Tfw Same Braincell

no but srsly what are we hoping for here. like, okay, so we assume the villains don’t die and get “saved,” but aoyama, who: 1. was blackmailed into helping afo, 2. literally did not kill anyone, and 3. immediately and sincerely regretted his actions, still gets locked up and told to repay his debt to society, literally WHAT are we hoping will happen to people who willingly joined the villain cause and killed people for their own deeply-held values. at this point i hope they die i hope everyone dies!!

Some more negative reactions to 426 in Japanese fandom

“gentle criminal, for your crime of uploading unpopular youtube videos of your cringefail illegal activities, repent by showing your remorse and put your life on the line to stop an entire prison break single-handedly and also fight this supervillain.”

Kohei horikoshi is a rat ass motherfucker and a raggedy bitch whose writing should be considered the eleventh plague. The way that he fried the entire premise of his work is foreshadowing for his future job at mcdonalds

and the other layer for me i guess is what the shounen fight usually represents, not only a physical determination of who’s stronger but also of whose ideology is more legitimate, and it just sucks that dabi loses on both counts, which is. rough. considering how much of his character is built on the pain of being deemed a failure and the narrative just goes “yeah the inferiority is true actually”

touya and fuyumi are all lashes and doe eyes while natsuo and shouto are football headed stewie griffins with sticky fingers and eye crusties… this is the baby todoroki divide

So I had a thought:

Dr. Garaki straight up says that due to his catastrophic injuries, Dabi shouldn’t have survived a month after escaping the facility and because of that, none of All-For-One’s cronies bothered retrieving him, and everyone involved was pretty shocked when he turned up years later for the villains’ social upheaval/anarchy quest.  The explanation we get for this medical improbability is he remained alive because of his absolute hatred for Endeavor and need for personal vengeance/validation.

Me:  “There’s no scientific or medical explanation that makes this remotely plausible outside of bullshit anime willpower and——*side eyes H.P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air*——You!”

Long story short, Cool Air is one of Lovecraft’s lesser known short stories about this guy Dr. Muñoz who is technically dead, but through sheer willpower, he’s able to keep himself alive, and through the use of a janky cooling system he keeps in his apartment (an air conditioner, it's an air conditioner) he’s able to keep his body from rotting.  The contraption fails one night, and in a desperate attempt to stave of the inevitable, he recruits his downstairs neighbor to keep him supplied with ice until they can get the machine fixed.  They can’t fix it in time, Dr. Muñoz dies, his horrible secret comes out, and that’s pretty much the plot.

To sum up, a technically dead guy who keeps himself alive through sheer willpower…and ice…?  And Rei’s Quirk is…

It’s still implausible because Lovecraft should never in a million years be taken with any kind of scientific/medical seriousness, but neither should My Hero Academia, so my new headcanon is Rei’s Quirk manifested way earlier than everyone thought it did and Dabi just never noticed it and credited his survival to the aforementioned hatred and determination.

In short, Dabi is a Lovecraftian abomination.

...

And for good measure, when I re-watched Overly Sarcastic Productions video on Lovecraft to see their rundown on Cool Air, this description of Dr. Muñoz came up:

This shitpost is writing itself.

cw salt, but the fact that Shouto lets Rei say this:

without explaining the circumstances to Hawks doesn’t sit right with me, especially when we have a previous in-text reference for how Shouto feels about his burns and the real person who’s to blame for it:

and idk, call me pedantic, biased or whatever, but the framing of the scene makes it feel as though the further the story goes on, the more the characters aren’t allowed to have complex and sometimes contradicting emotions towards the abuse they experienced. It’s just as Fuyumi said, “it’s not like I don’t feel the same way Natsu does, but we finally have this chance, you know?”

and that was perfectly fine when it was just Fuyumi’s chosen way to deal with her own feelings. Like, when it was still a decision motivated by a character’s agency. Fuyumi wants a second chance at a normal family. What she wants is not presented as an authorial statement on what everyone else should want. In fact, Shouto and Natsuo want something else entirely. And that was fine.

Until now.

With the shift the story took now, with the whole Todoroki family coming together to stop Dabi,

and with the emphasis on extending a hand to Enji while doing so, it feels less like this is an organic choice that makes sense with the characters’ personal journey of acceptance and of healing, and more like the narrative is forcing them to reconcile because it’s what the story needs in order to keep moving forward down the “saving Touya” path. Like, even admitting that there was good faith on hori’s part, even conceding that they might’ve just called a truce for the time being because they realized they have a second shot at getting their brother back from death…

That good faith falls short of the actual framing.

Cause Hawks asks Shouto that question right after acknowledging that Enji was indeed an abuser. Past tense. As if shedding a few tears suddenly cancels that out. It’s all good now.

And… idk… For it to be a “truce” the narrative still needs to hold him accountable. But it doesn’t. The second Enji vowed to do better, the story declared he was better. Hori can say that the victims don’t have to forgive him all he wants, the truth still stands that the story has already forgiven him

i would be more tolerant of hawks or feel like #hottakes about him had some value if there was any interest in discussing him as a marginalized person buying into the system, for power, stability, and whatever misguided belief that the system does good. a child in poverty with abusive parents becoming a person who would do anything in order to never be disempowered nor poor again. a child who was saved by the hero system convincing himself that because he got out anyone can get out, especially anyone who is (like himself as a child) morally blameless and willing to try hard to win the approval of his superiors.

if only there was any talk about dabi and twice being, in hawks' view, morally inadequate and not appropriately grateful towards the establishment (nor, in dabi's case, his own abuser), because his assessment is informed by his own contrasting experience. he needs to perform those mental gymnastics to justify his own place within hero society, to justify his own deserving nature by creating a category of people, within his mind, who are undeserving. if only those people who resemble him would change, if only they would work harder, if only they would come around to his way of thinking, they could replicate his success and earn a place within hero society.

there are plenty of marginalized people who've somehow "made it" and are more than happy to use their own marginalizations to support the status quo. "i'm a poc and if i achieved this so can you." "i'm mentally ill but i did this, so what's your excuse?" "i'm a survivor and i think she's lying." we recognize that these people exist and are still marginalized with all the social precarity that that entails; however, they do harm to people who are even more vulnerable than themselves who share their marginalizations. talking about this means analyzing the positionality of a fandom-favored attractive skinny guy and the power he wields though, so it's more appealing to throw him into the trauma olympics to be bnha's one true victim or whatever.

All horikoshi knows is shitty dads, killing women, eat hot chip and lie