#placeholder oda tag

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I think one of my favorite things about all the collective BSD medias is that we can see glimpses of characters at so many different stages in their lives, and are given the opportunity to watch them grow and change. Like... sure, there's a lot of medias with dynamic characters that change across it, but something about these snapshots of characters' lives we see across the novels & main series feels more organic and alive to me.

We see Oda at 14, already jaded and with blood and his hands, in Untold Stories. We catch him again at ~21 in TDIPUD, just kind of... minding his business. And already. he seems so different from this teenager, more content with his place in life, but he's still outrunning his past. It isn't a completely different person, the past still follows. And then again in Dark Era, where he's made connections with others, connections with places, and has someone to miss him when he goes. I don't think 14 year old Oda had that.

Dazai, too, of course. We can see him at 15, at 16, at 18, at 20, and at 22. We get Dazai at so many stages. His descent into the mafia and the absolute misery around him, and his slow crawl up to the light and how its changed him. How it lingers.

I think Ranpo's arc from terrified 14 year old boy who can't understand the world in Untold Stories to the confident, self-assured and generally relaxed detective he is by the main story is one of my favorites. You can see how clearly he's always been the same, but the change in his confidence and his security on his place in the world is incredible.

There's so many arcs I could talk about. The way pasts linger in BSD makes every character's arc feel so much more real. The way they're all striving towards something but slip, but aren't perfect at hiding where they came from, and how each character's journey and arc is completely different. They aren't all cookie-cutter arcs of 'haha was a bad guy now a good guy,' there's convoluted non-linear climbs that makes their arcs feel so much more realistic. I love being able to see characters in so many places in their lives I love being able to watch how circumstances ruin them, how circumstances bring them back. Incredible. I'm obsessed with all of them.

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noooooo shut upppp i was just thinking how if brook was a skeleton when his soul went back then the rest of the crew would also be skeletons on the ship and he would have to look at his dead nakama's skeletons and then at his own skeleton but he's alive and lo and behold he's picking up their skulls in this episode

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between the day i picked up dazai and untold stories, i've got a lot of oda thoughts on my mind.

i could have missed something, but to me it never seems like he has any particular remorse for his past as an assassin. he seems ashamed of it at times, and is frustrated when its brought up. ashamed that his past, to him, is preventing him from being a writer (at least, in main timeline. i'm ignoring beast for now.)

and that's... interesting, to me. oda who is put on a moral pedestal, having this violent past with little regret for the lives he took on a moral standpoint outside of how it impacts his own future. and i think that's worthy of being looked at.

i really think its because oda is like this that he was able to have an impact on dazai. remember, it wasn't necessarily any form of morailty that drew dazai to oda, it was just oda's... quirkiness, per say. oda has a past of violence and bloodshed. he's dangerous. the challenge in life for him is completing his work without killing people.

he is at times horrified by some of dazai's actions, but he's not disgusted. he's not really put off by them. he's already seen that side of the world, though his was much cleaner. dazai's violence is personal. oda's was impersonal, which is probably why oda is able to reconcile it the way he was.

oda's morals aren't cut and dry "good" at all, and in a way he is rather self serving, just with a penchant for helping orphans. that's probably also why, in beast, he was able to connect with akutagawa. he wouldn't be judgmental or disgusted by akutagawa's violence. it was natural to him to simply react to it with a straight face as he does all else. and why he fit so well in the agency in general. he was in that grey area, just like everyone else. i'll always be fascinated by the way oda is put up on a pedestal in dazai's mind and by extension much of the audience because oda's morals are dubious at best. he's really grown on me as a character lately, there's a lot of layers to peel back, for a dead man.

