#deku accepting shigaraki and revealing afo as a big liar won't make a lifetime of destructiveness just disappear

[stillness-in-green]

sorry, didn't see the answer until today. thank you for that but I mean proving AFO wrong that Tenko is filled with hatred and destroying and no one can accept him. we know thats a lie now but Tenko still dies?

Hey again, anon. So, I went back and tried to fit this follow-up context into your original ask—answered here for anyone who wants to look over it again.  My initial answer was based on you meaning that AFO should have been “proven wrong” in his assertions about human frailty and how, once someone has been rejected by society and become a Villain, there’s no way for them to come back.  Reconsidering your issue (that Deku killing Shigaraki doesn’t prove AFO wrong) with the knowledge that what you meant was him saying Shigaraki is only capable of hating and destroying things…

I guess in the end I don’t think the story believes AFO is wrong about that either? I mean, obviously he was, back when he first told those words to at-the-time-still-Tenko. But now? Not so much, at least in the author's eyes.

Below, if you want to subject yourself to my reasoning again, you can follow along as I talk myself through getting to that quite jaded conclusion.  My apologies if I misunderstand or misrepresent you again anywhere along the way!  Admittedly, based on my experience with the fandom and what names we choose to use in talking about the characters, I suspect we’re coming at them from radically different positions, but my position is the one I’ve got to offer you. Please know that, to whatever extent we might disagree on how much "Shigaraki Tomura" was ever a legitimate persona, we are united in our opinion that Deku should have done more for him if the story was serious about him being the Greatest Hero.

......

So, okay, the biggest issue with asserting that Shigaraki has any kind of moral core or personality independent of his AFO-instilled hatred/destructiveness is that the best arguments for it all revolve around the League and how Shigaraki wants to be their “Hero,” how that’s contiguous with his personality even from when he was “Tenko” because both fit a pattern of reaching out to the outcasts that everyone else around them ignores or mistreats.

I believed that too!  I still do, in fact!  I want to be clear that I think Shigaraki still has legitimate grievances and that his desire to make a world in which Villains will be happier is still, in its own way, noble and true!

But.

But that glorious spread where Tomura says that even if every bit of his hatred is smashed, he’ll still keep going because he has to be a Hero for the Villains that need him?  That spread comes before the montage showing AFO’s involvement in the Shimuras’ lives from before Tenko was even born.  And part of that montage is the absolutely buffoonish reveal that AFO even influenced Tenko’s sense of heroism by leaning on Tomo and Mikkun (the aforementioned outcasts) to encourage him to be a Hero.  I tend to assume that the two of them were from one of Ujiko’s orphanages—I can’t imagine how else AFO would be in a position to give two random children direct orders!—but whatever the case, it means that even Tenko’s draw towards standing up for outcasts is something influenced by All For One.

If you take that away, what else is left?  I could pick a few little traits here and there, but ultimately, what Shigaraki comes back to in the end, in that very last conversation with Deku in the shared mindspace, is destruction.  He pursued it to the end, his last expressed regret is that he couldn’t carry it out, and his final messages to ally and enemy alike revolve around the destruction he sought—telling Spinner he died fighting for it and telling Deku that it’s up to him and his whether any of what he destroyed actually stays destroyed.

To me, that suggests that the manga does believe that Shigaraki Tomura was, ultimately, an existence that could only destroy, and the fact that some of what he targeted deserved to be destroyed doesn’t negate the fact that he was still ultimately defined by the destructiveness that AFO meticulously crafted him to embody.  Even Deku seems to think that, in the end!

Like, really working through the timeline here?  Deku did want to believe that the Crying Child indicated that Shigaraki had some drive other than destructiveness at his core.  One of the (vanishingly rare) times he actually spoke to Shigaraki during their fight was his refutation of Shigaraki’s claims that he’d successfully devoured The Crying Child and thus transcended his humanity.

