#meta:hawks

[thyandrawrites]

I wonder if people realize that the reason why the League was allowed to exist for as long as it did without violent suppression from the HPSC is only because of the threat of the noumu

So. We know from Nagant's backstory that anything capable of shaking up the status quo was quickly and covertly executed without much fanfare:

In fact, the Commission was so indiscriminate in applying that rule that both villains and heroes are said to have died under her rifle.

The reason why not even heroes were exempt from this ruthless retribution is simple. The Commission, as an institution born to regulate the spreading phenomenon of vigilantism and the chaos that follows, wasn't created with the purpose of administering justice, but rather to do just that: regulating society. They're not cops. They're an odd mix between politicians and spin doctors. On one hand, their official role is that of overseeing heroics as a whole—issuing hero licenses, coordinating pro heroes, analyzing and administering the data that goes into the hero rankings, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, their less official and more prominent role is that of puppet masters of the hero narrative. They feed a favourable (for the heroes, that is) interpretation of events to the media, and have done so for years, in order to protect the citizens' faith in the status quo.

This is why, for example, the truth of who Nagant actually killed to get thrown into jail isn't public knowledge. Letting the citizens know that she'd offed the Commission President would raise question. People would wonder why a fairly beloved heroine would turn against the institution that trained her. They'd want to know the motive behind the murder of such a prominent figure in the industry. In other words, revealing any specifics would not only expose their internal disputes to the public eye, but also, and most importantly, instill doubt.

That's what it always boils down to. The Commission exists for one purpose: protecting the hero system from anything that might make it crumble—be it doubt, social unrest, and last but not least the worst case scenarios themselves, mistrust for heroes and the reign of terror of villains.

The current arc gives us a bit more insight into that. What happens when the citizens stop trusting heroes as protectors? And what happens when villains shake up the population so much that hope and faith in things ever getting better starts to sound like a child's tale? Lawlessness is what happens. A second coming of the vigilantism era, where untrained and unregulated civilians take matters into their own hands to feel less vulnerable, to retain some control in the face of such uncertainty.

So we come full circle: all of this is why the Commission acted around the law so much, and sent Nagant against anyone who so much as thought of endangering the status quo, corrupted heroes included:

Prehemptive killing for the greater good was not above them, either. Nagant says it best: it's a system with two sides to it. The "good" side, the glorious one that gets the spotlight, made of heroes as saviors and cool fighters who protect people from the bad guys... And then the dark side, the ugly truth that for such neat labels to exist, anything blurring the lines or threatening that artificial peace had to be violently shot in the head for appearances sake. So much so, that even "starting to talk about it" is considered a life sentence.

Enter the League.

This is where things get interesting, because the Lov seems to challenge everything I just went over, at least on the surface.

If it's true that even voicing discontent about the current state of things warrants a quick and covert execution... how come Shigaraki&co could merrily call themselves The League of Villains and put out a whole Manifesto of Everything Wrong with the Hero System without getting their throats cut by a featherblade two days later?

At face value, it might seem like such suppression methods are a thing of the past. They were true once, but now things aren't as dire as they used to be.

Except... This isn't true. It's become a lot subtler than a gun-themed heroine shooting people in the head, true, but... *gestures at Hawks and Twice's subplot* this is still very much a thing. Twice was killed for the threat his quirk at full power posed to hero society.

He wasn't arrested and thrown into Tartarus. He was murdered on the spot for the crime of possessing a dangerous quirk. Not even using it. Possessing it. It couldn't get more obvious if it tried: it's a blantant parallel to Nagant executing that guy above. Again, not for the crime of acting on his subversive ploys. But for discussing them.

Let me clarify that I'm not digging this back up to spark another debate on Ethics and Choices. This fandom has seen enough essays on that already. I'm bringing up the example of Twice specifically because Twice was killed by Hawks, a Commission operative, on Commission's orders. This is significant because it's meant to say more about the institution that regulates heroics more than it does about the victim of their brainwashing.

It's an established unspoken rule that heroes don't kill. The story goes above and beyond to state this. No matter how vile villains are, under normal circumstances they're always captured alive. Take for example All For One. He's arguably much more dangerous than Twice. While it's true that Twice's quirk could potentially overthrow an army and thus throw the nation into chaos, the more doubles he makes, the frailer they become. His strength lies purely in numbers, but a single skilled pro hero was enough to overpower him and render him harmless. AFO, on the other hand, has his finger in every pie and doesn't just rely on a quirk (or five or a dozen) to be dangerous. He has a network of loyal henchmen, he has enough charisma to draw followers to him, and his power extends beyond Japan. It reaches all the way across the ocean and into America. He's feared on a woldwide scale. Yet, he wasn't assassinated on the spot. He was thrown into Tartarus, despite how clear it's now become that keeping him alive was a huge faux pas for the heroes. So why did they?

The reason is simple. It was All Might who brought him in, and not the Commission. We know that they too had their eyes on him,

and it's not hard to guess what Nagant was asked to do if she were to find him. But All Might is no hired gun, and he doesn't answer directly to the HPSC. Thus, AFO got to live, unlike anyone else the Commission deems "a threat."

Now, while Hawks has less of a double life than Nagant, he's still expected to carry out orders for what the Commission decides is the greater good. Just like his predecessor. Since he was taken in as her replacement, the truth of the matter is that he inherited her role as the Hand of the Commission. He handles their dirty laundry, oftentimes against his will,

because it is "necessary" to bring peace.

The only real difference between them is that unlike Nagant, his talents lie more in the reconnaissance and intel gathering fields, so we don't see him act as a hired assassin more than that single time. Yet, I want to underline that the spying he does is still on Commission's orders, and as such, it is instrumental to the Commission's agenda as much as Nagant's assassinations. Besides, the fact that Hawks struck to kill despite his private desire to save Twice further emphasizes that the HPSC hasn't changed overnight simply because their President changed. When an individual becomes too dangerous, too much of a threat to what they've built, the killing order can still be issued—and it has been.

But over time, their need for manifacturing an illusion of peace lessened. I'm not sure how Kaina's and Toshinori's timelines intersect since we aren't given clear ages for either... But... with All Might's rise to the top, organized crime took a beating and dropped at historic lows. As such, I assume there were less and less potential threats to the status quo, and society thrived in actual peace without a need for the Commission to kill people in the shadows.

In fact, organized crime is so outdated that when Shigaraki comes around and starts recruiting allies, what he gathers is a bunch of uncoordinated small fries.

As usual Viz phrases things with zero sympathy for the villains and waters it down to "kicked around" but both the og Japanese and the official Italian translation here say "oppressed". These 72 people followed Shigaraki because they felt the allure of lashing out at hero society. It was a suicide expedition, attacking a school packed with pros, but they still did it. All of them except Shigaraki and Kurogiri were apprehended, with most of them swiftly defeated by a bunch of high school freshmen. We could go as far as calling this first attempt at a villain group disorganized crime.

So between Nagant's and All Might's combined efforts, people who are dissatisfied with hero society have all but stopped gathering together to express those complaints, or to plan an effective way to change things. Either by choice or by force.

This of course doesn't mean society naturally evolved into something everyone's satisfied with. We know from many characters' backstories that despite the front as an utopia, hero society is not devoid of flaws. Inequality and discrimination run rampant, and with them, an anti-establishment sentiment from all those people oppressed or overlooked by it. But by the current point in the story, when the League is officially created, the Commission successfully achieved their goal: making those sociopolitical fringes of the population so small and quiet—as opposed to the all-encompassing faith in heroism—that they've basically become irrelevant. A minority that still exists, but that can be silenced easily with the iron fist of the law if need be.

But then the League went and ruined that. They not only succeeded at spreading fear amongst the population, but they've also exposed all the cracks in the system, rendering it vulnerable. Where fear festers, doubt seeps in. And we've seen what happened when the League was left to grow stronger and stronger. They've eventually gotten strong enough to level cities alone, and they've put enough of a dent in that faith that civilians don't trust heroes by default anymore.

So why are they still breathing? Why did the Commission take the risk of letting them be, allowing them to gather more and more allies and cement themselves as the rulers of the underworld until they became strong enough to potentially destroy the hero system itself?

The noumu. I'm telling you, it's because of the noumu.

No, but seriously. It's really because, at least at first, the League was a relatively small fry, compared to the threat of bioengineered superhumans. Shigaraki didn't leave enough of an impression on the police working on the case to suggest they believed he would make it far. They labeled him an unstable manchild, someone more fearsome on accounts of his ability to just throw noumu at problems than because he was fearsome himself. The only serious threat the League posed at USJ was thanks to that single noumu. Then there's Hosu, and Shigaraki only appears to unleash several weaker, white ones to wreack havoc.

By then, the Commission starts taking an interest in the Lov. We are told that Hawks was supposed to take part in the Kamino raid,

but didn't because he couldn't make it on time.

But interestingly, they also hint that this entire operation was rushed. Storming the place before they could get more intel on the League and on the noumu wasn't the plan. But a student was kidnapped under the pros' noses, and the school was in hot waters with the media for it.

Now, let's consider for a moment UA's status. As one of the most important hero schools in the country, and as the sole one that televises its sport festival every year as a big spectacle on par with the Olympics, UA has both prestige and power. Probably more than other schools, in fact, considering they're always everyone's first choice both when it comes to enrolling in it and when pros needs interns and manpower to thicken their ranks. UA is the dream of many starry eyed kids who hope to make it big in the industry.

Yet, all that prestige and status doesn't stop them from becoming a target for public blame. The fact that the media put the school under scrutiny for how they handled the crisis at training camp is not just bad press for the school. It's also bad press for heroes in general because UA is widely regarded as the pinnacle of the hero industry. They train the best students to become top of the food chain once they reach pro. There's a reason why Bakugou, obsessed with being the best, wanted to enroll in UA and not, say, Shiketsu. UA's name itself is a pun on the Japanese word for "hero" (UA, read as Yuuei, is eiyuu, hero, backwards).

So a failure of the school is a failure that is capable of shaking the trust in heroism itself. And that's precisely what worries the Commission.

After all, we know from later arcs that they don't actually care about endagering students at all. In fact, they're perfectly fine letting kids be on the frontlines of a war without even informing their parents of where their kids are being sent to. So, to tie this back to the question by the journalist above, the Commission isn't interested in reassuring the families of their students that the kids are fine. All they care about is what they've always cared about: spinning a narrative where faith in heroes is justified by results. Since heroes always return from a mission with a victory in the bag, the trust that the public puts in them, and thus the HPSC by association, is well-placed and needs not be questioned.

So when the attack on training camp happens and the heroes face one of their first real losses—26 wounded, 1 kidnapped—the Commission scrambles to fix this PR disaster. Despite the sparse intelligence they have on the League, and despite their own reticence, they greenlight the Kamino raid anyway. They think that what they have is enough to sate the angry media into trusting them again. They'll rescue the kid and thus save face. And if in the process they can apprehend the League and destroy a noumu lab all at once? Even better. But publicly, it's for the kid.

Except, it turns out that the lab was a decoy, and not the original place where the noumu come from. It was planted there as a distraction, or possibly as a storage unit for Shigaraki to use freely, but disposing of it doesn't neutralize the threat of the noumu science itself. And indeed, AFO'S appearance soon after proves just that. He comes with more monsters in tow, and has his own teleporting quirk to move them around. Basically, AFO was playing two moves ahead of the HPSC. And I think Kamino is where the Commission finally realized that, too.

So what do they do next? They show us their real agenda for the first time and plant a mole in the League's ranks.

The primary goal of Hawks' infiltration was always that of finding out the true location of Ujiko's lab. Getting close enough to the League to better get the jump on them when they're vulnerable was only secondary. The proof is that the raid only gets a green light when Twice makes the mistake of mentioning the hospital to Hawks.

And Hawks dutifully relays it to the Commission. Thanks to this intel, they track down the clinic, send an undercover agent, snap a pic of one of the little noumu, and deduce that's where the secret, underground villain lair was all along. And the operation—which is notably issued by the HPSC itself, which entrust it to Endvr—is a go.

And you know what's even more telling? That once Ujiko is safely in hero custody and can no longer make minions for AFO... All the pro heros finally get the authorization to kill the League on sight.

So yeah. That was a really roundabout way of saying that the times where the Commission assassinates its enemies in cold blood are far from over. The League were just lucky to have AFO behind them to buy them time. But eventually, even that ran out, because the HPSC is not, and has never been, sunshine and rainbows and second chances

[thyandrawrites]

one thing I find interesting about Hawks and Nagant is that both have been conditioned and trained to use body parts as their signature killing weapon. Nagant uses her hair as bullets and a rifle that emerges from her flesh. Hawks exercised so much control over his feathers that he learned how to sharpen them into blades and often wields them as such instead of support gear, despite how reliant he is on those feathers to fly.

