#the detail- might simplify it down for other pieces

[ice-reblogs]

My first official art of Eclipse!

Heres the lineart. Not sure if im exactly happy about coloring this- because you cant see the detail as much, but oh well- tis done

[citrus-c0la]

Hi! I’m a fellow Idia liker and might I say- you draw him beautifully. I was wondering if you can give me any tips on his hair 😭 I’ve only drawn him like 2 times and I just can’t get it right.

Hello! Thank you so much! QwQ I'm not very good at giving tips nor am i confident in my skills but here are some ways that helped me learn how to draw it!

Firstly, you categorize his hair into different parts, that way, its easier to see what kind of silhouette or form you want it to take. Its basically like how you usually learn how to draw hair, by sectioning them into bigger pieces.

After this, you can start adding more details into those strands to make it well... fiery? Honestly, I highly suggest looking at references especially with his sprite because you can easily break it down once you start understanding the shapes of his strands!!!

Here's a comparison with the reference. As you can see, I just simplified his hair so that it would make it easier for me to understand since I basically just need the overall shape of his hair. Also!!! Sectioning the hair into different parts can really help you, especially if with different hairstyles!!! For instance, you can remove the other half of the upper side bang and the lower side bang and turn it into one section that slicks back and then adjust his Back upper and lower hair to get his Phantom Bride hairstyle! Here are some other tips that i incorporate in some of my work!!! They might be helpful for you too! :

Idia's hair is well, fire, so he has alot of strands that float up and curve, so dont forget about that! and its not just upwards, he has hair that curls downwards too. (Basically, he has a lot of fly-aways lol) When you draw fire, its kinda like letting a little kid go off and draw squiggles all over the canvas.

Another tip is that Idia's hair curls more once he starts getting flustered, excited, or just in a very positive emotional state!

When Idia is enraged, his hair flares a whole lot more, making it REALLY look like fire!!!

Lastly, his hair turns into sparks if he gets surprised!!!

Anyway, that's all the stuff i can give you for now. I hope some of these helps you as much as it helped me!!! >< 💚

i just really love drawing his hair. Rendering it? not so much....

[20dollarlolita]

(It's been entirely too long since we've started a tutorial with a very blurry picture, which is a 20dollarlolita tradition. Am I about to fall over and only staying upright because of a death grip on this trim? Stay tuned to find out)

Let's make a skirt.

There's a lot of lolita fashion that doesn't fit most people. It's me. I'm most people. I'm going to wear it anyway, so I'm going to resize that to fit me.

The hardest part of resizing a lolita skirt (or skirt part of a dress) is that you almost never can get the fabric that the skirt was made out of. Lolita prints are usually pretty limited run. While some dresses will let you redistribute the fabric to have a slightly less full skirt, that's usually a major reconstruction that ends up drifting a bit away from the lolita shape.

x

A ruffled bustle bustle, however, is pretty common. Bustles like this are pretty common in lolita fashion and add an additional detail. In addition, you can make the waist of the skirt several inches bigger without a problem, and without compromising skirt fullness. If you ever want to undo the alteration, seaming the skirt back up is not very difficult. It's not a fully seamlessly reversible alteration, but there's far worse things you could do to the garment (ask me about my AP dress with mesh pits).

The problem is that bustles like this take quite a bit of energy and fabric, especially if you want to have details like lace trim. It's one of the more time-consuming alterations to do.

Or you can make one bustle/ruffle underskirt, one time, and wear it with all your skirt and dress modifications. You can splurge and get some nice trim and get some nice fabric, because you only need to buy it once. You can also wear it as a standalone skirt. (Just remember to never, ever steam it before taking pictures. You wouldn't want to look competent)

I put off making one of these for a very long time, because I'd made the process much more complicated in my head than it turned out needing to be. Once I was building this and realized I needed to simplify the fuck down, this became a really easy project.

Materials: I decided to make the ruffles on my skirt out of eyelet lawn, which is a cotton fabric that has an all-over embroidery. I got this for about $10 a yard on ebay. I don't have a very accurate judgement of how much I used on the skirt. I bought 4 yards and used probably 3.5, but I also wasted a bunch of fabric on an extra tier that I had to chop off. I wanted a fabric with more detail than broadcloth, but that wasn't exclusively going to work with OTT styling.

I got 30 yards of 1/2" Venise lace off cheeptrims.com for $9. I really recommend putting lace on your ruffles if you can. It really adds to the detail level, and you only need to buy it once. You already have to hem all of this so you might as well hem it with lace.

You will also want some fabric for the slip layer (for want of a better term) to attach the ruffles to. My ruffles were a little bit sheer, so I wanted an opaque base fabric for modesty. Depending on the look you're going for, you can also use this layer to add some subtle detailing or changes to the finished look. If you're only wearing it with over-the-top looks, using a base fabric with shine or glitter can stop your ultrabustle from looking too plain. If you're wanting your ruffles to lay flatter, getting a soft fabric with a lot of drape will make the ruffles droopier. I just used some weird cotton plainweave that I got at Green Store for 75% off due to a bolt-long defect.

I used 1" elastic in the waistband here, because this skirt can get a little bit heavy, and then you often have another skirt on top of it adding to the weight.

The other thing that I used that made this much easier was a ruffling attachment for my serger. You don't need to use a serger, but a ruffling or gathering attachment that allows you to ruffle a flat strip of fabric and sew it onto another piece of (not to-be-ruffled) fabric will speed things up considerably. I know a lot of people buy a ruffler or a gathering foot when they start sewing lolita, and then are disappointed when they don't use it very much. There's a very limited number of lolita applications for these attachments, and I'm happy to tell you that this is one of them. If you don't have one, you don't need to go buy one. You can just do the two-step process of gathering the fabric and then sewing it on. But if you wanted an excuse to go buy one, well, you have one.

The Plan:

So I'd previously made a lot of math and calculations for how each tier was going to gather into the previous one, and then realized during the build phase that actually was way too complicated.

What we need is a rectangle with ruffles on it gathered into a waistband. Yes, a rectangle. I know, I was stunned too, but the final result worked the best.

I wanted the tops of the ruffles to be hidden in seams. If you just sew ruffled strips onto a single piece of fabric, it's very difficult to hide all the raw edges and to make sure you're not spreading loose threads all over the place. We're going to make ruffled strips, and sew them to each other. This covers up the raw edges very nicely.

This also will allow you to slightly gather the second and top tiers to each other, if you want to make this skirt in an a-line instead of a bell/cupcake shape.

The Math:

If you know what skirts you're planning on wearing your ultrabustle with, it can help to measure them and get a good guideline.

Generally, you want your ultrabustle to be a number somewhere within these guidelines.

~~Close to the same length of the skirt you're wearing it with or ~~4"ish longer than the skirt you're wearing it with. (This depends on if you want the bottom ruffle to stick out. If you're Tallita and all the skirts and dresses you're resizing are also too short, you might want this to double as a ruffled underskirt) and ~~An acceptable length to wear as a skirt all on its own.

My first run at this ultrabustle was WAY too long, and after chopping off the entire top tier, it ended up being either 1" shorter or 1" longer than the skirts I'm planning on wearing it with, which is a great number for me.

As for the total fullness of the skirt, you have to remember that the ruffles will add visual volume to the skirt. This means that you don't actually need the hemline of your skirt to be super full. All that matters is that your petticoat can comfortably squeeze in there. For this, I measured the hemline of the smallest dress that I had that still fit my petticoat, and used that. It turned out to be about 80" around.

So, what sizes do we cut this at? It's math time.

Here's a worksheet if you want. You're going to need to know how long you want the finished skirt, how wide you want the hem of the slip (not the ruffle) of the skirt, how many ruffle layers you want, and your waist measurement.

The slip needs to be shorter than the ruffles, so it doesn't show. So total slip length is your skirt length minus 2.5". Divide that by the number of ruffle layers that you have, and you'll have how long to cut each of those. This is slip tier short side.

Each ruffle layer needs to be longer than each slip layer, so that the slip doesn't show. You want each ruffle to overlap the previous one. So, take your slip tier short side and add 2-3" (or more, if you want). This is your ruffle short side.

Your finished slip diameter is your slip tier long side. That one's easy.

If you're a math and planning person, you can determine your ruffle long side measurement. You'll want to take a piece of your fabric, cut to the ruffle short side measurement and also about 45+ inches wide, and a piece of your slip fabric. Run them both through your gathering attachment so that your ruffle fabric is sewn onto your slip fabric. If you like how that looks, you can then measure the finished length of the ruffled fabric and use that to calculate how much fabric you'll need for the ruffles. There's four places where people mess this up. First of all, if you're using your gathering attachment to sew and gather at the same time (which is the point of that attachment), you want to do all your test runs gathering it onto a fabric. The amount of fabric that goes into a machine ruffle changes depending on if it's onto fabric or just gathering. Second, you want to use your finished fabric, at your finished ruffle length. Different fabrics will ruffle different amounts, and different ruffle widths will look different even at the same gathering amount. Third mistake people make is to not gather a long enough strip. The longer a strip you gather, the more accurately you can measure how much fabric is actually going into your ruffle. And the fourth is to take that measure as an accurate one, and not plan for needing extra fabric. The upside of the gathering attachment is that it will save you so much time. The downside is that you can't be as accurate with knowing how much fabric you'll use. Remember, you can always turn the leftovers into a matching accessory. Even if you're going to go yolo like I did and not do the math about how many ruffles you need, you will still want to run a check that you like how your ruffling attachment looks. You don't need to measure super accurately, but try to get a feel for how much fabric is going into each ruffle. For example, if your ruffler takes a strip and makes it 1/3 it's flat size, then you'll need more fabric than if your ruffler makes it 1/2 it's flat size. If you're really on a budget, you can just cut your ruffles at 2.5x your slip long dimension and precisely gather by hand. My time's worth something to me and so it wasn't worth it to do that just to save a yard of $10 fabric.

The last part is just to check that your ruffle long dimension (or it's rough approximation) is still at least 2.75x your waist measure (3.25 is better). If you don't have that, your skirt likely won't look full enough for a lolita silhouette. If that's the case, just add to your skirt dimension until it is.

Actually making it:

Before you forget, cut out a piece for your waistband. You can decide if this looks better in your ruffle fabric or your slip fabric (I used slip). This piece should be 3ish" longer than the distance around the fullest part of your booty. You need this to be longer than your booty distance so that you can get it on your body. If you're using 1" elastic, you want this piece to be a minimum of 3" wide.

I've found that the easiest way to do this is to start out by making the whole skirt as a single, very long strip. So, I take my slip tiers and cut them all out, and sew them into a long strip.

On my specific fabric, I decided that I wanted the pattern on the eyelet to go lengthwise. So, instead of cutting the fabric across the grain (short side, selvedge to selvedge) like I normally would, I cut down the 4 yard length of the fabric. This meant a lot less seaming. Since I didn't really know how much fabric I was going to use (you know that test I described to check how much fabric you're going to use? Yeah, guess who didn't do that), I just cut them one 4-yard strip at a time. I'd ruffle one all the way, stop, and cut the next one. This did actually save me quite a bit of fabric versus cutting them all at once. I had to go back and sew the sides of the ruffle together once the skirt was done. It was a small price to pay for the convenience I experienced.

I knew what size I wanted the finished ruffle length to be, but I cut my ruffles about 2.5" longer than that. I wanted a little bit of wiggle room once the skirt was done, so that I could do the length adjustment once the whole skirt was assembled.

And then, it's just a matter of letting the ruffler do its work. My serger ruffler works by you putting the item to-be-ruffled on the bottom, and the item to attach the ruffle to on the top, and then just hitting go. Some other rufflers work by putting the to-be-ruffled at the top, so you can see it as you go. Like all sewing machine attachments, if you're not sure, just go on youtube and search "HOW SINGER GATHERING FOOT DO THING NOT LOOK LIKE SHIT?" and someone's probably made a video of it.

So, once you've run all your ruffle through your machine, you should have a nice single strip of slip fabric with a ruffle on top of it. Now, some gathering attachments don't actually sew super strong seams, because you have to adjust tension or stitch length pretty severely to get it to ruffle like you want. The other advantage of putting the ruffles in a seam instead of just topstitching them onto a piece of fabric is that it doesn't matter how strong your ruffle attachment is, as long as it's strong enough to hold until you can put the ruffle in the seam. The seam provides the strength.

Once you have your single long ruffle, cut off a section that's the diameter of your bottom tier.

Now you just need to sew them together (and finish your inside edges). I like to start at the bottom tier and go up.

For each tier, you're sewing the bottom of the slip layer to the top (ruffle and slip) of the tier below. Just pull the ruffle of the higher tier out of the way, put right sides together, and sew.

If you aren't using a serger, you can zigzag over your edges and then trim them down, use an overcasting stitch from your sewing machine, or topstitch some seam binding over the seams. The extra line of stitching on the slip layers in front won't be visible. One of the other nice things about building this in the way we have is that, when you finish the edges of your inside seams, you're putting three layers together and finishing it as one. This is actually a lot less then 1/3 of the work of finishing them separately, because you'd have to finish the ruffle as a flat piece, which would take way more time. Have I convinced you on the greatness of this technique yet?

Continue cutting pieces off your ruffle layer and stacking them until you have as many layers as you decided you were going to have.

Once you have your layers all stacked up on each other, it's time to sew the skirt back seam. I find that it looks best to hold the ruffles out of the way, sew the slip together, and then go back and sew all the ruffle pieces. Basically now is a good time to just check for any ugly spots and to touch them up.

There's like 50 ways to attach a waistband to a skirt. For this one I used this method (what a blast from the 20dollarlolita past we have there. Also please note that the cost of ruffler feet seems to have gone up from $15 to $60-$100 in the past 10 years and despite working in a sewing machine store, I'm not totally sure why).

Once you've got the whole skirt assembled, it's time for the finishing.

The first thing that I did was put it on and try to judge how short I wanted my top ruffle. I'd cut all my ruffles extra long in the short dimension, so that I could shorten them when they were on the skirt. I picked a length that worked, marked it out, and chopped at that point. I then did this for the other two layers. I found that I wanted my bottom ruffle to be a little bit longer than my top ones, and cutting it long allowed me to make that choice.

I then started just zigagging on my lace. If you don't have a serger, you can use the lace as a hem finish, which also saves you an additional step. The lace really added a lot to this, and since I only need to make this once to wear with a lot of different garments, it was an economical use of nice lace.

I started putting the lace on the top layer first. This is because, if I ran out of lace, having a different (wider) lace on the bottom layer wouldn't look strange. As previously mentioned, I did zero measuring of how long my ruffles are, and had no idea if 27 yards would be enough lace. Don't be like me. Do some tests. Or be like me and choose the life of treachery. Anyway, stick lace on this thing, please. You worked hard and your skirts deserve it.

The only other thing that I did was to cut the slip layer down by about 3" on the very bottom. I did this because I made a mistake, but I like how it looks.

You can take this system of ataching ruffles in rectangles or even a trapezoid and stick it in the back of a skirt (or skirt on a dress). I did that here because I knew that I wanted a pink bustle, not a white one.

I'll do a tutorial for the actual skirt resizing sometime after I actually resize a skirt with this. Here, all I did was slice the back, hem those edges, and then button on some waist ties from another dress. This let me easily add several inches to the back of this skirt, without needing to re-distribute pleats, and without sacrificing the fullness of the shape.

