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bsd-fan · 1 year

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Dazai, Chuuya, humanity and the mafia part 0.5: Foils

I wanted to do this analysis properly but the truth is that I simply don´t have the time for it, and there are so many things I want to /scream/ about soukoku. So this half-assed analysis will have to do (I swear there is thought behind all of this, this still will be insanely long and will contain spoilers from the manga and lightnovels). I also want to point out that as much as I love soukoku as a ship, most of this won´t be about them in a romantic way. Also, English is not my first language so this probably will have some mistakes, I apologize for them.

Now, I love soukoku but I most often than not find myself in disagreement with the way the fandom perceives them. At first I wanted to do this about their relationship exclusively but then it hit me that my real problem with the fandom´s perception (this includes soukoku stans and skk antis) is the tendency for making the characters all about soukoku. Because /that´s/ the real problem. Soukoku is a relationship formed by two incredibly complex and amazingly writen characters that when together make something even better. If we want to understand soukoku, then we need to understand the /individual/ characters first and then the relationship, never the opposite. We can´t try to understand the individuals from the relationship. That just doesn´t make sense. Some of the worse takes I´ve heard comes from this idea. Takes that go from “Chuuya is Dazai´s reason for living” to “Dazai doesn´t give a damn about chuuya because he left him” comes from this kind of thought. That´s the reason I´m gonna start by analyzing the characters /individually/ first.

Once I found someone asking why Dazai and chuuya are considered opposites by the fandom. At first, it seemed obvious, their personalities are constantly clashing, their life philosophies are completely different, and in the great scheme of things they don´t really share values or ideas, damn, even the colors used to represent them are opposites but then I really stop to think about it and I realized all of this differences ironically came from the same place. And this is fascinating because at the end, the reason they are consider opposites isn´t for all of their differences, it´s for the only thing they have in common. I´m gonna explain myself, every single character in bsd is built around something, there is a core in each of their characterizations and that is the defining thing for them. They develop as characters thanks to that.

“people live to save themselves” We can understand most of the characters in bsd using that quote. They have something that keeps pushing them, something they look for, something they will live and kill for and that´s their core. And...Dazai and Chuuya have exactly the same core. The main conflict for both of their characters is their inability to recognize themselves as human beings and the desperate need to find their humanity despite that. Going from that, the natural thing would be for them to be the most similar, right? I mean, they have exactly the same goal but the thing is that they decide to takle the problem in completely /different/ ways and /that´s/ what makes them opposites. In bsd we can trace parallelisms between almost every single character. I can trace parallelisms between Dazai and yosano, ranpo, oda, kunikida, nikolai and the list goes and goes (not mentioning fyodor because he actually /is/ a narrative foil) and the same thing happens with chuuya and half of the characters but even with all of that I wouldn´t consider them opposites, just different. But Dazai and chuuya? They are essentially the mirror image of the other and I´m not saying this in a romantic kind of way but in an objective one. Narratively speaking they share the most fundamental piece of their characterizations but even when they want the same thing, even with the same problem, they act in completely different ways and that´s because the root of the problem is different and the way they experiment it is also different. So, yes they are essentially two different sides of the same coin and it´s frankly fascinating to analyze them and the way they interact.

I´m gonna start by analyzing Dazai.

#bsd #soukoku #analysis #chuuya bsd #dazai bsd #Honestly this was just a long prologue #The real analysis start in the next part

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