#same thing with yukio mishima (author of the decay of angels)

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Some books and stories that I think are worth reading in conversation with Yellowjackets

Shirley Jackson, all works but especially The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson might or might not need any introduction in this fandom. The Sundial is her take on doomsday preppers, Hill House is of course her haunted house novel (one of the classics of that genre), and Castle has a female protagonist who makes Shauna look like a plaster saint.

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's work has some of the most pervasive darkness and brutality of any major American writer (maybe Ambrose Bierce comes close), and the second of two novels that she completed before her death is no exception. (The first, Wise Blood, is also very good; the intended third, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, only exists as a fragmentary short story.) Francis Marion Tarwater is kidnapped and raised in the woods by his great-uncle, who is convinced that Francis is destined to be a prophet. The great-uncle's death commences a bizarre adventure involving auditory hallucinations, sinister truckers, an evil social worker, arson, developmental disabilities, and baptizing and drowning someone at the same time. Content warnings for all of the above plus rape. O'Connor is also a fairly racist author by today's standards--she was a white Southerner who died in 1964--so keep that in mind as well.

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness. Teenage protagonist is schizophrenic and also a channel for a genuinely supernatural force; well-intentioned but poorly-considered efforts to treat one of these issues make the other worse. Sound familiar? There are supporting characters who are affectionate parodies of Slavoj Zizek and Marie Kondo. A minor character is a middle-aged lesbian who cruises dating apps for hookups with much younger women. Some people find this book preachy and overwritten, but I really like it and would plug it even if I didn't because the author is someone whom I've met and who has been supportive of my own writing.

Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel. Can be read in translation or in the original Japanese. This is the fourth and last book in a series called The Sea of Fertility but I wouldn't necessarily recommend the first three as particularly YJ-ish; Decay is because it deals at great length with issues of doubt and ambiguity about whether or not a genuinely held, but personally damaging, spiritual and religious belief is true. There's also more (as Randy Walsh would put it) lezzy stuff than is usual for Mishima, a gay man. Content warnings for elder abuse, sexual abuse of both children and vulnerable adults in previous books in the series, forced abortion in the first book if you decide to read the whole thing from the beginning, and the fact that in addition to being a great novelist the author was also a far-right political personality.

Howard Frank Mosher, Where the Rivers Flow North. An elderly Vermont lumberjack and his Native American common-law wife refuse to sell their land to a development company that wants to build a hydroelectric power plant. Tragedy ensues. I haven't read this one in a long time but some images from the movie stick in my mind as YJ-y. Lots of fire, water, and trees.

Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers. Yes, this is the same Leonard Cohen who later transitioned into songwriting and became a household name in that art form. Beautiful Losers is a very weird, very horny novel that he wrote as a young man; it deals with the submerged darkness and internal tension within Canadian and specifically Quebecois society. One of the main characters is Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Iroquois convert to Catholicism who was probably a lesbian in real life (although Cohen unfortunately seems unaware of this). This one actually shows up YJ directly; the song "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot" that plays in the season 2 finale takes its lyrics from a particularly strange passage.

Monica Ojeda, Jawbone. Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. Extremely-online teenage girls at a posh bilingual Catholic high school in Ecuador start their own cult based on such time-honored fodder as Herman Melville novels, internet creepypasta (no, this book does not look or feel anything like Otherside Picnic), and their repressed but increasingly obvious desire for one another. The last part in particular gets the attention of their English teacher, whose own obsessive internalized homophobia grows into one of the most horrifying monstrous versions of itself I've ever read. Content warning for just about everything that could possibly imply, but especially involuntary confinement, religious and medical abuse, and a final chapter that I don't even know how to describe. Many thanks to @maryblackwood for introducing me to this one.

Jorge Luis Borges, lots of his works but especially "The Aleph," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South." Can be read in translation or in the original Spanish. The three works I list are all short stories. The first deals with mystical experiences and the comprehensibility (or lack thereof) of the universe, the second with coded and submerged references to sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular, the third with leaving your well-appointed city home for a ranch in the middle of nowhere and almost immediately dying in a knife fight, which is surely a very YJ series of things to do.

H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," "The Dreams in the Witch House," and "The Thing on the Doorstep." Lovecraft in general needs no introduction--the creepiness, the moroseness, the New Englandness, the purple heliotrope prose, his intense racism (recanted late in life but not in time to make any difference in his reception history) and the way his work reflects his fear of the Other. These short stories are noteworthy for having settings that are more woodsy and less maritime than is usual for Lovecraft's New England, for overtones of the supernatural rather than merely the alien, for featuring some of his few interesting female characters, and for their relative lack of obvious racial nastiness. Caveat lector nevertheless.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. It's Moby-Dick. Once you realize that Captain Ahab is forming a cult around the whale and his obsession with it you can't unrealize it.

[sableeira]

everyone has those authors that you would be so unhinged about if they were introduced in bsd right?

mine are: emily dickinson (it might be too late for her but I’m in denial), franz kafka, and any german author but especially goethe (c’mon asagiri give us the rest of the transcendents) and schiller. I’m not able to describe how unhinged I would be if any of them get introduced

[hamliet]

HAVE YOU SEEN CHAPTER 79 OF BSD?!

