Day 1: Vampire 

Sorry, but I can’t help but drop our KDA-cosplay-performance off here. If you aren’t Russian it’ll be difficult to understand… but there are a lot of local memes XD Yes, I’m (Akali) cosplayer too. ____ Простите, но я не могу не закинуть сюда наше выступление с косплеем КДА. Если вы не русские, то понять будет сложно… но тут много локальных мемов хд Да, я еще и (Акали) косплеер. 

the j stands for “just cuddle with me already”

when the customer service rep offends you just right

sorry if you answered this already but i STILL don't quite understand why Dazai is mad at Ango because Ango practically had nothing to do with Oda's death in my POV?? Like they were all just pawns of Mori so methinks that the entirety of Dazai's wrath should be directed towards Mori instead.

Anon, I was discussing your ask with @empathique today, and we both understand where you’re coming from. Rationally and logically, we all know that Mori is the mastermind behind bringing Mimic into Yokohama and causing Oda’s death, and Dazai knows that as well. That’s also why we both see Dazai as unreservedly hating Mori a lot more, because if there is a fault, it lies squarely with him. 

However, for many, many complicated reasons that have tangled into an impossible web, Dazai is unable to bring himself to forgive Ango. To begin with the most straightforward of reasons and to work towards the complicated ones…

1. It cannot be said that Ango has no fault in Oda’s death. Despite the fact that Ango was manipulated by Mori as well, Ango played a crucial role in opening the channel for Mimic to enter Yokohama, and given that the government wanted the mafia to resolve the issue, it can certainly be seen as the government making the mafia do the dirty job. Ango is complicit in this, however much he treasures Dazai and Oda as friends. His action is one of the many factors that led to Oda’s death, and Dazai will not and cannot easily forget this. 

2. That being said, Ango’s part is merely one of many factors. These are some of the other factors: Mori masterminding the entire situation, Mimic killing the children, Gide and his soldiers’ pride and honour, the country that has smeared their name, Oda being blinded by the desire for revenge and refusing to listen to Dazai and Ranpo, Dazai understanding Mori’s scheme too late. Just as it can be said that it’s not one person’s fault, it can be said to be everybody’s fault as well. And that includes Dazai’s fault in this entire situation. 

3. Dazai is a frighteningly intelligent man, and hence I wouldn’t be surprised if, as much as he blames Ango, he knows Ango is not the only one to blame, and he has a reservoir of self-hatred for his own part in Oda’s death. However, Dazai is terrible at confronting his own demons—if his philosophy of life is that he is prepared to lose what he really wants the moment he gains it, then he has resigned himself to not forming valuable and long-lasting relationships in order to protect himself from pain. But he has failed here—he has formed important relationships in the form of Ango and Oda, and now he has lost a friend who understood him and who was important to him, and he absolutely cannot handle this. A defeatist philosophy like that he has held cannot produce any healthy healing or processing of his own guilt. 

4. If he cannot accept Oda’s death, if he cannot handle Oda’s death and his own regret in a healthy way, then where does that lead him? In Dazai’s case, it has led him to joining the ADA because Oda wants him to take the path that saves people, and not because he truly believes in the ADA’s purpose. He still has not found a reason for living, and he still has not overcome his guilt. In my opinion, given his lack of healthy ways to grieve, it’s no wonder he’s so angry at Mori and Ango; but Mori is a much, much more dangerous target, more intelligent than him and entirely capable of ruining all that is precious to Dazai, making Ango an easier and, in some ways, a much more personal target. Hence, I believe Dazai’s wrath at Ango stems from a much more deep-rooted wrath at himself and an inability to move past Oda’s death. 

5. Furthermore, given the nature of their friendship (in the sense that the friendship is formed only among the three of them in the bar), with Oda gone, Ango serves as a walking, living, breathing reminder of the friendship Dazai desperately clung onto. Looking at Ango is as good as being reminded that Oda is dead, that those days in the bar are over, and that both of them failed Oda. Hence, while Dazai deeply loathes Mori, his wrath towards Ango is a lot more personal and it contains a lot more pain. 

6. And what would come of it if Dazai forgives Ango? Forgiving Ango would mean, to Dazai, moving past Oda’s death. Given everything that has been discussed above, that is an impossible task for the present Dazai. He needs a lot more time and to find a reason for living that truly comes from himself before he stops clinging onto Oda’s words as his only lifeline. For now, he remains a sharp, intelligent, terribly lonely child who is wandering lost, and such a person is incapable of the grace of forgiveness, whether it is to a past friend, or to himself. 

Please note this is really a personal interpretation and others might think very differently. I hope this addresses your question!

Let’s talk about an Ariel who walks away—limping, mouthing inaudible sailors’ curses, a sea-brine knife in her belt.

Ariel traded her voice for a chance to walk on land. That was the deal: every time she steps, it will feel like being stabbed by knives. She must win the hand of her one true love, or she will die at his wedding day, turn to sea foam, forgotten. The helpful steward tells her to dance for the prince, even though her feet scream each time she steps. Love is pain, the sea witch promised. Devotion calls for blood.