I don't know, I just find it a neat detail, and I like to think that the equation body parts=weapons was instrumental to their grooming as child soldiers. "Quirk" is just a fancy word for individuality, and in fact it was translated that way in early fan scans. This is why so many characters are often depicted struggling to define who they are when their quirk doesn't measure up with society's standards. When superpowers are just a part of someone's identity, they become intrinsically tied to a person's self-perception and self-worth. And this would be even more the case for children like Kaina and Keigo, who were both self-conscious about their quirks and desperate to prove themselves.

We even have a precedent for this same grooming and it's AFO's manipulation of Tenko. In a world where it's normalized to teach kids that you are your quirk, it was easy for AFO to convince Tenko he was born to be violent and bloodthirsty because his quirk, his very individuality, claimed blood. His trauma and his young age just made him all the more emotionally malleable.

All I'm saying is that it would've been equally easy for the Commission to adopt the same manipulation tactic. If quirks become synonyms with identity, then it stands to reason that their application for violence also becomes part of who you are. In that light, when we see Hawks and Nagant as adults have little or no sense of self outside of their role as tools for the Commission, we know that the overwriting process is already complete. Their identity as civilians, as individuals, was erased. Effectively, Nagant and Hawks have already become sentient weapons themselves.

[thyandrawrites]

I was thinking of the circumstances of Keigo's "rescue" and how much sense his worldview as an adult makes once you take them into account.

Keigo thought of the hero who apprehended his father as the one who "saved" his past self, but the truth is that this was the opposite of what actually happened. There was never any "saving" involved, only a hero vs villain showdown. A fistfight we weren't even shown that ended up in Thief Takami's departure from the family picture. But his arrest plunges Keigo and Tomie into the uncertainty and the desperation that leads to Keigo's eventual adoption by the Commission. It's certainly interesting how young Keigo internalizes that as saving — I guess it could be, if you read the arrest as "freedom" from his father's abuse, but what I am trying to stress here is that this was not what "saving" thematically means in the context of the series at large. Keigo wasn't rescued. He was left to fend off for himself, left to wander the streets with his mother in a fashion that's not that different from Tenko's situation after the death of the Shimuras. And Keigo lived in that fragile state of uncertainty that he rationalizes as "freedom" until a different evil eventually swept in and corraled him into heroics under the guise of providing "help".

And this is where it gets interesting, imho.

Cause Hawks' first instict as a hero is the same as the instinct he had as a kid when he stopped that car crash: it's the same impulse to save others, properly save them, put them out of harm's way that he showed when he automatically rolled Twice out of the way of Dabi's flames. The impulse that makes him pull hundreds of people out of a crumbling skyscraper in Kyushu. The impulse that makes him lend his feathers to Enji when he sees him in a pinch.

And yet, at the same time, there's the conditioning of his own past circumstances that murks up his vision of what "saving" means, and veers it towards the violence he was made to believe is "heroic". Cause at the end of the day, no matter how at heart, as Keigo, he wants to save people, another part of him — the winged hero Hawks, aka the heroic persona he tries to model after Endeavor, someone equally uncaring of people's personal circumstances so long as he performs well on the job — will always push in the direction of defeating evil as quickly and efficiently as possible. Cause as a kid, he was left to wander the streets for who knows how long, homeless, poor and starving, his own personal needs taking the backseat when faced with the more pressing matter of "the greater good", which in that context was dealing with the threat of a villain, Thief Takami.

People have talked and will keep having complex feelings about Hawks' real standing when personal ethics / the greater good are involved. But I think that when they dismiss him as simply "corrupt" and "unheroic" in the aftermaths of Jin's death (which is understandable, it hurt me too), they ignore the fact that the hand that struck the killing blow was the byproduct of his upbringing, as well as a manifestation of repressed trauma

[thyandrawrites]

Born for a purpose - on Dabi and Hawks’ parallels

There are hundreds of analyses breaking down the foiling between Hawks and Dabi. I’ve written several myself. But what I find interesting is that till now we lacked the proper key to interpret that foiling.

Touya’s and Keigo’s sense of identity is inextricably tied to what they’ve been told is their purpose in the world. Both were born because their parents had envisioned some kind of use for them, and both were treated as a bother when it became clear the genetic lottery hadn’t turned out the way said parents had hoped.

The way they act as adults is the direct result of their failure to meet those expectations as kids. That loss of purpose became a loss of identity, then the erasure of their past and the creation of a new identity that would give them meaning. In a lot of ways, Dabi and Hawks are the (depersonalized) personas created to justify the purpose of Touya’s and Keigo’s continued existence. (more under the cut)

I’m gonna start with Dabi, who is the most obvious example of the two.

Touya was born because Enji wanted to entrust his ambition to best All Might to a son who would inherit his own power, without the overheating downside. From the start, Touya’s conception was never planned as an act of love, or the selfless desire to bring to light a new life. Typically, when you make a baby, you’re implicitly agreeing to creating an individual other than you. That baby is a tiny person, with needs, wishes and an individuality which are entirely theirs. But the Todoroki family is presented as dysfunctional from the start. The kids are born to fulfill a purpose, and the marriage itself is built on the requirement to fulfill that purpose. Enji doesn’t account for individuality. There’s his will, and his will his absolute. His children will be heroes, so long as he says they fit his standards. He doesn’t perceive them as their own individuals, only as extensions of himself. This is made very clear by the fact that he thinks that their success in beating All Might will be his success.

What this translates to is a very flawed parenting. Enji raises his kids without making a secret of that ambition. They were born because Enji needs someone strong enough to beat his rival. He makes sure that they know what’s their ultimate goal, and how important it is for them to achieve it.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that his kids grow up to be painfully self-aware of what they’re told is the purpose of their existence. Touya in particular knew exactly how his birth came to be. He knew that Rei was pressured into an omiai marriage, and he knew that it was done with the purpose of having kids with both quirks, so he also knew that the wedding happened because Enji wanted a child with a better quirk than his own. What this means is that Touya was perfectly aware that Enji expected something from him, and it was Touya’s duty to deliver. It was Touya’s duty to beat All Might. He was born for that reason and that reason alone.

And at first, this didn’t weigh on Touya.

Because at the time, he didn’t yet have a reason to think he couldn’t meet his father’s insanely high standards. At first, Touya seemed to be exactly the perfect child Enji had always meant to create. He didn’t have frost to cool him down from overheating, but he had a stronger firepower than Enji’s. So that meant he had bigger chances of besting All Might, because he could reach a strength level above Enji’s own.

The fact that Enji sees this superior strength as positive is important to note, because it reflects in Touya’s own self-perception. Touya can see that his father is proud of him, and he grins wide in turn, showing off his ignited fist, and urging his father to teach him more. Touya takes obvious pride in being a good fit for Enji’s plans. He likes the challenge it places on him, and he wants to achieve more. To prove that he can take it and come on top of it just like his dad. He wants to reach the point where he’s stronger than All Might as fast as possible, and he’s confident that he has the strength to get there eventually.

Now, it goes without saying that this is not a healthy stance. Touya was made to base his entire identity around something external, like the validation that comes from feeling like he succeeded at achieving his goal, rather than something intrinsic, like the fact that he as an individual was already worthy of love and attention to begin with. But this flawed self-perception is not confuted by anyone around him. In fact, it is reinforced. When Enji sings his praises, it’s always in relation to All Might. Touya’s constantly reminded of his role, of his duty, of the contract he’s expected to fulfill by virtue of being part of this world. If his father is proud, if his father gives him attention, is because Touya is a useful tool.

That changes abruptly once he starts exhibiting signs of “weakness”. He starts getting burns, his hair turns white, the doctor tells him his body can’t sustain his quirk’s activation without permanent tissue damage.

Touya gets abruptly removed from the training, and that’s when his sense of self starts cracking, cause for all his life, his worth and his sense of purpose have always been tied to his accomplishments in the gym.

this brings about an existential crisis. If Touya's conception was planned at a table to achieve a goal, once that goal is no longer achievable, Touya’s reason to exist nullifies.

This shows in Touya’s phrasing. He uses the verb “create”, which is a cold, almost analytical term to refer to the conception of a new life. It’s a pretty dehumanizing term. Touya perceives himself not as a person, but as a tool meant to be useful to its creator. But once he starts “malfunctioning”, his father doesn’t have any use for him anymore, and easily tosses him aside. Even if originally this act was justified by a need to protect Touya’s health, it quickly becomes clear that it’s not fatherly love that makes Enji neglect him from then on. It’s the failure to be a fitting heir to train.

In fact, by this point Enji has already moved on from Touya entirely. He had two other children to replace him, and he retreated into the so-called “world of heroes” in order to avoid his responsibility as a father.

Touya, however, cannot as easily move on, because for him, his entire existence is tied to his usefulness. To his bloodline. He wasn’t brought into this world to be his own person, but to be a receptacle of his father’s ambition. And to answer the question of why can’t you just move on, he tells Enji as much:

How can he move on from being his son? that’s not something Touya can willingly step away from. He didn’t choose to be brought into this world, nor did he choose to be entrusted with an impossible to achieve standard. But he was, and he wasn’t good enough to succeed. His genes will always doom him to be his father’s failed creation, his father’s useless son.

The fact that Touya isn’t allowed to be a person outside of his ambition to be a hero is also reflected in his relationship with his peers. Even if Touya had wanted to do something else than following in his father’s footsteps, there is a certain social pressure he’s subjected to that reminds him of his personal lackings on a daily basis.

every kid wants to be a hero. So much so that those who don’t get automatically cut out from the group. But it’s not just that. Every kid is free to pursue that dream, except for Touya. He was born to be one, and yet, he didn’t make the cut. And then his own father refused to look at him for 5 years, refusing to accept his share of responsibility for bringing Touya to life and then just as easily dismissing him,

and that was the final nail in the coffin. Notice how Touya’s emphasis is always on “needing”. On making his father “be glad” Touya was created. Up until Touya’s end, and even now as Dabi, Touya’s character is written to rotate around the theme of external validation for his existence. He’s directionless, lacking a sense of self, and he’s still subconsciously waiting for someone to acknowledge that he exists. The one thing that pushed Touya over the edge, the thing that made him go up in flames at Sekoto Peak, is that lack of acknowledgement. All Touya wanted when he begged his father to resume the training was to be told that his life still had meaning. That even if he couldn’t beat All Might, there was a reason why he was on this Earth. But his father couldn’t even do as much. He “made kids he didn’t need”. What Touya is complaining to Natsuo here is that Enji makes kids like they’re just a commodity to him. Something that can be tossed away once it breaks.

And what Dabi wants, even 10 years later, is for his father to acknowledge him even after he “broke”.

he says “look at me” while symbolically crying blood on top of a picture of his family estate. The symbolism here is meant to invoke his foiling with Tenko, whose existence too, was “gently denied”

by the adults who didn’t want to acknowledge Tenko’s self because it went against the wishes of the patriarch of the family.

What made both of them crack and splinter was the fact that both of their households forced their personhood into silence. Forced them to give up on the one thing that made them them. Touya defined himself as his father’s proud heir. Tenko wanted to be a hero like his grandmother. And yet, in both cases, it was family itself that suppressed that identity, that forced them to give it up.

So, Touya became Dabi, a villain, to make his existence impossible to overlook or ignore anymore for his father, a hero. If Enji had chosen to avoid the blame in Touya’s eyes by hiding away in the “world of heroes”, what Dabi does during the war arc is essentially backing him into a corner where Enji can’t hide anymore. He makes their past a public affair, so that Enji will be forced to answer for it to everyone he meets, and he faces his dad like a threat that a hero simply cannot turn a blind eye to.

Over and over, he commands Endeavor and Shouto to look. He  wants Enji to watch as he burns Shouto alive. He wants Enji to finally see him, to finally see what Enji has done to him.

Not only that, but Dabi purposefully staged this to make Enji live through the same failure Touya experienced. He sent villains after him, knowing he would beat them, to build him up. To make him taste the success that would come as an accomplished number one, someone who had bested All Might. Just like how Touya was initially propped up on a pedestal as the perfect creation, the golden child entrusted with Enji’s ambition. And then Dabi took everything away from his father, just like how his father took everything from him. He took away the warmth, the praise, the attention, the respect and the pride.

In essence, his way to take back his agency after losing his sense of self, was to embrace his label of failure, and to bring down his father with him after making him fail too. Fire so hot it burned was what “killed” Touya, what labeled him a failed creation, and yet he chose “Cremation” as his new name, and built a whole persona around that loss of identity.

He lost his purpose to be alive, and made that loss his purpose to keep living.

Moving on to Hawks. He, too, is acting the way he is as a result of the failure to meet his parents’ expectations as a kid, though in his case it’s a lot subtler.

