#meta:todoroki

[thyandrawrites]

I think what many people don’t realize with the Dabi vs Shouto fight is that it’s not actually a brother vs brother fight.

Biologically yes. They have the same parents.

But being bothers is more than that. Touya and Shouto Todoroki don’t know each other. They never had the opportunities to form any sibling bond. That’s why they can only see each other but their titles of villain and hero.

mmh, I don't know if I can agree 100% with this reading. On the one hand, it's true that they don't know each other, and that's largely why they don't understand each other's motivations and goals. Like, Touya misinterprets Shouto as someone who's blindly following Endvr's footsteps because Touya wasn't there to see that distancing himself from his father's shadow was a huge part of Shouto's personal journey. And Shouto in turn misinterprets Touya as someone who's blindly using violence and blaming their dad to escape the consequences of his actions because he never saw Touya fight ever since he was a child for Enji to acknowledge his flaws as a father. Thus, he doesn't get that Touya is doing this as a mean to get accountability and justice. So yes, they lack a relationship as brothers that would give them both the right context through which to contextualize the other's actions, and the compassion needed to put themselves in each other's shoes.

But on the other hand, I don't think it's possible to talk about their conflict while subtracting the fact that they're brothers from the equation. Imho you can trace back their respective worldviews, identities and yes, even the way they think of each other back to the theme of family, and the dysfunctional patterns they grew up tangled in (and replicating). There's no Dabi the villain without the role Shouto played as a replacement who "stole" his life, and there's no Shouto The Non-violent Hero without the weaponized memory of his brother used to justify Enji's increased and ruthless abuse over the years. They are both the worst thing that happened to each other because Enji's shitty parenting made them out to be that (though it's not true. In reality they are both just victims who had no active part in the other's suffering). Yet, Shouto's perception of Touya is colored by the family's treatment of his brother and vice versa, because Enji specifically used them as tools to lessen the weight of his own actions.

So for example we see Shouto perpetrating the scapegoating rampant in the house by seeing Touya as "the crime" of the family that needs "stopping",

and Touya perpetrating the idea of Shouto as the golden child by seeing him as a kind and good-hearted hero who makes Enji proud:

But the thing is, both of those views echo their parents' perspective on what their respective roles should be. This is most obvious through Shouto, whom they outright address as the family's little hero:

But it's also apparent in how they talk about Touya. Enji sees Dabi as a criminal that's the manifestation of his "sins" who "stole so many futures"; Rei sees him as someone on whose behalf to apologize to Hawks, with the implicit idea that Dabi is more wrong for burning him than Hawks is for murdering a man in cold blood. Both see him as the bad sheep of the family as much as they see Shouto as the perfect idealized good kid.

So imho you cannot fully comprehend them as heroes and villains without tracing back their current beliefs and their views of each other to their connection as brothers and children in a fucked up family. They were pitted against each other since basically birth, and I think their current conflict reflects the flaws of their upbringing more than it does the failures of the hero/villain system, though I think the ideas are definitely connected

[thyandrawrites]

I agree with your comment on the heroes. The students aren't ever going to learn if they keep listening to the old gen. They have got to think for themselves. Bur Hori makes all the heroes and kids brain dead when the villains bring up good points, just so he can have this push and pull. Now I am wondering. Mind you Shouto Todoroki is one of my favorite characters along aside Dabi who is my fav villain. During the reveal when the abuse of Shouto was put out into the light Shouto didn't seem to be too happy about it. I think cause of how hero society is, he was taught to just be quiet and take it? Is that why he is so quiet all of them and puts himself in harms way? I am just curious on your thoughts.

Mmh, no, I don't really read it as though Shouto's giving in to social pressure or any external expectations. In fact, I think he's very stubborn about fighting authority and things that are chosen for him. You can't convince this kid to do something he doesn't want to do, and you won't dissuade him from doing things he shouldn't do if he thinks they're right. That's just how Shouto is. (See the aftermath of Stain's arc and his reaction to being reprimanded for illegal and unauthorized quirk use)

That said, I think that the reason why he reacts that way after the broadcast is because it throws him off balance. Shouto canonically struggles a lot before making choices. He's an overthinker and he spends a lot of time making up his mind about what is right and what is wrong. Because of this, he spent a majority of the manga coming to terms with his father's legacy, and only after some deep soul searching, reassessing of his ideals, and reconnection with his mother, did he finally figure out how he felt for his dad. All of this took a lot of careful consideration, and at last he came to a conclusion he was confident in.

He didn't want a father/son dynamic with Endvr, but he would only be interning for him to learn how to better make use of his fire, which he neglected to train properly for nearly a decade.

He also decided that he would give Enji room to grow and to prove himself to his family, without granting automatic forgiveness in exchange for the effort. Basically, he comes to terms with working under Endvr's guidance on the condition that this doesn't mean reconciliation or blanket forgiveness. To even consider that, Shouto makes it clear he wants to see a real change first, and he makes sure his dad knows he's just giving him a chance to become a less shitty person.

He reminds Endvr of all this one the first days of the internship, in front of his friends, so it's not like he wants to keep the sordid past a secret, per se. But he shows the ability to separate Endvr the cool number one hero from Enji the shitty father and husband.

Shouto wants to see Enji change; he already has a certain degree of respect for Endvr the hero for his experience in the field and fine turned quirk control. What he needs is to see more of an effort from his father to change in the domestic sphere, but after some inner growth, Shouto is now able to keep work ethic and private life separate. Thanks to this, he can be around his father again without it being detrimental to his mental health like before.

This gives Shouto balance. For the first time in ten years, he has reached something resembling stability. He feels secure in his hero path, and he has things to look forward to on the personal side because he's curating his reconnection with Rei at the same time, another thing that had been weighing on him all this time.

When Touya comes back from the dead and talks about their past, however, he throws a wrench in that tentative stability. Suddenly, everything needs to be renegotiated again to accommodate Touya's reappearance in the family dynamics. Shouto wants to reconnect with him because Shouto has always wanted to reconnect with his estranged family members, and he feels close to Touya in some regards, which amps up that feeling. But Touya is a villain, while Shouto is a hero, and that complicates matters because Shouto feels a responsibility towards the population, while also feeling the urge to connect with his brother. The current arc shows that he's being pulled in two different directions at once, and can't choose which instinct is stronger. Dabi notices this and exploits it to get the jump on him. That makes Shouto falter further because he never wanted to hurt his brother (he developed a cold fire technique just for that), but the nature of their roles makes them enemies.

Plus there's also the fact that Touya's reappearance destabilizes Enji as well, making him fall back into his avoidant and neglectful patterns.

So Shouto feels pushed into the role of pulling Enji back on track whenever he seeks an easy escape, and that further weighs on Shouto. He wanted Endvr to prove himself as a father, gave him room to do so, but any change Enji was slowly crawling toward was thrown askew by the reveal. Shouto hadn't forgiven him for the abuse, but was shown to be genuinely interested to see which steps his old man would take to be a better person from then on. But since Touya came back, Enji regressed. Instead of moving forward or facing the past head on, he retreated into crying over himself, avoiding Shouto, ignoring Touya, and doubling down on being Endeavor the Proud Hero who Defeats Big Bad Villains. It's an involution instead of the growth Shouto was hoping to get, and it put the family several steps backs in their jurney towards healing. The opposite of what the poor kid wanted.

I think it's understandable, all things considered, why Shouto wasn't happy with the events after the broadcast

[thyandrawrites]

Hello. I love what you said about the heroes. I agree. It seems Hori makes them really dumb when it comes to the villains pleads so he can have this push and pull, back and forth kinda thing. Now with how hero society is do you think that is why Shouto kept quiet about the abuse? He seems not to think of himself as a victim and thinks he deserves it similar to Hawks. Which is not a good mind set to have for anyone let alone a teenager. :( He puts himself in harms way following behind Deku and Bakugo alot as well I noticed.

Hi! thank you for reading my meta. Yeah, it seems like the heroes' unwillingness to listen is more an excuse to maintain the push and pull than anything else. At this point we should already be past it. But anyway.

To answer you, I agree that Shouto doesn't see himself as a victim. He always attributed that role to Rei and saw himself more as her defender, rather than acknowledge his own hurt at his father's hands in full. I have a longer post on this here.

Whenever he talks about Enji's abuse, he always phrases it like "I can't forgive you for what you did to mom" and never to himself. Tho, being fair, this might have a watsonian explanation. If Shouto really sees Rei as Enji's primary victim, that could help us make sense of why he deflects to her opinion of Enji. He seems to thaw out a lot of the iciness he feels for the man when Rei reckons that Enji is changing. It's possible that Shouto already worked through his own issues with his dad when he came to terms with his fire side, and the lingering resentment and distrust he feels now is on his mother's behalf. As in, Shouto already did his soul searching and established his boundaries. He doesn't want a father/son relationship with Enji, just a work one. But Rei has been in a hospital for ten years, and she's yet to work out her own issues. In that light, Shouto might be okay with giving Enji the chance to prove himself despite not having forgiven him for his mother because he rationalizes this second chance as something he's doing for her sake. To set things right, you know? and give her a chance to heal.

anyway, I don't think that keeping quiet is something he did because society is the way it is. He simply doesn't seem to crave public accountability the way Touya does. Shouto has a different belief system than his brother, one that boils down to personal responsibility. Shouto's mistrust for authority probably also influenced this, but he basically thinks it's down to the individuals to correct their actions when they do something wrong, and not on authorities to make them pay. This is what he submits to Touya during their confrontation, too. Answer for what you did. Correct it. Shouto wants the same thing from his dad. He doesn't care about outing Enji not because he wants to protect him or because he thinks no one would believe him if he ratted him out, but rather because he wants Enji to right his wrongs. He still asks accountability, but he wants Enji to own up to it in front of the people he hurt, thus in the private sphere. Shouto doesn't believe Enji's apology should be to the world, but to his family, because that's who Enji hurt. From his perspective, Endvr the hero is fine, but Todoroki Enji is the one who fucked up. For Touya it's different because Touya always saw "Endvr" as a mask, a front, something to hide behind when Enji didn't want to act like a father. To Shouto, however, his dad is a decent hero but a horrible person

[thyandrawrites]

Good point! I can provide the linguistic trivia. The adjective Shouto uses is indeed not the same as Dabi's above.

Though it was translated as "innocent" in the official release, that's not the word I would've gone for. It makes Shouto sound more self-righteous than he actually is in this scene. "innocent" here only works if you take it to mean "unjustly targeted" and nothing more.

The original phrasing was "関係ない", which, as the picture above points out, means "unrelated, disconnected." The line that comes right after this one is "aim all your rage at us," which makes it clear that Shouto is chiding Dabi for dragging people who are not part of the Todoroki family (=unrelated) into his revenge.

In other words, the conflict between the two brothers comes down to their different mindsets and their different needs. Shouto sees Enji's failures as a parent as something that Enji needs to resolve in the private sphere because his wrongs pertain his life as a civilian and a father, not his life as a hero. Touya, however, wants Enji to be held accountable by society because he thinks that blindly idolizing heroes as agents of justice enabled his abuser to get away with his crimes till now.

So this dialogue here is less Shouto saying "boo, you killed good people and that makes you bad!" and more Shouto trying to push his own ideals onto his brother, and failing to see why Touya would not respond well to them, or have different values and needs. (I wrote a whole post on this btw, if anyone was curious)

I still want to know who were those thirty innocent people that Dabi supposedly killed because all we saw was he killing other villains( not innocent people).

By innocent people I think he meant civilians. But I highly doubt Dabi would even be able to approach an innocent civilian with his burnt face.

I had a theory about that specific word when I broke down his speech during the broadcast! Dabi's use of language is very deliberate, and he demonstrated that he can use it to further his points (see how he completely changes registers and speech patterns during his taped confession to appear more educated and humble).

