the fact that nobody mentions the divine beasts in totk drives me insane. not mentioning the calamity, fine. it’s been over a century. they’ve started rebuilding. but the divine beasts?? ur telling me nobody is going to even mention where huge sheikah machines went after causing huge messes and then standing over the settlements for a while? no “oh yeah and behind eldin is our war machine dump be careful there” line? i get not mentioning guardians and not having them around, but the beasts? ur going to tell me u call it vah medoh perch but won’t tell me what the fuck happened to vah medoh? i’m going insane i’m so insane
totk is just “omg omg i’m around ppl and i’m doing silly tasks for them i love side quests this is just like animal crossing” *steps one meter outside a settlement* i am alone and i know nothing this world rejects me the same way i reject rejection no one can ever understand me or feel the immense loss i experience as i walk through this rejuvenated land
are you seriously telling me nobody edited zelda botw to father by the front bottoms yet?? what are zelda fans doing
Trying to explain to my friend this concept
this is a good step to take, but enlightenment is realizing that you wouldn’t like something if you didn’t believe it was good on some level, even things that seem superficially “bad” at first.
@vampire-wizard-solidarity made me think of failgirl zelda lol
i love skyward sword so much because the devs were like “okay let’s give link’s trusty sword a consciousness and a personality” and then they made her an autistic dyke. and they were so right
i think the worst sin of zelda fandom’s mischaracterisation is how they make botw zelda have the competent girl disease. like please. she made link eat a frog. her entire arc is about how everyone expects her to be the competent girl and how she utterly fails at that task. she is silly. let her be silly i beg.
Do you think atsushi has a black and white viewpoint? Can you show examples of that?
I mean, I guess? Why does this ask sound like a literature textbook reading comprehension exercise afvjtcarcnkyvarvkufsgb
I don’t think the issue with Atsushi is him having a black and white view as much as it is him being superficial and quick to judge; he has a very high consideration of Dazai because when he first met him he looked extraordinary and good to him, and nothing about Dazai Atsushi finds out is going to change the positive opinion he has of him. He first saw Akutagawa and Fitzgerald as ruthless evil people when he first met them, and that’s everything they’re ever going to be to him. The issue with Atsushi is that he won’t change his mind easily; but I don’t think that necessarily means he sticks to black and white views. He loves Kyouka despite he’s seen the most ruthless side of her in more than one occasion. He understands where Lucy comes from. He admires Dazai despite knowing he’s committed crimes in the past. He even came to forgive his abuser the orphanage director, to an extent. In Dead Apple, he says “a boy always uses the claws of a tiger in order to live”– that does sound like he contemplates there’s no true good or evil, and you could hardly expect any less from the Bungou Stray Dogs protagonist.
i think you’re right about him being quick to judge people and then not changing his mind easily, but i think he definitely also has a streak of black and white thinking to him.
for example with kyouka: even though he sees the most ruthless side of her, he’s stuck on his idea of her because he’s projecting. his big revelation when he first meets her is that she doesn’t have control over her ability - he sees this young girl who’s being given commands and literally has a bomb strapped to her chest and i think he genuinely sees a victim. he thinks about how he himself couldn’t control his tiger, and he projects his own separation of himself and his ability onto her. that’s why he struggles so much in dead apple - for example the scene where he says that killing is wrong no matter what, and kyouka disagrees with him, instead saying that the agency’s killings and the mafia’s are different. he reacts with shock. and the biggest revelation of dead apple is, of course, when kyouka denies the view he projected onto her - saying that she doesn’t hate her ability, and didn’t experience a similar relief to him when it was gone. she also apologizes for not telling him sooner, suggesting she knew that it would be a difficult reality for him to bear, because he is not yet ready to view his ability and the act of killing with nuance.
i think his inability to properly change his impressions of people and his black and white thinking go hand in hand, for example with dazai atsushi doesn’t even really consider his past crimes - he never quite grapples with dazai’s past, he just accepts that dazai is now a good, great guy and that’s it. the way he talks about dazai ditching akutagawa it’s clear he thinks this was justified - he doesn’t think about the larger dynamics or even the events that took place, as far as he’s concerned dazai is cool and akutagawa is horrible so akutagawa was in the wrong.
most of the time when atsushi has to address some sort of nuance, he breaks down. he breaks down in dead apple. he breaks down when he learns the orphanage director wanted to give him flowers. he breaks down in the latest arc, when learning information that apparently complicates the situation. his arc, i think, is largely about overcoming his black and white thinking + his inability to change his view of a person. the bsd plot is structured in a way to make atsushi question the morality of “good guys vs bad guys”, which i think for him is at least partially a trauma response (it’s easier to conceptualise your abuse as having been at the hands of just a malicious irrationally evil person + the headmaster’s conditioning is easier to process if one thinks of morality as a binary rather than a more complex system of judgement).


