#creating constellations

You are supposed to feel sympathy for both Victor and The Creature, they are both sympathetic characters who do horrendously awful things, and I wish people would stop acting like you have to pick one to be ‘in the right’. They are both in the wrong. But you can understand why they make the decisions they do; Victor was wrong to abandon the creature when he wasn’t the ‘beautiful’ thing he intended to create but I know that if I were in the same situation I may also have ran away from the terrifying looking accumulation of corpses that I had made, The Creature was wrong to kill all of those people, obviously, literally their only crime was being related to Victor in some way, but I also know that he was justified in the rage that he felt towards Victor, and I understand that (as a crime against nature that had never been shown kindness or taught literally anything about how the world works besides what he learnt from eavesdropping) he didn’t know how to express his feelings in a less violent way.

“O grantors of dark disgrace,” he whispered so softly that only he could hear. “‘Disgrace,’ huh?”

Number one thing to mention is the fact that Dazai says this only for himself, only he can hear it. This means that he’s being honest in this moment, he is voicing his thoughts out loud.

Clearly he’s musing on Chuuya’s activation phrase, and he singles out the part about disgrace. Of course I am very soukoku pilled so naturally I choose to interpret this as a kind of surprise (especially when it is compounded with the ‘incredible’ afterwards) Dazai doesn’t think that Chuuya’s corrupted form is a disgrace, he doesn’t think that it it something to be feared, and we see this a lot from him.

I find that Dazai looks at Chuuya with a lot of affection while he’s in his corrupted form. A state in which most people find him terrifying. And it’s not just because he’s used to it, we see this in the original quote, Chuuya is using corruption for the first time to fight off Verlaine in his corrupted form (a literal monster) he is using gravity to hold his broken bones together, he’s bleeding from every part of his body and yet Dazai still thinks he’s something amazing, he doesn’t think he’s worthy of the title ‘disgrace’, he’s thinks it’s ‘incredible’. He sees Chuuya broken and bleeding and monstrous and yet he still calls it ‘beautiful’ in Dead Apple.

"I hate it when you say stuff like that, it always means that I actually don't have a choice."

It has always felt antithetical to their dynamic, choice has always been a big thing for them, there's never any orders, it's always a question. From their first fight together in Fifteen, Dazai asks Chuuya "Do you trust me?" Chuuya has to choose to trust Dazai. In Stormbringer Dazai gives Chuuya all of the time that he can to decide whether or not to activate corruption and let the answer to his humanity be lost (Before I started drafting this post I actually hadn't realised that Dazai actually tried to give Chuuya as much time as possible - "Two more minutes. Nowhere near enough time to decide how to live the rest of one's life, but it was all the time they could spare" - that was very obviously caring of him. How did I not notice that sooner?) and in the meantime, he puts his mind to work creating backup plans, should Chuuya choose not to go through with it. Choice is so important to how they work, it's always trying to allow the option for a choice, even in a situation where it feels like there is no other choice.

That's when it hit me. In the manga Chuuya says;

"Whenever you say that you really mean there's no choice at all!"

Chuuya feels like there's no choice, what he doesn't realise is that Dazai is doing mental gymnastics to ensure that he can have one. If Dazai can even attempt to come up with backup plans when Guivre, he surely could have attepted to come up with one for Lovecraft.

With Chuuya he says what he means. He hates Dazai? Yes. Correct. Who wouldn’t hate a guy that made your friends stab you in the back, let you be tortured, and generally made your life like a mini hell for three years. But also his actions tell us he cares about Dazai, a lot. He’s always saving him, he shows concern when he’s injured, the deep sadness that’s so clear on his face when he talks about when Dazai left. Both of these things are true and are not mutually exclusive.

On the other hand, Dazai says he hates Chuuya, does all of the aforementioned making his life hell things, and seemingly goes out of his way to make sure Chuuya suffers. But at the same time, he goes out of his way to try and prove Chuuya’s humanity and defends it to other people, he places his life in Chuuya’s hands every other minute, he looks at him softly when he can’t see and compliments him when he can’t hear. Underneath Dazai’s hundreds of schemes and ulterior motives he cares about Chuuya as well.

Frequently he describes an unknown person doing something (saying something or moving or yelling) before clarifying that the person was in fact himself.

