#at least Ujiko would still love AFO as an innocent child

[stillness-in-green]

On Giving AFO the Chainsaw Man Treatment

Below the cut, find a pair of asks about the chances of AFO's threat being resolved in a similar way as Chainsaw Man deals with its Act I villain. I'm not planning to actually discuss that CSM resolution, but even a passing description of it represents a major spoiler to anyone who's only following the anime, so hit the jump only if that's not an issue for you.

I gotta say, anons, if anyone in this series has to get age-reversed for a do-over, my first choice would be AFO.

Forgive me; I'm going to talk a lot about the widespread Age-Reversed Shigaraki prediction below. I know you didn't bring up Shigaraki at all—for all I know, you hate that theory just as much as I do!—but most of my familiarity with Baby!AFO is through that filter, so it's through that filter my answer comes. But I don't think either character should get age-reversed, which I'll get to in the latter half of this post. Please just skip to the next bold header if you don't want to read me comparing the two.

Better AFO Than Shigaraki:

So like, as far as I'm aware, the general assumption is that if Shigaraki (the only other candidate for whom reversion to infancy is ever proposed) is rewound to an infant, he’ll truly be an infant, with his memories wiped clean.  And this, it's implied, will give him some kind of moral clean slate whereby the person who committed all the many, many crimes Shigaraki has committed will have “died” and therefore be beyond punishment.

If that would be morally acceptable for Shigaraki Tomura—arguing that the person who caused all that harm and death doesn’t exist anymore—why would it not be morally acceptable for AFO?  If the people who lost homes and loved ones to Shigaraki would be expected to just let bygones be bygones because That Is A Child, why would the same not be true of those AFO hurt?

Of course, the easy answer is that Shigaraki is himself a victim of AFO, whereas AFO is not—so far as we know—the victim of anyone.  Thus, Shigaraki is perceived to be deserving of a second chance, while AFO is not.  But if the karma gets wiped clean regardless—if you can make AFO a better person instead of killing him, give him a chance to grow up as a person who will put good into the world instead of bad—I don’t see the two as being all that different.

If anything, I think it’s a better answer for AFO than it is for Shigaraki.  Narratively speaking, Shigaraki is a product of Hero Society’s failures as much as he is AFO’s upbringing, so addressing those failures is every bit as important as saving him from AFO for the challenge he presents to feel adequately resolved.  AFO, conversely, isn’t challenging a bunch of societal mores,[1] so I feel like the story giving him a do-over wouldn’t feel like it was trying to sneakily evade answering that challenge by raising him up as a good little law-abiding, paradigm-accepting citizen.

Also, the heroes having to deal with Baby!AFO is much, much funnier than them having to deal with Sweet Blameless Tenko.  As someone who staunchly believes that All Might has done sweet fuck-all to earn some kind of saccharine Dad Might Raises Baby Tenko ending, I would far rather see him having to navigate the fraught waters of raising the innocent child version of his lineage’s archenemy.

It Won't Be Either of Them, Though:

All that said, I think it’s going to be a moot point regardless because Ujiko’s little Rewind serum is clearly not working on AFO’s memories, nor was the raw version, so to speak, ever shown to affect Deku or Mirio’s.  Baby!AFO with his memories intact doesn’t solve the problem AFO presents at all, any more than it would for Baby!Shigaraki.  At best, it might reduce the raw physical threat they pose, but if their mentality is unchanged, it’s just kicking the problem down the line for a decade or two.

Even setting the memory issue aside, though, AFO has been pretty clear that the serum has put him on a timer.  He’s fretting about getting to Shigaraki because there’s something he needs to do before he, like Eri’s father,[2] gets Rewound to nonexistence.  I suppose there are ways around this—having Erasure work on the serum’s ongoing effect, having the serum just run out of efficacy before it can eat through AFO’s prodigious lifespan, etc.—but from the current setup, I don’t think a Nayuta-style resolution to AFO is on the table.

And It Shouldn't Be:

And that's just as well. While I think Baby!AFO would be funny, I can really only say that because AFO as we have him here in the endgame is so two-dimensional that he barely registers as having an identity to lose to the ego death of reversion to infancy.

That ego death is why I don't much care for resolutions that involve returning a villain to infancy. Usually, when I see that plot, the unspoken reasoning runs that the affected character had their life and innocence stolen from them, and thus they deserve a second chance at being happy and having a normal childhood. Maybe that's a comforting thought for some people, and I wish those people well of it.