The word he used when he calls his victims "innocents" is "罪なき" which means innocent but also crimeless, sinless, fault-less. That is indeed an odd choice of word when he know for a fact that some of his victims were definitely two-bit criminals. Alley thugs. But the choice to use that word makes a lot more sense when later on Dabi calls himself "a sin" of Endvr's creation. The phrase that was officially translated as "some vile stuff"

in the original text actually reuses the same kanji as above, "罪", finally clarifying the nuance. Dabi considers himself an extension of Enji's crimes, and thus a "sin". So by extension when he comments that the people he killed were "innocent," he's not making an evaluation of their morality (or telling us whether they were heroes or villains), but more simply comparing them to his dad, and judging his father a much worse offender for being a corrupted "agent of justice."

In other words, he's saying that those people didn't deserve to die, but their unjust deaths are on Endvr for creating a monster, Dabi, who is the product of Endvr's own crimes

[thyandrawrites]

Thinking about Shouto's resolve to bring Touya home to eat noodles together gave me some food for thought (pun not intended).

Beyond the obvious symbolism of filling out the missing seats at dining table as a metaphor for fixing his broken family, I think there might be an added layer there, too.

Shouto doesn't have much of a frame of reference for normal sibling bonding activities. He was still a baby when Endvr forced him into isolation, and while his siblings played together, Shouto only ever looked at them from a distance, like an outsider.

This isn't told straightforwardly so it's up for interpretation, but I think Shouto had his meals served separately from them, too.

It's hinted at when Natsuo yells at Endvr for not giving them the chance to be a normal family and for keeping Shouto so isolated from them that Natsuo's only now learning that soba is Shouto's favourite food. This despite the fact that Shouto eats soba basically at every meal.

And then it comes up again during the tododinner miniarc, this time a little more clearly:

"Endvr probably didn't let you eat it."

Now, why would Natsuo not be sure if Shouto had gotten the chance to enjoy his food, and why would Shouto act surprised that he might've, if they all sat at the same table?

This is why I don't think they ever did. I mean, they likely did at some point, but that was before Touya attacked baby Shouto, anyway. They were too young to remember it.

If this is true, then I'm fairly sure that the first time Shouto had the chance to enjoy a meal with the two of them was in the aftermath of the High End attack in Kyushu. When Endvr was still hospitalized and thus out of the house.

As far as we know, that's also the first time Shouto is shown properly interacting with Natsuo. From the latter's reaction when their father interrupts them, I'm willing to bet it was their first prolonged conversation as well.

Building off this, if Natsuo didn't even know Shouto's favourite food until then, it's safe to assume they were basically strangers living under the same roof.

Why I'm bringing this up now? Well, my point here is that if we then reread Shouto's resolve to bring Touya back in light of this, it reads differently imho:

The callback is there. "I don't even know what Touya's favourite food is". Just like Natsuo didn't know his. And just like how Natsuo was determined to reconnect with him by slurping a bowl of soba together and chatting about trivial stuff, in spite of (or maybe even to prove a point to) Endvr, Shouto decides then that he wants to sit around a dinner table with his eldest brother as well and do the same.

It's not news that Shouto wants to "save" Touya not as some perceived moral duty as a hero but simply because he wants his big brother back. But we also already know that he sees his past self in Touya, so imho it's not too farfetched to think he sees a shadow of his own isolation as a child in Touya, too.

Of course, there are differences between them. Shouto was forced to stay away from his siblings. Touya was forced away for those three years of the coma as well, but then chose not to come back home.

But what Shouto sees is more simple: Endvr's ambition brought us apart, but our resolve to reconnect will bring us back together, because we're not bound by his will.

However, Shouto doesn't know his brothers. Touya is even more of a stranger to him than Natsuo, and he only got to know Natsuo better in the last four-ish months. Again, Shouto doesn't have much of a frame of reference when it comes to siblings bonding activities. But there is one constant in his interactions with them, and it's food. Even when he was still living in a "separate world" from them, he received and ate their cooking. After he broke free from that barrier, he met with them over and over around the dinner table, first by eating noodles with Natsu, then by inviting his friends over for dinner. They even attempted to cook together once, if we take into account the novels.

Now, food, and sharing meals in particular, is commonly used as a metaphor for connecting with people. But I think it's a nice touch that here it's kinda used as a string that brings Shouto closer and closer to his siblings, and it begins before their first lunch together. At first, their cooking was the sole thread that connected him to their world, the sole way for him to feel included in the family, so to speak. And now we see it actively become a bridge between them.

Cause at the end of the day, what Shouto had always wanted, at his core, was to be part of their whole, and not just an outsider. I'm def oversimplifying here, but Touya, too, is similarly written like an outsider, despite his different circumstances. His determination not to "quit" alienated him from all of them, to different degrees. Endvr actively avoided him, Rei couldn't look at him, Fuyumi didn't understand why he kept burning himself, and Natsuo struggled to bear the weight of being his sole confidante. Touya notably died alone (his mother couldn't stop him, and his father never showed up) and he's even more isolated now as an adult, refusing to admit he cares about the League, keeping secrets from them, being a lone wolf.

I think that to an extent Shouto does recognize Touya's isolation, and that he projects onto it, a bit.

Shouto doesn't know what siblings are supposed to do together. But when he thinks of Touya, of how lonely he must be in his path of revenge and hatred, he remembers what helped him break out of that mindset was opening up to people and forming bonds. He even tells Touya this. I was saved by my friends. But he's not Touya's friend. He's his brother. And what do brothers do?

They eat meals together, like Natsuo did with him. So he mirrors that, and extends that logic to his other estranged big bro.

Bringing Touya home is instrumental to more than just Touya's healing. It benefits the entire family by finally allowing them to be a whole. The noodles thing allows Shouto to finally be part of the activities of "Touya and the others" that he was denied in the past. It allows Fuyumi to cook for all of them, something that clearly brings her joy. It enables Natsuo to get to know Shouto and reconnect with Touya, whom he dearly missed, at the same time. It gives Rei a chance to heal, with more than just a photograph of her children to hold on to in a sterile, lonely hospital room. Heck, it even works with Enji, whose "biggest regret" supposedly is wrecking that family, and whose biggest hope for the future is to see them reunite around a meal again.

So yeah. If broken bonds, loneliness and isolation are the wrongs that needs fixing, food will act as a catalyst for their eventual togetherness.

Soba will be the real hero of this story, I guess.

[thyandrawrites]

I wasn't sure whether to ask you this now or Sunday but what did you think of the chapter? I liked it for the most part but I would love to get your thoughts.

So, to start off, I need to make something very clear: I think both brothers are wrong about and unfair to each other. I don’t mean any of what follows as a slight on either of them. I think it makes sense, considering both their backgrounds and the things they know about the other to make the kind of hurtful assumptions and dismissive remarks about each other’s baggage that they show in this chapter. But for the sake of analyzing why they just can’t seem to reach an understanding yet, I will go over both their mindsets and try to break down exactly why I think they’re both wrong. 

If that’s not your cup of tea, please do value your sanity and skip out on reading this post. What follows is my take, and I will ask everyone to please respect it as such. 

So, without further ado. [under a cut for length. grab some popcorn]

Let’s start with a simple concept. Dabi and Shouto have baggage. Both grew up in an abusive home, and though their experiences aren’t a 1:1 equivalent, both kids ended up developing a very strong belief system that they stick to with almost fervent drive. I believe that these strong beliefs are what are making it hard to see each other’s viewpoint. Currently, they both seem to be trying to make sense of how the other could end up like this by comparing them to… well, themselves. 

A necessary introduction: explaining Dabi and Shouto’s personal beliefs 

What motivated Shouto to help out his brother was noticing that Dabi was stewing in a spiral of hatred and thoughts of revenge similar to Shouto’s own struggle at the beginning of the series. However, because of this, I think he started seeing Dabi as what Shouto himself could’ve become if he hadn’t gotten support from class A and his family. And while this might or might not be true, it makes Shouto believe that the way he got out of that spiral will automatically work for his brother as well. I will go over why I think that in a moment. 

As for Dabi, he has such a disparaging opinion of his little brother because he can’t fathom how Shouto could not want the things Touya desperately longed for as a child. What he says here: 

is very telling. It seems that for all the things about his upbringing that Dabi rejects, he still hasn’t gotten rid of the mentality Endvr raised him with: when Touya and Shouto were small, he used to tell them that they lived in “different worlds” than regular people. The “world of heroes,” an elite space separate from the concerns of regular people. Of course, by the time he tells Shouto this, the words have become an excuse. A way for Enji to justify the isolation he forced on his youngest in order to make him as strong as he could be, as well as an excuse to keep training him in spite of Touya’s death. 

But Enji’s relationship with Touya started out differently enough for the words to solidly take root in Touya’s psyche. Till now, Dabi still holds on to this idea that he was made to be this strong. Even as he fights his brother, he keeps comparing the strength of their quirks and calling his superior. When AFO’s surgeries weakened his body and thus his potential, Touya spent years trying to catch back up even if it meant collecting burns that would’ve killed anyone else. 

The way he clings to this idea that he needs to prove that he’s strong is obsessive, unhealthy. It’s the result of Enji raising him with toxic expectations. Back when Touya was a child, Enji really believed him to be the key to achieving his lifelong obsession. He told Touya that he was the bridge that would close the distance between himself and All Might. All that was made possible by Touya’s quirk, one that surpassed Enji’s own strength. 

Dabi took that to heart. He was lucky enough to be born the heir of Endvr’s legacy as a top ranked hero, and with an inherent potential that set him apart from others, from regular citizens. No one, not even his dad, could ever best All Might. But Touya was raised with the expectations that he could. That he would, in fact. Unlike others who only looked at heroes on TV and decided to pursue that career, Touya was already living in the house of the then number two. When other kids collected figurines and played video games, Touya was already cultivating his talent to eventually enroll in a hero school. Becoming one was his raison d’être, and he was supposed to be handed the tools to hone it to perfection. In that sense, he truly belonged to a separate world. 

Yet, he proved to be “defective” before he could capitalize on that potential (which, not coincidentally, is why he gets mad at Shouto for wasting his). 

Once Touya’s purpose was stripped away from him, he tried moving on with his life like everyone else, but that didn’t — couldn’t — work. Being raised with the idea that he only existed to fulfill his father’s ambition, Touya didn’t have the tools to adapt to an existence without that goal. As a result, he couldn’t mesh well with his classmates because he couldn’t relate to them. They had aspirations, goals, wants of their own; he was brought to life to fulfill his father’s. 

Touya could see that he was different from other kids his age, too. For one, his family wasn’t normal. Enji didn’t marry for love and he didn’t choose his wife’s quirk at random. Touya and Shouto weren’t normal kids. Everything about their conception was a transaction, and their entire existences had been shaped by it. 

Additionally, Touya’s awareness of the circumstances of his birth set him even more apart from others. Because of that awareness, he could see everything wrong with his family, and tried to address it. But the more he kept at it, the more his peers drew away from him and gave him the feeling that those around him couldn’t understand him. This is why for example we see him yell at Rei and Fuyumi for not getting why moving on isn’t an option for him — not when the thing he needs moving on from is his own DNA — or why he crawls to Natsuo for validation but gets upset when his brother “tells him to buzz off too.” 

This perceived divide influences his actions as an adult as well. Despite sharing similar backstories with the League, he never confides in them, and even acts distant on accounts on how different he thinks they are. He calls Toga a nutjob, he doesn’t care about Shigaraki’s goals, and he refuses to admit the League was ever anything other than a stepping stone for him. 

With the broadcast, we see Dabi attempt to bridge that distance for the first time. By his own admission, he wants people to understand why he made certain choices. Yet, he’s met with indifference and more scapegoating. The public doesn’t care about his reasons. He wanted them to think more critically about heroes. Instead they call Dabi annoying and they go back to giving support to Endvr and Hawks like the crimes Dabi just exposed them for were water under the bridge. 

As a result, I think that Dabi convinced himself that people won’t ever listen, let alone understand. All they want to do is smile and laugh in the face of other people’s suffering, to paraphrase what he tells Toga not much later. They don’t want to think critically about the system and reform it. They only care about being reassured that everything’s okay. Or that it will be okay after the remaining heroes clean up this mess and restore the old status quo. 

