and when Karma heard the news, he felt lost. Kneeling in front of the plaque with the Nakahara family name on it, Karma asked his parents what he should do. He didn’t know what to do. He felt alone in this world.In the midst of his mourning, a passing Buddhist monk saw Karma by the family plaque and inquired if Karma was related to the family. Karma was, stating that his parents had passed away rather recently, and that the bloodline of the Nakahara family rested on him now. Taking Karma’s’ comment into consideration, the monk mused that perhaps that statement isn’t exactly true.Because this Buddhist monk is very familiar with the Nakahra family. After all, he was the one that sealed away their former son’s memories.

MOTIFS

Scarlet Threads

These threads symbolize Fate and how certain characters and circumstances were destined to be tangled in one another

Shadows

There’s something very interesting about youkai shadows. They behave much like normal shadows, but they convey the inner self, thoughts, and feelings that the youkai doesn’t outwardly display.

A good example of this would be Dazai. He normally displays himself as a human; but if you pay attention to his shadow, you’ll see it slowly morph and take on kitsune-characterics depending on how he views himself in a particular moment. Or in some instances when he wants to reach out but is unable to, you’ll see that his shadow is reaching out for him and it visibly extends its hand and clasps it around another’s shadow.

Paradise

Paradise is essentially some version of Heaven or an ideal place where it’s safe and comfortable to be who you are. This is the fabled land both Oda and Dazai are traveling to find to find rest and closure and to strip away from the identities that their respective worlds had stitched to their skin.