#qualities and relations

[russellmoreton]

DSC_5315 Chorismos by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: russellmoreton.blogspot.com/

[somewhatsentientspellbook]

in honour of today's beautiful gift

[sentientsky]

hmmmmgrhhf thinking bout crowley and childhood trauma and abandonment and rage again

[ingoodjesst]

have you put the pieces together yet, detective

[briankang]

Magic, madness, heaven, sin

[egophiliac]

here's the Meleanor chibi speedrun! upfront warning for some flickering and/or flashing throughout from all the sped-up zooming/layer changes.

it turns out I only really recorded up to when I exported the PSD for the first time, so I went back and recorded a bit more to at least show a little of the reworked cape breakdown and background. and then bounced her rig around so you can see a bit of it too! the parts I'm not too embarrassed to show, anyway

even sped up it's still like 47 minutes (s-she took a really long time to make okay), so there are timestamps/chapters in the description if you click through! I certainly don't expect anyone to sit and watch it through, but maybe it'll be interesting to skip around in?

[rolling-harbinger]

When you’re so fucked up so you relate to literally every characters problems.

Not to mention the plethora of other problems he has that not even the other characters can relate to.

How is he even functioning at this point 😟

[ninamodaffari]

my life's work as a concept artist is complete, I got loss.jpg into The Sims 4

[g1ngerbeer]

the struggler 😔

[fem0ral-artery]

strictly speaking, he's an actor (you may have seen him in a couple of things)

[russellmoreton]

DSC_5604 Isotropic Spaces/Fields, territories where distinctions between figure and ground disappears. by Russell Moreton

[ex-n1hilo]

the narinder i got had his bags packed after the final fight idk about y'all

[pumpkinnkidd]

metamorphosis knightmare

[linusbenjamin]

And now my bitter hands    Cradle broken glass       Of what was everything          All the pictures have             All been washed in black                Tattooed everything.

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Genuinely don't think I've seen anyone talk about chapter 25 as a pivotal moment for Dazai so I'm gonna put this out here because I think his reactions here kind of negate that whole omnipotent Dazai interpretation which I hate with every fibre of my being.

Firstly, he's like, clearly caught off guard here. And don't try to tell me he wasn't, because this is just one instance of his genuinely horrified reaction to Q's release and when he realized what was actually going on with Atsushi, Naomi and Haruno.

Him being caught off guard carries significance here because you'd never catch him screwing up this bad later in the series - which is exactly my point.

I wrote a post earlier about how I don't think Dazai really is very much like Mori or Fyodor at all, and I stand by that, because their motives are different. Tldr for that post: Mori and Fyodor are ambitious and proactive, while Dazai is empty/numb and reactive.

What this leads me to believe is that Dazai is less a chess master like those two and more of a contingency planner - he's so good at "predicting" because he is uncannily good at thinking like his opponent and then planning for literally any possibility under the sun he can come up with. He's no gambler. Everything and everyone is practically (and unknowingly) micromanaged. It's almost paranoid in a sense, and I definitely think it's a trauma response to something he went through that we don't know about yet - after all, he was more than capable of this before he even met Mori.

...which brings to me to Mori's influence here. It's straight up like Dazai forgot how willing Mori is to gamble huge risks for a good outcome. It's like he forgot the mafia could be a real threat to his best-laid plans.

Going to throw out a wild claim here that I don't think is actually all that baseless - I think it's widely assumed that Dazai molds himself to what he needs to be (true!) but I think this misses the idea that he is also easily influenced by the mindsets of the people around him (see: the difference between Entrance Exam Dazai and early manga Dazai, the whole "the longer he was in the mafia the darker and more incomprehensible he became" thing from Stormbringer, how dark his eyes get in the prison sections with Fyodor, etc.). I could go on, but for the sake of not making this post too much longer, let's assume this is true because it suddenly makes sense as to why he failed to predict Q but predicted other events much later that were inherently more difficult to predict:

He was in the wrong mindset. He was thinking like an Agency member, and dare I say, he even got a little complacent. He started to get used to not having to manipulate every last variable - he was removed from a toxic environment - only for Mori to pretty much instantly fuck that up in one scene.

Let's also not forget what happened the last time he miscalculated Mori's intentions.

The consequences of this blunder could've been a lot worse and he knows it.

In his mind, thinking like an ADA member wasn't good enough to stop a potentially awful outcome - awful outcomes that could bring him pain. So, he goes back to what he knows - think like the demon prodigy. Think like Mori. Later on, think like Dostoyevsky. Because it seems to me that he believes as long as he is still working for the light that it doesn't matter if he uses these horrifically manipulative and inhumane methods of getting there. But he is wrong. Darkness within the context of good intentions is still very much darkness, and it hurts people all the same.

In the very next chapter, Dazai arranges Ango's car accident. And he only gets worse and worse throughout the series as he regresses back into his paranoid darkness that manifests as this omnipotent facade - his safety net that ultimately prevents him from developing in a positive, more human direction.

[peaches2217]

On a similar but mostly unrelated note to my last post, I wanna bring your attention to this particular moment in SMO:

This game gets a lot of praise for how expressive Mario is compared to prior games, and I think this is one of my favorite examples. He's got this badass determined game face on when he's about to face off against Bowser for the final time... and then Bowser decides to kick it up a notch and taunt him. Enter Peach, who is panicking and crying out for Mario, and she's practically within arm's reach, which makes the fact that he's powerless to save her while Bowser's still standing that much more hideously cruel.

Just! Look at his face! How it goes from determined to horrified to pure, seething anger. This fight was already personal, and now it just got a whole lot worse, and all of that is conveyed brilliantly within the span of five seconds using nothing more than Mario's facial expressions.

That heightened expressiveness carries over into Bowser's Fury and SMBW, and maybe it's small in the grand scheme of things, but I think it adds so much to each games' experience, and I'm so excited to see more in future titles!