The fact that the public only wants stability — even if it’s just superficial peace that rests on wider, unaddressed societal issues — is well established by canon, by the way. It’s pretty transparent both in the press conference chapter and in the aftermath, when UA becomes a fortress and there are tensions between civilians and heroes that AFO attempts to exploit. And during the broadcast, Dabi made it a point of addressing exactly this type of audience. The people who, as he told Tokoyami, “stopped thinking for themselves.” Those who mindlessly go with the flow, with no personal conviction of their own. In other words, the feckless followers who only want heroes to take charge so that the regular citizens don’t have to examine if their system is even still effective at keeping up with a changed social landscape. 

What does this huge tangent have to do with Shouto and the newest chapter, you’re probably wondering. 

I think that Dabi resents that Shouto, quote, “holed up at UA with those scared little civilians,” because of everything I just went over. 

Why would Shouto depend on others when he, too, was born different from them? Like him, Shouto was brought to life to fulfill his father’s ambition of besting All Might. Like him, he was set apart from everyone else by the purpose placed upon his conception. But unlike him, Shouto was gifted with the perfect mix of circumstances that Dabi didn’t have: the perfect melange of quirks his father wanted; a body that wasn’t at odds with said quirk; years of training under Endvr, who never looked away from him the way he did with Touya. 

The fact that Dabi mentions birth is especially crucial here: he’s not simply envious because Shouto is better at everything than him. He’s furious because his father has validated Shouto’s existence, unlike Touya’s, and yet Shouto doesn’t seem to regard that for the blessing it is (for Dabi, that is. To Shouto, the attention was just a curse. Not that Dabi realizes that). 

Shouto’s skills are such that he was never removed from his destiny — from the world of heroes. He’s not a failed creation, and as such he still has purpose. 

Meanwhile, Touya feels not only forgotten about, but even erased from existence itself. Enough so that he thinks he needs to destroy himself and his father in order to “leave a mark in this world”. In order to prove he existed. 

We now know that everything for Touya was an uphill battle. His father gave up on him. AFO gave up on him. The whole of Japan gave up on him. Only Dabi ever believed in himself, and yet, that never seemed to be enough. So when he sees Shouto ambling through life and following all the steps laid out for him, he gets bitter he wasn’t given the same chance and takes that misplaced anger out on his little bro, who has nothing to do with the neglect Dabi went through. 

All the talking down he does in this chapter proves that while Dabi thinks he understands Shouto, in fact, he doesn’t even know him. He might’ve watched his little brother’s achievements from afar, but he doesn’t know Shouto’s intimate struggles with his legacy and with forming his own worldview. 

Mistakenly, Dabi convinces himself that Shouto doesn’t have a belief system of his own. Since Touya was able to recognize the corruption of heroic ideals and of modern society from a very young age, he expects Shouto to do the same. But his little brother never came to reject the current system like him. Despite having experienced similar abuse, despite knowing first-hand how heroes aren’t always morally upstanding, Shouto still believes in heroes. 

Dabi takes this to mean that Shouto is just another feckless follower who defends the current status quo without questioning it. This is why he assumes that Shouto is fully his father’s puppet: going where the number one tells him to, emulating his father down to the way Enji conceives heroes — only as strong fighters who simply defeat villains, defending the establishment with no deeper thought into what they’re doing. 

It goes without saying that this reading is entirely wrong and unfair and pointlessly cruel. 

In truth, Shouto’s never been his father’s pawn. In fact, he’s tried to oppose Endvr’s will any way he could. Every time Shouto happened to go along with one of Enji’s wishes, he always set down boundaries and made it very clear that he wasn’t doing it for Endvr. So for example, even if Shouto went along with the training, it was because Shouto wanted to be a hero like All Might. Even if he used the paths Enji opened for him, like the recommendation for UA, he still fought at his own conditions, only using his ice. Or again, when he accepted that he needed to work on both sides of his quirk, he only interned for his dad to exploit his long experience in the field, not because he wanted to blindly follow in his footsteps or put water under the bridge. 

Fast forward to this chapter again. Dabi accuses Shouto of being here only because he’s Endvr’s puppet, obeying orders like all the sidekicks from the agency. But Shouto chose to be here, and the reason why is important because it perfectly shows his personal growth.

Shouto’s belief system boils down to a very simple concept. Letting people die when you can act and save them is wrong. Saving lives is a hero’s job and moral imperative. It always takes priority over anything else, even the law. 

So Shouto can’t ignore Dabi and keep trying to be a hero anyway. That literally goes against his definition of what a hero even is. He has the capacity to intervene, to act, and stop his brother. So he does. Even if he has to put his life on the line. A hero is always willing to risk himself, his career and even his reputation to do the right thing and make a difference. 

I’ll admit that putting it that way it sounds no different from Deku’s “my body moved on its own” idealization of pure heroic martyrdom. And in a sense, they do have common grounds. That makes sense since both of their conceptualizations stem from their admiration of All Might. All Might is the physical embodiment of that mindset: he’s a rescue hero who elected self-sacrifice as the pinnacle of selflessness and compassion. But in Shouto’s case, it’s a bit more complex and less black and white. 

Shouto didn’t start his heroic career off on the right foot. At first, he had a lot of anger that got out at unexpected times. Once he realized that his hatred for his dad made him a worse person and thus a worse hero, though, he willingly made the choice to change. 

Here he’s clearly referencing his own mindset prior to reconnecting with his mother. Back then, he didn’t concern himself with other people, and didn’t even give them a second glance, thinking he was above them. After his confrontation with Inasa, he realized that this mentality made him act too similarly to his father, and he wasn’t okay with that. I'm stressing that last part because it's important. 

Shouto spent a good portion of his early life believing in predetermination. Growing up in an abusive household, he developed the fear that he would one day end up hurting others the way his father hurt Rei. 

this was a big factor in why he struggled to accept his father’s training. He started associating his fire side with his father’s cruelty, and rejected it as a result. He thought that using it meant giving in to Enji’s will and following in his footsteps, but he didn’t want to be cruel like him. 

After making peace with his fire side, though, he abandoned those ideas. Reconnecting with Rei and recovering the memory of her encouragement shifted something in him. He no longer believes in predetermination and instead embraces personal responsibility. In Rei’s words, Shouto’s not bound by his blood. His DNA and family circumstances don't doom him to continue the cycle of abuse. Shouto has agency to change his fate. He has the ability to make his own choices, and he can choose to be a better person than his old man. 

From that point on, then, Shouto does just that. He rejects violence as a way to solve problems, and instead attempts to tackle them his own way. If up until the sport festival he only cared about excelling and coming on top of his competition, now he starts developing his own opinions on heroism and ethics. He decides that he doesn't want to be powerless again, like when he was five and Rei got unwell and then taken away from him. Swearing to become a hero who can actually help others, he vows to not let people within his reach slip away from him if he can do something about it. 

This is why, for example, when he senses Tenya going down a dark path, he follows him till Hosu and offers him the same words that helped him. Choose the man you want to become. Don’t go down the path of revenge. Choose to be the bigger person, and stick to it. Even when you let yourself down and betray your values, pick yourself back up and do better from then on. 

This philosophy is called personal responsibility. That is, the belief that individuals cause their actions and can thus control their destiny instead of passively suffering it. According to it, when individuals fail to meet expected standards, they don’t have to look for an external cause to blame, but direct that blame toward themselves and take accountability. 

To Shouto, making your own choices and taking responsibility for them is comforting. It reassures him that cruelty is not automatically inherited like he originally feared, but always a choice. Thanks to this change in mindset, he was able to come to terms with his legacy and make peace with himself, so it goes without saying that he'd become an advocate for it. It helped him, so it should help others as well. 

Right? 

The problem with personal responsibility

Here, Shouto's clearly trying to push his brother to live by the same philosophy. This speech bubble is an obvious callback to what Dabi said during the war arc, equating his flames to their dad's to make Endvr partially responsible for Dabi's actions. This is Shouto's response. Dad went crazy, our home was shit, but you cannot blame your actions on someone else because at the end of the day it was you who burned those people to death, not father. 

Now, I want to point out that Shouto's not condemning his brother's actions from a perceived higher moral ground. He's not saying "You're irredeemably evil and deserve punishment for your actions that I shall now deliver." I believe that interpretation to be a misreading of Shouto's character. It contradicts Shouto's core belief, the idea that people can change, and can choose to do a complete 180, because Shouto himself did one too. 

However, I also think that Shouto’s words fall completely flat here for two reasons that I will now explain. 

For one, Shouto’s demanding that Dabi owns up to his actions, but at the same time he’s giving Endvr a free pass to keep ignoring his eldest for the greater good. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. In the context of a war, it makes sense for Enji to be deployed against AFO. They need his manpower. The hero ranks were thinned down in the previous war and Endvr remains one of their strongest fighters. Shouto knows this, of course. Back in chapter 56, during the first internship arc, he recognized that his father has the judgment and insight worthy of a top hero, so Shouto recognizes that Endvr’s experience in the field is valuable when it comes to hero work. 

So, it makes tactical sense for Endvr to be there instead of facing his son. But thematically? Not so much. The central conflict in Endvr’s character arc is that he always runs away instead of facing the consequences of his actions, and that he hides behind hero work to skip out on his duty as a parent. 

And the thing is, the narrative draws attention to this as well. Insert meme here: [heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point]

AFO is a piece of shit, and he always greatly delights in twisting the truth, but what he says here is right on the money. Endvr IS dumping the weight of cleaning up his own messes onto his youngest son. The fact that Shouto apparently suggested it doesn't change the fact that Endvr is still doing what he’s always done: punching villains instead of caring about the wellbeing of his family. 

Now, I don’t want to be unfair to Shouto’s character and apply selective reading. It’s not ooc for Shouto to be okay with Enji dealing with AFO, per se. Connecting to what I said earlier, Shouto believes that a hero’s moral imperative is that of saving lives. By his own admission, Enji is a shitty father but a passable hero. One with good battle sense, at the very least. When he’s fighting, he knows what he’s doing. It’s not a stretch to think Shouto wants Enji to stop AFO because he knows the threat AFO presents to civilians, and doesn’t want more innocents to die in the crossfire. In this light, Shouto would be okay with letting him do his usual Number One shtick for the same reason he was okay with letting his dad stay a hero without ever exposing him for the abuse: Enji is a good hero, and what he does helps people.

However, my problem is not with Shouto as a character, but with the overall narrative of the Todofam, and how it often fails to deliver on its own set up. 

Before this arc, there was a great deal of focus on how Shouto got his father to agree that they would save Touya together. But in 351 we find out what that actually means: how is Enji defeating AFO in any way related to rescuing Touya? It’s not. Splitting up to fight on two different sides of a battle is the opposite of what doing something “together” means. 

Now, I would understand the point of choosing to do things this way if splitting up had been Endvr��s choice, or otherwise the result of the heroes’ planning. Putting it like that works with the narrative. It shows that the old guard of heroes still isn’t ready for systemic change, because they’re not ready to critically re-examine their own flaws. It works because unlike them, the kids already have a set up as the harbingers of that change, the ones who will succeed even if no one believes that rescuing villains is even possible. 

But if Endvr wanted to face Touya and only didn’t because Shouto insisted he shouldn’t, then Endvr’s cowardice gets reframed as mindfulness of Shouto’s wants. What is effectively continued neglect of his eldest suddenly gets framed as heroism instead, because Enji’s doing something morally good — he’s saving Japan from AFO. 

Besides, showing Endvr’s reluctance to agree with this plan despite the fact that he does go along with it, only cheapens the narrative of personal responsibility further. Why is Dabi being ethically condemned as selfish for choosing to murder, but suddenly letting Endvr skip out on his parental duty is not his choice but Shouto’s and thus completely out of Endvr’s control? 

See what I mean? It’s pretty ineffective writing all around. Endvr is getting sympathy, but Dabi isn’t, when in fact, both should be held accountable for their actions. 

