Thinking Abt Young Shakky

Fandom: Scopper Gaban is gonna be so badass when he's finally introduced.

Oda:

this is so important actually. the image and voice of dazai, one of the smartest people atsushi knows, manifested by atsushi's mind telling him that he knows something dazai doesn't. he can do what dazai can't. he's smart enough to save everyone, despite his doubts about himself. and he knows it, even if he needs a voice that isn't his own to say it to him.

zoro and law were so unnecessarily rude to tashigi in punk hazard, and my first reaction was to be irked by the misogynistic aspect of it. oda’s treatment of tashigi’s character is questionable, but there’s actually more to it than her being a woman

as we know, zoro can’t stand that she looks like kuina while being a weak crybaby: she vindicates kuina’s fears that women can’t be strong warriors. being so condescending towards her is a way for him to assert that she is not kuina (because kuina was so much stronger than him)

law is trickier because he is a douche to everyone & has no particular connection to tashigi. but the words he tells tashigi also happen to be the philosophy of doflamingo, the man he hates most in the entire world.

why would he think the same way as the man who caused him so much pain? law is obsessed by revenge against doflamingo for killing corazon. in doflamingo’s own words, cora was a weak person; he didn’t get to choose how he died. the injustice of it fuelled everything law undertook for the second half of his life

so why is law parroting that philosophy? maybe because fighting against a clumsy, emotional marine reminded him of the person he lost, and why he lost him

someone who also happened to be a weakling fighting for a desperate cause, who cried for sick children abandoned by the world

tashigi is a character of her own with her own goals, but others keep seeing their dead loved ones in her: she reminds zoro and nami of their best friend and mother respectively.

not to say oda isn’t misogynistic (he is), but tashigi’s weakness specifically mirrors the fragility of other characters who unjustly died because of that fragility, and yet changed everything for the people in their lives

JUST TWO DADS DOING WHAT THEY THOUGHT WAS BEST FOR THEIR BABIES

Doodles

Something incredible to me in Beast is just how... wrong Dazai was so often (and, by concequence, Gin). And how he was wrong in a very opposite was from og!Dazai's thinking.

Getting the memories from og!Dazai gave him many advantages, but it also held him back when it came to actually seeing the other people around him. Especially Atsushi and Akutagawa. He was convinced about being born good or evil and innate natures, which is something the story disproves time and time again.

In his mind, it didn't matter that he'd groomed Atsushi for almost five years into being the white reaper. It didn't matter that he killed himself infront of him after making himself the central point of Atsushi's frail sanity. It didn't matter that he fired Atsushi from his one remaining purpose. Why? Because Atsushi was "born good" in his mind because he was good in the original world and therefore any evilness groomed into him would be easily undone without any lasting consequences in his mind.

If he saw Atsushi being reformed slowly by Mori, he'd get to the wrong conclusion. He'd attribute it to nature rather than to Mori being able to rehabilitate him.

And this also shows in his treatment of Akutagawa. He thinks of Akutagawa as being inherently bad because he was in the mafia originally. The whole story is him being victim to confirmation biases when it comes to him and, because of that, the same happens to Gin. His idea with Akutagawa was never, at least to my understanding, to make him into a good man of the Agency, but rather have the ADA hold him under their care to unleash against threats. He didn't believe Akutagawa could become a proper ADA member (because he wasn't originally) but believed that the Agency would take him in anyway (because they took in Dazai and Kyouka in the original universe) and keep him from lashing out unless there was an enemy ahead of him.

And Gin gets fed this belief. It's why she doesn't talk like there will be a point in which Akutagawa might be reformed into a good person. Or that what he needed was to learn to calm down and organize his priorities. She believes he cannot change because that's what Dazai has taught her. Akutagawa's objective by the end of Beas isn't finding her anymore because he needs to better himself for himself and to prove Gin wrong. Not to reach her expectations or demands, but to prove her wrong, to show he is capable of change.

And, surprisingly enough, it's Atsushi who has the best take about Akutagawa in the final chapters, even though in Akutagawa's mind all of their judgements were put as if the same. From Atsushi's words, at least, Akutagawa is described as someone who is bad, who can't understand or separate violence from their objectives and who'll prioritize the violent option above even his objective, but he never expresses the opinion or feeling that that's his nature or he was born, likely because Atsushi know better than anyone how much someone can change or be changed. Atsushi doesn't think Akutagawa is a good person, but doesn't see him as someone incapable of becoming one (which does have some beautiful implications of SSKK always being able to understand esch other better than other can, even if they don't react or deal with the knowledge all that well).

And Dazai in the original universe thinks a lot more like Beast Atsushi than Beast Dazai (I could write a whole novel about the similarities between Original Dazai and Beast Atushi, because oh my god are they interesting). He doesn't believe in good and evil as something inher of someone nor does he see good and evil as concepts that are set in stone, but rather something personal to individuals. It's why I think even if Dazai was sent back in time to the exact point Beast Dazai received the memories, he would have gone through a completely different route when it came to changing the outcome of things. But also because he's changed since leaving the PM and it doesn't seem like Beast Dazai ever really grew up after getting the memories, he stayed both childish and a child.

Imagine being Collun & you're like 1 & barely gaining consciousness & you're starting to realize that while all the other kids get to ride piggy back on their dad's back yours is so tiny he rides on your back so he can like burp you after you drink a bottle & he can barely even hold up the bottle for you, but he's still your daddy & you still cry for him when you're scared & he's just this little guy who means everything to you, but like also you accidentally sat on him once & he would've suffocated to death if your mommy hadn't been there to move you.

What a fucking trip man. Gaban definitely tried to give him a piggy back ride multiple times despite Ripley telling him it's not a good idea. Now he has back pain, but it's completely worth it.

OUTFIT SWAP BETWEEN THE VINSMOKES AND THE ASUL SIBLINGS YIPPIE

+yonji and Zoro because I didn't want to exclude him 💚🫶