#vvitchy-ways

[thecolombianviking]

I was tagged by @psyberspryte

1. last song: You Are a Pirate - Alestorm 2. last movie: I don't even remember. it's been a minute sine i've watched a movie 3. currently watching: Summer House 4. currently reading: way too many mangas to list 5. currently craving: A long vacation

i tag: @solomonar-culbec, @eborane, @vvitchy-succubus, @kladivonacarodejnice, @misfit-among-the-angels

[creative-anchorage]

Tags by @vvitchy-succubus:

#i know when you're in your early 20's

#it seems like the world revolves around people your age

#and they want you to feel that way so you'll keep up on trends

#making them money #but the truth is

#it doesn't

#and frankly anyone over the age of 30

#just doesn't care if you think we're still relevant and cool

#because we have figured out already that life is in fact

#only getting started #and 32 is still young

#you will still feel like your normal self after you turn 30

#except that you'll give less of a shit

Hey. Hey! You! If you think like this:

I am fucking begging with you to cut that shit out because believing, even subconsciously, even if it’s “only” about people you don’t like, that turning 32 means crossing a threshold into irrelevance and social withdrawal will not only close you off from relating to the vast majority of cool people alive on earth, but will inevitably send you into some sort of personal crisis as one day you approach the threshold yourself.

[lovelesswiki]

The dynamic between Natsuo and Youji has always fascinated me. Since their first appearance, they've obviously moved beyond murderous psychopath twins. I enjoy your commentary on Loveless characters so, do you have insight to offer on the Sagan Brothers?

hey! thanks for the question!

i talked a bit about natsuo and youji when i wrote this post, but ill expand on it a bit here. 

let me start by saying that i have a lot of gripes with the way loveless is written, and most of those gripes surround the fact that we’ve dropped every plot line and bit of characterization besides ‘look at this weird thing seimei’s doing!!!!!!! LOOK AT IT!!!!!”

surprisingly, though, natsuo and youji are not part of that. 

in all seriousness, natsuo and youji are the two characters in loveless who i think have been written and have remained to be written really, really well. they’ve developed and changed over the course of the series in a way that’s consistent and believable, while their core values have remained pretty much the same. what i’m trying to say here is that even though this is a manga about catboys and even though i’m talking about two genetically modified kids who can’t feel pain, natsuo and youji are written shockingly realistically. 

i talked a lot in the post i linked above about attachment theory and how it affected the sagan boys (and maybe the girls, too). the basic rundown is that developmental psychologists (developmental clinical psych is actually my specialty hahah so this may get long) have a theory about why kids sometimes act out inappropriately sometimes towards adults. from an early age, kids are supposed to ‘securely attach’ onto an adult, which basically means that kids are supposed to have a parental figure they can trust, and it’s supposed to be someone they can trust to come back and trust to comfort/soothe them in times of need, whether that’s physical needs (food, water, discomfort) or emotional needs (lonliness, pain [emotional or physical], affection, etc). kids who are not securely attached but still have some sort of attachment usually have minor developmental issues, but kids who are unable to form an attachment at all usually suffer greatly from larger emotional, behavioral, and developmental issues. 

i’ve also talked a bit about how i feel nagisa’s relationship with natsuo and youji is very…ignored or passed over. and really, it’s not completely the readership’s fault, because her treatment of them is often played for laughs. but sometimes, it’s not, and it’s in those times that it becomes apparent just how concerning her behavior is towards them, especially since it’s in those times that it’s obvious that the two are looking to her for some sort of real, parental support, and she’s reacting very badly and abusively to it.

this panel is a prime example of this, because at the time youji was expressing concern for nagisa and wanting to help her in a very normal way, and she reacts by hitting him hard while screaming that he’s useless to her. when i bring up this scene, i like to also bring up the fact that until soubi takes them in when they’re twelve (or eleven), the two of them lived with her and just because they can’t feel pain doesn’t mean that she’s allowed to hit or injure them. it doesn’t justify it–in fact, it actually makes things worse, given that any abuser could see this as a justification to do it more. 

