Kitsune-fox-55 - Idk What Im Doing

THEORY TIME THEORY TIME

ok. so. first of all FYODOR FCKIN DOSTOEVSKY I LIKE U AND ALL BUT???? REMAIN DEAD??? U JESUS FR??

ANYWAYS ignoring that

so bc i adore skk to hell and back obviously im gonna explore their dynamic first

what kills me is how familiar they are with each other. they arent insulting each other in every sentence, which is still alright. and what struck me the most is how much dazai seems to trust chuuya. more so than anyone.

so far we know that dazai isn't exactly the most open person around. his entire cheerful joking persona is a facade, a fake. what you see is usually only what he wants to show you. his real emotions? ive only seen them very rarely, if at all. now look at these

the way chuuya says what he does implies that he is already used to this habit of dazai's, which is only possible if dazai did this in his mafia days, AND even then, he was open and willing enough to let chuuya see it and know that dazai was anxious. which means that even before mersault, before dazai left the mafia, he and chuuya atleast were that close that the usually closed-off, know-everything demon prodigy could show his worry to his partner, multiple times.

i think that over here, dazai really isnt hiding his emotions. you can see the shock and worry on his face and in his eyes clearly as he puts the pieces together. not only that, hes also laying out parts of his plan to chuuya, in addition to his theories. which he rarely does unless im wrong about that (its possible). he isnt worried about chuuya using his emotions and weaknesses against him, because he trusts him enough, although i think the trust between them was already shown when both of them fake-killed each other.

its easy to see the panic in his eyes, and personally i feel that this is him showing a bit of weakness, which is perfectly alright. the thing is that again, hes letting chuuya see this. I very much doubt that he would have let down his facade enough to show this to absolutely anyone else.

also the poor guy literally looks so stressed out here give him a goddamn break asagiri

aaaaand now chuuya.

now what strikes me is that even in the last chapter/s, chuuya has multiple times tried to reassure dazai that fyodor is indeed dead to try and calm down dazai's worries. this can also be him also wanting a damn break but anyways.

and these panels. while many ppl are agreeing that hes just sitting there being a pretty boy while dazai tows through helicopter debris (and i agree), and definitely chuuyas sadistic streak when it comes to dazai is showing itself clearly, its often been seen in both the official arts and animanga that whenever working together, chuuya always covers dazai's blind spots.

think about it. dazai has his back turned towards everything. if someone launched a surprise attack on him at this moment, the chances of him dodging, finding out abt it in time is pretty low. chuuya is directly behind dazai. i got this idea from another post i saw, but what if this is also chuuya covering for dazai yet again? protecting him?

anyways thats it folks maybe ill make another post on jesus- i meant fyodor soon

they try, honestly they do, but the doctor isn't a stationary creature and never has been, especially not when they know there's something they could help with. which is to say, it takes a week of soft quiet life before he starts begging kate for a job. kate in turn withstands three weeks of the doctor's incessant begging and big puppy dog eyes while donna noble stands right behind him and mouths don't you fucking dare before she makes a counteroffer: he can work in a lab (the 'very far away from active duty' is implied) as long as he meets with unit's therapist.

and he refuses, of course, loudly and profusely, right up until donna very gently but very firmly tells him that it really could help, actually.

so. therapy. the doctor assumes it won't do anything. the unit therapist is no nonsense and unflinching and very very bright, and twenty minutes later the doctor sits outside the room hyperventilating while kate finishes paperwork and kindly doesn't mention the way he's all but curled into her.

the second session ends much like the first, and the third, and then the fourth he walks out with dry eyes and a tremulous smile. the fifth, kate calls donna and she takes him home and they drink hot chocolate and he doesn't start talking again until the next day. it takes him seven sessions to be able to stay in the room for the full hour; kate pats him on the back and then finally allows him to build a shield for her office as a reward. she sits outside the therapist's office every time he has a session, even though she has to have better things to do. they don't talk about it.

unit only has files on things the doctor's done on earth, and even then, only sometimes, which means that when the doctor talks about some things he just. edits, a little. talks about two weeks in a confession dial and a month in prison, because maybe then he doesn't have to think about the enormity of it all. and every single time he does this, the therapist looks at him and very kindly calls bullshit. it's weird, being known. it's different with donna. he is donna and donna is him, in ways they will probably never talk about. but he sits in that cluttered little office for an hour a week (sometimes two or three times, if he's doing particularly badly) and he feels seen.

