Recently I have came to the conclusion that the Aftermath of the Great War, how the Stray Ones deal with living in a post-war world, is the true plot of BSD.
Most fans think the silly detective story in the beginning is the original plot which unfortunately was forgotten by the author, which is fair; but I argue that’s not the case.
The Great War, while appeared quite late, actually connects to almost every single events and characters in BSD from the beginning.
If my memory serves me right, it is first mentioned in the manga in chapter 39: Portrait of a Father (2016). Atsushi figured out that the orphanage director, being an orphan in an abusive orphanage himself, and later on a victim of the war, developing an extremely awful mindset: children need to be exposed to the terror of the world in order to prepare themselves and survive. It’s this mindset that made he abused and tortured the poor boy, and look, it brings us to the problem since the start of the series (2012): Atsushi’s trauma.
It’s discussed more in chapter 65: Dreaming of Butterfly (2018) aka Yosano’s backstory. However, if we circle back to chapter 8: Kill A Man and Die Thee Too, Part 2 (2013), Yosano’s introduction, her speech to Kaiji makes so much sense now after reading her backstory. So the war had been planned since the early stage of the manga.
After that, the Great War became a prominent topic after the introduction of Fukuchi. His motive, action, mindset that lead to the Decay of Angle saga are all the results of anticipating in the war. Even last year, chapter 115: Flecks of Dark Foam, it’s revealed that Teruko’s backstory is also set in the war.
And now we got to the light novels.
Mimic in Dazai Osamu and Dark Era (2014) is already so infamous. Being used as the scapegoat, they went to Japan, destroying Oda’s dream and the indirect cause that push Dazai out of the mafia.
They reappeared again in 55 Minutes (2016). Speaking of which, 55 Minutes provides us with a lot of information about the Great War outside Japan and relating to ability. In the same novel, it’s revealed that ability users participated in the war and the clash between the Transcendent caused the most casualities in the whole human history.
And in the war, ability weapons were developed, one of them is the Shell. Experiments on ability users to create singularity were done.
Stormbringer (2021) also provides us info about those experiments: one of them is the artificial living singularity project aka Paul Verlain’s Demonic Beast Guivre and Nakahara Chuuya’s Destructive God Arahabaki (Dazai, Chuuya, Age Fifteen does mention that Arahabaki is from a lab).
And what happened within Japan? Untold Origin of the Armed Detective Agency (2015) tells us: after the war, there were so much orphans that the government had to allow child employment, Ranpo is among those orphans. That’s why Naomi, Kyouka and Kenji can work in the agency in spite of being minors (Before them, there was Ranpo, and possibly Yosano)! Beside this, tons of illegal, underground and foreign organizations flooded to Yokohama, making it even more chaotic before the war.
Mori said he agreed to become the Port Mafia boss to keep the underworld in control. It’s not explicitly stated, but I can guess the chaos of the underground’s activity is the main reason.
These are the only ones on top of my head.
pixelskylines
snowghoul
blakekathryn
origamiaround
romaincrisis
discoholicmusic
2087
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
