#i mean they can't prove a lot and relied on his confession but he did confess in the end.

[aletheialed]

not me desperately trying to find a way to release enoch from imprisonment for post-canon threads despite the fact that he'd probably be serving at LEAST a life sentence-

[wawawawawawawawawawawawawa]

hello! i really liked your post regarding izaya and ASPD! izaya is a character that i love even if i don’t necessarily understand him, so i appreciate how you approach criticism of certain portrayals of him without being overly pretentious. i’d love to hear more of your thoughts about our little meow meow, as the poets say, and thank you for shizayaposting in the year 2022. hero.

hihi!! and thank u! i understand him to a concerning degree and i'm glad you didnt think i was pretentious because i did kind of slip into my "i am writing a personal essay that is going to be published in a magazine" style near the end there. but maybe my essays arent as pretentious as i think, too!!

and hmm... thats a broad topic, "more thoughts," but i do share the sentiment that izaya is a very lonely person and that he loves shizuo- but the sensation of love is very different for someone with ASPD, so he might not even recognize it at first! emotions can be very dull and unrecognizable with ASPD, and i only cared about love because i personally wanted a partner! the idea of having someone who i knew i could wholeheartedly rely on, who fit perfectly with me... it was very enticing :) the safety, familiarity and the care called to me- after all, you can do whatever you want as long as you have a safe place to go back to... and a safe person there to welcome you home :)

(i am happliy engaged- it has its difficulty considering my fiance is my emotional opposite- he's hyper empathetic and possibly dependent- but it's a happy engagement nonetheless)

so my point being, i think it would take quite a lot for izaya to recognize feelings of love, but loneliness is a different beast altogether! it's easy to identify haha

and i think izaya is big on appearances- he's a powerful information broker, so he needs to have the penthouse. never mind that it feels too big and empty and impersonal, like he's a guest at a hotel! and he knows there's something that makes him different from other people. he's not stupid. i'm not sure if he knows what exactly it is, but it's there.

and.... sometimes people stereotype themselves.

i'm going to paint a target on my back and admit something: i'm self-diagnosed. put the damn pitchforks down, i have a therapist and he supports my decision. but before i came to terms with it, i would constantly stereotype ASPD. stuff like "ah, i can't have aspd, i cried at a dead cat!"

(i love cats)

and similarly, i would go "well, if i do have aspd, i can't cry at dead cats, because it means i have emotions and everyone knows sociopaths can't feel emotions! they dont cry at movies or anything!!"

(i later read confessions of a sociopath, and in the very first chapter, the author admitted to doing the same thing. get out of my head etc etc etc)

and i think izaya would be the same. he knows he's different. he sees expressions of emotions as contradictory to his base nature- it would prove him wrong about himself, prove that he's just another human. whether he thinks he's a god or a waste in that instant, it would still prove him wrong. he's not above emotion and he's not above hurt. and if he craves companionship, that means there exists something he desperately wants but can never, ever get. no sane, comforting human would accept him the way he is. and if he loves shizuo, the feeling is tenfold. he would want something with all his heart and wanting would never be enough. there would never be anything he could do to get shizuo to fall in love with him.

(except, according to fanfics, get brutalized and left to die, causing shizuo to stumble across him in a vulnerable state, finally seeing izaya as a person, izaya's masks forcibly ripped off as shizuo sees him for who he is)

(i wonder if izaya would ever be so desperate as to get himself brutalized for this outcome. if he ever acknowledged his feelings, the lack of control over the situation might get to him enough that he's driven to do this)

and that's why i think izaya masks everything. he's scared of his own humanity. because gods have everything they want, and humans have wants they can never have.

izaya is not a god. he's a human that is fundamentally broken in a deep, perverse way that nobody around him mirrors. he doesn't know why or what it is. all he can do is pretend to not suffer from it, pretend that he doesn't want, pretend that he isn't forever reaching for something that he can never have.

and i will shizayapost till the end of time my friend o7

[bemusedlybespectacled]

do you imagine the Public Pretender concept addressing the bigotry (esp. racism) in every step of the policing-judicial-incarceral system, or would it be more of a B99 situation where it ultimately functions as propaganda? (It seems like those sorts of comedic shows can't ever effectively bite - especially when they often rely on connections with the systems they represent - and any criticism winds up limited to one-off "moral lesson" episodes.)