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ever think about how oda, who tried to be a better guy, never really became "good" because at the end of the day he thought it was a hopeless endeavor. he didn't actually think he'd ever do it so i think at one point he just stopped trying. he hit a wall. he was a low ranking mafia member but he stopped killing. he saved some orphans. but he continued to work for an organization out there making orphans. to associate himself with people who were even worse. he kind of just got... good enough.

ever think about how verlaine saw no place for himself among humanity after being treated as a weapon and a tool for his life. how he wanted to be better, have a quiet life and people who understood him, but decided that idyllic dream was impossible. and watched it get ripped away from him again and again. so he gave up to rot in a basement.

how about beast dazai? who tried and tried and tried again to find a better world only to keep making things worse in pursuit of his goal. who never got to see the product of all his hard work. who made it just far enough then threw it away for the vague chance of preserving something, some little thing, that could have been better in this world than the last.

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actually i have more to say about 14 year old oda from this scene.

"I don't need forgiveness." The hit man's voice was close to a murmur, since his lungs were being crushed. "There is no forgiveness in this world. There is only retaliation--revenge against those who betray you."

There's just something about younger Oda's philosophies and mannerisms that... gets to me. He has a little more conviction, but. Like two pages later in Untold Stories, we get these (separate, but like, a paragraph apart).

He was young, with short hair that had a reddish tinge to it. The boy's dark-brown eyes were frighteningly vacant, void of even a fragment of emotion.

The boy looked back at Fukuzawa with lifeless eyes--not the way one would expect a boy to look at the person choking them unconscious.

This is all Oda, but does that vacantness ring any bells, anyone? What's another highly talented young boy constantly surrounded by death we know and love... oh, Dazai, of course. We're all familiar (I assume) with younger Dazai's general empty void, but I grabbed a couple lines anyway mostly because I like to pedantically prove a point. The first is pulled from Fifteen, the second from Side A of The Day I Picked Up Dazai.

His expression was back to how it normally was: lifeless and utterly disinterested.

It seems all the value standards of living reflected in his eyes are just as worthless and ugly as scrap iron.

Oda helped to put Dazai on a better path, but tonight I'm really thinking about how Dazai is a fulfillment of what Oda himself couldn't do. Oda tried to be better, he raised orphans, he stopped killing, but he never really did make it to the light. He became a mafia grunt instead of a private assassin. Its... better, arguably, but he's still on the wrong side of things. Dazai is that final push to bring someone to the light. After all, he couldn't bring the orphans to the light. At the end they were lost in the same bullshit that Oda was never able to get out of. There's no one left to fulfill that wish except Dazai at that point.

Blah, blah, Oda's last words to Dazai, moralizing, whatever, but what about this immediately after?

Whether it was past experience or someone's advice--Odasaku was trying to show Dazai the path he himself had once tried to walk. Dazai knew that. That was why he could bring himself to believe it.

Oda's last words, last push to bring Dazai to the side of the light, wouldn't have half the impact they did if Oda himself didn't have the background he did. Oda isn't interesting, doesn't have the impact he does, because he was just some mafia grunt. He has the impact he does because he used to be so entrenched in his own view of the world as a meaningless place and started to get out. He saw a way out, even if he didn't make it. What else could Dazai do but finish what Oda started? It was never entirely about just the words. Its the history behind them, the journey both Oda and Dazai have had in trying to find meaning in the world that really makes Oda's last words have the effect they do.

I have thoughts bouncing around in my head about why this train of thought makes beast all the more tragic but that's another post for probably another day.

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shoutout to young 14 year old oda as well for being able to hold up against fukuzawa, a highly skilled martial artist and bodyguard. oda, tiny teenager, while his hands are tied and a bag is over his head, holding up to fukuzawa long enough to kill his target. sure oda is a silly guy by the time you get to dark era but he's so talented.

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On extremely rare occasions, during months when I am in a tight spot for money, I will go to the casino and use this skill of mine to grab some easy money and go home.

so where's the oda lives aus where oda is the most annoying customer at sigma's casino

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what do you think of oda's last words to dazai?

was it good or nah?

Oda's last words to Dazai are a lot to unpack. Calling them good or bad is kind of a reduction, especially when so much of BSD is based around those shades of grey between.

Also anon I am so sorry, this answer ended up almost 1500 words. Buckle up I guess.

Before I answer this, lets put Oda into context a bit.

