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Tide

Atsushi & Kyouka gen commissioned by @harlequinade-13​! They get a day at the beach together :D

Rating: G Words: 3,600 Warnings: mentions of past child abuse.

Tide

Summer dragged over Yokohama like a beast’s hot breath, sweltering from mid-morning to late at night, making the pavement simmer. It seemed to turn the streets liquid and the day light to fog; Atsushi could not walk outside without feeling like he had stepped into a cloud, if clouds were made of sticky sweat. Sharing a dorm with Kyouka meant that whatever coolness they could afford by the way of electric fans had to be shared as well, and often the night found Atsushi breathing loudly in the open closet where he slept, trying and failing to put his overheated mind to sleep.

If Kyouka suffered the same, she didn’t say anything. She was still as a statue as soon as she lay down at night, but Atsushi didn’t know if it meant that she slept. She always kept her back turned to him.

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i love them sm u dont get it 😭😭😭

*combined ver on profile

Lately I’ve been really enamoured with the idea that the tiger is like. a secondary personality in atsushi’s head that he can speak to, and occasionally the living incarnation of gremlin brain

atsushi, grocery shopping: okay so i’ve saved enough coupons to eat this week tiger: fish. eat. consume! atsushi: no, i’m not transforming in the middle of the supermarket so you can go apeshit on the raw fish section. tiger: but….fish prey atsushi: but money can and should be exchanged for goods and services tiger: useless square leaves.

atsushi: smiling is a display of affection, okay? tiger: baring your teeth is a challenge and an invitation to fight or submit atsushi: well, how would you show affection? tiger: slow blink to display trust. rub scent glands against them. chuff. curl around to share warmth. atsushi: that’s– listen I know I had a weird childhood deprived of affection, but I really don’t think that’s how it works. tiger: ….bring prey for them to consume? atsushi: no. i still haven’t been able to look Kunikida in the eyes ever since you left the dead rat on his back porch tiger: was gift. atsushi: he doesn’t eat rats! tiger:…bring mouse? atsushi: you know this would be a lot easier if you didn’t keep suggesting dead animals the rest of the ADA, who’s been watching this one sided exchange go down: 0_0

Rewatching Bungo Stray Dogs (can’t remember where I got to in the anime, but I stopped reading during blimp arc) and. Yeah. Two episodes in and I’m just like, ‘Does Atsushi scent mark people or the office. Does Dazai slow blink at him, making Atsushi both confused but also calms him down? Atsushi struggling with if he doesn’t remember last night because he transformed, or because he drank. Or possibly being affected more by alcohol. Can Atsushi even HAVE a lot of alcohol or does that affect him more? (But if cats can’t eat onions or garlic, he would have probably noticed by now, unless he just figures he’s got a sensitive stomach and/or he’s just not used to non-orphanage food).’

Yeah. It’s very clear there’s a certain character trope that just activates my brain, pffft.

i love your blog can you write about atsushi being feverish sick or hc about it? sorry if i have poor English.

thank you so much!! and no worries your english is great!! I'm writing a fevered atsushi sickfic for Sicktember under the "Persistent Fever" prompt that I'm very much enjoying writing so far hehe...

- atsushi definitely has a lot of problems speaking up when he doesn't feel well or just recognizing that he need to slow down because of how he grew up. he has some pretty serious anxiety so when he doesn't feel good he either gets all in his head about or he doesn't realize it

- he gets low grade fevers often when he gets overly stressed out/exhausted/overworking

- kyoka and lucy have learned to keep an eye on him while he's working because he tends not to realize when he has a fever until it gets really bad

- kyoka is very sweet about making sure he looks after himself and lucy scolds the ever loving shit out of him

- sometimes they don't notice in time and he passes out :( they have to take him to the infirmary and keep a good eye on him to make sure he rests

- he's very prone to hallucinations and nightmares when he has high fevers 🥺 he'll turn over in his sleep, shake and breathe heavy and whimper, sweat through the sheets, and wake up sobbing and desperate for comfort

- atsushi is terrified of needles so they have to be sneaky when yosano needs to give him injections. dazai is a pro at distracting him but sometimes atsushi is just so out of it that he doesn't notice. sometimes his fever is so high that he's completely delusional and becomes terrified of yosano💔 he's accidentally hurt her in the past with his ability and they've learned to keep dazai handy to prevent that

- kyoka has to take him home when he's really not doing well because he's sensitive to the antiseptic smell in the infirmary and it makes him very nauseous, and he's very emetophobic so they try to avoid that as much as possible

- everyone in the ADA looks after him very well and sometimes he cries and wonders what he did to deserve their love and care 😭

Portrait Of a Father(?)