Yes!!! Everyone say thank you @akai-koutei, the hero the fandom needs.

It seems to be setting up for a final battle this arc (dare I hope we see Akutagawa?) but obviously, the chapter is mostly set up and a lot rides on who exactly “Kamui” (god) is and whether “erasing” the ADA is his ability or the book’s.

Suggestions I’ve seen:

Mishima Yukio, the writer of The Decay of the Angel. Started a coup, which could be related to what he’s doing now.

Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese author to win a Nobel Prize. He committed suicide by gassing himself. He was friends with Mishima, and since we know there are two  more DoA members, they might come together. 

Rilke, which was suggested on Twitter for the way his works notably inspired Mishima and for the er, stunning resemblance here. His poems are great.

Tolstoy, for no other reason than no collection of Russian writers is complete  without him and War and Peace as an ability. But to stretch things  further, Tolstoy is known for exploring concepts of God in his works, and he got heavily religious in his later life. TBH he’s the least likely on this list and will probably appear in a later arc.

Honestly, I think the remaining DoA members are the first two, so Kamui is one of them. But I’m happy to be wrong.

But let’s get back to Sigma,who might not appear again for a bit. Through exchanging the information he most wanted to know with Atsushi, Sigma for the first time experienced a relationship that wasn’t transactional, but transformational. He most wanted empathy, which Atsushi gave him. It’s what his ability could be used for, rather than using him as essentially a safe vault of information.

Sigma seems to be a middleman for Gogol and Fyodor, a child who matters… I plan on writing another meta on Fyodor and Gogol and how they’re basically two sides of the same coin (they both represent aspects of Dostoyevsky’s Kirillov) with Sigma in the middle and, perhaps, key to them not destroying each other.

[wolf-nir]

The Members of the Decay of Angels

The Decay of Angels is a five-member terrorist organization. They specialize in being a “murder association”. Although few in number, all its members have powerful and threatening abilities.

So far has been presented two members of this organization, Fyodor Doystoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol. The other three members remain a mystery, however it is known that possibly all of them are infiltrated into the government and the Japanese police force.

From the two members hitherto presented, it is possible to deduce that the organization is probably formed by classical russian authors, since Asagiri likes to present groups and organizations with members having the same nationality. This is the case with the ADA, Port Mafia and The Guild.

However, I believe that only two of the remaining members can be russian authors, since Asagiri has been playing reference to one of the classic Japanese authors, Mishima Yukio, which would make sense for an organization with predictable base in Japan needing a Japanese connection.

Following this theory, we know that there are several classic russian authors, an example is the very organization commanded by Fyodor, who has mostly russian authors. However, because it is a tremendously dangerous organization, it is possible to deduce that the authors chosen by Asagiri are the best known and/or controversial in the history of russian literature, both IRL!Fyodor and IRL!Gogol being part of this list.

Among several choices I have separated five authors known for their fame and influence in literature. Since this is a theory, I will introduce some of the IRL! and their possible ability. Since I’m not Asagiri and I don’t have much knowledge about russian literature, I may be wrong on some points here and there, but I hope you enjoy it!

❝  Leo Tolstoy ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Leo Tolstoy, born as Liev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is considered to be one of the greatest authors of all time. ✓ Born to an aristocratic russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852-1856), and Sevastopol Sketches (1855), based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. ✓ In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  Karenina ❞

✓ Anna Karenina is the tragic story of Countess Anna Karenina, a married noblewoman and socialite, and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing — something that prefigures her own later situation, though she would experience less tolerance by others. A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry Anna if she will agree to leave her husband Count Karenin, a senior government official, but she is vulnerable to the pressures of Russian social norms, the moral laws of the Russian Orthodox Church, her own insecurities, and Karenin's indecision. Although Vronsky and Anna go to Italy, where they can be together, they have trouble making friends. Back in Russia, she is shunned, becoming further isolated and anxious, while Vronsky pursues his social life. Despite Vronsky's reassurances, she grows increasingly possessive and paranoid about his imagined infidelity, fearing loss of control. ✓ Seen from a small perspective, Karenina is a novel focused on a toxic relationship because of Anna's mistrust and paranoia. (in fact I may be quite wrong, since I have never finished reading the book and probably never will -q) ✓ Thus, Tolstoy's possible ability could be something connected to causing paranoia/delusions in the victim or incubating the victim to betray his own allies. ✓ Seeing that Leo Tolstoy is probably also infiltrated in the Japanese government, it is quite possible that he is using his ability to cause discord among politicians, and if he finds himself infiltrated into another government or public force, his ability continues to be useful in conflict of national or international disposition.