Running on the desperate certainty that Shigaraki was wrong/lying, Deku smashes his way into Shigaraki’s core and metaphorically uproots his hatred and psychically holds his hands, and Shigaraki still says that even so, the Villains still need him…  And if it ended there, maybe we could say that AFO was “wrong” in the sense you describe—that while the method Shigaraki uses to Be A Hero For Villains is warped by AFO’s influence, his desire to be that Hero is genuinely his own.  But then we get That Reveal, and even the parts of Tenko that seemed to predate AFO are revealed to be just another aspect of AFO’s machinations—Tenko’s heroism, his sense of injustice, even his very existence, all are indelibly stamped with AFO’s mark.

After that reveal, Deku never again pushes back against claims that Shigaraki can only destroy.  He never pushes back on AFO’s claims of authorship of Shigaraki’s life; he never tries to encourage Shigaraki by insisting that his bonds to the League are real regardless of how AFO raised him.  Heck, he never even suggests Shigaraki still has the chance to figure out who Tenko could be as long as he can break AFO's hold and reject his teaching. No, Deku just…accepts AFO's premise, apparently.

And so I come back to the same conclusion I did before: Deku is angry at All For One, but he does not disagree with All For One.

I genuinely think that, as far as the narrative is concerned, the tragedy of Shigaraki’s ending is thus:

Anyone Shimura Tenko was or could have been was overwritten by All For One’s grooming long ago.  Maybe this could have been prevented if things had gone differently—if Nana had beaten AFO, if someone like Deku had been there to intervene the day of the tragedy, if someone on the street had reached out to him before AFO—but as it stands, Shigaraki Tomura is too far gone to save.[See Note]  Deku can end the monster that was behind it all and try to honor the victims that Shigaraki’s actions brought to light by changing the world that created them for the better, but he cannot save Shimura Tenko because Shimura Tenko was lost long before he and Midoriya Izuku ever met.

(Note: One of those "Maybe If..."s the story dangles is Spinner taking some ill-defined step to help his friend, but my opinions are that disingenuous suggestion are just a long string of profanity. Suffice to say, if Shigaraki could still have been "saved" all the way up to the start of the second war, then the Heroes bear way more responsibility for failing to do so than Spinner ever could, and Deku is even more of a fuckwit for not arguing with AFO's assertions that Tomura is nothing but what AFO made of him.)

Of course we wanted more than that.  Of course we wanted Deku to do more than that!  We spent all that time watching Shigaraki grow and bond with the League—why, if the only reason for that growth and those bonds was to prepare him as a vessel for AFO?  We watched Deku resolve to try to save and/or understand Shigaraki’s heart no matter what—why, if everything in that heart was written in someone else’s hand?

The story told us that the best heroes always manage to both win and save, and that we were reading the story of how Deku becomes the best hero—why, if the story was only going to conclude that Shigaraki’s death at Deku’s hand was inevitable because the harm All For One did was impossible for either of them to overcome?

And to me, at least, that’s why Shigaraki’s death and Deku’s role in it feel so wrong: not for the in-universe reason that Deku and Shigaraki don’t disprove/disavow AFO’s claims, but for the meta reason that My Hero Academia lied to us and wasted our goddamn time.  It spent over two hundred chapters building up Shigaraki Tomura—as a villain, yes, but also as a victim, a friend, an enemy, an ally, someone who existed in the world he was rebelling against—only to then turn around and spend its remaining two hundred chapters tearing him back down to nothing and then telling us that’s all he ever was anyway.

All For One killed that crying child a long time ago, and all Deku can do is wipe away his tears and then wave him goodbye. 

By punching him to death.

It’s hard to imagine a bleaker outcome for the “Tenko” that started Horikoshi’s whole career as a mangaka, but I guess that’s what happens when your chosen career brutalizes you so badly that you come to define a Hero as someone who helps people endure their suffering instead of saving them from it.

...…

...Uh.  So, this got pretty bleak itself in the end.  Sorry, anon, everyone.  I write that way to get my point across, and I’m no little bit bitter about the whole thing myself, but ultimately, I just want to remind everyone that the story is over.  I’m not going to try to turn this whole thing into a positivity post all the way at the end, but just embrace that much: your obligation to care about the things Horikoshi wrote—to the extent that that obligation ever existed—is fulfilled.  If you hate the ending, well, so do I.  But now and forever, we and everyone else can go and do what-the-hell-ever we want to do with the characters and world that Horikoshi left us.

I hope we do.  I’ll be rooting for us!