#Maybe Asagiri purposely waited for 101 to kill him off because it would be funny

[anti-dazai-blog]

10- Really, Chuuya already lost before the first round began (and other complaints)

A lot of Dazai’s “teasing” (although I hate to call it that— it takes away from just how far he’s willing to go with his mockery) is seen more in his tone and facial expressions than in his words. The inflections and intonations of his voice can’t be heard in the manga, but they can be inferred based on his facial expressions. I’m tempted to take his tone into account when writing this analysis, however I don’t want to accuse him of anything that he possibly didn’t do. This blog isn’t for making up brand new Dazai crimes, but rather for looking at things that he undeniably did [or caused to happen].

Because his mockery is delivered in such a way, the words themselves can’t be quoted back as evidence of how he chips away at people’s self confidence until there’s nothing left. Which makes this chapter in particular fairly difficult to write about. With Akutagawa, he outright tells him that he’s useless and pathetic, but with Chuuya he implements more subtlety into his mockery. Not subtle enough for bystanders or witnesses to miss it— anyone present for it can clearly see what Dazai’s doing. But if someone were to witness their interactions and then try to tell it over to a third party, chances are the person’s reaction to it would be “well that’s not that bad”.

[[I wonder if Chuuya ever tried to tell anyone [Kouyou] and they gave him that same reaction. I now wonder if Dazai does this on purpose, for that very reason]]

My analysis puts me in the position of a witness trying to tell a third party. I can’t just quote back the words like I did in chapter 9. But I also can’t make any assumptions about the tone of voice. So. I guess I’ll do my best to base this off of the text alone, but keep in mind that there’s more going on here than I’d be able to mention.

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Let’s start by acknowledging what was already acknowledged in part 9– that Atsushi’s current situation [getting kidnapped by Akutagawa] is directly Dazai’s fault. If Dazai hadn’t given Akutagawa that whole nice long speech about how he’s a failure and Atsushi’s so much better than him, he never would have gained this abundance of motivation to not only capture Atsushi, but to make sure he does a very thorough job of it. Without Dazai’s provocation, Akutagawa would have probably made a few more sloppy kidnapping attempts before going all out like this. But he’s now determined to prove himself. And so now Atsushi gets some more trauma to add to his collection. 

By extension, Akutagawa’s current “capture Atsushi” strategy was rather rushed, and had some holes in it. One of these holes in question was his involvement of Karma Transit to provide the truck needed for Atsushi’s capture. The mafia has plenty of vehicles of their own, and it seems unnecessary to involve an outside company in a kidnapping. Because of this, Akutagawa had to kill everyone at Karma Transit to keep them from revealing any kidnapping-related information. Although it may seem like a stretch to accuse Dazai of indirectly causing their deaths, Dazai knew what he was doing when he provoked Akutagawa. He knew what sort of person Akutagawa is, and could have easily figured out that if Akutagawa were to get sloppy out of desperation, many [relatively] innocent people would get caught in the crossfire. 

Now back to the dungeon scene. 

Chuuya decides to visit our local Source Of Problems in the dungeon. Which goes over just about as well as you’d expect [ie: not very well]. He visits him with two goals in mind: to find out what Dazai’s planning, and then to prevent said plans from coming to fruition. He only succeeds at half of those goals. 

His dungeon visit is off to a bad start, with Dazai immediately beginning his standard routine of mocking every single aspect of Chuuya’s life. Let’s do this segment in the standard Anti Dazai Series bullet point format:

The first thing that gets insulted is Chuuya’s height.  I can and will count every insult to his height as a form of body shaming, because technically speaking it is. According to Wikipedia, body shaming would include making fun of any aspect of someone’s physical appearance, including height. As it is I already count Dazai’s double suicide requests/flirting as sexual harassment, so why not count every time he mocks Chuuya’s height as body shaming?  [[that being said, the fact that Chuuya’s shorter than Ranpo is completely incomprehensible to me. I cannot picture anyone being shorter than Ranpo. Why is Chuuya so small. He has “a little taller than average” vibes. The fact that he’s canonly shorter than pretty much everyone else does not compute in my brain.]] 

Next he goes after Chuuya’s hat, calling it ugly. I doubt I need to explain why it’s messed up to insult a personal sentimental item that has so much significance to someone that they always keep it with them. To anyone who’d like to mention that the hat is also necessary for activating corruption: yes, but it’s not like he uses corruption daily, nor does he need to personally hold on to it to keep it safe. Any time he’s wearing it casually it seems like more of a sentimental item than one needed for a secondary aspect of his ability that he hardly ever uses. Either way, his hat is something that means a lot to him, and Dazai knows this. 

He then pulls the same sort of move he often uses on Kunikida: just outright lying for the fun of it. His lie of the day this time is that “all the worrying will make you bald early”. Although it’s relatively harmless, it’s still another way that he blatantly disrespects someone who’s supposed to be his equal. It’s degrading, in a way, to say something that he made up on the spot with such a straight face, as if he’s expecting Chuuya to believe it.

[And his purpose in saying this to Chuuya is a bit of a mystery. With Kunikida, he probably expects him to believe it, if only for a moment. But with Chuuya, he knows well that he won’t believe it. Is it only for the degrading aspect (“you’re so dumb, you probably would believe something like this!”) or is it something else? A part of me believes that a possible answer for this specific scenario could be that he wanted Chuuya to hastily take off his hat, for the purpose of ruining his hair (either via hat hair or static). But that’s just a theory. A game manga theory]

The added theatrics of allowing Chuuya to break the chains that were already unlocked was a bit degrading too. With every move Chuuya makes, it’s clear that he’s playing right into Dazai’s hand. I’ll discuss this at length in the next part of this series, because it would be easier to analyze each of Dazai’s moves in this chapter in relation to his goals in the next. So consider this installation of the Anti Dazai Series a prelude to part 11.

That’s about it for chapter 10– sure it was short this week (and admittedly not as thorough as the other parts), but next week it’ll get into the final part of the three chapter dungeon scene, where everything comes together and I can criticize Dazai with the full context of his actions in mind.

Join me next week for. Well. Part 3 of Dazai’s Dungeon Visit. You know that already. I’ve mentioned it a hundred times.

#Anti Dazai series #really funny how the first chapter Chuuya shows up in is binary. Given the whole “he’s made of code” thing. #(<- that’s a code joke not a gender joke. Sorry for having to spell that out but here on tumblr the reading comprehension is non-existent) #Ironically if Chuuya really did drown in the recent chapter he’d have died in a binary chapter too #Maybe Asagiri purposely waited for 101 to kill him off because it would be funny #Bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #dazai #chuuya bsd #atsushi bsd #akutagawa