can we just talk about how kenji has one of the Most tragic abilities in bungou stray dogs??? like. the more i think about it, the more heartbreaking it is.
he's fourteen years old and has an ability people would die/kill for. in s3, chuuya called kenji the ada's "trump card", so it's safe to assume the rest of the port mafia thinks the same way. he is immune to literal bullets, to being whacked in the head by hard metal or pretty much anything, he can easily lift cars above his head as if they were nothing,,,
but only if he's hungry.
if you ignore that last bit, kenji has one of the best powers in the show. and like he still does, but my God. he's fourteen years old. he doesn't think his ability is all that impressive. he doesn't see the issues.
since he has a job, he probably doesn't Really eat lunch, and if he does, it's snacks. but also his job is a part of the armed detective agency. therefore, things happen all the time. who knows how long cases will run, who knows when someone will try to destroy yokohama or the agency or whatever. there's been many times when it's been clear that they've had to work into the night. then we have to ask: does kenji eat dinner? no. probably not. and if he does, he probably just eats a piece of fruit or something small. that way, he doesn't lose his ability. he is the agency's trump card, after all. and he knows how important his power is. i mean, that's one of the reasons he joined ranpo and the others when they went against fukuzawa's orders in s3. it's not explicitly stated, but i'd argue that it's implied. anyways. does kenji eat breakfast? well, i don't think so. why? he sleeps when he eats. why sleep so soon after he just woke up? he has to go to work, anyways. so he can't fall asleep.
so, we've basically established that kenji probably has an extremely unhealthy eating schedule due to his ability. but also,,, what about his sleeping schedule? what kind of relationship does he have with sleep? so, let's say he eats a full meal three times a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. let's say how long he sleeps depends on how much he ate... so let's say that a small snack is no sleep since it's barely anything, just maybe makes him a little physically weaker. and a normal meal is at least an hour. that's at least three hours of sporadic sleep during the day - one of them shortly after he wakes up. but you know what makes that even sadder? what if kenji doesn't sleep at night because of his ability. or, sleep consistently or well? we can assume the agency actually really wants kenji to eat, even if he falls asleep, so on days when he can't get away with not really eating, he sleeps during the day for an unspecified amount of time. his sleep schedule would get so thrown off. also, he was raised on a farm, so we can assume he wakes up really early anyways. maybe early enough to say that there isn't any reason to sleep because he would wake up soon normally anyways.
and... what if kenji can't sleep without eating? what if kenji has to eat to sleep? maybe it wasn't that way when he was younger, but the older he got, the more his body grew to rely on his ability's exception. like... that's just... really sad. this kid is fourteen.
and think about it. the agency is best friends because they are. they'd probably like to go out to lunch or dinner together. i bet half the time at least, kenji wouldn't eat. why? because he'd fall asleep. wouldn't want to ruin the fun. because then they'd have to watch their volume around him or try to wake him up (and i hc that it's really hard to wake him up for like... the first ten minutes after a meal at least - it gets easier the longer he's been asleep or the less he eats). and what if they can't wake him up? then someone would have to carry him back and that's so kind of them but, well, they didn't have to and now kenji feels like a liability or a burden. like he ruined all the fun.
and he works with the armed detective agency. they've got a lot of enemies. he is the trump card. the physically strongest on the team. also the most naive and, objectively, the kindest. oh and one of the two youngest. can you imagine how vulnerable he is when he sleeps? i would imagine the agency wouldn't want him to eat by himself in public for, you know, safety reasons. and that even includes the cafe downstairs. who knows what could happen if kenji fell asleep on his own? and that's probably why he went to eat with atsushi in s1 ep11: he was with atsushi so he could eat out. one of those rare chances. and if an enemy did get to him while he was asleep, he'd be pretty easy to keep out of it: just keep forcing him to eat. shove food in his mouth, force him to swallow. and there you are: you have the armed detective agency's trump card. and kenji knows this.
and the sad thing is? kenji probably doesn't even realize he's having problems. he probably thinks this is normal. something he just has to deal with - and i don't say that in a negative or self-loathing kind of way. a genuine "it's always been like this; i know nothing else" kind of way. he wants to help people: that's why he came to the agency. he couldn't handle not being able to help everyone back home. he needs to be useful, to help. he grew up on a farm: he values hard work a lot - that much is obvious. he feels like he can't help if he eats consistently. he's probably (albeit subconsciously, unknowingly) scared of what would happen if he did eat and sleep consistently. that means he's not useful, right? that means someone will get hurt because of him. he'd rather starve than someone else get hurt. he was given this ability, he has to use it to help people.
