Ashiya Douman - Tumblr Posts
Almost forgot to post this today.
His hair is a god damn nightmare.
(cagliostro voice) douman, my dear fellow, what is that weird hackerman glove you're putting on
Me when I must return to the capital and curse death upon Seimei
Based on this post
“This is Ashiya Douman. Clap if you like Ashiya Douman. Okay, Okay. Not very many claps. Yeah, they look a bit pale don’t they? A little sick. This is their master. Aren't they cute! Their master’s hair is just adorable, look at that pigtail, oh and their master’s little outfit. Clap if you like her outfit…Anyways, they were all held hostage by the fairies and the other hostage, Mash, is presumed dead.”
just a comic about that really cute scene on sei’s interlude
Fate/Grand Order Unofficial Book - Sake Book
Chapter 5 - Douman and Tamagozake
Translated as a gift for my friends over at the Douman discord server.
PS.
Do not repost, thank you!
and aren't i my worst enemy?
i was looking through my old art files and man i never DID post this comic i made when heian-kyo dropped, did i. this is such old art but man, the emotions fate/grand order makes you feel about a whole clown. nothing like it
douman summary:
- animal (large cat/polar bear/orca)
- ik he's gender:unknown and in his case i parse that less as he/they and more as he/it
- trained itself to behave properly in order to receive chunks of meat; intimately familiar with etiquette but will still eat any idiot that wanders into the enclosure out of opportunistic instinct
- not necessarily suited to be an onmyouji but huge and buff enough (and clawed enough) to compensate for any lack of talent. can you imagine if it had decided to seek power through something less detail-oriented and reliant on rules as onmyoudou? if it had chosen animalistic violence instead?
- chose the path of adhering to strict rules because it has something to prove through the refined approach, so it humbly requests that you stay out of the enclosure and do not place your head in its jaws
- would probably blush if you listed all this out
realest imageset on earth btw
you could stick your fingers in his mouth just to watch his eyes bug out while he tries not to chomp em. and afterwards he will politely request that you operate with more restraint in the future so that you don't die, because if he were to snap and bite down in that instant he would probably immediately start eating the rest of you too.
no matter how excited he gets [with you close to him] you don't really need to be afraid. it's when his face loses all expression in the middle of whatever you're doing that he's about to bite your head off without realizing it.
sorry what were we talking about
“ashiya douman is evil for the sake of being evil”
yes! but also…..very much no.
(heian-kyo and very mild out of context paper moon spoilers abound below)
i think what i find sometimes among fate/go players is treating ashiya douman As It Says On The Tin; they’re a nuisance, a monstrous soul, a giddy evil jester happy to spread their malice to cause harm to human beings. and yes, as it stands, that’s exactly their role. even nasu states in an interview that douman was created to be a negative force to push the lostbelt kings a little to serve the plans of the foreign god as her Apostle. the man was told “be amusingly evil” and boy, did they live up to the task!
but to stop at just the interpretation of “oh, guy is EVIL that’s all, time to wrap it up and go home boys” completely misses the true complexity lying behind the surface, and whitewashes a key point repeated time and time again in heian-kyo.
douman….or rather, limbo (and the distinction is important!) is an alter ego. limbo is a shadow. limbo is a part of the whole. limbo is an aspect, a silhouette of humanity, a piece, a caricature. xu fu even goes into detail of the nature of alter egos here:
limbo is an alter ego, which means if you take the whole of ashiya douman and write them off as “evil for the sake of doing evil”, you are more than happy to stare at the shadow at the back of the cave without wanting to turn around. heian-kyo is more than unsubtle about this point. for where, does it ask, that resentment come from? where does that malice originate? when guda and the others meet the living douman (even if it is limbo, hiding in plain sight), the man they meet is not a overly hammy evil clown but a mild-mannered, sincerely humble monk. and it is seimei….yes, that seimei, the great nemesis, the one limbo spits at and hates with every fiber of their being, who makes the distinction over and over again that limbo and ashiya douman are distinct.
“but living douman also wanted to do evil for the sake of evil!” are you sure? this is a man who we see in a brief moment want to end his own life with no real hesitation because he was deeply appalled by the nature of his own evil in the form of limbo.
and then, if we really want to go down to brass tacks, even if we make a distinction between limbo and douman, with writing off limbo as the monstrous form of a human’s resentment and evil, is LIMBO really evil for the sake of evil? time and time again, we see limbo do things that seem so contrary as to be suspect. douman finds and fixes danzou up, claiming that they are doing so as to make her suffer more by giving her memories of her son, but without limbo, danzou would’ve continued to be a cold unfeeling broken machine with no recollection of what mattered to her most. in nagiko’s interlude, guda even calls limbo out for acting as a nuisance to actually help her and raikou resolve their differences. is that “evil for the sake of being evil”?
this isn’t to say that limbo isn’t evil at all. this isn’t even to say douman, as tragic as they are, isn’t evil in his own way, either. but the truth is more complicated. in the end, limbo and douman are just….human. flawed and horribly human, even if one is an aspect of a person. to write them off as some grand evil with nothing more to it is to make the same mistake that history did. douman was the nemesis of seimei, so he had to be evil. of course he’s evil. there’s nothing more. ignore the man crying at the edge of a cliff for all his sins and vices and flaws, hm? there’s nothing more. there’s nothing more. there’s nothing more-
Fufu. Even if I am in the guise of a Heroic Spirit, I am still the shadow monk of humanity. But I suppose that’s no different than what it means to be human.