This will all sit a little bit better once I've pressed the skirt, as well. Steaming the top layer of this while the garment is on me/a dress form/a hanger will decrease the poof in the top layer a little bit, and honestly, we could benefit from that in this case.

Anyway, if you have this, you have a very fast way to enlarge existing garments.

So, while this has thankfully very much decreased in the past years, there's still some people with weird opinions on MoDiFyInG bUrAnDo, so let's have a talk. Lolita clothing is not community owned. If someone who was never going to sell a dress to you modifies it, that doesn't take it away from you. This is a mentality that we tend to have in lolita more than other fashion just because of our high resell scene, but it wasn't ever going to be your dress and so you don't need to have an opinion about what happens to a thing you were never going to personally own. Things have value more than money, and value is often changed rather than destroyed. AP's Halloween Treats OP has no value to me when sold for $500 on Lacemarket. I don't spend that much money on lolita, ever. But a questionably-altered AP's Halloween Treats OP that I can un-alter has value to me if the price is good. But a questionably-altered AP's Halloween Treats OP has very little value to someone who likes the price, but can't undo the alterations. When someone resizes a dress or skirt, true, sometimes the people who are the size it was originally made can't wear it anymore. You've decreased the value to them, but you've made it more valuable to people who are the size that you've made the garment become. This skirt had no value to me when it's waist measure is 7.5" too small, but now I can wear it, so it has functional value to me. A lot of people who say that modifying the dress ruins it are either ignoring that also the stress of putting a dress not sized large enough for your body can damage it and not look as great while doing so, or else they have a much worse take. People who say that modifying clothes ruins the garment, but also say that wearing a garment that's too small ruins the garment, what they're actually saying is that wearing that garment is a privilege that should not be extended to larger sized people, and if they say that then they can just, you know, go fuck themselves. We don't need that in the community. Everyone deserves to wear lolita, and some people have to work harder to achieve it, and that's not fair, but everyone deserves it.

So yeah, kiddos! Build a skirt! Go cut up some clothes! Wear the skirts you've always wanted to wear! You can do anything!

And to answer the question we opened this with, yes, I was absolutely falling over.

[the-teddy-bear-butch]

‼️Semi-Emergency Commissions‼️

Long story short, my housing situation got a lot more expensive and I’m running low on scholarships. It’s my senior year and I graduate in December, so I just need to get through until then—but I’m stressed as hell about being able to afford my last semester in college. I would really appreciate any help :( and you get art out of it!

Basics

I can do just about anything in terms of species. Humans, D&D races, anthro/furry, animal/feral, mechanical, monstrous, alien, cyborg alien beasts, you name it.

I can also draw pets, you, friends and family, fictional characters, whatever.

I can do mild to moderate gore, but I don't have experience with excessive gore, nor do I really like it. Same for body horror.

I will not draw NSFW art. Non-graphic nudity or romantic moments are cool though!

I reserve the right to turn down requests based on my availability, whether I believe them to be out of my skill range, etc, etc.

Notes:

I can take payments through ko-fi, PayPal, or Venmo. All comms will be run by you a couple of times throughout the process to receive feedback and see what is and isn't working.

Full body digital pieces come with a simplistic background (ie. pattern, very simplified environment/effects, gradients, etc). Sometimes I get silly with it and might add some extra detail, but I won’t charge for extra detail that I added in the process just because I had an idea and was having fun with it.

I am best reached via my Discord, @/dyltgir, but you can also contact me via my DMs here on Tumblr, or on TikTok, Cara, or DeviantArt.

I can also do character design if you don't yet have refs and just loose ideas. :3

If there's anything you're interested in that doesn't appear here, feel free to reach out!

Headshot/Bust

Traditional Sketch: $7

Traditional Lined: $9

Digital Lineart: $12

Digital Flat Color: $15

Digital Full Render: $20

Half Body

Traditional Sketch: $12

Traditional Lined: $15

Digital Lineart: $20

Digital Flat Color: $25

Digital Full Render: $30

Full Body

Traditional Sketch: $17

Traditional Lined: $20

Digital Lineart: $25

Digital Flat Color: $32

Digital Full Render: $50

Other

Character Reference Sheet: $75

Chibi Front/Back Reference: $15

Sticky Note Doodle: $5

Character Poster (like Kass below): $60

Additional Character: +50%

I take payment through ko-fi, Venmo, or PayPal! DM me if you’re interested!

Examples can be found at this link!

To highlight recent work:

[hopefull-mindset]

A Much Needed Overview

I’ve been brought to a point of feeling the need to discuss the abuse depicted in Bungou Stray Dogs. This isn’t the brightest topic to speak about and I understand why people are reluctant to speak in detail about something as serious as this. It’s not easy, so I’ll be the brave face today because I feel disappointed about the lack of deep discussion beyond the popular topic of “The Abuse Cycle”.

I’m happy that it’s at least brought up amongst everyone as something that exists, I’m happy that people feel as though it’s something to talk about, but I don’t think most understand how to act about it. It’s never as cut and dry as how it’s depicted in most other pieces of media or how people speak about it in general. That is why I am thankful for its depiction here. Not saying that nobody speaks about it with clarity, but it’s not the majority, unfortunately.

I especially felt this was a good time to address this because of the reaction towards Asagiri’s thoughts on Dazai and Akutagawa’s relationship in the recent magazine interview. The outrage is not from nowhere, I was also taken aback at first, but to claim Asagiri “doesn’t even know his own story” is incredibly self-entitled considering the story isn’t done, nor are you the one writing this. If you read the story, no way is Asagiri justifying anything that happened. Please look at the question that is being asked, does it say “Do you think what Dazai did is morally right?” Of course, it isn’t.

Not to be rude but before you start questioning the writer himself if he’s read his own story, have you read it? Please keep in mind the fact this is only a magazine interview and doesn't reflect every nuance. Asagiri doesn't need to go “Oh yeah, this thing that’s bad is bad” every two seconds to explain himself. Asagiri’s writing decisions can be questionable and cannot be uncritiqued, but I’m going to have to defend him on this account.

I’m not sure if any warnings are needed concerning the subject matter considering most BSD fans know what I’m about to go over, but to be clear, please only read this when you’re in a well enough headspace for heavy matters such as this. I am not going to be talking lightly in any of this or dance around what’s happened between any of the characters, abuse is harder to talk about compared to other acts of violence that are objectively worse because it’s a more personal act that too many can find themselves in.

Finally, I do not want to speak about my own experiences online because I’ve only come to terms recently with it and they do not reflect everyone’s response to depictions of abuse in all media. Some things are very uncomfortable to admit about me that I haven’t told anyone, that no one would be able to take well even if they were my closest friend. This isn’t about me at all and there is no point in saying more about my reality, but I think my perspective might help people enlighten themselves on how truly complicated situations like this are.

What is Abuse?

Surprise, we need to go over this before any discussion about BSD happens because a lot misunderstand what abuse is. It's disheartening that the term has been so simplified that nobody knows what it means anymore. Don't substitute words for abuse or use abuse as a substitute for other terms. Abuse as a concept is quite hard to pin down with words and there are many ways to describe it, but by definition in the context that it’s directed to another person, abuse is:

To target and mistreat someone, causing them harm or distress in a repetitive manner

This by itself does not describe the grand scope of everything and probably might make you more confused, but it’s a great place to start and does describe what is directed to the victim. Many sources will use varied wording, but it’s the general knowledge that someone is being hurt to a fundamental level that makes it abuse.

Does the abuser need to intentionally hurt someone for it to be abused? Yes, but not in the way you think. Most abusers are not hurting their victims for the sake of just hurting them, that’s illogical, they’re doing it for something. Some examples include either for themselves in some way or what they think is for their victim’s “own benefit”. Even worse is when they genuinely believe it because they’ve also grown up in an environment that has that same mentality and reflects on themselves.

So yes, it’s intentional in that they’re doing it for a purpose. No matter their intention though, “selfless” or not, it’s still a selfish act in itself that they think that imposing their own will through harmful methods is what the victim needs. The abuse doesn’t need to be physically harming another for it to be abuse. As long as it’s harming you emotionally or otherwise and making you raise flags in your head, it’s abuse.

It sounds strange, but I'm saying it’s intentional because you’re still an intended target of their abuse whether they realize it themself or not. Abuse needs to repeat a form of distress in you to be abuse. For example, does one instance of physical violence against you count as abuse when it never happens again? Well, you need to think about the context. Usually, this would just be assault and that’s it, but is it left hanging in the air to happen again when you interact with them? Do you feel afraid for your well-being, even though it doesn’t happen again?

That’s still abuse, the psychological kind. Typically when abusers resort to physical means, it’s gonna happen again eventually. In this hypothetical instance, however, the point is that repeated distress does not mean repeated actions. It does not need to happen the same way for you to feel unsafe, it just needs to have power over you. Manipulation does not always equal abuse either. It’s a tactic used by abusers, but unless paired up with other actions, it doesn’t fit the criteria of abuse. Context matters when you examine what abuse is.

Here comes the tricky parts that are acknowledged less: When the abuser is someone you’ve relied on in your childhood, in a detrimental part of your life, or someone you care about that you put importance in, and it makes it hard to fully hate that person. What the abuser has done to the victim does not entirely reflect them as people, even if it’s still an important part of them that needs to be addressed.

Abusive people are not only defined by their awful actions, they’re not pure monsters like most love to pretend they are. It’s just easier to think that because accepting that they’re just a multifaceted human being hurts too much when you’re on the receiving end of their worse behavior. But what happens when you’re on the receiving end of both? You try to justify it the way the abuser is because you can’t accept that what’s happening is bad and not something everyone goes through. After all, they treat you decent enough sometimes.

Something so many people need to get into their heads already is that abusers can be victims and vice versa, but just because your abuser went through something themselves or is important to you, doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. Abuse is not forgivable just like that, you can rebuild a relationship beyond that if you’re able to, It’s not a “forgive-and-forget” thing.

Not everyone experiences and responds to abuse the same way, some hate their abusers fully, some can’t bring themselves to, and some don’t even know what to think, but there are so many who don’t feel one way that regarding all abusers as heartless monsters completely invalidates so many stories and their difficult experiences. I have a huge grudge against people like this who restrict abusive situations to just looking like one thing, this is why so many don’t even know that their situations are abusive.

Portrait of a Father

Chapter 39 reflects my points the most, and at the same time, it also turns out to be one of the most controversial chapters. It surprised me that it is, but maybe I shouldn’t be considering how most people on the internet act about abuse. It’s a lovely chapter to me personally and one of my favorites.

If you need a refresher, this is the chapter the Orphanage Director died in and leaves Atsushi in an emotional frenzy about what to think and believe. I know that the underlying message of this chapter is confusing to some, but it hit me in the face point blank on how this is about facing your abuser’s death without any personal conclusion with them.

Being sent on an investigation, Atsushi, after finding out the body was the Director, is stunned and scared because he knows nothing of the director other than his cruelty. He immediately assumes the worst and that he was coming after him again. Atsushi’s thoughts against him are entirely… on purpose in the director’s intentions because we find out that he has gone through so much violence and loss himself that he’s projecting his own will onto Atsushi and making sure he’d “survive in the real world”. So he became his first figure of hate and violence earlier in his life so he’d be “prepared for what comes next”.

I know so many take the backstory for the director as a way to justify what he did to Atsushi in the narrative, but it was just to put into context why he was so cruel. Abusers are never cruel for no reason, that never makes it right, but it’s reality. Atsushi was not the only one in the orphanage who was treated badly, he was singled out by the director most likely for an ability he couldn't control because the headmaster knew he’d get the most trouble for it, and unfortunately… he was right.

Akutagawa being his informant in this chapter makes perfect sense. He can see that what the director was for Atsushi is what Dazai is for him. No matter how terrible their actions were, it’s what kept them alive for so long. It’s not pleasant to confront, is it? Atsushi agrees because when he gets the information that the Director was going to congratulate him with the flowers he was going to buy by selling the gun he had on him, he freaks out. No way the guy he was raised so long to hate, the guy who put him through so much suffering, was going to congratulate him.

I know to some, Dazai’s talk with Atsushi sounded like he was justifying what happened because “it made him a good person in the end”, but that’s not what’s being said. This conclusion I’ve seen some people come to about this conversation confuses me. Dazai is just saying the obvious, you guys get all shocked and it weirds me out how easily it’s been glossed over that the reason Atsushi is so self-sacrificial and trying to do the good thing is because of the director. The reason he puts himself so much on the front lines is because he needs that worth in being good to live and prove the director wrong, he was raised to see that type of person is the most ideal person to live in this world.

After everything that’s been dumped onto him in such a short time, so much inner conflict of what to think of a dead man he no longer can have any personal closure with, he asks Dazai what face he should make, what he should think at this moment. Dazai tells him that they’re his emotions and he can think however he’d like, but commonly someone cries when their father dies. So he cries, because ultimately no matter his treatment, no matter the intent and its effects, it’s still the man who raised him. It’s flawed, but that’s what a father is stripped bare at its core definition and that won’t change no matter your feelings.

Now that I’m done summarizing this chapter and making sure you guys understood the point and how it spells out their relationship, I can finally talk freely about what was happening between them. When it comes to familial abuse, generational trauma is so prevalent it’s hard not to talk about. The director is quite reflective of so many parents who were raised to grow up too early in harsh environments, that they think they need to prepare their children for it too, even though it’s no longer needed.

You don’t need to like someone for them to be important to you, especially if it’s a parent in your life or someone close to that. That’s why Atsushi cries. He cries for the director, he cries for himself, he cries that it’s finally over, he cries for the kindness he could’ve gotten even if it wouldn’t have fixed anything, he cries for the father that never was, he cries because his father is dead. It’s perfectly normal to keep someone close in your heart that wasn’t perfect and to grieve their death.

Was the director successful in what he was aiming for? I want to say no, but he did. He succeeded in making Atsushi think of others in a good light and do good for them, making Atsushi resent him, and giving him the ability to keep going. Hell raised him right, but it was still hell. The problem is that his teachings were based on degrading Atsushi into being nothing but a life he should put aside in favor of others. Even if he continued hating the director like he wanted, he would still degrade himself for being a coward who didn’t hold himself to those standards. The result is not perfect because the director is not perfect, but in his position, this is a success.

The director for a while was his shadow of negative encouragement when he joined the agency, what kept him going in those moments, because he was what defined good, bad, and justice for him in his entire childhood. Even if he was dead, he’d still linger in his mind. I can’t parse out what to think about these hallucinations forming Akutagawa and Dazai to guide him later on, all it tells me is that he still can’t rely on or trust himself and he needs more development in his self-image issues.

I see why fans are confused, hell raising us right is a bizarre thing to say to a victim, so let me show you a perspective you're not seeing. Let's imagine you have an abusive mother who only wants you to be prepared for the things you're undoubtedly going to experience because of what you can't control. What she did does help you, but all that goes through your head is “Why couldn't she have done it differently without my own suffering?” The only thoughts that come rushing back when you think of those memories are the unnecessary pains. It takes a lot for a victim to acknowledge this on their own, they want to push back at the past so they don't have to see this plain reality.

Like anyone else that I’m going to bring up in this post, just because the abuse made them who they are or affected who they became, even when it keeps us going through life and benefits us in some way, does not make the abuse justified. Abuse is still abuse, I addressed this already and I hope not to address this again. I needed to detail an explanation because it’s quite easy to hate a man you know nothing about and has been painted in nothing but a bad light. The anger against the director is undebatable because abuse is not debatable, but to pretend the cruelty was nothing but for cruelty’s sake is mischaracterizing both him and Atsushi.

