catsbythegreat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
catsbythegreat) wrote2018-12-16 03:20 pm
catsbythegreat) wrote2018-12-16 03:20 pm
Entry tags:
[bsd meta] Dazai and Chuuya and Childhood
Yesterday someone sent me a tweet that caught my interest (they sent the image and I can't link it because I think it was deleted) which said:
"remember when dazai threatened to rip a 13 y/o childs heart out and then nearly slit his throat for something that wasnt his fault in th first place and chuuya encouraged him
i know Q was a little shit and all but he's still a child"
That is all true, but something about that tweet rubs me the wrong way in terms of how it assumes that Dazai and Chuuya should know better because Q is a child. But here's the thing: they don't. That doesn't make it okay, but it also doesn't make them terrible people for not knowing that the world works in terms of "young people shouldn't be considered unforgivable/completely at fault for their actions because they're just children."
Dazai and Chuuya never really got to be kids. Dazai was taken into the Mafia at fourteen, just one year older than Q, and before that point he was already jaded enough that he wanted to die. I'm assuming that, because he was smart and because he likely came from a not-so-great environment, he had figured out how terrible people could be. Mori took him in and made him an accomplice to murder, then had Dazai do the dirty work of the Port Mafia. By the time Dazai met Chuuya a year later, murder didn't mean anything significant to him other than perhaps a way to try to feel more alive through someone else's death.
Chuuya can't remember anything from before he was seven, and his entire existence is based on a god of calamity. Whatever the thing inside him is, it is a destructive force, and Chuuya as he is now came into being as the result of a destroyed lab and (I'm assuming) a lot of dead people. He lived in the streets with a gang of kids, became their protector, and by the time he met Dazai had already killed people without hesitation (like the guy in the plane in the first scene of Fifteen.)
Nothing changed when they joined the Mafia other than gaining more responsibility. They still killed people or helped other people do it, Dazai still planned and manipulated, Chuuya still attacked and led other people to attack.
There are a lot of young people in the Mafia, but no one that Chuuya and Dazai met was treated like a child, except for Odasaku's orphans, and it's possible that Dazai didn't think about them that much because they were technically outside of the Mafia.
Dazai was there when Q got taken in and it seems like Q was immediately assessed for how useful he could be. Dazai took Akutagawa in and put him to work. Kouyou wasn't that old when she took in Chuuya, but her role would have made her seem older. Remember that even in the present day, most of the people playing a significant role in the Mafia that we see are under 30, the outliers being Hirotsu and Mori.
So the scenes where Dazai threatens to rip Q's heart out, and the one where Chuuya tells Dazai to kill Q, aren't surprising, because neither of them considers Q a child the same way everyone else does. To them, Q is someone who's caused and is still causing an enormous amount of damage. His Ability takes away peoples' agency from them, something that I think makes both Dazai and Chuuya incredibly uncomfortable. To them, Q was never a child. He was just someone else in the Mafia, the same as they themselves were never children.
Q not being at fault because of his age and the manipulation forced upon him is likely something that Dazai and Chuuya both don't consider because they were in the same position, and to a certain extent take ownership over their actions despite that. Chuuya thinks he's in the right, being in the Mafia, because that's the side he's chosen to align himself with completely. Dazai is coming to terms with his past and trying to reconcile that with where he wants to be in the future and whether or not he can be a good person, but he still feels like he was (and sometimes still is) the Demon Prodigy. He can't really dig too deeply into Q being manipulated and not being completely at fault when he hasn't quite touched on the same thing for himself. (I hope he does, though, for his own sake.)
Adulthood and childhood were the same to Dazai and Chuuya because they were never treated like children. Their actions, crimes, and decisions were treated as adult ones (to the point where they both became Executives at a young age.) As a result, the concepts of redemption and good vs evil likely wouldn't have anything to do with age for either of them right now.
So while it's not great for a few reasons that either of them would want Q dead (given Dazai's current attempts to be a good man and Chuuya's loyalty to the Mafia -- they're both going against their current values in the scenes with Q), to me age doesn't factor into it. Their lives have been defined by the crimes and manipulations of their childhoods, and as a result that is how they view the world. Q is just another dangerous Ability user from the Mafia, and they want to deal with him accordingly.
"remember when dazai threatened to rip a 13 y/o childs heart out and then nearly slit his throat for something that wasnt his fault in th first place and chuuya encouraged him
i know Q was a little shit and all but he's still a child"
That is all true, but something about that tweet rubs me the wrong way in terms of how it assumes that Dazai and Chuuya should know better because Q is a child. But here's the thing: they don't. That doesn't make it okay, but it also doesn't make them terrible people for not knowing that the world works in terms of "young people shouldn't be considered unforgivable/completely at fault for their actions because they're just children."
