BSD and BSD inspiration literature sideblog
A lot of my posts are Stormbringer-related. Overanalyzing is one of my favorite things, but I am an expert in exactly nothing
If I'm ever obnoxious in some way, please let me know (politely). It's never my intention, but the internet can be a maze and I have no sense of direction
By a stroke of luck, though I hadn't previously known the tournament was happening, I saw this poll about an hour after it posted and got a picture of it. Here's what it looked like then:
The order stayed the same, Chuuya just pulled slightly further ahead of Shane and they both fell further behind Preminger, who got almost 16k votes. Which is quite fair. I voted for Chuuya, but if Preminger hadn't won, I might have regretted it
If you drew Karen from Stormbringer I would be eternally grateful (though she only has a written description so far, so it's a bit of a tall task), but please don't feel pressured, only if you feel like it. Anyway, your art is wonderful!!! Have a great day/night!
HI HELLO!! THANK YOU FOR REQUESTING
I’m having a hard time trying to find something cohesive for what I imagine her to look like
I read storm bringer fairly recently and so this was a pretty fun challenge.. I wanna hear what you think though!! let me know your thoughts and I might revisit her with a better design :•)
AND HERES MY THOUGHT PROCESS ALSO!!
(art isn’t the best, i know, i was just kinda doodling whatever)
@steinbeck-vines Here’s my favorite side-character! :D
I only have one real theory about who this guy could be, based on this paragraph:
He doesn’t appear to have a nullification skill like Dazai’s, I guess it’s more of a protection skill? (Assuming that someone’s not in the shadows actively using a protection skill on him.) So my theory is that this man is Ernest Hemingway, and his ability is A Farewell to Arms.
A little off topic, but it might be helpful to know when Dazai’s Entrance Exam was published in relation to the main volumes of the manga. If it was published before the Guild appeared in the main manga, then it was probably intended as some sort of cliffhanger. Although this novel also reveals that Dazai used to be a PM executive and that happened in like volume 1 so I don’t know how much of the ending of this novel was meant to be a “surprise” 😅 Maybe it’s supposed to make the reader wonder why Guild Guy didn’t show up with the rest of the Guild 🤔
Moving on, Guild Man doesn’t have much about him that really identifies him… except for his black cap. A cap which looks a lot like, well…
It’s basically the same picture, right..?
*Sigh*
Alright… even I can see when I’m reaching 😔 But if it’s not Hemingway (which could very well be the case since he has a lot of other popular literature than A Farewell to Arms which could function as an ability) would it really be that much of a stretch to assume this is another Great Depression author? Or at least someone somewhat contemporaneous to Steinbeck?
Heck, maybe he’s our Joseph Campbell 👀
There’s also this photo of the Guild with the random extra guys. Could one of them be Guild Man? (Assuming Poe isn’t the one on the far right, but it’s hard for me to tell.)
According to the BSD wiki, which isn't always reliable but I think usually is for release dates, Entrance Exam was released in Japan on April Fool's Day, 2014, just under two months after Fitzgerald first appeared in the manga on February 4th and just over a month before Steinbeck did in ch. 18 on Star War's Day of all days. That is to say, he can't have been foreshadowing the Guild, but Guild Cap Guy did (deliberately or coincidentally) make his entrance pretty soon before More Famous Guild Cap Guy
He could have known her for decades. He could have watched her grow up. He could have watched her grow old. He could have met her last week.
He could view her as a friend, he could be in love with her, he could feel like she hasn’t lived enough, he could not care about her specifically all that much but have lost too many people, he could be doing it on an impulse he wouldn’t have understood even if he had the time, and on her end, it doesn’t matter, because she’s incapable of valuing her own life unless someone orders her to. They’re both distanced from “humanity”, he by immunity from age and she by being a tool to whom power, deadliness, destruction is love, more robotic than the actual robot. The epitome of your life is worth something, even if you’ve done terrible things and will again, even if you can’t see it.
They would be BSD in a nutshell except they are frozen. We’ll probably never know if Karen lived after falling off that cliff (unless Hoshikawa adds a graphic death she doesn’t have in the ln), any more than we’ll know whether she was always like that or became that way, and the scant evidence points to her not being able to change deliberately, but maybe she could. Maybe the awe she appears to have while gazing at a void could be worth something to her one day, worth as much as she’s worth to him. Maybe it already is. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.
All we know is that he might have been able to save himself and live indefinitely, as he’s outlived so many people before, but dies smiling to save someone who can’t care enough to save herself and won’t care that he died for her unless someone asks her to.