But I mentioned two reasons why I think Shouto’s words to Dabi fall flat. The second is because of this other line: 

The heroes seem to be working under the assumption that villains can be “stopped” so long as they are talked into changing their methods. Toga would be a “normal” girl with a crush if she just stopped hurting the people she loves. Shigaraki would be the poor, misunderstood victim that Nana left behind, if he stopped it with all the atrocities. Dabi would return to being Touya-nii, if he stopped being a “baka aniki” and dragging people in his range of destruction. 

But of course, it’s not that simple. Putting it like that ignores that the issue the villains are fighting against is systemic. It cannot be solved by simply changing the actions of individuals. 

The official release translated Shouto’s line as “you’re not taking any more innocent lives.” However, for the sake of this argument, I want to focus on the nuance of that adjective. In his original phrasing, Shouto calls them “kankeinee hitotachi,” which actually means “people who have nothing to do with [something].” Coupled with what he says next, “aim all your rage at us,” the meaning becomes clear. He’s urging his brother to stop involving people who had no role in their family drama in his revenge plot. Dabi’s issues are with their father and him, so he should just focus on taking it out on them alone. In this sense, everyone else is innocent. Unrelated to the problem. 

Now, that is simultaneously true and false. On the one hand, Dabi’s victims weren’t personally responsible for the abuse Dabi went through (with maybe the exception of the Flower man in AFO’s lab, assuming he’s dead). On the other hand, though, people outside of the Todoroki family aren’t completely blameless, and acting as though they are is the exact wrong thing to say if Shouto wants to actually connect with his brother. 

See, the thing is, the public that watched Dabi’s broadcast put their faith onto Endvr despite being an abuser but called his victim annoying for wanting justice. As I went over above, they don’t care about the people that the system screws over in order to maintain the peace for the masses. In fact, they want to restore that system and go back to feeling reassured that the heroes have everything under control. 

I’m stressing this because Shouto and Dabi need different things to come to terms with their trauma. While Shouto might be satisfied with letting his dad keep his job because to him change is demonstrated through personal penance, Dabi wants more accountability from the system itself, because they all backed up his dad. Even after learning the truth about the domestic violence, they all chose to bury their heads into the sand and called Dabi a liar. Because Endvr is good at his job, they all collectively decided to give him a second chance without consequences. In fact, the country doesn’t even know that Enji vowed to atone to his family. He never told them. During the press conference, he just asked them to believe in him as a hero, and they all did. For all the public knows, Enji could still be an abuser. How are they not enablers? 

The issue is systemic. Individuals might choose personal responsibility but that won’t make a dent if the system itself is corrupted. 

Does this mean Dabi should have killed people? Does it mean he’s justified? Of course not. His trauma doesn’t give him a free pass for killing. Shouto’s right that he shouldn’t have murdered randos just to get back at their father, but he’s wrong in thinking that only villains should own up to their violence. Heroes should as well. The whole system could use some more acceptance of their own flaws. 

Lately, I get the sense that heroes are determined to “stop” the villains before they can save them. While this sounds perfectly logical on paper, I find the resulting  approach to be ineffective. I agree that the villains need stopping; this rampage is both destructive and self-destructive. It benefits no one. But the heroes entered this second war with a mindset of soldiers when their goal (or at least, the OG trio goal) is more akin to that of social workers. Deku wants to save Shigaraki from AFO’s abuse. Shouto wants to get past Dabi’s hatred and bring Touya home for noodles. Ochako wants Toga to smile instead of crying. Their goals involve compassion, but their methods employ suppression. They’re simply not listening yet. And that’s the problem. 

Utilitarian heroism might’ve solved problems in the past, but it’s outdated for the evolved problems the story’s depicting now. To make an easy example, punching Shigaraki and telling him how bad a victim he is won’t resolve the possession, because AFO’s control on Shigi is based on his resentment. The more Shigaraki feels misunderstood by society and suppressed for the greater good, the more his hatred will fester and make AFO’s control stronger. Similarly, all League members were shunned repeatedly, and clam up when faced with even more self-righteous blame.

The heroes need to work on compassion, not violence, if they want to break this impasse. 

This chapter was an overall failure of communication and reinforced some of the unjust scapegoating on the villains. And you know what’s frustrating about it? That all this miscommunication would vanish if everyone just stopped bringing up each other’s actions as moral ammo to fire at their opponents and instead attempted to relate to each other more. 

For example, I explained above that Dabi sees Shouto as an empty shell without personal convictions. He sees Shouto rely on others and thinks that makes him weak. He sees Shouto struggle to find his path as a hero and calls him a puppet for it, a doll on Endvr’s strings. But accepting that support is what allowed Shouto to get better and past the Earlyroki stage. While it’s true that for a time he lacked personal convictions, struggling with his identity was a big part of his inner growth and it got him where he is now. 

During that time, Shouto let himself examine who he was without his father. Dabi never did. Lagging behind everyone for a while but ending up with more solid beliefs that are yours as a result is not a weakness. Ironically, the one who’s blindly imitating their father for lack of a sense of self outside of him is Dabi, not Shouto. He needs to get there like his little brother. 

Hopefully, once they are done punching and yelling at each other, they’ll come to the same conclusion, too. In the meantime… eh. This chapter was just painful to watch, at least for me

[thyandrawrites]

I love how Shoto loves his brother unconditionally. He's not afraid of him, he doesn't want to run away or look away from Touya. He wants to understand him so much. He wants to be there for him and he wants to actually get a chance to be brothers together.

I love that about him. I love that his resolve to save his brother is not motivated just by a wish to do right by his own values and his definition of what a hero should be. Cause yes, to Shouto a hero is someone who doesn't trust authority to do right by default but instead will step in and put their life on the line to save others. But that's not what truly motivates him here.

What compels him is genuinely just a wish to connect to his brother, to get to know him for the first time. Shouto never got the chance to play with Touya like his siblings. He never got to bond with him. To Shouto, Touya was just a name his father threw at him when he didn't perform well enough during training. Nothing more. He was a dead brother he never got to meet, one that he likely didn't even know how to mourn.

Since then, Shouto was able to mend his relationship with his family. He reconnected with Rei. He spent more time having meals with Natsuo. He told Fuyumi about the friends he made at school.

Up until now, Touya was the only family member outside his reach, because until now, Touya was just ashes inside an urn. All Shouto had were the stories about him that his family could offer, stories that made up an incomplete, perhaps even incoherent picture. To Natsuo, Touya was a victim, killed by his own father. To Fuyumi, he was a victim of circumstances, died as a tragic accident that their father couldn't prevent. To Enji, Touya was a failed masterpiece. We don't even know what he was to Rei. But to Shouto... To Shouto Touya was barely more than a picture and an old photograph on a frame. How can he hope to understand Dabi, when all he has as a foundation for that sympathy is just stories?

I think it's great that Shouto recognizes that he doesn't have all the puzzle pieces yet, that he's still missing Touya's side of the story.

For all their similarities, their lives weren't exactly 1=1. Touya was discarded, but Shouto was not. Touya admired his father and wanted to please him, but Shouto did not. Despite being abused by the same person, their experiences are not carbon copies of each other. And it's important for Shouto to recognize this, to acknowledge his limitations, because this will definitely come up again.

in Touya's experience as a kid, everyone always thought they knew the perfect solution to all his problems. They thought that if they just tried to force him to see all the other options he had ahead of him, he would quit his secret training. In other words, everyone always just... Assumed they knew what was best for him, without really treating him like an individual whose feelings about it mattered, too. So what if he was crying himself to sleep every night? What if he tore at his hair and crumpled on the floor in a fit of despair? Forbidding him from training was for his own good!

... Right?

Well... Not really, no. As it turns out, ignoring that Touya had a will of his own is exactly what led to tragedy. If Enji had bothered listening to Touya's cries for help, maybe he could've saved him in time. As it stands, no one understood Touya then. To an extent, Shouto still doesn't. It's not his fault since he didn't know better and he was under a lot of stress, but during the war he did say some triggering stuff to his brother that totally didn't help with Dabi's spiralling. And that's largely because Shouto doesn't have the full picture yet.

What he can understand is Dabi's self-destructive hatred. Cause Shouto experienced it too. What he didn't experience was his father's rejection, or the loss of purpose Touya did when he lost the training.

But! It's great that he admits that he doesn't know Todoroki Touya. And it's even greater that he still wants to know him, regardless.

Shouto places a lot of importance on telling people your truth. And we see this in action multiple times. Shouto overshares. A lot. He does it with Deku at the sport festival when he's barely known him a few weeks, and he does it to a class of preschoolers who doubtfully even comprehend the full extent of his baggage. In fact, he does it every time he wants his words to have resonance, every time he feels the need for people to understand his motives.

To Shouto, this is vital. Explaining where he comes from is his way of explaining who he is. Because so much of his life has been dictated by his circumstances that he fears that all people can see when they look at him is just his father's last name. But that's not all Shouto is. It never has been. Yet, he dreads staying in Endvr's shadow cause it suffocates who Shouto Todoroki is.

Which, not coincidentally, makes him the perfect person to relate to his brother. Dabi has also struggled all his life to define his identity outside of his father. And the reason why he struggled in the first place is exactly because no one ever bothered trying to listen to Touya's truth. All they did was trying to dissuade him from pursuing heroics and from using his quirk. But no one was willing to listen about how much that rejection was crushing him. No one tried to understand why Touya was clinging to a life he couldn't have back. Heck, Enji never even listened to the pleas to meet Touya at Sekoto Peak.

But now we have Shouto, who's very eager to lend a listening ear. To hear Touya's side of the story, to understand who Touya was as a person before anything else, and how he wound up becoming Dabi. To understand that Touya needs freedom from that suffocating shadow as much as Shouto did.

I think that this will be instrumental to both of their character arcs. Dabi needs empathy and someone willing to look directly at him, to love him unconditionally for who he is, and not what he could've been. And Shouto needs to be able to address all the loose ends from his past. So much of his journey as a person has been that of facing his family and making things right with them. I think it's really important that he's finally getting a chance to make things right with Touya as well

[thyandrawrites]

Can I ask how do you think Shouto should stop Touya? Both Shouto and Touya can cancel each other out so neither are going to win with their powers alone.

Empathy. I know that word is overused in villain meta, but it's really that simple.

Shouto right now is the only character who can challenge Touya's self perception in any significant way. Let's remember that Touya's reason to be a villain is his lack of identity besides the purpose placed on his birth. Touya started spiralling and eventually fell through the cracks not because he wasn't strong enough to overcome his obstacles, but because, like early Shouto, he struggles to differentiate his Self from Enji's shadow. To this day, even his revenge plan essentially boils down to a wish to be finally acknowledged, to be seen as the masterpiece he was supposed to be according to his father's plans. He can't give up that goal because he simply has no identity outside of it.

But the thing is, Shouto started out in a similar enough bad mental place that he can reach out to Touya and show him a way out.

The central theme in Shouto's personal journey was figuring out how he can be just Shouto, instead of Todoroki Shouto, Son of Endvr and Perfect Masterpiece. There's a reason he chooses his given name as a hero moniker. His arc is all about finding his true self-expression, his own way of doing things that is independent from his father's ambitions for him. In other words, it's a journey to self-actualization. For most of his life, Shouto was unable to come to terms with his fire because he always saw using that side as surrendering to the ambitions that Endvr saddled onto him—a role he never wanted. However, in doing so, he reached the opposite result and allowed Endvr's looming shadow the power to dictate Shouto's actions for the better part of his life. Only when Shouto reclaimed his fire as his, did he finally find some inner peace, and was able to start a much healthier journey, make friends, make progress as a hero and a person.

I'm putting all that out there because I think the key to stopping Dabi is something very similar. "Dabi" is not Touya's true self, either. It's a villain moniker, yes, but it's also a persona born of trauma and bad coping methods, one that still suffers from the same struggle to define himself as anything more than Endvr's product. Much like early Shouto, Dabi can't reach his self-actualization (and instead seeks external validation) because he's trapped in that mentality. He can't see past the circumstances of his birth. He's not a full individual yet, because so much of his identity is tied to the expectations his father saddled onto him as a child.