This is left as an implication so take it with more than a grain of salt, but I think it’s possible that Keigo was also born because Tomie had some sort of use for him. The way I see it, it could be one of two things (cw abuse):

1. Tomie kept the baby despite how clear it is that she didn’t care for motherhood and despite her financial instability because she wanted to use him to make Takami stay with her. This is a pretty unsympathetic take on Tomie, I know, but the fact that she’s manipulative and kinda the matriarch of the family is pretty much canon. Her repeated calls of “don’t leave” throughout the chapter aren’t phrased like a suggestion in japanese, as the addition of that “okay?” implies here (which kinda softens the demand). Tomie is meant to read a little creepy and definitely dependant on others to survive.

When Takami was around, she sheltered him in exchange for money, and constantly requested for him not to leave her. When Takami was removed from the family, though, she latches on to the next closest person to achieve economic stability. When the chance presents itself, she sells off her own son in exchange for a comfortable life. And sure, she was poor at the time and the HPSC could promise better shelter for Keigo. But a mother who loves her child wouldn’t just treat him as a bargaining tool without a second thought. Especially if it means permanently cutting off any ties with him. Yet, Tomie didn’t hesitate. I think we’re meant to read her as a survivalist who isn’t afraid to use other people to ensure her own survival. Or at the very least as a selfish and self-focused character.  

So whether she got herself “knocked up” on purpose or as an accident that she then exploited for her own gain, it's pretty much canon text that Takami only stayed around because of Keigo’s birth.

2. The other explanation is that Tomie might've been trying to have a child with a specific power that could've helped her stay afloat somehow. Maybe she wanted a kid who would inherit her Sight, or a mix of her and Takami's quirks. Who knows. The only thing that's for sure is that she was displeased by the power Keigo was born with.

What matters for the sake of this analysis is that she lamented that his quirk, and thus Keigo himself, wasn’t useful to her. That he was born as his father’s son, but he did nothing to help her. And this is important to note, because it’s a parallel to Touya’s upbringing. Just like how Touya was entrusted with certain expectations from his father, Keigo was similarly expected to offer something to his mother in exchange for being born. 

Like Touya, Keigo wasn’t worthy of love and care because he was his own person, but he was thought unfit to satisfy his parents’ needs and rejected by them as a result. It’s pretty clear that there wasn’t any love in his conception, either. Keigo was kept prisoner in that shack, forbidden from leaving. Keigo’s father saw him as a disrespectful brat and was afraid Keigo would run off and tell on him. His mother once took him out to the grocery store to quieten his requests to be left out of his prison. He wasn’t treated like a person at all, only a bother. He was even made to think of his wings as a burden, so long as he didn’t use them for something that would benefit the family. 

His failure to meet his mom’s expectations defines how he acts as an adult to this day. What Keigo internalized from her complaints was that he needed to be useful to others to give meaning to his existence. 

“Why do you even have those wings?” is a question that adult!Hawks answers for us: 

if you’ve got wings, you should make use of them. He came to think of that as such an absolute truth that he even mentors Tokoyami to follow it. I say that this is an internalized notion because it makes Keigo long to prove himself in a situation that under normal circumstances would’ve been handled by an adult. Even as a small child, Keigo manages to pull off the rescue of 6 people from a car accident. 

Every kid wants to be a hero, but Keigo doesn’t just stand by and watch. How many children that young would have the presence of mind to intervene? To not just be frozen in place, witnessing the crash? Yet, for Keigo, being helpful to others is such an imperative that he immediately jumps into action without a second thought. And he makes a difference. He saves lives.

The thing about Hawks is that to this day, he’s still trying to obey that imperative. Still trying to make himself a useful asset for anyone who might need his help. He accepted that depersonalization because he was made to think of himself that way, as a tool for others to exploit. He has wings, so he has to use them.

Just like how Touya couldn’t make sense of his existence and thus had to create Dabi to give himself a new purpose, Keigo too does the same. He becomes Hawks, and lets the HPSC take away his name and erase his past, just like how Touya died and Dabi rose in his place. Keigo was given a blank slate and a fresh start, and he makes saving people his own identity. He’s no longer Keigo the bother, the unwanted kid who couldn’t help his own parents, but The Winged Hero Hawks, someone who helps people every day. 

This is of course just his way to deal with the trauma he faced as a kid. He was rejected by his own life givers, just like Touya, so he clings to the sense of accomplishment he feels when he can be of use to others (or to the greater good) because then he’s not letting his quirk be a waste. Being exploited gives his life meaning, in much the same way that being his father’s perfect heir gave Touya’s life meaning. 

So this brings us to the present arc. Right after a raid that failed largely because Hawks wasn’t able to warn the heroes of the threat they were about to face, Hawks reacts by shutting down. If his existence is defined by how helpful he is, it goes without saying that he cannot accept being responsible for the huge death toll resulting from the failed ambush. So we witness Hawks not thinking critically at all about his share of responsibilities. He doesn’t think about what it meant to kill Twice. 

This was the post-apocalyptic scenario that Hawks envisioned and wanted to avoid, the scenario he killed Twice in order to avoid. But it still happened, and yet we don’t see him reflect on it at all. What he does instead is clinging to something that gave him a sense of purpose before. 

Being a tool instrumental to other people’s success. 

Ever since his introduction, he tells us that he doesn’t think of himself as particularly worthy of attention. His back isn’t broad enough to carry the expectations of the entire world. Cause he internalized the failure to be useful to his parents as something that defines him, something he has to prove his worth against. Just like how Touya had internalized that in order to unlock his father’s acknowledgement, he had to show off a better control of his fire. 

Hawks thinks that all he can do is being someone else’s support item, so he devotes his entire energy to that purpose. During pro hero arc, he understood that what the world needed was a leader who faced the villains proudly, his back straight no matter how many odds were stacked against him. He identified that leader in Endeavor, someone who had given him faith in heroes as a kid, and devoted himself to building him up as a better symbol of peace, supporting him from the shadows. He provoked him during the hero rankings broadcast, knowing that it would’ve prompted Endeavor to make a bold declaration that would make the citizens feel safe. He brought Endeavor along in Kyushu, knowing Dabi would release a noumu and needing someone who would be able to neutralize the threat and keep the citizens’ faith in heroism strong. 

And he’s still doing it now, even going as far as preparing Endeavor’s speech for him before even talking to the dude about the charges against him. He explain this away as wanting to put his faith onto someone who is “trying to be better”. So let’s unpack all of that.

Hawks tells us that he believes in reformation, but this isn’t quite true. If this was, he wouldn’t have offered a chance of a fresh start after jail time just to Twice, but to the rest of the League as well. Instead, he offers it to Twice alone, someone Hawks himself calls “a good person”. 

I think that Hawks singled out Jin specifically because Jin reminds him of himself. 

By Hawks’ own admission, Jin is just a guy who wants to help his friends. And indeed, Jin is someone who would lay down his life if it meant saving his found family. Sounds familiar? Yep. Hawks sees his same selfless strife to be of help to his peers in Twice, and he decides to give him a second chance because of it. 

But the thing is, Twice cannot accept that offer, because it means abandoning the League. It means turning his back to the only people who treated him as a human being. So he refuses Hawks’ “help” and calls him out on Hawks’ selfishness. Hawks isn’t offering Jin a choice here. He’s masking it as kindness, but it’s either “reformation” after jail or death. Jin would rather choose death than betray his people. And that’s when Hawks strikes to kill. Why? 

This is just my guess, but.

“When neither side will give up... somebody has to die.“

Virtually, there is no difference between Endeavor and Twice’s stubbornness. Hawks even tells us as much. He knows for a fact that Twice will never give up his plan to help the League achieve their goals, because Hawks grew up admiring a man who similarly never gave up in front of a challenge. That’s a trait that Hawks finds commendable, the will to push on when the stakes are all against you. Yet, despite the admiration, there is something that marks Twice’s stubborn “plus ultra” determination as different from Enji’s. 

Twice didn’t want to face his past and “be better”. He shot down the offer for reformation, cause just like Hawks, Twice isn’t interested in facing the demons from his past. He has the League, and the League gives him a sense of purpose. 

Twice’s character is largely defined by his wish to be of help to others to make up for the kindness he received. He lived alone in the streets for so long, and he was beaten down by hero society so much, that even when he finds comrades who value him for who he is, he still thinks of his dynamic with them as a “do ut des” relationship. Something was given to him (a place where he can finally belong) so he needs to give something in return. 

In other words, Twice is Hawks’ villain foil. Not a negative foil, just his jungian shadow. From his conflict with him, Hawks was meant to acknowledge certain truths about himself and come to terms with them. Twice already had what Keigo could never achieve: a group of people who valued him as a person, not as just an asset. Twice of course didn’t realize this, but it was true. Shigaraki never forced him to use his quirk on himself, respecting Twice’s boundaries, despite how Redestro’s arc made it clear that a Twice who can clone himself is a force to be reckoned with. 

But Hawks never reached the point of acknowledging his own wants, unlike Twice. He never got to the point where he could accept to just take without giving something in turn, because again, Hawks defined his sense of purpose as his usefulness to others, his readiness to be exploited. 

So what Hawks does when he sees Twice running off from the chance to address his past and instead towards the one thing that gives Twice purpose (his friends), is striking to kill. 

I think the reason why was that Hawks projected onto Twice, and killed him to punish his own past selfishness. This will make more sense once we make a detour. This chapter shows us that Hawks respects and admires Shouto for what he perceives to be “kindness”. 

Basically Hawks thinks that facing your abusers is what makes you selfless, admirable, while moving on from them, finding your freedom without tying the loose ties makes you selfish. In other words Shouto is “a class act,” an impressive person, because Shouto attempted a reconciliation despite how the odds were stacked against him. Hawks is very much a “fly or fall” kinda person. To him, it doesn’t matter how hard something is, you should always try to measure yourself against it. That’s why he only took an interest in mentoring Tokoyami when Tokoyami got tired of being left chasing his back and attempted to keep pace with him. Similarly, Hawks always thinks of challenges as a measure of worthiness. 

Keigo, however, didn't face his parents. He moved on from them, and by his own admission, was fine with cutting ties with them till now. Emphasis on till now. 

Cause despite his front, I don’t think that Twice’s death left him as unaffected as he’s acting. He simply repressed that part of his consciousness that can think of it. Cause right now, Hawks is feeling impressive amounts of guilt. If not for Twice, cause I don’t think he’s at the point yet where he has even come to terms with that murder, at least towards the status quo. Hawks’ failure to put down the League resulted in the current social unrest and street violence. 

I don’t think that Hawks’ wish to line up with Endeavor and his resolve to help him be “a better person” is Hawks trying to get redemption by proxy, per se. I think it’s avoidance of the elephant in the room. 

Twice called him out on the fact that his way of dealing with people who fell through the cracks of society doesn’t make him a hero. But if he’s not a hero, Hawks has no identity left. His existence isn’t justified, because he lived, he left his parents, he became his current self, all as a fruitless attempt to find meaning for his life. For his quirk. 

So what he’s doing instead is clinging to what worked for him before. He’s attempting to “fix” hero society by helping the current number one in filling his own shoes as a symbol, instead of addressing his own bias as a fellow corrupted hero.

Cause at the end of the day, another thing that Hawks and Dabi negatively foil each other in, is self-awareness. Dabi thinks critically of his own circumstances, and he addresses the thoughtlessness of hero society. He recognizes that he’s a victim, and going against the hero mold is what gives purpose to his meaningless existence. By contrast, Hawks doesn’t perceive himself as a victim at all, only as someone selfish, and he rejects that same selfishness because he was raised to think of it as something terrible. So instead, Hawks finds his own purpose in protecting the status quo, because the current system is what gave young Keigo the chance to prove that he was worth something after all.

[thyandrawrites]

What are your views on the conference?

do you think dabi has been successful as a villain? he exposed the truth about endeavor but I feel like there hasn’t been much consequence on endeavor’s side? like him crying/breaking down and some civilians not trusting him just isn’t enough for me. I feel like it won’t stick. plus it ironically brought the family together. 

Two different anons again, but these questions can be answered together.

Starting with the press conference, it just confirmed what I’ve been talking about for the past weeks. Hawks and Enji aren’t actually ready to address the past yet. While it looks like they are owning up to it, all of what they’re doing is in fact self-serving, and done for reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by their victims.

This press conference was staged to give them a platform to respond to the allegations against them, but the thing is, while they did confirm that the allegations are true, they also did nothing to show that they regret their actions. Because they haven’t yet understood why the things they did were wrong. In fact, they’re pretty much reacting like they’re the ones being unjustly victimized here.

[More under the cut. What follows is hero-critical so don’t engage with me or this post if you think Hawks “had no other choice” or something similar. Thank you.]

Hawks even outright plays the victim. He’s not doing a public apology through a press conference because his personal ethics tells him it’s the right thing to do. He’s doing it because he knows it’s expected of him, which just isn’t the mindframe of someone who understood the gravity of his actions. From his phrasing, we can parse that he thinks that heroes like the top three are being put under scrutiny for no good reason, and like this is a test of his own endurance, when it should be a matter of proving his good faith. Hawks just killed a man who was running away, and he’s acting like it’s unfair that the world is holding him accountable for it.