after four months, there are memories he can touch without flinching, and people he can talk about without crying. he starts spending a couple of hours just sitting in the vortex, not because he's hiding or running but just because he likes the way it feels against his skin. he cooks dinner every other night and washes up when he doesn't. he takes out the bin every week even though it's rose's job, because he loves her. and he can say that now, and he doesn't think about her short lifespan or about all the other people they've loved and lost. he can say that and just mean it.

part of his contract is an agreement to never offer a trip to a member of unit unless it's actual life or death (the small chemical leak in the lab doesn't count; he takes shirley to new mars anyway) but he finds himself toying with the idea of asking for a session in the tardis. just once, just to see. the therapist looks at him and sees him and it is monstrous and they keep looking anyway and now the doctor can sit through a family dinner without wanting to tear his skin off and he doesn't know any other way to say thank you.

it's funny, almost, how quickly he grows attached to this person who picks through his hurts and rifles through his traumas and holds direct eye contact while doing so. the doctor talks about their deaths and their crimes and their cowardice and the therapist nods and asks him how he feels and it's. it's terrifying. it's beautiful. it's the worst thing he's ever ever been through, and the best. he feels ripped apart and put back together in a way that few people have ever been able to— huh.

after his sixty eighth session (he's unable to not keep count) the doctor walks outside to where kate is annotating a schematic and says, thoughtfully, they're the master in disguise, aren't they. and kate says oh 100% and please don't let them know that you know because they will definitely go to the second stage of whatever long con they've been hatching and they're too good at this for us to let them go

can someone please tell me what the fuck I just saw

There are a couple more Garrus-Vakarian-related hills I'm willing to die on.

Maybe this particular bit of fanon has faded over the years, but there used to be a lot of insistence that Garrus is young and somehow inexperienced when he meets Shepard. Canon doesn't really support this. Turians start their mandatory service at 15. Garrus has at least a decade of experience. Even if he's 2-4 of years younger than Shepard (according to Patrick Weekes), he's got at least as much field experience as she does by dint of the difference in turian and human "enlistment" ages.

Garrus is really damn good at his job at C-Sec. You don't give the Case of Investigating the Rogue Spectre to a greenhorn. You give it to your best, most tenacious agent. Pallin may not always approve of Garrus's actions, but that doesn't actually stop him from putting Garrus on the tough case. Also, we don't know much about how C-Sec works but we do know a bit about how the turian hierarchy works, and we know C-Sec was essentially a turian initiative. That means it's a meritocracy where failure reflects on the superior, not the one who failed. So, in roughly a decade (Shepard's 29 in ME1; I always think of Garrus as about 27), Garrus has not only done shipboard military service, but he's also risen to be one of C-Sec's top investigators; Pallin wouldn't risk having Garrus's "failure" reflect poorly on HIM otherwise. I'd say that actually makes Garrus as remarkable in civilian law enforcement terms as Shepard is considered to be within the ranks of the Alliance military.

Of course Garrus was scouted by the Spectre program. And honestly, if his dad hadn't stepped in, I think Garrus would have become a Spectre, no problem. Especially for a turian, he's cut from precisely the cloth the Spectres would be looking for: extremely skilled, extremely capable, and--most importantly--he's a turian not just able but willing to work outside the chains of command that turians are taught from birth to revere and be loyal to above all else. This is the reason Pallin is leery about Spectres: he's a good turian. Good turians follow straight lines; they don't carve out their own paths.

Garrus's dad's not dumb, and he's not cruel, and he, too, rose to the top of the C-Sec hierarchy. He took one look at his kid, I think, and said, "I love my child, but I'd say it's a 50-50 chance he ends up a shooting-first-asking-questions-later Spectre like Saren Arterius, and I don't want to see that happen." Yeah, he uses his parental influence to try and jam square-peg-Garrus into round-hole-C-Sec and Garrus resents him for it, but there's no way he did it just to stop his son from getting his way or because he doesn't like Spectres. I expect Vakarian Sr. had to clean up more post-Spectre-interference messes than we can possibly imagine. But we also know he and Alec Ryder were pals later.

So the importance of what Garrus learns from a Paragon Spectre Shepard is this: You can't just do what you want and claim the ends always justify the means. That's what Saren does. Over and over again. Garrus's code and his idealism and his sense of justice and his ability to work alone should make him a great Spectre, actually, but he needs Paragon Spectre Shepard's actions to show him the lesson he tells her he's learned during ME1: "If the people I'm sworn to protect can't trust me... well, then I don't deserve to be the one protecting them." (And the seed of Archangel was planted.) I think for the first time he realizes that even though he believes his sense of justice to be correct, it doesn't matter for shit if he can't show others why that's so. And that's where the trust comes in. (Also, ow, the extra level of importance this gives their exchange where she tells him she trusts him and he tells her she's about the only friend he has left is... a lot. Cool, cool. I'm totally fine. Nothing to see here.)

