#babe are you ok youre writing about rengoku daddy issues again

[risingscorchingsuns]

still thinking about this btw. shinjuro and kyojuro are the same man.

when kyojuro died, shinjuro told senjuro to stop crying and get over it. the funeral was over, it was time to move on. it’s more than likely that he taught them both to grieve exactly like that when Ruka died.

when Ruka died, kyojuro was lost. he didn’t know how to cope with grief, with loss, with change, with any of the massive, massive feelings that no child should ever have to navigate. but here he is anyway, with all these emotions and no way to process them.

so he goes to shinjuro. his father, his guardian, the man who was always so infallible in his previous years. to him, shinjuro held up the sky. kyojuro goes to him for comfort, for affection and familiarity to make sense of the grief, only to have him utterly and completely abandon him. lost in his own grief, shinjuro shoves kyojuro away to wallow, telling him to get over it. that there’s no point dwelling.

shinjuro wallows in his grief, drowns it in sake, does anything he can except actually processing and moving past his emotions. he won’t acknowledge that anything affects him. he won’t admit, not even to himself, that a single moment of earnestness and humility will leave him much happier than pretending he was never hurting at all. but shinjuro won’t do that work, because it’s uncomfortable. he doesn’t want to feel pain, so he quits being a Hashira. drowns himself in agony in order to avoid it. he’s destroying himself in a desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

kyojuro is a child. he has no idea what grief is. he doesn’t know that you have to feel your emotions, to let the pain hurt so it can heal. when shinjuro tells him to get over it, and punishes him for being upset, he has no idea that he’s not doing anything wrong. that it’s healthy to feel grief, and that his big feelings are a sign of healthy emotional development. he can’t get over it. he can’t make sense of it, he can’t forget about it. he can’t let go of it, so he learns to push it down. watches what shinjuro does, and mimics it accordingly. hangs on every shouted vicious word.

the grief of ruka’s death was fundamental in the way Kyojuro learned to process emotions. even as he lay dying, bleeding out from a gaping hole in his abdomen, he remained calm, forced himself to stay collected so he could leave his last words behind. at twenty years old, calm and collected as he bleeds out into the dirt. a smile on his face.

he refuses to be like shinjuro, so wrapped up in suppressing his misery that he can’t see anything but pain. but in his efforts to never turn out like his dad, Kyojuro inadvertently absorbed the mirrored behaviors to cope. the only difference is that kyojuro is reflective. he knows how it feels to be scorned and alone, and refuses to ever make anybody feel the way his dad made him feel. but in all his endlessly self-sacrificial martyrdom, Kyojuro never took the time to feel his own pain- he simply buried it by ridding others of theirs.

hi guys it’s 5am and im having a mental breakdown so here’s some rengoku family analysis

kyojuro and shinjuro eternally two sides of the same coin. he may not have realized it, but both his parents died when ruka did. he grew up without a father, except his father is right there in the other room. he had to be the father for senjuro. he HAD to be, because Shinjuro wasn’t gonna do it. in his own words, “Senjuro has it even worse than I.” Kyojuro had to protect those weaker than him, had to be strong. Being strong was the only thing that gave him control. The only thing that made him feel worthwhile.

Kyojuro died without a dad. He died not knowing that Shinjuro would ever regret his actions. He died without the father he’s always been deprived of. But he still loved Shinjuro because it’s the only father he has. even though shinjuro failed him fundamentally. neglected him, abused him, scorned him. abandoned him utterly and completely. Kyojuro never stopped loving him because he’s his father’s son.

Kyojuro saw himself in Shinjuro. In ways that both inspired and terrified him. The death of Ruka, Shinjuro’s reaction, Kyojuro being so young. Shinjuro taught him how to grieve, whether he meant to or not. Both of them bury their pain, shove it all away into a place that will never be seen. The difference is Kyojuro grew up watching Shinjuro’s pain eat him alive, and started to bury his own in positivity. In strength. Finding his purpose in being strong, in supporting others. But at the end of the day, he is his father’s son. He’s still not allowing himself to feel grief. He’s still not allowing himself to rest. Because what is he if he isn’t strong? Who is Kyojuro, if he isn’t the Flame Hashira Rengoku?

Kyojuro is simultaneously determined to both reinspire his father, and to never turn out like him. He loved the man that Shinjuro was, the man that Kyojuro needed, the man that he died without. He was determined not to turn out the same way, to let his flames burn forever, until they burned him alive if they had to. To never give up the way his father did, to never let anyone down the way his father did. To never fail anyone, the way his father failed him. So he buries his pain in responsibility. No time to fail if you just never stop burning. He can’t let his grief taint him like it did his father. even in his final words he believed that. the flow of time waits for no one. it wont stand patiently by as you grieve. and while those words in of themselves are incredibly powerful, and an important lesson, i believe kyojuro internalized them to an unhealthy degree.

but while the words are something kyojuro lives by, in an ironic twist of fate he’s still a lot like Shinjuro himself. in his efforts to not turn out like him he’s done the same thing. he pushed aside his pain, held himself together so tightly. because he can never let anybody see that he’s hurting. he can never let anybody see that he’s anything less than Flame Hashira Rengoku, infallible pillar of strength and passion. kyojuro is always smiling when he looks at others. when he looks at senjuro. he’s keeping himself together so tightly. because he has to. because nobody else is going to do it. because if he doesn’t hold himself together he has nothing, he’s a mirror image of his father. they are two sides of the same coin. Kyojuro desperately yearning for the man Shinjuro used to be, while subconsciously determined not to turn into the man he is. and he stubbornly clings to that forever in hopes that he’ll be the one to inspire him, that he can bring shinjuro back. if he’s just strong enough. if hes just good enough. if he just works a little harder he can have his father back.

Heavy are the shoulders that wear the Flame Hashira haori. Heavy is the Rengoku family legacy.

i have no idea if this is coherent at ALL, it’s definitely not my best analysis, i havent proofread and its five in the morning lol. maybe when im more rested ill come back to this and do a proper essay with sources and context, but for now here’s some unpolished stream of consciousness ramblings with zero editing. kyojuro rengoku daddy issues i know what you are