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linkspooky · 2 years

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THE WORST STALKER

After having a lover’s quarrel, Atsushi and Akutagawa are destined to reuinite, in a fight that will probably serve as the climactic battle of the arc, happening at the same time as Dazai and Sigma vs Chuuya and Dostoevsky. This fight will also confront Atsushi about his most major flaw, his demonization of Akutagawa refusing to see him as anything other than a murderer even when presented with more sympathetic traits, by now being faced with a vamped up, Akutagawa who cannot kill and is not anything other than death incarnate.

1. A Mafia Member Who Does not Kill

Atsushi has always had an incredibly strict black and white view of morality. This way of thinking isn’t entirely his fault, it was quite literally drilled into his head as a kid. Atsushi believing he needs to play hero and protect innocent lives in order to continue to prove his right to live, divides people into roughly two categories, innocent people he needs to save, and villains he needs to punch. Despite how similar Akutagawa is to him, he always espouses how Akutagawa is in the latter category.

Dazai’s a murderer. Not only that he took Akutagawa into the mafia, and groomed him to be a weapon and a murderer, beating him, or even trying with bullets when he didn’t comply with Dazai’s harshb rand of training or didn’t lsiten fast enough. Threatening to thorw him out on the streets again and let him starve when he didn’t perform well enough.

Kyouka’s a murderer. She killed thirty five people, men, women and children with no discretion simply obeying as she was told. She’s an orphan just like Akutagawa, she was someone who was taken into the mafia and taught to kill in order to survive the same way Dazai took in Akutagawa.

The only difference between them and Akutagawa, is Atsushi’s own personal judgement. One thing to remember about Atsushi is as much of a cinnaemon role as he appears on the surface, he is actually, incredibly mentally unhealthy. He actively hallucinates his dead orphanage headmaster screaming at him, even still. He hates himself deeply and viscerally.

The reason Atsushi’s ego is able to go on at all, is because he protects himself with reality-distorting defense mechanisms. Denial. Refusing to believe stressful truth. Suppresssion. refusing to think about stressful truths that have entered his memory. Rationalization, making up excuses like blaming Akutagawa for the way Dazai treated him, because he wants to continue thinking of Dazai as a good person and Akutagawa as a bad one.

Defense mehcanisms are theorized as a variety of atuomatic tactics to protect ourselves from anxiety, especially against threats to the self-image, often without realizing we’re using them. We alllie to ourselves sometimes, or avoid things that unnerve us, or sheild ourselves from stress in many way.

Atsushi loathes himself, but also he has to continue going on fighting, so in order to do that he finds somebody else to hate. Projection, another mental defense mehcnanism by which people attribute to others within their own mind is what allows Atsushi to keep going. What was drilled into Atsushi’s head at a young age, was that out there in the world there are people who only hurt others, worthless people who don’t have the right to live because they can’t protect others.

“Those who can’t protect are worthless” and also “This is the face of an evil person who uses violence to abuse the weak, hate me, but never hate yourself.” While Atsushi has survived his headmaster’s abuse, and even the headmaster himself as passed on, Atsushi’s entire worldview is still defined by what the headmaster taught him. Atsushi has to protect people, otherwise he’s not good. Akutagawa has to be an evil person using violence to abuse the weak, an evil person he hates, otherwise he will hate himself. Even in an alternate universe of Beast where Atsushi is the one massacring people for the mafia, and Akutagawa is just trying to save his sister, Atsushi still insists that Akutagawa must be evil, there must be no goodness inside of him.

Atsushi builds his entire ego on proving himself good, but also his ego-defense mechanism needs a scapegoat for him to project all of this “bad” and self loathing onto. It’s the only way the master taught him to keep going on. That’s why unlike Akutagawa who is in perfect control of his own ability, Atsushi turns into a tiger, and berserks. it’s always someone else doing the violence, there’s someone else to blame, Atsushi hates the tiger, not himself.

The entire point of the movie Dead Apple is that even someone like Atsushi, who loathes murder, will raise his claws in defense of his own life because he just wants to live.

Atsushi and Akutagawa are both orphans who are struggling their best to live as stray dogs, but Atsushi and his belief in internal goodness needs to demonize Akutagawa in order to pulift himself. He doesn’t think he can go on living without doing this, it’s a defense mechanism.