When Shepard asks him what happened on Omega, he replies, "My feelings got in the way of my better judgement." Something tells me that this never happens to "good" turians, which just makes the line so much more devastating. And although the lesson some might take away from this is "feelings bad; no feelings ever," the "grey" that Garrus has to learn to deal with is precisely the grey of recognizing feelings, validating them even, but not acting on them until they've been examined. (Which is why my Shepard stands between him and Sidonis; she doesn't give a shit about Sidonis. But Garrus has refused to process his own feelings of failure and self-loathing, so they have to take the therapy session to the Citadel and deal with it there.)

Ahh yes. The mountain range of character analysis.

Plot armor but it’s Bruce Wayne’s wealth.

Bruce is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce does not want to be one of the richest men in world.

He starts by implementing high starting salaries and full health care coverages for all levels at Wayne Enterprises. This in vastly improves retention and worker productivity, and WE profits soar. He increases PTO, grants generous parental and family leave, funds diversity initiatives, boosts salaries again. WE is ranked “#1 worker-friendly corporation”, and productively and profits soar again.

Ok, so clearly investing his workers isn’t the profit-destroying doomed strategy his peers claim it is. Bruce is going to keep doing it obviously (his next initiative is to ensure all part-time and contractors get the same benefits and pay as full time employees), but he is going to have to find a different way to dump his money.

But you know what else is supposed to be prohibitively expensive? Green and ethical initiatives. Yes, Bruce can do that. He creates and fund a 10 year plan to covert all Wayne facilities to renewable energy. He overhauls all factories to employ the best environmentally friendly practices and technologies. He cuts contracts with all suppliers that engage in unethical employment practices and pays for other to upgrade their equipment and facilities to meet WE’s new environmental and safety requirements. He spares no expense.

Yeah, Wayne Enterprises is so successful that they spin off an entire new business arm focused on helping other companies convert to environmentally friendly and safe practices like they did in an efficient, cost effective, successful way.

Admittedly, investing in his own company was probably never going to be the best way to get rid of his wealth. He slashes his own salary to a pittance (god knows he has more money than he could possibly know what to do with already) and keeps investing the profits back into the workers, and WE keeps responding with nearly terrifying success.

So WE is a no-go, and Bruce now has numerous angry billionaires on his back because they’ve been claiming all these measures he’s implementing are too expensive to justify for decades and they’re finding it a little hard to keep the wool over everyone’s eyes when Idiot Softheart Bruice Wayne has money spilling out his ears. BUT Bruce can invest in Gotham. That’ll go well, right?

Gotham’s infrastructure is the OSHA anti-Christ and even what little is up to code is constantly getting destroyed by Rogue attacks. Surely THAT will be a money sink.

Except the only non-corrupt employer in Gotham city is….Wayne Enterprises. Or contractors or companies or businesses that somehow, in some way or other, feed back to WE. Paying wholesale for improvement to Gotham’s infrastructure somehow increases WE’s profits.

Bruce funds a full system overhaul of Gotham hospital (it’s not his fault the best administrative system software is WE—he looked), he sets up foundations and trusts for shelters, free clinics, schools, meal plans, day care, literally anything he can think of.

Gotham continues to be a shithole. Bruce Wayne continues to be richer than god against his Batman-ingrained will.

Oh, and Bruice Wayne is no longer viewed as solely a spoiled idiot nepo baby. The public responds by investing in WE and anything else he owns, and stop doing this, please.

Bruce sets up a foundation to pay the college tuition of every Gotham citizen who applies. It’s so successful that within 10 years, donations from previous recipients more than cover incoming need, and Bruce can’t even donate to his own charity.

But by this time, Bruce has children. If he can’t get rid of his wealth, he can at least distribute it, right?

