#Hori chucking out an entire arc never to think about it again

[justatalkingface]

Occasionally in these critiques you mention the butchering of Hawks' whole character in and post The War Arc so consider this an open question of thoughts on Hawks. Because all the pre-war Hawks stuff was some of my favorite bits of the manga before the shark.

Or, if you'd prefer something more directed: why were Dabi and Hawks both strongly tied to Endeavour when they don't interact with the other's arc? Why make them foils in a self-destructive pursuit of a goal if not to examine each other through their Dark Mirror? Why the BJ fakeout? Did it matter? Should we consider what Hawks was willing to do when it's allll fine actually?

Did any of Hawks' excelltent arc even really MATTER?

In short?

No.

Like, unironically, everything before the war doesn't matter anymore because of the ending we got, they could have just introduced him during it as a generic good guy and so far everything would be the same. But as funny as it would be, a one word answer isn't all that satisfying, so let's talk about Hawks.

(I'm going to point out here that I was already planning to do this, but I figured I'd wait for the next couple of chapters since it looked like it was going to focus back on Hawks and Twice. But, since it's delayed for health issues, and there's no real guarantees we'll be back next week... screw it. I somehow doubt whatever happens will really resolve any of the problems Hori snatched screaming from what was one of the best character arcs in the story anyways, so there's really no reason not to get on with it.)

In the beginning, we get introduced to Hawks, one of the top heroes: he's young, he's cool, he's, if I dare channel Might Guy for a moment here, hip. He's got some drama queen elements to him and he's outspoken in a way that the other heroes don't seem to be; he's more real, genuine, than people like Best Jeanist or Edgeshot, who (from what we've seen) seem to have a more bland public 'face', and he's not afraid to say something that people won't agree with. In just a few scenes, he seems like more a person than a lot of the characters do with far more screen time than him.

Then we find out that, actually, he's kinda sus. And he works for sus people. And, actually, all of this is heavily related with the corrupt heroes mentioned on and off throughout the entire ass story.

And he seems genuinely impressed by Endeavour, despite his violent image, and supports his rise to Number One where everyone else seems more doubtful.

These are the big things that make him so interesting to so many people: he's a deep character, deeper than most of the cast, loaded with mysteries, secrets, and oh so juicy drama, and so different than everyone else. What's not to love?

Later, it escalates when Hawks kills a fellow hero, just for the sake of the mission and then that's when shit gets real, because it makes you wonder: how far will he go? How much can he do without being affected?

Both of them are trying to play the other, and both of them are aware of it to some extent, if not the degree to which the other is planning and willing to go to, but it's at that moment you wonder: no matter how confident Hawks is, is he too confident? Is the man who is just a bit too fast flying just a bit too close to the sun?

He was a very real Icarus metaphor, and we watched on, eagerly waiting to see if his wings would melt in the face of his own hubris.

Over time, the story fed us bits and pieces, slowly building the picture of a man being driven closer and closer to the edge... and then, the war.

So, here's the thing with the war: so much of it, so much, is terrible. The Hawks part, though? Honestly, most of it is pretty great; there's only one part I don't like, and that's Best Jeanist actually being alive the whole time.

It's weird, in a really forced kind of way, to make Hawks seem double ultra good, in the face of all his prior characterization, because of course he wouldn't kill a fellow hero! Moreover, Dabi's surprise, when he was the one prepared for his betrayal the whole time, when he his first thought on seeing the body was, 'it doesn't even matter if this is the real one or not, the fact that Hawks killed someone is stain enough', which... seems like forced stupidity on his part, not checking at all to see if, like, someone robbed a funeral home or something, but whatever.

The point is that Dabi, of all people shouldn't have been surprised by Hawks betraying him, because he was the one that was ready for it. He has a monologue about it, for fucks sake. That confusion feels like it's there just to demonstrate how sneaky and great Hawks is, that he got to have his tactical victory and his moral victory, and do it right under all the dumb old bad guys noses!

This is, in retrospect, prep for Post War Hawks.

Because while I don't like that, my big problem with Hawks isn't him in the war, my problem isn't even with him killing Twice, my problem is after the war.

After the war, you see, is where Hawks is... honestly, I can't put this any other way than replaced. Have you seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Any of the versions? You know how, when someone is replaced, they have the same knowledge, but they act different? Like the motivations that moved that person before, the emotions, the various drives that comprise a human being, are just... gone. They're hollowed out, and replaced with something that mimics the way that person used to act to blend in, and allow it to push its own agenda.

