The second cour of
Bungou Stray Dogs has stayed with me for a while now and I really need to put forth some ideas about the show just to get it out of my system.. Igarashi and Enokido outdid themselves in how they approached the second cour, having adapted the light novel
Dazai Osamu And The Dark Era. It wasn't only an inspired decision but a brave one as this was the narrative equivalent of inserting the
Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuioku-hen OVA into the TV series just before he arrived in Kyoto. It's not that it's fundamentally different in execution and tone, it's because it dramatically alters the character of one of the principal cast members, giving weight to every action taken when before it could just be hand waved off as humorous eccentricity. The second cour doesn't just differ there as the Igarashi/Enokido duo took a relatively weak twenty chapters of manga and successfully bolstered the unambitious themes present during the fight with the Guild by using the light novel adaptation to frame events, effectively drawing out character drama that wasn't to be found in its original incarnation. In fact, the episode structure and thematic structure is so bizarre compared to traditional works that I felt compelled to make an image to better illustrate my feelings on how it's presented.
The first cour is what it is. Despite publication in a monthly seinen, it could be described as a battle shounen at heart since it indulges in introducing quirky characters with quirkier powers and letting the pendulum swing back and forth between action and comedy as hard as it possibly can. It's greatest strengths in relation to the second cour is the teasing of Dazai's past we're constantly made privy to, how little we actually learn, and Atsushi's personal journey in finding acceptance in the Agency even if he still doesn't think all that much about himself. That same journey is both the major theme of the show itself and any of the main characters since their respective personal tragedies had led them to the same place of isolation.
The adaptation of
Dazai Osamu And The Dark Era.
(adaptation differences may be found here) to open the second cour is a work where life is cheap and dreams are out of reach. The main character wants to someday become a writer but feels if he falls back into a life of killing, he'd be unworthy of such a noble pursuit. Among the Port Mafia, he's arguably the strongest yet also the least ambitious as life is only worth living due to the orphans he cares for and the dream he clings to. When something happens to the former, he abandons the latter in the name of revenge and resigns himself to death in doing so.
He's not the only one in this run of episodes that struggles to find meaning. Dazai reveals he joined the Port Mafia to see if it's dark world could show him a reason to live. The antagonists are a group of soldiers that were sold out by their home country and pursuing a battlefield worth dying on. Their leader had the same sort of precognition that Oda possessed and explicitly sought him out as there'd never be a even field for him to die on if he didn't.
The only ”winner" from all of this is Dazai who takes his friend's dying words to heart. It's depressing all around and going forward. From here on every soft look from Dazai, every wan smile from him, we no longer see the adept eccentric but a man haunted by the ghosts of his past.
We jump forward four years to present events and pick up where the war between the Armed Detective Agency, the Port Mafia, and the Guild is now underway. The pace of the story felt rushed so I reviewed the part of the manga that covered the second cour to find it too moved at a similarly rushed pace. It's a monthly manga so the chapters were fairly long yet never seemed to cover much. Instead it felt as if it was a series of loosely connected vignettes with just enough plot thread to lead from one encounter to another and this is reflected in the anime. Anything excised in the adaptation was either superfluous or distracted from the focus on the main characters. No doubt this was an artifact of trying to manage an overly large cast. It's largely the same save for the changes made to strengthen the connection to the first four episodes of the cour
Where it shines is the execution of theme running throughout. Both redemption and legacy are major themes of the second and any character introduced in this arc, or at the very least, important to the events at hand has ties with both. Sometimes they're strong, sometimes they're almost so loose to the point of being specious, yet when taken as a whole, they present an undeniable string of connections. I made another image to illustrate this with main/introduced players of the last eight eps (and botched the haphazard grid work but it'll suffice for the purposes of this thread.) It's presented in generalities to avoid too much story detail since that's largely unimportant in the end as the macguffin driving events is important to only one character with the lengths he was willing to go in order to achieve it it driving the rest.
Thankfully, the success of the overarching thematic work is a credit to Igarashi's experience and a great example of what adaptation to a different medium sometimes requires.
When we see Dazai hold a totem of his past, it stings because of how tightly Igarashi bound the events of today and those of four years prior.
When we see Akutagawa and Atsushi argue over self-worth, we readily recall the conversations of Oda and Dazai and how while Dazai could never understand Oda, Oda's friendship enabled him to understand Dazai. The plot threads aren't what tied the second cour together, it was the prevailing themes established in events four years prior that let us
see events as clearly as Dazai could at the end.