But how about this? When the prince marries another, nothing happens. When Ariel stands over the prince and his fiance the night before their wedding, her sisters’ hard-won knife in hand, she doesn’t decide his happiness is more important than her life. She decides that his happiness is irrelevant. Her curse does not turn on the whims of this boy’s heart. 

She does not throw away the knife and throw herself into the sea. She does not bury it in the prince and break her curse—it would not have broken. She leaves them sleeping in what will be their marriage bed and limps into a quiet night, her knife clean in her belt, her heart caught in her throat. Her feet scream, but they ache, too, for the places she has yet to see. 

Ariel will not be sea foam or a queen. There is life beyond love. There is love in just living. Her true love will not be married on the morn—the prince will be married then, in glorious splendor, but he had never been why she was here.

Ariel traded her voice for legs to stand on, a chance at another life. When she poked her head above the waves, it wasn’t the handsome biped that she fell for. It was the way the hills rolled, golden in the sun. It was the clouds chasing each other across blue sky, like sea foam you could never reach.

(She does reach it, one day, bouncing around in the back of a blacksmith’s cart, signing jokes to him in between helping to tune his guitar. They crest up a high mountain pass and into the belly of a cloud. Her breath whistles out, swirls water droplets, and she reaches out a hand to touch the sky. Her feet will scream all her life, but after that morning they ache just a little bit less). 

I want an Ariel who is in love with a world, not a prince. I don’t want her to be a moral for little girls about what love is supposed to hurt like, about how it is supposed to kill you. Ariel will be one more wandering soul, forgotten. Her voice will live in everything she does. She uses her sisters’ knife to turn a reed into a pipe. She cannot speak, but she still has lungs. 

Love is pain, says the old man, when Ariel smiles too wide at sunrises. It’s pain, says the innkeeper, with pity, as Ariel hobbles to a seat, pipe in hand. At least you are beautiful, soothes the country healer who looks over her undamaged feet. The helpful steward had thought she was shy. Dance for the prince even though your feet feel stuck with a hundred knives.

Her feet feel like knives but she goes out dancing in the grass at midnight anyway. She’s never seen stars before. Moonlight reaches down through the depths, but starlight fractures on the surface. Ariel dances for herself.

She goes down to caves and rocky shores. Sometimes she meets with her sisters there. Mouths filled with water cannot speak above the sea, so she drops into the waves and they sing to her, old songs, and she steals breaths of air between the stanzas. She can drown now. She holds her breath. She opens her eyes to the salt and brine. 

Ariel uses canes and takes rides on wagons filled with hay, chickens, tomatoes—never fish. She earns coins and paper scraps of money with a conch shell her youngest sister swam up from the depths for her, with her reed pipe, with a lyre from her eldest sister which sounds eerie and high out of the water. The shadow plays she makes on the walls of taverns waver and wriggle like on the sea caves of her childhood, but not because of water’s lap and current. It is the firelight that flickers over her hands. 

When she has limped and hitched rides so far that no one knows the name of her prince’s kingdom, she meets a travelling blacksmith on the road with an extra seat in his cart and an ear for music. He never asks her to dance for him and she never does. She drops messages in bottles to her sisters, at every river and coastline they come to, and sometimes she finds bottles washed up the shore just for her. 

They travel on. When she breathes, these days, her lungs fill with air.

Some nights she wakes, gasping, coughing up black water that never comes. There is something lying heavy on her chest and there always will be.

Somewhere in the ocean, a sea witch thinks she has won. When Ariel walks, she hobbles. Her voice was the sunken treasure of the king’s loveliest daughter, and so when they tell Ariel’s story they say she has been robbed. They say she has been stolen. 

She has many instruments because she has many voices—all of them, hers; made by her hands, or gifted from her sisters’ dripping ones. Ariel will sing until the day she dies with every instrument but her vocal cords. 

She cannot win it back, the high sweet voice of a merchild who had never blistered her shoulders red with sun, who had never made a barroom rise to its feet to sing along to her strumming fingers. She cannot ever again sing like a girl who has not held a dagger over two sleeping lovers and then decided to spare them. She decided not to wither. She decided to walk on knives for the rest of her life. She cannot win it back, but even if she could, she knows she would not sound the same. 

They call her story a tragedy and she rests her aching feet beside the warming hearth. With every new ridge climbed, new river forded, new night sky met, her feet ache a little less. They call her a tragedy, but the blacksmith’s donkey is warm and contrary on cold mornings. The blacksmith’s shoulder is warm under her cheek.

Her feet will always hurt. She has cut out so many parts of her self, traded them up, won twisted promises back and then twisted them herself. She lives with so many curses under her skin, but she lives. They call her story a moral, and maybe it is.

When she breathes, her lungs fill. When she walks, the earth holds her up. There is sun and there is light and she can catch it in her hands. This is love. 

Bartender: thanks for stopping that bar fight, spiderman. Can I get you a drink? It’s on the house

Peter: thank you, but I can’t

Bartender: why not

Peter:

Bartender:

Peter, trying not to give his age away: I’m pregnant

Model au: plushie tiger was named Atsushi The Second. Yes it was Dazai idea. Btw can you imagine if Atsushi and Dazai woul end in a session together where they have pose as a cute couple?

*cough*