So the key to stopping "Dabi" was never a new super move. It cannot come down to just physical blows, because the root of the conflict was never pure physical prowess. It was always a matter of identity, or lack thereof. A matter of finding out your true self by exploring who you are without blood as a chain around your ankles.

Right now, as the sole other receptacle of Endvr's ambitions of glory, Shouto is the only character who can see how those expectations stifled and warped his brother until burning hatred for Endvr became the only self-expression he had access to. And right now, Shouto's the only one who successfully got out of that mindset and started healing.

The way Shouto was able to reach that point was by coming to terms with his legacy and finding his distance from Enji. He made peace with his fire side by understanding that the circumstances of his birth didn't have to influence his path moving forward. Cause blood isn't all an individual boils down to. Choices matter as well. Connections. Shouto found a way to use his fire when he didn't associate his father's cruelty with it, and instead used it for kindness, for helping others. He became a more accomplished hero when he let his classmates get close to him, when he relied on them and let them rely on him in turn.

Notably, Dabi still struggles with all of that. His desperation to justify his existence to his father shows that he's still trapped in his legacy with seemingly no way out. He doesn't see any other options for a "failure" like himself. He talks about "warped rails" and predestination, and clearly still sees his blood as a sentence upon his head, something inescapable, and by giving Endvr that much power to define his worth, he forgot he already possessed it, inherently, as an individual. And all that accomplished was erasing "Touya" more and more until what's left is just "Endvr's failed heir". Even the way he uses his fire mirrors Endvr's, and so does his self-reliance. He doesn't open up to his peers, refuses their help and their companionship unless the situation calls for teamwork, because he thinks he doesn't "need" them. Like his father, and like early Shouto, he sees self-reliance as strength and cooperation as weakness.

But Dabi, like early Shouto already did, is meant to move past all that, because that's not who he is, but only a reflection of how he was raised.

In this sense, Shouto's empathy can be the only bridge to him right now. By using their shared experiences as a common basis, Shouto can understand what the root of Dabi's villainy is, and help dislodge the warped misbelief that's the cause of that spiralling. Remembering Rei's words to him (the ones triggered in his fight with Deku) helped Shouto reconnect to his origins, to the self buried under all the trauma, and eventually led to his growth. So I think Dabi, too, needs to be prodded and l challenged until he, too, can return to his origin and be just Touya again. Not a failed masterpiece, not his father's son, but just Touya. The boy he was originally supposed to be.

After all, this manga isn't particularly subtle about this, either. How many times has Horikoshi used the visual tool of depicting younger versions of his characters to show exactly that—the power of connection, the idea that growth can only begin when you're true to your origins?

So yeah, those are my two cents. I think that's how "Dabi" can be stopped. By stopping, cancelling, the reason why this villain moniker exist, and return Dabi to just Touya-nii.

[thyandrawrites]

Hi, there! Hope you're doing well.

I wanna ask a question regarding Dabi and Twice's relationship.

We've seen that Dabi has no problems working with Twice and is seemingly not annoyed by his antics and contradictory personality. Twice also has confidence in Dabi's strength and rebuffed his doubt about his own strength. It is implied that Dabi and Twice views each other as brothers in combat, even though there were occasional arguments between them.

During the war arc, Dabi doesn't blame Twice for his mistakes and goes to save him from Hawks. Dabi even gives Twice some encouragement to keep fighting, showing no signs of blame towards his comrade and actually gives Twice a high-five.

But during Twice's death, Dabi appears devastated to the point where he becomes fully committed to the task of killing Hawks to avenge his ally, but only because he cares more about Twice's worth to his own ambitions than his friendship with him.

Dabi even further says that he doesn't care about Shiggy or the League.

Did Dabi really mean it what he said there to Hawks? Or is he just trying to suppress his emotions by acting all tough and ruthless and not caring about anyone around him especially the League?

Hey! sorry for the belated response, I've been busy and this ask deserved more than a quick response.

To understand Dabi we need to understand a key trait of his characterization: he is not emotionally well-adjusted. As such, none of his statements about how he feels can be taken at face value, because he's not in touch with his emotions when he says them. A take I see fairly often is that he acts aloof and standoffish on purpose because he values his independence, but imho that's only partially accurate. He does do that, but it's a subconscious thing. He doesn't do it to be a tough guy or a tsundere. He literally lacks the emotional tools to relate to others in a healthy way.

Allow me to make a comparison with Shouto to better explain my point. At the beginning of the manga, Shouto was very similar to Dabi in a lot of ways. He was distant from the rest of the class, he was super self-reliant, and he picked fights with people that he felt were looking down on his strength:

these are all things Dabi does, too. The reason behind them is simple: it's a learned behaviour from having to survive in an abusive household with a self-reliant, authoritative example of masculinity as their sole role model growing up. I'm not stating this to say that either Dabi or Shouto are trying to consciously emulate their dad, but they do, in fact, model after him to a certain extent, though without realizing. They definitely internalized that someone who is strong acts like this. Standoffish, strongly focused on a goal, hostile to anything that might distract them from achieving their goal:

before his character development, Shouto used to be dismissive of other people, unwilling to accept their help, and outright rude. All of this not because he wanted to, but because he didn't realize he was doing it. By Shouto's own admission, his goal of getting back at his father clouded his best judgement, leaving only anger and laser-focus ambition behind.

And I say it's subconscious because even after receiving character development, Shouto still struggles to shrug off his self-reliance:

It's only when Aizawa points it out to him that Shouto realizes he cut off Momo entirely. He assumed he had the best plan, and didn't let her give suggestions on their team strategy. Shouto did notice that she wanted to say something, but since he's used to dealing with things alone, having been trained to be strong on his own, he doesn't even think of asking for her help. He just assumes he's the boss and that she'd play support cause the situation calls for it, and he's already got a plan.

In much the same fashion, Dabi does the exact same thing with the League. He doesn't clue them in on what he's planning to do with the broadcast, assuming they would all play support:

He's rude without meaning to (calling Spinner a lizard and Toga a freak), and above all, he's too laser-focused on his own goal to take part in a group goal, coming across as cold and distant in the process:

How does any of this relate to Twice, you might wonder. I'm getting there!

As I mentioned, Shouto did all of those things for two reasons: one, he didn't know better, and two, his hatred for his dad put that burning, all-encompassing urge to achieve his goal above any attempt at socializing and having other priorities in life.

In fact, that tunnel vision was so strong, Shouto later reflects that it blinded him from even acknowledging other people.

"I guess I wasn't even looking at him from that very start. In order to deny Endeavor and all that he is... because that's the only thing I was seeing"

the above line applies to Dabi as well. Shouto got to the point of relating to his brother and saying "he is me" because he recognized that same self-destructive, single-minded hatred that paralyzed him for so long in Dabi. Dabi, who is still stuck in that mindset.

It's not that Dabi consciously wants to keep Twice and the League at arm's length. It's that he's too emotionally maladjusted to even look at them and see friend material in any of them. Just like how Shouto protested that he belonged in the friendly atmosphere of class A and challengingly declared that he wasn't there to make friends but only to become a stronger hero, Dabi shows the same inability to think of the League as anything else but an asset to his goal.

So when he says this:

he's not a reliable narrator that we should take at face value. He says what he thinks to be true, but we readers know that is not an accurate depiction of his real feelings, the ones he's repressing in order to achieve that goal. I mean, look at his eyes. They're as wide as dinner plates, his pupils tiny pinpricks. His mouth is pulled in one of his most manic smiles. The art also clues us in: when he says all of this, he's high on adrenaline and pure rage. He's not lucid, and he's furthest away from being in touch with his feelings than ever. Cause in this moment, with the sting of yet another hero's betrayal that he didn't see coming, it's like he was slapped across the face by his trauma all over again. So clearly, he reacts with a coping method: he closes like a clam, shuts people out even more, and clings to his revenge with an even more desperate effort.

This is how I think he rationalizes it. Follow his "logic": if he doesn't care about the League, then he doesn't care about Hawks killing one of them. If he doesn't care about Hawks' backstabbing, then he doesn't care about heroes betraying his trust. That in turn means he doesn't care that his father was one of those as well, a "hero" who never showed up at Sekoto Peak and let him die alone. And if he doesn't care about his father's betrayal, then he cannot be hurt by it. If he's not hurt by Endvr's abandonment, then it means he's indifferent to his father's judgement that he's a failure. And if he's indifferent, then it means his father never had that much power over Touya's self perception in the first place. Then that judgement wouldn't be true. Touya would not be a failure after all. And if he's not a failure, then he is strong. If he is strong he's still in the running for his father attention, and his existence still has a purpose.

Are you still following?

Putting it that way shows just how far his emotional repression goes. Basically, Dabi's got 25 years of unaddressed issues that he never got any closure on, and to this day, they still stunt his ability to move on from his trauma and see anything past the goal of getting his father's attention. His relationships with his family and with his peers, unfortunately, end up as a casualty to that war. It's not that he doesn't care, or that he wants to keep people distant, or that he wants to hurt them.

It's that his hatred is stronger than any other feeling he might've once experienced, numbing him to anything that isn't his revenge.

That doesn't mean that he doesn't feel those things, though. His grief for Twice was real. He still feels the other emotions, but they're just overshadowed by his rage and desperation, which get worse and worse off the longer he spends self-destructing to achieve his goal

[thyandrawrites]

Do you remember the scene where Shouto's happy memory with his mom gets triggered in response to Deku getting through to him? What if something similar will happen to Touya, but with him reminiscing his happy time with siblings?

Maybe? I think that Midoriya's lines triggered that memory with Rei specifically because of the words Rei said to him then. Shouto had repressed them, but they bubble back up to the surface when Midoriya inadvertently echoes them: you are not your quirk. You are not your father. You can be a hero and a kind person at the same time because the two things don't cancel each other out.

Similarly to Earlyroki, Dabi also represses a lot, and he actively tries to distance himself from his own memories. Just like Shou, he got so tangled in his tunnel vision that he's barely his own person anymore, and the only thing that keeps him going is his need to prove his dad wrong.

The only way I could see a repressed memory coming back to the surface and help him out of that spiralling is if said memory directly contradicted every twisted version of the truth Dabi's functioning on.

To put this in better words: in Shouto's case, remembering what Rei told him back then was a turning point less because he remembered a time when he was happy, and more because he remembered why he wanted to become a hero in the first place. Beyond what his father wanted him to accomplish, Shouto's drive was originally a desire to be a rescue hero like All Might. Yet, somewhere along the line, when he got lost in his hatred, he lost sight of that goal. Believing himself responsible for Rei's commitment, he starts believing he hurt her just like his father.

But then the memory resurfaces, and with it Rei's lesson: it's not his dna that dictates his fate, but his actions. So long as Shouto keeps choosing to be a hero to help others — so long as he chooses kindness — he won't become the type of man his dad is.

I do believe that Shouto will save his brother by helping him the way he was helped. His best chance at getting through to him is by telling Dabi that he, too, is more than his dna. Especially since Dabi's entire sense of self rests on the fact that he's Endeavor's son.

So for me, recovering happy memories with his fam wouldn't quite cut it. The trauma is too extensive, and the tunnel vision too strong. For it to work, that resurfacing memory should unbalance him like it unbalanced Shouto. It should remind him of who he was before his hatred took the best of him. I'm not discarding the chance that this might happen, but for me, I think that the only thing strong enough to give Dabi pause right now would have to be a memory where someone told Touya he was more than enough.

Given his backstory, I'm not fully confident that such a memory exists, or Touya would've never spiralled that hard out of control. But I'm really skeptical that at this point anything less than that would even register in his brain. He's ready to die. Shouto brought up Natsuo during the war and Dabi barely reacted. He's so detached from his emotions that remembering an easier time would probably only make him get angrier for what was stolen from him

Fundamentally, I think that Shouto and Touya are so different because Shouto had the unconditional love of at least one parent to keep him emotionally more well-adjusted than his big bro and his admiration of a good hero to keep him grounded. But Touya didn't have an easy equivalent, so in his case this would be harder to pull off imho

[thyandrawrites]

I know Endeavour will play a role in saving Dabi but I really want his role to be what Rei was to Shouto but also in a mirrored sense as well. Shouto was saved by Deku but to really move forward he needed to see Rei again and I think it should be the same for Dabi. He should be saved by Shouto but he still needs to confront Endeavour to start moving forward. The difference though he doesn't want to reconnect with Endeavour like Shouto wanted to with Rei.

