Akutagawa Remembering Who He Is By Having Atsushi Die For Him Like He Died For Atsushi Before. The Look

The rot was inevitable

This is how optwt is talking about Nico Robin right now. Op is a supposed Robin fan as well btw (she's their literal pfp).....

Imagine trying to say Robin was useless in Egghead (which is what they did) when she was out here throwing hands??

Imagine trying to paint the moment of the coward trio + Brook saving Robin as anything more than a beautiful display of love & an amazing reminder of how much the character's life has changed for the better?

Imagine watching Robin be understandably triggered by Saul getting taken down & calling her a crybaby who needs to "get over it"?? What? The same chapter Saul told her not to do anything btw.

As if Oda isn't consistently realistic with how his characters respond to traumatic events & triggers??

When I say Powerscaling & "Agenda Piece" have rotted the brain, THIS is the exact type of takes I'm talking about. I honestly cannot believe anyone who calls themselves a Robin fan can in good faith say something so ridiculous wrong & mean spirited about the character. It makes no damn sense to me smh. Do you even like her at this point to be saying something so off base? Do you even understand the character & writing?

their combined level of freak is unmatched

Hrm hrm today I’m having thoughts about Kuina and her overwhelming Lost Boy vibes and how like. You NEVER GET Lost Girls like that. Narratively, she is The Girl Who Didn’t Grow Up. She will always be eleven and perfect, immortalized in memory. In Zoro’s mind, she is forever just a little bit older and a little bit taller than him. Even now when he remembers her, he pictures her face from an upward angle. She will ALWAYS be “older” and yet she will NEVER be more than eleven. I want to know what was happening in Zoro’s head when he turned 12 and realized he was older than she would ever get to be. I just. All the vibes, give them to me. This is one of the things that just gets me every fucking time!!!

(Sabo is also positioned like this, and is a fairly straightforward example up until it gets subverted by him ACTUALLY GROWING UP. Sabo is what happens when the lost boy grows up and it’s fucking FASCINATING.)

I think the key thing is, in order to be a "lost boy" narrative and not just a tragically dead child character, there needs to have been an expectation of greatness. It's not that little girls don't die in fiction, or that they aren't mourned. But this particular type of narrative emphasizes the specific grief of the loss of incredible potential, which isn't a thing dead little girl characters usually get. They're usually narratives about the loss of innocence or the fragility of life and the injustice of mortality, and Kuina has a little of that - how unfair it is for her life to be cut short. But it's also the bit of, if you'll let me get lyrical for a moment, you could have done so much more if you only had time.

as people grow up, one of the things we have to deal with is the loss of the possibilities of what we could have been, because we can only become one of our possible selves. Even if you become great, even if you're happy, even if you made the best possible choice, you still have to make that decision that to become this I must give up on becoming that. Lost Boys don't ever get to become, so they are enshrined with all that potential still in them. All of the people they could have been, all of the paths they might have taken.

(A thing that drives me crazy: balancing the grief of growing up with the grief of not-growing-up. The tragedy of becoming and the tragedy of never getting to become. The dozens of ghosts of possible selves that every adult carries around with them. Not relevant to the current discussion, but still, a thing to think about!)

There's also the fact that she gets set up with a projected character arc - we can see how she might've grown and dealt with her insecurities and overcome the obstacles in her path, but she'll never get to do it. And Zoro can take their shared dream on himself and make that his responsibility, but he can't resolve her emotional baggage for her, because that's not how that works. And we don't know! Maybe she wouldn't ever have managed it! But Kuina-the-confident-adult is just one of the many possible people she'll never get to be.

Doodles

If we adopted children into the mafia would that be fucked up or what

kunikida had the most wild time in dazai’s entrance exam like imagine being under the stress of working at a dangerous detective agency AND doing math tutoring at the tender sensitive age of 20 years old and suddenly your boss throws a guy at you who is the BIGGEST walking red flag and has no recorded background or history and just happened to meet a really important government guy at a bar and land a job at your workplace and is obsessed with suicide and tries to kill himself at work and has detailed knowledge of the human organ trafficking business and your boss is like “well, he’s your problem now, if he gives you bad vibes just shoot him in the head if not I want to know if you’d recommend him as our newest employee. okay bye”

Their designs are so good I almost forgot they are horrible people

In the catzai au, is Fyodor an actual rat and Nikolai a dove?

perhaps

Thinking about Dazai and Kyouka and how they're both former Mafia members who managed to escape and join the Agency... and that's an experience that's uniquely theirs, nobody else could understand what they went through—and what they're still going through, as a consequence of all that they did in the past.

They could afford to talk about it more, or share some kind of solidarity over it. But then again, neither Dazai or Kyouka are the type to be forthcoming, especially when it comes to their pasts. I imagine that there's still little things! Like Dazai understanding some of Kyouka's trauma when nobody else knows exactly what bothers her and why. Like Kyouka knowing the full extent of the cruelty that Dazai is capable of, and therefore comprehending the weight of his choice to be on the side of good.