And that is why one of my favorite dynamics in BSD is two people who only interact once and have two and a quarter pages each max.
Scratch a bunch of things I've said, I've reread the same few passages too many times and the rest not in ages. We do know that Karen lives, at least for a while!
She's not referred to by name again, but "the ice-creating skill user" and "the skill user who could liquefy mass", Karen and the Colonel, are specified as the only ones whose Abilities don't bounce off Guivre in the part of the fight before Adam sets off the Shell (though neither's deals damage), and the Colonel survives (well, not for much longer, but Guivre doesn't get him), so it's very possible that Karen does too! I really hope she doesn't make it through all that only to end up like Emily Jane Smith during the Dragon's Head Conflict. Or to take on a new identity and move to Detroit. Any which way, the time manipulator is able to save her then, which means both that he accomplishes what he died to attempt and that Karen is capable of surviving a fall off a cliff and going back into battle not long after.
He could have known her for decades. He could have watched her grow up. He could have watched her grow old. He could have met her last week.
He could view her as a friend, he could be in love with her, he could feel like she hasn’t lived enough, he could not care about her specifically all that much but have lost too many people, he could be doing it on an impulse he wouldn’t have understood even if he had the time, and on her end, it doesn’t matter, because she’s incapable of valuing her own life unless someone orders her to. They’re both distanced from “humanity”, he by immunity from age and she by being a tool to whom power, deadliness, destruction is love, more robotic than the actual robot. The epitome of your life is worth something, even if you’ve done terrible things and will again, even if you can’t see it.
They would be BSD in a nutshell except they are frozen. We’ll likely never know whether Karen makes it through the battle (unless Hoshikawa adds a graphic death for her or a survivors view not in the ln), any more than we’ll know whether she was always like that or became that way, and the scant evidence points to her not being able to change deliberately, but maybe she could. Maybe the awe she appears to have while gazing at a void could be worth something to her one day, worth as much as she’s worth to him. Maybe it already is. But we don’t know. We’ll never know.
All we know is that he might have been able to save himself and live indefinitely, as he’s outlived so many people before, but dies smiling to save someone who can’t care enough to save herself and won’t care that he died for her unless someone asks her to. And he does it by pushing her off a cliff and having faith that she'll survive the fall. And he's right, she does, and she starts fighting again soon after.
And that is why one of my favorite dynamics in BSD is two people who only interact once and have maybe 3-4 pages each max.
//Fun fact of the day! Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, was apparently ridiculously in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter author). Officially going to state for record that BSD missed a trick there.
Surely, this is speculation based on something subtle and Melville didn't write anything super Gothic romance-y about them, like that their hearts beat in each other's chests, or that his lips were Hawthorne's and not his own, or something like that. Surely...
Oh. Oh.
Now I'm wondering whether Asagiri didn't know or didn't think a Hawthorne-Melville dynamic would fit into the plot and thus made them more or less wholly unconnected because whoah
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 paragraph countdown from 5 different WIPs
5.
“I learned that on the set of Bloodbath 9.”
“The first eight bloodbaths didn’t do the trick?”
“There’s only one other, and I wasn’t in it. Blood Bath, 1966. Bloodbath 9 is a reimagining, of a sort, embracing the kitsch and Beat aesthetics of the original but incorporating more deliberate elements of surrealist film. Instead of just being so odd it’s unintentionally sort of surreal.”
“I know,” Piano Man says. “My favorite character is Antonia.”
Antonia was Lippmann’s character. Come to think of it, an artist who brutally disembowels people is almost too à propos.
4.
“Wait, wait, I’m forgetting myself. Come in for a moment, have a drink. I need to call Chuuya. You can look at his baby pictures while you wait, they’re hysterical. This four year old floating on the ceiling dressed like a penguin, except—“ he leaned in as if divulging a great secret “—penguins don’t fly.”
Whatever Verlaine had prepared himself for, it wasn’t this drunkenly hospitable man, who was dressed a bit like a penguin himself, inviting him in and offering him a glimpse at the childhood his little brother had lost too soon.
“Dressed like a penguin?”
“A penguin. Lippmann will show you, he has the pictures. It’s adorable.”
3.
“That one’s Hurt/Comfort,” orphan_account said, pointing at the wombat by Yuan. “The others are Title from an MCR Song and Destiel. Now, the rules. The rules are simple. When it’s time to start a new party game, the name and rules of the game will pop into one of your minds with fanfare and trumpets. The trumpets won’t go away until you tell everyone what it is and they’re very loud so I don’t think you’ll get away with ignoring them. When you’re asked a question, it will be impossible to lie or not answer, no matter how intrusive the question is, unless the game specifies that you can take a shot instead. I don’t know what’s in that bottle, so if you choose the shot, uh, good luck. You’ll also feel compelled to give extra-thorough answers when thematically appropriate even if that’s OOC. I mean, out of character.”
