#um anyway. i hope this is at least semi-coherent and not immensely overwhelming lol

[zukkaoru]

i am so curious what mirror pronouns dazai means. do you mind me asking

not at all!! basically mirror pronouns in general means "refer to me with the pronouns you use to refer to yourself". so for dazai that would look like kunikida referring to dazai with he/him pronouns, yosano using she/her, i typically write he/they ranpo so ranpo would switch between he and they when referring to dazai, and so on and so forth

i made a post about it a few months ago but basically i see dazai's feelings towards their own gender being very... vague and indefinite. they don't exactly feel cis, they don't exactly feel like they're nonbinary, they don't exactly feel like they're trans, they don't exactly feel like they're anything. using mirror pronouns i think is a way for them to sort of consolidate those feelings into something workable. they can just. borrow the genders of the people around them! and it's also interesting to me bc i feel like to some extent, that's how dazai feels about humanity in general. they don't feel particularly human, but they can be a reflection of humanity. they can take the humanity shown to them by those around them and reflect it back onto others and feel like they're passing as human. they're just borrowing humanity from the people around them. plus i think dazai would see mirror pronouns as a fun little game. which is significantly less serious analysis but still very true and kind of the initial reason i came up with this headcanon ngl

anyway to accomplish this in writing, i basically just have the narration refer to dazai with the same pronouns used for the pov character. there's a lot of aya pov in the fic i'm working on with mirror pronouns dazai, so the narration in the aya pov sections refers to dazai with she/her pronouns. but then if kunikida refers to dazai aloud, he uses he/him. in the one scene i've written so far from dazai's pov, i had the narration refer to them with the pronouns of the people they were interacting with to emphasize the reflective aspect of mirror pronouns (i.e. in the beginning of the scene, while talking to sigma, dazai is referred to with she/her. then, when chuuya comes in and sigma leaves, dazai is referred to with they/them.) one thing about me is i love to play around with when the narration refers to characters with certain pronouns, especially if it changes partway through, i am very particular about exactly when the switch occurs. so also writing mirror pronouns dazai is very fun for me in that aspect