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seemisu

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bsd brainrot

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In all of the amazing character analyses and studies that I have seen done for Akutagawa's character in BSD, something I really wish people talked about more is how deeply, deeply, lonely he is. I think his antisocial tendencies are often played off for laughs but re-reading the Beast spin-off recently made me realize exactly how much personal loss Akutagawa has had and how tragically it has wounded his concept of friendship. There is no shortage of examples of him treating people poorly and pushing them away and yet, despite this, we are given canonical evidence that he actually values friendship very highly and is angry and frustrated about his own lack of friends.

Most people interpret his little rant in the elevator to Atsushi from the end of season 2 to be primarily about Dazai but the line specifically about how Atsushi was blessed with friends has always stuck out to me primarily because of how angry Akutagawa is when he says it. He's furious when he's listing what he perceives as the gifts that Atsushi was given but does not fully appreciate. This used to strike me as odd since Akutagawa is generally seen keeping others at arm's length and never letting anyone get too close to him but re-reading Beast gave me a better perspective on this particular behavior in a way that broke my heart.

And while Beast is an AU of the original series, the backstory given for Akutagawa is remarkably similar to the one given in the Heartless Curr short story. What this shows us is that Akutagawa cared very deeply about the kids he was protecting and hints that the infamous massacre which eventually led him to Dazai was not his first experience losing the people close to him. Loss is something he is all too familiar with and what happens with the mercenaries can be thought of as an inevitable ending from Akutagawa's point of view but can also be seen by him as a personal failing.

To Akutagawa, friends are people he lets down and then die. Again and again and again. His resistance to letting people in is his own way of coping with the pain of loss he has experienced time and time again whenever he has let himself get close enough to call someone else his friend. So, yeah, he's angry at Atsushi who he sees as taking his own friends for granted and still wallowing in misery because, deep down, he wants what Atsushi has in many more ways than just Dazai's acknowledgment. Akutagawa can see that Atsushi is still unhappy even though he has friends by his side and misinterprets this as carelessness. In getting this mad, he is saying that, if he had Atsushi's friends, it would be enough to make him happy in a way that it is not doing for Atsushi.

It's no tremendous analytical feat to state that Akutagawa's hatred of Atsushi is actually just misdirected hatred of himself. Still, this interaction is certainly just one more example of this for the books.

Akutagawa pushes people away to keep himself and others safe but, in the end, this hasn't protected anyone, it has just made him lonely which only serves to make him even angrier than he has the words to admit.

All of this long and probably incoherent babble to say, Akutagawa is desperate for someone who won't just up and die on him to finally stay by his side and take the pain away. If I wasn't already sure that he'd already met this person, I'd wish that he soon would.