Vintter

Bringing this back after all these years cause I'm rewatching season 2 with a friend and... I actually have a lot of thoughts about Mori and Chuuya's relationship. "Chuuya betraying his own principles for Mori's vision" I feel is so spot on on past me's part.

In season 2 we see Chuuya having a fun time scheming with Mori and gambling the lives of two innocent girls. And enjoying all these underhanded tactics. Like?? Fifteen!Chuuya would never. Not because he wasn't ruthless enough as kid, he had no problem with violence as long as it was for the right purpose. But teenage Chuuya was straightforward and earnest to a fault. He faught Rimbaud while praising him for his honorable reasons for killing them. He despised scheming, hence why he despised Dazai.

Then, as he grew up, Chuuya became more and more accustomed to Mori's tactics. His fall as King of the Sheep cemented Mori's teachings about how ruthlessness and cruelty is necessary for the greater good of the organization, and Chuuya believed him.

And now we see grown-up Chuuya, in Dazai's absence, following in Mori's footsteps in a way Dazai had refused to do.

Which brings me back to the og post, cause I think people who write Chuuya as disposable or a pawn in Mori's eyes fundamentally misunderstand their relationship. It's easy to recognize him as a mentor figure to Dazai because the text literally says it. "You remind me of myself" "come back to the fold Dazai" etc etc. But just as Mori projects certain aspects of himself onto Dazai and hopes to mold him in his image, he does the same with other aspects of himself, with Chuuya. To Mori, Dazai is Mori's intellect, ruthlessness, apathy, while Chuuya is his loyalty and sense of a greater purpose. They are both important to Mori because both of these kids represented different aspects of what Mori sees himself as. Hence why he was so adamant to bring them together and mold both of them into what he wanted them to be.

Design is not my passion