The reason why Hawks thinks that society turned on him is because he justified Twice’s extrajudicial killing to himself as something he was doing to protect that same society that is now ungrateful for his personal sacrifice. He liked Twice and he really didn’t want to kill him. He genuinely means it when he says that he felt like he had no other choice if he wanted to make sure that Twice’s quirk wouldn’t cause more widespread destruction. The thing is, what he thought and what he felt in that moment doesn’t matter. Whether or not he had a reason to justify his actions to himself doesn’t have any weight to anyone else but himself. If his personal justification was enough to make him a good person, then we could also just brush off Enji’s domestic abuse too without any consequences, because at the time, Enji also had a way to justify it to his own conscience:

But this isn’t something that can be dealt with by simply slapping their wrists and calling it a day. Murder and abuse are serious accusations. Hawks and Endeavor are law enforcers, but they acted around the law, knowing that it would protect them. This is what they’re being asked to acknowledge by the narrative. In order to keep being heroes, they’re asked to prove that when faced with dire circumstances again, they would put other people’s wellbeing over anything else. Because otherwise the public can’t put their faith in them, since that faith was already betrayed once.

Yet, the remorse they show isn’t entirely genuine, because it’s still self-righteous.

What Hawks is offering here isn’t an apology, it’s an excuse. While it’s true that his words express a true sorrow for Twice’s death that is distinctly different from the formal, detached apology he offered for his relation to the thief Takami, it falls short of being effective because he’s being sorrowful about the wrong thing.

Hawks is sorry that he couldn’t be a better hero. What he’s failing to realize is that he needed to be a better human being.

He’s still stressing how Twice had to atone for his crimes, when Hawks refuses to atone for his own. Notice the hypocrisy? A crime committed by a villain is bad and needs reformation. A crime committed by him, a hero, should be welcomed with a “thank you” by society. Hawks was supposed to be a hero who saved people. So where did his compassion go?

I have already dissected this in detail in other posts, but the gist of it is that Hawks never made an effort to understand Twice’s circumstances. Through all their talk, Hawks never presented himself as Twice’s friend, but just as an agent of the state. He offered redemption, reformation, a fresh start... What he never offered was a listening ear. Twice tried to tell him how the system whose reformation Hawks was praising did absolutely nothing to give Jin shelter when he lost his job and got an unfair criminal record. He tried to make Hawks see the League’s humanity, because Toga and the others were the only ones who offered him sympathy and a place to belong when the heroes never bothered helping him.

Yet Hawks refused to offer any sympathy that wasn’t conditional. For one, because he never extended the same offer for reformation to Twice’s friends. But most importantly, because the moment Twice resisted his “help”, Hawks retracted all his sympathy and went for the kill.

I’m not going to argue on whether or not he really had no choice but to strike Twice with a lethal blow, because arguing about that is pointless. Horikoshi could’ve written their confrontation in any other way if he so wanted. If he didn’t, it’s because that situation was meant to read as hopeless, as lacking in options. It was an either/or scenario where Hawks had no other choice. And that’s the point!! Cause a hero is defined by their ability to save even when there is literally no other option available. The story tells us —now straight-up beats us over the head with a neon sign — that “true” heroics is the determination to trudge on and do the right thing even when all of society is against you. So for example Deku is a “true hero” because he’s dead-set on saving Shigaraki even if the whole world will swim against his tide. Shouto is a “true hero” because he repeatedly did the right thing and saved the day when he acted against the law and common sense in order to save his friends in Hosu and Kamino, and vowed to save his own brother in the aftermaths of Jakku.

The story tells us repeatedly that when faced with the choice to save or to kill, a hero should always choose to save. If there is no other option, a hero has to create one.

Hawks didn’t, and he’s not even sorry about it. He thinks that killing Twice was the heroic thing to do because he believes in a version of heroics that is utilitarian and logical, devoid of true human emotion.

The greater good matters more than the individuals. His duty to the masses matters more than the “sentiment” that made him grow fond of Twice on a personal level, that made him falter and want to rescue him.

Look at his face as he offers his explanation during the conference. It’s entirely devoid of emotion. He looks dead. Where’s the human warmth? The guilt that should go with someone who’s saying “I’m sorry”? Where is his compassion, his strife? Where’s the heroic dedication to push through adversities, the stubborn will to never give up on a good cause? Hawks already gave up on it. And that’s kinda the point. His choice to kill was framed as the wrong one not because the public is being mean and ungrateful, but because Hawks’ had to kill his own humanity in order to carry it out.

@/ transhawks did a great meta on this here. Twice’s given name means humanity. He’s just a regular guy who only cares about his friends, an everyman. He represents the masses that Hawks swore to protect. By killing him, Hawks also killed his own compassion, he betrayed his own genuine will to do right by the people. The “sentiment” that made him offer a helping hand to Twice was the true heroic call (if misguided), but the duty that made him go for the kill was not. All that the latter accomplished was doing wrong by a “good person” that was still within his reach. And that’s why it is unforgivable, and why he needs to acknowledge it and correct it.

But he’s not even reached a stage where he’s thinking critically of it. He’s still making up excuses, acting like the victim, and he’s still endorsing a system (via his support of Endeavor despite the allegations against him) that cares more about defending the perpetrators than rescuing and empathizing with the victims.

In much the same way, Enji is also showing that same lack of self-awareness. His apology is just as empty as Hawks’ own, because it also shows he hasn’t understood that the one person he needs to make amends to here is Touya, not the masses.

Just like Hawks, he is apologizing for the wrong things. Over and over, the story has told us that the reason why Enji hasn’t been able to reach atonement yet is because he always used the wrong approach. In pro hero arc, he thought that he could make up for his past abuse by being a better hero from now on. The reason why that happens is because he hasn’t yet internalized that what he did is abuse. He only understands it as his own “weakness”. He didn’t show a strong enough character, and his family suffered because of it. So of course his way to “fix” that was to show off his strength.

But the thing is, being a strong hero doesn’t mean anything to his family. Shouto even tells us on screen that beating bad guys can’t be enough to show his change of character, because beating bad guys has always been his job, and he’s always been good at it. What he needs to prove is that he understands that he needs to change on a human level as well. He needs to show compassion towards his victims. He needs to own up to what he did to Rei and to the rest of the family. He can’t make amends to them as a hero, because heroics is the reason behind the abuse itself. To truly make amends, he needs to understand that his behaviour was lacking as a father, not as a hero.

Yet, despite all his tears and his show of feeling guilt in the aftermaths of Dabi’s reveal, he still hasn’t reached that self-awareness yet.

When the reporter asks him to take responsibility for his actions and to beat up the bad guys, Endeavor rises to the challenge as he’s always done. But notice the way it’s framed. The woman falters midway through her rant, likely having realized that she’s asking him to take down his own son. Cause that’s the thematic knot of Endeavor’s character. He was fine beating up the bad guys until he found out that one of them is a villain of his own making. Until one of said villains is his own son. He didn’t show any mercy when fighting against Shigaraki. In fact, he burned Shigaraki alive without even blinking twice, and then showed surprise when Shigaraki could still walk afterwards. That’s an unequivocal employment of excessive force. Heroes aren’t supposed to kill, yet Endeavor and Hawks are both “fakes” because they have killed on the job before.

The story is basically telling us that if Dabi hadn’t revealed himself as family, Endeavor would’ve used that same brute force, that same lethal intent with him too. Because he’s used to facing villains as a threat that needs a beating, and in doing so, he’s lost sight of what being a hero is actually supposed to be about. Heroics is not a way to show off who has the strongest quirk or the highest villain apprehension rate. At its core, heroics is the selfless dedication to help people. Beating villains is supposed to be a means to an end, not the prize itself. Villains are supposed to be those who threaten peace, and because of that they should be defeated and arrested. But Endeavor just treats them as his personal punching balls. To him, being a hero was never about helping maintain peace. It was always about proving to the world just how strong he is.

He completely fails to realize that a hero’s job is also to protect those who can’t defend themselves, to put them at ease with the promise that he’s watching their backs. That’s the reason why All Might was so popular, was because he made them feel guarded. Endeavor is not only someone who never made anyone feel safe (in fact, he terrorized his own family), but he’s also a guy who thinks of compassion as “people-pleasing” and of heroism as a dick-measuring contest. A measure of his own strength.

So when the woman tells him “you should’ve beaten the bad guy”, Enji answers “that’s right. That’s how I, as Endeavor, can atone.”

So what happened to atoning as a father? He’s still refusing to do it. Still clinging to what worked for him before, much like Hawks. They’re falling back in the same exact standings they had in pro hero arc, before they were faced by the consequences of their actions. Hawks is once again giving Endeavor his full support, helping him be a better symbol from the shadows, because he’s still hiding behind the claim that his back isn’t broad enough to reach success on his own terms, and he has to be instrumental to other people’s agendas. And Endeavor is once again taking this as a challenge as a hero and not as a father.

I guess it could be argued that the fact that Enji specifies that this is his way to atone as Endeavor is a sign that he might be realizing that he needs to act differently as Enji. But that’s a stretch. There isn’t any acknowledgement on his part that he should act any differently as a father. If he had truly understood that his true way to atone is bringing Touya back to his family, this was the perfect opportunity to tell the world that. To reinforce his son’s humanity by taking ownership of the abuse and recognizing that Touya is violently lashing out as a result of trauma, of Enji’s failure to give him the psychological help he needed 10 years ago.

Yet, I want you to realize that Enji doesn’t mention Touya at all during the whole speech.

Sure, he doesn’t deny what happened to Touya and that’s a step forward, but he doesn’t own up to it either. If he had, he would show that he understands that the victims here are Touya and the rest of his family. That his atonement should cater to their needs, not his own. Yet he doesn’t act like it at all. What he wants is to show off his own strength, and that hasn’t changed one bit.

The proof that this is character stagnation is that he repeats the same words he said in pro hero arc. Endeavor’s atonement is self-serving, because he understands it as a way to earn back respect from his peers, not as a way to make up for the abuse to his victims. He still thinks everything revolves around him, that he’s the showman here that needs to prove himself. He’s treating this like a test of his own worth, not an apology to Touya. That’s why he doesn’t mention him at all. This isn’t for Touya’s benefit, but for Enji’s own. This is all motivated by pride, not by the understanding that if he wants to stay a hero, he needs to prove he can live as ethically as he can by being instrumental to his victims’ healing.

So, just like Hawks, he’s apologizing cause he couldn’t be a better hero, but not for not being a better person.

This is why at the end of the chapter we see Dabi grinning maliciously, saying that what he did wasn’t enough. The press conference just proved him right on all accounts.

The heroes’ justice is self-serving, and all it protects are the heroes themselves. None of them ever takes accountability for their mishandlings of power, and the public cuts them too much slack, propping them up as symbols of the “just” society even though the public now knows they’re rotten too. What Dabi was trying to accomplish with the broadcast was an acknowledgement that the public’s approval of such types of heroes only creates more villains, only expands the rot of their society. Yet, this chapter shows that half of Japan’s population is still resisting the hurtful truth, and trying to cling to the comforting lies they believed all their lives.

This is realistic by the way. Change doesn’t happen overnight. To make a real life comparison, it’s like the JKR disaster. When she turned out to be a raging transphobe, many long-time fans lost a childhood idol, denied their support of her work, and started to push for a deplatforming cause they understood that allowing her to keep influencing the masses was dangerous. However, many others couldn’t completely cut off that part of their childhood that was impacted by her works, and as a result were more lenient towards her, giving her second chances, or even drawing a mental divide between her rl opinions and her works, as if the two aren’t connected.

Endeavor’s case mirrors real life in that. Bnha society is similarly split into those who want accountability, and those who want “death of the author”, which in our case is just��� a desire to keep receiving more of Endeavor’s protection as a hero without having to think too hard about what it means to keep giving him support.

Even if the hero/villain dichotomy was just addressed as something that isn’t as black and white as they always thought, their society has normalized it for too long for things to change overnight just like that.

Personally, I don’t worry about this being a sign of how “unsuccessful” Dabi might’ve been as a villain. If he had what he wanted right away, he wouldn’t have a reason to keep fighting against hero society. And we need this conflict to still be in place when the new generation will face off against the League.

Basically I think that while the old guard failed to acknowledge villains as people, or to create options when there was “no other choice” than taking down the bad guys, Shouto, Deku & Co. will succeed where they failed, bringing compassion and understanding back on the table. And once the new gen paves the way, society will likely follow, this time for real though

[thyandrawrites]

so uuh do you think hawks can be understood as someone that blinds himself into doing The Right Thing no matter the consequences because he is desperately trying to avoid becoming like his parents?

I think so, but I doubt it’s something he does consciously. But I also definitely think that his penchant for polarizing the world into “good” and “bad” people is something he started doing as a result of the domestic abuse he lived through.