You can’t pick and choose what’s been told to you in the text just because you don’t like a character and lack the maturity for it. It gets quite hard to do that sort of thing when it’s a character you‘ve grown to care about, it’s no wonder Dazai is divided between so many. Speaking of Dazai, his involvement in this makes as much sense as Akutagawa’s. He’s currently in a mentor position for Atsushi, no matter what Akutagawa says, and shows interest in his development. So of course he’s going to purposely stick his head into something that would affect Atsushi greatly. Both Akutagawa and Dazai are viewing this through their lenses as people who grew up in the darkness of society, and it’s not that Dazai thinks what happened to him wasn’t terrible, you should have eyes to read the panels provided, but he’s generally unfazed and able to sound neutral because he’s used to that cruelty.

The Port Mafia’s Environment

(Aka: is it really “all Mori’s fault” or is it just the product of being literally in The Mafia™?)

I’ll go over the “Cycle of Abuse” in a second, but please keep in mind that you can’t just blame everything on Mori. Just like the Director, it’s so easy to pin the guy who’s just been the worst for every problem there, but it decimates the other characters involved as well and makes what they’ve gone through go flat because you’re restricting it to a misinformed presumption.

To make a bold statement, I need you to completely throw away your idea of what the abuse cycle is. The Mori to Kyouka pipeline being the singular “Abuse Cycle”? Garbage, needs to go away too. I've seen many fans use the term “Cycle of Abuse” too carelessly, and while from afar the way they're using it is not technically wrong, they have the wrong thought process behind it.

The Cycle of Abuse is simply the patterns of what keeps us in an abusive dynamic and negative mental state, either with an individual or environment, and makes it incredibly hard for anyone to leave. It’s not the actions you take that make it the Cycle of Abuse, and it's not just one straight line of people going through similar motions. You don’t have to be someone’s abuser to be the one who keeps them there, if you feed into it you’re still a problem. Even if you don't actively add to it yourself, just staying there as a bystander and not trying to do anything to change it or speak up for the victim when you clearly could also still make you responsible. Just with your presence, it validates what they've gone through as normal.

If you need more of an explanation, two opposite examples include Higuchi & Akutagawa and Beast Kyouka & Atsushi. Higuchi is a traditional example in that she stays in the mafia because of her relationship with Akutagawa, and stays by his side for reasons unknown. What we do know is that she’s incredibly indebted to him enough to care for him to an extreme extent, but their relationship is abusive all the same. Beast Atsushi and Kyouka sounds strange for me to bring up, but this is an example of a non-abusive person contributing to the Cycle of Abuse. Instead of taking her out of an abusive situation, he brings her back in.

Many characters are a part of this main narrative of abuse in BSD, so it's not inaccurate to say Mori, Dazai, Akutagawa, and Kyouka are a part of it as well using this definition as all of them are the reason or contributed to why someone was stuck in a negative, abusive situation or the victim themselves. I’m guessing none of you are genuinely referring to this though and are referring to intergenerational abuse, a repeating cycle of younger generations taking after their abusers when they're older, which is a completely different phenomenon. Both are referred to as cycles and have many commonalities, but it’s not the same. Not to sound like a total dick, but this barely even applies to them.

Not because the concept is based on familial relationships, it can happen with older figures in your life too, but because our oh-so-famous Abuse Cycle gang does not have that commonality to make that claim. They have narrative parallels, but that’s pretty much it. I will save what I have to say in their sections, but Mori and Akutagawa did not abuse Dazai and Kyouka respectively for this type of claim to have any legitimacy. Kyouka certainly broke a cycle, but not that kind since that would need her to continue it in the first place and then prevent her own experiences from even affecting the next child.

What do all Mori, Dazai, Akutagawa, and Kyouka actually have in common? They are/were in the mafia, using their natural talents of cruelty for the underworld.

The Port Mafia resembles something of an abusive household or community that sees so much of what’s done to others there as normal, and constantly compares it to how it was with their old boss and thinks, “At least it wasn’t as bad as that.” It’s quite like the Orphanage Director’s thinking but on a larger scale. Does that make everyone in the Port Mafia abused? Nope, unlike most abusive communities, the Port Mafia is quite literally the mafia. Everyone is there for different reasons, at different ages, and different experiences. Everyone is taken advantage of in these situations, no matter the circumstances, but it doesn’t make them abused automatically.

So it’s hard to have a stance on anything about them being abusive other than the mentor situations in the Port Mafia don’t see abuse as abuse and just another way to teach their subordinates to survive in their world if they deem it necessary. Was Chuuya abused, either by Mori or Kouyou then? I’m going to have to say I can’t tell you that. We don’t have enough information on either of his dynamics with them to say that they’ve directly had any repetitive behaviors of direct harm against him specifically, and there's no reason for them to do so either. I’m not going to use the argument that “Chuuya doesn’t hate or fear them, so that must mean he wasn’t” because again, that type of response does not reflect so many situations.

Chuuya was still harmed by being in the Port Mafia as a teenager because nobody should have been surrounded by this much cruelty at that age. It doesn’t matter if he shows visible distress or not about the Port Mafia, he was just desensitized to it since his sheep days. So was he an abuse victim under the idea that being a child in the Port Mafia is abuse? That depends on who we’re speaking of, but in Chuuya’s situation, I'm going to have to say no as he's already internalized their mindset from his own experiences separate from the mafia. Keep in mind that it also still holds true that you can find family in situations like this, it’s not mutually exclusive. Some just find more comfort in what they’re used to than what would be better for them. Kyouka is a better example of someone being a victim of an abusive community.

A false claim I've seen made many times are the ones where they have it as if Mori is the mafia itself or that he made the mafia what it was. It shouldn’t be too surprising, but it’s the opposite. Mori already held flawed, heartless, calculative methods when in situations he thought required them. We’ve seen him as a soldier and an underground doctor, but we know nothing else about him outside of his cruelty, just like the headmaster. What he does is never for what he thinks is for his benefit, but for the sake of something larger. Whether it’s for the city, the country, or eventually, the Port Mafia.

The mafia is the first time he’s been put into a position of absolute leadership and is not yet accustomed to that at the beginning of Dazai, Chuuya, Age Fifteen. He’s able to quickly fit the mold of a mafia boss, but there’s that bit of honesty that peaks through in this light novel in the first and last sections that’s ignored too quickly. First Mori complains about nothing going immediately right, questions himself about Dazai, and becomes genuinely stressed if it was the right decision to involve him, then confesses that he sees himself in Dazai to him (and him and Fukuzawa in Soukoku in private), and finally gives his honest take of leadership to Chuuya.

I already go over Mori as a character in one of my other posts and will speak more of him later on, so I don’t want to reiterate the same points, but here we have proof he has (albeit poor) humanity. He did not become the Port Mafia boss for his own selfish gain of power if you’ve forgotten, but because Natsume introduced him to becoming part of the Tripartite Framework to protect the city he loves, it’s where he’d excel best in this plan. The Port Mafia was already a shithole, Mori just made it livable again by becoming what an organized crime group needs.

It’s what makes the dynamic between Kouyou and him so intriguing because you have an abuse victim who has embraced the environment she was forced back into, but won’t let go of someone who’s proven to be more of a decent leader than her tormentor and can be relied on. For victims who couldn’t get help or realize they needed help, the easier path is to accept this is your life through some justification. While I said the Port Mafia resembles an abusive community, communities as such aren’t purely terrible and that’s what keeps them justifying it in their head. The family you have for yourself, whether it's a made one or the one you're born with, is what sticks for you.

Like it or not, Mori isn’t stupid. He takes risky gambles that backfire on him sometimes, but he’s good at his job. He’s brutal enough to prove his own against the people who didn’t think he should’ve been boss and outsiders who want to go against the Port Mafia, but he’s considerate enough towards his people and shows enough competency to be perfect for the job. He’s not a great human being, but what did you expect? He no longer had any room to express that humanity, he never had; there was no benefit from being a good person in his line of work.

The Heartless Cur

That looked like a great segue to talk about Dazai and Mori’s dynamic, but it’d benefit to go over Akutagawa first. For those who do acknowledge it as an abusive situation, Thank you for at least taking that step. Numerous don’t and it worries me at the state of what’s considered abuse vs. training. It may be both at times but don't excuse one for the other. Training needs formal consent and communication at some point during a session. Akutagawa is learning, but it’s the same as getting yelled at as a child for not doing your homework right, when again, you’re still just learning.

It might’ve been easier to see for those who do acknowledge it because of the visible physical abuse that happens, but let's not undermine the psychological abuse happening as well. Dazai has messed with his psyche on an abhorrent level through his degrading and threats, making him reliant to hear a single word of acknowledgment from his mouth. What happened to Akutagawa is beyond the mafia’s environment.

Akutagawa does not hate or want Dazai dead for what he’s done to him, but he does hold anger at the seeming abandonment he’s been put through… and at himself as well. Anger that he couldn't get to what Dazai wanted him to be before he suddenly left. So he proves himself by climbing the ranks and becoming someone feared. Spectacles of violence not because he enjoys the feeling of other’s suffering or the power over them, but to show Dazai that see? He's still worth looking at!

He stays in the mafia because he’s found a place there. Even if he could, there was no point in leaving the mafia after he disappeared because what would be left for him if he did? He will always be an unchangeable, horrific hound of the dark and there's no changing that in his mind. From an inference of his actions in the dungeon when they finally reunite one-on-one, he wanted to believe that he was above Dazai after all those years, but Dazai doesn't act impressed or scared or anything. After all that effort, he gets nothing but ridicule and mockery like he's back to being that little kid with an oversized coat too big for his body.

Worse is that he gets told that some new kid Dazai picked up, who didn't train to the extent he did to refine his abilities, is better than him somehow. He gets riled up and at first, takes out on Dazai, but all those threats about killing him and how he went against the mafia were empty. Even now he can't bring himself to hate Dazai, he needs his mentor to acknowledge him no matter what side he's on. He never let go of Dazai, his coat is proof enough of that. So he takes it out on the party that isn't responsible and is convinced he needs to overcome Atsushi to prove something to Dazai.

He doesn't hate Atsushi, not genuinely. He does the same when he’s told he’ll never compare to Odasaku, someone who objectively should’ve been the weakest member due to his status. He gets angry at Dazai’s words, gets angry at himself, then takes it out on the person mentioned, rinse and repeat. I’m not sure if I’m the only one to notice, but he genuinely believed that the meaningful life Dazai gave him laid in the mafia and being useful to its cause. He has no reason to be as loyal to the mafia if he didn't think this.

Dazai’s acknowledgment means more than just appreciation for his skills and strength, it means his life meant something by striving for being the strongest. It’s not about the acknowledgment at all. Whenever he critiques and shames Atsushi for how he lives his life, it just feels like he’s unknowingly shaming himself through him without having to acknowledge his wrongs. It makes me curious about how much the acknowledgment itself even matters to him and the validation it gives him to strive for this is an excuse to keep living so what he’s doing in the mafia even matters in the end. What counts as acknowledgment to him?

He's convinced his faults are what made Dazai turn away, he just doesn’t know how to do anything to fix it and can't fix it this late into the game. What does Dazai want from him other than being stronger? When Dazai directly asks him to do something important involving Atsushi, he’s confused. He has no reason to trust him to do these missions. He’ll take the chance to prove himself once and for all, but to be included means he's being acknowledged, so what gives? The number of times he visibly self-reflects can be counted on one hand because as soon as it shows, he goes back to justify his violence and ignores his faults.

As someone whose favorite character is Akutagawa, I’m disgusted that all people can take away from him is “Akutagawa is an obsessive fanboy that deserves no sympathy because of what he did to Kyouka” or “Akutagawa is a poor, miserable man that didn’t deserve what Dazai made him into and should be absolved of responsibility because it’s all Dazai’s fault”. Both are very shallow and very harmful to perpetrate as they continue the idea that a person can only be the abused or abuser. He's both and it's okay to admit that.

Quickly let’s clear up this: He is not the way he is because of Dazai.

What Dazai IS responsible for:

Akutagawa’s need for his constant approval and recognition

Akutagawa learning to hone his ability

Akutagawa’s toxic views of being useful

The reason Akutagawa’s still alive

The reason Akutagawa is the Mafia’s dog

What Dazai is NOT responsible for:

Everything else

Akutagawa’s lean toward violence, his one-track stubborn mindset, and his lone-wolf attitude are not a product of Dazai’s treatment, he’s always been that way because of his time in the slums. He got beaten down by adults frightened of his empty gaze, had to learn to protect himself and find something to eat to survive, helped take care of his sister Gin and his friends by himself, and everyone constantly dying around him. That’s the real reason his personality is like that. He is a victim of his circumstances in a society that deemed him worthless, so he also thinks of his life as worthless. That’s why Dazai means so much to him.

Dazai did not trick him into joining the mafia, Dazai expressed what he was going to go through was worse than what happened in the slums and gave Akutagawa an out that he could live a normal life with enough money, but he knew Akutagawa would not refuse because he still needed meaning in living, just like him. Gaining enough money to get by so he and his sister could get out of the slums would do nothing for him, he already felt that his life was worthless. He has no problem throwing it away at any time, he was gonna die young regardless because of his lung disease. It has manipulative undertones, but that's how Dazai usually is with even the people he cares about.

Akutagawa knows too well that a person needs a sign, someone to tell them it’s okay to keep going, and so does Dazai. Part of Dazai’s goal is to save Akutagawa from dying and give him a reason to live like he promised that day because he sees the potential that could come from his development. I don't want to sound like a dick again, but you’d have to be dense to think Akutagawa would still be dead by the end of this arc. He isn’t sending him off to his death, Dazai doesn’t know everything.

Even if he knew Akutagawa might die there, it's better than both Atsushi and Akutagawa dying at that moment. If Akutagawa didn’t want to die for him, he wouldn’t have, he chose to save Atsushi’s life. This is why I have to defend Asagiri. Let’s reread the interview together, to make it get across already.

(Twt link)

Q: Just like how Akutagawa and Atsushi's relationship has changed, I could feel the relationship between Dazai and Akutagawa moving forward too. Is it like what Akutagawa has said in Episode 3 of Season 5, that every order he has received from Dazai so far has been "a trial", "a part of a meaningfull life"?

First, the question being asked. They’re asking Asagiri about their relationship in the present, and how it’s developed. Akutagawa is no longer thinking he was abandoned by Dazai for a new, better student like he was made him believe, that was just to rile him up and interact with Atsushi more. Instead, he realizes that he’s not supposed to work against Atsushi, he’s supposed to work with him. How he decides to go about that battle with Fukuchi and whether or not he works with Atsushi like a partner is his trial. If this was Akutagawa before he met Atsushi, he would’ve no doubt escaped or might’ve thought defeating Fukuchi would prove himself to Dazai. He's not an obstacle to his meaningful life, his quest for a meaningful life lies with Atsushi.

Asagiri responds with:

Asagiri: Needless to say, Dazai is the most qualified person in this world to help Akutagawa grow. Dazai has a vision for Akutagawa's development, and he completely understands what it takes to achieve it. We, as obsevers, can only see bits and pieces of that vision. But I can at least say that Dazai's training plan has never been wrong.

