#His relationship with Doumeki is on full display | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cosmicjoke · 3 years

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More Saezuru rants incoming, haha. I know I’m gonna lose followers like this, but whatever, I gotta talk about it.

Well, I’m finally all the way caught up, just finished chapter 44. I know all of this has probably been discussed into infinity, since I’m always late to the party. So one thing I want to kind of talk about here is Yashiro’s constant attempts to push Doumeki away, to make Doumeki leave him, and the reasons behind that.

It’s obvious Yashiro doesn’t know how to react to Doumeki’s kindness or gentility towards him, and it’s obvious that it’s because Yashiro’s only ever been treated with brutality and cruelty. He’s so used to being treated as worthless and as unlovable, that being touched by gentle hands and with tenderness is, tragically, in it’s own way, a worse kind of pain than anything physical he could experience. Like it shorts out his brain almost. It leaves him confused, and frightened and lost. Abuse, being abused, being hurt, is such a common, every day part of his life, that to experience the opposite of it is, in itself, almost a traumatic event to him. That highlights in such a profoundly sad way just how deeply damaged Yashiro has been made by the actual abuse he’s suffered. That it’s rendered him unable to process or accept kindness, rendered him incapable of seeing himself as deserving of kindness, and made his kneejerk reaction to such treatment one of fear and pain and confusion.

One thing I want to talk about though, other than that deeply tragic aspect of Yashiro, is another equally tragic experience, and how, I think, it’s affected his relationship with Doumeki, and his fear of allowing Doumeki into his heart. And that goes back to Kageyama, and Yashiro’s experience with him. Kageyama is the first person Yashiro loved, of course, the first person he ever developed real feelings for, and as we know, Kageyama failed to return those feelings at all, in fact, in the most damaging way possible, and at a time in Yashiro’s life of such great vulnerability, rejected those feelings, and rejected Yashiro in the process. I think the impact of this on Yashiro, and his relationship to Doumeki, and his attitude towards love in general, can’t be overstated. Yashiro’s one experience with love, his one experience with allowing himself to be vulnerable, to be open and expose his true self to another person, in this case, Kageyama, ended in Kageyama utterly failing to even acknowledge Yashiro’s feelings for him, and seeming entirely oblivious to those feelings to boot, unaware or uncaring. You can only imagine then, coupled with the horrific sexual abuse Yashiro had gone through up to that point at the hands of his stepfather, how these two experiences would have shaped his view on love, and the kind of pain it not just CAN cause, but in Yashiro’s experience, will without doubt cause.

The scene in which Kageyama tells Yashiro he cares for him because he’s his “friend”, and Yashiro’s reaction to that, the way he starts laughing almost hysterically, is so obviously Yashiro trying to cover up his own unbearable hurt, and it’s incredibly painful to read. Kageyama telling him he only cares for him as a friend is the door shutting on Yashiro’s hope for some sort of romantic relationship with Kageyama, and out and out rejection of Yashiro’s feelings, and making it all worse is Kageyama’s own obliviousness to those feelings, his lack of understanding about why Yashiro starts laughing. It’s like Kageyama is sending Yashiro the message that he never cared enough to even realize what should have been obvious, which was that Yashiro was in love with him. Of course, Kageyama demonstrates his own lack of perception throughout the story. And later, we get to see the full extent and impact of Kageyama’s dousing of Yashiro’s hope, when Yashiro is back home alone, and he begins to cry, faced for the first time with a new kind of pain, separate from the pain the sexual and physical abuse he’s suffered up to that point. And that’s the pain of unrequited love. He’s truly devastated by it. By the one person who he hoped might love him as a person, who might treat him as a person worthy of love, instead essentially telling him that he only thinks of Yashiro as a friend, and displaying absolutely no awareness of Yashiro’s actual feelings. Again, that loss of hope, that rejection, coupled with Yashiro’s abuse at the hands of his stepfather, and many other men, had to have reinforced to an almost irreparable degree Yashiro’s low sense of self-esteem, his belief that he’s an unlovable freak, incapable of inspiring anything in others but loathing and disgust.

I think that experience has a huge impact on how Yashiro reacts then to Doumeki, and Doumeki’s insistence that Yashiro is in fact a beautiful person, a person worthy of respect and kindness. There are many reasons Yashiro doesn’t want to start a relationship with Doumeki, despite clearly being in love with him, but one of those reasons is just fear of rejection. I think Yashiro is actually terrified that Doumeki doesn’t mean what he’s saying, or that, as he later tells Kageyama, that Doumeki is simply infatuated with him, blindly following him like a baby bird. I think Yashiro is afraid of Doumeki eventually “coming to his senses” and realizing Yashiro really is all the bad things people say he is, thusly rejecting him. If that were to happen, Yashiro would then be faced with the pain he felt when Kageyama rejected him, that pain of unrequited, unreturned love, and that scares Yashiro incredibly. He doesn’t want to have to feel that ever again. Which of course is also one of the reasons I think Yashiro tries never to get involved with anyone beyond a sexual relationship. He doesn’t want to involve emotion, or feeling, because the pain of rejection is too much for him, the awful reminder that he’s capable of falling in love, but is himself unlovable. Of course it all ties back into the consequences of child abuse, and how those consequences manifest, in Yashiro’s case, believing himself to be a creature incapable of being loved. The cruel duality then of him being fully aware of the possibility that he’s capable of developing feelings for another person, while at the same time fully convinced he himself can’t be loved, is absolutely heartbreaking.

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #yashiro #yashiro x doumeki

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