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swallowerofdharma · 20 days

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Yashiro’s Cruel God part one

Disclaimer: this post contains a detailed and straightforward analysis of chapter 25. Doumeki isn’t the villain, if you were worried about that. Actually I must apologize because I wanted to talk about him too, but as usual I started this meta with Yashiro and got carried away. This is also why I am dividing it in parts to avoid having a very very long post. So other parts will hopefully follow to fully elaborate the premise I made. Thank you for understanding. And please take care of your wellbeing, if mentioning Yashiro’s stepfather upset you, maybe skip this one.

Premise: not a matter of perfection but of balance

This person I followed reblogged the Declarations of healthy adulthood by David Richo in big big font and - having only one thought on my mind apparently - I read all that text in Yashiro’s POV. I actually don’t think that this is a perfect model or anything, and I am generally skeptical of self help books (I only assume this is something like it), but why not use this as an example, while considering something that I find interesting about Yashiro and Doumeki? During the discussion about the latest chapter, I said something along the lines of Doumeki representing young love, while Yashiro’s approach has been more mature, and I meant it thinking about Yashiro being aware and cautious about hurting others [and being intentional when he does, since he put a bullet in Doumeki’s leg] and being quite self reliant, and yes I know that he is also afraid of being hurt/loved! in previous posts here, I have mentioned that Yashiro’s acceptance of his past is only-in-part denial or downplaying of trauma, because it has been also a strategy and an impressive sign of his maturity and determination to live in the present. Isn’t it exceptional that Yashiro doesn’t seem all that resentful of his parents? That he openly says that he doesn’t blame others? We have to confront his words always mindful of the fact that he usually is an unreliable narrator, but in many instances he says the truth or half truths and his demeanor confirmed that he did some of what David Richo proposes: I accept full responsibility for the shape my life has taken; I accept that I may never feel I am receiving - or have received - all the attention I seek; One by one, I drop every expectation of people and things; I let go of blame, regret, vengeance, and the infantile desire to punish those who hurt or reject me; No one can or needs to bail me out. I am not entitled to be taken care of by anyone or anything, I let go of control without losing control.

I thought that it was very interesting to consider the Yashiro/Doumeki dynamics from different angles, like older/younger, or even realist/romantic, for example. The point of this experiment isn’t to make a comparison of merit nor to talk about a character in better light than another. Maybe those differences need to be confronted or balanced: for example the realist maybe needs some of the romantic’s idealism to soar and not be stuck on the ground. Yoneda-san might be onto something so human and amazing here. An important clarification is due before saying anything else. As characters that are written as full human beings, with their complexity and contradictions, Yashiro and Doumeki can’t be put neatly into the opposite categories I proposed. The story is much more dynamic, so I ask you to take a further step and put those opposites at the ends of a spectrum and to move our characters freely in both directions. Yashiro tends toward being effectively the older and more realistic one but he has traits that make him move down towards the other end too, even to the extreme of being childish. Consider for example these other statements, from the Declarations of healthy adulthood: I need never fear my own truth, powers, fantasies wishes, thoughts, sexuality, dreams, or ghosts; When change and growth scare me, I still choose them. I may act with fear, but never because of it; I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me; If people knew me as I really am, they would love me for being human like them. These points clearly demonstrate Yashiro’s unresolved problems, where he is stuck if you want, and why probably nobody believed me when I pointed at him as being mature (eh, he has his moments tho, you can’t deny that).

I challenge everyone to consider that those four points in particular are quite challenging for most people in general, but particularly so for someone who has fear/betrayal as the foundational principle in their childhood instead of a normal amount even a scarse amount of parental love/safety. And I want to underline childhood here, not teenage years or later.

I need never fear my own truth, powers, fantasies wishes, thoughts, sexuality, dreams, or ghosts. Yashiro here is a mix of contradictions, because he outwardly seems to own those things, even making them a point of his persona, but most of those things are based on the lies he told himself, or his stepfather told him: see this other point

I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me. Isn’t this statement extremely helpful to understand Yashiro’s situation? To feel safe he had to build his personality according to the rules of the one who had all the power over him and had already taken away any sense of security from him. This is probably one of those things that can be hard to understand when you have never been there. Most notably, not only in the manga this has been pointed out, but it has been pointed out by Yashiro himself. He is self conscious of this, he knows that he lied to himself as a child, that he had to, and he is constantly choosing to continue lying because that is still the only foundation he has. There was no familial love, no other relative safety. Letting go of the lies actually means going to pieces and breaking down.

