#the last sentence does my actual understanding of this thought's thesis an injustice

[kaurwreck]

There's certainly Something about singularities in Bungou Stray Dogs presenting as massive, myth-derived creatures with more than passing resemblances to kaiju given the setting predates its analog to World War II.

Gojira and the kaiju genre were born in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon Incident (in which an American hydrogen bomb test rained radioactive ash on a Japanese fishing boat and much of the South Pacific). Life form singularities (like Chuuya and Verlaine), the Seven Traitors, the Transcendants, Mori's fixation on skill-based warfare, and everything else about the Great War all indicate that skills are akin to nuclear arms.

But unlike nuclear arms, skills are generally framed as intrinsic to their user. They're neurological; as much as part of skill users' wiring as the rest of their synapses. Even for Kyouka, whose skill was inherited but not fully integrated, her skill more resembles hereditary neurochemical wiring than it does nuclear proliferation.

Gojira (1954) ends with Dr. Serizawa's promise that hydrogen bombs would always assure nightmarish, monstrous manifestations of the horrors of war. You'd think Dazai's gift, then, would be the enigmatic focal skill of the series; he's capable of nullifying hydrogen bombs, after all.

But it's Atsushi and his celestial Byakko that Shibusawa calls the antithesis of all other abilities. And, as explained in 55 Minutes, Byakko doesn't heal or regenerate Atsushi, it negates his wounds. Atsushi isn't only a particularly tenacious shounen protagonist, Byakko compels him to stand when he's been cut down. When Atsushi is at the edge of death, Byakko consumes him completely, and Atsushi is lost within him, moreso than even Chuuya is in his Corruption state (Chuuya is fully conscious in Corruption— if Atsushi is conscious, he's either repressing or sluggishly recalling the memory of what occurred). Akutagawa also mentions during the Cannibalism arc that Atsushi's claws cut through skills themselves (even Rashoumon, which eats space). Akutagawa also becomes aware, in 55 Minutes, that Byakko can be triggered by Atsushi's peril, and Akutagawa does so to negate the manifestation of a seemingly transcendant skill that otherwise had utterly defanged them (although he seems sorry to have to do it).

Nevertheless, although Atsushi's Byakko seemingly negates the metaphorical horrors of the Great War illustrated by the others and their relationships with their skills, it's Atsushi who posits that perhaps skills aren't innate. He says to Kunikida, "Maybe they come from somewhere else and stick to us. Maybe they're something we can't understand... I don't really know how to put it into words, but that's how I feel."

Much of 55 Minutes is colored by Atsushi's fear of Byakko and his understanding that Byakko could devour him. His fear is seemingly validated by the antagonist, a manifestation of a skill that seemingly swallowed its human. But although textually consistent with his expressed fear, Atsushi's tone, demeanor, timing, and thought processes from when he speaks that line until the light novel ends aren't. His musings reflect his namesake's exploration of and uneasy relationship with the nature of existence, which he understood to be constructed by one's culture and environment better than most due to his somewhat rootless childhood.

I think it's interesting that someone with a skill capable of cutting through other skills, negating wounds, and antithesizing all skills challenges whether skills are innate at all. And if they're not, what does that imply about the parallels between skills, the horrors of war, and the fear of nuclear holocaust?

It's important to me that the scars of American imperialism and disregard for the sanctity of life are not erased from the narrative when discussing the world wars and nuclear proliferation. So I hesitate to posit anything about what skills may be in Bungou Stray Dogs that is too abstracted from trauma wrought by Western imperialism, Japanese imperialism, or the horrors of World Wars I & II. But perhaps that's it; when Atsushi speculates that skills are something that sticks to you, I'm reminded of how trauma has shaped and informed his own. He is certain that Byakko's negation and restless hunger are connected to his birth and subsequent suffering. At first, I thought we were being teased with his early background. But there's no need to tease; the reason so many characters in Bungou Stray Dogs are orphans directly relates to the Great War and the generational trauma still reverberating in its aftermath, and amid the threat of another, even more destructive war.

Perhaps Atsushi was implying that skills are constructs born not from any innate self, if there's such a thing, but from traumas, experiences, needs, cultures, and environments. Which is to say that skills aren't separable, exactly, from their users, but they're not innate either. They're like our personalities: immutable once shaped in the crucible of our most formative years, but nevertheless reflections of not only ourselves, but of what we need and who we become when confronted by others, in all of their beauty and horror.

Thus, perhaps it isn't Atsushi's skill that's so very antithetical to all others. It's his understanding of it, his ability to cut through to others, his compassion, his cowardice, his curiosity, and his separation from his sense of self that both inflicted him with Byakko and which will allow him to transcend it to become who he desires to be. It reminds me that, shortly before his death, his namesake decided to become a writer. And that although he wrote and lived only briefly, his sincerity, thoughtfulness, and introspective skepticism cut, and continue to cut, with a brilliance emblematic of life.

Anyway. Atsushi is both the main character and protagonist of Bungou Stray Dogs. Dazai knows this, too; even if he can nullify Byakko, he's just as impacted by Atsushi's brimming earnestness as everyone else Atsushi encounters. Atsushi liberates the narrative so that it's not a warning that the horrors of war will proliferate so long as we are capable of mass destruction, but instead it's a promise that hope needn't be intrinsic to persist all the same.

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #bsd atsushi #atsushi nakajima #bsd meta #this was all sleep deprived stream of consciousness #but it helped me untangle my nagging fixation on 55 Minutes and Dead Apple #the last sentence does my actual understanding of this thought's thesis an injustice #but im too sleep deprived to articulate myself with any precision so itll have to suffice #i apologize for the timing #but i also dont #because nakajima atsushi's body of work is reviving my skeptical curious optimism lately