#my mind

"No, I did not answer your boring text," is what he says. Right? It's an insult, obviously. It's meant to hurt, to be dismissive. Because he's on edge - about losing to Latvia, about his family situation, about being in Russia in general and about everything that comes with that as the Captain of the Russian Olympic Hockey Team. Shane is hurt by it. He's meant to be, so that he will leave Ilya alone and not offer him safety and comfort in this place that's all ice cold hostility and fear, so that he will not tempt Ilya to fall to his knees and find solace in Shane's Canada fleece-clad arms, so that Shane won't give them away with his big brown eyes full of kindness and yearning.

"No, I did not answer your boring text," he says and anyone who hears it won't think twice about it. If someone were to be listening. Which they probably are, this is Russia. And Ilya is a person of interest.

But the thing is... Ilya loves boring. We know this. He knows this. Shane doesn't, not yet, but he will. Ilya fell in love with boring - with Shane folding his clothes and answering sexts literally and as unsexily as possible, with Shane's sexy, boring glasses and boring, blue sheets. With Shane whose boring dad reads the New Yorker.

Ilya loves boring. He craves it. He chases it. Exciting and wild lose their appeal the deeper he sinks into boring. Into Shane's boring.

So yeah, he did not answer Shane's boring text and everyone else hears a dismissal and an insult but what Ilya is saying is, "I did not answer your thoughtful text. Your kind text. Your sweet text." He never answers it, partly because of safety reasons, partly because it becomes moot. But the entire time he's in Russia, that text keeps him going. It wards off the chills of his countrymen's glares and his father's disappointment.

JUST SHUT UP.

their “hatred” is just an exaggeration. it’s not real hatred based on specific events - it’s just a type of dynamic. it’s their “tradition” to hate each other.

this isn’t platonic or romantic love, which is why it’s easier for people to slap the label of “rivalry” on them instead of digging into all this messy complexity. i love canon soukoku. i love the way they subtly show their attachment to each other. i love analyzing all those little details. we should respect soukoku for what they are

Chuuya has people he can genuinely hate - people who have hurt him and those close to him (hi, Verlaine). but out of all those people, he chooses… DAZAI?!?

NO.

it’s just a way to single Dazai out from everyone else. they’re both just traumatized teenagers whose relationship turned out this way. this isn’t hatred - it’s about what each of them personally lacks. if Dazai is mostly cold and emotionally empty, then Chuuya is pure emotion. he’s a bomb, a hurricane that destroys everything around him - exactly what Dazai lacks. and it works the other way around, too. that’s exactly why they complement each other so perfectly

and here’s another point people rarely mention

in chapter 130 of BSD Wan! Chuuya directly says that he doesn’t hate Dazai. he himself acknowledges their complicated, ambiguous relationship, shaped under the weight of everything that’s happened before. there’s nothing “simple” or “easy to understand” about their relationship - it’s a much deeper, more complex level of connection