Many find this answer questionable, I was stunned reading it myself. Asagiri is not wrong at all here though, Dazai is objectively the only person in this series who can find a way to help him. Atsushi is the endpoint, but Dazai has been guiding him to this point. Dazai himself said that he was planning to team them up the moment he met Atsushi, he was still thinking of him even after all these years. There are much scarier implications than thinking that Asagiri was wrong. It's that Dazai was doing everything intentionally to get Akutagawa’s mindset where it was. He didn't mess up with Akutagawa, he just couldn't personally teach him the skills he needed and chose a different route until he found something that could.

Asagiri is not saying the abuse was morally justified, but the intention behind it was not wrong in an objective stance. Dazai would know what to do the most because of his understanding of wanting to find meaning in living. Teenage Dazai couldn’t have achieved much by himself, even if he could understand since he also could not find meaning in life. That’s why he made him hang on to his every breath of validation so he would keep his faith in Dazai long enough for him to find a solution to this dilemma. The moment in life when he found Akutagawa was not ideal and he still did what he thought he had to do for him to survive in the mafia. Without his ability, he's incredibly weak and needs to be able to defend himself. A violent person could not have made another violent person unlearn their violence.

You could say he just wanted a weapon, but that’s not it, not even close. Many of you are stuck on the part that it was a suicidal teenager that picked Akutagawa up from the slums and that no way someone like that could teach another suicidal teenager anything, so it’s “comical that Asagiri thinks as though he’s the most qualified”. You’re not wrong in some sense, but this is still incredibly intelligent, “Black Wrath of the Port Mafia”, Osamu Dazai, and not just some suicidal teenager.

He’s also no longer a teenager. Right now we’re talking of Dazai in the present who’s grown and no longer needs to be how he was in the mafia, he has Atsushi now, someone who can help Akutagawa see what’s wrong in his outlook. The only thing he could’ve done back then was to shelter Akutagawa so he wouldn’t kill himself. It's horrible, but Dazai validating where he is now would do no good for either of them and fix nothing.

Q: What kind of person is Dazai to Akutagawa?

Asagiri: Actually, at the time of "The Dark Era", Dazai already spoke very highly of Akutagawa, as someone who would "become the Mafia's strongest skill user in the not-so-distant future". He just doesn't say that in front of Akutagawa himself. The reason he doesn't say it is that Dazai has to be "the presence that continues to give meaning to life" to Akutagawa. So far, that trial has been completely successful.

None of what Asagiri brings up is new information. He doesn’t say it in front of Akutagawa not to spite him, but if he gives these praises out too freely, he loses his distant, almost god-like presence in Akutagawa and will go back to being just a lone wolf with no exceptions that will carelessly get himself killed. Without any goal, he’s lost. Just like Atsushi and the headmaster and how Atsushi hinges on proving he can do a good thing to motivate his life, Akutagawa similarly hinges on the fact that if he fails, he won’t get Dazai’s approval.

However, his death was not fully about Dazai’s approval in the way he's been preaching. In chapter 87, he mentions Dazai’s approval like always, and when they fail the first time even after trusting and working with each other as Shin Soukoku should, It hits him. What came into his head I cannot parse out at the moment, but his actions speak so much louder than any explanation we could've gotten. Of course, he's helping Atsushi escape, but what does he do for that? He used his ability on his shirt, and not just on the coat like he typically does.

It doesn't seem like a big deal at first, he could've always done that, but when was the last time he used it on something that wasn't the coat Dazai gave him? The coat means many things. His new beginning, his path in being Dazai’s student and successor (as that was also Mori’s coat), but it also conveys Dazai’s will that keeps him alive and that he's only strong with his coat. Without it, he's defenseless, so he clings to this coat the exact way he clings to those orders. It's his encouragement to keep going when Dazai isn't there. This overwhelming, suffocating responsibility, an oversized coat, is a lot to give to a kid but it's comfortable and he’ll grow into it eventually.

It was already a huge step in his development that he gave Atsushi his coat, but to use his ability not on his coat means he's making an effort to overcome his fixation and do an action unrelated to Dazai for the sake of Atsushi’s life. His whole life after the slums, everything he's ever done was with Dazai in mind. Him saving Atsushi’s life was not because he was doing what Dazai wanted him to do, that he'd finally get approval for doing It, and in turn give his life meaning before he died. When he saved Atsushi, it would give his life meaning in just that. He shouldn't let himself be defined by the past the way he criticizes Atsushi for, so he’s going to choose his meaning. I wouldn't say he's moved past Dazai yet, but he's getting there.

Dazai and Akutagawa’s relationship is not healthy in the slightest, and Dazai’s crueler actions and words against him are not right, but they’re still growing and not stagnant characters. Atsushi and Akutagawa learn from each other and that's what's pushing them to change. Nobody will pretend those past means weren’t just abuse, they were, but there's so much more to it. Like I asked with the director, was he successful? Well from what I’ve said, yes it so far has gone the way Dazai hoped for in the best-case scenario.

In the main universe at least, this is one of the better ways it could’ve gone. Beast is a different story. Teenage Dazai of the main universe was unsure of Akutagawa’s future and did only what he could’ve done at that time, but Beast Dazai does have that knowledge and he decided that it would be best for Akutagawa to not be in the mafia, instead bringing in Atsushi. It wouldn’t have been good to let him pursue his violent tendencies more than necessary in the mafia in this universe when he knew there was a better option, especially with someone like Oda, who would take the time to care for him properly.

Even if he didn’t bring him in, he still gave him the motivation to keep living for something. The prologue of Beast is a mirror to The Heartless Cur, with instead it’s a distant relationship of hate Akutagawa has for him for taking his sister. For those who argue that since Beast exists, that means Asagiri was somehow “wrong about Dazai”, but it’s still Dazai from the beginning that’s the source of this motivation. Dazai, who's still guiding him. If we’re gonna be honest, Dazai was putting their development/capabilities in speed run mode with the logic and future information he had access to prepare them for a timeline he won’t be alive for. There are many factors for what he did in Besst, but that’s not the conversation.

What does he get from helping him? Who knows, Asagiri wasn’t being cheeky when he said we only see bits and pieces of his vision. We barely have any clue what’s going through that man’s head, so don’t act like you do. He wasn’t always planning for the next Soukoku. Maybe it was a thought that came up sometimes, but he’s only met Atsushi recently. What about Akutagawa was so different from any other powerful ability-wielding orphan? Well, we’re not gonna know any time soon.

The point is that Dazai is thinking about their future, even if the abuse or manipulation makes that hard to see. Please do remember that abuse is still selfish no matter the intention, but non-selfish intentions make it all the more complicated to process. Their relationship is not misunderstood by Asagiri himself, it’s just clear to me most don’t want to face the unpleasant truth that there is more to their dynamic. When I first realized what was going on, I couldn’t help but get unnerved and awkward when someone would ask me about these two. These are both characters in the spotlight that you’re supposed to care about, but what happened between them is rotten.

You’re not supposed to pretend it didn’t happen because Dazai still contributed to who he is and it shows whenever it’s on screen. Abuse doesn’t make us stronger, don’t make it as if that’s a message that Asagiri is spreading. What happened to him motivated his development, but with Atsushi, that’s the opposite. Their circumstances are different and victims process what's happened to them in various ways. Depicting it in a form less common than usual doesn't mean the author thinks in the same way the victim does, it's just nuance at work.

I did not add Akutagawa’s attitude towards his subordinates and newer members as Dazai’s responsibility because Dazai is not the one controlling his hands when he hits Higuchi. Dazai’s mentoring contributed to his toxic views of being useful, but it’s only Akutagawa’s responsibility once he raises his hand. Instead of thinking of this in the context of the most typical abusive situation you can think of, how about this:

Your parent was raised in an abusive household, but they think they came out of it just fine and that there was nothing wrong with how they were treated. They treat you almost the same way, and all you can take away from that when you find out is, “At least it’s not as bad as it could’ve been”. You still hold anger at the standards they’re forcing you to reach, but if that’s what it takes to get that approval, then you’ll keep going anyway. Even if you get yelled at and you know you shouldn’t be treated like this, it’ll feel nice when you finally get on their good graces, right?

Then you get a new sibling, and all of that comes crumbling down. They don’t treat your sibling anywhere near the same when you were that age. Years go by and you get angrier and angrier. Why is it only you that was put to that standard? Even worse is that they treat you differently now too. You finally got to those standards, but now what is it worth? They’re so much nicer now and you want to curse them out for only changing now. Why couldn’t have had that parent from the beginning? It’s so unfair, but you can’t take it out on them because you still need them, they mean so much to you. As angry as you were, they were doing it because they cared about you in their way, you think. It was what your grandparents did to them at least. So you start treating your sibling similarly to how you were treated because you can’t take it that they didn’t experience that hardship without destroying yourself first.

Question: Are you right in what you did? Was the parent responsible for what you did to your sibling?

Nobody in their right mind would say yes to that first question. It makes sense why it happened, but continuing abuse will never be the correct answer. You’re doing the same thing your parent did. The second question needs more exposition to answer, however. How responsible is responsible?

In the end, even if it was the parent who influenced it, you’re only responsible for what you’ve done on your own accord. The parent did not tell you to take it out on your sibling, you decided that yourself. The parent is still responsible for what they’ve done to you, never get that wrong, but if you say that your guilt is absolved because it’s all their fault, you sound no different from any other abuser in denial. Are you saying now that the parent is also absolved from guilt because it’s all their parent’s fault too? Listen to yourself, You hurt someone but it’s not your fault, but the person who hurt you is also somehow not at fault? If someone came up to you and said that, you’d be fed up.

For those who do the same thing with Mori, rethink what you’re saying. Is it that painful to admit your favorite characters are at fault and that they’re changing? This comparison isn’t perfect and ignores some key factors: Dazai isn’t Akutagawa’s or Atsushi’s father and is not much older than them, the Port Mafia is a violent workplace environment and requires you to be able to navigate it a certain way, and all three of them at adults in present time. I used this comparison to be more real to earth and something a larger audience could process themselves to truly get that the emotions here are not straightforward even in a realistic situation.

Re: Portrait of a Father

Just like the prologue, in chapter 3 of the Beast light novel, Portrait of a Father is mirrored and retold in brutal upset that does not hold the hopeful bittersweetness at the end of it unlike its original. Before the present day, against all orders Dazai gave him, Atsushi attacked the orphanage on the day of his birthday. On his birthday, he would be reborn from the ashes of his past being burnt away, and kill the director inside to release himself from the fear of those memories.

It’s what he says at least.

Playing out, the director was expecting him. There might have only been one person in his mind who would’ve attacked a rundown orphanage on this scale. It frightens Atsushi after all that planning and fear of losing to the director, he could still see through him, but confusion takes hold when he’s told that he was late for his graduation.

Graduation? Atsushi is in fight or flight mode, why is he approaching him with this box? He can’t imagine it being anything other than a weapon, nothing else would make sense for this cruel monster. The director won’t give him any straight answer, just repeating words he’s heard over and over growing up here. He uses his tiger hearing to glean what could be inside.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

There’s the proof, it had to be a bomb. He needs to protect himself before anything happens or he’ll die. He’s scared, he can’t move, but he has to fight. The director opens his arms for the embrace of his child… and death, plummeted into a bloody mess on the floor. Only out of the corner of his eye, only when Atsushi stopped, he saw what was in the box. It was a watch, brand new and high-end. Happy Birthday was what was written on a sheet of paper next to it.

His last words, whispered into his ear, were words of encouragement: “Yes… just like that.”

I was not kidding when I said this was brutal. Just like in the main universe, Atsushi learns why he did what he did and can’t place any of his feelings, but overwhelmingly guilt crushes him to keep protecting people with his life rather than just fear because he killed him. He finds out much earlier about what happened with Shibusawa, and how the director protected his identity as the tiger.

The director’s intentions are draining when you let your mind wander. As we’ve established, the headmaster as a figure of hate for Atsushi is intentional on his part. He doesn’t explain anything on purpose here to probe him into killing him. He bought that watch for Atsushi as a congratulations for growing up and becoming a new independent individual.

In the split minute before Atsushi took the first swing, he said his usual, “Those who fail to protect others do not deserve to live.” I have to question now if he was so willing to die there, even encouraging him to kill him, then has it been this whole time he still can’t live with himself for what happened to his friends… or is it because he couldn’t protect Atsushi anymore? Maybe I’m overthinking it and it was just that the headmaster thought Atsushi needed to kill him to remove an obstacle in his growth as an individual, to be a necessary sacrifice for his benefit.

It's too flawed though. The director will never leave him, not after all that he's engraved into Atsushi. The watch has become not a symbol of a person who's found himself, but a child that's latched himself onto his father's cold corpse that won't ever respond, but that child would do anything to have him wake up and say "Good job, Atsushi". The director also has a clock, but can he call himself a strong individual when he hasn't let go of the past either?

Time stopped for Beast Atsushi when he picked up that watch. If he had just followed orders, none of this would’ve happened. If he isn’t his father’s child, if he doesn’t uphold his last wish, then who is he? When he’s no longer in the mafia and has time for himself to think, he wanders.

He failed in becoming someone he could be proud of, he deserved to die for that but doesn't want to be dead… because It wasn't truly about the Director, just like how it wasn't truly about Dazai’s acknowledgment or saving his sister for Akutagawa. At first, that was the motivation, it's the reasoning they keep going with, but in the end, it was to save their own life and give it purpose to validate why they're still around. If they can die like this, then it's all the same. If they have their own life in someone else’s hands, then they no longer have to be responsible for their own heavy-hearted weight.

Beast Atsushi is given neither and is taken of his reasoning, but he keeps going. Aimlessly.

Luckily, it’s not where his story ends.

He wakes up in his old orphanage, and it’s no longer the dreary place it was when he was younger. Kids laughing outside, no chains on the walls or bars blocking off the windows, and the new Orphanage Director greets him. He tells him that he will go back to being a student of the orphanage until he can become independent again, under one of Dazai’s last requests before he died.

Still, there’s one thing he needs to do. The new director takes out the watch and tells him to break it. Atsushi is distraught by this notion, but he won’t let Atsushi leave if he doesn’t. The new director has good reason, there is no point in becoming someone the past director was proud of and this is what’s holding him back. Atsushi, eventually, tells him he will not break the watch. He can’t move on just yet and this watch is still proof he’s himself, yet…

He’ll keep going and move forward, just like Akutagawa told him after he spared his life. The new director finds those words to be enough, saying he can’t leave until he finds something else to define himself with, but he can keep living here as his son. He went there to burn away his past and came out of it not able to let go of the past, but now he can redo and process it healthily with someone willing to hold him like a father should.

The Man Who Raised Dazai

Everyone who’s read Beast has questioned it: Why did Dazai in his right mind have Mori take care of an orphanage? Why did he save his life? Better yet, why is he so nice?! I have come up with some speculation on why Dazai would.

“Beast Dazai recognized this potential of change either from the multitude of universes he was able to witness or recognized it in his own considering canonverse Dazai never does anything against Mori (even if he visibly dislikes him).”

“Possibility is one thing, the why is another. It was either that he saw potential and good that could come out of this in the long run, Mori’s intelligence and expertise still proves usefulness, less dangerous for Oda in the long run if he let Mori stay there instead of the Mafia, or all three.”

(Didn’t feel like rephrase them)

We can’t know anything for sure about his decision, but I do know Mori is the type of character to sacrifice his feelings for what he thinks would logically benefit the sum, and there’s no better way to release yourself from that too-calculative responsibility than to remove yourself from it and to be in a place where you’re allowed to care for others and express yourself when there is no greater purpose than to just grow.

