THREAD: This is a thread I wanted to do for awhile but a thread about my favorite decadent delinquent, Ango Sakaguichi. Contains some notes about his design and some fun facts because...I love Ango.

As stated before, I'll be taking about his design in bsd and then proceed to unload all of my Ango fun facts. I'm sorry (not really).

A lot of my bsd!ango knowledge is from the anime and movie, my apologiess,,,

also this thread is long, im sorry!!

It's only right to begin things off with a comparison and its the most obvious one: physical looks!

In BSD, Ango looks extremely similar to the irl author. He even has his mole and the same glasses! I think that this element is nice and I enjoy it a lot!

A quick fun-fact here: irl ango was quite physically active. He enjoyed sports, such as judo, and spent his time swimming, if he was drafted in the war and the fear that his ship might sink. A cold winter bath almost killed him due to the training in his hometown's waters.

Now, with that comparison out of the way, let's get to the bulk of this thread. This is Ango's personality in the bsd wikia page. And it is known that he works as a government worker in the series.

irl ango was not like his bsd counterpart. he was actually the opposite.

The Buraiha, also known as the Three Ravens or Decadence School, were writers who often criticized the standards of Japan during ww2, the "bad boys" of Japanese literature due to their subject matter and their decadent lifestyles.

And boy howdy, was Ango decadent.

Ango was known for his delinquent attitude. In his youth, he got into fights so bad that his mother would lock him out the house when she saw him in rags. He lived off stimulants and alcohol. He preferred sexual women. And he was a slob, as shown in this famous photo of him.

another fun fact: ango refused to clean up the corpses of bugs in his home, preferring for them to rot in nature. however some corpses were in areas that would create more of a mess so he never touched them.

he once had his whole house covered in ddt to kill bugs!

He was known for his scandals, such as mudslinging with politicians, just as much as he was known for his essays and short stories. He was a massive procrastinator and hated deadlines.

Also, Ango irl was quite critical of the government.

While some writers turned to the right (Yosano) or were forced to follow (Ibuse), Ango was so stubbornly against the wartime government to the point that his friend Makino Shin’ichi thought that he was going to die due to how brazen his works were.

In his essays, Ango challenged the idea of bushido, imploring that people should live for themselves, not because of a "samurai" role or for cultural icons. Decadence, to him, was a way of humans to explore themselves, to actually live as a human.

Or that's what I understood!

So this begs the question: Why is Ango a calm and collected government worker in bsd when irl, he's a chaotic decadent anti-government writer?

Answer:
1. His family
2. Subversion

Ango's father, Sakaguchi Niichirō, was a Diet member of the political party Kensei-kai while his mother, Yoshida Asa, put a lot of pressure on him to actually do something worthwhile with his life.

His role as a government worker is a mirror to his father.

I should add: his childhood was not happy because of this. his father only sough political ambition and only ever paid attention was when he wanted Ango to prepare ink for him. His mother was so aggressive that his sisters attempted to murder her through poison.

I also think that its a subversion of some sort. After all, if he's chaotic irl, why not make him prim and proper? The very thing he wasn't! Though, both of their lives are still messes, lol.

With that, out of the way, I wanted to talk about ango's realtionships with characters as there's a few irl connections!

Oda and Ango were friends irl, though their friendship was private. Ango agreed with Oda on a lot of key points in the Possibilities of Literature but had some divergence as Oda was a typical Osaka writer while Ango was active in Tokyo. Still, quite an interesting fact!

The reason the divergence is brought up is because, back then, Tokyo literature was considered to be the top standard of literature, the literature that you had to make if you wanted to be big. Oda himself challenged that notion and fought for more local literature.

Dazai and Ango were also friends! Much like Oda, Ango had his agreements and disagreements with Dazai's opinions but were friendly. I will say that compared to Oda, their friendship was more open and their interactions are just recorded as Dazai's interactions with Oda.

Another (not) fun fact: When Dazai committed suicide in 1948, Ango was emotionally devastated by it. It had gotten so bad that Ango had to be checked into a mental hospital so he could cope with the entire thing.

Ango treasured his friendships, drinking with Oda n' Dazai at Lupin. After their untimely deaths, Ango defended them and often is quoted as saying that both of them made important contributions to Japanese literature. He loved them and was incredibly shaken by their deaths.

Chuuya had confessed to a waitress who was in love with Ango. He challenged Ango to a fight but after seeing their height differences, backed out and decided to punch the air a meter away from Ango. Both were super drunk at the time. It's perhaps their funniest conflict.

Did you know that Ango was a mystery novelist? One of his stories, Furenzoku Satsujin Jiken (A Case of Non-Serial Murders), had earned him the praise of Edogawa Ranpo and also earned him the second Mystery Writers of Japan award in 1949!

Here's a huge outlier: Ango had read works of Akutagawa. In his beginning novelist years, Ango suffered so much that, like Dazai, he wanted to follow Akutagawa and commit suicide, even writing that he understood Akutagawa’s “vague anxiety” that he wrote in his suicide note.

Another (not) fun fact: This was not Ango's first desire to commit suicide. Due to his unhappy, borderline abusive, household, Ango wanted to commit suicide when he was eight and often ran away from his home because he believed it to be not his home.

Another (REALLY NOT) fun fact: One of Ango's stories, In the Forest, Under Cherries in Full Bloom, was inspired after Ango had witnessed bodies burning underneath the cherry blossoms.

Ango himself stated that he was afraid of destruction but found destruction as something he couldn't look away from, a "beautiful treasure" almost.

I can't really end this thread on the fucking carpet bombing fun fact so, I'm going to add a few more things about irl ango that I like, as well.

One of Ango's favorite foods was Ochazuke, just like atsushi (bsd-wise, that is)! He disliked sea cucumber and has a fondness for whiskey and gin.

Ango's birth name was Heigo Sakaguchi. He gained the name Ango after his teacher shouted at him for his truancy and it became his pen name, later on.

When he was a teen, a 2-meter tall dick made out of snow was found in front of his school one morning. Due to his reputation, it was assumed that he was the one who did it.

Ango was expelled from school, after he had punched a teacher. After his expulsion, his old desk was flipped over. Carved in the wood was the message: "I shall become the grand delinquent, rising again one day in the annals of history."

I should add that I do love bsd!ango as much as I do the irl author! I find his design being the utter opposite of his counterpart intriguing while keeping his sharp mind. His role is neat and I'm ready for more uses of his ability.

Anyway, that's the end of my thread where I ramble about a Japanese author who has been dead for about 64 years. Tune next time where I make a thread talking about the irl atsushi because his entire life story makes me sad.

Small addition post-thread! Here's how Ango looks like in the game, Bungo to Alchemist. Compared to bsd!ango, he fits more in line with the delinquent image. He's also based on irl ango's love of ninjutsu and heroic romances!

(he's also my fav and voiced by sugita!)