kagekachou | Journey to the Past: De-Aging and Related Matters

It's rather after the fact, but I wasn't really able to follow up on re-aging Tatsumi as I would have liked to, what with performances and moving out and such. So why not essay, I say.

I tend to joke about Tatsumi being a grown-up Kyouya. So when I was preparing to de-age him, it was quite tempting to use Kyouya icons. In the end, though, I managed to exercise some restraint and decided against it. Looking back, it was an even better decision that I realized, because it helped to avoid some unnecessary dissonance that might have occurred. Because despite the quite numerous superficial similarities that Kyouya and Tatsumi have at their normal ages, ickle Tatsumi is very much not a Kyouya. Normal Tatsumi has the power and cool collectedness that Kyouya does, but he also has a shitload of life/afterlife experience. And young Tatsumi had none of the power. Can we see the potential conflicts here.

It can be easy (for me, at least) to forget that Tatsumi is 88 years old (non-canonically -- the reasonable age range for him is probably 80-96). As they say, shinigami age amazingly well. 8D My personal approach regarding YnM shinigami is something of a ghostlike, arrested development approach – they’re shinigami because for some reason, they couldn’t let go. Not to say that character development doesn’t exist, because it does, but for me, the fact that Tatsumi has been a shinigami for over fifty years means that he hasn’t journeyed a great distance from where he was personally when he died (or at least not at a speed faster than that of the tectonic plates). So, you get a strange combination of young and old. (Random drabble pimping: Maturity by

wordsofastory.)

There was at least one instance of OOC surprise with my version of de-aged Tatsumi. If you're familiar with Tatsumi just from the anime – well! The nice thing about the anime is that it has pretty eyes, consistant character designs and a more streamlined storyline without horribly conflicting with the manga canon. There are some things here and there (one which I remember Hisoka mentioning), but on a whole, the two fit together pretty well.

However, the main thing that the anime loses is: backstory.

Unfortunately, the anime did not lose enough backstory for there to be any large amount of coherency in the manga regarding some backstory issues. ~~Damn you, Matsushita.~~

Nevertheless.

Here’s a few dates, just to pin things down, because I like doing that. Non-canon things are in italics.

Ye Olde Timeline
2 February 1900: Tsuzuki is born.
27 December 1910: Tatsumi is born.
1918: Tatsumi's father leaves.
1926: Tsuzuki dies
1927: This is the point from which I took de-aged!Tatsumi.
1928: Tatsumi's mother dies.
1940-1941: Tatsumi dies; Tsuzuki and Tatsumi are partners for three months; Tatsumi requests to end the partnership; begins working as Shokan Division secretary.
18 April 1953: Watari is born.
1977: Watari dies.
10 October 1980: Hisoka is born.
1996 or 1997: Hisoka dies.
Spring 1998: Bookverse Arc
Winter 1998 or 1999: Kyoto Arc
Spring-Summer 1999: Hisoka, Tsuzuki and Tatsumi leave YnM world for CFUD.

Why don't we start with the time period.

In Chapter 52 of the Gensoukai Arc, Tatsumi says to himself: "I am a person who can trust no one but myself. It's not that I think highly of myself. It was the way of living in that time. I trust neither country nor other people!!" Ahaha, whoa. XD So, some of his being a suspicious little bastard came from that.

(Moving beyond where I'd taken him when he was de-aged, I'm open to the possibility of his having been involved with the military at some point in his life, despite that (or perhaps because of that -- getting a look from the inside and all). That would certainly help explain his thought during his little breakdown in Volume Five of the manga that "I've taken the lives of thousands." Given the times in which he was living, that could easily be taken at face value as applying to his life, the short period of his afterlife when he was an active shinigam or a combination of the two. Given how practical Tatsumi is about most things, I'm inclined toward believing that most of whatever the hell he's talking about happened while he was alive.)

Let's move onto family, hm?

In Volume 5 of the manga, Tatsumi tells Hisoka: "My mother had royal blood. She was always a lady in every sense of the word. So it was a shock when she eloped with my father. Then my little sister and I were born. My well-bred mother had no idea how to manage a home. As a child, I remember thinking that I had to take care of her."