tldr: kenji's ability is so interesting and underutilized in the the manga/anime and in the fandom and is so overlooked in angst potential. his ability most likely has ruined his eating and sleeping schedule to the point where he doesn't know anything different and genuinely thinks it's healthy because it's what he's always done, it's what he was blessed with, right? kenji deserves more love in canon and by the fandom <3
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abt ur reblog abt fandom stuff, i will happily oblige to ask if ur brain gave u anymore thought of the no apocalypse junpei finds quark au? love love love aoi's role in it and i think abt it a lot so im curious! literally happy to listen to anything abt it this is my entire shit
Oh!!! Sadly I don't have much on it, no, but I do have the initial little exchange that made me think about it, a lot of times my brain just runs with a back and forth dialogue and if I like it I write it down and only if I like it a lot do I go back and write down the descriptors and rest of the context to how the scene plays out in my head but it's sadly not happened to this as fun as it would be of a scenario to think about my brain checked out after I wrote down Aoi being super embarrassing to Akane by talking about when she was a baby and bossing the two around cause they called him in to babysit for being the only one there who knows anything about tending to another living being
Okay actually I read the thing again and apparently I thought of this as an au on my version of the au where the kurashikis don't do any of the vlr or ztd stuff and just work with sois on random esper stuff after a couple years so they don't have to be on the run anymore but they still have more restrictions than other agents, so there's a little joke that's like hey do you this violates probation? And idk there could be a plot there somewhere also they're at least in their late twenties by that point if not early thirties and Junpei and Akane aren't married cause this isn't canon they don't get officially hitched as soon as they look at each other again
I guess I'll add what I actually have here, hold up I'll give the bare minimum of context so they're not talking in the void
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Once the door cracks open and Akane gets up in a huff to greet her brother with one rant after another, none of which Junpei even directs his attention to or try to follow, he gets up from his seat carefully. Holding a little blond baby draped in a single blanket they had lying around in his arms.
Aoi already got the heads up of what's happening from Akane earlier, although she didn't sound as eloquent as usual. Tenmyouji was out and somehow came across an empty lot which somehow had a baby crying in it and somehow it wasn't just him hearing things but an actual child that was abandoned there when he went to look.
And somehow, he thought bringing the kid home with him was the most logical course of action, which Akane couldn't agree with less. There were a thousand other ways he could have helped and as far as she's concerned this is one of the worst ones.
Before they could get into an even messier argument the crying started up again and she elected to call her brother in for backup before she had a Moment™ over how irresponsible it was for her stupid fiance to come home with an infant when he has yet to successfully keep a plant alive on his own.
Despite how set off by such an unpredictable event his sister was, Aoi wasn't seeming terribly unsettled. In fact after he's done helping Akane cool off and sending her to take a breather along with a glass of water for herself, he walks up to Junpei rather giddy. Which Junpei will never get used to seeing from him. He'll much less get used to hearing him make a high pitched voice as he leans in to lend a single finger for the baby to grasp with his whole entire chubby little hand.
"Aww... where did this little guy come from?" He spends a little bit like that, Junpei also smiling fondly while Akane, from far over the corner table, silently judges them both. It's late at night and she got herself coffee instead of plain water. Then Aoi's voice goes mostly back to normal, dropping harshly to an incredulous tone as he pulls his face away like he didn't want the infant to notice the change in tone. Although, his hand doesn't move away. "Seriously though, are you guys gonna keep'em?"
"That's the idea!" "We're *not* keeping it!"
"Ah, I see what the emergency really is. You needed a babysitter while you tear each other to shreds, I mean, sure, at your service. Hey, hold like this." With that Junpei's arms are free, he does watch for what his brother-in-law to be shows him to be the correct way of properly resting them over the shoulder and then how to support the baby's neck and head with how he was doing it earlier.
"Did you give them a bath after bringing them in? Even wrapped up on this it's far too cold outside. How long's it been exactly?"
"Uh, only a couple hours, sun was already down. And no, of course I didn't, how do we even do that? You can't just put him in a shower."
"Well, no duh. You need a little plastic bathtub, eh- honestly even just the sink will do, as long as it's shallow enough to hold them up."
"How do you even know this stuff."
Akane joins them, getting close while paying attention only to what they're talking about. Unfortunately, it's Aoi who's talking.
"Mom and dad had me help dry Akane after her first baby bath–" "Aoi..." Her hand goes instinctively to pinch his arm but it stops halfway, then it stays there as she closes her eyes and inhales deeply defeated by the fact she can't shut him up this easily without risking him losing his balance.
"She was soo tiny. I don't know about being this small, but I think she was heavier."
"Aoi. Aoi. Please, shut your mouth. And I'm pretty sure you just couldn't hold as much weight back then."
"Hm. Maybe." He shrugs. Then completely takes the subject over a one hundred and eighty degree turn. "Do you think this violates probation by the way?"
It's Junpei who answers.
"That's... A fair question."
He didn't think of the legal implications of bringing a baby off the streets to his house which just so happens to be the same place his criminal mastermind girlfriend lives. In fact, he was much more hopeful she'd be all altruistic about it and how it's the right thing to do instead of getting hung up on it being an impractical solution or that he's just fooling himself wanting to skip right to raising a kid together or whatever.
"We are not on 'probation', and we're not adopting a whole human child because of an impulse *you* had, Junpei. Our technically legal position is only yet another reason we should–"
Aoi interrupts her before she can get on a roll ranting again.
"Can you guys argue at the grocery store? This thing is gonna get hungry sooner rather than later and we can't exactly feed them with instant ramen."
"I have other things on the kitchen, I'll let you know!"
"Yeah, well, but I don't figure you treat yourself to baby formula on the weekends, now do you? And a can of energetic won't do it either, jackass. Now, get moving!"
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