#@shigarakins: thank you for your tags!

[codenamesazanka]

Shigaraki’s death is still bullshit, but while rereading his final battle with Deku, I remember these tags from @shigarakins on my “bnha is like a bad ghost exorcism story”:

#tbf tomura afo and kurogiri kind of were dead all along considering that they literally died and then were brought back #tomura specifically was brought back by a powerful & negative emotion #quite literally like a ghost who can't move on #no coincidence imo that they died alongside the ofa users - who were more explicitly presented as spirits with unfinished business #wherever that fits into the story of bnha or was done well is a different question ofc #very horikoshi though to be all over the place like that

And he's right.

Tracing the Path of Death [Very image heavy]:

So after Deku held Tenko’s hands and destroyed his hatred, both the Memory Tenko and the Physical Reality(?) Shigaraki starts shattering.

The little boy is crumbling, while Deku is intact. Meanwhile, Shigaraki is also breaking away, as is his mass of hands, as seen from the outside world.

The shattering is indeed caused by Deku punching OFA into Shigaraki, by shooting it into the iron core of hatred and rage.

The iron core of hatred and rage shatters, allowing Deku (and Nana) into Shigaraki’s mind. From there, they have to shatter its innermost center too, and they do:

So by the time Deku “gets through” to Tenko, all of that hatred and rage has been smashed. It's gone. Shigaraki starts eroding away.

OFA destroyed the core, which destroyed the body.

Thus: Iron Lump of Hatred and Rage = Shigaraki himself.

If so, then: Destroying the Iron Lump of Hatred and Rage = Destroying Shigaraki himself

Why does that work?

Well, if we think back all the way to the end of the Jaku Battle, the story has this to say:

Shigaraki died for real back here, but it was his hatred that brought him back. So if the only thing powering him alive like a battery is his hatred, then, yeah, destroying that hatred would kill him.

He literally was a ghost that haunted the world out of hatred and anger (at injustice, for himself and the people he cares about.)

[more analysis below, but also counterpoints]

In his dreamscape of Chapter 270, after he had died after falling out of the tube, I wonder if that was like, his afterlife. The transitional state between life and death. Because his dead family was there.

All the dead Shimuras are there, pulling at him. At the time, everyone thought that it was them preventing him from going to AFO, back to the destructiveness enabled by an evil abuser, and yeah, it's still that. But I think it is also just the dead claiming him. Shigaraki/Tenko is dead and they want him to stay dead, to stay with them. Taking him to the afterlife with them, because he actually still loves his family and was thinking of them and so why not stay?

But Shigaraki rejects that. Rejects death, and walks towards AFO, the man who cultivates his hatred and rage. And that’s when Shigaraki comes back alive. He was dead, but he clung to the power of AFO and his hatred and dream, and so he is brought back to life.

So then, how exactly did Shigaraki Tomura die?

The responsibility for that is sorta on several parties:

There's obviously Ujiko, who induced a “deathlike” state in Shigaraki for the surgery.

So he’s the one who physically put Shigaraki into this risk in the first place - however, he did have full intention and the tools to bring Shigaraki out of it too. Ujiko would have, if not for the Heroes.

On the Heroes’ side, it was Mirko who cracked the tank:

Allowing for Mic to later come to shatter it with his Loud Voice:

Note Ujiko’s dialogue - he still has the opportunity and resources to wake Shigaraki up, as long as the tank is mostly intact. But Mic’s attack fully destroyed the tank, and obliterated that possibility.

But of course, there’s AFO himself, who says that his original scheme was to completely take over Shigaraki.

It's not clear if the surgery had been 100% complete then Shigaraki would've been fully suppressed and gone; or if, as AFO says here, that Shigaraki's impulse and will was so strong that it wouldn't have worked anyway. Still, AFO had essentially planned to kill Shigaraki.

And of course. There’s Shigaraki himself, who agreed to the surgery, to take AFO. If he hadn't, if he had just stopped looking for the Doctor, if he had run away from all this the moment AFO was arrested, then he wouldn't have been on this course to death.

The things that contradict this:

-> The only solid text element we had of "resurrected by his hatred" is mainly Deku's narration in that one panel. Blink and you'll miss it; then never mentioned again, so it doesn't feel at all incorporated into the story. Even the mention of the small electric current - In the chapter itself, we saw the broken electric cord in the water, we saw an electric shock in the art.

