#i am glowing yall have hyped me up so much ty 🥺

[kaurwreck]

hi i love reading your posts about bsd!!! they're very insightful + very clearly written by someone who's spent a while familiarizing themself with what they're talking about, and they're often refreshingly unique. particularly always taken aback (surprised? in a good way) by the trust you have in bsd in a work. even when i disagree with them, your analyses and theories are always (1) interesting (2) evidently written by someone approaching bsd and their conversations in good faith, both of which matter a lot to me.

might be completely off-base, but do you think having a background in law might impact writing bluntly/authoritatively, especially if your writing is perceived differently out of fandom spaces? i don't have enough experience to be confident, but that tone next to the emphasis on clarity in your writing feels like it fits, even if only in a chicken-and-egg way.

I stand by my problematic wife!!!!!!

I really, really do have so much faith in and love for bsd, and I trust Kafka Asagiri implicitly. This is, in part, because months and months ago, as I felt myself becoming consumed by the source material, I recognized I needed to temper myself and my expectations of the work.

My intensity and obsessiveness are as familiar to me as the beleaguered tendons in my wrists. I know twinging aches precede sharp, heated pain, so I know when to wrap the inflammation before it flares any further. Similarly, I know that if I don't ground myself before hours of hyperfixated research become tens of hours, I risk becoming disillusioned, and I risk pouring myself completely into something that won't replenish that time, energy, and emotional investment. So, I wrap my wrist when I can feel the inklings of tendinitis, and I reorient around authorial intent when the hyperfixation begins to spore.

So, I sought out interviews with Kafka Asagiri, expecting that he'd spoken to the limitations of his authorial framework.

(This sounds silly, but it works for me; for example, I adore Vanitas no Carte, but I only engage with the material referenced in VnC (ex: Song of Roland) shallowly except insofar as I have an independent interest. This is because when I similarly felt I might become obsessed, I sought out interviews, during which Jun Mochizuki stated clearly that the references she makes don't penetrate the substance of her characters or the story. So, I'll skim them, but most of the energy I pour into VnC (of which there's a lot), I pour into VnC itself rather than it's reference materials. This is because I'm rewarded by insights into the narrative I hadn't noticed before; different facets of interpretation I hadn't previously considered; greater understanding of the characters; etc. It's reciprocal; otherwise, it drains me dry because I cannot emphasize enough, I do not approach research like any human person should.)

Anyway, so, I searched for and identified statements Kafka Asagiri made about the referenced material. And, I was pleasantly surprised that he is passionate about the underlying literature and, from the outset, wrote the story hoping his audience would gain an interest in the literary works from which he took inspiration. And that sufficed, that constituted assurance that while I couldn't expect that he would intend all of the connections my obsessive, insatiable, pattern hungry brain would make, there was depth I could explore while still engaging with bsd.

What's wild is that I was expecting, like, easter eggs and light or ambiguous foreshadowing. Instead, once I started researching the period, authors, works, etc., the story began to open and come together where it hadn't been before. I clearly was already enjoying it, but there were what I perceived to be fairly severe structural flaws and neither narrative focus nor diverse enough arcs. Except the more I read the source material and the more I engaged with bsd as a multimedia work in which the various adaptations were facets of a whole rather than the same story reinterpreted + the various spinoffs as fragments of canon; the more I noticed a dialogue between bsd and its source materials. Which, taken together, recontextualized what I previously perceived to be narrative flaws such that while novel in structure, bsd became a satisfying, deeply intentional narrative.

This isn't to say I am noticing only and everything Asagiri intended to write, but his own sincere engagement with the works on top of which bsd is written is so tightly woven into the story and characters that bsd is a genuinely innovative medium of literary critique and historical reflection for an expansive array of literature that spans several eras.

So, I really, really do have so much faith in and love for bsd, and I trust Kafka Asagiri implicitly. Not because I think it's without flaws or that it hits each of its marks; because, quite frankly, even evaluated in the context of its unique structure, it's a rough tumbled gem. I certainly don't trust the story to fall into into a more common or familiar structure either.

Instead, I trust it to be sincere, compassionate, thoughtful, ambitiously playful, delightfully absurd, and I trust it to have more heart than sense. But mostly, I trust that while the story and Kafka Asagiri are untethered from convention, they are grounded in the hope and love and desperate yearning for humanity that saturates each of the namesake authors' works and legacies.

So, yeah, I'm never worried; but I'm often delighted.

(also, thank you so much for the kind words!!! y'all are ruining me with how sweet you've been this evening 🥺 you're also very, very on point regarding the impact of my law background on my writing, specifically its bluntness and emphasis on clarity. the authoritativeness actually preceded my legal training and even my ability to write. i'll spare you the baby lore, but, like, yeah, i think we should just cut our losses on that one.)