I think we can all agree that this is the most controversial chapter in the whole manga. We can’t agree on what its message is, if we are supposed to agree with it, what Asagiri wanted us to think about the characters involved … So, I finally decided to jump in the lion pit and put forward my opinions on it.

I’ll start with a brief recap: Atsushi finds out that the Headmaster of his orphanage, the one who tormented him, is dead. His reaction is … well, if he had been legal for drinking, he would have rushed to buy champagne. A fitting reaction, considering what we have already seen of the Headmaster at this point.

But then we get a shocking revelation: the Headmaster died in a car accident while going to buy flowers for Atsushi, to congratulate him on his successes with the Agency and his great work in saving the whole city. Atsushi is shocked, because … seriously? Eighteen years of abuse, and now he acts like he has always cared about him?

And he expresses his conflicted emotions with a likewise erratic behavior: he runs off from Tanizaki, tries to have a cathartic fight with Akutagawa (who ignores him exactly because of his state of mind), goes to his old orphanage to attend the funeral from a distance, and lastly wanders off to see some conveniently placed families with attentive fathers and young sons.

At this point, Dazai reaches him. And here starts the really controversial part.

They examine together the Headmaster’s background: he appearently grew up in the same orphanage, but at a time when it had even worse conditions, enough to make Atsushi’s time under his education ‘look like heaven’ in comparison. When he got out alongside some other orphans, he quickly fell into a life of crime; then they all got drafted into the Great War, and saw his friends die one by one, until he was the only one left standing. 

This left him with an huge unaddressed trauma and the convinction that his determination and will to live, acquired in spite of hardships, were the only reasons he survived; so he decided to dedicate himself to raising the next generation of orphans according to these principles, creating a system where the priority would have been survival at all costs. 

And the narration, through Dazai, sorts of portrays him positively for that. Attention is brought to how he was tortured worse than Atsushi did, how the fierce mindset underneath Atsushi’s meekness was grown by his treatment of him. If the Headmaster never did so, would Atsushi be so attached to life? Would he have not succumbed to self-loathing?

To answer this, I’ll take the liberty to give first my own analysis, and then consider what the manga probably wants me to answer.

Yes, if the Headmaster had not been abusive, Atsushi would have survived. Much better, I’d add. It is mentioned that Atsushi was nearly killed at his orphanage, more that one time, and let’s remember that he has one hell of an healing factor. If he had been a normal kid, chances are that he wouldn’t have survived … which, besides begging the question of how on earth the Headmaster’s own time at the orphanage could have been worse than attempted and nearly successful murder, makes one wonder how exactly it’s supposed to be formative for the kid.  

Then, the Headmaster is given the credit to have prevented Atsushi’s self-loathing for being a tiger, by becoming himself the object of his hatred. What a martyr. The problem with his reasoning is, that is all the damn story that we see Atsushi have an huge issue with self-loathing! And it isn’t even related to the tiger, most of the times! There are moments where he’s shocked and scared after he went overboard with his power, but the main sources of his problems, the flashbacks that plague him? They’re about his time at the orphanage. 

He regularly remembers, and even has allucinations of, the Headmaster and the other members of the staff calling him worthless, good for nothing, pathetic, unworthy to live, and all sorts of pleasantries of this kind. When he allucinates the Headmaster, that nasty voice in his head is the one who tells him to quit, to give up, that he’s not good enough and he shouldn’t even try to do something with his life. 

Of course, at this point we could rigirare la frittata saying that it’s what the Headmaster meant, to make Atsushi stronger by giving him someone to rebel against … but honestly? There are thousands of better, different ways to teach someone to value their own life. If the Headmaster, given his traumas, couldn’t think of one, then it’s his own damn fault for not realizing that he couldn’t be a good teacher or caretaker before a lot of therapy, and not taking a different life path. 

The one who gives his all despite his insecurities is Atsushi. The one who is willing to face down powerful enemies in desperate battles for the sake of a city he has come to love is Atsushi. The one that didn’t wield to despair and self loathing, pushing forward each and every time, that’s Atsushi. The Headmaster doesn’t have a shred of merit in this. 

Now, time to take a guess at authorial intent. And this is … tricky, that is, for the very simple reason that I can’t get into Asagiri’s head and extract the intended correct interpretations from the multiple possibilities. All I can do is propose the most likely, based on what I can read.

The first possible interpretation: the most obvious. We are meant to take that scene and its message as it is. The Headmaster did terrible things, but he also helped Atsushi in his growth. Our boy wouldn’t be half as strong if he hadn’t already experienced severe abuse, and he’s really got to cry the death of his father figure. Bacia la mano che ruppe il tuo naso perchè le chiedevi un boccone. 