❝ A Confession ❞

✓ The book is a brief autobiographical story of the author's struggle with a mid-life existential crisis. It describes his search for the answer to the ultimate philosophical question. “If God does not exist, since death is inevitable, what is the meaning of life?”. Without the answer to this, for him, life had become “impossible”. ✓ According to IRL!Tolstoy, in the face of the inevitability of death and assuming that God does not exist, the most intellectually honest response to the situation would be suicide. ✓ Thus, the ability of BSD!Tolstoy would also be manipulative in content, perhaps something close to the ability of Yumeno or Fyodor, in that by touch or any other kind of contact, Tolstoy could manipulate the victim's mind to commit suicide, perhaps by incubating existential doubts or personal insecurities that, in extreme circumstances, could lead the person to the suicide. Honestly, that would be the last ability I'd like Atsushi, Akutagawa or Dazai to face (even if Dazai can cancel the ability).

❝  Andrei Bely ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely; 26 October [O.S. 14 October] 1880 – 8 January 1934), was a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, communist, and literary critic. ✓ His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century. ✓ Boris Bugaev was fascinated by probability and particularly by entropy, a notion to which he frequently refers in works such as Kotik Letaev. ✓ As a young man, Bely was strongly influenced by his acquaintance with the family of philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, especially Vladimir's younger brother Mikhail, described in his long autobiographical poem The First Encounter (1921); the title is a reflection of Vladimir Solovyov's Three Encounters. It was Mikhail Solovyov who gave Bugaev his pseudonym Andrei Bely. ✓ Bely's symbolist novel Petersburg (1916; 1922) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. The book employs a striking prose method in which sounds often evoke colors. The novel is set in the somewhat hysterical atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Petersburg and the Russian Revolution of 1905.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  Petersburg ❞

✓ To the extent that the book can be said to possess a plot, this can be summarized as the story of the hapless Nikolai Apollonovich, a ne'er-do-well who is caught up in revolutionary politics and assigned the task of assassinating a certain government official — his own father. At one point, Nikolai is pursued through the Petersburg mists by the ringing hooves of the famous bronze statue of Peter the Great. ✓ The main character of the book is known for wearing a strange red domino mask and cape. This visual is a way of “acting like a fool” in front of the woman who spent a lot of time courting and being rejected. ✓ The ability of BSD!Bely could be deceptive, illusory, very similar to that of Oguri. ✓ His ability could be to hypnotize the victim so that she was able to see and do catastrophic things as just “silly things”. An example would be to turn a bomb into a simple bouquet of flowers or something else that would make the victim cause chaos without actually realizing it.

❝  Mikhail Bulgakov ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (15 May [O.S. 3 May] 1891 – 10 March 1940) was a russian writer, medical doctor and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. ✓ He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. ✓ After illness Bulgakov abandoned his career as a doctor for that of a writer. In his autobiography, he recalled how he started writing: "Once in 1919 when I was traveling at night by train I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story". ✓ His first book was an almanac of feuilletons called Future Perspectives, written and published the same year.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Master and Margarita ❞

✓ The story concerns a visit by the devil to the officially atheistic Soviet Union. The Master and Margarita combines supernatural element with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying a singular genre. ✓ The ability of the BSD!Mikhail is very similar to that of Lucy Montgomery, the only exception is that instead of a doll, Mikhail has the body of a dead woman as his marionette, he calls her Margarita. ✓ Margarita is described as a woman in a Russian style dress of the 19th century in a lush shade of red. His eyes are black and empty-looking. ✓ She is able to obey Mikhail's three specific orders. She “comes to life” during this process through the drinking ritual of Mikhail's blood. The more complicated Mikhail's desire, the more blood Margarita consumes.

❝  Heart of a Dog ❞

✓ The Heart of a Dog is a satirical work in which a doctor does an experiment on a dog rescued by him in which he transforms the animal into a human of personality and primitive aspects. (or at least that's what I understood, frankly I'm so confused with this book) ✓ The ability of BSD!Mikhail, in this case, would be quite simple: through physical contact, he is able to make a human being surrender to his most primitive and savage side, until that person becomes, in fact, a dog. ✓ Mikhail is able to control the duration of the transformation, meaning he is able to make someone turn quickly or slowly, depending on his intentions. Besides that, once the person is totally transformed, it is impossible to undo the transformation.

❝  Anton Chekhov ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. ✓ Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress." ✓ Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Seagull ❞

✓  The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev. ✓ The ability is to "send" your fatal injuries to the body of other people. According to BSD!Anton, the people with whom he makes this exchange are his mere seagulls who used to live happily and ignorantly, but who know him only to be a tool to kill his boredom. ✓ For the exchange to take place Anton must have made a "contract" with the other person. For the most part, people are women who have previously been their lovers or who are in love with him.

❝  Maxim Gorky ❞

⌈ IRL! Facts ⌋

✓ Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a russian and soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for theNobel Prize in Literature. ✓ Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913-1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). ✓ He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.

⌈ Ability ⌋

❝  The Lower Depths ❞ 

✓ The play is centered on lower-class characters living in a shelter. Everyone has questionable ethical actions throughout the plot. ✓ Gorky's ability is based on people's lies. He is able to turn any and every lie that the person has already said into reality, most often causing the destruction - be it physical, mental or social - of the victim.