#Main manga Dazai knows the entire plot of the next ten arcs before they even begin

[anti-dazai-blog]

y'know, it's kinda ridiculous that dazai eventually won without much difficulty. in recent chapters of the manga, we witnessed for the first time that dazai was struggling so hard, which showed him less omnipotent than he was, and more human at the same time. but it turns out that he was making a fool out of fyodor all along!!!! he lost to the power of alliance!!!! ...excuse me? then what was meursault arc all for?

i love bsd, but there are too many things that annoy me, and the flaws of the series are rarely talked about. so im reaaally happy to see you criticizing the series. i love your blog sm, please never stop posting!! 💕

YES EXACTLY!!

Dazai’s omniscience does NOT help humanize him. All that it does is give him more accountability in everything that happens. He doesn’t get the luxury of pleading ignorance because at this point, the story has made that no longer believable. 

No matter what, Dazai knows everything all the time, doesn’t make mistakes in his plans and strategies, and is capable of anything. If this is the case, which I said it was semi-jokingly in the early days of this blog, he really can be held accountable for pretty much anything and everything happening. Which I’d really rather wasn’t the case.

One of the main themes of bsd is humanity. No one’s special or perfect, everyone’s a human being trying their best to get by. The Meursault arc did a pretty decent job of humanizing both Dazai and Fyodor, two characters who were previously shown as (intellectually) flawless, by having them struggle in their battle of wits against each other. Having both of them mess up or miscalculate in some way made them seem like real people and not just two algorithms playing chess. 

Having Dazai reveal in this final episode that he knew everything all along, everything went according to his plan, and there was never any challenge to begin with entirely defeats the purpose of the arc. What are we supposed to take away from this? That Dazai automatically wins any fight because he’s Dazai? That removes all stakes. 

Why continue watching a show if you’ve already been told that one specific character will always win—and not only that, but it won’t even be a struggle for him to get there, because he knows everything about everything all the time. 

I really, really hope that this was an anime-only ending. Asagiri can still fix this. Admittedly, bungo stray dogs has always been character-focused rather than plot-focused, so while I trust Asagiri to handle the characters better than this, I’m not really sure what to expect plot-wise. But I’m gonna hope for the best.