Another possible interpretation is that it’s an acknowledgement of the fact that people are complicated, and it’s fine to have complicated feelings towards them. Warped as he was, the Headmaster truly believed that he was doing what was better for Atsushi. Isn’t it horrible to confront the fact that the person who abused you is not a cardboard villain with nothing inside, but instead a very complex human being who had a ‘benevolent’, if not logically sound, reasoning behind them? Atsushi is not in a good situation: on the one hand, he can’t forgive the Headmaster for what he did to him, but on the other, he can’t ignore the fact that he did it out of “care” for him (wheter of not it did him any good). He, who had repeatedly been told that he was worthless and undeserving, he had been the object of care all along! What’s one to do in such a situation?

Atsushi doesn’t know either. There is no manual with the instruction for the right emotions and reactions to have. 'Quando a mio padre si fermò il cuore' ... magari avessi semplicemente non provato dolore. He ends up looking at Dazai with that face, a very forced smile in the uncertainty about how else to react. And Dazai just gives his comment about people crying when their father dies, and Atsushi does exactly that. This is already a kinder interpretation: Dazai made it clear that Atsushi could react however he felt better, but he understood that the kid felt like crying, and gave him an implicit okay to do so. It was a way to help Atsushi express his emotions, bypassing the blocks that the Headmaster himself had put on the road. And personally, I suspect that it gets the closest to authorial intent, because of the emphasis on ‘finding a will to live despite one’s trauma’ has already been established as a central theme of the manga.

A third interpretation put as much focus on Dazai as it does on Atsushi. Dazai is the one who reaches to Atsushi and all but call the Headmaster’s violence ‘necessary’, defining him as Atsushi’s ‘father’. And we already know that Dazai is no stranger to violence as a teaching method; just ask Akutagawa. His treatment of the young mafioso - beatings, calling him worthless, even an attempted execution - is strikingly similar to how the Headmaster raised Atsushi.

And sure, Dazai’s got his promise to Odasaku, be a better person, stay on the path that protects the weak, but these are the ideals he picked up in his formative years in the mafia. It’s likely that he can recognize that his treatment of Akutagawa was wrong, but on some level, he thinks himself as justified: it was how you taught a kid to live in a cruel world, the same reasoning of the Headmaster. He still has his violent tendencies: remember the famous slap he gave Atsushi?

I’m not sure whether he still stands by this ‘educational system’ or not. He hasn’t expressed any explicit regret over how he treated Akutagawa, but he made a point of treating Atsushi in a very different way. He still gave that slap, but that could have been a moment of ‘regression’: a situation in which he needed an Atsushi on top of his game ASAP, couldn’t figure out how to calm him down properly, and fell back on doing what he knew: teaching through violence and harsh words. He expresses no regret over this thing either … but there actually might be, Dazai is a character defined by the fact that he lies to everybody (to his mentees, to his colleagues, to the enemies, to the readers) and so pinning down his true thoughts is very difficult. 

With his answer, he might have projected more than a little in the Headmaster. Maybe what he told Atsushi was a covert way to explain his own actions, to present the point of view of ‘a person who does these things’. Maybe prepare him for an absolution; maybe prepare him to handle disappointment over his mentor’s true nature. Maybe prepare him to recognize himself in Akutagawa, and thus sympathize with him and improving the Shin Soukoku dynamic! Bungou Stray Dogs has pulled bigger levels of insane planning after all. 

Anyway, I find this a pretty interesting interpretation; even if it could have been elaborated upon better, if this is the case. It would show the situation not strictly as a message to the readers, but an analysis of the characters.

Thanks to anyone who bothered to read my ramblings!

Life is so much more enjoyable once you stop putting so much pressure on yourself

I am BEGGING the bsd fandom/fanfic writers to PLEASE know basic feline anatomy and that TIGERS CAN’T PURR! I know it’s cute to have Atsushi purring, BUT HE CAN’T! I’m sorry, but it’s not possible… but write him chuffing! Chuffing is cute too!

That is all

Ely Ely Ely for the requests maybe Beast! Atsushi in a cat café? I feel like he would like those

He loves them :3 (everyday I wake up and thank god for the stroke of wisdom that hit you when you suggested raccoon stripes beast sushi)

I know I've talked about this before but thinking about Atsushi with tiger traits. Thinking about his eyes glowing at night if any light hits them and night vision. Enhanced hearing that causes a lot of sensory overload, especially during storms. Slightly hissing that just sounds like air leaving his mouth if he gets extremely startled, for example, someone waking him up from a nightmare. But it was something he would get punished for at the orphanage so it only makes anxiety worse.