The Hawks after the war reminds me of that, like he's been replaced.

Before the war, Hawks was cheerful a lot, but it was clear that that was just his default way of acting, that a lot of the cheer, but (and this is important) not all of it, was a mask. He'd flip in an instant from silly and irrelevant to dead serious, we'd see him think dark thoughts and plan against whoever he was talking to, but we'd also see him genuinely express emotion. That cheer was a layer to him, just one over a character that was clearly far deeper than what we were seeing.

After? Until the actual fighting, and Twice 'showing up' (this is why I was thinking of waiting), he was just... cheerful. Vapidly so. No jokes, no silliness, just generically positive. He'd be cheerful and smile, or he'd turn his emotions off, and there was no... in between.

If Hawks was a character with eight, or even just five layers to him before? After the war it's just two. And for most of the characters that's a lot more that we'd usually see of them, but for Hawks, that's a lot less. Where is the darkness? Where is the doubt? Where is anything beyond what pushes the heroic agency in the most efficient way he can?

I can't possibly describe the sheer dissonance I felt in pre- and post-war Hawks, the sheer confusion I felt in how bland and empty he seemed.

So yeah, when I say, "Hawks was killed and replaced by Bodysnatcher Hawks", I'm joking, but it comes from somewhere real all the same.

Alright, now let's talk about him killing Twice.

On one level, him doing is brutal, cold logic: Twice is an enemy. Twice is the single greatest force multiplier in the setting. Killing him, now, before everything goes to shit and he can get going will save god knows how many heroic lives, and quite possibly allow them to win the day; imagine if Twice got to Tomura, or Dabi? An infinite amount of clones is bad enough, but once you give them fire power....

On the other hand, well, killing is wrong. Apparently killing is basiclly illegal for heroes... which, not going to be honest, is a bit weird to me? It feels like that got tacked on after the war as part of the way the setting is whitewashing heroism, because, well, what if they can't capture someone, but can only kill them? Should they just let them go? It's not always the right choice, or even often the right choice, but flat out not having the option is naive in a way that reminds me of a lot of the post war choices because, you know, things like that are complicated.

But like I said, I'm not down on the killing, per say, so much as the situation. The situation is actually pretty fucked up.

Because Hawks had Twice cornered. If he wanted to capture him, wanted to neutralize that greatest threat? All he'd have to do is knock him out, or tranq him, somehow, with all abundant support tech that's out there. That option was there for him, and Twice never would have seen it coming, because Twice trusted Hawks completely, and he knew it, planned on it, coldly planned to betray it. If he had wanted to actually stop him right away instead of dragging it out like that, it would have been easy.

But he didn't. Why? Well, surface level, he wanted Twice to surrender, which would allow him to be better off after he's arrested. But that's the thing with Hawks; it's generally not that simple.

Hawks is smart, you see. Hawks is a trained manipulator. Twice is as subtle as a brick to the face. Hawks had to know, in the same way we all knew, that Twice would never surrender, never abandon his friends, just to try and improve his own lot, or even to save his own life, never.

So. We ask that question again. Why'd Hawks do it that way? Why'd he drag it out so long instead of just dealing with it?

Let me put it like this: he isolated Twice, one of the greatest assets for the PLF, right at the moment he would be needed most. In that room, before Twice could start multiplying, he had total control, and he could easily slap down any attempts to escape Twice made with his feathers in that confined space.

The second anything happened, people would instantly start looking for Twice because he is, again, one of their main assets and the strongest single force multiplier in the setting.

Hawks, despite knowing all of this, started talking, going through the motions. He even attacks Twice, but only, and deliberately, injuring him but leaving him alive. All of this? All of this burns time. Hawks is delaying this, as long as he could.

Then Dabi showed up. And it could have been Dabi, or it could have been anyone else, but the moment Dabi showed, the situation slipped out his control. He could no longer easily contain Twice; he went from a helpless prisoner to an active threat instantly.

And I think that is what he was waiting for, that is what he wanted, deep down: an excuse. A justification. Because he couldn't save him even if he wanted to (and he did want to, is the thing: he moved to protect Twice from Dabi's flames, and briefly tries to plan escaping with him), and thus he had to kill him. But, he wasn't executing a someone he captured in cold blood anymore, no, he was stopping an enormous threat before it could cause enormous casualties. He had to do it, or everyone would die.