At 14, he was a highly regarded private assassin. One of the most skilled in Yokohama. He's got that vacant hopeless look to him that the tweens involved in death get in the BSD universe, and really only holds to retribution for betrayal and not much else other than just doing his job. I'm not sure off the top of my head when he met Natsume and decided he wanted to become an author, but somewhere in there he had a moral shift and was given a goal. I'm not sure when he really started collecting orphans, but I know he got... Sakura, I believe, during the Dragon's Head Conflict when he was about 21. This would also be not long after he met Dazai.

Oda... isn't perfect at all. I went on about it a bit in my last Oda post, but he really didn't make it to the light like he wanted to. He went from acclaimed assassin to mafia grunt that refuses to kill. Which... is a more lateral shift than he'd probably like. He's still supporting an undoubtedly corrupt and murderous organization, even if he himself isn't the one pulling the trigger, so to speak, anymore. Imperfect. He's a little better than some in the mafia, but is he, really? He's still, y'know, in the mafia. I could say something poetic about flowers blooming at night but I really don't even want to go that far. He's caring for some orphans, he's humoring Dazai, he's running some errands for the Mafia, point set. You could say he spends his time trying to keep some of the kids in the mafia alive and show them some kindness so they don't end up jaded in the way he did. We see this with Dazai, we kind of see it in the Dragon's Head Rush scene when he runs off with Akutagawa slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He's doing something, but he's not getting them out. I think he knows that's a decision the kids have to make on their own.

To reference Oda in Beast for a second, he sends Beast!Akutagawa to discourage one of the kids from joining a gang by being realistic with the kid. Akutagawa never directly tells him not to join, but he does tell the kid how fruitless it would be. The kid ultimately made the choice for himself to not go through with joining. Oda orchestrated that, too.

So... I said Oda isn't perfect. He isn't. But he knows that decisions mean more when its not somebody telling you to do it, but a conclusion you come to on your own once the reality of the situation is laid out. And in a way, that's what he does with Dazai. He understands Dazai's hopelessness. He was there, too, we saw it in Untold Stories with a 14 year old Oda.

So... Oda. Dying at 23. He's young. 23 is young. That's like, first real job out of Uni young. But he's been through the ringer and started trying to claw his way to the light. His death is tragic because he never quite made it.

Dazai. 18. Even younger, can barely be considered an adult. He's in the despair trenches now. He's already miserable. He hasn't started really clawing towards the light yet, not really. He's still convinced here that getting further into the "dark side" is what's going to help him find a reason to live. At this point, Oda knows that isn't quite true, he's a little further along in the journey, he found his light in the orphan kids, in spicy curry, he already figured out the light is pretty mundane.

But again. Oda never made it out of the dark. Here's an exchange from before his last words, when Dazai first runs into the hall.

"You're such an idiot, Odasaku. The biggest idiot I know." "Yeah." "You didn't have to do this. You didn't have to die." "I know."

Oda knows there could have been another way out, for this. He chose his death. He saw his lights were gone and he decided that he should go with them. Dazai and Oda are more similar than Oda is given credit for. In a way, in the final battle with Gide... he gave up.

So. His last words to Dazai.

"Listen." Odasaku wrapped his blood-soaked hand around Dazai's. "You told me if you put yourself in a world of violence and bloodshed, you might be able to find a reason to live..." "Yeah, I said that. I did. But what difference does that--?" "You won't find it," Odasaku said in almost a whisper. Dazai stared at him. "You should know that. Whether you're on the side that takes lives or the side that saves them, nothing beyond your own expectations will happen. Nothing in this world can fill the hole that is your loneliness. You will wander the darkness for eternity."

This is Oda setting up the reality for Dazai to make his own choice. Oda never really found the light. He's speaking more from his own point of view than what he really believes for Dazai. Dazai, especially during Dark Era, he doesn't really function off of hope. He has it, sure, though he'd never admit it, but that's not a guiding principle for him. But he is pretty feelings-driven for a "logical" character. He felt a little more alive back during that fight with Rimbaud, and decided yeah, he'll join the mafia, to try to recreate that. He doesn't recreate it, as we see in Stormbringer. So he starts messing around again. Whatever. Point being, Dazai is pretty emotion-seeking. He found a lot of those feelings around Oda, because Oda could understand his situation very well. There was an easy comradery in understanding. Oda is appealing to both Dazai's logic and his feelings here.