I agree. Shouto will likely reach out to him emotionally to stop the self-destructive spiralling, and I'm assuming it will parallel Shouto's own self-actualization process. The "it's your power" scene wasn't so much Deku saving him, but rather Deku triggering Shouto's exploration of his identity. It was an acknowledgment that Shouto isn't just the sum of his genetic make up, but his own individual. That's why after the sport festival we see Shouto coming to terms with his legacy, addressing loose ends, and redefining what it means to be born a Todoroki.

The weight of a stifling legacy is a big motif in both Shouto and Dabi's character arcs. Both had the weight of expectations placed on them at birth, and they've both struggled to define themselves in spite of them; for Shouto, this struggle translated into a process of learning who he is (as a hero) if he denies his father, and if he can still pursue his goals without hurting others (=his mother). For Dabi, you'll notice that the struggle is pretty similar: it's the process of learning who he is (as a “failed creation”) if his father denies him, and if he can still pursue his goals (give meaning to his life) without hurting himself.

As you can see, and as you put yourself, both of these process are reliant on a confrontation with Rei and Enji respectively. In different ways, both siblings' need for Rei or Enji's approval has held them back for years, and this holding back is posited as something that they need to address and move on from.

In Shouto's case, he needed to confront his mom to ask her “can I still be a hero (despite taking after his quirk)?”

In Dabi's case, he needs to confront his dad to ask him “can my existence still have value (despite taking after her ice genes)?”

Cause both brothers sort of developed this fear that because of their dna, because they were born in that family, there is something inherently wrong with them. In other words, both of their traumas are rooted in (perceived or not) parental rejection, and it festered into self-loathing and self-repression. For there to be any self-aactualization for Dabi, he also needs to confront the root of that insecurity (and redefine who he is despite his legacy).

[thyandrawrites]

Has anyone pointed this out already?

I think they were roughly about the same age, too, when they realized just how big a piece of shit their father is. Touya was maybe 3 or 4, Shouto was around 5 or 6. The clenched fists, the trembling incredulity that then shifts into open anger and defiant glares, the helplessness they both felt... And finally, their realization that their father is the only one to blame. They mirror each other so much

[thyandrawrites]

I am unsure if you've replied this already but I couldn't find it through scrolling through your previous posts. Has Shouto even acknowledged/internalized his victimhood during the series tenure? I've seen him confront Endeavor about his crap behavior regarding his fam but very little is made about the fact he's the primary receptor of the physical side of the abuse. Maybe it's tied to the "Privilege" of having Half Hot-Half cold and being told that it's a Great Gift?

That's a good question. Apologies in advance if I'm forgetting something, but I don't think Shouto has ever explicitly addressed his own victimhood. Whenever he brings up Endvr's abuse, it's always in relation to how he wronged Rei specifically.

I don't think there has ever been an acknowledgement on his side (or by the narrative) that how Endvr treated him was equally fucked up. I think that partly this is because Shouto made Rei his reason to be a hero. He grew up watching All Might on TV with her, and internalized that a true hero is someone who rescues people. So obviously after witnessing how dysfunctional his family is, and how Rei took half of the brunt of the abuse, he made the connection that she needed saving. The fact that Shouto also needed saving from that family environment isn't ever explored to be honest. Like Hawks, it would seem that in order to take on the role of the saviour, Shouto gave up his own victimhood.

I think the closest we come to him acknowledging that the abuse he suffered himself isn't excusable is his spite towards the training he received on his fire side:

and his distaste for violence that resulted from that:

but even then, it's never framed as something that should warrant Shouto an apology from his father. What Shouto resents is his father's obsession for his fire side and his violent lashing out towards him and his mom when his expectations weren't met, not the fact that there were expectations placed him in the first place. The narrative does a very poor job of making that clear, too. Since Shouto's character journey is rooted around the theme of accepting both halves of his power, all his internal struggle is focused on what it means to have his father's fire inside him. Which, I mean, is a narrative that makes sense. When you grow up with abusive parents, you spend the rest of your life recognizing traits in yourself that could make you perpetrate the cycle of abuse, and actively trying to correct them. But in bnha this theme is explored weirdly, cause Horikoshi keeps trying to paint Endvr as less awful by making other characters responsible for his actions as well.

See, imho the real reason why Shouto never explictly stated his own victimhood is because he's written to feel partly responsible for his mother's fate. Like he had any say in his own birth, cause that's all he did to land Rei in her current situation. All his guilt is misplaced, and yet it's never outright addressed as such. The framing never confutes the fact that Shouto is a child and shouldn't be responsible for his parents' failures.

Even now, after recent manga developments, Shouto seems intent on "proving" how great a hero he is by fixing his family. Which, you know. Should be Endvr's job

[thyandrawrites]

This is a very controversial topic but how do you feel about Endeavour getting involve with stopping (saving) Touya?

I have mixed feelings about it. Mostly because there is a world of difference between stopping and saving, and those two words imply very different attitudes that I personally feel are at odds with each other. “Stopping” means that Enji’s still seeing Touya as a villain. He’s emphasing more the bad things he’s done than the reason why he did them. It means that he’s still subconsciously thinking of him as the scapegoat to Shouto’s golden child. Stopping means that Enji plans on facing him as Endeavor the hero, which is an approach that has already led to failure before. So I’m unsure why he’s still persisting in it. “Saving”, however, means that he recognizes Touya’s status as a victim and his right to be angry at him. It means that Enji sees Touya more as the son he failed and the son he lost, then as the villain he’s become, and that Enji’s ready to finally be a parent to him and give him the attention he neglected to offer Touya as a kid.

The ambiguity in the phrasing here leaves a bitter taste in my mouth because in my opinion, as I explained in other posts, there won’t be a conclusive and effective ending to Dabi’s arc if his victimhood isn’t recognized. If not by hero society at large, then at least by the family who always treated him as a bother, an inconvenience. Their lack of care is what made him a villain, so I don’t think an ending where Enji simply fistfights with Touya can be effective in showing that Enji now cares about him. You cannot “stop” someone from manifesting trauma. But you can help him get better, you can rescue his will to live.

All that said, though, I have my doubts that Enji’s the right person to reach Touya emotionally, to connect to him enough to make him stop his self-destructive journey. If my abuser reached out to me to offer his help, I would never accept it. I would just lash out harder. Which is why I’m pretty sure that Enji is being set up to fail again, so that Shouto can succeed by offering what Enji lacks: empathy.

notice his phrasing: in his head, he’s still making sense of this whole issue as a hero vs villain conflict, and he’s shown to be conflicted because the villain here happens to be his son, and that makes him falter on the job for the first time. He’s the hero with the highest capture rate of the country, and yet there’s this one villain who’s a terrible mass murderer that he cannot capture.

The fact that Touya’s his son is just a side note to him, an hindrance to what he would normally do when faced with a bad guy. If Dabi was literally anyone else, he wouldn’t hesitate. If it wasn’t someone he knew personally, Endeavor the hero would’ve burned him alive in an attempt to stop him just like how he did with Shigaraki. Shigaraki and Dabi foil each other, they’re both abuse survivors who became villains to lash out against hero society for all the ways it had hurt them.

Yet Endeavor the hero doesn’t falter for a second in front of him. Shigaraki’s whole speech (that is literally calling out the type of hero Endeavor is) flies completely over his head, because Endeavor doesn’t think of villains as people. He doesn’t recognize that what they’re saying might be true. He doesn’t accept his share of responsibility in being one of the forces that brutally silence them, that mercilessly rejects them. Enji rejected Touya as an heir and as a son. he refused to even look at him, and yet, he’s able to listen to Shigaraki’s speech without thinking it applies to him purely because Enji thinks himself above the words of a lowly villain. Of a lowly “mass murderer”. So thematically, he can’t listen to Touya either.

That is where Shouto comes in, because if Enji is still alienating Dabi as a villain before than as a son, if Enji’s still thinking of this as a matter that needs to be solved in a hero vs villain fistfight, Shouto on the other hand relates to Dabi on a personal and emotional level:

While Enji says “my son’s a mass murderer”, Shouto says “he’s ME”. Shouto of course recognizes that Dabi’s a villain too, but that doesn’t stop him from empathizing with him, from putting himself in Dabi’s shoes and acknowledging Dabi’s feelings. Which is why he’s a better candidate than his father when it comes to actually reaching out to Touya on a deeper level.

So, to answer your question: I don’t think Enji should be entrusted with the success of this mission. Endeavor the hero might succeed in “stopping” Dabi the villain, maybe. But imho Shouto is the one who will “save” Touya properly.

[thyandrawrites]

Hello! I was wondering if you think there is any significance that the heroes set up to save the villains; Deku, Shouto and Uravity, all have their heroes names be based on their actual names. One of the things about the older generation is that there seems to be a dissociation between the hero and the self- endeavour and Enji most obviously but also between All Might and Yagi as well as Hawks and Keigo. Thanks! I love your metas!

Hi! I guess I never really thought about it in those terms, but I agree that there is definitely a disconnect between the older gen’s hero selves and their actual personhood. You quoted three great examples after all, and I’ve talked about the subject before too so I def think that’s a thing.

I don’t know if I’d connect the fact that they’re selflessly dedicated to saving the villains to the idea that they’re down to earth because they chose names that reflect their actual identity tho. Of all three, I think Deku’s the only one whose hero name has a certain narrative weight. The name “deku” itself was reclaimed from an insult to the very symbol everything Izuku can accomplish in spite of his previous powerlessness. The same narrative wasn’t applied to the other two, so I am hesitant to say that their names, however down to earth, hold the same weight and significance. It just seems like a coincidence that they chose names that are close/identical to their civilian names.

However, Deku, Shouto and Ochako all have one thing in common, and imho it’s what makes them so highly sympathetic of the villain’s backstories and so different from the people who embraced heroics for some lofty aspiration or for the fame. It’s the powerlessness itself. It’s not just Deku, all three have experienced it in one way or another. Specifically, it’s the powerlessness that comes from being unable to help others.

For Deku, it’s the fact that he was denied that chance from the get-go. Not even his mother believed he had a chance to be a hero, and society drilled that powerlessness into him every day, taunting him with his lack of quirk. But lacking a superpower doesn’t mean lacking agency or drive. All he needed was to be supported, believed in. He could make a difference. Even then, he understood that the true heroic call is jumping in to rescue people in need, and there definitely is a pattern to the people Deku has helped. It’s always those whose call for help gets ignored for one way or another. Bakugou was left to fend for himself against the Sludge villain. Kouta was considered a rebellious child instead of a kid who was hurting. Eri was a variable that the heroes didn’t even see coming. And now Shigaraki, who’s someone the entire world already gave up on. Deku was an overlooked kid too, and that powerlessness taught him compassion.

Shouto in turn experienced the powerlessness of being unable to save his mother. That frustration was a defining moment for him, because it was when he understood that a hero’s job is that of helping others, not doing whatever it is that his father does.

Shouto experienced first-hand what it means to be failed by institutions (his father was a pillar of society, and yet a villain to his own family), and so as a hero he vows to save those that the system overlooks. It’s not a coincidence that the first person he chooses to extend a helping hand to is his own mother. Shouto refuses to be powerless again. He can make a difference, and he will even if he has to break the rules to get there.

Ochako admittedly had a lot less development than the other two, but she follows the same pattern. She was helpless to prevent Sir’s death. She cradled a dying man in her arms, and that experience changed something in her. It’s one thing to witness someone dying in battle, and another to see them slowly bleeding to death as you try and carry them to a medic. The powerlessness of seeing a life slip through your fingers, that grief, are what cemented her resolve to save people.