That's not to say the rest of it is all that bad. Igarashi storyboarded five different episodes (
13,
14,
15,
16, and
24), the first four eps have two single use versions of the OP (
1,
2) mixed in with those episodes, and good direction allowing for the original work to be improved. One example is adpating
sterile manga panels so they become
exciting segues into title cards. Action is consistently entertaining with the powers growing stranger as events progress, evoking the sensibility of Stand fights present in the
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure franchise. It's by no means a perfect show but I haven't had one absorb my attention so entirely since
Concrete Revolutio last year.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ending but something kept bothering me as if I'd missed some sort of important element of it. For the next day or two after finishing the show, I'd go over the final episodes in my head, sometimes even making time to watch selected scenes, to discern what I was overlooking. My mind kept coming back to this exchange, one not present in the manga and one that bolsters the thematic elements of the show as laid down by the first four episodes of this cour.
Suddenly, it clicked for me. The language Dazai uses is exclusionary. There's no ‘we' or ‘our', it's entirely Atsushi's success. He's distancing himself from Atsushi's accomplishments as if they were not his own but why? I gave this further thought and arrived at the following: Dazai's role in events wasn't to save Yokohama even if it was a consequence of his true goal.
When Dazai told Taneda he wanted a job where he could help people he didn't necessarily mean the general populace. That was something the other gifted of the world could fight to do.
When Hirotsu asked him why he loved Yokohama,, his sidestepped the answer with something again absent from the original manga. The people he wanted to save were those other outcasts of society, those like him with a past steeped in blood and who could only be understood by someone that had also existed in that same realm. He was there to save the Atsushis, the Akutagawas, and the Kyoukas of the world since the loss of Oda was because Oda felt he no longer had the right to live and that pain had never left Dazai. While Yokohama was there for Atsushi, Akutagawa, and Kyouka to protect, those three were there for him to save.
We need look no further than
Yasuomi Umetsu's ED for proof.
In an interview regarding the first cour's ED, he wanted to express the relationship of the main characters through it, describing such as his thoughts on the title in a condensed fashion. It's plain to see the same is present here. After the opening shots of Yokohama, we have the form of Akutagawa laid bare before us, upside down to illustrate how he sees his place in the world. We watch the pain of his heart spread to every fiber of his being as an illustration of both his slowly failing health and the pain he feels at being separate from Dazai. From here, we're given quick cuts of all those important to Dazai in the final act. Each shares the same trait of the bloodstained face as a representation of their own lives and the lives each has taken.
Akutagawa and Atsushi are then presented together, a stark contract to Umetsu's first cour ED that focused on the isolation of the two. Visible friction exists between the two rivals which is recognized by the spark in Dazai's eye before his attention is called away.. The fluttering pages from the first ED return but now Dazai is the one that is isolated from the rest. He's not a man with scars but a man still grievously wounded from the loss of his friend so many years prior hence the necessity of the bandages that's part of his costume design. He's forever injured by Oda's death. Despite this, the bandages begin to unravel and find both Akutagawa and Atsushi as reaching out to them with his own pain is what's necessary for him to mend the wounds of the past. Akutagawa is unable to hold onto his before Atsushi finds himself haunted by the specter of Akutagawa as the pages of the world burn around him. Unafraid, Atsushi reaches out to grab one and his initiative is rewarded with the return of normalcy. Pages fall around him as if celebatory confetti and so he takes Dazai's loose bandage in his hand, having done his part in helping Dazai remove one.
Another contrast against the first ED emerges as Dazai extends his hand to touch Akutagawa.
In the first ED, Dazai reaches out to Akutagawa but his hand fades before he can reach him.
Later in the same ED, Akutagawa is shown sinking beneath the water and a single tear of blood is shed as he resigns himself to fate. The second ED differs as Dazai's hand finally reaches Akutagawa and his raging soul is pacified. The single bloody tear rolling down his cheek loses its color, becoming transparent like a real tear, as the anger on his face dissipates, leaving only long sought relief.
The ED closes with a shot of Dazai staring at the sun, guarding his face with his hand. Light and darkness is an important theme of Kyouka's character due to the long running assertion that a flower born in darkness can only be at ease in darkness. Like everyone else featured in the ED, Dazai was a born into this darkness yet now he can look into the light with a weak smile upon his face. It's a symbol of hope and It's not until here that we can fully appreciate the poignancy of the show's title as well as the irony of Osamu Dazai authoring a scenario where the stray dogs of society, bereft of both hope and a future, are given a chance to prove that they are, in fact, not disqualified from being human.
