#i only compared him to tomura cause hes the best example of a kid led astray

[fruitgumy]

one thing i don't like about how hori wrote afo's backstory is that the narration makes it seem like afo was just born evil by saying that he was just born greedy and selfish. a major theme of the series is how otherwise good or even just neutral people become evil because of societal failures, but it's like all of that goes out the window when it comes to afo.

i'm in no way excusing afo, but he was a "meta" born in a time where people hunted his kind for sport. if you're a toddler with a deadly power that both makes you physically different from others and is so powerful that it scares people (spearlike bones) of course you're going to be ostracized. and with that ostracization comes the people who want to kill you. so what do you do? what is the only thing you can do? it becomes kill or be killed. then you become desensitized to killing, you may not even fully understand the weight of a life — you're only, like, 4 years old. you learn that problems can be solved with violence. need something for you and your brother? kill to get it. you realize that what you want can just be taken, not to mention your power incentivizes you to take what you want anyways.

many people point out that yoichi grew up just as poor and abandoned as afo, but there's an important distinction to make. yoichi was thought to be quirkless. he would not have been hunted like afo was. he would not have had the pressure of keeping a weaker, sicker sibling alive. although yoichi's life was no walk in the park, he and yoichi would've had an entirely different worldview. afo craves power because power is what has allowed him to survive his childhood. yoichi's lack of power and victimization because of his weakness leads him to understand the importance of wielding power responsibly. so with that in mind, it must've been hard for him to understand yoichi's talks about justice when they likely only survived because of afo's ruthlessness.

i realize this post makes me sound like afo's #1 dick rider which i kind of am, but i'm not delusional. the man is evil, he chose to stay that way, and he was well past any form of redemption, but i just hate the idea of an inherently evil newborn baby so fucking much. i think that he's like tomura in the sense that with the right guidance, he could have been a somewhat normal person. (that's a whole other post in itself, how he literally gave tomura his own trauma because he knew from experience how it would break him) yes of course it's possible for him to have grown up without becoming evil, but honestly i think anyone, if handed those specific set of circumstances, would more than likely go down a very very bad path.