“We know what OOC means,” Kyougoku said from where he was sprawled out on a cliché psychologist’s chaise. Even Ayatsuji hadn’t recognized him yet because he had been aged down at least five decades and looked about twenty-three, but he would end up kissing the characters whose canon ages were closer to his during Spin the Bottle regardless.
“I don’t,” said Peach Blossom, who only had an Ability in canon, not a name or gender. She was in exciting new territory.
2.
They feel like they’ve kissed him a thousand times before, and maybe they have, somewhere, maybe they have, and they feel like sobbing because any moment they could run out of time. Lippmann has never been afraid of death, which made the risks associated with joining the mafia easier to swallow; has been more and more neutral on the idea of being alive as they’ve realized there’s not much higher they can rise and a very long way to fall and they already accomplished everything they came to, perhaps everything they can. But if Piano Man and their friends are to die for, then they must also be something to live for, and that could end at any second. In another world, it already has. In another world, maybe Piano Man is dying, right at this moment, rockets shrieking helpless dirges in the sky. It doesn’t feel like a new beginning, however much Lippmann wishes it could. Maybe some part of them was born forty-five, or maybe they’ve kissed too many people on the screen, lived too many alter egos’ happily ever afters and abject tragedies.
But they want to go home with Piano Man. They want to wake up next to him in the morning and brew strong coffee while he makes breakfast, then go out and pretend they haven’t all grown old inside before their times. They want to write him love letters. They want to try to be young and in love, to feel alive, to feel like the leaves and the rocks and the clouds are new.
Blue Grace chapter 2
Heat simmers on the highway, blipping into black pools which look like tar pits when he’s tired, what his boss McAuley calls fatamorganas. He can barely reach the peddles of the truck. The road is empty for miles ahead of him, miles behind him, until a dark purple Yamaha Ténéré 700 comes rumbling, soaring towards him, past him, its rider a blur of white and blue fabric and black plastic, face hidden by a helmet.
I’m assuming this is Lippmann speaking… Did they just say B-Beat aesthetics… As in— *Gets Blue Grace war flashbacks* What exactly did Lippman learn, I wonder?
Is penguin man Piano Man? He has a very black-and-white color scheme. This fic sounds so wholesome 🥺 (I bet it’s actually soul crushing angst isn’t it.) WAIT DID PIANOLIPP ADOPT CHUUYA!?!? ❤️❤️❤️
*Bunal Chuuya voice* Peach flower girl >:0 /silly Hmmm this Orphan_account character sounds like someone I know… I wonder why that is, Talieorph—I mean hoff—beck /vsilly Wow has Kyougoku been reading fanfiction!? :0 I have no idea who he is aside from the fact that he’s a kind of obscure bsd character. Hehe this sounds like it’s gonna be a good one. Peach Blossom already has my heart <333
I— Lippmann… Lippmann… The repetition of the “maybe they have, maybe they have” is just so— the tone of the remark is resigned and urgent and hopeful all at once OUGH!!! You lured me in with stupid cute baby Chuuya and precious Peach Flower and I forgot that you can hurt! 🫵 /vpos “They already accomplished everything they came to, perhaps everything they can.” LippmannLippmannLippmannLippmann— I wanna annotate the entire blurb ahhhhh “But if Piano Man and their friends are to die for, then they must also be something to live for” LIPPMANNLIPPMANNLIPPMANN AHHHHHH I CANT EVEN DESCRIBE HOW THIS MAKES ME FEEL!!! (A lot of times characters are very “I will sacrifice myself for my friends” but letting Lippmann also have “I will live to see my friends” is very very dear to me thank you thank you thank you) “In another world, maybe Piano Man is dying, right at this moment, rockets shrieking helpless dirges in the sky.” Is this a reference to IRL Morōi Saburō? I believe I recognize a similar theme from ¿was it one of the poems? you wrote? Ah, I checked, here are the lines: “and across the globe I tried to stop / a war you thought you’d die in / from banging down your door.” <333 “Maybe some part of them was born forty-five” I feel that in my soul 🥲 “They want to wake up next to him and brew strong coffee while he makes breakfast” the coffee!!! The world famous Lippmann coffee!!! /silly “then go out and pretend they haven’t all grown old inside before their times.” AaaaaaAAAAAWH 🙏 /vpos
*Wipes away my tears* Okay, Albatross time! Is this Albatross driving or a Beat driving I wonder. I love the description of the hot highway… hmmm, this leaves me with a lot of questions. I’m excited to see what happens! :D
