After getting no votes last time, this is take-two of the PG removal. I got some confirmation from someone on reddit doing an analysis on Atsushi and it made me rethink my proposal and if Atsushi should be a pure good.
What's the Work
Bungo Stray Dogs Is a 2012 monthly manga series written by Kafka Asagiri and illustrated by Sango Harukawa. The series is regarded as underrated by many but is very popular in Japan.
The series revolve around characters that are based off of famous people in 20th century or older literature history, and their powers are a reference to those people's famous works. The protagonist, Atsushi Nakajima was kicked out of his orphanage and saved a man named Osamu Dazai from drowning, only to find out that Dazai was trying to off himself on purpose. Dazai and his partner, Doppo Kunikida are looking for a rampaging tiger and the two of them find out that Atsushi was the tiger (thanks to his ability to turn into a wild tiger). After the investigation, Dazai recruits him into the Agency he works for, the 'Armed Detective Agency', a grope of detectives that handles crimes too dangerous for the police to handle. There, he meets many other ability users as they tackle various cases and events taking place in the city of Yokohama. As Atsushi fights and works to earn himself a place in the world, he and his allies fight to protect themselves from their longtime rivals, the Port Mafia and defend the city from outside threats like The Guild, the Rats in the House of the Dead, and the Decay of the Angel.
Who is Atsushi Nakajima
Atsushi is a member of an organization of detectives that solve crimes and cases that normal police can't take called the Armed Detective Agency. As a child way before joining, he was raised in an orphanage where everyone there physically and verbally abused him, especially the orphanage's director.
By the time he turned 18, Atsushi was kicked out of his orphanage out of fear of his ability to turn into a wild tiger. That reason was unknown to him though as he thought it was so that they would have less mouth to feed. Weeks later, he would meet Osamu Dazai.
Atsushi is a young man who suffers from his low self of steam issues and is always plagued by the words of the people at his orphanage about how worthless he is. Despite that, he has a good heart and a since of feeling sympathy for people even for people that were once his enemies like Kyouka, Lucy, and Sigma. Even sympathizing with Ochi Fukuchi when supposedly died at the hands of him and Akutagawa.
On a few instances, Atsushi doesn't hesitate to help or save people, even people he never met before like when he saved Dazai from drowning and when he covered up what he thought was a bomb with his own body to shield the Agency's staff members and to lessen the explosion's range.
His self of steam issues aside, Atsushi fights his hardest to improve his confidence and sense of self-worth and has gone to even protect Yokohama from ability users who use their ability to harm others.
Why He Doesn't Qualify
- The Reddit post I received did a very good job at explaining Atsushi and the user told me that my biggest setback when I proposed Atsushi was that I didn't understand where Atsushi's motives truly lie. I'll try my best to summaries it.
- Atsushi, as good of a person as he is, has a selfish side to him that he probably isn't even aware of. If we take a really deep dive into his motives, he's someone who thinks of his self-worth before the lives of others. Case in point; when he and Yosana were stopping Motojiro from blowing up the train they were on, Atsushi was having thoughts about how everyone at his orphanage was telling him that his existence is meaningless and he’s a good for nothing, after that, his next thought was, and I quote "I'll prove I deserve to live", hence why he wants to save the passengers on the train in the first place, rather than "These people are gonna die, I need to save them.". To simply put it, Atsushi fights on the side of good because he believes that doing good will earn him the right to be alive, not entirely because doing good is the right thing to do, if that makes sense. Like basically he's stroking his own ego.
- Atsushi also has a black and white world view that has a very big choke hold on him. Based on his view of morality, anyone who does bad thing is in his eyes a 'bad' person and they deserve what's coming to them, with Akutagawa being a good example, as even though his dislike toward Akutagawa is justified due to Akutagawa attempting to kill him and Kyouka in season 1 and almost getting in his way of stopping the Moby Dick from crashing into Yokohama, Atsushi never took the time to understand Akutagawa and his actions until later on. Instead, similar to how his orphanage director judged him, Atsushi judges Akutagawa every time Akutagawa so much as grinds his gears, like when Atsushi said "I may be pathetic but the reason you flaunt your own strength is so that people can fear you. You’re telling me that’s not pathetic?" at the climax of The Guild Arc.
- Same thing can also apply to the people he's close with. To Atsushi, the members of the ADA are 'good' people no matter what they do and would on some occasions make excuses for them or completely overlook some of the bad things they did or have done in the past (even if they were for the great or good). In the DEAD APPLE movie, in responds to Akutagawa planning on killing Shibusawa, Atsushi response with a "that's not how we do things at the Armed Detective Agency." when in truth, Atsushi knows that's a lie. He also seems to believe that Dazai is purely a good person, yet he has no idea what the other side of Dazai is like.
While he does mean well, Atsushi's lack of self-confidents leads him to make decisions that could potentially harm the Detective Agency like when he proposed to form a temporary alliance with the Port Mafia in order to defeat The Guild, which is something Fukuzawa objected because working with criminals goes against everything they stand for, and when he told Francis that he and the Agency will help him find whatever he's looking for as long as he doesn't use Q's curse to send Yokohama into chaos.
Also, one scene I forgot about is the scene where he and Kyouka (though justified in order to undo the Decay of the Angel's plot of framing them as terrorist) illegally broke into a maximum-security prison under a government bank in order to save Mushitaro. So... yea.
Final Verdict
Overall, Atsushi is a good person, but his unhealthy black and white world view, impulsive decisions and assumptions, and him doing good deeds only to earn himself a right to live is what holds him back from being pure good or even a near pure good. Maybe something like inconsistency admirable.