zephyrsus:

Heiwajima Shizuo is a man of black and white.

I’m not talking about his bartender suit. I’m talking about his mindset.

Bad guys are bad, good guys are good.

Children are innocent.

Hitting a girl is bad.

Violence is bad.

Gambling is bad, so all people who gamble should be beaten up.

Shinra is a nutjob.

Celty is my good friend.

Tom-san is my senpai who gave me a job, so I’m indebted to him.

Varona is my kouhai, so she cannot be a bad person.

Izaya is a shitty flea who ruins my peace, so I hate him.

Shizuo sees the world in black and white – in terms of absolutes.

These staunch beliefs serve to compose Shizuo’s world.

Going from sweeping statements to making perceptions –

The girl who attacked me is just a kid, she’s innocent, there must have been someone else behind this.

Violence is bad, people don’t want to hang around me because I’m violent, kids didn’t want to play with me because I’m violent, violence hurts people, violence is bad – I use violence, I’m bad. I’m a monster.

I want peace. I can’t have peace because of my violence. I hate violence.

I hate violence, but I’m the one who’s always violent – I hate myself.

-          And so on. Shizuo’s beliefs grow to become his perceptions.

Shizuo’s skill is his deduction.

Not his strength. His strength isn’t a skill. It’s something he was born with.

Shizuo’s skill is his deduction –

Because he forms his perceptions through his various beliefs.

He deduces, through his beliefs, what is the most likely possibility and from that his perception is formed.

- Did he kill those three men? …Not likely.

- There’s no way that Izaya would have had strong enough arms to kill those three men bare-handed like that. First of all, why on earth would he want to make such total enemies of the Awakusu-kai folks in the first place?

- If he didn’t do it himself, then he must have gotten the information beforehand that someone else was going to do it and tricked me into going there on purpose…

- Durarara Volume 6

 

Izaya doesn’t have strong enough arms to kill three men bare-handed, Izaya wouldn’t want to make enemies of the Awakusu-kai –

Most likely Izaya didn’t kill the three men.

If he didn’t kill the three men, he should have known someone else was going to do it.

If he knew someone else was going to do it, he must have gotten the information beforehand.

And so on. It’s all very logical thinking through pure deduction. And since it was Mikiya who hired Slon to kill the three men and Izaya knew about it, Shizuo came to the correct conclusion.

Because Shizuo said in SH that he wrote in his elementary school graduation anthology that he wanted to be a detective, it could be that he was aware of his skill of deduction from young.

“Look, all it means that when I lose it, it’s ‘cause things make no sense. If there was any logic to it, then I wouldn’t get pissed even if I got shot or stabbed.”

He says it to himself to Varona. He loses it when things make no sense – which means things must make sense to him. Which means he relies on logic and reason.

What does this have to do with Shizuo’s black and white mindset?

It has to do with the forming of his perceptions being constructed through logic and reason.

I hate violence, but I’m the one who’s always violent – I hate myself.

And it’s true. He’s the one who is most violent of all even though he hates violence, and thus it’s only reasonable for him to hate himself.

And it because it’s reasonable, because his perception of himself as someone to be hated is formed through logic and reason which makes sense to him, he cannot reject it. 

Because rejecting it would mean rejecting his own deduction.

And this is exactly why Shizuo hates, and has continued to hate Izaya for years and will not entertain any thought of Izaya having one bit of good in him even if Shinra says it – because it goes against his black and white perception and his deduction.

More importantly – Izaya has done nothing to change Shizuo’s perception. He acts exactly like the shitty flea Shizuo thinks he is, manipulating humans and doing other shitty things, taunting Shizuo, getting people Shizuo cares about involved. He basically just proves Shizuo’s deduction.

If he had done something – tried to get along with Shizuo, or show weakness in front of him, Shizuo could have changed his mind about him.

Because Shizuo cannot reject his own deduction of Izaya as a shitty flea.

So if the shitty flea shows weakness, Shizuo knows it’s real, but logic tells him it can’t be, his perception of Izaya will become all jumbled up and he might even blame himself.

Because if shitty fleas don’t show weaknesses, but the shitty flea is showing weakness, and that weakness is real, but Izaya is a shitty flea but he’s showing such weakness in front of him –

It is for once not the shitty flea’s fault but his.

He must have done something so bad that even Izaya the shitty flea cannot hold back a display of weakness.

When his black and white perception is invaded by a hint of grey, Shizuo begins to doubt and reconsider.