To me, though, it smacks unpleasantly of rhetoric that says that once someone has been hurt enough, scarred enough, changed enough by their suffering, they might as well just die and start over because they're too damaged to ever find happiness again, so why bother trying? I am Extremely Not Here for that message.[3]

Now, there's probably a whole different discussion to be had about how that plot reads symbolically when the author/readers believe in reincarnation. I have no idea where Horikoshi falls on that in the Shinto/Buddhism spectrum most of Japan occupies. Still, I don't know that it can rightly be called reincarnation, if the person has to grow up with the exact same name they had before and is probably being raised by someone who remembers everything they did under that name previously and is always going to have half an eye on making sure they don't grow up the same way again. That's a pretty lousy "new life," isn't it?

IRL subtext aside, I'm also against the idea because, as I mentioned earlier, Magically A Baby Again is too easily used as an end run around having to meaningfully address a character's anger, trauma, wickedness, or whatever motivation is so insurmountable that it can only be defeated by completely obliviating it. That definitely shouldn't happen to Shigaraki, but even with AFO, it feels like it would serve the same function as a Disney Falling Death: remove the villain's menace without dirtying your heroes' sparkling clean hands with the moral responsibility for a death.

Thanks for the asks, anons, and your patience.

------------------ FOOTNOTES ------------------ 1:  Narratively speaking, I mean.  Obviously, as The Supervillain Of All Time, AFO challenges all kinds of societal mores!  But the reader isn’t encouraged to think of those challenges as legitimate the way they are with Shigaraki.

2:  And it only just occurred to me in writing this, if Eri’s quirk requires the consumption of her horn to power the Rewind effect, and we saw it go from Very Large to Tiny Nub just in taking six months off Mirio, what on earth is the explanation for her Rewinding her father out of existence?

3: This is also why I've got zero time for the whole idea that "Shigaraki Tomura" has no meaningful existence of his own; that the thing going by that name is just fifteen years of AFO's Grooming caked on top of an inner perfectly innocent, perfectly preserved, Shimura Tenko.

[makeste]

Part 1. Hi, what do you think of Tomura's new conviction. You said that his conclusion is not logical, which I disagree and agree as a reader, and I think that I agree based on his pov. As a reader I see that there are legitimately good heroes, perhaps the majority of them. But they are still complicit in having child soldiers involved in a war, as well as that their solution to dealing with the nomu is to kill them, even though they at this point k now that they are victims of the Dr.

(fyi, this is in response to my liveblog of chapter 281 here. the short version is that I was not wholly sold on Tomura’s argument that heroes should all be eliminated just because they’re incapable of saving everyone.)

I do agree with you that Tomura’s logic makes sense from his own perspective, which is one of the things that makes him such a great villain. however, I can’t ignore that his perspective is completely warped and distorted. this isn’t his fault -- AFO groomed him, as you said, and he basically never had a chance -- but that doesn’t make it any less true. his logic makes sense from his point of view, but it falls apart completely when viewed from any objective angle. I think it’s possible to feel empathy and sympathy toward him without losing sight of that fact. so if you see me making remarks to that effect -- tearing into the holes in his logic -- that’s the perspective I’m coming from. I absolutely don’t blame him for feeling the way he does after everything he’s been through, but I’m still going to call a spade a spade. I do it with all the characters, including the ones I love the most. and honestly, if he ever stands any kind of chance at redemption -- and I really hope he does, even though I know that objectively speaking it’s a long shot -- he will eventually need to own up to his shit. having a tragic past can certainly win you sympathy, but it’s not a get out of jail free card to do whatever the fuck you want and expect everyone to just go along with it.

as for the heroes, who have admittedly made some questionable decisions here and there, here’s the thing. this is not a situation where it’s possible for everyone to win and everyone to be happy and for no one to get hurt. there’s no clean solution to this. there is no “good” action to take (and keep in mind, by “action” I also mean inaction, as in simply doing nothing, which is a meaningful and impactful choice in its own right) that will result in absolutely no harm. so what the heroes are striving to do instead -- and this includes even the HPSC, much as I hate them -- is to take the course of action which results in the least amount of harm, particularly to innocent people.