What happened with Yosano is undoubtedly wrong, but Mori had put away any sympathy in those situations because he needed her to do what he brought her in for. I was confused by his declaration that violence should never be used to educate children when I read it, especially out of his mouth, but now I understand. He would know with certainty that it’s not the right way to educate children, particularly because this is a Mori that hasn’t been in the dark for these past years and has grown to care for these children at the orphanage without any greater intention for them.

He’s not like the Old Director because he has no reason to think these kids would end up the way he did. They’re just kids that need someone to raise them with kindness, kindness will be what gets them through life as functional adults. Abuse has too many drawbacks to be called an optimal solution here. Is it surprising that all it took to change Mori was the kindness and salvation Dazai offered to him when he took over? Can you believe it was that simple to treat someone like a human being instead of a figure of hate?

What sticks out to me like a sore thumb is that when he’s introduced in Beast, he’s referred to as the man who raised Dazai. He is, regardless of what you think, the closest thing Dazai has to a father figure. In regards to how the fanbase speaks of their relationship, it’s hard to think that he cared about Dazai, but he did and the extent of how bad it got between them is grossly exaggerated.

As many comparisons Dazai gets with Yosano, their relationship with Mori is very different. Unlike Yosano, he did not need to be forced to do anything with psychological abuse and he did not need to be torn down to do what Mori asked him to. We don’t know what happened to him to become like this, but it wasn’t because of Mori. Yosano had light in her and a motivation to do the right thing, but Dazai didn’t. Dazai is no stranger to any violence or using violence himself even before Mori if he's this desensitized.

It’s useful that Dazai is like that when he meets him, up until it isn’t. He’s moody and actively looking to die. Mori can’t predict him that easily and Dazai can see right through him. There’s another huge difference between them though: Mori sees himself in Dazai. We don’t have enough insight in his head to make conclusive statements, but I think this is why he cared for Dazai. It’s not because he saw a child struggling that he cared, but grew some fondness because he saw a little mini-him. When he drove Dazai out of the Port Mafia, he expected him to come back and take back his vacant seat.

Eventually, Dazai will come back and realize that petty anger about someone dying is illogical in somewhere like the mafia. But because of him not being able to see through Dazai and seeing himself in him, he also expected him to eventually usurp his seat if he stayed any longer. That is why he had invited Mimic at the time he did and manipulated the situation so Oda, someone he knew Dazai cared for, would go and take care of the situation flawlessly. He’d be sacrificed and Mori could get something out of it, a Skilled Business Permit. A perfect plan… in theory, but Mori was wrong and miscalculated on many levels because of how many assumptions he made about Dazai.

First, he wouldn’t have known that it was Oda who held the words that would convince him to leave the mafia and go into the world of light. Dazai will never come back to his own volition. Second, as those panels quite literally tell you, Dazai was never planning on killing him. He saw his place in the mafia and saw that he was needed there. When Mori finally realizes his mistake with Dazai 4 years later during the Guild Arc, he can’t go back. His plan was still perfectly sound and he still got what he wanted out of it. He shouldn’t regret it, but…

Now that’s been paved out, where does wanting to save Dazai fit into this? If I had to assume, it’s the same reason he didn’t shoot Dazai for leaving his office during Dark Era. He cared about that boy, for 4 whole years he left him and his seat alone when the logical thing he should be doing was replacing him, but as much as he might’ve cared, he needed to put the mafia first. He didn’t let him die because of his use, but also because of their so-called “common destiny” in his eyes, a diamond in a rough he might’ve disposed of otherwise if he didn’t see his potential. There’s not much he could’ve done for Dazai here except keep him healthy and alive. Mori gets tons of flack for not trying to help him, but there's nothing he could've done, not in their position.

He can't cultivate his potential if there is abuse involved because there is no logical reason for him to do anything to Dazai. You guys have to stop assuming the worst when it comes to Mori, you’re missing huge character details that are right in front of you. The difference between Mori, the Boss of the Port Mafia, and Mori, the Orphanage Director is that he had time to rekindle his humanity so he’s able to care about him like a normal human being, feel guilt, and admit regret after Beast Dazai has died. Mori at most was responsible for ingraining tactical strategies and theories and molding him into the perfect Mafioso and right-hand man.

Not to say any of those aren’t a bad thing. He’s still a child and having him use his desensitized, intelligent mind to build the potential in what he could do for the mafia, it’s just that he’s responsible for very little in Dazai’s personality. The only answer I could give about Dazai being abused by Mori or being abused under the credentials that he’s a child in a violent, unsafe place is the same answer given earlier for Chuuya: in his case, not really.

Regarding this, I retract my statement about anything I’ve said about Beast Atsushi not being a victim in his time in the mafia, but I still hold my stance that he’s not the victim of the port mafia. I want to say the same thing about Beast Dazai and Atsushi that I do here, but considering he picked him up and trained him like how he trained Akutagawa, there’s a great chance Dazai emotionally abused him when you read their interactions. Not physically as that would make him too much like the headmaster, but just enough emotional distress in bringing up traumatic moments to manipulate him into doing what he needs of him.

It’s not a good relationship, but Mori wasn’t targeting Dazai in any real way like the Director and Atsushi or Dazai and Akutagawa. Unlike every other section, I have to conclude that he didn’t do anything to Dazai in that regard other than treating him like another adult when he shouldn't have. I don’t have much to say negatively about their dynamic otherwise. Just a weird, terrible son with his weird, terrible father. It’s more like someone who's taking after their mentor’s teaching and methods rather than an abuse victim echoing their abuser. This is why I don't accept the “Cycle of Abuse” as how the fandom understands it. It tells me a lot that people resort to the blame game.

I wonder what Dazai and Mori’s relationship would've looked like without any of this in the middle. Maybe something in cadence with Ranpo and Fukuzawa, but I can't help thinking that accepting Atsushi as his son in Beast instead of a student wasn't just for Atsushi’s sake. He was about to call him his student too, but immediately changed his mind. He already admitted he was helping him because of what happened to Dazai, so it can’t be a huge jump to think that in the same way this is Atsushi’s redo in building a relationship with a father figure, this is Mori’s redo to give him some atonement for the boy he failed.

A Mother’s Love

Kyouka, when we first meet her, appears as a force to be reckoned with. With skills a young girl shouldn’t have, and a demon shadowing behind, she’s a terrifying opponent. Quickly though, that appearance falls short in tragedy when the bomb Atsushi’s after is found on her own body and when he asks if she truly wants to kill... She has no answer, but her actions speak clearly. She gives him the defuser because she doesn’t want any more people to die, but the man behind the phone will not let it defuse.

So Kyouka does the next best thing to save more from dying: falling off the train with the bomb that’s about to go off. As long as she dies with it, nobody can use her and her abilities to massacre the people on the train when the bomb eventually fails to do what is necessary. Because that’s when Atsushi realizes that she cannot control her ability herself. No matter what she genuinely wants, she will never have the ability to obtain it because of this one fact. She can only be what people tell her she is.

We all know this story well, she gets saved by Atsushi and the man behind the phone is Akutagawa. Atsushi offers her the same kindness Dazai extended to him regardless of his reputation and destruction because it’d only be the right thing to do. He knows her incoming fate of eventual death for her crimes, he can’t do much, but she should at least experience normalcy this one time.

When she’s about to turn herself in, Akutagawa stops her and tells her she did her job well as a decoy for him to capture Atsushi. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a peculiar oddness about Akutagawa here in his attitude towards Kyouka. In all logic, even though she is a strong tool to the mafia, she’s a low-level member, a disobedient one at that, and should’ve been killed on sight for her betrayal considering how quick he is to violence, but he talks as if nothing even happened. He brushes off any thought of her dying as she’s spouting nonsense and that she’s going to go back to the mafia as normal.

But then he spouts off about how she’s better off dead on the ship if she stops killing. What’s up with that? It’s not completely obvious at first, but he’s projecting his own experiences in the slums and beliefs formed from Dazai’s mentoring onto her. From his time when he wasn’t in the mafia, he tells her there’s nothing left out there for people like them, there’s only rock bottom. He can confidently say that there is nowhere that would accept her for her ability, demon snow, because it’s the same for him.

The only way her life can have value is to kill to be useful, just like any good mafia member. It’s exactly why that flashback with Dazai happens here. He’s the one who fed him these thoughts he’s lived with for these past 6 years, and what she’s been believing for 6 months. He doesn’t loathe her, he sees it as doing a favor for her. What else can a little girl who can kill be use of except to kill in her circumstances?

Contrary to popular belief, he is not her abuser and is not the same thing Dazai was to him. He neither trained her nor did we have information on their relationship to come to that conclusion. The only thing we know is that he was the one sent to pick her up by the Port Mafia. We can prove she is not the way she is because Akutagawa since Beast, well, exists. She is one of the few characters I can confidently say was a victim of the Port Mafia itself and not just a person of the Port Mafia specifically.

Akutagawa was trying to be what Dazai was to him, but he is selling a bastardized version of it to her. The person who was her Dazai was Atsushi, the same person who was given Dazai’s act of kindness. Someone who has experienced the same things Akutagawa has and is living proof that she can hope for something better.

He could see that the same revenge and lack of regard for her life in her eye was the same kind he met Dazai with. Despite that, these lessons he’s internalized have helped no one, not even himself. She can’t find meaning in something that is the root cause of her suicidal ideation. This life is unfulfilling for people like them who need meaning in life. Akutagawa doesn't realize this because he still has Dazai to be his motivational goal. That’s why he failed to help Kyouka, Dazai’s efforts would’ve been considered an utmost failure too if he wasn’t actively trying to fix that misunderstanding. Kindness is what actively saves us and helps us grow, the harm in abusive environments will only stunt us. But what happens when kindness is offered to us, but nothing comes out of it except proving us right that we’re unsavable? Then you have Kouyou.

Kouyou is the second person I could say was a victim of the Port Mafia. She has the same belief Akutagawa had about people like them being unable to be saved, so the only thing they can do is embrace it. I can’t claim she was Kyouka’s abuser either as we again don’t know enough, but that doesn’t change that her behavior is emotionally abusive, and is a much better contender than he is.

She’s doing the same thing Akutagawa was doing himself. Seeing themselves in this child and doing what she “needs” instead of what she wants. Just like him, she views this as saving her from the hands of light that will never make room for them and will ignore everything else she says. When Akutagawa is faced with her “disillusionment”, he… accepts it when she refuses his will and chooses another path, but almost kills her to spare her from that decision that would “doom” her.

Kouyou is much less accepting, opting to kill the root source of this hope itself, Atsushi, because her fondness for Kyouka prevents her from leaving her for dead. In contrast to Akutagawa’s attempt at being what gives her life meaning, Kouyou wants to stop Atsushi from being like the same man who also gave her hope that they could escape to the world of light. She can’t bear to see Kyouka go through the same realization she did far too late.

I can see what you're thinking, why am I reluctant to call either of them Kyouka’s abuser? Even if Akutagawa doesn't count, shouldn't Kouyou count because she seems to have an actual relationship with her and her effects are prevalent in Beast, the same points I mentioned to debunk accusations against him? Sure actually, but think about it like this. What the Port Mafia does have in common with real situations is that this is a community that is full of victims who refuse to process their traumatic experiences for any reason, and bring down others to their level when they don’t fit in their narrative to justify what’s happened to them.

There isn’t just one abuser weighing over you, there's this collective pressure from so many who aren't your abuser but they still contribute to your abuse with their presence itself. If Dazai wasn’t there in the mafia, would Akutagawa's situation have changed? Yes. Now if Akutagawa or Kouyou weren’t in the mafia, would Kyouka's situation have changed? Not at all. She’d have fewer examples to refer to, but she’d still be abused. If it’s easier to imagine, think of it similarly to cult mentality and how they keep you in cults. That is the reason I emphasized being a victim of the Port Mafia instead of an individual. Kouyou, Q, and Kyouka, while you can pin their main perpetrators on certain people, their overall situation doesn't change.

Now why doesn’t she just use the phone herself instead of letting people call Demon Snow for her? Wouldn’t she have more agency that way? Atsushi proposes this, but she rejects it instantly. It’s a very simple answer, it’s the same reason she can’t bear to look at it outside of when she’s forced to use it in combat. It’s her ability that killed her parents and why she was forced into this position.

It’s not hard for a little girl to believe she’s nothing more than a killing machine when she sees that night her ability would mercilessly kill her parents. She eventually caves when Kouyou points out how quick she is to vindicate violence to protect that hope she desperately wants a part of, and how she will never change. Her first mission with the Armed Detective Agency is proof in itself. Was Atsushi going to keep extending his kindness after hearing what she could only blame herself for?

Kouyou is a character I’ve seen that gets a lot of double standards compared to all of the other characters I’ve mentioned with abusive tendencies and is almost purely liked. She’s not seen as an absolute monster (The director, Mori) or controversial with one side containing pure dislike and another pure love (Akutagawa, Dazai), it’s only that she’s a well-written, sympathetic badass girl boss. It’s either because she’s a woman, that she doesn’t use an overt intimidation style, that her motives are more obvious in their emotional influences, or all of the above that she’s not treated the same.

Kouyou’s motivations are not special, as I’ve said. The only thing that differentiates them from the others is that they’re not covered by a mask of indifference. As fond as she is for her, she’s not much different from anyone else who holds the mafia up in high regard. She weaponizes her words in where they’d hurt the most so Kyouka would come with her. The entire last section of their battle sums up with her saying, “Kyouka come with me, they’ll only use you for your Ability when they get a hold of it. Even if the mafia did the same thing, at least they’ll accept you for who you truly are: a natural-born killer. You don’t have to fight anymore, I’ll protect you.”

When Atsushi finds Kyouka once again subsequently in her disappearance, she chooses to embrace her violence to help the Armed Detective Agency in this fight with the Guild. After her walk in where she used to reside, she comes the the conclusion she no longer belongs there. Against Kouyou’s wishes, she will brandish her blade for a home. That blows up in her face the moment she starts. Atsushi gets taken, and it’s just as Kouyou said would happen. If even her violence doesn’t get her wish, then what can she do besides leave herself to her fate?

As someone who’s seen another with a talent for killing walk the path of good and is on that same path himself, Dazai talks to her. He tells her about how she hasn’t gone through her entrance exam yet, how she isn’t an official member because she hasn’t proven her will or life on the line to help people she doesn’t necessarily know. Kyouka doesn’t believe she could’ve passed if that’s what it takes, but Dazai doesn’t agree with the points she’s brought up. So what if she’s killed or considered dangerous? That doesn’t make her less qualified to be a part of the Detective Agency, everyone there is from different backgrounds.

She can’t know everything, not even about herself. Nobody does, but it takes others to see more of yourself. Excelling in one area doesn’t prevent you from nurturing your potential in another. What would that make someone like Atsushi, a person who’s been her guiding figure throughout—but was never seen as anything more than a threat or a beast because of his ability before he joined them? The truth is, our lives aren’t defined by one purpose the moment we’re born, it’s only something you can make for yourself. We’re not the places we’ve been raised in, not the ideas people apply to us, and we’re especially not defined by the traumatic experiences we had no control over.