That is Lippmann speaking, but fear not: she and Piano Man have just met and it’s only a reference to the beatniks in Blood Bath. I say she because that fic is genderbent, mostly because I found the thought of Piano Man growing up in an organization with male-dominated leadership and identifying as a woman but choosing a masculine alias anyway (is it so people will take her seriously? to catch them off guard? just a Billy Joel reference?), and the ways being a woman might impact Lippmann’s treatment in both jobs and by the public, interesting. The WIP, however, is a piece of cavity-level fluff which I mostly wrote in a short amount of time to try to beat writer’s block last Fall. I’m debating whether to rewrite it to be better/more serious, post it as it is, and/or post it and write a related, more serious fic
Penguin man is Piano Man and that is a very unserious AU where the Flags found a whole trove of Chuuya’s baby pictures instead of just one and it ends up saving them all
He’s an absolute menace, that’s who he is. IRL Kyougoku asked to be made a grandpa villain and he got his wish. BSD Kyougoku is wicked and entertaining and in a world where I read Gaiden before Stormbringer, he might have been one of the characters who took up the most space in my brain, along with Tsujimura, the other Tsujimura, and Ayatsuji. As for Peach Blossom, I’ve made at least three elaborations-to-the-point-of-almost-OCness on that character; this one is a mafia grandma, and she and Kyougoku will be causing so much chaos together
I thought you would like this one. The rockets are meant as a reference to Lippmann being described as a bomb which will go off when he dies and to Oda saying the bundle of supernotes he found on Dazai (which could have been made by Piano Man, who’s dead by then) is as dangerous as a nuclear warhead; they might also have been a reference to Moroi but I can’t remember. The parts about being born forty-five and growing old too soon are definitely projection on my part but also IRL Lippmann inspired and I think they fit
Albatross is driving the truck. Who’s riding the motorcycle shall remain mysterious for now
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 paragraph countdown from 5 different WIPs
5.
“I learned that on the set of Bloodbath 9.”
“The first eight bloodbaths didn’t do the trick?”
“There’s only one other, and I wasn’t in it. Blood Bath, 1966. Bloodbath 9 is a reimagining, of a sort, embracing the kitsch and Beat aesthetics of the original but incorporating more deliberate elements of surrealist film. Instead of just being so odd it’s unintentionally sort of surreal.”
“I know,” Piano Man says. “My favorite character is Antonia.”
Antonia was Lippmann’s character. Come to think of it, an artist who brutally disembowels people is almost too à propos.
4.
“Wait, wait, I’m forgetting myself. Come in for a moment, have a drink. I need to call Chuuya. You can look at his baby pictures while you wait, they’re hysterical. This four year old floating on the ceiling dressed like a penguin, except—“ he leaned in as if divulging a great secret “—penguins don’t fly.”
Whatever Verlaine had prepared himself for, it wasn’t this drunkenly hospitable man, who was dressed a bit like a penguin himself, inviting him in and offering him a glimpse at the childhood his little brother had lost too soon.
“Dressed like a penguin?”
“A penguin. Lippmann will show you, he has the pictures. It’s adorable.”
3.
“That one’s Hurt/Comfort,” orphan_account said, pointing at the wombat by Yuan. “The others are Title from an MCR Song and Destiel. Now, the rules. The rules are simple. When it’s time to start a new party game, the name and rules of the game will pop into one of your minds with fanfare and trumpets. The trumpets won’t go away until you tell everyone what it is and they’re very loud so I don’t think you’ll get away with ignoring them. When you’re asked a question, it will be impossible to lie or not answer, no matter how intrusive the question is, unless the game specifies that you can take a shot instead. I don’t know what’s in that bottle, so if you choose the shot, uh, good luck. You’ll also feel compelled to give extra-thorough answers when thematically appropriate even if that’s OOC. I mean, out of character.”
“We know what OOC means,” Kyougoku said from where he was sprawled out on a cliché psychologist’s chaise. Even Ayatsuji hadn’t recognized him yet because he had been aged down at least five decades and looked about twenty-three, but he would end up kissing the characters whose canon ages were closer to his during Spin the Bottle regardless.
“I don’t,” said Peach Blossom, who only had an Ability in canon, not a name or gender. She was in exciting new territory.
2.