This isn’t different from what happens to people who are tortured. Yashiro’s father completely took away any sense of security and safety. The aggravating circumstances were that Yashiro as a child didn’t have any other point of reference or knowledge to understand what was happening with his body and in that state of mind what his father told him had to be the only truth possible. Parents who abuse their children most often don’t even realize what they are doing to its full extent. That’s the immense cruelty of these types of situations. The rules are lies, but the lies are rules to follow to be safe:

You like it when it hurts, right? If it doesn’t hurt, I can’t get into it.

What happened in chapter 25: why now?

Yashiro didn’t want to have sex with Doumeki and said so repeatedly. Doumeki has grown on him, behind liking his physical appearance or using him as a substitute for Kageyama: Yashiro truly liked this person and he liked that Doumeki was impotent. Thanks to that, Yashiro grew comfortable around Doumeki and with comfort and safety comes familiarity. When Yashiro discovered that the impotence was gone, he was angry and terrified. They had become too close and now the premise has changed and Yashiro couldn’t trust Doumeki or himself anymore. I won’t analyze here the scene in the shower but I’ll skip to the point. Doumeki only understood that his love was required, that he was wanted and stopped thinking. He acted passionately like any young person who had a normal foundation in love would. He didn’t understand anything that Yashiro asked or why there were mixed signals and what it all meant. He pushed and hurt and broke without being aware of what he was doing.

And Yashiro was trapped in a situation he had tried to escape from his all life: with a person who felt familiar, a person he loved and relied on, in the safety of a home, who wanted sex and was going to do what he wanted regardless of what Yashiro had to say. Yashiro desperately tried to control what was happening through usual patterns, making it hurt, asking Doumeki to do from behind, detaching the sex from his emotions, but he couldn’t and for the first time in his life sex was different from what he knew, because while Yashiro had loved his stepfather, his father didn’t love him and he didn’t treat him like Doumeki did. And every lies built around his father’s abuse came to the surface. Including the fact that his father never loved him. Doumeki broke him indeed because he broke through the lies/rules upon which Yashiro had intentionally built his entire personality/safety. And he wasn’t ready for it, he specifically said he didn’t want it, he had known all along, he already knew when men before Doumeki tried to make love to him and when he built a strategy to specifically avoid being confronted with those lies/rules. He didn’t love those men. He did love Doumeki though. But once again Yashiro didn’t have a choice. And he was physically hurt and recovering after being shot and knowing his life was in danger outside of that room. He had just discovered that Doumeki lied about being impotent the previous time he touched him in the car and before that. It was probably the worst timing possible for making love. At some point Yashiro grew resigned and even reciprocated a little, reaching for Doumeki, caressing his face, and he even reassured him before he fell asleep. There were words that Doumeki said that Yoneda didn’t disclose fully, choosing instead to immediately took us in the flashback with Yashiro. I think it is probable that what Doumeki said was something that Yashiro’s father had said and that we are going to confront before the end of the manga. I personally want to know these words more than what Yashiro said while an airplane passed by and Doumeki was unconscious. Morbid maybe on my part.

I have stated that I am not going to make Doumeki a villain here. The point of this analysis is just to see where Doumeki was in terms of maturity. To be continued…

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #saezuru analysis #yashiro #doumeki chikara #yashiro x doumeki #yoneda kou #eri reads saezuru

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annaritastella · 1 month

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Love him too much.

Another draw of mine...

#doumeki chikara #saezuru tori wa habatakanai #twittering birds never fly #yashiro #yashiro and doumeki in love #love #yashiro x doumeki #kou yoneda #saezuru feels #love them #ti amo #amore mio

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doumeki-kun · 10 months

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#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #twittering birds never fly #yashiro x doumeki #doumeki chikara #saezuru #saezuru fandom #doumeki #yaoi manga

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saezurumurmurs · 11 months

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Everyone says that Doumeki is not emotional during sex with Yashiro. There is a panel after Doumeki penetrates Yashiro he looks so intense. The emotion clearly on his face. Is he angry or trying to control himself. That was the first time he had intercourse with Yashiro in 4 years. Why that face? He is definitely over come with something.

Does This Look Emotionless To You?

I don’t know who everyone is, but Doumeki as ‘not emotional’ is just not a thing.

This is not an emotionless exchange. They are both fighting their emotions … and losing.

Doumeki is barely controlling himself, how could he not be? Yashiro is everything in this man’s world, and this is it after four years. Years in which he made himself into a man Yashiro had to take seriously. He doesn’t know what Yashiro has been feeling all this time and vice versa. There are still hidden feelings and truths for both of them.