Dazai and Chuuya never really got to be kids. Dazai was taken into the Mafia at fourteen, just one year older than Q, and before that point he was already jaded enough that he wanted to die. I'm assuming that, because he was smart and because he likely came from a not-so-great environment, he had figured out how terrible people could be. Mori took him in and made him an accomplice to murder, then had Dazai do the dirty work of the Port Mafia. By the time Dazai met Chuuya a year later, murder didn't mean anything significant to him other than perhaps a way to try to feel more alive through someone else's death.
Chuuya can't remember anything from before he was seven, and his entire existence is based on a god of calamity. Whatever the thing inside him is, it is a destructive force, and Chuuya as he is now came into being as the result of a destroyed lab and (I'm assuming) a lot of dead people. He lived in the streets with a gang of kids, became their protector, and by the time he met Dazai had already killed people without hesitation (like the guy in the plane in the first scene of Fifteen.)
Nothing changed when they joined the Mafia other than gaining more responsibility. They still killed people or helped other people do it, Dazai still planned and manipulated, Chuuya still attacked and led other people to attack.
There are a lot of young people in the Mafia, but no one that Chuuya and Dazai met was treated like a child, except for Odasaku's orphans, and it's possible that Dazai didn't think about them that much because they were technically outside of the Mafia.
Dazai was there when Q got taken in and it seems like Q was immediately assessed for how useful he could be. Dazai took Akutagawa in and put him to work. Kouyou wasn't that old when she took in Chuuya, but her role would have made her seem older. Remember that even in the present day, most of the people playing a significant role in the Mafia that we see are under 30, the outliers being Hirotsu and Mori.
So the scenes where Dazai threatens to rip Q's heart out, and the one where Chuuya tells Dazai to kill Q, aren't surprising, because neither of them considers Q a child the same way everyone else does. To them, Q is someone who's caused and is still causing an enormous amount of damage. His Ability takes away peoples' agency from them, something that I think makes both Dazai and Chuuya incredibly uncomfortable. To them, Q was never a child. He was just someone else in the Mafia, the same as they themselves were never children.
Q not being at fault because of his age and the manipulation forced upon him is likely something that Dazai and Chuuya both don't consider because they were in the same position, and to a certain extent take ownership over their actions despite that. Chuuya thinks he's in the right, being in the Mafia, because that's the side he's chosen to align himself with completely. Dazai is coming to terms with his past and trying to reconcile that with where he wants to be in the future and whether or not he can be a good person, but he still feels like he was (and sometimes still is) the Demon Prodigy. He can't really dig too deeply into Q being manipulated and not being completely at fault when he hasn't quite touched on the same thing for himself. (I hope he does, though, for his own sake.)
Adulthood and childhood were the same to Dazai and Chuuya because they were never treated like children. Their actions, crimes, and decisions were treated as adult ones (to the point where they both became Executives at a young age.) As a result, the concepts of redemption and good vs evil likely wouldn't have anything to do with age for either of them right now.
So while it's not great for a few reasons that either of them would want Q dead (given Dazai's current attempts to be a good man and Chuuya's loyalty to the Mafia -- they're both going against their current values in the scenes with Q), to me age doesn't factor into it. Their lives have been defined by the crimes and manipulations of their childhoods, and as a result that is how they view the world. Q is just another dangerous Ability user from the Mafia, and they want to deal with him accordingly.
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'Q is still a child' is an appeal to emotion and has nothing whatsoever to do with logic. If we were Dazai, our thought processes might be something like this: Q is being used to kill people> he is being hurt in order to trigger his ability> it's too dangerous for Q to keep on living> he's probably better off dead (except Dazai decides keeping Q alive makes his own survival more likely).
Chuuya, who is almost as pragmatic as Dazai but who does put value in emotions and honour, agrees with Dazai's assessment. Killing one person (in this case Q--who regardless of being a kid or not is really fucking dangerous) is worth it if it means there would be no more wide-scale deaths like they have experienced when Q escaped.
Ethically speaking, SKK are standing on very rocky grounds. It's like the trolley problem, where they either would have to kill a child or let the child to kill more people. Like there are no correct answers to the trolley problem, there's no 'ethical' solution to their dilemma with Q. Making a stink about Dazai and Chuuya expressing utilitarian views annoys me tbh. I'm not surprised, but still annoyed that people still look at things in black and white.
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And defo from their own experiences, Dazai and Chuuya would have thought of Q as old enough to handle the consequences of what he is and what he does. :"D Like it sucks, but for their part many other human lives are on the line.
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