They feel like they’ve kissed him a thousand times before, and maybe they have, somewhere, maybe they have, and they feel like sobbing because any moment they could run out of time. Lippmann has never been afraid of death, which made the risks associated with joining the mafia easier to swallow; has been more and more neutral on the idea of being alive as they’ve realized there’s not much higher they can rise and a very long way to fall and they already accomplished everything they came to, perhaps everything they can. But if Piano Man and their friends are to die for, then they must also be something to live for, and that could end at any second. In another world, it already has. In another world, maybe Piano Man is dying, right at this moment, rockets shrieking helpless dirges in the sky. It doesn’t feel like a new beginning, however much Lippmann wishes it could. Maybe some part of them was born forty-five, or maybe they’ve kissed too many people on the screen, lived too many alter egos’ happily ever afters and abject tragedies.
But they want to go home with Piano Man. They want to wake up next to him in the morning and brew strong coffee while he makes breakfast, then go out and pretend they haven’t all grown old inside before their times. They want to write him love letters. They want to try to be young and in love, to feel alive, to feel like the leaves and the rocks and the clouds are new.
Blue Grace chapter 2
Heat simmers on the highway, blipping into black pools which look like tar pits when he’s tired, what his boss McAuley calls fatamorganas. He can barely reach the peddles of the truck. The road is empty for miles ahead of him, miles behind him, until a dark purple Yamaha Ténéré 700 comes rumbling, soaring towards him, past him, its rider a blur of white and blue fabric and black plastic, face hidden by a helmet.
Reblogging because I realize I made a spectacularly bad mistake. Normally, I check the original French for precise wording, but I'd only checked another section when I posted this. In the original, it’s just men, not brothers, so unless Asagiri read that or another translation which takes the same liberties, it’s less likely to have inspired the brothers thing. I still think it’s interesting in regards to the parallels and contrasts in how Verlaine and Albatross treat Chuuya, though
what draws me to chuuya's work is this permeating sense of longing for what once was, and the underlying grief and fatigue accompanied with the realisation that it is forever lost. he didn't live very long, was only thirty when he died, but the trauma he experienced throughout his life aged him a lot, whether it was losing his brother at a young age, having his lover leave him for his best friend, the death of his father and then the death of his first son. and not to mention living through the first world war.
he is awake yet asleep, vital yet weary, but even in the depths of his despair there is an urge to carry on. consider the lines from these three poems
O expectation of mine, you old, dark air,
Be gone from me, be gone!
I entertain myself with nothing but my meager dreams
Poems of the Sheep
This earnest hope as well within that idleness
Was maybe all that ever awed me
O but even then, but even then,
I never thought I'd become that man who only dreams!
Exhaustion (III)
In other words, it's a problem of passion.
You - if from the depths of your heart are furious,
Then rage away!
The Call of Fate (III)[1]
they speak of vitality, of a bridling energy and desire to act, to be, to “suck the marrow out of life”[2]. he has dreams and ambitions and wants and believes that everything should be experienced and felt deeply. but it was always something out of reach, something that he could never touch. instead his lofty expectations became heavy, they became a burden, they became something that weighed him down. it’s hopelessly tragic and unbearably relatable.
some notes under the cut
[1] translation credits: Ry Beville, "Chūya Nakahara, Poems of the Goat, Bilingual Edition", (First Edition, Bright Wave Media, 2022). another translation of poems of the sheep (or sheep song) is by christian nagle and can be found here. it’s my favourite translation of the poem tbh.
[2] i’m borrowing this line from dead poet’s society, but it was originally said by philosopher henry david thoreau. the full quote goes
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…
i think the message behind the quote, and of the movie in general, echoes the sentiment that chuuya often shares. it’s nothing short of a tragedy to live a life unfulfilled
BSD AU where everything is the same but Higuchi has the ability to summon any weapon out of nowhere. on one notable occasion, she just whipped out an entire nuke
It’s pride month, Taliehoffbeck… You know what that means! ^^
(A-SPEC FLAGS HOORAY!!! Happy pride month Taliehoffbeck! Go be gay and merry in Paree 🙂↕️ /silly)
Huh
what
do you want me to make like
queer fanfiction
because if so that's sticking to our regularly scheduled programming
me telling myself I'm going to write and then barely writing anything but writing something else eventually. I am trying to work on that though
(A-SPEC FLAGS!!! Happy Pride, Serendipitousity, and a happy month in general! I took a picture of the Eiffel Tower for you and then added seven characters. They ended up so pixellated as to be almost indistinguishable but I tried)