More, they went over a line emotionally and they both know it. Yashiro slapping him around after the tattoo discovery, and his mostly calm acceptance of it, is a chrysalis point for them both. Yashiro has to come to terms with who Doumeki IS RIGHT NOW, and Doumeki knows for sure whatever Yashiro says, tenderness and love is what he wants, because that’s how he really feels.

I know this is disordered thinking… but for Yashiro violence is love. Or it was.

Doumeki is fighting to control himself, but he isn’t angry and he isn’t without emotion. He is still his stoic self or trying to be right now. He may be trying to give Yashiro what he wants, but he is also getting what he wants. And how much to feel, how much to give, how much to want… this is all part of what he will be fighting against.

But don’t forget, here is the man he’s been fighting for.

The one thing he wouldn’t want to do is chase Yashiro away by making the same mistakes he did before. Yet, with this kind of emotional longing between two people, how could he not be feeling a whirlwind inside? He is still trying to be strategic even now, but I think it can only work so much because you can be sure he really wants to make love to Yashiro… not fuck him, or manhandle him, or rough him up in anyway. He had likely hardened himself to this, and was prepared to give it to Yashiro with as much sardonic feigned unfeeling as he could. This is what we saw in that heated exchange of words. But Yashiro wouldn’t allow that. And that’s why smacking Doumeki around was the best way to ask for the tenderness he wanted from Doumeki.

In all the panels I’ve seen of 52, and without getting any dialogue yet, it seems clear that they are both feeling everything.

I think they’re both struggling to pull back from the edge and are both losing, because they’re on a fast train to wherever it is they’re going to end up.

Side note: How much intense, passionate sex has this ‘everyone’ had? Ain’t anybody seen these kind of “we fucking” faces before? These “I am going to crawl inside your soul” faces? These “this is too good and I can’t think straight, but I need to think straight” faces? Just me? Ok. 🤷🏽‍♀️

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #saezuru #twittering birds never fly #saezuru fandom #doumeki x yashiro #yoneda kou #doumeki #Yashiro #yashiro x doumeki #saezuru meta #saezuru chapter 52

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saezurubirds · 1 month

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Just a fantasy of mine

These two couples give off the same atmosphere. If Saezuru had came out in the 90s, I think the late Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung can pull off Yashiro and Doumeki in a Hong Kong adaptation.

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #yashiro x doumeki #happy together #leslie cheung #tony leung #opinion

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jcena18 · 8 months

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My drawing of September Magazine 2023 featuring Sexy Chuuya 🤭🤭🤭

#chuuya fanart #bungou stray dogs chuuya #chuuya nakahara #chuuyabsd #chuuya bsd #soukouku #soukoku #dazai osamu #bsd chuuya #dazai x chuuya #chuuya and dazai #moriarty the patriot #sherlock holmes #mikaela hyakuya #owari no seraph #yashiro x doumeki

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cosmicjoke · 4 months

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Do you think Yashiro would be better without Doumeki at this point considering everything that happened and is going to happen?

Hi there,

I don't really think Yashiro would be better off without Doumeki, despite the current situation and everything in the past between them. I say that because we see what's become of Yashiro without Doumeki. He's spiraled into a deep state of depression and malaise in his life, directionless and with little will to live. Part of that state for Yashiro is a direct result of Doumeki's shattering of his previous defense mechanism against his trauma. Unintentional as it was, Doumeki ripped away Yashiro's ability to shield himself from what was done to him as a child and as an adult at the hands of so many men, and all Yashiro is left with now is the brutal reality of his own victimhood. Another part of the reason for Yashiro's depression, though, is the loss of Doumeki himself. Yashiro was ready to kill himself right before the four year time skip, and again, part of the motivation behind that suicide attempt was the loss of Doumeki. Yashiro knew he couldn't keep Doumeki in his life. That to do so would be doing a great harm to Doumeki, pulling him into the kind of terrible life Yashiro himself was forced into. Yashiro isn't and never has been selfish enough to ruin someone else' life for his own benefit. So he gave Doumeki up, knowing how much losing the only person who had ever, truly loved him, would devastate him. Rather than face the pain of that loss, Yashiro chose to die.

But then, Doumeki saved him, and Yashiro had to go on living, still faced with the impossibility of having Doumeki in his life, and we see what that's done to him. We see how much it's hurting Yashiro now, how it's worsening his depression, believing that Doumeki no longer cares for him, or even possibly hates him.

The thing is, Yashiro has never known what it really is to be genuinely loved, and genuinely accepted for who he really is, except for those few days and weeks in which he had Doumeki. That was the only time in Yashiro's life he's known requited love, and the only time in his life he could actually be himself. He's been dealing with an incalculable amount of crippling trauma, on his own, his entire life. He had a single mechanism for coping with that trauma, one which is now unavailable to him, and which he can't ever get back. He needs help.