The most notable instance is when the kids get blown up and he described hearing someone yell before stating that the feeling in his throat meant it must have been him. It’s jarring in juxtaposition to the first person narration throughout the light novel. Oda is simultaneously a person who is very alive, and a person who is not. I think that’s why he gets along with Dazai so well, on a certain level he understands Dazai’s disconnect from life. I also think it’s why he loses his will to live so completely by the end of the story, he didn’t have a full grasp of it at the beginning.

Odasaku was a man who knew how to live, he had many reasons to wake up every day and keep going, but he wasn’t a man that loved life itself. So when he lost those reasons, he lost everything.

The reason he didn’t push Dazai on his worldview was because he didn’t know how. He couldn’t teach something he didn’t know, he could show Dazai his reasons but he could never give Dazai his own. Because a ‘reason to live’ will only get you so far, your reason to live needs to simply be to be alive or else it can be taken away.

Dazai tells Odasaku that there is no reason to live if we all simply die anyway. Oda cannot refute this because he doesn’t know how to disagree, he isn’t connected enough to his own life to explain to Dazai why it is important to live anyway. He just goes through the motions of life.

Sure, in the episodes where she features heavily (Humpty Dumpty, Finding Judas, Fetal Position, Joy) it's often pointed out that she's too emotionally invested in the case and it impairs her judgement thus she isn't a good doctor.

If you pause and apply that thought to anyone else in House or literally any other medical drama it kind of falls apart. One of the sources of conflict in medical dramas is a doctor getting too emotionally invested in a patient, either it's someone close to them or someone experiencing something familiar, and nine times out of ten that character will make mistakes because of it. Both Foreman and Chase make mistakes that kill patients, Chase because he was distracted because of his dad's death and Foreman takes a risk with a patient that he sees a lot of himself in whilst also being under the pressure of his family being in town (I know that the main thing we're supposed to take from House Training is that Foreman is acting like House, but these heightened emotions can't have helped). Even House makes mistakes and acts even more brashly than usual when his emotions get involved (e.g. All In, Insensitive, MEANING) and none of these characters are called bad doctors. "It's because it only happens a few times" I can hear people say, to that I raise you the fact that we only ever see Cuddy involved in cases that are very emotionally close to her. In Humpty Dumpty she knows the patient personally, in Finding Judas and Fetal Position it's patients that directly parallel her personal struggles with the idea of being a mother and her infertility, in Joy it's both of those things combined! It's no wonder Cuddy messes up in these situations!

Reading fifteen has me thinking about the parallels between soukoku and rimlaine.

So obviously there’s the betrayal. Verlaine betrays Rimbaud for a morally ‘good’ reason; he wants Chuuya to be free, he wants him to have the life that Verlaine was denied. Much like how Dazai left Chuuya to pursue the light, to fulfil the wish of his dead friend.

On the other hand, Rimbaud wanted to remain loyal to his country. He wanted to fulfil his duty and complete the mission. His loyalty to Verlaine was strong yes, but there was one thing he would put above his dearest friend and that is what Verlaine asked him to choose between. His loyalty to his friend or his loyalty to his country. Similarly, Chuuya was left behind, Chuuya was the one who would have remained loyal to the pm because that was his first priority. He’s immensely loyal to Dazai (something that I’ll probably talk about in the future) but if it was pitted against his loyalty to the organisation Chuuya would choose his family.

There’s also the fact that Rimbaud is somehow the better mentor (even though he only switched to giving advice like two minutes before dying). Verlaine sees himself in Chuuya, much like how Dazai sees himself in Akutagawa and Yumeno, this leads them both to the conclusion that their protégés must suffer like they did. Verlaine thinks that Chuuya must also be alone because that is their shared fate. Dazai (in my opinion) takes a lot of his negative feelings about himself out on those he sees himself in. Contrast that with Rimbaud who manages to be kinder to Chuuya in his last few minutes of life (after trying to kill him) than Verlaine (his supposed ‘big brother’) in the many times he interacted with him. Similar to how Chuuya is known to care more for his subordinates and those under his care than Dazai (he seems to be a better mentor to younger characters as well but that’s just speculation since he basically never interacts with anyone else)