every choice the heroes have made is guided by this principle. Hawks attacks Twice because if he does not, Twice will ensure that the League and the PLF’s operation is successful. Mirko attacks the High Ends with the intent to kill because the High Ends were already awake and activated -- which was not part of the plan, and is entirely Ujiko’s fault -- and were trying to kill her, and could not be stopped via non-lethal means because of their regenerative quirks. do the least harm. if she hadn’t fought to kill, she wouldn’t have been able to get to Ujiko in time to stop him from powering up Tomura to 100%. Tomura would then have been unstoppable -- even at 75% he’s practically unstoppable anyway -- and would have killed countless people (which he already has done; we don’t know how many were killed by his initial attack, but it’s safe to say that many people, both heroes and civilians alike, did not make it out. on top of that, one of his first actions upon waking up was to set Gigantomachia and more Noumu loose, with explicit instructions to kill anyone in the way -- again, heroes and civilians alike. innocent people who haven’t done anything by anyone’s standards, including Tomura’s own dubious ones). do the least harm. if there is no action you can take which will result in no harm at all -- and there isn’t, because inaction results in the villains carrying out their plan unopposed, which means death on a mass scale and oppression of anyone deemed lesser, such as quirkless people, people with “weak” quirks, etc.  -- then take the action which will result in the least amount of harm to the fewest innocents.

as far as I can see, just about all of the heroes’ decisions have been in line with this creed, even the more unsavory ones. I’m not personally happy about the decision to allow the kids to join in the fight by any means. but it’s also undeniable that had they not been there, we would be looking at a very different aftermath of this. they’ve already made a huge difference. if and when Machia is stopped (which I’m still betting he will be, although the sedative seems to be taking longer than anticipated to kick in), it will be entirely due to class 1-A and 1-B’s efforts. the fact that Aizawa is still alive and breathing and still has his quirk is because Deku and Kacchan and Shouto were there to protect him when it counted most. had they not been there, there’s no doubt that Tomura -- who, it should be mentioned, wants to kill all of the heroes anyway, including all of these children, who would have been next up on his “to murder” list if the villains’ plans had succeeded -- would have won in no uncertain terms and we’d be witnessing the birth of an apocalypse right about now.

so all in all, from what I can see the heroes have basically done the best they could under exceptionally bad circumstances. the child soldiers thing aside (which still bugs me even though it’s been proven to have been 100% the correct call), I can’t really say I disagree with any of the choices they’ve made. their own logic, unlike Tomura’s, is sound. Tomura and the rest of the League have got it into their heads that the current world is broken beyond repair and that it’s better to just wipe it out and start anew. they don’t have any kind of plan for a new and better system to replace it (even though the PLF acts like their post-apocalyptic anarchic survival-of-the-fittest society will be some sort of utopia), and they have no regard for any innocents who get caught up in the crossfire. not only that, but their definition of people who are not innocent is highly skewed (Dabi attempting to kill Tokoyami, a teenager who was not threatening him in any way and was simply trying to save his dying mentor, comes to mind). it’s a very conveniently flexible logic that bends and twists to suit their own needs, because the truth is there isn’t anything really logical about it at all. they’re not actually going to make the world any kind of a better place with anything that they’re doing. but the thing is, they don’t actually care about the world. they only care about their own little part of it, about their own friends and their own personal vengeance trips, and satisfying their own desires. they are not trying to do the least amount of harm. they’re harming indiscriminately, and selfishly. and any time you’ve got someone who is doing that, there’s really no possible way to defend it, imo.

so yeah. this is why no matter how many monologues Tomura or Dabi or Re-Destro or the rest launch into about how heroes are corrupt and the villains’ cause is somehow just, it’s always going to ring hollow to me in the end. and again, this doesn’t mean that I’m indifferent to their own personal suffering or what they’ve been through or anything like that. my own personal desired endgame for BnHA involves a redemption arc for Tomura that a lot of people would probably consider unrealistic tbqh. I like these guys a lot! but they’re in the wrong here, plain and simple, and the heroes are justified in trying to stop them from destroying the fucking world, even if it means they might have to go for the kill. we’re past the point of imagining that there’s any other kind of way to resolve this that involves talking things out, or somehow taking down this nigh-invincible unstoppable regenerating superman without killing him. at this point that is probably the last fucking thing on any of their minds, and rightfully so. it’s just a tough situation all around, and it’s not going to end well or end clean no matter what happens, and that’s just how it is. all any of these characters can do is try their best to make decisions that they can live with.