I think if Yashiro lost Doumeki now, it would destroy him. It would shatter what little motivation he has left to keep living. He needs to know there's someone there for him, who loves him, who accepts him for who he is, who won't hurt him, who won't judge him, and who can actually see who he is, too.

Doumeki is all of those things. I think Yashiro very much needs him.

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #twittering birds never fly #Yashiro #Doumeki #yashiro x doumeki

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everything-poetic · 1 month

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Yashiro being bitter

Then a few minutes later he's sweet again

And..

Sweet and bitter is the perfect description for yashiro😭

#saezuru #saezuru tori wa habatakanai #yashiro x doumeki #domeyashiro #lustfulcat #yaoi manga #yaoi

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danmeibrainrot · 10 months

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They're in love your honor

#saezuru #saezuru spoilers #saezuru tori wa habatakanai #twittering birds never fly #yashiro #doumeki chikara #doumeki #yashiro x doumeki

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twitteringnerdsneverfly · 3 months

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"I'm in love with you Kashira, that's why" I believe is what he meant to say, Yashiro-san

#twittering birds never fly #saezuru tori wa habatakanai #yashiro x doumeki

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swallowerofdharma · 18 days

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Yashiro’s Cruel God part three

Back to the premise of this series of meta, we have opposite concepts, older/younger and realist/romantic at the far ends of a spectrum. We have two characters that are dynamic and we want to move them on this spectrum. Because at the end of the day, this is a love story, and that means something: it is quite uninteresting to me personally determining who is better, it is more important seeing where they meet each other and balance each other. I have removed from my opposite concepts good/bad intentionally. But I will use terms like positive and negative connotations in connection with the characters’ goal of smoothing the differences, adapting to the other, changing because love pushed towards a balance. Positives and negatives are part of those concepts equally. Disclaimer as usual for all the adult content that Saezuru shows, I will talk about Doumeki’s first time in straightforward terms.

Doumeki

When I think of Doumeki in terms of a character in manga, several things come to mind. One that intrigues me most: he is someone who attacked his father, he didn’t kill him, or eat him… hello Eren, but he definitely had to violently confront his father’s sins. This is something that is never quite treated neutrally in literature, if you think about it. To us, Doumeki saved his sister, and his father deserved punishment anyway, so nothing wrong if Doumeki beat him severely. If we believe Inami, he almost killed the man, or the sentence Doumeki received, it was aggravated assault, - even if anyone would have justified his actions - he is sentenced and put away. From my understanding he chose to protect his sister privacy, but attenuating circumstances were probably considered. But how we feel about it doesn’t quite matter in the story. How Doumeki feels certainly matters more. To continue using as examples the Declarations of a healthy adult, like we saw with Yashiro, Doumeki at the beginning of the manga isn’t a child by any means. He had to confront quite abruptly reality, too.

Like with Yashiro, it is useful to consider these two statements: I am still safe when I cease following the rules my parents (or others) set for me; One by one, I drop every expectation of people and things. Doumeki was already a young adult, when he came to that violent confrontation with his father. He never had to question him, and I think that him becoming a policeman, following the same career path as his father, clearly shows that Doumeki was following his example, thinking it was a good one, trusting his father’s judgment and beliefs. I think we can safely say that what he discovered about his father and role model was monumental and shattering, that reality itself shifted for Doumeki in that moment. But breaking the proverbial egg came undoubtably later in life for him, at a point when Doumeki had the possibility to face a painful reality. There is something else very intriguing for me about how he told the story to Yashiro. He admitted that his sister changed when they were both much younger, but that he didn’t pay attention and avoided her. Little digression here, but I want to give an example to illustrate why I would interpret this detail a certain way. In my early twenties, I was on a trip with a group of friends in Spain and we decided to go see the Covetes dels Moros de Bocairent in the mountains near Valencia. Upon entering the first hole, I realized something very relevant to me. Since I was a small child I had to deal with quite severe arachnophobia and there was definitely a high chance that, if I went exploring the caves as I was setting to do, I would find myself in immediate proximity of spiders. I asked the local guide and he made a face like he had to deal with arachnophobes before and confirmed the possibility. The thing is, I really was eager for an adventure. And traveling was my favorite thing to do, more than that, exploring every nook and cranny of the places I went to was like a mission to me. So I made my decision and went in. I paid special attention to the movements I had to make, to the ropes, to the smooth surface of the rocks I put my hands on, to how the light came through and to the next hole and the next and I came out of those caves excited like everyone else. Later that night, already back to camp with my friends, I asked them if they saw any spiders. All of them had and they kept it quiet for my sake. I had the suspicion that was the case all along, but our mind is a powerful tool. I didn’t want to see spiders and I didn’t see them for real, because I wasn’t looking for spiders. Science tells you things like that about our minds, but to put it to the test and actually experience it really gives you a sense of full understanding. So going back to Doumeki’s story, it is very possible for me that he knew that something not right was happening, but he protected himself from having to confront a reality about his father hard enough for him to not be ready, so he redirected his feelings of discomfort toward Aoi’s feelings for him and gave himself permission to ignore her. I am not trying to put Doumeki under scrutiny or to blame him, I want to understand how he might have felt. I think it was a very normal thing for a teenager to do, but I also consider how Doumeki had the freedom to escape from reality to a degree that Yashiro certainly had not. And it makes all the difference in how they approach the world they live in and how they tend to be more-or-less realistic about their situation - and how at the core of the conflict in the story is their struggle to find a middle ground between conviction and objectivity, between the factors of belief or commitment and the factors of reason or knowledge. And why they inevitably go back and forth and not always act coherently, because they have hope and doubts respectively.