One thing worth noting here is that even as a young child, Keigo was extremely aware of how fucked up his family environment was. He talked about his parents in very detached terms:

He is correct of course. Tomie did bring him to town to shut him up, so I can totally understand the lack of warmth that transpires from his words. But imho it goes deeper than lack of affection for them.  It’s not just resentment for the abuse and neglect he suffered.

He straight-up calls them “broken inside” and stops seeing any kind of redemption for them at the end of the line. In a way, it’s like he already gave up on them as “too far gone”, and doesn’t want to end up like them.

Notice his phrasing. Going to the police is doing things “the right way”, but he has to insist to his mother for her to consent to it, cause she wouldn’t have done if she had any other option. In other words, his mother didn’t want salvation, so she was truly past the point of saving. Which might be why he so easily leaves her behind:

a mindset he still shows as an adult when he faces Twice, btw. Offering selective help only to those he labels as “good people” who can have a fresh start after reformation is just another way in which he keeps dividing the world into good and bad victims. His mother was a bad victim cause she was broken inside, hence he doesn’t think much about offering her his help. He would be a shining light for those who were actually worth it. And Twice was a bad victim (or at the very least, an inconvenient one) because he refused to do the “right thing” and surrender himself to the police.

I think that the reason why he accepted the training is cause he was still subconsciouly trying to answer his mother’s question “what are those wings for?” by proving that he could still be helpful to others. I do think that his clinging to his self-righteousness and polarized worldview is a coping method, though. Some part of him knows that his mother deserved a second chance, too:

and deep down, he chides himself for not reaching out to her back then.

I think there’s a chance that the present Hawks is undergoing some change, though. Killing Twice didn’t leave him indifferent, even if he’s still justifying it as an act for the greater good. But if the greater good was still enough of a motivator for him, he wouldn’t be feeling admiration for Shouto because of Shouto’s ability to face his parents with his chin up and an open mind. I think he might be starting to question what “saving people” actually means to him personally, which might be the first step into understanding that if he didn’t end up like his parents, it was just out of pure luck, not some kind of intrinsic moral quality that marks him as different from people who turn to petty theft to survive. Jin was one of such people, and Hawks admitted himself that he was a good man despite it

[thyandrawrites]

After Twice’s death I wonder if we will ever see a conflict between Hawks and Toga 🧐 I don’t know why, but I see an interaction (somewhat, like 45% haha) of just Hawks being indifferent to his death and Toga just snaps at that. But since Toga’s character is more connected with Uraraka and we’ve never seen them interact from what I remember, it may not happen. Also, do you think Toga will actually return to the League? I just have a feeling that I don’t think she will return to them, along with Compress. What are your thoughts if that’s alright?

mmh, I can’t say I agree with any of these predictions. Sorry about that, I don’t mean to shut you down, I just don’t personally see the appeal in any of that. But I’ve been routinely wrong about my predictions before so don’t take that badly! There’s a high chance I’m wrong this time too.

For one... I know the fandom latched on to the idea of Toga as a lonesome avenger since her bond with Twice was very strong and she was the one to hold him (his clone) in her arms as he passed away. But I would be incredibly dissatisfied with that narrative choice if it ended up becoming canon. I want the whole League, not just Toga, to unify against Hawks the same way they all gathered together to avenge Magne. Hawks’ betrayal affected all of them, not just Toga, and besides, Hawks has already been set up to clash against Dabi again since he’s intruding in the Todofam rescue narrative. So I personally expect the League as a whole to fight against him at some point. 

Moreover, I don’t think at all that Hawks is “indifferent” to Twice’s death. Putting it like that seems to me like a misreading of his character.

This^ is not indifference. Look at how he stills when Twice shows sympathy and offers him genuine acceptance and friendship. Look at the zooming in on his overwhelmingly sad smile, at the way it’s barely a smile at all, cause resignation is clear as a day on his expression. This chapter was titled “friends”.

Look at all the emotion on his face. THIS was Hawks being fully genuine. If he was indifferent to Twice’s fate, why offering him a second chance, why looking so sorrowful at having to fight him in the first place.

Hawks was never “indifferent” towards his death. Even after the murder itself, Hawks directly tells us that Twice’s drive to help his friends is an inspiration for him. He could’ve easily forgotten about him once he was dead, but no, Twice is the reason behind his resolve to keep doing what Hawks feels is the right thing (which we readers know is bs, but he doesn’t).

When you compare all of that to this, you realize that the lack of emotion here ^ is the actual mask, not the other way around. Press conference!Hawks is a Hawks who already reverted to his detached work persona. It’s not the real him, it’s not Keigo the person who can feel, who can have a certain fondness for a person on the other side of the law. It’s the Winged Hero Hawks, someone who cannot be “tripped up by sentiment”

The point was never that Hawks is “indifferent” to the act of killing a friend on the job in oder to protect the faceless masses. Cause he’s not. The point is that Hawks feels, he feels so much, in fact, but at the end of the day he still makes the conscious choice to squash his personal feelings because he doesn’t think he has a right to his own wants.

Hawks is extremely self-aware that the system who rescued him isn’t actually the utopia it looks from the outside. He’s aware that they didn’t free him, but just put him in a bigger cage. He knows all those things, and he still chooses to fight for the preservation of that system, of those captors. Cause he was raised by them to think he shouldn’t want freedom. he shouldn’t let sentiment trip him up. But the fact that he admits that his personal feelings can trip him up in the first place means that there are such feelings, and that they directly oppose the orders he was given by his superiors when he embarked this mission.

I’m sorry, I’m just ranting at this point. But I’m just super tired of people either woobifying Hawks or demonizing him. For me, there’s a middle ground, a gray area. He’s not a saint but he’s not a demon, either. He’s a fucked up person who sees the world through twisted lenses because accepting his own victimhood means losing his entire sense of self. He needs consequences for his actions, and he’ll get them, but he was never a black or white character so I doubt that his end will be, either

[thyandrawrites]

I haven’t cried since my tear ducts got burned

or: The good of the many vs the existence of the Others: aka what the foiling between Dabi, Hawks and Shigaraki tells us about hero society’s bias on victimhood

Alright, so I’ve been seeing a lot of confusion and unrest in the fandom ever since 267 dropped and Dabi claimed that he doesn’t care about the League, so I decided I’d wear my meta hat and go over the reasons why we’re not meant to take his words to heart there. 

It’s not just that he was lying or that he was being sarcastic. It’s deeper than that, and it touches a few thematic points of bnha as a whole, so it’s worth exploring past the very obvious reading, which is that he’s grieving and he’s angry and he’s not in his right mind. I’ll also go over the shift in his agenda, and the symbolic reason behind his inability to cry. So, without further ado, let’s delve into it. (under a cut for length)

1. Hawks and Dabi are foils. Two sides of the same coin. 

Alright, so a few people might’ve forgotten this detail, with everything that’s happening right now. It’s understandable. So allow me to remind you about this very important key for reading both their actions. 

Foiling is a technique that writers use to draw parallels between two characters. Sometimes those parallels are perfect overlappings, sometimes they work as sharp contrasts between the two. This is used to highlight certain sides of said characters, be it personality traits or mentality / goals / ethics.

So, Dabi and Hawks are foils. How so?

Both are light haired little kids who were completely helpless to change their fate. Both were raised in environments where the choice of what to do with their future was taken away from them by the authority figures in their lives. Both were trained since a very young age, and both were only valued for the heroic potential of their quirks. These are the things that overlap. But there’s also things that position them on two very opposite sides of the same spectrum. While Touya “died” and got free, Keigo remained in his cage. While Touya willingly gave up his name and formed a new identity that gave him meaning, Keigo was forced to give up his and was handed a new identity that depersonalized him. So when Dabi became an agent of societal change, Hawks became the very tool that’s charged with the goal of upkeeping the status quo. 

So, they’re two sides of the same coin. What does this tell us about them, and why is it important now? 

Hawks’ narration informs us that he “doesn’t let sentiment trip him up” in order to carry out his goal. He fully believes this, to the point that it’s only when Dabi reminds him of his civilian persona, the identity he was made to leave behind, that Hawks finally goes for the kill. 

The intent here is clear. Up until this point, Hawks was toeing the line between his own personal wishes and his duty as a hero. We see the two sides of him battle each other. He selfishly wants to capture Jin alive, and tries everything in his power to incapacitate him so that he doesn’t have to kill him. Something that’s worth mentioning here again is that here Jin serves as a physical narrative tool to show us Hawks’ personal wishes. Jin is everything Hawks is not allowed to be by the Hpsc. Jin is free. Jin can relax and “sit back with a nice cold one”. Jin has friends. Jin is valued not for how useful he is to his comrades, but as a person. Jin is what Hawks would be if he wasn’t made to become a hero. However, “Takami Keigo” is no more. Takami Keigo is not allowed to exist, because he gave up that identity, and his duty here is to be The Winged Hero Hawks. 

So, as my friend Linkspooky pointed out in her own meta lately, when Hawks goes for the kill, Hawks is not only a victim screwing up another victim, he’s also making the conscious choice to perpetuate the system - and in doing so, he’s also killing his old identity and the part of himself that wants things in order to be who he needs to be for the job. Because the greater good is more important than his personal wishes. 

How does this relate to Dabi? Well. There is a clear parallelism at play here: just like Hawks tells himself he doesn’t let himself be tripped up by sentiments in order to carry out his goal, Dabi is pretending he hasn’t grown attached to the League because he’s only there to carry out his ultimate revenge against hero society and his dad. 

Both are characters who left something behind in order to be who they needed to be. Hawks, his real self, with all his wishes attached. Dabi, his family and everything else that can distract him from his revenge. 

Just like Hawks, Dabi is not a very upfront character. Both characters repress and compartmentalize a lot, but they just express this in two opposite ways. Dabi by projecting his own self-hatred onto his dad, and Hawks by constantly punishing himself instead and by throwing away the key of his own cage. One's hatred is directed outwards and the other inwards but they're the same feelings of inadequacy, because they are foils. 

Both of them are aware that their methods are wrong on a purely ethical level, but they push that self-awareness to the back of their minds, because their objectives are noble in theory. Hawks is sacrificing himself to take down the league even if it makes him a scummy hero, so that there can be a real peace and heroes can have leisure time. And Dabi is constantly burning his own body to take down fake heroes, even if he had to make his family mourn him to gain freedom, so that there can be a society with no heroes, a place where corruption doesn't exist anymore. Both mindset are flawed, and both are trying to cure a disease by working on the symptoms rather than the causes. And both repress and compartmentalize the things that get in the way of achieving those goals. 

So on the one hand, you have Hawks killing the part of himself he sees reflected in Twice, and punishing himself for wanting things by cutting  short the life of the only person who saw him as a human being and not a tool. On the other hand, you have Dabi insisting that he doesn’t give a shit about the people around him, both allies and enemies, even if caring too much about the family he left behind is exactly the reason why he went crazy. He also keeps inflicting his same fate by burning people to a crisp, subconsciously mimicking the violence and lack of tolerance for weakness or “unworthiness” he was brought up with, in a way essentially punishing the people who remind him of his weak, defenseless past self. 

2. Dabi cannot cry since he “died” because hero society didn't allow him to be a victim. 

So. Dabi being unable to cry can, of course, be just read literally. He bears the scars for it, and it makes sense that he got out of the incident with a few disabilities. However, given the context where we are first informed of it, this serves also as symbolic commentary. 

There is a certain theme at play in bnha. The people we get to witness Deku saving are always little children crying and begging for help. First, Bakugou during the sludge villain incident. Deku only jumps into action when he recognizes him and sees the frustrated, terrified tears in his eyes. 

He later even tells him that the reason he couldn't wait for the right hero to come to the rescue was exactly that: he thought Bakugou had the face of someone who was begging for help. 

From then on, this theme is repeated. We see Kouta crying and hiding behind Deku when the threat of Muscular, the man who killed his parents, comes up. We see Deku refuse to let go a terrified, glossy-eyed Eri and almost screw up the whole operation, and we later see Deku reach out a hand for a sobbing Eri who's desperate to be given a better option than succumb to her abuser.

Crying as a visual narrative tool for invoking help from the heroes is very much a theme in bnha. And it's always small children who do it. Because when a hero sees a small child crying, how can they turn down their help? We are told that this is exactly what heroics boils down to. 

However, we are also told that there are kids who don't get saved. Children that hero society overlooks, and who later end up falling through the cracks. Todoroki Touya was one of them. 

The fact that two of the main villains in bnha, Shigaraki and Dabi, share eerily similar backstories that unequivocally point out the flaws of the Hero system is not coincidental. Both were left to fend off on their own against their respective abusers, both were overlooked by the heroes who should've come to their help when they were small kids crying and begging for help, and both ended up as the main protagonists of their respective tragedies as a result of the heroes’ negligence. 

