I like your brain ty
possibly hot take but I think it’s actually more in character for Dazai to not have a tragic backstory in the traditional sense. like no dead parents, no childhood abuse (at least not overtly). just a brain wired for entropy. just a kid who looked at the sky and couldn’t feel anything. a child who should’ve been fine—but wasn’t.
I love the tragic orphan story as much as the next guy, but isn’t it worse if he had everything he needed and still turned out like this? not because the world hurt him, but because of his own brain. because his chemistry betrayed him before anyone else had the chance to. dazai’s not the product of trauma. he’s the product of existential rot. he’s not broken by something—this is just who he is. a factory defect.
it’s the difference between “i hurt because they hurt me” and “i hurt because i exist.”
like yeah it’s sad when someone’s shaped by their circumstances, but dazai is so, so unsettling as a character because his pain is self-generating. he didn’t need outside influence to spiral. to turn into what he became.
there’s something so deeply upsetting to me about a character who isn’t reacting to tragedy, but who is the tragedy. the kind of person who you want to save, but there’s nothing to save him from. there’s no villain to fight. no curse to break. it’s just him and the awful weight of his own existence.
dazai is not a story of destruction followed by redemption. he's a story of continuance. of surviving in spite of. he is not healed. he is not saved despite bettering himself some with the agency. he just keeps living by the thread of a promise because someone good looked him in the eyes and asked him to keep going.
and I just personally find that so much more devastating.
“Words are so powerful. They can crush a heart, or heal it. They can shame a soul or liberate it. They can shatter dreams or energize them. They can obstruct connection or invite it. They can create defenses, or melt them. We have to use our words wisely.”
— Jeff Brown
characters going “we were lovers once”: eh, it’s okay i guess. it’s nice enough
characters going “we were friends once”: absolutely devastating. one hit knockout i’m gone
Dazai is cruel. Dazai is abusive. In some way Dazai haven't changed and won't change. Dazai is manipulative. Dazai is dangerous. Many of Dazai's actions are disgusting. His actions could be perceived as inhumane. But Dazai is a human being.
It's always about being human. In your own eyes. In the eyes of others.
Dazai doesn't consider himself non-human because of his cruel actions. It's nothing about his morals. After all, Dazai had dealt with so many cruel people. He knows evil is human. He thinks he's lacking something. Something that makes others move forward. A purpose in life. Isn't he just lost?
Dazai's character is portrayed as infallible but it's not truth. To make mistakes is the most human thing you can think of (next to peeing in the shower). His mistake is that he can't tell he already has meaning in his life: working for ADA, protecting his friends, protecting the world.
"Anything I would never want to lose is always lost. It is a given that everything that is worth wanting will be lost the moment I obtain it. There’s nothing worth pursuing at the cost of prolonging a life of suffering." – he's always ready to leave. Dazai tries not to get attached. He's always ready to lose everything. Doesn't it make him just a passive observer in his own life? From a manga reader's perspective, we know he has significance to the story but Dazai sees himself as nothing. He's able to catch the moment only when it's already a memory. Dazai may think of himself non-human because he only lives his life halfway. He plays chess – he moves the pieces but does not appear on the board.
So even if you're a genius, still you're nothing more than a sinfully stupid and cruel human being.
found tsh roleplayers on twitter from 2014 on a random night. i felt like discovering a treasure chest...
this is my favorite one so far. i still think about this tweet every day.
camilla at henry's grave every year whispering his name over and over to herself because of the time he told her that the romans believed saying a dead person's name gives them just a little bit more immortality
i was doing research on donna’s life because i’m writing a thesis on the secret history and i came across this beautiful article that delves into her private life a bit more, revealing that there are a lot of personal stories she included in the book, such as her love for proust, which, in fact, isn’t the only thing she shares in common with richard as her voice because indistinguishable from his, since she spent 9 years writing a story from his point of view. people that know her described her as a great storyteller and an eloquent person who was rather quiet in real life, but also an insomniac smoking in her room at 4am and that awfully reminded me of richard as well. they way her looks were described resemble camilla - boyish haircut and boys’ suits, which is the similarity they have regarding appearance, but another thing that binds them together is the fact that donna herself was in a college clique similar to the greek class, except that she was surrounded by a couple of other literature students, making her the only girl in the group! they even had an eccentric professor picky about his students in a way that julian was. her accent, is in a way, southern yet british sounding, which is how she described francis’s accent. what’s beautiful about all of this is that it seems as if she didn’t do it on purpose but rather that her life became intertwined with the character’s life, blurring the lines between the two to the point that not even donna could distinguish it. as a writer, i know how easy it is for that to happen and how beautiful it is to look back on your manuscript and notice how you left pieces of yourself in it.
the world is getting so ugly and bleak and it’s hard not to feel so hopeless. but we have to remember that they want us to feel that way.
it reminds me of this quote by dan savage - “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”
joy is resistance. it’s really scary times but we are all in this together.
I thought I couldn’t relate more to Francis Abernathy but after he pretended to have a heart attack and insisted that Richard must drive him to the hospital I remembered me crawling down the stairs, breathing loudly- I could feel a heart in my mouth- and then realized I was holding hand on the wrong side of my chest all the time
Did you folks know that George Orwell is NOT just a character from the secret history who disliked Julian?he was A REAL PERSON. Donna thank you sm for inventing this man imagine not having animal farm or four pages list of 11 rules how to make a perfect tea. To live would be a torture…