All of it accumulates the person we are today, and we can’t change that no matter how much we resent parts of our image that don’t hold up to what society deems as right, but it shouldn’t take control over what we want for ourselves. It isn’t fair for the victims who were forced into a life where they had to fend for themselves, the children who had to navigate an adult’s messed up world that didn’t have room for them to grow as kids should. Forced into a box where they stay unaware that they’ve ever left their mother’s womb, break out in fury with eyes that grew up too early—only to become lost and thrown away, or rot in that box without a single person knowing they were a breathing, living human being.

I deem abuse selfish for this very reason. Kouyou is wrong for this very reason. If she finds comfort in her reasoning, then I can’t critique her for her own choices and will have to respect her for choosing to stay in the mafia even when the old boss is dead, every abuse victim is different, but not a single person is born evil or good, in the dark or light. Not a soul has to stay in one place because they started there. It’s going to be a hard journey to truly achieve what you long for, results aren’t immediate and not everyone gets there no matter their effort, but still try. Try because it’s still worth trying, because you’re still worth more than you think.

In parallel, you can only get there as long as you’re seeking it. Too many see the Armed Detective Agency as something that will automatically save characters just by working there, but the only way it can help them is if they seek out their help themselves. The ADA is not the right place for every character, but Kyouka does want a place there. After her conversation with Dazai, she knows what she wants to do now. She will smash the drone she’s in into Moby Dick so nobody will have to die, but sacrifice her own life in the process. She’s chained to this place, but her choices aren’t.

She doesn’t have to die with regret, with this she can pass the entrance exam and become an agency member like she wanted. She made a difference for herself just by this act. It’d be a pretty melancholy arc if it ended like that, thank god we know it doesn’t end like this. When you become a full agency member, you gain more control over your ability, meaning—

She’s fine.

The exposition is over, let’s talk about Kyouka. Her arc is beautiful and the neglect to talk about her when it comes to her abuse story besides saying, “She’s the one who stopped the abuse cycle” and then nothing else is heartbreakingly superficial. She didn’t stop it, it’s impossible to, but she did break out of it. Kyouka’s section has more exposition than the others but I expected that. I wanted to save her for last because she’s the only one whose arc has come to a peaceful conclusion and not unfinished, and the lighter message felt nice to leave off on.

I shouldn’t berate Kouyou too much, the only reason she stayed in that room after being captured by the ADA is because she did want Kyouka to experience what she never had, and speaking with Dazai helped reassure her that Kyouka would be able to achieve her dreams. It’s no longer the age of the old boss. As well as her shedding the truth about her parent’s death so she wouldn’t have to resent her ability as not an avatar of massacre, but a product of her parents’ love that will always stay with her. She didn’t let go of the phone she’s had this entire time because her mother told her not to let it go.

Me going over Kouyou in this fashion is not me saying you shouldn’t love her character, I like her too. It’s just that it’s passed over so fast what she did, but somehow Akutagawa is more at fault here is mind-boggling. I’d get it a little more if this is because she redeemed herself by wanting the best for Kyouka over what was best for the mafia, but I doubt that’s the case when that moment is talked about so little as well.

I genuinely need you all to understand that not every character is going to have a satisfying, clean conclusion like this. Akutagawa’s story is most likely not going to have a conclusion that satisfies everyone and you should respect it when it comes. There’s no perfect way of writing abuse, but there’s no correct way of doing it either. I don’t think Dazai is going to have the repercussions you want him to have any time soon. If you got the message from Beast, getting revenge on an abuser doesn’t make us feel better or let us process what happened to us. Total resentment keeps us stuck.

The only thing that will heal us is the kindness so many offer in this series. You in no way need to extend that kindness to an abuser, you don’t need to forgive them or let them into your life again, but be kind to yourself and don’t let resentment prevent you from focusing on yourself. Forgiveness and reconnection are not the same thing. Don’t be angry when a victim does want those things. Unless it’s character inconsistent, that’s not something we shouldn’t have any opinion on as the right or wrong way to go about their lives. What if later they do change their mind and want something different from what they originally planned? That’s fine too. Everyone is different. Don’t give unsolicited advice to people who do not want it, let them decide for themselves. It is the best thing you can do.

The worst abusers are the ones who refuse to change and see wrong in what they’re doing, but what about the ones who do want that? Then also let them heal. They did something awful, why isn’t it a good thing they want to stop it now? You don’t have to let them in just because they changed though. Apologies don’t fix the damage already done, but to some victims, it feels nice to feel that what’s been done to them is acknowledged. You don’t want them to hurt others the way they’ve done to you, and neither do they. It hurts to let them forgive themselves when you haven’t and never will, you want to see them suffer, but that’s the only way things can change.

Dazai has changed, is he a good person even after what he’s done? I despise this question for any character of this series. He’s grown so much, and if you don’t think so, reread his conversation with Kyouka I beg of you. It is a far cry from his mindset in the mafia. A better person for sure, but a good person is hard to define for anyone in this series. The mafia is still the mafia, do any of them qualify as good people? The government, even if it’s the position of the right in society, is still an unjust system.

What a good person is cannot be an objective answer, people think there is but it’s not. A good person is how much we know about them and where our position in life affects our viewpoint. Prejudice values don’t make you correct in what you think a good person is, being convicted of a crime, one you might not even have committed, doesn’t automatically make you a bad person, being associated with a group doesn’t mean anything about who you are, etc. It’s all subjective in the end.

Meaning someone like Odasaku is essential in a story like this. He still has a presence in this narrative, even if he died in a light novel, because his existence pushes the boundaries of a “good person” in the fact his contradictory existence establishes itself. He failed in walking the path he wanted, but he doesn’t regret it even in his dying moments trying to.

Afterthoughts

The themes of morality and humanity go hand in hand with the abuse present in Bungou Stray Dogs, so it was hard avoiding talking about this when it was necessary. I don’t think it’s right of us to judge a character’s path that isn’t finished, in a story that’s nowhere near done. Ultimately, I’m only talking in a place of experience but never will it make me exempt from any personal bias. I tried to be as objective and nuanced as I could about this, and I hope it shows.

Abuse isn’t one of those things that I can analyze from any logical stand point or take resources to back my statements up about abuse. Of course everything I say can be backed up, but abuse is a personal, human matter and we’re just human being trying to figure out more than we can handle. I just couldn’t be comfortable with how people are now choosing to talk about Asagiri and needed to shed some light in what you’re missing.

Now I could’ve gone over Higuchi or Lucy because their stories also involve abuse, but I don’t think I could say anything new about them without repeating points I’ve already said. We know very little about Higuchi and what made her so devoted to Akutagawa, and Lucy is pretty quick to summarize considering her story is just like Atsushi’s. Q is also a character to be brought up but I don’t have enough information on them to say much about any abuse itself that happened.

Yosano was also an option but I don’t think anyone had any trouble understanding her backstory. Well I was only really aiming to speak about what’s not been spoken enough. Thank you for reading haha, god this thing is monstrous. Already got to 14k words by the time I was officially done…. I didn’t know if I wanted to lean into character analysis or just exposition, I hope it’s a good enough mix of both. This took way longer than the 4 days I was planning to write this in.

I was later reminded that I could do a post on how their abilities functioned and reflect on their abuse/traumatic events, but I didn’t think I’d have enough room for that here. It could be a bonus post eventually? I don’t think I did Kyouka enough justice in that aspect, but i’d just be beating myself up again about not making this perfect.

I hope I don’t come off scary or a very serious person? I’m very open to requests or discussions people want to engage in. Oh jeez, I’ll just embarrass myself if I keep talking. Writing this was a bit much, never really liked writing stuff myself. Sorry if glossed over anything, I wanted to stay on topic and not detail into something unnecessary.

The message BSD has is a pretty normal one, but there’s something very special about how it’s written here and I’m happy it exists. Maybe I shouldn’t have made this so long? But there’s so much to express sigh……

[calware]

how do you draw your curls cause i love the ones you do for the lalondes

thank you! first, it depends on two things: the type of curl and the amount of detail i want to use. it's funny you mention the lalondes because i don't think i've ever drawn them with detailed curls ;^^ so i will just give tips for a more simplified style

the first thing to keep in mind is the general direction the hair flows. curly hair will have more "structural integrity" so to speak so it will be less flat than straight hair, so for the lalondes who have shorter hair, it gives their head a halo effect

but of course, a character with longer hair will have heavier strands that get weighed down

when doing simple drawings, i like to simplify the shape of the curls by drawing a triangle shape but swirling my pen in small motions while doing so. the result is a bumpy triangle. if you're used to drawing hair using these triangle-like pieces, it might be helpful to think of replacing them with curly triangles

i sometimes leave it as this, but other times i'll make the ends of the coils a bit looser by adding some small looped or curved lines to the ends

if i want to do something even simpler, i'll just give the hair pieces less "definition" while still trying to keep the same basic shape. at this point i want to mention that it really helps if you vary the size of the curves, so it looks a bit more natural

if i want to show hair with even tighter coils, i'll put more distinction between the hair pieces and make the curves more deliberate

i hope that helps!! and again this is VERY simplified

[thevulturesquadron]

Hello! 👋 Could you list some of the best comic books that explore the Rogue/ Magneto relationship?

Hey there!!! 👩‍🚀 Oh gosh! With pleasure! I might be a bit rusty because I haven’t gone through older Marvel comic books in a while and also because I am not up to date with the recent years of X-Men comics BUT there are still a couple of issues that are very dear to me when it comes to Rogue & Magneto, so happy to share:

It all started in the year 1981:

1. Uncanny X-Men #269 ; Uncanny X-Men #274 & Uncanny X-Men #275 (1981, Written by Chris Claremont) [The story is pretty self-contained to these 3 issues and it all starts with Rogue realising that her Ms. Marvel powers are gone and Carol Danvers somehow has her own body now. (a very simplified context of what was going on in that era with the X-Men) I absolutely love Rogue in these issues. She has sass and personality, and she still carries a lot of her energy from the 80s.]

2. X -Men Volume 2 (Issues #1 - #3) - (1991, Chris Claremont) [They meet again after the events in the Savage Land, now on opposite sides.]

3. Magneto Rex: Issues #1- #3 - (1999, Joe Pruett) [This miniseries… is a bit weird and needs some context. It’s at a time where Marvel really wanted to have Magneto return to his evil ways and be a villain for the X-Men (regardless if it made sense or not). Not one of my favourites and generally can live without but it’s a ‘next stop’ in their interactions, so adding it to the list.]

4. Then we have X-Men Legacy! ( 2008, Mike Carey) [This one is a chonker, and to make things worse it is connected with other series running at the same time. It has pieces of Rogue and Magneto through the entire run but all in all, the story sees them reunite under the same team in Utopia (starting with Legacy #231). The full run of Legacy can be difficult to follow up on but if you have the time, it’s really worth it. It’s also the first story in YEARS where Rogue is allowed to shine and do her own thing. If you need a more detailed list of what issues are really worth reading, in what order and what is happening in between them let me know and will be happy to write down a breakdown!]

5. Memorable mentions in the main series: There are quite a few tiny bits about them in the comic books but here’s a list of issues that give more context to how they interact and how they feel about each other:

a. Marvel Fanfare #33 - (1982, Chris Claremont. I love Rogue in this one and it’s such a nice example of what a good and powerful duo they can make. Something that is later explored in Legacy as well. b. Legacy #223 (during Rogue’s journey to control her powers) we have a glimpse of how she remembers and sees Magneto’s presence in her life. c. Magneto #10 (2014, Cullen Bunn) - Similarly, a glimpse into Magneto’s mind on how he remembers Rogue and the impact their connection in the Savage Land had on him. d. Mr & Mrs X #6 (2019) - there is a page between Rogue and Magneto where, in all that mess, at least Magneto’s honest feelings for her and his care for her happiness shine through.

And last but not least, Age of Apocalypse. [This is a completely separate timeline that the comic books liked to visit from time to time. In this universe Rogue and Magneto are pretty much in love and married but… it’s a very tragic universe. Original series started in 1995; then it got revisited in 2005 and again in 2015… I think? The series… is far from perfect, there are so many things that can be described as unhinged (dialogue included) but, there is so much love for these two characters and I absolutely recommend it if you are ok with investing some time into reading it, and most of all if you are ready for a real heart break (again and again).]

Hope this helps! Happy to go into more details or put aside a cleaner list if interested! 💜

There are a couple other mentions in the comics so in case I missed something important I will summon one of the gods of endless knowledge when it comes to X-Men to correct or add to the list: @maedelin

[wiltkingart]

Do you have any advice on how 2 not overwork a drawing? Over-detailing my art (to the detriment of the final result) is a big weakness of mine, and ive been working on it lately, but simplifying my art is way harder than I thought itd be. I keep getting stuck in a mentality that less detail = less effort, even though all my struggling should prove that isnt true lol. & I almost always like my simpler drawings better, even though that makes me feel kinda lazy…as long as it’s fun tho, right? [1/2]

I’m asking here bc one of the things I adore about your work is how confident and striking your paintings feel. I really admire the way colors and shape language interact in your art…I always want to keep looking to see what I can find hidden in the details, but they don’t take away from the main focus of the image. How do you manage to strike that balance? [2/2] (sorry for the long question lol)

honestly this is still something i struggle with at times! but some things that have helped me are:

- identifying which parts i tend to overwork the most. for me thats faces so i have made it a conscious habit to render faces last. that way i can match my level of face rendering to the rest of the piece.

- working on all parts of the painting at once. some artists are able to work on a painting from section to section. this is not me, regardless of detail level. jumping around all over the place keeps me from focusing too hard on one section above others. i even take this one step further by working on 2+ paintings simultaneously but there is something wrong with me for this one i'll admit.

- staying zoomed out for as long i can. this goes in hand with the previous point but when you're zoomed out its easier to lay down the biggest/primary color blocks without the temptation to detail. once the main color blocks are nicely balanced its easier to pick out a few points of interest to add spots of detail to, and restrain myself to them. (easier said than done! but i try!)

- getting comfortable with backtracking / deleting overworked sections and layers. this might seem scary but this has saved my ass more times than you might think. i always save a version of my drawings before i merge everything / start rending so i can always copy over earlier sections if needed.

- cold turkey removing details from the equation for a while. i did this more from necessity than choice, because i was struggling with my health a few years back and had zero energy to sink into art for long hours. but looking on the bright side it helped me realize what details are/aren't necessary and how to build my features from big -> small. this progression of my patho art shows pretty well how i introduced details back into my work over time.

but yeah! sometimes i do still find myself creeping a little too close to overwork territory for comfort, even with all these safeguards in place. in that case i have to accept that not every piece i put out will be my 'best' and that perfection has no place in art. that's not the point of it!

simplifying forms isn't easy, the same way abstract art isn't lazy. but with all things it can be learned with enough practice. and if you decide at the end of it all that you still like drawing a lot details, it might be a matter of readjusting how / where you implement them. best of luck <3

[heythereneighbor]

Headcanon: Wally and The Development of his Art

Disclaimer: Mun was an art history student. There will be a little nerdiness.

-

Wally is the resident artist of the Neighborhood. That is something everyone knows. This has been a literal "painter" role, in that he has painted rooms before (it takes him a while, but he gets the job done); but also a painter in the creative sense. If not painting at home, then he has his satchel with his go-to sketchbook and colouring pencils. Creativity is part of who he is. It's impossible not to recognise his distinct style: bright colours, bold lines, subject matter broken down into simpler forms. 'Childish', some might say, yet intentional.