We are told that Shimura Tenko lived in a neighborhood that was overflowing with heroes. Yet, no one saw the signs of the abuse he lived through daily at the hands of his father. No one was there to prevent the horrible consequences of his quirk activating for the first time. And most importantly, no one was there to offer him shelter and emotional stability in the aftermath of losing all his closest relatives in a blood bath that is on par with a scene straight out of a war zone. Worse yet, adults saw the signs of ptsd on little Tenko's face when he was left to roam the streets in search of a helping hand, and still left him vulnerable to Afo's kidnapping because they counted on heroes to show up. Eventually. They saw a clearly distressed child and didn't even make sure he was looked after while they waited for the heroes to be less busy. The reason why Tenko was kidnapped by Afo and later became a murderer is intentional negligence by the heroes. 

This is a repeated theme in bnha. 

Remember when Bakugou was left to fend off the Sludge villain for minutes on end, even as he was literally being choked and fought to stay conscious, and all the heroes on the scene stood there, unmoving, just waiting for someone else to handle it? 

In a world where there is a surplus of heroes and not enough villains to justify it, it's only normal that heroes lose sight of what heroics should actually be about - putting your life on the line and doing the scary thing that would scare away everyone else, but could potentially save lives - and instead regard heroics as a purely transactional job, an intersection between demand and supply that needs to meet certain criteria in order to unlock the heroes’ help. 

We know that Hori wants us to pick up on this theme because it's presented over and over. The fact that heroics as a whole, as a profession and as an ideal, has been corrupted so deeply, is stated as part of bnha’s worldbuilding. 

It's thanks to this fundamental fallacy, this fundamental negligence, that things like the public’s ignorance of Endeavor's domestic violence can be explained away. 

Shigaraki tells us what’s the psychological mechanism at play here. “Heroes will come to rescue me,” says Deku, someone who has blind faith in hero society. “No they will not. Look at how many fucks they give about you,” says Shigaraki, someone who literally has been in that same position. Waiting for heroes to notice his distress. And was left alone.

I’ve seen people brush Shigaraki and his rightful claims off by virtue of the fact that Shigaraki is a ruthless killer. But it’s exactly because Shigaraki wasn’t born as one, that his words hold meaning. Shigaraki here works as a signifier of just how people fall through the cracks in the first place: because everyone, including heroes, feel too comfortable in their own bubbles. In an age where heroes are constantly patrolling the streets, or punching up bad guys at every corner, or smiling back at you on tv show or maxi digital screens in the middle of town, no one expects evil to lurk out in the open. Sitting at a mall, holding a deadly hand on Deku’s throat. Because All Might’s catchy phrase “I am here” made them constantly feel protected. Watched over. This way they can walk by Shigaraki and Deku and not notice a single thing wrong. They can turn a blind eye because they were taught that someone else is handling it, that someone else is watching. 

But we know that’s not true. Otherwise cases like Shigaraki’s wouldn’t exist.

So. If civilians are turning a blind eye, and heroes are busy watching civilians and villains, who is keeping watch on the heroes? 

This kind of fallacy is exactly how Todoroki Enji could get away with domestic abuse without anyone noticing for more than 22 years. No one, including heroes, ever bothers questioning why Todoroki, a flame user, has a burn scar on his face. No one questions why Todoroki has a very obvious grudge against his (hero) dad, despite being his pupil. Despite having every reason to look up to him as a role model. No one questions that Enji might not be a good dad, not even after they witness the obvious, not even hidden tension between father and son. All Might even obliviously asks him for parenting advice once. And wait for it, it gets better. Rei’s room at the hospital she’s been locked up in for the past ten years has a plaque on the door that reads Mrs. Todoroki. Right there in plain sight for everyone to see. Yet no one ever questions it. Todoroki Touya died young, very likely as a result of Enji's actions and choices, and to this day, even though Enji openly admits to his culpability, even if his own children still can't forgive him for it, he has yet to be held accountable for it by the public at large. The public who a few months ago, back in december, crowned him the number one hero and symbolic heir of All Might, the person who can beat up bad guys and keep everyone (but his own son) safe. 

If no one expects Endeavor to be an abuser, it goes without saying that no one recognizes Touya’s status as a victim, too. By denying his victimhood, they also deny him his right to be a crying child begging to be saved. They doomed him to die alone instead, and be snuffed out by his own fire. While his father walked away without any legal consequence, and was free to finally reach the goal he abused his kid for, becoming number one. 

So. Dabi cannot cry - both literally and symbolically - ever since his tear ducts burned up when he “died”. This is when the thematic transformation began. By “dying”, he also stopped being a victim altogether. He became one of the punishers instead. An adult who cannot cry, and who turns on the evils that wronged him and left him to deal with his demons alone. Aka corrupt heroes. Like Endeavor. Like Hawks. 

The fact that Dabi cannot cry, but also refuses to show sadness when Hawks murders his friend in front of him, is relevant as more than a simple statement about his disabilities. It’s also a symbolic way for Hori to make a point on a deeper level. 

I talked in point 1 about how Hawks is a violent tool put there to guard the continued existence of the current status quo. In this post here I explained why more in detail. But basically: when he takes Jin down, Hawks dehumanizes him. He refuses to listen to Jin’s words, refuses to see him as person and understand his point of view. When Jin begs and tries to reason with him that the league is what gave him a home and understanding, that the league is not the faceless monster Hawks thinks they are, Hawks shoots the clones down with his feathers. 

What we can take away from this is pretty straightforward. Hawks the hero cannot empathize with villains, because empathizing means seeing his own share of responsibilities. It means accepting that hero society is not as righteous as he claims it to be, and if he starts thinking of it that way, he cannot be a tool for the system anymore. He’d lose his entire remaining sense of identity. So what he does instead is sticking to self-absolution. Intentional negligence. He refuses to see Jin’s begging and crying, and keeps holding a sword to his throat. Comply, or I’ll have to kill you. Because Jin’s personal feelings don’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. 

By trying to force Jin to reintegrate with the society that casted him out and sent him spiraling, without acknowledging that hero society did those things to him, Hawks is pushing for a reading of this whole affair that justifies his own actions - but not Jin’s. What Hawks is saying is that villains are people who choose to be monsters. They are not victims. Jin is the only good egg, because he is a good man, uncorrupted, but if he resists him, if he doesn’t wanna be wiped clean by the heroes “justice” then Jin also becomes a subversive element that needs to be taken down. See what’s happening? Jin’s victimhood can be entirely stripped away from him the moment it inconveniences the upkeep of the status quo. 

So when Dabi cannot cry in front of Hawks - Hawks who once again, is a symbol of the hero society he’s defending - it’s not just because he’s physically unable to. But also because hero society didn’t let him stay a victim, either, and instead stripped that helplessness away from him, painted him as an unfeeling, bloodthirsty monster, until Dabi eventually became one. 

3. It’s the Heroes’ fault / There are no real Heroes

Once again, Hori is intentionally drawing a parallel between Dabi and Shigaraki here. 

There is Dabi who cannot cry to express his grief and there is Shigaraki who cannot mourn because he’s wearing the hands of his victims on his body. 

There are two kids who weren’t rescued when they needed heroes the most, and there are two kids who end up hating heroics as a whole as a result of being left behind. Shigaraki hates All Might’s “I am here” catchphrase because All Might wasn’t there to save him. Dabi hates the rhetoric that heroes rescue people, because even heroes who are famous for being the types to rescue others, arbitrarily decide to label people like him and Twice as ruthless monsters that need to be taken down. 

Those smiles are a rebellion in their own right. They refuse to comply to the expectations of hero society. Hawks’ words when he faults Dabi for not showing sadness show once again how much he dehumanizes him. He literally just killed Dabi’s friend, and five seconds later he bitches to Dabi for not mourning according to easily understandable standards. 

What they end up embracing is instead a violent form of lashing out. While it’s certainly true that both their narratives address the flaws of the hero system and directly call out on screen the consequences of those flaws, the consequences Dabi and Shigaraki embody, it’s also true that neither one of them is actively looking for social revolution. It’s quite the opposite. What they’re seeking out is the violent destruction of the status quo. 

Shigaraki wants to destroy everything he doesn’t like (with the sole exception of the things his friends like). Dabi wants to rid the world of heroes. 

I waited for the official scans to check because they’re usually more reliable in terms of nuance, and Dabi says “there are no true heroes”. There is a significant shift in Dabi’s agenda here - or there seems to be, according to Caleb’s translation. Before this arc, Dabi’s vengeance was fully directed at fake heroes. The corrupt kind. The heroes “riddled with holes” according to a different past translation. Back then, Dabi’s words sounded more like the vendetta you’d expect from a guy who had a grudge against a single person. As a matter of fact, I did write several posts myself about how I thought (and still think) that back then Stain’s ideology was just a front for him. it gave him a good reason to go after his dad, but that was it. I don’t think he was doing it for a bigger goal other than killing Endeavor, not even for his family, because if societal change was really what he wanted… well, he could’ve easily destroyed hero society by revealing his identity forever ago. 

I’ve said this before, but Dabi is a character who relishes in having the upper hand over his opponents. He shows this by shouting out their full names in front of them, showcasing that he knows something that the other doesn’t. Dabi is a character who is purposefully and consistently shown to hold his trump card close to his chest, because he is aware that it gives him an advantage. Dabi knows his own weaknesses all too well. He knows he cannot overpower his enemies by relying on brute strength alone - it’s why he often only barges into a fight when he either has an easy way out or a clear advantage. He did this with Hawks too, waiting until Hawks was “tripped up by his personal feelings” to catch him off guard and gain the (momentary) upper hand. His awareness of his own weaknesses is exactly what makes him rely on his smarts and on strategy. 

Right now, Dabi is quite literally the most dangerous character in bnha. The information he keeps to himself is so powerful it could undo hero society. He could  destroy the status quo any moment if he were to reveal that the number one is a violent domestic abuser who killed him, and that similarly the number two hero is also a murderer who not only killed a villain on the job (something we were expressly told heroes aren’t supposed to do), but also sacrificed the beloved Best Jeanist, a fellow “good guy”. 

Yet, he never before now made use of that information. Had he wanted to truly expose the hero system for a violent police state that uses armed oppression of dissent by design to upkeep its privilege, he could’ve easily done that ages ago. All he’d have to do was gain notoriety as a villain and then tell the League who he was. Yet, he kept that card close to his chest because he presumably only wanted to reveal it in his showdown with his father. 

Until now. 

This is a pivotal change for his character. 

When he says “there are no real heroes” he is denying that there can be good heroes, the ones who aren’t fake, ones that actually do save people. He’s saying that everyone is the same. They’re all corrupt, because they all work to preserve a system that lets people like Jin die. People like Todoroki Touya die. And I mean. He’s right. 

This is a Dabi who just went through the shock of seeing Hawks kill someone. And with this I don’t mean that Dabi trusted him. We know he didn’t buy that Hawks was a villain sympathizer from the start. He knew Hawks only wanted in as a spy. We don’t know why he let him join, possibly just to exploit him, but I also think Dabi did seriously not see this coming. 

Before this plot twist, it can be noted that Dabi’s way of interacting with Hawks aligns perfectly with how he addresses other pro heroes, not fellow villains. With the league, he’s rude, dismissive, he insults them plenty. When he is talking to Hawks, though, he’s chatty, jeering, smiling. He taunts Hawks by telling him Hawks saves people like all heroes are supposed to do instead of proving to Dabi that he is actual villain material. 

Dabi thought Hawks was a hero through and through, and didn’t trust him as a result, exactly because Hawks was the type of heroes who always made sure to save everyone. 

When Dabi attacked Hawks from his blind spot, he was counting on Hawks to get Jin out of the way. This wasn’t him just being careless with the league’s lives. This was him getting an accurate if partial reading of Hawks. Hawks was trained to always prioritize saving people. What Dabi does not expect is for Hawks to be trained to be little else but a tool. 

It’s only when Hawks gets unmasked as another fake hero, just like his dad, keeping a front of moral rectitude only to hide the skeletons in his closet, that Dabi finally shifts. He no longer wants to rid society of fake heroes. He wants to rid it of heroes altogether. This way, he basically aligns himself with Shigaraki’s agenda. Much like him, he’s not preaching for selective cleansing or societal change. Hawks’ life doesn’t matter to him anymore. No one else’s life matters to him anymore. He wants the indiscriminate destruction of the status quo, and he positions himself as the first domino piece to set off that chain reaction. Sure, he might think that a factory reset might eventually lead to a change, to a better society emerging from the ashes of the corrupt one, but for the moment, his goal aligns with Shigaraki’s. It’s destructive, not constructive. 

Hawks, like the society he represents, denied Dabi his victimhood and then doomed the whole league to die by choosing not to save the one guy who was arguably the least villainous of them all. 

Dabi responds by finally embracing his role as a destabilizer. He reveals his trump card, his real name, and relishes in the final upper hand he has over Hawks.

Shigaraki said: “The king has returned”. 

Dabi says: “You should’ve kept both eyes on me.” 

Both are destroyers, and both have legit reasons to turn against hero society. 

4. Dabi wasn’t there when Magne died.

We finally reach the last point! 