what’s more is that after this, youji doesn’t even react. he seems to think it’s completely normal, like he’s grown up with this, and it’s that that makes me doubt, as well as her previous treatment of them, that this is a first-time or even recent thing. every interaction we have between nagisa and natsuo and youji is her being extremely cruel, cold, and overall pretty terrible to them. she never actually treats them well and it’s as if she sees them as toys rather than actual children who simply can’t feel pain.

i’ve said previously that natsuo and youji most definitely did not attach onto nagisa correctly, if at all. theres things that are incredibly off about them and her, including the way they seem to think of their relationship with nagisa as having the potential for a romantic relationship or simply just the way they are at the beginning of the series. at their introduction, the two of them are sadistic monsters who seem to want nothing more than to hurt everyone around them and behave completely outside of the norm. in fact, at their introduction, the two of them fit almost every qualification for both reactive attachment disorder and conduct disorder

(these simplify the symptoms a little bit from how i learned them in clinical classes, but it’s a good simplified rundown)

conduct disorder:

reactive attachment disorder:

it’s notable that conduct disorder is typically estimated to turn into antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) in about ~30% of cases and is sometimes seen as a precursor to ASPD. some clinicians that i’ve met actually believe that CD always turns into ASPD. in my opinion, they are wrong because of nature vs nurture AKA i believe that if it’s caught and intervened with in a healthy, correct manner, the effects of CD and RAD (which are usually co-morbid, for the record) can be reversed. some people don’t agree with that, but that’s my professional fight to fight. anyways, i keep saying at the beginning of the series because… to put it simply, Natsuo and Youji have changed and progressed more than any other character in the series, including ritsuka and soubi. 

obviously, the general treatment for RAD and CD is usually to find out why a child isn’t attaching/why they haven’t attached and change that. the cause for both of them is typically abuse and neglect, two things we’ve seen in natsuo and youji’s case with nagisa. if a clinician/case worker were to asses the situation, it would’ve been bad enough that they would’ve been taken out of the household. which is what happened, accidentally, when natsuo and youji lost the battle against soubi despite driving a nail through his hand. after that, the next step would be to put the child(ren) with someone else, someone who’s fit to be a parent and preferably, someone who will take care of them and give them what they need, and someone who will allow them to progress at their own rate with attaching. that… again, is what accidentally happened. i’m not saying that agatsuma soubi is a perfect parent or even a really good one, but he happened to be what natsuo and youji needed to start becoming normal kids and not sadistic monsters who nearly raped a woman. soubi essentially lets them do what they want with some guidelines and isn’t overbearing but takes care of them and seems to offer them some sort of parental figure to talk to if they want to. he’s not the best at it and obviously has no idea what he’s doing, but purely by coincidence, he’s doing something right. 

right now in the series, natsuo and youji are little goblins who are annoying and irritating and a bit mean to the people around them, but they’re nothing like how they were. the way they are right now is kind of how you’d expect any shitty, stuck-up middle schooler entering puberty to be. maybe they’re a little worse, but they’re absolutely nothing like how they were at some point. they’ve developed relationships with other kids, have succeeded in school, and have somewhat attached onto soubi to the point where they generally seem to do what he says and didn’t want to leave when they were called back to nagisa. in fact, they even state that living with soubi is much more preferable and enjoyable than living with nagisa.

the two of them could still clearly benefit from a lot of therapy but completely by coincidence, soubi was the right thing for them and natsuo and youji have developed to the point where they can be called protagonists who don’t really have any bad intentions anymore.

there’s something else i wanted to touch on that i mentioned above, and that’s the fact that they’ve both made offhanded comments that seem to imply that they view nagisa in a romantic/sexual light. this is something that seems to confuse fans a lot to the point where many just tend to choose to completely ignore it since they don’t want to touch that with a ten foot pole, and i don’t blame them–it’s weird and creepy and so, so out of the norm that people can’t start to comprehend it. after all, most people, to some extent or another seem to realize at least a little even if they look over it, that nagisa did raise these two and is a maternal figure. their remarks about her would make anyone uncomfortable. well, i’m here to make you all more uncomfortable by saying that this is due to abuse and is completely in-character on nagisa’s part.