The ending of the last arc, and prelude to this arc began with a simple challenge between Akutagawa and Atsushi. Akutagawa was not to kill anyone for the next six months. While yes it’s good for Akutagawa to stop killing people and start walking the path that Oda walked to become a better human being, he also fixates on this part of Akutagawa being a murderer, and that’s why Dazai won’t accept him. See, there’s a reason Dazai abused Akutagawa, he’s bad and therefore he deserved to be abandoned, and Atsushi doesn’t have to think about it anymore, or the possibility that Dazai might abandon him too one day

2. The Tiger is Strong, but You Are Weak

It’s important to recognize this fact because no thinking, is Atsushi’s worst coping mechanism. By refusing to see the full reality of the situation, he gives up his agency. At his worst in the Beast AU, Atsushi is just a completely mindless follower of Dazai’s ideals believing absolutely everything Dazai says will become reality, because he is too afraid and crippled by guilt to make full decisions himself.

“The Tiger is Strong, but you are Weak” is the way Kunikida starts this arc assessing Atsushi’s abilities at the start of this arc. Once again, bringing up Atsushi’s flaw that he, himself, as a person, does not think and exert his will on reality. He lets other people take control, he lets the tiger take control, he lets Dazai take control, he blindly obeys rather than thinking for himself because Atsushi is quite literally so self-loathing his ego can barely handle making those decisions.

This is also a prettty major flaw for Akutagawa too, existing only for Dazai’s approval, blindly following the port mafia, but also Atsushi exists in a much healthier environment than Akutagawa does now with the detective agency, and Atsushi still doesn’t really want to grow past thinking the way he did as an orphan child. Playing hero lets him feel like a hero, he doesn’t want to think beyond that, he doesn’t want his notions of the world challenged,especially by people like Akutagawa.

This entire arc is about challenging, Atsushi’s black and white notions of the world. Not the strength of the tiger, but the strength of Atsushi himself to decide for himself. It starts out with Goggol pointing out the completely obvious fact that murderers aren’t what the headmaster told Atsushi they were, they’re not evil people who do evil for evil’s ska,e but rather normal people who feel guilty just like anyone else. Atsushi is confronted by the Hound Dogs, who blindly follow justice the same way he does, some of the members like Jouno don’t really care if the people they’re fighting are truly guilty or not, as long as they get to punish evil. He’s confronted with what it’s like to be on the other side of someone assuming you are a complete monster and enemy, and fighting you in that dehumanizing way.

However, I’d like to point out, time and time again how Atsushi acts during this arc, the majority of whicb he spends time seperated from Dazai. Everytime he’s asked to think for himself, he conjures an image of Dazai to tell him what to do.

Dazai, or at least the image of him, has essentially become what the headmaster was to him before. He’s an image in his mind that commands him to go forward when he doesn’t know what else to do. However, I doubt Dazai is actually using a way to pass a message.

The much morelikely explanation is that Atsushi is figuring these things out all on his own, but Atsushi’s self-esteem and confidence being at the bottom of the marianna’s trench, he can’t even imagine deciding these things for himself. Atsushi thinks hecan’t stand up on his own, so, he imagines Dazai ordering him to do these things or sending him secret messages. Remember, Atsushi has actively hallucinated the headmaster several times before this, and they both occupy similiar positions in his mind.

Atsushi’s ultimate goal is to get rid of the headmaster’s voice in his head, and learn to think for himself and stand on his own two feet, however, this goal is continually sabotaged by the fact that lacking any self confidence, or even a strong self image, Atsushi is absolutely terrfied of being alone.

He’s both afraid of the burden of responsibility he faces when he’s alone, and he’s also simply afraid of being left alone again because at the orphanage he was always alone.

The direction of the fight seems obvious when Akutagawa shows up to fight side by side with Atsushi, however, they’re both sabotaged by the same flaw they share. They essentially don’t want to grow up and think for themselves, so they let themselves become Dazai’s tools. “It’s not that Dazai-san discarded me, it was all a test, he planned for this all along.”

Atsushi similialy doesn’t think for himself, or reassess the situation at all. For one he didn’t believe that Akutagawa would stop killing people. He doesn’t challenge the situation, or reassess his ideas of Akutagawa at all.

