Hi! I'm a huge fan of all of your work, but as a Byakuya Togami enjoyer, I absolutely adore all of your art featuring him. Because he occupies so much of my brain space, I always like to ask people- what draws you to him? What are your thoughts on him, and are these thoughts different than the ones you had about him when his character was first introduced? I apologize if these questions are too vague to really answer in a tumblr ask. Thank you for sharing your work here; it always makes my day.
(the very first pictures i ever drew of him..)
while he stood out to me from the very beginning, i honestly had no idea I would really grow to be so fascinated and enamored with byakuya as a character— I liked him as soon as I saw him, but I think the moment that completely solidified him in my mind as a character was..
i think.. even with the moments and tropes that are definitely worth a bit of criticism in chapter 2, i was pretty blown away by the depth of his depravity and madness stringing up chihiro, fucking with mondo, and completely engineering his perfect plan to string makoto along with him the entire time— and then to use toko to reveal jack, after creating nothing more than a half-assed and miserable copy of her master work. he’s a fanatic and even no better than a serial killer fanboy, he’s instrumental in the themes of gender, sexuality, masculinity, and shame in the chapter itself. the trifecta of him, chihiro, and mondo is a triangle of obsession, impulsivity, and insecurity — jack and makoto the end results of this creation at the hands of these people, byakuya, no better than jack himself— I may even say he has an obsession and fixation on makoto no better than toko has to him— the ultimate irony of their relationship in this second triad.
i really thought him to be an irredeemable person, which drew me to him as a villain more than anything.. but the implications of his behavior and him as a character mess me up so unbelievably, and the fact that you as a protagonist— and makoto as a character— are more or less implied to be the one person who has ever shown him compassion, gotten him to open up about his extraordinary circumstances.. and the fact that he immediately snaps, pushing and pulling in his grapple with a need for understanding and human connection after experiencing a life comfortably soulless and devoid of it.
he is a depraved and damaged person, who boasts endlessly about killing others, threatening to weed out the weak, and is thrown into a situation not unlike his own childhood in a remarkable competition to survive— and yet he doesn’t hurt a soul, he is more bark and verbal abuse than bite, he tampers with something already dead, he says it’s for his own gain, but I believe in my heart that he is not the kind of person that seeks to cause any further violence. is he not a narrative mirror to genocide jack herself? a violent and damaged thing purely due to circumstance— created through neglect and hatred, and living to cause that same pain.
the last line blew me away the second I finished this free time event— I feel it says all that it needs to say about who he is, truly, at the core beneath the pompous and aggressive visage. his life is but a tragic one— again, of survival, death, and inferiority. if he was a scared person, at one point, he has surely buried that fear deep into a place it can never be found. he was not ensured a single thing from the day he was born— he had been nobody, he is, ultimately, nobody, and cannot accept the reality of his own humanity when he has been so profoundly dehumanized for the entirety of his existence.
“it should have been you,” and it wasn’t, and he continues to be alive, and he has to be alive, and despite everything he has done, he is still the last person to fight for Makoto’s life against kyoko’s betrayal in chapter 5, he still becomes a person willing to sacrifice himself for the good of komaru naegi and takes the action of saving her knowing that it will put him at risk— despite his nature, and the will of every force in his life turning him into the cruel thing he was… he is not beyond learning how to be a human being, for the first time in his life.
i think, in the end, what draws me to him so much is the fact that he is not irredeemable— that he is as much the product of circumstances as anyone and anyone else— absurd and extraordinary ones, if anything. and that maybe he can learn to be a person beyond the chains his lineage has strangled him with. that he is not as ensured to be horrible as anyone else is ensured to be good from the moment that they are born— that perhaps he did not deserve what made him into what he was, and beneath everything, there is still someone who is capable of compassion.
titsay
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