Also, sidenote, throwback to Dead Apple, and all of Shibusawa's ramblings about nobody ever defying <i>his</i> expectations, and Dazai responding with "you wouldn't be saying all this if you actually had friends." So Oda's words ended up false, later on, when Dazai made actual connections. But Oda didn't know that, he never made it that far.

"Be on the side that saves people," Odasaku replied. "If both sides are the same, then choose to become a good person. Save the weak, protect the orphaned. You might not see a great difference between right and wrong, but… saving others is something just a bit more wonderful." "How do you know?" "I know. Better than anyone else."

So, the last quote, Oda set up the reality. Here's where he lets Dazai make his own choice once he has all the information. Here's where he kind of contradicts himself. He never really says that it will fix Dazai, personally, to join the side of the light. But what Oda is saying is that the world itself would be a little better, possibly a world more suited to helping Dazai find his own light. A different world than the one Oda is leaving.

I've kind of said a lot, but I haven't really answered the original question. So my answer is Oda's words follow his pattern of offering a reality and letting someone make a choice based off it for themselves. He was giving Dazai the tools he needed to make his own decision. Oda was flawed, jaded, and dying at this moment. His words aren't perfect. But Dazai didn't want hope in that moment. That would have been too much for him, I think. There are people in this world that listen to happy songs when they're sad to cheer them up, and there are people that listen to sad songs when they're sad as its a form of catharsis to feel your own emotions resonated with. It helps make sense of them. Dazai is the second type, here. Despite being emotion-driven, he's not super emotionally aware. I think mixing those signals would have done more harm at this point. He didn't need hope, he didn't need told that the world is a magical fairytale place. He needed the catharsis of someone else seeing him, <i>understanding</i> him, and telling him to go be better anyway.

Yes, Oda's last words were kinda cruel, telling Dazai that nothing will ever help. The words of a dying man in grief can't be expected to be cheery. But I do think that if joining the light were presented in any other way it wouldn't have had the impact on Dazai that it did. I'm not saying his last words were great, but I'm saying they were right.

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ohhhh..ohhh..oh..LAW..oh that law speech ohhhh

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celestial dragon ewwww

i need to be put down actually- he is a man wearing capris with a receding hairline. even with all the evilness aside like come the fuck on what's going on why is he attractive

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🦇🦇🎃🎃🎃🎃🦇 Trick or treat!!! 🦇🦇🎃🎃🎃🎃🦇

so I guess in this game, we can give anything

I give you..

(crab sticks!! cause it sounds like your name lol)

-- it's also dazai's fave food I think 🤭🤭

anyways..hmmm

your posts are great, your tags are interesting

you overfed me with your oda post (still recovering from that lol)

and uhhh..hmmm..

what does white hill road mean?

^^ no pressure ask btw! im just interested hehe.

🎃🦇🦇🎃🎃 Happy Halloween! 🎃🦇🦇🎃🎃

also why did a blog like you follow me on your side acc?

dang I'm flattered 😂 feel free to unfollow anytime bro.

(I'm still going to haunt you now as casper the friendly ghost tho because of what you did to my oda fixation lol) << ur posts killed me.

have a good day. step on a lego :)

/j

oh, a trick or treater!! giving me a treat! and what a nice one too. i'll go find a lego to step on, just for you.

ahah, I originally followed mostly because I wanted more mutuals in general, but your cursed edits are entertaining so I've stuck around! expect more oda-related posts as i work through untold stories, probably.

as for "white hill road," that's my main timeline Dazai tag! a lot of my character tags are "placeholder" tags, as I'm waiting until I find the right song for them. dazai and chuuya's main timeline tags are both from Deaf Havana songs! Dazai's is Speeding Cars, and the phrase 'white hill road' is taken from it. I just think the lyrics are very Dazai.

ps. a treat, for u

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shirohige!!!

shirohige just loves adopting kids