I think the difference between B99 and any potential comedy about defense attorneys is that they're on fundamentally different sides of the system. Like, the problem with B99 isn't that it's a comedy. Law & Order isn't a comedy and it's definitely copaganda. Punch-up comedy pointing out flaws in the system through humor is definitely a thing.

What makes something copaganda is a bunch of underlying premises, like:

The job of a police officer is to investigate and stop crime.

Police officers generally try to do that job effectively. No police officer ever tells victims of crime that they can't help because something is a "civil matter," or that there's no point in investigating because they're not going to find the perpetrator, or that they personally can't prove that a specific person did a crime (even if there is evidence that a specific person did a crime) so they're not going to do anything about it.

Any impediments to policing, like needing a warrant or not being allowed to beat up suspects, are bad because they prevent the police from doing that job. Police should be allowed to use any means necessary to do their job effectively.

Any person who impedes a police officer in any way – including asking for a warrant, refusing to talk to police without a lawyer present, or just being a defense attorney – is either guilty of a crime or knowingly abetting in a crime for evil reasons.

That job is always more important than following silly rules like "4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures," and efforts to make police officers follow those rules are obstructive and annoying. Even if a police officer does do something bad, like torturing someone for information, it's always for the greater good.

The police are infallible. They rarely arrest innocent people, they never elicit false confessions, and a person is clearly and definitely guilty once they have been arrested (as opposed to after they've been convicted).

Now, some of these things, like "the police always try their best and don't give up," are understandable as narrative devices. It would be really boring for every episode of a procedural drama to be like:

Victim: Help, help, I'm being stalked by my ex-boyfriend! Officer: Aha, but how do you KNOW it's your ex-boyfriend? Victim: I have text messages from him saying, "I am going to kill you" with pictures of my house. Officer: But someone else could have stolen his phone, right? So we can't PROVE that he was the one who took those photos and sent those texts! Sorry, can't do anything, call us if you get actual proof. [chunk chunk]

Some of the premises work as narrative devices if your purpose is to have the cops be the protagonists. It makes sense to have your heroes be good and moral people doing good and moral things, and for things that prevent them from achieving their goals being portrayed as bad.

But they don't work if the cops are the antagonists, because now you're operating from the side where the cops are impeding your protagonist's goals. And this is especially true if we're talking criminal law, because then a lot of your plots are going to be something along the lines of, "Hooray, we kept this damning evidence out because the police got it by breaking into the house without a warrant!"

Now, mostly what I'm envisioning is a comedy, and frankly, a lot of day-to-day stuff in my job is funny in a kind of absurdist/dark way. Like, "can you believe this guy threw a condom at his lawyer" or "so this guy is accusing my client of sacrificing their child to the Illuminati" or "I gave my client extremely clear instructions at 4:30 PM and then got a phone call at 9 AM that morning that started with, 'BB, I fucked up' because she had immediately done the exact thing I told her not to do and had been arrested for it." This is the Parks & Rec "the sign said not to drink the sprinkler water" vibe that I mentioned in that post.

But if you have any sort of recurring antagonists, like the Vulture or Wuntch in B99, then you can definitely show bigotry in the system by using the character as shorthand for it, and you don't even need to get that allegorical. Have Steve the Prosecutor or Kellyanne the Cop and just have them repeat some of the things I've heard from actual prosecutors and cops. And then you don't even need to do some kind of after-school special moral at the end: just have Kellyanne make a joke about beating up a homeless man and then have our protagonist look at the camera like they're in The Office.