#but he was saying like. there's a certain nihilism of white ppl who end up realizing things are bad when they didn't already

[nullcoast]

The world is fucking disgusting

[thyandrawrites]

about your answer to the touya ending ask: this is what happens when ppl write mature themes in a immature story. like i dont think bnha is inherently bad but it should have stayed as a simple silly slice of life manga with some battle shonen elements in it. in practice hori cant go too deep with the narrative of the todofam drama without alienating his audience, so we're probably stuck with a "everything is solved and everybody is good and happy" ending.

Hi! you make a good point, but I agree and disagree with it. While I do agree that heavy-handed talk about abuse and trauma is too much for a battle shounen series (and is typically more of a subject matter for seinen), I also think that Horikoshi could've had some more serious topics even without cheapening them like he did.

I think all my major issues with the todofam plot stem from Horikoshi's decision to backtrack with his original set up. Say, if Endvr never became a pov character but stayed the black and white shitty father he was at the beginning, notably filtered through Shouto's pov, we could've had a much better Todofam resolution that didn't involve half of the nonsense that we got instead.

Let's think about it for a second: bnha has a huge amount of characters who have in one way or another been let down or screwed over by their parents. Like, an insane amount. More than most series I've read, and that includes seinen. And in all cases where there's abuse involved (with the sole notable exception of Endvr), the pov we get is that of the victim. Even when Horikoshi goes out of his way to portray how the abuser came to become who they are when they hurt their children (see Kotaro, see Chisaki), the narrative still frames them as the bad guy, cuts them zero slack, and then dishes out narrative punishment. Kotaro was never said to have been "blinded" by his abandonment issues. In fact, despite the sympathy we might've felt for him when we learned why he hates heroes so much, we are also reminded within a few pages (via his family confronting him for hitting Tenko) that Kotaro is still a vile person for taking it out on his son, and that such behaviour is not forgivable. Similarly, Chisaki projected his self-hatred and abandonment issues onto Eri and scapegoated her for it, but everyone still saw him as just an abuser, and in fact, his victim joined sides with the heroes to turn against him and give him the punishment he deserved.

All of this to say: Horikoshi knows how to write narratives of abuse without belittling the victim's pain to humanize the abuser instead. He did it twice. Endvr simply got off easy because he's a hero and thus cannot be "bad." If anything, I'd say that the one thing that's plucking Horikoshi's wings is the idea itself that heroes can do no wrong, ever.

In that sense, I do believe he has written himself into a corner: if he hadn't been pushing so strongly for the idea that heroes never suffer consequences, he could've actually followed up on all the social injustice he keeps peppering into the story. My idea is that Horikoshi himself matured as a writer as he was still planning out the series. So certain things he didn't expect to become major themes did, and now he doesn't know what to do with them. He's in that awkward place of needing to wrap up arcs that require change, but he simply doesn't have the foundations to pull off that change smoothly because he never expected to get where he is. So we have for example Shigaraki picturing that Deku will save him even if these two have had maybe 10 whole panels together and there is virtually no reason for Shigaraki to have warmed up to the idea of trusting heroes overnight. And because the series insists that heroes are good, and since the MC never really matured from his blind idolization of them, Shigaraki will likely abandon his nihilism in favor of idolizing them again too before the series wraps up.

It's a shame, really, because I do think Horikoshi writes the flaws of this superhuman society really well. I wish he'd gone into this with a more solid plan of what he wanted to get out of this story, though