emotional incest is a term that you don’t tend to hear unless it’s out of a clinical setting or from a community of people who are recovering from/dealing with abuse (justnomil on reddit uses this term rightfully a lot, for example). emotional incest is generally where someone treats their kids as if they’re their romantic/sexual partner emotionally by seeking inappropriate emotional support from their kids when that emotional support should only be sought from an adult involved with them. this is when the parent turns to the child to use them as a confident/emotional support to lean on when the child needs their emotional and physical needs fulfilled. in turn, the children feel emotionally abandoned because their parent is using them for only emotional support as if they’re a romantic partner. it doesn’t imply that there’s physical incest/sexual abuse going on, but the effects can be similar. (this is a helpful link for more info about emotional/covert incest).

in short, this seems to be what’s going on between nagisa and natsuo and youji. she’s shown in the manga dumping all of her problems and emotional problems onto natsuo and youji, who might i remind you are 11-12 years old, and never really talking to another adult about them because natsuo and youji don’t know enough to tell her that she’s doing something wrong/needs to change. when a parent does this and treats their kids this way, it can often leave the kids… feeling very strangely about the adult. oftentimes, like with physical incest, it can initially leave the kids feeling ‘special’, like they’re better than the adults, like they’re mature, and these feelings can lead towards the want to fulfill what they think is the expectation of a romantic partner. or, better said, it’s very common for kids to mistakenly develop what they attribute as romantic feelings for the parent, because they think the parent is treating them so specially and already as a romantic/sexual partner. this seems to be what’s happening with natsuo and youji in this case. i say this because while they make comments about this (’my/our woman’, wanting to be more sexually experienced for her, etc), they don’t seem to hold any actual feelings for her, but more the expectation that because of how she treats them, that this is what they’re supposed to do with her. 

emotional incest is a very hard concept to grasp because not a lot of people know about it and because of that, it’s hard to understand why natsuo and youji act the way they do towards nagisa, but i’m  pretty positive that it’s because of the fact that she treats them like romantic/sexual partners emotionally by dumping all of her emotions and problems on them and trying to have them deal with it and offering them no parental reassurance or support. this is really just another long winded way of talking about another way in which natsuo and youji attached wrongly onto nagisa, which caused the way they are in their introduction to the series.

youji and natsuo’s emotional and development problems might be better understood when looked at from a community psychology viewpoint, as well. community psych isn’t my specialty, but it’s a side passion of mine so i think i know it pretty well. community psychology basically looks at the levels of development and problems that someone has and how they can affect someone at an individual level. if someone has problems at all levels, then they are likely to be developmentally and emotionally affected at an individual level. 

above is the systems usually used in community psych. it helps us understand the connection between problems an individual has and the problems a society has and how they affect each other in this context. i’d wager to say that natsuo and youji are so developmentally and emotionally affected because they have problems at literally every level. starting off from macrosystems, they have an issue with the culture/society they’re in, given that they’re isolated by nagisa and considered outsides due to their physical condition. locally, they have similar issues–they’re completely isolated in one culture in an isolated school in an isolated town in an isolated mountainous area, and even then, they’re a little ostracized in the community because of the fact they can’t feel pain, something that’s very integrated into the culture of the Fighter-Sacrifice world. Organizationally, they’re isolated, as well, because they live with nagisa and don’t go to school in the traditional sense. they also have a ton of problems in their microsystem with their ‘family’, consisting of nagisa, and their lack of friends. overall, all of their problems and isolations in all these contexts comes down to cause problems on the individual, to the point where in the beginning, natsuo and youji do not act like normal kids at all.

it’s only after the two of them are exposed to a normal, usual culture (macrosystem), placed in a non-isolated city (local), going to a regular non-isolated diverse school (organizational), and have a somewhat functioning, healthy family and group of friends do they start to greatly improve, because all those issues have been taken off of the individual, leaving them to start developing correct attachments and overall ‘getting better’.

i know that i’ve rambled a lot about psychology and also about nagisa in this, but both those things are so heavily intertwined with natsuo and youji’s stories that it’s hard to separate them or not talk about them when trying to analyze them.

so, to combat that, let’s talk a little about them as individuals?

