Oh my god, can we talk about the color symbolism here? I love season 4 so much already. All the organizations have certain colors dedicated to them: the Guild is yellow, the Agency is turquoise, the Port Mafia is a mix of red and that light purple/fuchsia, the Decay is dark blue, Hunting Dogs are white, Special Division kind of copper or brown, and everyone in between has a mix of colors that show whose side they’re on or whose they’ve been on in the past. Perhaps the intensity of the color also shows the characters’ morality/state of mind like how Harukawa does their eyes in the manga?
Yosano is mainly turquoise (her membership with the Agency) but has streaks of the light fuchsia associated with the mafia because of her past with Mori.
Kyouka, like Yosano, also has a bit of emphasized pink/red colors because of her previous alliance with the mafia.
What’s interesting though is that unlike Yosano and Kyouka, Dazai has no remnants of the mafia’s colors in his picture. Maybe to symbolize how all his previous history was erased? And for you Tanizaki theorists out there, this is a stretch but he’s also not as deeply turquoise as the rest of the Agency. Could this be foreshadowing of him being the one to join the mafia after this whole situation is over?
Tachihara is definitely white with the Hunting Dogs, but also definitely has a layer of the mafia red in there cause like Hirotsu said, he is mafia among mafia. He can’t escape either part of himself so he is more a blend of the two colors.
Chuuya and Akutagawa are a deep red, mafia through and through. They’ve never known any other organization, so it’s interesting to see them compared to the Black Lizard group and even Mori.
Poe is fully deep turquoise like Kunikida, Fukuzawa, Aya, Katai, and Kenji. It seems they’re saying he is officially an honorary Agency member. I say honorary because he still seems to be getting paid by the Guild (or at least is still using his earnings from them since they disbanded?) according to what he says to Ranpo in Ch. 54/S4E4.
Considering Poe, Lucy’s portrait color is weird because she helps out the Agency now but still retains the yellow of the Guild. She is more aligned with the Agency and Atsushi now, so it’s strange to me she doesn’t have even a hint of turquoise.
What’s funny is Mushitarou’s portrait is copper like Ango and Taneda’s are. He’s not really willingly a Decay member since he doesn’t participate in the rest of their schemes, and Ango offers him a job with the Special Division later in the manga if I’m not mistaken. Ranpo also kinda guides him in that direction too after he’s caught in the Perfect Crime arc.
Though a lot of the characters’ alliances are pretty solid with one or more organizations, a few still don’t quite fit in with the rest of the group based on the saturation. If we’re assuming that the intensity of the color mirrors the character’s aspirations the lighter it is, and their mental state the deeper it is, then some things fall into place for characters like Dazai, Fyodor, Ango, Mushitarou, Kenji, Tanizaki, Lucy, Sigma, and Mori. These shots are all probably varied by a moving background and illuminated letters, but I think this condition could still apply.
tl;dr Bungou Stray Dogs has such a wide cast of characters, especially involved in this season, and I love color symbolism a lot.
“Every person wants time, needs time when they can be alone. They need a world that only they know about. Without that, nobody can go on living. That is what our minds are. As long as we don’t express thoughts out loud, nobody will know of them, right?”
—
Ōkura Teruko, “Devil Woman” from Gensen: Volume 2: Selected Stories in Modern Japanese Literature
This might be the shortest chapter we ever had? At this point I guess I will end up writing every single thing here xD
As usual, please understand that I don't speak English or Japanese as my first language so I may make some mistakes here and there.
SPOILERS AHEAD
After hearing the real purpose of the Decays of Angel, Atsushi can't decide if stopping it is the right thing to do, so he struggles inside his head because it is something he can't decide on his own.
He seems to hear words from other members of the Agency in his head, saying things like why can't he get such a simple thing (Ranpo), that failure is not acceptable (Kunikida), and that he doesn't need to do anything (Kyouka). He then sees a vision of Fitzgerald who says noone is expecting anything from him.
Lastly, Akutagawa appears and when Atsushi is thinking what kind of words he would hear from him, Akutagawa tells him to look outside. Atsushi looks at the door Teruko opened there for him, and sees Dazai pointing his way out of it, with a serious face.
Atsushi makes up his mind and leaves the room. Teruko tells him not to, but he ignores her, thinking that not knowing what to do is not the right reason not to do anything. He has to go and report it to Fukuzawa. Just like that, he leaves the room, the guards try to stop him but Teruko tells them to let him go.