 And I’m assuming that the fact that she specifically experienced the death of a man she respected and cared about will factor in her connection to Toga, who similarly lost someone very dear to her, and asked us what death of a villain even means to a hero 

So basically I think that the disconnect between a hero’s ethics and an individual’s morals doesn’t affect the trio as much as the older gens because all three experienced helplessness. And that more than anything shaped the abstract idea of heroics into goals that are personal to them and very achievable. Their drive is not motivated by the good of the faceless masses like Hawks or All Might, but by specific people

[thyandrawrites]

The heroes’ hands are dirtier than ours

hey! Thank you for your patience so far. One reason why I put off answering this ask was because I think this topic can tie into a bigger meta about Dabi’s mindset and showcase how it’s the direct result of worldbuilding flaws—some of which Dabi’s character is meant to directly call out on screen. I hope you won’t mind my digression. I will talk about his relationship (or lack thereof) with Shouto, but I will also talk about manga spoilers, and about Dabi’s treatment of Tokoyami and Hawks, because the two topics can connect. If you’re just here for some Todofam angst, and want a more direct reply, you might just wanna read point 1 and 3. Point two is a bigger detour into chapter 271 to figure out the root of Dabi’s character hang-ups, and how they would impact his possible future confrontation with his bro. 

So, without further ado, let’s start this long-ass meta! 

1. Dabi doesn’t particularly wanna fight anyone - until they prove to be “scummy” and/or complacent

I know, I know. This might seem like a bold claim. He killed Snatch, didn’t he? Except... not really. If we compare how seriously he was taking that fight as compared to... say, Geten or Hawks, the difference will be pretty obvious. 

Against Snatch, he was lazily strolling around, a grin stamped on his face, but he was otherwise completely calm—relaxed, even. We see him make some taunting remarks with an almost apathetic nonchalance. Heroes always prioritize saving other to their own wellbeing, he tells us, and that’s exactly what makes him get the jump easily on Snatch. 

We know that his heart is not in it because nothing about it is personal. He’s merely following orders. There’s no trace of the murderous grins that pull his staples grotesquely in a freak horror show, like when he’s fighting against Hawks or Endeavor, or the calm, chilling fury he displays against Geten. 

He doesn’t bother with the killing blow, leaving it to Compress. A far cry from jetpacking after his targets in order not to let them escape his attacks. And even though we see him overheat, it’s more a result of letting out big blasts than, you know... actually trying to do any real damage. 

You might object—but Dabi is a very cautious fighter! Of course he wouldn’t fight seriously when he can help it. His skin overheats easily. And you’d be right. However, I will argue that there is a distinct shift in his eyes, when he fights for “conviction” reasons, as opposed to when he just obeys orders, lending his hand to Shigaraki's agenda. 

During training camp, he was barely trying to put up a fight at all. I think this was equal ways because he was trying not to overexert himself (again, because he's aware of the limits of his quirk), but also because his heart wasn't particularly in it. 

Dabi goes into this kidnapping mission knowing that Bakugou won't switch sides. He can read him well enough to know his ideals are too solid for him to be tempted into villainy, and yet he still goes along with Shigaraki's orders because they give him as good a chance as any to start poking holes in the blind faith heroes have that they can always save everyone. 

We know that this is Dabi's character hang-up. He resents the rhetoric that heroes save people, because he wasn't saved. He resents that heroes put up a front of putting other people's wellbeing above their own, of always being right, morally upstanding and just, because he was abused and likely killed/left to die by a hero who was anything but, and who only ever cared about his image and his own accomplishments. 

So this is why we see Dabi basically rattle off the League's plan to Aizawa. To him, that entire mission was meant to prove a point to hero society. He wanted to demonstrate that heroes wouldn’t be able to save Bakugou even if he did give them a warning. And he was proven right. The heroes’ efforts were fruitless, and the League was successful. 

To Dabi, murdering any of the kids or the pros on site wasn't that important, like it was to other League members. Once again, just like with Snatch, he was barely fighting at all, and he was instead more focused on using his fire as a containment net and a defensive tool - keeping the heroes away from him and Twice, the ones carrying out the distraction. 

The fact that Dabi avoids combat whenever possible is presented directly on screen from that first arc. He spares Aoyama, pretending not to have seen him hiding in that bush, and this later almost jeopardizes the mission. We aren't told his reasons to act that way, so it remains a topic for speculation. Does he not like fighting kids? Was Aoyama an exception because he was terrified out of his mind, and that hit home in ways that made Dabi not want to go for the kill? Was Dabi simply saving his energy for later, not seeking out a fight with Aoyama cause he figured Aoyama would stay put? Was it a mix of all those things? 

In the end, his reasons for sparing him don't matter as much as the act of sparing him itself. What we can get away from that scene, and from the confrontation with Todoroki, Deku, and Shouji that follows, is that Dabi is not a character who's interested in killing randomly (like Muscular or Moonfish). The only time we see him be fired up (pun not intended) about something during that arc was when he was taunting Aizawa, mocking him for caring about his students above anything else. So he’s much more interested in proving how heroes’ self-congratulating mindset blinds them to the flaws of the system, and how ‘saving others’ is often just a front of arrogance. 

The scene with Shouto at training camp further proves this reading. He doesn’t engage in a full-on fight, and merely limits himself to taunting his little brother. Had he wanted to fight for real, he most certainly could’ve. But Shouto isn’t yet on his radar, not as much as his dad. To understand why we gotta make a small detour into spoiler territory. 

2. You stopped thinking for yourself

This past arc has done an incredible job of flipping the idea that heroes are always just on its head, showing us the other side of the coin—the people they don’t bother saving. I have written another more extensive post on this topic that you can read here. 

Given how the series is Deku’s coming of age story, his hero academia retelling, it goes without saying that the point of view on heroes that we’re fed since chapter one is a very biased one. It’s the point of view of a hero fanboy who has grown up idolizing the profession, thinking that heroes are the coolest and the kindest people in the world. Later in the story, however, we begin to realize that this viewpoint is more than a little naive. 

In this arc in particular, the fact that heroes are just as ruthless as villains has become particularly clear. Heroes aren't even above using literal 15 years old on the frontlines of a military operation. Let’s not call it a “war” because that’s not what this is. The way this was set up, with Hawks infiltrating first and then launching the operation before the end of Shigaraki’s incubation period reads very much like a covert ops assassination attempt. 

From the way the arc starts with the heroes marching under All Might’s victorious statue, to how they created divisions and sent them after villains and civilians of Deika city alike, from how secret this operation is, to how dead-set they are on dehumanizing Shigaraki, none of this reads like a typical “heroes square up against the big bads in an open brawl” fight. This is literally framed as a military intervention carried out by an oppressive government seeking out the violent suppression of dissent. Because the plf’s plan is threatening the undisputed authority of the Hpsc. 

You might object that the plf planned on creating a dystopia much worse than this. They wanted to reign with terror. And you’d be right, the plf is not any better, ideologically speaking. It goes without saying that Shigaraki’s desire for indiscriminate destruction is not a good way for him to cope with trauma. But “not being any better” means that they’re on the same level. 

Killing—whether you do it for a “good” or a “bad” reason—is still killing. This is what Dabi’s argument boils down to. What happened to ‘saving people’? Does that only extend to crying, morally good kids who have yet to show any “bad” after-effects of abuse? Why is the heroes’ violence always justified, always brushed off as “just”, even when they commit crimes that are anything but? Why does no one hold heroes to the same standard as villains, considering that both of their hands are dirty? 

Why does only one side go to jail, while the other is governing society? 

This is an argument that has been interwoven in the series ever since the first proper arc, USJ. Time after time, villains who were failed by hero society in one way or another keep challenging the protagonists with the question: 

“how is your violence any better than mine?”

Shigaraki in particular bears the worst of this constant dehumanization. He gets called a manchild, someone who kills just to kill, because for the heroes it is easier to just brush off those claims than to actually reflect about the truth in them. Cause after all, USJ!Shigaraki wasn’t above murdering children to summon All Might, right? So his violence must be more morally repulsive than All Might’s. Shigaraki must be too far gone, past the point of having any humanity left. 

Except both the readers and All Might get a harsh reality check for this self-righteous claim during the fight in Kamino, and the rhetoric that villains choose to do bad because they’re inherently evil gets blatantly called out on screen in all the arcs that follow. Shigaraki is Nana’s grandson. He ended up becoming a villain as a result of Afo’s gaslighting and the heroes’ negligence. He wanted to be a hero too, but he never got a chance to because the heroes could not prevent the bloody death of his family. He became a “violent manchild with a taste for blood” because Afo specifically moulded him to be brutally violent, pushing him to use his quirk to kill, and then offering positive reinforcement to make the lesson stick: if Shigaraki destroys, Sensei is pleased, hence Shigaraki needs to keep destroying to make him proud. 

Villains—at least the remaining core of the League—are not villains because they’re inherently evil. They’re villains because the heroes failed them. On top of that, heroes (who are supposed to save others) often dirty their hands with things that are extremely unheroic, further making the distinction between the labels really murky. 

Just to mention a couple directly from this arc: Miruko was completely fine with smashing the brains of a bunch of noumus—even if we’d just learned that noumus are victims of Ujiko’s mad science, and that some of their humanity still lingers in them after death. Aizawa and Mic only care about avenging Shirakumo—but not about the other victim of Ujiko’s science that is currently being unethically experimented on right before their eyes. Actually, Mic and Miruko go as far as trying to destroy the vat that was keeping Shigaraki alive, because neutralizing the threat he posed was more important than treating him like a human being whose life was literally on the line. Aizawa is the literal caretaker of a child who foils Shigaraki, and yet he remains blind to Shigaraki’s victimhood, deliberately so, because his hurt feelings and the success of the “mission” overshadow his humanity, even for a second. 

This mindset of efficiency over humanity is particularly made clear when X-less, the hero entrusted with Shigaraki’s not-breathing body, prioritized destroying the tubes over making sure that Shigaraki breathed. You know, by giving him cpr. Since heroes are supposed to save people’s lives and Shigaraki was dying on him. 

… And then there’s Hawks, but he deserves a point of his own, so I’m gonna talk about him in a minute. 

So, back to Dabi’s point: heroes are just as violent and ruthless as villains—they’re just on the right side of the law. All Might uses violence to uphold an equally violent police state under the threat of being punched into space. So do all the other pros, as exemplified by this arc, because complacence to the status quo is preferable to them than questioning their own morality, and maybe—maybe even to seeing all the people they overlooked. Cause heroes would much rather bury the external threat, just like they’re planning to do with Shigaraki, rather than investigate how all these villains even came to be. How these villains fell from the cracks of their society. 

Which brings us to the Dabi/Hawks/Tokoyami scene. 

Dabi gives Tokoyami the chance to break free of his blind hero-worship mentality by showing him what hides behind Hawks’ polished hero persona.

I think it’s important to note here how calm Dabi is at first. He was literally grinning like a madman until a few seconds before, but when Tokoyami shows up and immediately shields Hawks, Dabi’s attitude shifts. He’s no longer looming, crazy, aggressive. The first thing he does is remarking how fucked up it is that heroes are recruiting literal 15 years old for a military operation. 

This is of course meta commentary. Again, the story is told from Deku's perspective, and Deku is a student in a high school for heroes. Before, we never really questioned the morality of training teenagers to hone their often lethal superpowers for combat situations. After all, this is a shounen manga. Fifteen-year-olds punch each other in the face a lot in shounen mangas, and the addition of cool powers is only a fancy worldbuilding plus to a well-established genre. 

Yet Dabi, a literal character in the story, points out the absurdity of this situation. This is no longer a hero academia. The kids are no longer being asked to fight on a stadium under the strict supervision of their teachers. This is 15/yo being dragged in an armed conflict against villains with high death counts under their belt—a conflict that Hawks himself envisioned to end up bloody. A conflict that has seen already a bunch of people die (some of which minor, unnamed characters, but still dead ones). 

Let's not forget how this situation came to be. In order to make sure that the raid was a tactical success, the Hpsc changed the existing rules on hero internships to make their ranks bigger. What they did was essentially the in-universe version of  lowering the age of military recruitment in order to have a bunch of child soldiers at their disposal—even going as far as putting inexperienced teenagers on the frontlines as cannon fodder, simply because their quirks pack a big punch. Again, because to hero society, efficiency overshadows humanity. 

