erotic grotesque nonsense

magda • 29 • she/her/hers • dilettante • lesbienne

[kaurwreck]

DAN DA DAN | Ch. 91

[lleyksie]

dueling tigers 🍊

[kaurwreck]

that the hunting dogs in bsd are a tightly leashed instrument of the military police state is rich with macabre subtext, if you're familiar with tetchou, fukuchi, and jouno's irl journalism careers. (i've linked an english-language resource about their work in the meiji-era press below, for those interested.)

in very, very brief summary, jouno wrote gesaku (which was a heavily stigmatized genre of pulp/popular fiction) and all three of these men were among the first 'western-style' newspaper journalists in japan. each were, at one point or another, however briefly, imprisoned by the state in retaliation for challenging the boundaries of the suppressive Meiji-era free press laws, and they persisted in their journalistic endeavors even as the government cracked down on newspapers. including fukuchi, who was (to oversimply it) centrist at his most radical and who had connections within the government through his former career and close friends. (as fukuchi described this period, "It was like a gush of water.... As soon as a reporter spoke, he was summoned. Many respectable reporters and gentleman were fined or jailed.")

like, i'm especially wary of my American lens here, and, more specifically, my American constitutional law background, since I'm impelled towards righteous indignation that is all at once anachronistic, culturally obtuse, and painfully hypocritical. but even acknowledging that my voice is an ill fit for this particular conversation, I don't think i'm terribly off base to suggest that asagiri's choices re: the composition of the hunting dogs are at the very least interesting!

[further reading: everything i know about tetchou, fukuchi, and jouno's careers and the Meiji press comes from Politics of the Meiji Press: The Life of Fukuchi Gen’ichirō by James L. Huffman, which is available open access (i.e. for free!!!!!) on JSTOR.]

[keiaoi811]

Hatched

[luna-azzurra]

The thing about a good character flaw is that it has to be the same thing as their greatest strength just turned up too high. the person who loves deeply and therefore controls. the person who sees everything and therefore trusts nothing. the person who is so loyal they lose themselves. there are no clean villains and no clean heroes and once you understand that in fiction you can't unsee it in people. everyone is just their best quality at the wrong volume.

[scribeherself]

“they never explicitly looked at the camera and said ‘i am experiencing immense grief’ so how was i supposed to know??” i don’t know what to tell you, man. if a story doesn’t spoon-feed you the character's internal emotional state like a jar of mashed peas, you guys just willingly starve. subtext is not a myth, i promise it won't bite you.

[i-am-a-fish]

don't be mean to yourself that's you

[requiem-on-water]

“Black Cloud” for the exhibition “The Accursed Hour” by Carlos Amorales at Fondazione Adolfo Pini | Ph: (1&2) Andrea Rossetti (3) Alessandro Spadoni

[requiem-on-water]

The Rotten Cherry dress by Dilara Findikoglu s/s (2026)

[kaurwreck]

i've been saturating myself in bildungsroman and bildungsroman-type stories in anticipation of my thirtieth birthday (to reflect on and ritualize this next threshold of my adulthood). and while they're all resonating with some degree of transcendence, the pool of stories i've been wading in have skewed towards "boyhood" and "girlhood" as overlapping but distinct experiences. and I guess they are, but they're also very much not, and coming of age stories with lenses that skew towards a binary childhood tend to flatten their characterizations of the opposite gender's experiences, motivations, and behaviors, which then blunts the sharpness of their themes.

i'm not frustrated, exactly; i think there's immense narrative value in archetyping, especially in genres concerned with childhood. i'm also very cognizant that i'm not even trying to take an empirical or representative approach to sampling the genre. (i.e., my observations likely reflect more on my pool of inspiration and media diet, inclusive of my biases and limitations, than the genre itself.)

but, even if i'm not quite frustrated, i'm feeling heated and maybe even restive — and, without angelizing either work, increasingly fond of osamu dazai's school girl and be-papas's revolutionary girl utena.

[ara-khne]

🦋 thou shalt not die

(is this anything)

[definetelynotavampire]

Prepare for trouble! >:D

Poe: I haven't seen Karl in a while...

[annileearts]

they match!

[kuttithevangu]

Every work of art says things the creator hasn’t considered, but if you’ve really thought about what you’re trying to say then generally the additional dimensions you didn’t know it had are in alignment with your purpose, whereas if you think you’re making no cultural comment at all you are actually making a LOT of cultural comments, most of which will be unflattering to you

[kuttithevangu]

Porn is one of the most culturally rich types of media imaginable so the answer is: you cannot do this

[kaurwreck]

asagiri won't write akutagawa and poe interacting with each other in any meaningful way because asagiri has integrity and he knows that if they ever met, akutagawa would suck poe and derail the entire narrative.

anyway, tidbits from Glimpses of Poe by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa [tl: Ryan Choi]:

In his writing, brutally from the first phrase to the last, Poe had the habit of employing abstruse and lofty language. In praise, he elevated a work to the heavens, and in criticism, he condemned a work to hell. In one notorious excoriation of a certain famous poet, the writing is so littered with factual errors as to be an embarrassment, but the biggest error of all was that he even published the piece to begin with. For all his vitriol, Poe ultimately saw no innate difference in worth between the people he scorned and the people he acclaimed.

[...]

Poe’s penchant for insults and negativity, far from being baseless, had stemmed rather from his personal philosophy. In this sense, he was simply acting objectively in accordance with his system of logic that said that the chief role of the critic was to highlight the faults of a work. He stated this on many occasions unequivocally, that it is not the job of the critic to address beauty directly, for beauty that requires explaining—Poe would agree—does not count as beauty.

*

Therefore, beauty—to Poe—was transcendent: apparent and accessible to anyone of any race. The obligation of the critic is not to mediate the aesthetic experience but to identify the defects that detract from it. Poe’s conviction about beauty’s unteachability sits at the center of his critical philosophy.

[...]

...[Today] there is little doubt about the greatness of Poe, for all greatness—so it seems—must wait for posterity.

[onnastik]

You know, for someone the fandom likes to joke about as "the betrayal guy", Ango is incredibly consistent in his loyalties. He was simply never loyal to Mimic or the Port Mafia in the first place; he only joined them as a spy, and he stuck to his original loyalties even when he made friends and started feeling bad about it. He didn't even really betray the government for Dazai in the DOA arc; they'd been subverted by the Page and Dazai had a plan for fixing that. Even when going against orders, he was acting in the Special Division's real best interests and never mind if other people didn't see it that way.

He only looks disloyal if he doesn't happen to be loyal to you.

[kaurwreck]

I would gently go further and suggest that Ango isn't loyal to organizations or institutions, but Yokohama, specific people, and his values. He participates in organizations as a means to serving that which and those who he holds dearer than submission to any authority for submission's sake. Ango seemingly doesn't hold the Special Division as an institution dearly — instead, he holds dearly certain people within the Special Division and the Special Division's constituency.

That his ability is named after Discourse on Decadence, especially considering Asagiri's seeming affection for irl!Ango's legacy in detective fiction, is helpful for interpreting Ango's motivations and moral decision making.

[kosmogrl]