It is not possible for someone like me to have a normal romantic relationship. I didn’t want you to touch that side of me.

I intend to stay beside you.

Another aspect of Doumeki I find interesting in terms of a character in manga is how he seems to be someone who - as a teenager - was going with the flow, having no particular passion or goal or a personality that made him stand out. It stands to reason that he would follow his father’s choice for a career path, or that he wouldn’t even question his school nurse in middle school. I want to be careful here with my wording, because once again I am taking a step back from making judgments from a moral standpoint. I don’t believe that that type of situation and that breach of boundaries wouldn’t leave a wound on a young boy. What interests me here is how Doumeki recounts his experience: I was in a trance and I can’t really recall. Which is another example of how our mind protects us from what it could be too armful to us to process. Yoneda breaks the scene and doesn’t fully elaborate but we clearly understand what happened there. Doumeki wasn’t old enough to consent in any capacity and he didn’t question the nurse nor he told others. But he was old enough to know about sexuality and to make sense of what has happened and rationalize it as “my first time”. Furthermore, there wasn’t a queer element to it, the nurse being a woman fitted with what social representation of sexuality paints as normal. I’m pointing these things out to underline why Doumeki was able to preserve his self image in a way that just wasn’t possible for Yashiro. To properly explain why the moment that really shattered Doumeki’s sense of reality was finding his father on top of Aoi. The fact that he was a young adult makes it more bearable, so - if he now stands on shaky ground - his foundation makes him able to bear a certain load with strength of character and resilience. When Yashiro asked him to be careful, not to break him, he really meant it. Yashiro is in part very self aware and in part has to instinctively try to protect himself. Yashiro’s foundation is a bunch of lies that his father gave him and he knows that much. Hence his foundation is very fragile and when he is on shaky ground it’s hard for him to be strong and resilient. The queer element in Yashiro’s case is very much present, because ten years old Yashiro was told that he had to be a girl in the wrong body, because otherwise how could his father would want to have sex with him, or how could Yashiro could have an orgasm from it, giving what social representation of sexuality paints as normal? See how harmful that can be? Yashiro at least didn’t fully adopt that one of his father lies/rules, didn’t commit to it for what we see in the story. But the idea of being born wrong, of being a pervert, that it would have been easier for him to be a woman lingers. Especially when he realized that he had fallen in love with a boy, making his attraction towards both boys and girls a reality and his own: no longer a lie/rule his father put on him. That is in part why he cried so much upon realizing it it wasn’t just because he was unrequited and why he is still unable to consider same sex relationships a part of the normalcy and he is much more conflicted about it than Doumeki, who simply accepted that new discovery about himself. The last scene of the latest chapter packed quite a punch.

I have been very cautious about terminology and confronting the issue of sexuality and identity for several reasons. Mostly because I think it is such a delicate theme that Yoneda-sensei handles very sensibly imo. I think that once again I have to continue with this analysis at a later date. I realize that as usual I couldn’t make my point efficiently and briefly. To be continued then…

Buying an umbrella for someone and covering them from the rain is a particularly significant image in Saezuru. I really love how these two characters, Yashiro and Aoi, interact in the story and what that means for Doumeki on a deep unconscious level.

#saezuru tori wa habatakanai #saezuru analysis #doumeki chikara #yashiro #yashiro x doumeki #eri reads saezuru

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