Art is something that has been a special interest of Wally's for as long as he can remember. With his sight being his strongest sense, he cannot help but want to share to others the things he sees.

The beauty of art is that it is a personal way of sharing something that you saw, more profound than a photograph, for example. No one will see a sunset the same way you will, because another person will never be in the same spot, at that precise moment in history. The view will be different if you recreate your viewpoint the next day. The planet's rotation has turned a fraction, shifting the time of sunset marginally. Weather conditions will not be identical. What you see - and what that inspires you to create - is truly unique, from that perspective. Not only that, it shows how you see it. 

Long before the "start" of Welcome Home, he had a different style. It was far more detailed, and had more attention to shape and form. It was more akin to a 'realism' style, or as close as one could get in a stylised world. He had a knack for finding good spots to sketch from, or how to make the arrangement of still life pleasing to the eye. He could create scenes that had the eye naturally move from point to point, drawing you to the focal point.

It was beautiful, but it was complicated.

The problem with this style was that it was detailed. Wally would get so caught up in sketching a tree that he would erase a leaf over and over again if it wasn't in just the right place. He never grew frustrated at his work, but that didn't make him any less of a perfectionist. Over time, this desire to replicate exactly what he saw meant that he found the creation of it less satisfying, though the final pieces were no less beautiful.

Then, one day, he looked at his surroundings in his bedroom, and he had an idea.

Wally was surrounded by colour - bright, bold colour. It was something he loved, yet he never showed it off to the same extent in his work. What if he tried that?

That was the start of an "unlearning process". Wally began to shift his attention. The sight before him would be broken down to the simple colours and shapes. The message would still come through, no matter how simplified the shapes became. He left the eraser at home and began embracing mistakes. Any mistake meant that it was unique. It was something that he made, flaws and all, and wasn't that lovely?

For those who may know some art history, they may recognise that this is a story with a hint of a reference to the 'real world'. It is akin to what the artist P.ablo P.icasso went through, a man who would have been known worldwide by the 1960s. P.icasso was one of many painters who rejected the emphasis on the styles of the Masters of the R.enaissance period and instead began to experiment with more unorthodox designs, along with different mediums, throughout his lifetime.

Another decision Wally made was to reduce the use of black unless necessary. You may have noticed, for example, that when Wally draws his shoes, he chooses purple. That's intentional. Wally found that black was too strong compared to other colours, and drew attention away from them. In particular, he didn't like how strong black outlines "blocked" the other colours. This would put his style in contrast with cartoons that were produced at the time, including animations for Welcome Home itself.

This is where he began to use a darker shade for outlines (eg. orange outlines for something coloured yellow). The only times he actively chooses black is either when he draws faces, or when he is colouring Frank's hair and trousers - and both of these are accompanied with dark blue.

This is also a small nod to another art movement called Impressionism. This was a painting style that took great focus on portraying things as they were seen. When painting nature, they relied on both natural light and natural colours. Black, generally, was not considered 'natural'. Further to this, some Impressionist artists liked capturing people 'in the moment', doing actions such as dancing or talking to others instead of sitting and posing.

What this all resulted in was a modernist-adjacent style, where a drawing appears rushed, as though made to capture a moment before it is gone.

Of course, Wally wouldn't say this. He would simply say that he likes drawing this way because it makes him happy. It doesn't have to be perfect, nor does it have to be 'the best'. There may be others who can sketch 'better' than him, but he won't stop doing what he loves because of that.

And would you believe it? This simpler, bright style is something that is easier for children to copy! 

It is said that there is a place somewhere within Home that stores this older art, with a style so vastly different that one might think it belonged to a 'different' Wally. Rest assured, this is his work. Maybe he may be caught dabbling in this more intricate style one afternoon.

Perhaps those of you who view things from the perspective of the 'studio' may be trying to understand the logic for this. Simply put, consider the idea that an early approach for Wally's art was for him to be incredibly skilled and teach children about different famous paintings. However, it was ultimately decided that the lessons would be too stark in contrast with other topics, and the art skills were scaled back enough to allow Wally to be akin to a drawing instructor.

[4noki-vns]

The Art of Asset Reduction: VNConf 2024 Write-Up

This is a write-up for my Visual;Conference 2024 talk on asset reduction: presentation of scenes with reduced art labor.

I will discuss how to reduce production requirements via various methods of asset presentation and staging, walking you through case studies of existing visual novels. This talk will guide you to answer the question: How do I fulfill my project scope without asset bloat?

This is an art talk that assumes you have already scoped down your story and have created a list of scenes that you need. This is not a talk about scoping down your game's story.

You have scenes you need to make. How are you going to make them (and with style)?

Abstraction

Cut-ins

Reduce

Reuse

-

I. Abstraction

I start off with abstraction as a reminder that visual novels are a combination of visual and novel (amongst other aspects)

Abstraction

Abstraction is a strong tool for bringing focus to the writing, highlighting ambiguity and setting the mood with colors.

Examples I mentioned in my talk include:

Black screen

Solid colored screen

Sky BG

Of Components

The mood-setting power of abstraction also extends to scenes with characters, especially CGs.

As again, abstraction draws focus to what you choose to emphasize: the characters.

(FLOWERS -Le volume sur ete-)

They are gay. Thank you for coming to my VNConf talk.

-

You can similarly abstract characters.

(Lachesis or Atropos)

Consider representing irrelevant characters (e.g., NPCs) as silhouettes. The reader can fill in the details within the shapes themselves.

Silhouettes are especially great for crowd scenes where you want to draw focus to the main characters.

This will be a recurring theme:

What do you really need to draw?

-

II. Cut-ins

One common not-quite full screen piece of art you'll see in many visual novels is the cut-in.

The cut-in typically consists of the:

Item/focus

Frame

And is often for topics such as objects or small animals, which may exist in the scene but may not be within the same frame of reference as the background and sprites.

The separate framing informs the players that the item is "separately framed."

(Who is the Red Queen?)

For example, this small bird is not huge and would not be the size of a character's head even had a sprite been on screen.

The Foreground-Backdrop Heuristic

Cut-ins make strong use of what I refer to as the "foreground-backdrop heuristic."

(Shikkoku no Sharnoth)

A general backdrop informs the reader of a broad location or scene (especially if characters are present). Then a more specific foreground (the cut-in) informs the reader of the specifics.

As the foreground cut-in is in a different frame, the pairing of the two helps create a mental model of the space in the reader's mind.

Cut-ins can be used for:

Backgrounds (mix and match foregrounds with a backdrop)

Reduced CGs

Presenting existing assets in a different frame of reference

CG variants

Try tackling your visual presentation in a layered, comic book-esque fashion with cut-ins!

Just be careful about clutter.

Whether you want to go for the layered cut-in style, the 3d stage cinematic style, or a combination of the two, make sure you have a vision before you jump in.

SD CGs

I had to make an obligatory mention of SD "super deformed" CGs in this talk, so here it is in the write up as well.

(Grisaia: Phantom Trigger Vol. 1)

SD, chibi. However you call these, they're great for playful scenes that might require more art than your classic sprite-background combination.

What SD CGs do best is that they:

Fulfill the role of a CG

Are easier to draw than fully rendered non-chibi art

Can be distributed to different artists to reduce artist workloads due to style difference

Just keep in mind that a simplified CG is still a CG and thus may lack reusability.

Consider what scenes really need a CG.

-

III. Reduce

Now, consider asking yourself: "Does what a player does not see need to exist?" (mostly applicable for games with opaque UI)

Yet, what you need to draw is what you need to draw. How can you reduce the work in what you need to draw?

One option is:

Palette Limitation

You've heard of gray scale games, but don't forget about other ways of limiting your palette to reduce workload.

Dramatic, mood setting color power

Less rendering work

(Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows)

A similar idea can be applied to NPCs for a more detailed take on silhouettes.

-

IV. Reuse

Lastly, please remember to be economical and reuse assets as necessary. One of the great joys of cut-in BGs, for example, is reusability.

I had to give an obligatory mention to CG variants in my talk, such as:

(Fatal Twelve)

However, overall, you never know when you'll want to use various components of your art elsewhere such as intermixing CG and sprite art.

Please keep your working layers if possible.

Other reuse examples:

UI (especially in episodic games)

Gameplay (e.g., Kogado's rhythm game)

Consider asking your programmer to work on a framework to reuse, reducing repeated code work.

-

Conclusions

All in all, you can make your game.

And it doesn't need to be hellish on your budget or timeline.

If you take anything away from this talk, let it be to:

Prioritize reusable assets

Maintain aesthetic; avoid clutter

Display important scenes

Do not scope up; aim for a set goal

A scene can be presented in many stylish ways, some of which will suit your workflow better than others.

So, go on. Make your game!

-

Interested in my works? Find me on itch:

And check out my newsletter:

-

VNConf 2023 Talk Write-up:

[moss-marinara]

SO YEAH I HAVE COMMISSIONS NOW if you want your OC as a cute lil pixel sprite (for personal use only), you're in luck! just pop down to my ko-fi (linked below) and follow the instructions, which are pretty much standard commission fair.

Of note though! Some stuff i won't do: -NSFW (idek how i'd do that at this scale lol) -highly detailed/mecha stuff (i might be able to pull it off if i simplified it but just be warned, and ask ahead of time if you're uncertain) -purely to respect other artists boundaries, i'm just sticking to OCs atm, though if you have an OC that's from a piece of media that's still fine tha ko-fi link go go go: https://ko-fi.com/mossmystified (characters that aren't mine that i used in the reference image below the cut)

-Loop (In Stars And Time) -The Batter (OFF) -Venus (Psychopomp) -Frisk (Undertale) (i couldn't post this in good conscious without putting this here first)

[battleslippers]

do u know how to render...

lol i mean ik u do but can u teach me?????? (only if u want :3)

HERE WE GO. I am by NO means an expert/professional, so my process isn’t perfect nor is it the most efficient (😭), but here’s my process + some time lapses.

added a border because this post is so damn long

1. sketch — I try to make sure it’s accurate if there is a ref, and the proportions are right in this because the sketch determines how good the rest of the piece is and how much tweaking you’ll have to do in the future. Think of it like the foundation: if it’s wonky, everything else will be wonky and it’ll be a HUGE pain to fix later (speaking from experience). The purly painting is probably a great example of what NOT to do in this case! That thing took so much time because I didn’t have a good enough sketch and I didn’t really have my colors down, so I did a bunch of tweaking, which you’ll probably see in the time lapse.

2. Base colors/undertones/blocking in: this 100% differs depending on ur style, preference, and goal of the painting. If I’m doing a photo study for value or color, I’ll simplify it down as much as possible (basic colors or 3 values). Undertones are there if you’re REALLY working a traditional method I think.

I think this is one of my best examples of this type of painting. This is purely copying a photo to the most accurate, and if I had to do anything differently, I’d block in the shapes and shadows THEN go into all those details (I feel this would be more efficient but, again, preference lol).

3. Shadows — this really goes hand in hand with the previous step, but I like to establish these with usually a cooler tone depending on the environment and lighting. If your piece is outside on a clear day, the shadows on a lot of things will be blue due to the light from the sky. If you look at enough pictures and pretty much anywhere around you, you’ll see how light and shadow interacts with colors of the environment, which is really cool!!!

4. Messing with it — with those undertones and shadows, I might add in extra colors like redness or blue for things like skin to get that layered feel (especially considering how skin isn’t totally uniform due to its mild transparency). Then I’ll color pick those in between tones and block in stuff and do it until it feels right. The Angela painting is probably my best example of this, which I’ll reblog with (plus two other ones) For Curly’s jacket, I used a few different brushes to get that texture and the whole process was basically scribbling until it looked right. Hatching is one of my favorite methods to get a little texture in, so I do that a lot too.

5. Finally touches/technical settings — once everything is totally done, I’ll usually mess around with the Hue, Saturation, and Brightness along with Color Balance and Curves on the overall painting until I’m happy with it. Then I’ll probably turn up the Sharpness a little and maybe add some chromatic aberration.

Overall, I usually do these steps going from background (if there is one) -> skin -> clothing -> hair, but I hop around a lot. I usually establish the flats overall then render each individual one.

Also, lighting does NOT have to be warm and shadows do NOT have to be cool; it all depends on the context. As long as your values are right, your colors will probably look good. Of course, it’s still worth knowing how to make them harmonious or contrast and allat, but values are the main foundation. Online resources are also awesome (my favorites being Proko, Marco Bucci, and Sinix among many others) and just observing things around you and others’ art is an incredibly powerful tool. I usually like to check my values by making my painting black and white by coloring in a luminosity layer with white. This method isn’t universal due to different programs, but if there’s a setting to turn ur drawing black and white, I def recommend it.

A side note: my rendering style is basically just painting 😭 At most I have like 5 layers max (sketch, flats, background, subject, hair or anything else I’m afraid to fuck up) but I end up combining flats and sketch most of the time and just paint over it. Most of the time, I have 2-3 layers and combine them all by the end. For the (currently) black and white Johnny one I’ll reblog with is just one layer, but I’ll probably make layers to overlay color and another to add variation/detail. My process isn’t very uniform or clean 💀

I am SO sorry this turned out to be such a long post good god

EDIT: I realized the paragraph I thought was deleted actually just moved so I erased it lmao

[pencilnewt]

I dont think I have seen somebody draw as beautifully as you have, really.

The colors you use to draw make the photograph, as does the shadowing. And your ideas? Genius.

How did you learn all this great technique? Was that something you have always done or did you just start drawing?

I hope I could just tell you how amazing your art is to me (and many others)✨

thank you so much omfg!!

it’s definitely taken a lot of time and practice, i didn’t just wake up one day and know how to draw the way i do rn!! and im still learning all the time, im very self-taught!! gonna fish thru my instagram for a min and grab some screenshots of old art to demonstrate this in a sort of timeline but it feels very self-indulgent (which i try not to be too often haha) so it’s under the cut if anyone wants to see :3

i feel like im able to create something approaching the art i see in my head for the first time in my life and im SO grateful for any and all support people have given me while im doing that in a way i literally cannot express like i read EVERY SINGLE tag people leave on my art on here and it makes me want to fucking cry <3

quickly first of all i use CSP version 1 these days but over the past 9 years i’ve used nearly every free drawing program available - krita, 🏴‍☠️photoshop, firealpaca, autodesk sketchbook, ibis paint, medibang…

anyway some sketchbook drawings circa 2016/age 13 (earliest i have photos of, but i have one earlier sketchbook somewhere) at which point human anatomy was still an utter mystery to me:

got my first drawing tablet in 2017 - a little wacom intuos draw, which i don’t think they make anymore, but i still used it until about a year and a bit ago when i bought my xp-pen display tablet w my first paycheck. i think this was literally the first thing i drew on there:

a bit of a jump to 2019 (this is where i got my love for fuzzy chalky textures i think):

i try not to think about the dsmp era too much but that’s where i made some big strides (especially in my colouring) because i felt a lot of consistent motivation to draw!