Except Dick Grayson absolutely refuses to receive any of his money, won’t touch his trust fund, and in fact has never been so successful and creative with his hacking skills as he is in dumping the money BACK on Bruce. Jason died and won’t legally resurrect to take his trust fund. Tim has his own inherited wealth, refuses to inherit more, and in fact happily joins forces with Dick to hack accounts and return whatever money he tries to give them. Cass has no concept of monetary wealth and gives him panicked, overwhelmed eyes whenever he so much as implies offering more than $100 at once. Damian is showing worrying signs of following in his precious Richard’s footsteps, and Babs barely allows him to fund tech for the Clocktower. At least Steph lets him pay for her tuition and uses his credit card to buy unholy amounts of Batburger. But that is hardly a drop in the ocean of Bruce’s wealth. And she won’t even accept a trust fund of only one million.

Jason wins for best-worst child though because he currently runs a very lucrative crime empire. And although he pours the vast, vast majority of his profits back into Crime Alley, whenever he gets a little too rich for his tastes, he dumps the money on Bruce. At this point, Bruce almost wishes he was being used for money laundering because then he’s at least not have the money.

So children—generous, kindhearted, stubborn till the day they die the little shits, children—are also out.

Bruce was funding the Justice League. But then finances were leaked, and the public had an outcry over one man holding so much sway over the world’s superheroes (nevermind Bruce is one of those superheroes—but the public can’t know that). So Bruce had to do some fancy PR trickery, concede to a policy of not receiving a majority of funds from one individual, and significantly decrease his contributions because no one could match his donations.

At his wits end, Bruce hires a team of accounts to search through every crinkle and crevice of tax law to find what loopholes or shortcuts can be avoided in order to pay his damn taxes to the MAX.

The results are horrifying. According to the strictest definition of the law, the government owes him money.

Bruce burns the report, buries any evidence as deeply as he can, and organizes a foundation to lobby for FAR higher taxation of the upper class.

All this, and Wayne Enterprises is happily chugging along, churning profit, expanding into new markets, growing in the stock market, and trying to force the credit and proportionate compensation on their increasingly horrified CEO.

Bruce Wayne is one of the richest men in the world. Bruce Wayne will never not be one of the richest men in the world.

But by GOD is he trying.

I was today years old when I learned that when you type “otp: true” in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship

when i tell you i had an aneurysm

Inspired by Keep your cards close (and keep me closer) by NobodysPoet

please just take a moment with me to appreciate how "s'envoyer en l'air" has so much comedic potential as an expression considering Chuuya's ability and how much mileage two teenagers who love antagonizing each other could get out of it

One of my favourite things about Mori and Fyodor projecting onto Dazai is that they keep thinking he's exactly like them when... no??? He's not???? At all??????

Idk maybe I interpret Dazai differently but while Mori and Fyodor are clearly Dazai-foils, I just can't see them as really all that similar.

Sure, strategy-wise, they have a lot in common. They're also all relatively unbound by such things as morality and have few close people - feeling lonely for the most part.

But what gets me is... Mori does what he does because he is an ambitious leader. Fyodor does what he does because he has an ambitious dream. Both are after a way to make the world/city better according to their visions and are prepared to go about darker means to achieve this.

Dazai... doesn't really have any ambitions? They all have eerily similar lines of thinking and ways of dealing with and manipulating situations and people, but their emotional cores are completely different.

Dazai is not ambitious. Dazai is empty. What's more, he's kind of lazy and only really motivated to take action on someone else's requests/orders - otherwise he's actually a really passive character imo. He took orders from Mori in the mafia, only intervened in the DHC because Chuuya got mad, and left the mafia and helps people in the present day because he made a promise to Odasaku. All his strategizing and planning is retaliatory, rather than proactive like Mori or Fyodor. I think the only time we see Dazai planning proactively is in Beast, but even then, that's not some lofty vision for the world/city, that's a desperate plan to save one single person.

This is a huge part of the reason why I think Dazai's threats to kill Mori and take over as the boss were complete bs. Why would he want that? That's more responsibility. I don't see why he would have any desire to lead the mafia outside of Beast.

But because Mori expects Dazai is just like him, and this is something he would do in that situation, he accepts it, putting him and Dazai in this uncomfortable stalemate where neither has complete power over the other. So it has a tactical purpose, yes, but it's far from ambitious.

What's more, Mori and Fyodor are shown to have no compunction with sacrificing people like pawns, even people close to them. Logic wins out, at all costs. Dazai is not good at sacrificing. He's selfish. Once he has something or someone, he's loathe to let it go. If he is significantly close with someone, emotion will actually win out in the end (Odasaku). Dazai is afraid of loss.

So, yeah, they are all amoral brilliant strategists who are isolated from most other people but their motivations are completely different. In all actuality, I think Mori and Fyodor have a lot more in common on that note than Dazai ever did.