Magne’s death, bloody and graphic as it was, served the narrative purpose of finally cementing the league as a unit, fighting together for the same goal. It also served the purpose of letting Shigaraki grow into the leader he is today. Someone who doesn’t let his friends behind, and someone who makes his enemies pay for hurting his comrades. 

The point of interest here is that Dabi was absent during her death. This was significant plot-wise, because removing Dabi from that gorey sight, and from the emotional bonding amongst the League that followed, Horikoshi meant to draw him apart from them, to make him go off on his own on occasions, to show us that he had a different goal that Shigaraki didn’t share. 

This time, the reverse is happening. When Twice, the core of league, is killed in a gorey bloodbath by an external agent coming there to disrupt the League’s unity, Dabi is the only person present to witness it. 

My guess is that this was not done by chance. It’s Dabi’s turn to let the loss of a comrade make him grow. Possibly grow closer to the league, too, and finally share his goal with Shigaraki. But it’s definitely his screentime. Quite likely also Tomura’s, given the huge amount of narrative foiling between them I just went over, as well as the fact that Shigaraki has been markedly absent from all the action so far. 

Predictions? I don’t dare making any yet. It’s a bit too soon to delve my toes in the theory pot anyway. But whatever is the direction Hori intends to take this… with this amount of foiling at play... there’s one thing I can say for sure. It’s gonna be even more intense from now on. 

[thyandrawrites]

Quick question: Do you think Hawks will ever be redeemed or continue to get...well, frankly, shittier? Because aside from the LOV,I really did want Hawks to turn out different. :^\

Btw, I hope you're no longer getting hateful messages/asks. 💕

Hey! To be honest I don’t like making predictions, I much prefer commenting on stuff that already happened. I have no idea what to expect from Hawks anymore, but my reading of him so far is that he’s repressing hard right now. I talked a little about this here. He’s compartmentalizing, putting his feelings in a box and then storing it away it at the very back of his mind, hoping to forget about it.

I am hoping for a redemption for him as well because quite frankly his foiling with Endeavor makes me uncomfortable. He’s a victim who ended up screwing over other victims and that’s tragic, especially for a kid who had a genuine wish to be of help to others. Imho the only way to end his arc in a way that doesn’t feel like Hori completely fucked him over to become a mouthpiece of Endvore’s redemption is to give Hawks a chance to make up for his past mistakes. The problem is, to do that, Hawks needs to acknowledge that those were mistakes in the first place.

We got close to that in 306, but not quite. I hope to have coherent enough thoughts to share after reading Viz’s translation of the conference, but. For the time being, it should be noted that the fan scans didn’t translate that part very well. In japanese, the words he uses to apologize for hiding his connection to his father aren’t the same as the words he uses to apologize about Twice. The former is stiff and formal and kinda a default pr response. The latter shows more emotion, and as I understand it, is more personal. Which is a start, I guess. It shows that Keigo still lives inside him. The “sentiment” that “tripped him up” before, that made him falter in his capture of Twice, is still within him, so it could be freed at some point.

Of course his difference in wording alone is not enough of a basis to “redeem” him yet. He’s saying that he’s sorry, yes, but also that he would do it again. Which is the mindset that needs challenging in order for him to finally correct his past wrongs. So long as he keeps thinking that villains can be killed by the heroes when they pose too big a threat to the status quo, it means he’s still valuing the law over his humanity. It means he’s refusing to see that the reason Twice was a villain in the first place was because the system that Hawks is defending tooth and nail didn’t offer Jin any protection at all, and threw him to the wolves instead.

For Hawks to have a chance of recovering his humanity, he needs to finally be put in a position to see, truly see, that villains are just people as well, and that they’re hurting. He didn’t acknowledge Twice’s pain at all before. Twice tried to explain to him that the reason he is loyal to the League is because the League gave him a place to belong without asking for anything back, while hero society casted him out, made him homeless, jobless and friendless. Hawks’ response was to dismiss Twice’s need for human connection when he asked him to abandon them. That’s not sympathy, it’s dismissal of Twice’s trauma. And now Hawks is barging in on a narrative of healing, and he’ll likely bring conflict into it. If he saw Twice as a threat to the establishment, it goes without saying that he sees Dabi as another threat. Look at how much Dabi destroyed in a single week. And he’s still out there, ready to make matters worse.

BUT. What’s different now is that Dabi still has a family. And despite the messy framing with the phrasing about how they’re going to “stop” him, it’s pretty much a given that Dabi’s being set up to be saved. For Enji to atone, he needs to save Touya, there’s no getting out of that. If Touya died for a second time or got put into jail and forgotten about as everyone else moves on, that’s an inconclusive ending. It’s not change, so it cannot lead to redemption.

So the current set up is basically Hawks and Jeanist (and Endeavor the hero) vs Rei, Shouto, Fuyumi, Natsuo and Enji the father. At some point, Endeavor will have to shift into Enji in order to succeed here, he needs to acknowledge Touya’s hurt, so there’s only two ways this could go. Either Hawks is gonna oppose him till the end, or Enji’s full acknowledgement that he’s personally responsible for Touya’s fall through the cracks will pave the way for Hawks to finally acknowledge his own shortcomings.

Either way, I think Hawks is gonna die before the end of the series, but he could either die a hero in the true sense of the word, someone willing to self-sacrifice to save others, or he can die as an unchanging cog of the current rotten machine that needs demolishing in order for something new to be built on its foundations. Personally, I think only one of those options is compelling, but it’s all in Hori’s hands

[thyandrawrites]

"Say what you will about the desperation of the situation, but these aren’t the actions of a hero who saves people. They’re the actions of one victim screwing over another victim. Hawks embodies the worst flaws of the hero system. He considers people who are already damaged, Best Jeanist, Twice, to be acceptable sacrifices for the sake of the peace of everyone else. This is not because Hawks was ordered to do so. It’s because Hawks sees himself that way as well. What’s really sad ultimately, is that Hawks sees himself in Twice. 

[...] He is choosing to sacrifice himself. However, the problem arises when Hawks decides to sacrifice other people along with him. Hawks is not the perfect self-sacrificing he sees himself as. He is ultimately incredibly imperfect and just as capable of doing bad things as the villains. It doesn’t excuse his actions because he’s a hero choosing to do bad things to a villain. The fact that what Hawks is doing isn’t justified, that it’s his own choice that he struggled with, is what makes him shine so much as a character."

Hawks and Chisaki: Birds of Prey

There are a lot of takes of Hawks’ actions in the past few chapters lacking nuance. People either seem to want to claim Hawks has no choice in his actions whatsoever due to being a victim of the system as wel, or claim Hawks is only capable of betraying Twice because he’s a sociopath who doesn’t feel any attachment at all. In order to help elucidate the nuance behind Hawks’ actions, and to illustrate that someone is capable of being both a victim of the system, and also choosing entirely on their own to do bad things that perpetuate the system. They can simultaneously be a victim of the system, and a part of that same system. There’s a difference between a bad victim (a term used to compare the experiences of two victims, and try to dehumanize certain people’s reactions to trauma because they’re not acceptable or easy to digest) and a victim who does bad things. 

Hawks is still a person. A person choosing to do bad things. So to explain that let’s compare him to Chisaki. Hawks already shares several things in common with Chisaki, but this isn’t just my comparison the story itself draws comparison between the way the both of them exploited Hawks. 

Continua a leggere

[thyandrawrites]

Stop. Saying. That Hawks. Will die here.

I'm trying to live in denial and all of you pessimists are making it difficult, so here's a list of reasons why I think that won't happen:

1. Keigo's name literally means truthteller. Hori has made it a pattern for his names to always relate in some way to the character, and Hawks is still the only one who needs to act on the foreshadowing of his.

2. Keigo has been set up as the bridge between Enji and Dabi, and has already brought them to collision once. It makes sense from a narrative point of view, considering his own past abuse and his admiration of an unsuspecting abuser, that he will eventually learn the truth about who Dabi is and how Enji played into that.

3. If Dabi kills him, and the building crumbles, Dabi essentially said goodbye to his and Twice's only chance to get out of there alive. And Dabi still has his vendetta plot to act on so he cannot die here, either.

4. There have been multiple cases of foreshadowing that Hawks will meet Shigaraki and he hasn't yet.

5. Shigaraki and Hawks are written as foils so they need to meet each other eventually. To balance out each other. Both of them were taken in as kids by people who used them as tools, twisting their entire mindset to think of themselves and their own emotions as something that holds them back from their goals. Hawks is a character that craves genuine connection, and Shigaraki is someone who will always make a home for all the rejects and misfots that society will not accept. Hawks has been told that his individuality doesn't matter, that he should get rid of it because when he slows down people die. Shigaraki never valued his comrades for the strength of their powers, but only ever as people. And Shigaraki has been lacking a purpose, and let himself be brought forward by an indiscriminate desire for destruction, but he lacks a purpose. Hawks can give him one. Together, they can destroy the institutions and the people who victimized them both.

6. Twice is still there (if Dabi hasn't accidentally roasted him too), and Twice doesn't like internal conflict amongst his friends. He still blames himself for brining Overhoe to the lov, resulting in the loss and injury of comrades. Doing this for a second time is not a way to set up growth on Hori's part, it's overkill. If Hawks simply remains a friend turned foe until the end, Twice will keep blaming himself, and will keep persisting in his toxic mindset of having to prove that he's worth staying with the lov, that he has to pay them back. For Twice's character arc to make sense, Hawks needs not only to survive, but to turn into an asset for the lov, but this time for real. As a friend.

7. Twice and Hawks are also foils. Both of them have 0 self esteem and think that sacrificing themselves for others is what they need to do. We already know from Twice's arc in mva that this mindset is what's holding him back from finding true happiness and will eventually be corrected by the story, so since Hawks' mindset is the same, it stands to reason his will be corrected as well.

8. Hawks' wings catching fire was foreshadowed forever ago, so we all expected this to happen eventually. The Icarus symbolism and all that jazz. But you're missing a crucial point. Twice, now, it was Enji's fire burning them. One,

And two, directly in-story:

So the Icarus foreshadowing is that Enji is gonna melt his wax wings and bring about his metaphorical fall from grace. Not Dabi. It was never about dying but about reaching clarity. And you know what a bird with flaming wings is?

A phoenix. Aka a symbol for rebirth.

9. Hawks' entire character is based around the concept of self-sacrifice for the greater good. Killing him here, after he sacrificed his own future with the league for the sake of a victory for the heroes, after he literally cornered himself like a martyr, confessing his betrayal to the man he hurt the most, is like killing him in the middle of his character arc. Characters are supposed to grow and evolve and be challenged throughout a story, not be handed everything they want without any narrative losses. Having Dabi burn him and rough him up for his betrayal is narrative punishment for what he did, but narrative punishment cannot work if the character dies 5 minutes later before he can drive home that loss and grow from it.

[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.

[thyandrawrites]

im losing my shit over 265 so i gotta ask. do you still think hawks could become a villain? bc dabi straight up roasting him at a five foot range seems pretty antithetical to it. what’re your opinions?

Call me a fool who’s setting herself up for disappointment… but this arc hasn’t yet given me a solid reason to despair about Hawks’ fate yet. 

For one, I expected his betrayal. And I expected it to be awful. Did I foresee him going all Hero Supremacy Rhetoric on a poor man begging for him to stop, to have sympathy, to be less self-righteous and cruel? Well, no… I don’t think anyone quite expected him to pour salt over a gaping wound. But I think we all foresaw him sticking to the ideals he’s grown up with. I had hopes that Hori would make use of Shigaraki’s incubation period to show us Hawks actually bonding with the League and starting to see them as people, but Hori skipped narrating that part, which means that he never had the intention of developing Hawks’ cognitive dissonance as a linear process. After some pondering, I can see why. That would’ve been a little too convenient narrative-wise. 

I don’t mean this as a justification for any of his actions, because I think he deserved the punishment the received, but let me reiterate for a moment that the current Hawks literally doesn’t know any better. Hawks has been raised from a tender age to be a tool. He’s been taught to prioritize the greater good over his own morals and his own needs over and over, until the point he internalized that he must always strive to save as many people as possible, at the cost of literally sacrificing his limbs. Hawks is constantly running at his topmost speed, even when he’s technically off duty, because he’s been raised to believe that if he slows down people die. He’s constantly thinking of a faceless majority of people who will benefit from his heroic sacrifice, and he devotes it all of himself in hopes of one day eradicating all villainy and finally gain the freedom he so longs for. 

So how does this relate to Twice and to what’s going on?

Twice is the collateral of that mindset. Sacrificing Twice for the sake of saving hundreds should technically be an easy choice for Hawks. It’s just one person, isn’t it? It’s the Trolley Problem I talked about before, and that since then has been explored by other meta writers, too. Sacrificing one person for the sake of a majority of people. An utilitarian mindset that privileges collective good over individual happiness. 

