Interlude: the Four Primary Victims of Dazai
Trying desperately to explain the difference between Dazai’s treatment of and the show’s portrayal of the Primary Four Victims of Dazai, so here’s a fun little diagram I made:
This is based on what the average Dazai Encounter is like for each of them— there are exceptions. This chart simply represents what you’re most likely to find if you were to pick a random Dazai Encounter for each of these four characters.
What makes Dazai’s treatment of Akutagawa [and occasionally Atsushi] come off as less of a joke than his treatment of Kunikida and Chuuya is probably the power imbalance. Akutagawa and Atsushi both hold/held positions lower than his. They are/were his subordinates. They’re not in a position where they can properly defend themselves, even if they wanted to.
This leaves the audience understanding clearly that his treatment of them is wrong, or at least severely flawed.
On the flip side, Kunikida and Chuuya are his equals. Or at least they should be. They are/were his partner. They don’t have to kiss up to him— he’s not their boss and they don’t have to worry about jeopardizing their jobs by standing up for themselves.
So they often choose to fight back— or at least defend themselves in some way.
This doesn’t change the fact that Dazai’s treatment of them is pretty horrible. Just because someone defends themself doesn’t mean the original injustice is now all settled. The person who commits the original offense was harming someone who didn’t deserve to be harmed, while the person fighting back was harming someone who recently harmed them.
A person who attacks someone who did nothing to them to deserve it and A person who attacks someone who hurt or harmed them are not equally guilty.
I must make that clear before Chuuya shows up in my analyses. I’ve seen posts floating around here saying that Chuuya and Dazai are equally guilty, because Dazai does Dazai Things and Chuuya punches him in the face for it.
I’m not really sure why Chuuya’s accused of harming Dazai more often than Kunikida— Kunikida definitely spends some time beating up Dazai too. As he should. As everyone should.
Additionally, claiming that using physical violence to retaliate against a non-physical attack is “unfair retaliation because the punishment is harsher than the crime” is overlooking two things-
The previous point I made— the person who starts it is more guilty than the person who retaliates by default, due to the fact that the person who starts it is attacking someone who did nothing to deserve it, and-
The claim in question is made under the assumption that all physical forms of harm are always worse than all non-physical forms of harm. This is blatantly not true.
In short— this shouldn’t even be up for debate. Dazai’s treatment of Chuuya is just as horrible as his treatment of everyone else, Chuuya has every right to fight back and defend himself, and the fact that he does doesn’t make Dazai’s treatment of him any less bad. Nor does it make Chuuya “just as bad as Dazai”.
Although this analogy isn’t comparable to this situation, it would be like saying that a person who kills a murderer in self defense is “equally guilty” to the murderer, because they both kill people, and they both have tried to kill each other.
When I post my analysis of chapters 10/11 (probably next week/the week after, because this week I’m still working on ch9), I will be defending Chuuya to the same extent that I defend any other victims of Dazai, and if anyone has any comments to make on how “chuuya’s equally guilty”, you can go take that to another blog, because here on the Anti-Dazai Blog, that sorta sentiment is strongly disagreed with and will not be listened to*.
*[ unless you send a very well-written essay on why you disagree, with proof and examples from the manga or Light Novels ]
Now that my opinions on this are well explained, I’ll get back to chapter 9’s analysis, which I hope to post tomorrow.
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