#spool.ask

[fatestrings]

Yeah I think what the family needed was not only touya going to a therapist, but endeavor too because the guy’s obsession with #1 was the root cause of their destruction. I think there was a genuine, mutual connection between touya and the dad in the earlier years which probably factored into why touya was so messed up over it. Not to mention the miscommunication of it all. I also feel like too many fans exclude endeavor from young!touya’s healing when he’s a major part of it, like it or not. Idk that’s just my 2 cents. Sorry for rambling :s

Also I don’t think either parent thought he was p-slur, they just didn’t know how to talk or handle him in typical traditional asian family fashion. I do see touya thinking this about himself though.

You know what I think they *all* needed family therapy because rei showed signs of being afraid of touya ever since he tried to kill shouto plus with her own diminishing mental health she wouldn’t have been able to properly help him with these feelings inside her. They were all messed up except for fuyumi and natsuo :’s sorry last one I just had a lot of thoughts with my own family as well

no need to apologize, i appreciate that you've chosen to share your perspective with me!! it's an unexpected gift :-)

endvr cld definitely use some rehabilitation. ideally, his behavior wldve been addressed much earlier on and spared us some of the heartache to come. obv setting his whole eugenics plot into motion after only like a year or two in second place was a major issue that spoke to how flawed his psyche was; but for him to so naturally fall into that, to aquire a wife to breed and to mistreat so many people with such ease, implies that he's already been in that mentality and been allowed to get away with things for so long that it was already second nature. that sort of deep, long-term mentality takes a Lot to unlearn and unpack, even if you're fully dedicated to it. he reminds me a bit of what bakugou used to be like, at the very beginning of the manga. if bakugou had continued to have his middle-school worldview validated, to have never made or friends with or had irl role models that were such good people, to have been congratulated for every misstep, i think he could've grown into an envdr- type character.

i think the best and the safest option for the family would've been to separate him from the others as early as possible. for him to get help and try to improve, and to create a support system for him that doesn't involve anyone he's forced into a subservient role. due to the fucked-up and firmly-established power dynamics in that house, i don't think there's any potential for him having a healthy relationship with rei or his kids unless he removes himself fully from the situation and doesn't pressure them to make any contact with him. he'd have to allow his family, for once, to interact with him out of their own free will. i also think that if he's going to make an honest attempt at improving, he needs to reflect upon + restructure his entire concept of heroics. aside from his ranking obsession/ inferiority complex, he fights to decimating the "bad guy" first and foremost, rather than focusing on helping the civilians or on de-escalation, and he causes a lot of unnecessary death and destruction as a side effect of this cruel and single-minded thinking. i don't think he'll be able to treat people better if he continues fighting humans so cruelly and indiscriminately (think of his vigilante vendetta), esp not when he's publically congratulated for these "wins". (i have a bit of a bone to pick with the toxic hero-civvie-villain culture at large but that's neither here nor there...)

i agree that all of them could benefit from therapy. fuyumi and natsuo are the quietest in the family about it but they have also definitely been traumatized by growing up in that place, in a major way. natsuo's actually out of the house and has been able to heal the most out of the lot in canon, but by virtue of his siblings still being entrenched in the thick of it, he's stuck in a situation where he can either be closer with his siblings and be unable to move on from envdr, or to heal on his own and continue distancing himself even from fuyunee. and then she's got her entire life dedicated to servitude- it's apparent that she's never really allowed herself any indulgences, and she probably wouldn't know what to do with her life if she was no longer able to serve the family or her students. she took upon herself rlly early on the role of the mother and of the mediator and has obviously internalized this as her duty. i wouldn't be surprised if she felt personally responsible for like "failing her familial duties" every single time a dinner is derailed, or she doesn't manage to keep endvr's rage under control. they all need to learn how to be people, instead of tools to be wielded.

[fatestrings]

Big agree on the endvr separating from the rest idk why some people had issue with that it’s actually the best thing that could have been done. Tbh I always thought vigilante!endvr felt different from main!endvr and that’s only bc I’m so obsessed with reading over each todoroki member in the main series. I feel like the editor told the other writer to do his thing with some guidelines and he went overboard. Although I do like it as a way to show how pro heroes get away with too much.

yeah, vigilantes is a bit darker/edgier than the main manga, or at least it used to be. things have been getting more mature in the recent bnha chapters, but in the earlier stuff it seemed like bnha was geared to a younger/ more general audience and vigilantes was more for the older fans. i prefer to read vigilantes as equally- canon to the main manga, but i know some purists wld consider it au. i also take anything from the todofam's- esp endvr's- perspective with a grain of salt bc i know how ppl can warp painful memories in their mind. i've seen firsthand how an abuser can slowly warp their own reality to smth entirely different, to alleviate some of their guilt. i'm most inclined to believe natsuo's perspective, then fuyumi + shouto's, then rei + touya's, then endvr's. (i can explain my reasoning if you'd want bt it'd take a bit and half.)

tht being said, i am a longtime fan of western superhero comics, which have these awful and convoluted canons, so i tend to be more accepting of multiversal content, where ppl make fanworks based off of their own canon-adjacent aus. i don't rlly nitpick how canon a person's fanworks is if they've made smth enjoyable or intriguing.

[fatestrings]

I think if rei tried to get touya help without endeavor actively being there, touya would have been stubborn and not listen because it would only reinforce to himself that he didn’t matter to his dad who is (unfortunately) the parent he holds closest to his heart. These fluffy hcs are okay but I can’t with how they ignore the core of touya’s issues and how they needed to be fixed.

is this a response to the fanart I reblogged?

yea, I get what you mean. the only way for him to accept from anyone other than his father wldve needed him outside of his endvr's influence, and would take a lot of time and effort. if rei tried to reach out by herself in that period of time, touya wldve been likely to lash out at her several times (in a way tht wld fuck with his psyche more) before he actually began trusting the process. he seems to resent how much he resembles her in his childhood, so her being the one to support him wld make things a bit messier at first. he wld prolly start fluctuating between the "dad's always right you're just a fucking ps*cho" and "yes! I am not the only one who thinks this is unfair I am validated" mindsets, and this wld be a rlly hard cycle to break out of. if he had his siblings agreeing with rei this wld also probably help him side with her, bc touya is unlikely to trust his own or rei's perception of reality, but is shown to trust at least natsuo's opinion.

that being said, sometimes it's just nice to indulge in some more lighthearted fiction. I like to just imagine a fantasy where things can go well, or at least better, for my favorite characters, just for a moment. I don't think there's anything wrong with indulging a fluffy au or two, even if they don't hold up well against canon