It is worth noting here that Dabi is intimately acquainted with this kind of mindset. Endeavor and the Hpcs share an eerie number of similarities in their methods. Both forced literal children even younger than 15 (Hawks, Shouto and presumably Touya) into ruthless “training”, and ripped away their personhood from them in an attempt at bending their victims’ will to their own needs, violently pulling on the leash whenever those kids tried to stay off from the path that was chosen from them. 

So Dabi has damn good reasons to resent the child soldiers mentality, and to watch with contempt people who thoughtlessly get involved in this glorified police state. Even when the people who thoughtlessly promote it are the child soldiers themselves. Maybe even more so. Shouto wasn’t given the option of not becoming a hero, and neither was Hawks. But Hawks later consciously became a tool for the system, by choosing to let his personal wishes not matter in the grand scheme of things, and sacrificing people “for the greater good.”

Hawks’ choice to kill Twice because he sees him as a threat to society is very much framed as Hawks’ desire to remain “thoughtless”. When Hawks goes for the kill, he does so against his personal wishes on the matter. Because the “greater good” is more important than single people. He chooses to only see the subversive potential that Twice’s quirk represents, because that’s the same kind of dehumanization that the Hpsc put him through: people are not worthwhile because they’re people, but because their quirk is strong; or, in Hawks’ case, because his ‘strong’ quirk has “heroic” potential for them to freely exploit. 

Hawks’ decision that Twice is dangerous then is a cold, analytical assessment. Hawks reduces Jin to his villain persona, but firmly refuses to see that Jin is also crying and begging for Hawks to understand. He’s refusing to acknowledge that the people Jin wants to keep safe can be victims on Jin’s level, because doing so would force him to reassess if this entire operation wasn’t abuse of power, just like Jin accused. It would force Hawks to acknowledge that villains aren’t inherently evil because they choose to do bad, as hero propaganda would have it, but that villains are humans, too. They’re not either “good people” or monsters, but layered individuals.

This is the kind of double standard that Dabi calls heroes out on. The only times we ever see Dabi fight up with the fire of conviction shining in his eyes and making him look unhinged, is when he’s faced with “scummy heroes”. Heroes who are too self-absorbed to notice all the ways they’re not heroic. Heroes who don’t save. Heroes who abuse their power and status to get away with literal murder. Heroes, essentially, who would either not let Endeavor face any consequences for his actions, or follow in Endeavor’s footsteps and be equally rotten. 

How does Tokoyami fit in here? He certainly didn’t kill anyone. Why is Dabi is so feral when he gives chase? 

Tokoyami is still a kid and a hero in training. As I argued before, Dabi is not the type to fight needlessly. He doesn’t seek out fights if he can avoid them. So he puts Tokoyami to the test. He doesn’t know what’s Toko’s hero motivation. He only knows that the kid just shielded Hawks. But Hawks is a “dirty, thoughtless” hero. Is Tokoyami the same? 

So he lays down facts plainly. As was pointed out here, he doesn’t simply say “Hawks killed a man.” He says “Hawks killed a man who wanted to help his friends.” The intent here is clear. Dabi is insisting on the humanity of Twice’s actions because he wants to see if that will make Tokoyami’s hero worship sway. Would Tokoyami’s opinion of Hawks change, if he saw the result of sticking too closely to hero propaganda, to the point of letting it dictate your actions for you? Or would he condemn Hawks’ choice because heroes are supposed to know the worth of a human life, and not to justify murder only when they’re the ones committing it? 

I think it’s important to reiterate here that this raid is not a war. It's not an either/or situation. Hawks could’ve still captured Jin alive as he originally meant to, so murder was an extreme decision that makes Hawks no different from the killers he arrests for a living. The “he didn’t have a choice” argument is a naive reading that insists on denying Hawks agency to make him look less responsible for his actions and thus more likeable. And I say this as a Hawks fan. He did have a choice. He could’ve chosen to side for the person who saw him as a caged young man an offered comfort and belonging. Instead he chose to bury his personal feelings and to defend the establishment that keeps him caged, the establishment that failed both Jin and him. 

That is a choice. As Dabi would say, it’s the choice of not thinking for yourself. It’s the choice of letting a superior state of things—the law—dictate what’s good and what’s bad, when we were given multiple examples in-universe of how legality doesn’t equal morality. Endeavor is a hero and a violent domestic abuser. Hawks is a hero specialized in rescue and someone who killed on the job. Unlicensed quirk use in public is illegal, and yet it saves Bakugou from the League. It also saves the pro hero Native and Iida’s life against Stain, when unlicensed hero trainees Shouto and Deku sweep in to rescue them. 

It is—and it should be—possible to like Hawks and still read nuance in his circumstances. The real tragedy in Hawks’ character is not his supposed lack of choice, but the fact that he’s so detached from his personhood, from his wishes, that he literally cannot allow himself to have good things. That he chooses to stay in his cage, and that in doing so, he cages other people as well. 

Another thing I feel like it’s important to point out is the different attitude that Dabi and Hawks show towards Tokoyami, because it’s directly presented as a sharp contrast. Dabi treats Tokoyami like a person. Hawks treats him like a soldier. Dabi appeals to Tokoyami’s humanity, trying to make him think for himself, to make him realize that what Hawks did was fucked up on a purely ethical level—Hawks gained the trust of someone he called a friend, and then manipulated him and lied to him for months in order to later backstab him. 

Meanwhile, Hawks doesn’t do Tokoyami the same courtesy. He calls out to him, and immediately we see the shock on Tokoyami’s face subside as he asks Hawks for orders. And ordering him around Hawks does, starting to mentally list a series of dehumanizing facts about Dabi. He files Dabi’s actions in a coldly analytical way, noting how his quirk takes a toll on his body like it’s a weakness that will give Tokoyami an advantage. Hawks is still thinking of villains as threats who only ever need to be dissected in regards to the strength of their superpowers. And he expects Tokoyami to do the same. 

And Tokoyami does. Tokoyami chooses not to question the status quo, and instead to remain the child soldier that Hawks expects him to be, Hawks who was a child soldier himself, Hawks who still chooses to blindly obey orders from the Hpsc even when he doesn’t want to.

That’s when Dabi attacks. Understandably so. If Hawks’ actions are justifiable to him, then so are Endeavor’s. Dabi cannot accept that. 

This is not to rip into Tokoyami’s choices. The guy is still 15, he doesn’t know any better, and his previous experience with Dabi was an unpleasant one, so it stands to reason that he wouldn’t be willing to believe Dabi’s word for it. It also stands to reason when you consider the type of teacher Hawks is. There are other metas on this by people who aren’t me that point out that Hawks is the type of mentor to see his mentee like someone meant to surpass his own records. Until Tokoyami proved himself to him, Hawks didn’t bother trying to nurture him. So it totally makes sense for Tokoyami to wait for Hawks to give him orders, instead of questioning things. Hawks teaches the same way he was taught. Obey, do better, don’t question things. 

But the thing is, Tokoyami is being used as a metafictional device for framing here. Toko’s immediate forgiveness of Hawks’ horrible actions isn’t just meant to be read as Toko’s biased pov. Just like Dabi is not simply talking about Hawks’ actions when he says that heroes have dirtier hands than any of the villains. Both of those are comments that encompass the whole of society. Dabi is calling out the tendency of hero society to always justify its own actions as righteous, even when the facts prove otherwise. And Tokoyami proved him right. Heroes would much rather remain thoughtless than challenging their own rotten beliefs, even when faced with the physical evidence of how rotten they are. 

Which brings us back to our conclusion, the original question of what would Dabi do if he was forced to face against Shouto. 

3. How sad, Todoroki Shouto

Shouto was very much raised to be a child soldier too. A mini-Endeavor, if you will. Endeavor certainly did try to mould his son into as close to a second version of himself he could manage, and the thing is, he almost succeeded. Shouto is still in the process of unlearning all the learned behaviors he picked up from his dad. He’s still trying his best to come up with a way of being a hero that is truly his, not just a shadow of his old man’s. A more detailed analysis on this topic can be found here. 

There are good reasons to believe that Dabi doesn’t know anything about his little brother. Anything that matters, at the very least. Endeavor forced them apart since they were young, there was a big age difference between them, and probably also enough comparisons drawn between them by their dad to exacerbate an already difficult sibling bond even without taking into account anything else. Natsuo, who lived under the same roof until college, didn’t even know Shouto’s very obvious love for soba. So this means they weren’t even allowed to eat meals together. So Dabi’s understanding of who Shouto is as a person and as a hero trainee is a big fat “?”. I think it’s safe to assume that what he knows about him is just what he can pierce together from the fact that he enrolled into UA, and immediately gained popularity in the hero world after the sport festival as Endeavor’s own pride and joy. 

Dabi probably thinks that Shouto will end up becoming a self-obsessed hero like their dad. After all, he’s letting himself be moulded into Endeavor’s heir, isn’t he? At least, from the outside it does look that way. 

So when they meet at training camp, Dabi is apathetically taunting him for the same reason he’s taunting Tokoyami. Just who are they saving? Other people, or their own pride?

We, of course, know that Shouto’s desire to save others is not self-serving. He does it because he genuinely believes it to be the right thing to do, and he doesn’t hesitate to challenge authority outright in order to stick to his beliefs. Dabi and Shouto are foils because both of them rebel to authority in different ways: Shouto, by actively challenging established rules of hero society whenever he feels like they come up short of real life situations, and Dabi by trying to smoke out the liars and the rotten heroes that the law protects. 

I think that if it ever came to serious blows between them, Dabi wouldn’t really hesitate to fight Shouto seriously just because they’re brothers, if he felt like Shouto was trying to make excuses for hero society’s flaws. 

The thing is, though, Shouto isn’t making excuses for anyone. 

He’s still holding his father accountable for what he did to their family, and while his way of doing things might not be seen as enough for Dabi, it’s certainly a step away from blindly condoning murderers because it’s the easier route, one that doesn’t involve self-reflection. If anything, I’d say Shouto is the king of overthinking. He think and thinks about his own choices so much, he often ends up questioning why he makes those choices in the first place. Even with the horrible framing of his decision to forgive his father, I think it’s safe to assume that Hori’s intent there was to show Shouto be torn up by his own process of choosing right from wrong. 

And this is the keyword here: while it’s true that Shouto is following in his father’s desire to make him a hero, Shouto is also stubbornly doing it his way. He’s not merely accepting orders from his mentor like Tokoyami, or not questioning his own morals when he’s asked to make a choice. 

And Dabi’s character hang-up is that heroes who pride themselves on saving others are fakes, because there’s people who don’t get saved. People who get overlooked by heroes, who only save others when it looks good on them, but then do their own dirty work behind closed doors. 

I think that Shouto is meant to challenge that. People will argue until the end of time on the topic of whether or not Dabi is being set up for a redemption arc, but. In my opinion, he is. Indisputably so. The whole focus of the Tododinner miniarc was exactly that—how the fact that Touya wasn’t saved still remains a big hang-up for all the Todorokis. We’re even told through Endeavor’s pov that he still desires to have the chance to bring Touya back home, because not saving him is his biggest regret. And while I certainly hate the idea that Endeavor should be entrusted with that, I do believe that was a deliberate set up for Dabi’s eventual redemption. 

For Dabi to stop his self-destructive goal of bringing down his father, he needs to be faced with the realization that there are heroes who choose to do good. That his brother is not the same as their dad. 

Dabi’s purpose in the story is that of calling out heroes for being complacent and self-absolving. He lived and he rebelled when hero society dictated that he died and remained forgotten and not missed. But Shouto’s purpose is that of acting according to your own morals even when the law says you shouldn’t. Shouto is someone who acts around the rules when the rules are limiting. So if the rules say that villains are just threats to be disposed of, I think Shouto can be the person to challenge that, and to bring Touya back home when no one else would’ve bothered trying to save him.