natsuo and youji are very interesting characters, both in-series and in meta. they’re treated interestingly in fandom [in meta]. i, like many others, treat and tend to talk about them like they’re one person, rather than two separate people. i do this a lot, and i’ve been doing it in this post, even. honestly, sometimes it’s easier to view them as two people because although they look different and have started having obviously separate personalities, the two of them are a unit and they’re so involved with each other that just like it’s hard to not talk about nagisa when analyzing them, it’s hard not to consider them as one single unit of a person when doing the same. the fact of the matter is, though, that they are two different people, and more obviously so after they’ve started living with soubi. 

originally when they were introduced, natsuo and youji seemed like they had the same personalities. they were both equally violent and malicious, and at the time, neither seemed more subdued that the other. over time, though, as they’ve started adjusting to being more ‘normal’, they’ve developed significantly different personalities. natsuo is the calmer of the two, but seems more generally upset at things happening around him. he’s developed a better mind for empathy and seeing the emotions of others and seems to follow youji usually. the empathy is a double-edged sword, though, since natsuo seems to get more easily depressed/upset at events and happenings. youji, on the other hand, has developed to be much more of a leader in his antics, but he has clear and obvious trouble empathizing with others, something that seems to frustrate him lately. he more clearly shows distress when he is distressed and seems to get much more frustrated with himself. they’ve both lost most of their violent tendencies and have developed into just generally mischievous gremlins children. i jokingly call youji the ‘hell child’ because of his tendency to start erratic misbehavior, but it’s absolutely nothing close to attempting to rape someone or killing animals and (maybe) people. 

meta-wise, this change has started a clear trend of liking natsuo and youji. i’ve discussed this same thing before, but at their introduction, you’re not supposed to like them because they’re introduced as small monsters who kill a dog, might’ve killed Sleepless, and then try to rape hitomi and drive a nail through soubi’s hand. you’re absolutely not supposed to like them and you’re supposed to want to kick soubi’s ass when he takes them in out of what you later realize is pity on his part. as they become more human and normal, though, people fall in love with them, and they eventually clearly turn ‘good’ when they willingly try to fight against seimei and then willingly volunteer to go with soubi and ritsuka for support when kio gets kidnapped, despite the fact that soubi is marked as one of the strongest fighters and is clearly able to take on bloodless on his own. 

on top of that, natsuo and youji have begun to care. this is most clear when they both get upset over ritsuka being upset over the loss of soubi and their immediate insistence that theyll help him. there’s not a whole lot in it for them, since they believe they can take care of themselves (though they can’t, but they don’t know that in canon), so they’re helping ritsuka out of what seems to be concern for someone they view as family/a very good friend. the fact that they care is actually clear before this, though, specifically when nagisa calls them back and they realize that they sort of just want to stay here, with soubi, and then they later realize that they miss him and ritsuka, and then they finally make the conscious decision to leave the woman that they’ve wanted affection from and a connection with their entire lives, and go back to soubi. they care about other people now and both of them have started to experience empathy (though youji doesn’t seem to realize that it’s what he’s feeling) and have started to view their relationship through a light in which they’re beginning to realize that it’s wrong and inappropriate and living with soubi is much better.

soubi also cares about them, even if he has weird ways of showing it. as i said, he’s not the perfect parent or even a really good one and there’s a lot of ways he can improve, but he’s somewhat what they need and part of the reason they’ve become normal children. he actually seems to treat them mostly like an adult should–namely, he doesn’t emotionally treat them like a romantic partner and doesn’t dump everything on them to sort through. he also seems to enjoy taking care of them, as well as ritsuka, and does miss them a lot when they leave. he is happy that they’re back, even though he doesn’t show it immediately, and goes far enough to enroll them in school to get them to be normal kids.

in short, i think natsuo and youji could use some heavy therapy, but they’re actually the two most well-written characters in the series, which is a little impressive given that they’re background characters. they’ve evolved and changed more than any other character in the series, to the point where they’ve become very likable protagonists, a stark difference from how they were when they were first introduced. nagisa is the cause of their developmental issues, as well as them being almost completely isolated, and they’ve changed because of the fact that they’re no longer around her or being isolated.