Back in Mersault, Dazai and Sigma are playing rock paper scissors. Sigma is mad because he cannot win even once. Dazai tells him that its all because of his "tension" and his "timing", that the tension of his arm, his look can reveal his next move, and also one can plant the next move onto the opponent without them knowing by their own gestures. And that with enough practice, even Sigma will be able to do that.
Sigma tells Dazai he is glad Dazai is not a customer in his casino. Dazai then tells Sigma that he must have understood now, that everything is just a trick, and Dazai is not someone beyond human or anything. In this world, there exists no super, nor ordinary human.
The chapter ends here. Next one will come out on February 3rd (Japan time)
We finally got a new chapter name! "Drifting Underwater"
Things went really fast in this chapter and a lot of new information has just been thrown in I need some time to proceed it but Dazai is so consistently crazy and messed up and in-character and somehow it makes me feel good XD
Note that neither English nor Japanese is my mother tongue so I do make mistakes here and there. Please let me know if there is anything you want me to correct.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Sigma asks Dazai what he is going to do against such a strong opponent like Chuuya, and Dazai tells him its is okay because he has been thinking about ways to kill Chuuya everyday over the last seven years, and also he is getting help from "angel". Sigma understands that he is talking about his help from outside, to which Dazai says Sigma is pretty sharp for a three-year old.
Dazai then explains to Sigma how he uses his heartbeat to communicate with Ango. Sigma tells him that he is a liar and it is just a part of the truth, because if that's the case, it is just one-way communication. Dazai then asks Sigma to guess what he uses, and that if he guesses it right, it means he is better than Fyodor. Sigma then starts to think about very seriously and Dazai thinks to himself how honest Sigma is and that he is just like Atsushi.
Sigma suddenly remembers the situation they are in and reminds Dazai that they have to break out of that prison before Fyodor. Dazai tells him that they don't have to because he is going to kill Fyodor within the time of the game.
Meanwhile, as Fyodor enters the passcode to open a door, the system shows an error and an alarms goes off, locking all the doors around him and Chuuya (even though he seems to have opened all the previously doors swiflty). Water starts pouring into the room. All the doors are built to deal with special skills so even Chuuya cannot destroy it easily, and once the operation starts it can not be cancelled.
Dazai and Sigma finally reaches the central control room and Dazai just casually opens the door, which freaks Sigma out because he expects to see a bunch of prison guards inside that. But as the door opens, what Sigma sees is a bunch of bodies, and everyone has been brought down. He asks Dazai what he did because the door just opened now. and Dazai told him that he has "stopped the time", which confused Sigma even more because that is not even Dazai's ability. Dazai then goes on and explains that this prison gathers a lot of ability users, and one of them is the world's most dangerous bandit. Her ability allows her to stop the time for everyone but herself, within a few kilometres around her. Ango has negotiated with her in exchange to reduce her sentence, and have her stop the time in the prison every morning, for an amount of time that Ango has decided beforehand.
Sigma thinks that what Dazai says doesn't make sense, because even if that prisoners stop the time, she cannot escape, and the people whose time were stopped wouldn't even realize it. Then he realizes that Dazai has the nullification ability, which means when the time stops for everyone in the prison, he is the only one that can freely move around. And that is when he comes and knocks down the guards who cannot move because their times are stopped. He states that it is easier than knocking down a sleeping monkey. That is also the answer to Sigma's question, the method Ango uses to communicate with Dazai. It's the amount of time stopped everyday that was used as a signal for Dazai to decode. By doing that, there is noone but Dazai that can receive it.
Dazai turns on the radio and talks to Fyodor inside the room. He asks if Fyodor is ready to die, and Fyodor replies that he cannot kill him. Dazai finds that it is interesting, because he knows Chuuya's ability is useless against this. So there is only Fyodor's ability left, which he assumed that cannot do anything about this situation either (that's why he chose this trap). Fyodor doesn't react to that, but he makes a very serious face.
Dazai stays quiet for a moment and tells Chuuya that it is also time for them to part. And it is such a pity things become like that. He says that it has been 7 years since they met and even though they are fighting all the time, there were moments when they were connected at heart, for examples... (We were shown a bunch of skk flashbacks in the past here). Dazai pauses there and in the next page, smiles nonchalantly and says actually there was no such moment and watches Chuuya disappearing under the water.
The chapter ends here and at this point I am so convinced that we are going to know Fyodor's ability in the next chapter and I cannot wait for it. Next chapter will come out on June 3, 2022.
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