…Only for the narration to tell us chapters later that the shock was actually so small X-Less didn't feel it. If the story really wanted to lean into the horror ghost element, it would've not shown that, right? No electricity at all, but maybe a sudden finger twitch, then X-Less realizing Shigaraki was coming back to life. Or, X-less thinking on-panel that that electric current was nothing, just static electricity before getting killed by Shigaraki.

Instead, telling us after the fact diminished it. One flashback panel with Deku narration - that he shouldn't have known! he wasn't there for it! - would barely register for the reader.

-> As much as the story rambles on about The Iron Lump Core Of Hatred And Rage, which, yes, is a big part of Shigaraki and what drives him, there’s literally his love for his League as well. You would think that after the hatred and rage is destroyed, that love would remain - and it does:

“…the Villains need a hero of their own.”

{Countercounterpoint: But apparently that love is not enough to keep Shigaraki in this world? Not enough to keep him intact. Maybe if the League had been closer, maybe if Spinner had taken that one extra step.*

{{{*But once again, there's Spinner’s survivor’s guilt musings. The moment when he could've taken one more step, and he could've saved Shigaraki…

If the narrative is right that Spinner should’ve done something here and it would’ve helped, then Shigaraki wasn't just a dead body on borrowed time. But if Shigaraki was dead from the start at Jaku, and his hatred was all that was keeping him going, then…}}}

But with the hatred gone, Shigaraki crumbles, and this desire to be the League’s hero does not counteract that crumbling.}

-> Whatever one can say about [Shigaraki and his Hatred And Rage being one and the same, and when his Hatred And Rage is gone, he would die], but Shigaraki was still fully whole and intact during his battle with Deku, pre-OFA-Kamikaze-Attack.

By all counts, he’s alive and kicking. The OFA vestiges says explicitly that his wounds are healing. Shigaraki says it will only take a super smash to really kill him. And while he’s still got his iron lump of hatred and rage, he’s also thinking about Spinner. His friend. Who he likes enough to want to see happy (see again previous point).

In carrying out the OFA-Kamikaze-Attack, Deku would break and shatter this guy, effectively killing him. It’s hinted that Deku sort of knew this, when he talks about “Smashing Tenko’s spirit would break the both of them,”

And in this scene again: 

Deku knew the risk of putting OFA into a body that might not be ready for it, a body that already had a quirk.

So regardless of whether Shigaraki would've died anyway if his hatred had been erased any other way, Deku’s actions still showed intent of possibly destroying Shigaraki and he willingly carried this out. There was a whole and not-crumbling Shigaraki, who Deku refused to talk to, and whose spirit Deku decided to smash by using a power that he knew would have potentially lethal physical effects on the body because he experienced it himself. Shigaraki may or may not have been a ghost, but Deku definitely contributed to the end of that existence.

-> Also, post-Hatred-Smashed, Shigaraki’s body was actually still intact too.

AFO has taken over, but the body is still here. The flesh might have taken damage, but it was still here, in one piece. Decay and the rage and hatred are no more, but the body was still here, whole.

Maybe it’s only because AFO took over, his vengeful spirit somehow able to keep the body whole and working? Who knows. (But then—if AFO can come back from the vestige/soul/spirit dead like that, after Shigaraki swallowed him up, why couldn't Shigaraki? Shigaraki, whose hatred and rage and driving force in his life has been destroyed, and so maybe his vestige/soul/spirit also dying, but if AFO can do it, so can Shigaraki.)

Never mind that AFO only comes back because of Deku and OFA’s actions; Shigaraki was also still existing, somewhere inside the body:

Still screaming in there - Because we know that Nana held him together after he was shattered.

(Also note that Shigaraki thinks his annihilation was when AFO swallowed him up. Not before, when his hatred was gone; but only once AFO took over.)

So between that “tethered, kept-from-fading” spirit that, even with all its hatred and rage smashed, was still existing, and a body that, while having received damage, was still okay enough to be walking around, there was enough of Shigaraki mentally and physically to keep around. Deku just never bothered to think of a plan that would allow that.

*

So. Was Shigaraki dead from the start? Yes, but not necessarily. Or perhaps didn't have to stay that way. Was Shigaraki gone the moment his hatred was shattered? Sort of, but he was actually able to stick around still. Could Shigaraki have stayed alive after everything? I want to believe so, at least up until Deku’s final smash.

Was it Deku who killed Shigaraki? I'll allow that there were a lot of factors that lead to Shigaraki’s death, but I think it’s also clear that it’s Deku who dealt the finishing blow and smashed away any possibility of recovery and revival.