From this, I'm assuming that when his mother eloped, she took a sizeable step down the social ladder, perhaps falling off it almost completely. The severity of Tatsumi's penny-pinching ways, which clash with how classily he can present himself, suggests to me that money was definitely an issue. And how that is the only mention of his father ever and how he felt like he had to care for his mother, I'm making the assumption that his father either died or left when Tatsumi was relatively young. Given Tatsumi's way of dealing with problems, I decided to have had his father leave. Which only made this prickly teenager more angry.

Family issues also are why I fully support Dee adopting Tatsumi. Tatsumi has been taking care of himself and others for a long time, with varying degrees of success. Though he denies it, he needs someone to take care of him every once in a while. SOMEBODY BE THIS BOY'S DADDY. 8D

Regarding being prickly and angry... Well, we all know that Tatsumi is prickly normally. XD But I do think that age has mellowed him -- or rather, time has let him fall into some pretty deep ruts.

...Humans, as they grow older, think too much. Sometimes I envy the young like Kurosaki-kun. I envy that power to follow through on one's thoughts.

YnM, Volume 8, p. 160

I like to think that this means that Tatsumi was once different from how he is now. And that maybe he regrets the change.

A final note on his rashness. While Bookverse events are basically canon fanfic with a questionable author, the actions of of Tatsumi's Bookverse counterpart, the Steward, do present interesting possibilities. If he feels that he has to, the Steward will kill to bring his plans to fruition. Not only that, but he'll do it with a smile. Until this volume, Tatsumi was Cool & Collected Mr. Exposition Man, whose freak-outs were budget-related comic relief. (Actually, until this volume, Tatsumi was basically exposition and comic relief, but.) I don't doubt that Tatsumi would love to tear Muraki to pieces. Yes, he tries to deny the fact that he's a woobie, but I think he also tries to deny this darker streak inside of him. Because, hey. He's a decent guy. But for the sake of people he ~~fixates on~~ cares about, he's willing to take drastic action that might involve people getting hurt.

And because no Tatsumi essay would be complete without one, here's the Tsuzuki section.

Compared to the childhoods of, say, Tsuzuki or Hisoka, Tatsumi's wasn't that bad. Not very happy, but a relatively non-shocking mix of familial dysfunction, a broken home, financial difficulties and, somewhere in the distance, political tension. The rest of his life, as I imagine it, was probably much the same: not very happy, but nothing that would make you go "omg what?!"

Then, he died. And was partnered with Tsuzuki. And omg what.

But what if it wasn't omg what.

De-aged!Tatsumi's interactions with Tsuzuki were basically my big "fuck you" to all of Matsushita's backpedaling (i.e. gaygaygaygay J/K IT'S MOTHER ISSUES RLY), which I incorporate as Tatsumi just having... issues. XD In the end, we did get the Tsuzuki/mom mix again, with those being de-aged!Tatsumi's two reasons for taking off. But as Tsuzuki-mun said in her essay meme, "Tsuzuki has, I think, always assumed that his relationship with Tatsumi came about through a series of unique coincidences. Knowing that Tatsumi could have liked him and maybe come to care about him without the baggage of their pasts surprised him. Maybe pleased him." Tatsumi also had assumptions: that while he did (does) genuinely care for Tsuzuki, he attributed a lot of it to, well, things that were not-Tsuzuki. This forced him to consider that just maybe the biggest factor was that he actually just likes Tsuzuki, and the baggage played its biggest role in all of the subsequent fucking up. Which makes him feel a little funny. A little regretful, a little relieved, a little helpless, a little at peace.

Overall, the de-aging opened him up some to Francescu (I loved the butterfly bit and wish I could provide a scan of when Tatsumi talks about the fireflies but I'm not on my home computer) and Dee, and settled some Tsuzuki things, even if they do feel a little weird to him right now. Practically speaking, both Dee and Bailey have a clue that we aren't dealing with normal humans here because he gave them a date (1927).

And Tatsumi is just glad that it's over. XD