But Izaya has yet to show any sort of weakness in front of Shizuo, and so Shizuo continues to hate him.

The issue is – Shizuo is a creature of deduction.

If manipulation is Izaya’s game, deduction is Shizuo’s.

Because Shizuo is just as independent – if not more, than Izaya.

Izaya is all alone, no one wants to have hotpot with him, he’s so lonely he talks to himself, etc. Even back then he was a distant kid.

Izaya is envious of Shizuo for having friends when he doesn’t.

But Shizuo has been alone too.

Shizuo isn’t like Izaya.

He didn’t choose to go on his own path and live a life different from a normal human’s.

He was forced out of the path of a normal human’s because of his monstrous strength.

Out of nowhere – when he was just a normal kid albeit with a temper, he suddenly gains this monstrous strength and becomes violent and scares everyone away and gets shunned by society.

It’s like you were normal, accepted by the other kids in the early years of your life, then suddenly when you reach elementary school people start bullying and shunning you for something you didn’t even know how it happened. And you gain such a bad reputation people shun you even in middle school and high school and no one wants to be friends with you because they see you as a monster.

That kind of psychological impact is big.

Izaya wasn’t excluded from society. Girls worshipped him in high school. His classmates in middle school thought he was nice. His sisters probably loved him since their parents were overseas. He was just a loner by nature. And once he embarked on his own path and was willing to do horrible things for his own personal desires – only then did people reject him.

But Shizuo was excluded from society from the start. People saw him as a monster, they were scared of him, he grew to believe he was a monster – and he isolated himself from society.

Considering this, what would Shizuo do?

Observation.

But not like Izaya.

Shizuo observes differently from Izaya.

If Izaya observes from the outside looking in, Shizuo observes from the inside because no one wants to be with him even though he’s in the same place as them.

So Shizuo observes, because there’s no one to teach him (Shinra doesn’t count, since the first thing he said is that he wanted to dissect Shizuo), because he’s already troubling his family with the hospital bills, because the last time he loved, he hurt the person with his violence.

So he observes, and deduces on his own through logic and reason,                 forming his own rules and perceptions – and that’s probably been his way of life as he’s lived independently for many years.

This may have led to his black and white thinking since he needs a basis, a firm foundation for himself as he had no one to lean onto or seek help from.

Though it turns out to be bad, like Shizuo beats up anyone who pisses him off, like ‘people who piss me off deserve to be beaten up’ – 

It’s something that has been with him throughout his life, which makes it hard for people to convince him otherwise.

However, Shizuo is open to consideration.

He has grown.

His character has developed.

He has learnt to not only care for himself as he had to, having been alone and independent, but to consider others’ feelings as well.

Kujiragi.

Varona.

Reason.

Because despite Shizuo’s black and white thinking –

Shizuo doesn’t judge.

He perceives.

It’s important to note the distinction.

In simple terms, judging is forming a conclusion, while perception is just understanding or interpreting in a certain way.

They’re similar, but I see perceiving as an attempt to understand, while judging is more of a solid definition.

Of course Shizuo judges from his perception such as how gamblers deserve to be beaten up because all gamblers are bad, but for example if he met a gambler who is not bad, or if someone he knew like Tom turned to out be a gambler in the past, his perception would change and he would revoke his judgment.

And that’s what happened with Kujiragi and Varona.

For Kujiragi, Shizuo matured enough to hold back his judgment. He asked her and Seitarou what they wanted with Celty – when in the past he would have beaten the bad guys up without caring about reasons of any sort.

“I get your drift. You guys have your reasons, I guess.”

Of course in the end he threw the piece of wall at her, but he still told Kujiragi that he’s made trouble for Celty and she heard him out and now it’s his turn to listen to her –

Shizuo tried to communicate with Kujiragi, even though she was the ‘bad guy’.

Because she had her reasons, even though they were just commercial, and she was honest with him.

And so he was honest back to her, treating her like a person rather than just a ‘bad guy’.

He allowed his perception to change, because he held back his judgment on her.

Izaya doesn’t have reasons of any sort.

‘I love humans’?

Shizuo doesn’t understand that.

Because Shizuo doesn’t understand love.

Especially not for the humans who shunned them both.

Izaya makes no sense to Shizuo.

Shizuo can’t understand Izaya.

Which is why Shizuo hates him.

Shizuo hates things that make no sense, that he can’t understand.

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