#is tumblr user spliqi going to show up in my notes aga— yay <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

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#also prev tags !!!!! #there’s sooooo much juicy mystery around bsd higuchi and mori that i need the series to touch on #and such a good point about tosui and aku. i kinda took it as asgr borrowing different aspects of the same irl relationship #and using them to build higuchi's dynamic with both aku and mori. but tosui's dissimilarity #to aku and the fact that she was eventually disappointed by him does fuel my (probably delusional) hope of her getting a character arc #in the sense that i wonder about akutagawa's current development and how it will affect her #if it will result in higuchi's realization that their paths don't align #in the same way that ichiyo realized tosui wasn't the advisor she needed. and that he was a different person than she thought he was (from @spliqi)

i'm also still lowkey delusional about her getting a larger character arc (-> asagiri please. we still don't know what her ability is beyond speculation.) but also very genuinely i don't think her feelings for tosui and her eventual disappointment in him can be mirrored one-to-one onto what she feels for akutagawa— if only because the bitterness she came to feel for him is directly contrasted against her affection for akutagawa's character archetype, and because the way she feels tricked and used comes up relatively early into her work. i'm saying that while leaning on the characterizations in "encounters on a dark night" specifically because of how startlingly similar the depiction of naojiro is to akutagawa as contrasted to the resentment felt for a man like namizaki, but i think her conflicted feelings towards tosui-like characters emerge earlier and tend to be a common thread?

(obligatory note on a more personal level i think it feels more hopeful to me if higuchi gets to be a little bit of a fool harmlessly and have her crush on someone who is never going to make her empty promises, as contrasted to the way ichiyo endured and felt in her actual life. always thinking of this post+adjacent tags tbh. relatedly but tangential, this post from the same op is one that makes so much more sense to me after reading through both irl akutagawa or higuchi's works... the archetypes they are show up repeatedly in one another's work in a way that's interesting to me.)

i went through a decent amount of biographical information on higuchi ichiyo before i touched the translations of her writing and: i think i've seen people commenting on her unrequited love for her literary mentor as adjacent to her love for akutagawa, which is understandable + probably a part of it, but the aspect of it that had eluded me before was that... akutagawa doesn't have many similarities with that mentor beyond higuchi's senpainoticeme-isms (/affectionate).

the mentor in question was insincere and charismatic and untrustworthy, and ichiyo was bitterly disappointed in + eventually disillusioned by him. which this is just to say that it took going through her prose writing to see: what ichiyo did love that i think asagiri pulled from was unfortunate characters who were raw/unpolished/sincere/angry and just needed a chance to be saved.