But Twice is also the first individual who treated Hawks like a person, not a tool. Twice is Hawks’ first real human bond. His first friend. Suddenly, the choice to kill him in cold blood is not as easy anymore, even for the sake of a supposed greater good. Suddenly, Hawks allows himself to be selfish. He wants to preserve what little bond they have. He wants to keep Twice in his life. 

Here’s where feelings get in the way of duty, making him commit his second mistake. He talks to Twice like a cop. Like a law enforcer, rather than as a person, as a friend. He completely disregards Twice’s feelings, and doesn’t react to Twice’s (on point) accusation that Hawks’ justice is self-absolving and self-serving. 

This is another sign of how depersonalized Hawks is when he’s carrying out his duty as a hero. He pushes down his (selfish) wishes and openly denies having grown attached to Twice. He puts on his cop persona, his unfeeling mask, and starts almost bragging about how easily he managed to pull off his lie of trying to tutor Jin before the meeting. Except his speech reads more like a desperate request for confirmation than a real brag. “I did my job right, didn’t I? That was flawless of me, wasn’t it? I didn’t slip up, I got you exactly in the harmless position I wanted you in, didn’t I? I did my job as I was supposed to. No one could question me.”

This was the second crack in Hawks’ hero mask.

We can see him visually struggling to stick to his duties even as he points several dozens of feather knives at Twice. We see him begging for Twice to choose the scenario that would be easier on Hawks’ guilty conscience: stop resisting, or pass out. Both of those options would take the choice to kill away from Hawks, and would make it easier to live with himself afterwards. Because, no matter what he says out loud, he has grown attached to a person he’s not supposed to have befriended. Sparing Twice is not what Hawks has been trained to consider a feasible option. Yet, we see him hesitate several times. 

Still, in the end he chooses to kill. 

Which is incredibly ironic, if you ask me. I’ve seen people frame this moment as the peak of his heroic agenda. As the proof that Hawks’ character will always stick to his cop ideals, and never shift from them. After all, he’s sacrificing a friend. It cannot possibly get worse from here, right? Nothing else could make him sway, if feeling sympathy for a target never stopped him from oppressing a minority that never had his same privileges. 

Except… I will argue that choosing to kill Twice is quite literally Hawks’ most villainous moment. Heroes aren’t supposed to kill. Not even for the sake of saving hundreds of people. Not especially kill preemptively. 

He done fucked up

Ironically, his most villainous choice happens while he thinks he’s doing his job as a hero. 

Just like Endeavor

Which is when Dabi chooses to waltz in and give him a satisfying roast for all the shit he pulled. if there’s one thing Hori can do well, it’s dishing out fitting narrative punishments for wrong choices. As well as building perfect foils and set ups. 

The thing is, even with how dire things are looking right now, there’s only one possible way out of this situation I can see, unless someone else arrives there last minute to interrupt. 

I already explained elsewhere why I think Hawks won’t die here, so what’s exactly the point of keeping him alive? Well, there’s two points imho. One, Hawks needs to start questioning the legitimacy of his methods, and compare his community-focused approach on justice to the League’s individual-focused one. Two, Hawks needs to correct the wrong he just did and thus begin proper character growth. 

There is a short-term and a long-term way I can see this unfolding. 

The short-term one is that Hawks will save both Dabi and Jin’s life from the crumbling building, just like @waxwingedhawks predicted. This makes too much sense theme-wise not to happen. See, the thing is that Dabi’s hang-up is that heroes are supposed to save people. And Twice’s hang-up is that heroes only ever save the virtuous. Both of them believe that no hero will save them. Which is exactly why Hawks must. Because, for all his doubts, his inflexibility, and for how much he thinks he can distance himself, Hawks is still primarily a rescue-based hero. And Dabi managed to catch him off guard and torch him exactly because Hawks wasn’t sticking up to his role as a saviour, and was trying to kill instead. It makes perfect narrative sense for him to do something that will prove, on a base level, past the hero/villain dichotomy, that he can see Dabi and Twice as humans. That his mask can crack, because even though he’s convinced himself he needs to do this, the truth is, killing Twice was never the most sensible option he had. 

The long-term route is that after this raid is over, and most likely will result in an overwhelming loss for the heroes (because it makes no sense for the heroes to annihilate the League here, as we’re not yet at the end of the story), Hawks will be blamed for this loss. Possibly discarded, too, by the hpsc. After all, his cover with the League is blown. He stopped being useful to them, and his failure to stop Twice will likely have ripples. 

I mentioned in another post that it would be real neat if Hawks lost his wings or his ability to fight with his quirk as a side effect of Dabi’s attack, and I still stand my ground on that, too. It makes a lot of sense when you consider the story’s themes. The lov is entirely made up of people who have no place in hero society, and all of them are either part of some marginalized community (like disabled, mentally ill and lgbt folks) or people who were straight-up discriminated against on accounts of their weak or unheroic powers. I’m just saying that if Hawks suddenly lost the very power that made him a useful tool for the hpsc, he’d finally get to see the other side of the medal. Maybe he’d even come to learn the truth in Twice’s words: that their society only ever cares about the virtuous, the sane, the heroic. That their society openly discriminates against people who don’t have flashy and strong powers, straight up calls them villainous, and lets them fall through the cracks without a single fuck given. 

But anyway. Even if Hawks doesn’t end up with permanent damage from this fight, I’m still positive that he’s not getting out of this as a hero. And I use the word “hero” here as in, someone commendable XD 

Anyway, all of this to say that I expect Hawks’ process of undoing of his own hero brainwashing to be a non-linear process. It’s far too convenient to make him suddenly realize that the worldview he’s upheld for 22 years actually make him a horrible person. Think of how Hori had to punish Bakugou over and over, almost every single arc, for sticking to his harmful mindset. But there’s no doubt that Dabi attacking him should be also read as narrative punishment, so I’m fairly positive that Hori intends to give Hawks proper growth, eventually. I can’t be sure if the way I envision it is how it’s gonna unfold, but this was my hot take XD 

Oh, and by the way… all of this doesn’t even take into account how much the Touya reveal would fuck Hawks worldview up further, considering that his ideal of enforced justice has always been………… Enji.

[thyandrawrites]

Saw the leaks and Hawks is canonly starting to become best friends with Twice and empathizing with his past. I thought villain hawks was a long shot but bitch MAYBE.

there’s something about the phrasing of those leaks that puts me off a little… I’m gonna wait for Caleb’s translation before jumping to assumptions tho… 

but. Other than that, the plot is finally starting to be interesting to me again :o It’s cool how Hori chose Twice of all people to make Hawks start seeing the lov in a more sympathetic light… Because aside from Dabs and Shigi, Twice is probably the guy Hawks has the most parallels to. 

Time to bring back rina’s birds & bottles theory in regards to Hawks’ backstory and how it likely puts him a position where he’s acquainted with poverty, likely neglect and a position “outside of society”. 

You guys know how much I’ve babbled about Hawks being essentially “one bad day” away from villainy himself 

So… Twice is someone who was pushed by 

poverty, 

loneliness,

and lack of empathy from his bosses to become a villain… doesn’t that sound familiar yet 

BRUH

I don’t wanna get ahead of myself, but I’m q u a k i n  g 

[thyandrawrites]

Did that anon just write lowercase birb for Tokoyami and uppercase Birb for Hawks, because I am shooketh. That's so sneaky xD I know most people are taking Dabi revealing something to Hawks as reason for him not dying yet. But honestly I think Horikoshi might have screwed Hawks over again with this. Since he's been avoiding it so much, what kinda evasion tactic will be used here hm. Maybe Hawks just doesn't wake up and he's stuck in a hospital room and that makes him vulnerable to the League?

I think it's pretty damn lame to let Hawks know and then also survive the fight only to take him out of commission, because he's suddenly become a much more relevant character in this conflict. Sure, I can understand why some fans jumped on this train of thoughts—I've argued myself about how Dabi had a tactical advantage here because he was the only one who held that piece of information (his identity), something strong enough to tilt the balance of this war in the League's favor. But I also believe that Hawks' character has a purpose here, one that hasn't yet been explored. There's a lot brewing in the pot right now and Hawks is inextricably tied to a lot of it. Let's recap:

- a good amount of narrative space has been dedicated to foreshadowing Shigaraki's and Hawks' meeting, and that has yet to be given a proper resolution (that is, either way: with Shig turning on him or Hawks turning his back on heroes).

- still no explanation about how Dabi knows Hawks' name that was taken away from him when he was a child.

- still no explanation about the Takami thief

- still no Hawks pov after he learned Dabi's identity, and this strikes me as a deliberate narrative choice, because Hawks is desperate to understand people, and he has no clue how to read Dabi, and now he's just learned that he's the son of his fave childhood hero??? Come on, there's no way this won't lead to him having some kind of thoughts about this whole affair

- still no explanation about what kind of circumstances was little Keigo extricated from, and why does he consider that as a rescue, considering how it led to his eventual lack of freedom as a Hpsc trainee

Imho there's very little point in taking Hawks away from certain death, if Hori hadn't wanted to explore these routes at some point.

So idk, while I can agree that Hawks might be laying low for the rest of this arc (he just went into shock for his burns and just lost two limbs ffs), I totally don't agree with the idea that he's gonna go in a coma (like I've read some speculate) to avoid spilling his guts about what he heard...? If he's not gonna act on what he learned one way or another, then there's literally no point in letting him know and letting him get away from Dabi...???

Besides, "acting on it" doesn't necessarily involve telling others about his findings, because Hawks isn't stupid, he knows that that info can unbalance the already frail balance hero society is standing on, plus Hawks has always been one to hoard knowledge and never tell anyone... Enough so that the hpsc president specifically hand-picked him for the infiltration operation because she knew of this ability of his.

So like. Maybe I'm being too hopeful again but I think this is a big changing point for him. It's what he's gonna do with that information that will decide if Hawks is a redeemable character or not, after the unforgivable things he's done.

Besides, I'm pretty sure there's still something big about his past that Hori isn't telling us.

[thyandrawrites]

So, why you got attached to his character in the first place. I will really appreciate if you tell, cause I have a feeling that we share the same reason, but unfortunately I tried to craft it but I failed :')

It’s midnight and my brain’s fried so I’ll give you the short version. I like Hawks because he’s a character written to be standing on the line that divides hero and villain worlds. He was born in poverty, one or both of his parents was implied to have been an alcoholic and possibly also neglectful. The fact that he was scouted as a small kid specifically because of his “heroic” quirk fits into a bigger theme of bnha: that of how only people with strong offensive powers get to be heroes while others get labeled villains. Yet, at the same time, there are factors in his backstory that make it clear that villainy could’ve easily been an option for him too. Even ruling out the chance that the Takami thief was indeed his father since that’s just a theory for now, it’s true that Hawks has far more villain foils than hero ones. His only hero foil is Shouto. His villain ones are Dabi, Shigaraki and Jin. 3 vs 1. That’s a pretty neat way of implying between the lines that Hawks has a lot of potential of understanding the pov of villains as well. 

Essentially what I like about Hawks is that he is born inside a cage, raised to think of himself and act as a tool, conditioned to give up his own agency in order to be that emotionless tool, but at the same time, the potential for him to break free of that cage is still there. It never really goes away. Because it’s with villains, not heroes, that he first showed his real thoughts, and his real feelings. It’s in Jin that he confided as a friend, and confessed his feelings of being trapped by the hero system, unable to fly freely. Even if he later pretended that was a lie he just said to appeal to the plf. 

Hawks choosing to kill does not make me like him less, because it fits with his narrative of denying his own self for the sake of his mission. This is what he’s always been written to be like. At the same time, though, we saw how forcing himself to do something that went so strongly against his instincts and his feelings was unraveling him from the inside. We saw him hesitating with the killing blow; we saw him begging Jin to stop resisting because Hawks wanted to cut the cake and eat it too; we saw him reflexively push Jin out of the fire only to stab him a moment later, when rationality kicked back in; we saw him keep dealing non-lethal blows in hopes of getting Jin out alive from that situation. 

Nature was constantly at war with nurture inside of him during these chapters, and I think this is really important to point out. 

Sure, he made a horrible choice and sided with everything he should’ve rejected. But it cannot be an undoing if he first doesn’t establish himself firmly on the opposite side from the lov. Choosing to kill Jin thus is choosing a known evil instead of an unknown one. How can Hawks choose himself first, and reject all his hero training, when he’s been conditioned to not have wishes? When he’s been trained to dedicate his entire personhood to a random ideal? Jin scares him because Jin isn’t bound by the same constraints Hawks is. Jin also lives to be as helpful as he can to his friends, but unlike Hawks, Jin had real bonds. No one in the League kept Jin around for his powers. They gave him a home because they valued him as a person. Hawks clearly isn’t valued as a person by the hpsc, and is constantly expected to sacrifice himself and his own wishes for them. So choosing to kill Twice is a super neat way for Hori to show that Hawks is trying to suppress the part of himself that wants things. 

And ironically, that’s gonna be exactly his downfall.