#'im glad ur not pretentious' thank u!! *UPS THE PRETENTIOUSNESS BY A BILLION*

[wawawawawawawawawawawawawa]

hello! i really liked your post regarding izaya and ASPD! izaya is a character that i love even if i don’t necessarily understand him, so i appreciate how you approach criticism of certain portrayals of him without being overly pretentious. i’d love to hear more of your thoughts about our little meow meow, as the poets say, and thank you for shizayaposting in the year 2022. hero.

hihi!! and thank u! i understand him to a concerning degree and i'm glad you didnt think i was pretentious because i did kind of slip into my "i am writing a personal essay that is going to be published in a magazine" style near the end there. but maybe my essays arent as pretentious as i think, too!!

and hmm... thats a broad topic, "more thoughts," but i do share the sentiment that izaya is a very lonely person and that he loves shizuo- but the sensation of love is very different for someone with ASPD, so he might not even recognize it at first! emotions can be very dull and unrecognizable with ASPD, and i only cared about love because i personally wanted a partner! the idea of having someone who i knew i could wholeheartedly rely on, who fit perfectly with me... it was very enticing :) the safety, familiarity and the care called to me- after all, you can do whatever you want as long as you have a safe place to go back to... and a safe person there to welcome you home :)

(i am happliy engaged- it has its difficulty considering my fiance is my emotional opposite- he's hyper empathetic and possibly dependent- but it's a happy engagement nonetheless)

so my point being, i think it would take quite a lot for izaya to recognize feelings of love, but loneliness is a different beast altogether! it's easy to identify haha

and i think izaya is big on appearances- he's a powerful information broker, so he needs to have the penthouse. never mind that it feels too big and empty and impersonal, like he's a guest at a hotel! and he knows there's something that makes him different from other people. he's not stupid. i'm not sure if he knows what exactly it is, but it's there.

and.... sometimes people stereotype themselves.

i'm going to paint a target on my back and admit something: i'm self-diagnosed. put the damn pitchforks down, i have a therapist and he supports my decision. but before i came to terms with it, i would constantly stereotype ASPD. stuff like "ah, i can't have aspd, i cried at a dead cat!"

(i love cats)

and similarly, i would go "well, if i do have aspd, i can't cry at dead cats, because it means i have emotions and everyone knows sociopaths can't feel emotions! they dont cry at movies or anything!!"

(i later read confessions of a sociopath, and in the very first chapter, the author admitted to doing the same thing. get out of my head etc etc etc)

and i think izaya would be the same. he knows he's different. he sees expressions of emotions as contradictory to his base nature- it would prove him wrong about himself, prove that he's just another human. whether he thinks he's a god or a waste in that instant, it would still prove him wrong. he's not above emotion and he's not above hurt. and if he craves companionship, that means there exists something he desperately wants but can never, ever get. no sane, comforting human would accept him the way he is. and if he loves shizuo, the feeling is tenfold. he would want something with all his heart and wanting would never be enough. there would never be anything he could do to get shizuo to fall in love with him.

(except, according to fanfics, get brutalized and left to die, causing shizuo to stumble across him in a vulnerable state, finally seeing izaya as a person, izaya's masks forcibly ripped off as shizuo sees him for who he is)

(i wonder if izaya would ever be so desperate as to get himself brutalized for this outcome. if he ever acknowledged his feelings, the lack of control over the situation might get to him enough that he's driven to do this)

and that's why i think izaya masks everything. he's scared of his own humanity. because gods have everything they want, and humans have wants they can never have.

izaya is not a god. he's a human that is fundamentally broken in a deep, perverse way that nobody around him mirrors. he doesn't know why or what it is. all he can do is pretend to not suffer from it, pretend that he doesn't want, pretend that he isn't forever reaching for something that he can never have.

and i will shizayapost till the end of time my friend o7