& then spent a LOT of time doodling my dnd character over the past year & doing some other little reference studies when i could find the time between writing my undergrad dissertation etc. this helped me nail down drawing faces better than b4.

i’d doodled some hockey stuff on and of for the past couple of years but only started properly drawing or posting anything at the end of september!! gotta say a big THANK YOU to everyone who reblogged pens snoopy when i first posted him bc without the support from people on here i don’t think id have initially been so motivated to keep making this art that i’ve loved drawing so so much. and i’ve made friends & mutuals that i’m even more grateful for :3 1st vs most recent:

i have lots of things i wanna keep working on, here are some:

more detailed backgrounds & lighting (biggest barrier here is terrible Can’t Be Bothered syndrome)

recognisably simplifying/stylising people more!! i can do this a bit but my strength is defo semi-realism i feel

improving my composition/making it more intentional. this is the biggest reason behind making those stamp designs actually (could go into much more detail in another post about what’s behind lots of the hockey pieces i’ve made, if anyone would like to hear about that. there’s semi-often something im trying to specifically work on or practice)

more movement & dynamism!!

this is probably so obvious but i’m like. passively learning from looking at other artists’ work all the time as well as practicing. if i really like a piece of art i see online i’ll try and identify exactly WHY i like it so i can think about how i might improve my own art.

if you read this far i’m in love w you <3

[frigid-moon-fall]

Since the post about the PS1 version of the manor went well, why not take a closer look at the bedroom in the remake? We still don't know whose room it really is, but Hugo comes out of it when you first enter the manor, and Leon heads up the stairs when saying he'll be in his room, and he comes from its general direction in a hallucination of Rutee's. With it being simplified so much, it's really anyone's guess whose room it actually is. These are the sacrifices of streamlining.

Anyway, details! Both visible and invisible.

First off, the things that are easy to see from this screenshot alone.

The (currently open) curtain around the bed for added privacy

The books aren't kept especially tidy

There's a piece of paper left on the desk with something on it. You can't examine it.

There's a picture frame on a shelf, turned to face the wall. This is an entirely different asset from the one in the foyer, which just happens to be turned away from the player's view, so it's likely this is on purpose. Whatever the picture is of, it's good to remember that the picture in the foyer is of the whole Katrea/Gilchrist family, and it's displayed openly.

The tissue box on the bedside table lol

And now things that you can't see.

There's a towel hung up in the bathroom somewhere entirely off camera

The bathtub is way bigger than the camera angle implies

The full painting on the wall

Full details of the coats in the armoire (A big strong artist should totally draw Leon or Hugo wearing those)

Full details of all the rugs

(Edit: Full shot of the bathroom!)

And now you might have noticed that all of these are isometrically oriented sprites instead of the usual top-down textures you'd expect from a 3D environment that looks like this. That's just how TOD's remake does things for a lot of areas. I guess it makes the art style easier to keep consistent, but it sounds like a pain to keep the skewing effect looking good across all rooms that use it.

By the way, if anyone wants something similar done for other areas, let me know which and what parts of it you're interested in specifically.

Oh, while we're at it, let's make a useless list of observable features in the most likely candidate for Leon's room from the PS1 version. We really don't need to, but whatever.

A whopping five different sets of drawers that Ori!Stahn is too polite to snoop through

A giant table meant for one

Two potted plants, neither of which would be in the general line of sight of someone sitting in either of the chairs (90 degrees to your left/right doesn't count), sitting on either of the window sills, or laying in bed

One trash can beside the desk, and one trash can beside the bed (They are specified to be trash cans in-game. It is not a chamber pot.)

A clock or radio on the desk. I'd sooner guess clock from the two hands.

A useless little nook that only houses one of the potted plants

A Marian She is not a room fixture, sorry

Oh, you clicked it? Okay. Here's my theory of where Leon sleeps....

On this couch in the dining room because that's the room where he spends all his free time anyway

[rococospade]

Have some Letho attempts, in oil paints(!)

Art, life and cat updates under the cut.

Art update:

I’ve opened commissions again for the next two months (October-November 2023). The last one in my queue is nearly finished, and I’m excited to share it — though I’ll have to crop the tumblr version substantially. I’ve also been working on tutorial content for digital painting. Monie’s been poking me for years to do one on sheer fabric, and I’m trying to edit that between other tasks. I’ve thought about doing one for scars as well — is there anything you struggle with that you’d be interested to see a tutorial or tip-sheet for?

In terms of personal work I’ve struggled to connect with my digital painting in the last few months, so I’ve been working more with traditional mediums. I love watercolour, I’ve been fiddling with my oil pastels since I don’t want them to go bad (they keep for about 3 years past opening, apparently) and I’ve wanted to try oil painting for years. Last week I finally took the leap and bought some water soluble oil paints: pictured above is my first attempt with them.

Oil paints are slippery little bastards — I had a teacher tell me “it’s like painting with colourful mud” over a decade ago when discussing them, and that sort of prepared me. I finally get it. They move constantly, even if it looks dry it’s likely not, I have no idea what I’m doing, disposal is a pain, I am wrong at every step, and I love them. Oil painting looks so cool! It’s so much easier to rework than acrylics! This is not always a good thing! I’m having a great time :)

Naturally, upon getting a new and notoriously difficult medium, I dispensed with looking up guides (surely things I watched or read months and years ago are sufficient for right now?) and sat down to screw around with the paints a few evenings ago. This resulted in a muddy mess even with a limited palette, but I’m a toxic goblin who doesn’t learn, so I shrugged and started working with the muddy tones to try and fix it.

@silverscalestudios was kind enough to give me a quick and dirty explanation on workflow when they found out what I was doing. Thank you again for that! I spent a while last night reading about various forms of underpainting because of you, and will give brunaille a try. I knew underpaintings were a thing but I didn’t know *why* or how important they really are — it didn’t occur to me the oil colours would be so transparent. Hopefully the next picture will be a little bit neater as a result of your intervention — thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it!

I found some useful videos on YouTube as well, but I’m struggling with colour temperature shifts. Some studies might be in order.

As usual I’m not satisfied with anything I do for long. My current goals are to learn more of the body’s simplified muscle groups, simplify my compositions more, and make more illustrations with character interaction as the focus. Also, I guess, to gain some competence with the mediums I’m playing with — but that’s a bonus more than a goal. Oil pastels especially are just so pleasant to work with that even if I hate the result, the process is too enjoyable to complain. And failure is how we learn.

Potentially useful tip, buried for anyone who read this far: assign yourself studies for the projects you’re currently working on. This took me far too long to learn, but if you struggle with doing general studies for the sake of them, do them to prep for a specific painting instead. If you suspect something will be difficult (the hand gesture, the colour scheme, lighting, expression, whatever) grab or make some ref and doing a couple of studies, so you can fail quickly and make ugly versions. It’s a huge timesaver when it comes to the final piece. My big, detailed paintings usually take 10-20 hours, so I’d like to get any difficult elements sorted before I start whenever possible.

For an example of studies for a painting: the four roughly scribbled Letho’s in coloured pencil on this post — those were done after I had my composition sketched onto the canvas, to figure out what I wanted to do for colours. And I’m glad I did! I tried the analogous scheme on a whim, and if I hadn’t done this study, I’d have played it safe and gone with a mostly neutral palette. Next time I’ll also do some lighting studies so I have a detailed plan for those before I start painting. Traditional media in general involves a lot more concrete planning than digital, and working with it is underscoring how many bad habits I have — especially with massively reworking paintings mid-process.

I did have a photo reference I was using for this painting (one of the images from the rogue warrior reference pack by Noah Bradley) with the lighting and hair modified to try to resemble something I’d seen another digital artist do, and by awkwardly tilting an asaro head in my kitchen to figure out how the lighting would work. There’s a relatively common lighting scheme in anime-esque art where just the tip of the nose is lit. It’s cute, but playing with the asaro head, I found that the top half of the area around the mouth should also catch at least a bit of light. The lighting ended up being repainted into something more standard for this, but you can see the triangle of light on the upper mouth area in the wips.

Life update:

Well, it was a nice run, but spouse and I finally caught corona last month >< that was horrible. I got lucky, in that I only had for a week or so and it was a mild case. Now I’ve mostly recovered except for a cough. “Mild” is still probably the sickest I’ve been in my life. Do not recommend. Will be going for the booster as soon as I’m able to, I do not want that shit ever again.

I’ve been doing a bunch of new things like sashiko (satisfying), trying to make pie crust (hard! But delicious, and the ingredients are cheap enough that I don’t cry over failure. Please give making pie crust a try, if you haven’t, it’s really not that complicated — the recipe I’m using only calls for 3-4 ingredients, and it’s so versatile. We’ve had like four quiches in the last week and a half) and trying to cook more. Adulting is hard. I’m also considering more decorative embroidery attempts, because I’m reentering my goth phase and want to customise my clothes with little mushrooms and skulls :) it would be cute.

About the cats:

Cloud is cancer-free! She has to get rechecks every three months, but the little monster made it. She celebrates by trying to sleep with her butthole on my face, which is terrible. I love her dearly. I wish she would stop with the butthole thing though.

Sheik is currently taking her turn as the cat with medical problems. She couldn’t eat for a few days and the vet rushed us in when we called. The vet came in and informed me that she wasn’t eating… because she had gas. It’s in her small intestine, which isn’t supposed to have gas in it for cats? Good job, you little weirdo. She’s getting further checks or it this month.

We also adopted an adolescent cat. He’s bonded very well with Tez, whom our other cats — well, they don’t hate him, but they’re a bit aloof. Tez is very big and a bit like a bowling ball with teeth, and most of our cats are old (or Jetta, who is full of bitter hate) and do not appreciate being tackled by said bowling ball. The kitten loves him, and Tez seems much happier for the company. He’s more gentle with kittens than adults. Not all of the cats are thrilled, but our oldest queens have accepted the kitten, so it should be smoother sailing from here. Unfortunately they like to play at 8am, so I am suddenly on an adult sleep schedule for the first time since working from home. Nothing like a teenage cat launching himself onto your abdomen to get the day started :) They were yelling at each other as I typed this, but now he’s laying beside me like a prince. … and attacking my cardigan. Nevermind.

Currently trying to find more ways to install cat climbs and enrichment, since we’re running out of corners for cat trees. Debating the merits of a cat run — we have very tall walls, which is neat but also I don’t trust these guys not to fall off. If we could spring for a modular system that would be neat.

If you’re getting two cats, pro tip: get two with similar coat patterns but different sizes. You will hate yourself. It’s very funny, and you can disorient any house guests!

[greenpanda-officialart]

Ergojosh :Use of Ai Art

Kay, I don't usually make posts like this, but its on my mind so here we go;

Ergojosh, an art youtuber whom I've followed created a video using ai in his art piece. He created his own original work, and only used ai as a tool- this post is nuetral in my opinion. I don't agree with Ergojosh, but I don't think what he did deserve to be cancelled and condemened, it's something a lot of artists had thought about (I'll get into that later)

His first initial sketch- with using a veil for the face and overall it looks like his art style, Ergojosh has his own unique signature that makes you think thats HIS art.

Then after using Ai as a reference the face changes, looking at this I would assume scott campbell made this, already you lose his identity by using other references and yes the sketch is looking better visually, but you no longer see Josh in the artwork.

The worst part at 3:58 he doubles down and becomes defensive that he used ai as a reference that he didn't generate it-

Which then later on when he admits to using Midjourney using a program and putting money into it and endorsing said product kinda defeats the purpose? "Oh I didn't generate ai therefore it's okay, anyway I generated an ai on a paid program that profits of stolen artworks to make this generated image." that artists are not okay with, so why be defensive of using ai refs when he generated images after? Oh, because he said it wasn't the 'face' he removed the faces but used it for hair, be it hair, eyes or anything a generated ai image is a generated ai image. No matter what it looks like.

So this is the final pose, which looks okay, but the hands should've been holding the hair strands and more hands couldn't been around the body in a sphere composition holding the strands.

around the 10;00 mark in the video, he sounded aggresive about the use of ai, that it's a tool, we should adapt and be mature. But people are allowed to hate ai and not want anything to do with it and would be upset at people who endorse it, after all if a small artist can use a few seconds of a song in their youtube videos they get copyright striked.

Meanwhile artwork is just scrapped and used- its rules for thee but no rules for me- type attidude, that the program and companies would not want their work to be stolen but think it's fair to take others works because it was public.

Even so- I get why Ergojosh was only making a video of using ai as a tool in his creative process, that yes the hair was a challenge, it's like get a glass ball and put hair inside it how would that look- oh with how broken the internet is thats a hard to find ref that might not even exist- the problem though.

Is that it's clear Ergojosh was trying to force ai to work when it wasn't happening, the truth is I think as an artist you can't make ai work for you- when I was using it for Uni, I felt frustrated at the lack of control and that it wasn't working out, people who aren't artists would be fine with it, but as creators its just more work.

And it was obvious in this video that it felt as if he was making it harder for himself.

so first image is the ai generated image from midjourney that he used,

second is the traced parts. I get it, there are some shapes in the ai image that looks good but this image just looks messy, the hair doesn't fit or flow like it should there are some strands that are too detailed/clutered and some too simplified.

after using grids and getting the composition down, he then fleshed out the hair and well;

This honestly felt like a cry for help, how he keep saying "I am the producer, I'm in control-" this hair looks random and messy like, was there any need for an ai input at all? Any one could've done this. there's no direction, no flow just random wisps just slapped on there.

He changed the character to a gremlin with a tail, worked on the lighting, but at minute 20 I was thinking...this is a lot of headache what a convulated way of working harder not smarter, it felt like an obvious struggle and the wispy tail was lost in the hair esp with how thin it was, and IF the tail had the hair draped over it instead but it's not its just, floating there.

And heres the final image which uh-

I don't understand how someone could spend possibly hours on an art piece that looks like ai-

The hands above holding the hair strands are gone, the eyes look like ai, the hand holding her chin also looks ai generated and at a glance nothing about this artpiece screams ergojosh.

some hair strands were coloured but some like the face look like a diff artstyle and the strands surrounding her look unfinished-

The only thing saving the focal point is the lighting, but even the two diff coloured eyes?

It felt like a lot of effort for something that didn't need the ai assist. Look lots of artists have differing opinions. Most hate ai and all it's uses even as a reference it shouldn't be entertained to even be called that. Most try to steal Ai back;

But it ends up looking like a "Draw this in your style," challenge and kinda proves ai's point. The whole 'stealing' ai is inherently using it, which I agree, other than the colouring or even painting style, the composition of the girl/cat I wouldn't copy that as it proves that I need the robot to think for me, but others think this is a way to 'stick it to the ai'

Personally, I would agree with Josh if it was using the generated image just for colouring, pallete ideas but using it for hair when he couldn've done that himself AND using Midjourney, putting money into a program that actually takes images from artists and using that stolen work for profit? "It's not stealing-"

It is, take a look at the 3-d model in CSP.

wonder why no one loses their shit when people trace these models for their generic webtoons? Because someone was payed for their time to create/code that model, it was put in there with CSP consent. Ai art, for me is like a Well that is open to the public, but the water people are taking from this Well is full of worms and parasites (aka. other peoples art) How can an artist use this when they are aware other artists work is in there, may as well trace and plagarise - the program is infested with other peoples work and if there was an isolated program I could use to train my own artwork then sure, but knowing that loish art is in there, has been trained it'll make all of my 'work' nothing but frankenstein abominations. I can't say with my full chest thats 'my' work.

And like this parasitic water, because it's free to the public people think I'm against free water and trying to force people to buy bottled and people are even going the Well water is more healthy for you.

All I've seen of ai, is done nothing but bog down platforms, it's a slog to find people who are real, not bots, not content farmers, not get rich quick pyramid scheme idiots, but people, communities.

Art is to 'connect' with people, if you couldn't be bothered to draw it, why should I be bothered to look at it, it tells me nothing about a person other than they have no passion.