#it's silly and fun and absurd and horrifying and gut wrenching and existentially threatening

[kaurwreck]

totally understand the apparent incongruity between the silly action absurdism in bsd and the recent political commentary, but the political commentary in bsd has been threaded throughout with varying degrees of subtly, some of which I only initially clocked because of my undergrad and graduate education in political science, philosophy, and law; my transpacific legal practice; and my longstanding interest in history, classic lit, political philosophy, strategy, and international statecraft. most of what I now understand only began surfacing after I began deep diving into the source material and historical resources that I started exploring explicitly to better contextualize bsd.

it scarcely breaches the surface of the political commentary in bsd, but below I've listed posts I've written on bsd's metacommentary relating to politics and philosophy:

World Building

bsd exists in an alternate interwar period between WW1 and WW2, and there are wild historical divergences that speak to Asagiri's ruminations on statehood and sovereignty.

the agency office is designed to reflect the east/west tensions specific to 1920s-1930s japan

the contemporary Japanese constitution as we know it does not exist in bsd, and that has implications.

us-japan and uk-japan relations are fundamentally different in bsd than in irl.

yokohama is structured in such a way that indicates the port treaties were never formally abrogated.

the port mafia performs the same function in yokohama as organized crime does in a failed state, relating back to the prior bullet point.

no, seriously, yokohama has a foreign military police presence that the port mafia proactively contains to stabilize the city because the city is a failed state, and we were told this within the first few episodes/chapters.

bsd continuously explores the impact of ww1, the tensions and failures of the interwar period, and how each + other auxiliary conflicts created ww2 — all of which are critical to understanding the modern state, and modern statecraft.

bsd yokohama also frequently harkens back to the chaos of early port treaty city yokohama, and the only thing maintaining its modernity is seemingly the tripartite framework.

Philosophy

fyodor's ability reflects his eastern orthodoxy.

dead apple reveals a lot of fyodor's ideological motivations and philosophical worldview, which in turn reflect his fear that only consequences prevent atrocities. (but he also thinks that there being any chosen among the all reflects a fundamental violence against humanity imparted by a god whose world he seeks to fix.)

aya's skill is a commentary on confucian virtues.

akutagawa is lost in the sauce of his own politics and philosophical anguishes, down to the frilly little jabot he wears.

Political commentary is woven into every aspect of bsd, from setting and set design to costume design to the historical references to the world building to the themes and narrative structure to the characters' motivations and driving forces. You can't have a story set between wars, one of which is explicitly WW1, without there being political commentary.

But there are even subtler details woven throughout, all of which emphasize that this is a story about what it means to exist. Any inquiry into existence requires political commentary, considering politics concerns the total complex of relations between people living in society.

It's also a flexible term, and lest the subtleties not be enough, the existence of ability users and their ongoing threat to civil order that drives Fyodor's consistently vocalized ambitions to eradicate them as a form of salvation more obviously references another definition of politics, i.e. the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.

And, lest we forget, the widepread, internationalization of fun, silly action manga is a form of soft cultural power/lever of international influence that serves Japan's interests as a nationstate. Which is pretty inherently political.

tl;dr: we cannot divorce how we choose to cope with the world from the world with which we're coping.

me: wow it's odd that I haven't seen more chatter about the latest chapter

me, reading the chapter: oh, it's because it's all hobbesian discourse and the brothers karamazov references