In essence, they’re both stagnating, because they’re too fixated on the ideas they’ve learned in the past, rather than letting themselves change and grow. Akutagawa still after all this time, it’s all about proving himself worthy of Dazai, and convincing himself Dazai didn’t discard him, to the point of imagining everything Dazai has done to him so far as just a test to strengthen his ability. Atsushi wants to see evil in Akutagawa and good in Dazai, so he doesn’t question these circumstances at all and continues following Dazai’s orders. Thetwo of them don’t work together as a team, as Akutagawa and Atsushi, they just try to copy the way Dazai strategized and try to be a second double black.

Atsushi’s defense mechanisms in his mind are so strong, he straight up, ignores reality at times. He misses quite obvious conclusions.

He can’t comprehend something as simple as the fact that Akutagawa sacrificed his life in order to protect both Atsushi and the mission, because that challenges the defintiions of good and evil he’s drawn up in his own head. (There’s a reason this entire fight is called hero vs. crimminal). It’s these defense mechanisms that won’t allow Atsushi to change. Instead of trying to learn new things and growing up, Atsushi is just trying to do the same thing he always does to solve the problem, follow Dazai’s plan, be the hero, and defeat the crimminal.

However, Atsushi not thinking for himself, just following other people’s deudctions leads him into a trap once again.

Atsushi is smart when he wants to be, for example, he noitced a simple contradiction in the hound dog’s words that pointed out the fact she wasn’t being fooled by Kamui and was in on the plan, because she possessed more knowledge than she should have.

However, he was also naive enough, to just walk straight up to her and be like “We’ll just talk things out with Ranpo, I know you’ve been hunting me this entire time but I’m sure once Ranpo explains everything will be 100% okay.”

I hope I’m making my case here, Atsushi is actually perfectly capable of using rational thought, he’s even intelligent and observant at times, but he prefers not to think for himself and only follow other people’s plans and because of that he walks straight into obvious traps like this one. I mean, this scene was happening at the same time as the Kenji fight. Kenji is the guy who walks straight up to crimminals like “hey, did you guys commit a crime? Be nice and tell me, pretty please?”

Atsushi is afraid to make his own decisions like an adult would, so he willfully gives up agency, and also sticks to his childish notions about the world. Akutagawa is a murderer who likes killing people and therefore he’s evil. Atsushi saves people, and therefore he’s good. There’s absolutely no overlap between Atsushi and Akutagawa, and he has to hate Akutagawa because he is a good person who obviously hates evil people. Atsushi remaining stagnant in that way of thinking, is exactly what brought him to chapter 102.

There are two pieces of foreshadowing in this chapter, one the sword.

Number one, the sword’s power is explained while we are shown Atsushi being tied up at the same time. The sword’s power is to make someone else capable of using your ability. Explaining this as simple as possible, Bram Stoker no longer has control over his vampires or the ability to create new vampires.

The one with all the power to create new vampires, is Kamui, because he wields the sword and is marked. So even though he’s using Bram Stoker’s ability, the one who has any and all control about how that ability is used is Kamui himself as long as he carries the sword and the mark. This is all explained, while Atsushi himself is contained.

Second, the appearance of the Dazai hallucination. The symbol of Atsushi’s desire to just, let someone else be in control, and the reappearance of Aktuagawa as a mindless, killing machine, the way Atsushi has always perceived him.

The quote that started this entire arc is “the tiger is strong, but you are not.” Now, we may see the culmintion of that foreshadowing, both Atsushi and Akutagawa’s desire to have a final fight against one another in order to settle things and move on with their lives after six months of Akutagawa not killing, but also Atsushi training to be strong without relying on the tiger’s strength.

My prediction is this, the sword which removes a person’s ability to control their own ability and instead gives it to someone else, is going to be used on Atsushi seperating him from control of the tiger.

At that point Atsushi will face the mindless Akutagawa again, but this time the fight between them can’t be settled the way they want it to, by seeing who’s ability is stronger. Atsushi will have to face Akutagawa as a man, and reach out to him as a person, in order to bring him back.

Whne he finally takes that step and bridges the gap between himself and Akutagawa, not only will they have surpassed Dazai and Chuuya by learning to actually cooperate as a team, but Atsushi will have grown as a man. Akutagawa and Atsushi not only need to grow into adults, they also need to be better than what came before them, in order to take down the threat against the world this time.

#shin soukoku #sskk #atsushi nakajima #dazai osamu #akutagawa ryunosuke #bsd meta #bungou stray dogs meta #bsd 202 #bungou stray dogs 202 #bungou stray dogs 202 spoilers #bsd 202 spoilers

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