And that, I think, is the interesting thing to me, because who is he justifying this to? The other heroes? They wouldn't know any better, wouldn't even know Twice was murdered with a little work on Hawk's part. His bosses? They probably ordered this. The public? They were only a problem because Dabi broadcasted this to them, because, again, Hawks dragged it out so long.

No, Hawks was dragging it out, was trying to justify it, for himself. Because he liked Twice, but he had to, he had to kill him. He had orders.

Twice's murder is fucked up, it's heart wrenching, but characterization wise, it's incredible for Hawks, because it's showing him following him through on his dark heroic path, no matter what it takes, but it's also showing him regret it. It's showing Hawks, a hero, do a bad thing for good reasons, it's showing all that depth we love in him.

If you look for it, there's a lot of discussion, about if Twice was too dangerous to capture or not, if Hawks could have done something different or not, if the killing was the right call, and while I have stated my opinions on that.... I feel like that debate is missing the point?

Because the thing is, it's not actually about if this was bad or not. The big thing is how do people react to this?

Because Hawks kills a man. He kills his friend, deliberately, in a pretty damn premeditated way. Does he care? Body Snatcher Hawks doesn't; it was the right choice, the efficient choice, so there's no need to dwell on it, no need to regret, no matter what mouth words he says about it to appease the public.

Does anyone care? The Number Two Hero killed a man in cold blood. This was broadcasted to at least Japan. We get a press conference, Hawks says the right words for a regretful person, with absolutely no apparent emotion, and everyone just... moves on. His colleagues, far more moral than him, don't care. In what would have been a deliciously ironic twist, his morally dubious idol, who he (should have been) doubting for his dark past, but who is trying to reform himself, doesn't reject him for it. The idealistic students don't care. His seemingly amoral handlers don't cut him loose as a liability. The only ones who care are Himiko and the villains, and after the war even she only seems to mind in a distant sense, in way that says, 'They could do that to me, too?', as if she's finally learning that death is a real thing that could happen when you overthrow a government, and doesn't even hold a grudge against the man who did it.

Toga, one of the most emotional people in the setting, with a friend group she can count on her hands, who finally has a sense of belonging, of acceptance, that she's craved her entire life, has her best friend murdered, and that's all she has to say about it?

The problem with Hawks killing Twice isn't that he did it, it's that no one, including Hawks himself or Twice's best friend in the world, or the panicking masses of the sheep that is the public, or the heroes who stand for truth or justice, cared, cared that he did it, cared that he joined the villains for months, cared about anything he had done, because Hori just... didn't want to deal with it. With complex heroes, with deep plot lines, with conflicts that don't have one side as RIght and the other as Wrong. So he threw out everything that would have made that happen, the upset, the horror, and replaced Hawks with someone who didn't have the capacity to be conflicted.

Dabi and Hawks were a glorious piece of foreshadowing and drama.

They're tied together so much, in so many layers because they're literally talking, and Dabi is his handler and connection to the LOV. We don't see much of it, because they only teased at Hawks with the villains, but before he 'joined' they must have talked a lot; there had to have been a connection there.

There's also the fact that, narratively, Hawks and Dabi are foils: Endeavour, indirectly, took Hawks, who was no one special, out of obscurity and into herodom, while directly taking Touya, his own son and thus rich and important, into obscurity and the depths of villainy. Both of them share ties to Endeavour, they symbolize the positive and negative ends of his characterization, have connections to the heroic industry that were dark and hidden from the public.

They don't interact with each other's arcs, like you say, but... you can see they were supposed to. Dabi was Hawk's possible damnation and possible villianfication, he was the symbol of the failure of his greatest hero, he was the one who was suspicious of him since the beginning, and almost stopped his dramatic betrayal and crippling of the PLF.

Until the war ended, the two of them were orbiting around each other, each drawing the other in closer for a collision that was as inevitable as it was going to be explosive.

The confrontation between them, that we were all but promised, was going to be beautiful... until that, like everything else, was abandoned post war for the body snatcher.

At the end of the day, my answer is still the same one as it was in the beginning of this rant: no. All of it, everything he did, all of it has been invalidated by Hori's sudden tonal shift, and unless he pulls off something truly god-like in the next couple of chapters to salvage it, it'll stay that way.

Instead, probably what will happen is Hawks being proved right in his murder by Toga-Twice causing mass havok, without showing any of the depth of the situation, and him coming to some form of peace with the guilt he's totally feeling, that we've never once seen, over what he did, and once and for all leave everything we loved about Hawks behind.