Some Muppet Spinneraki Kids For Feel Good

This is probably a weird note to end my time with MHA's run on; but I find it so strange how I still see people calling Tomura out on just being a destruction-hungry villain with supposedly no plan or follow up...as though he is unique for that simplicity. Especially after the ending we got. Like, Deku and All Might never really had a plan when they were reshaping society by beating up the enemy and everything worked out fine for them, but does anyone call them out for just using violence to mindlessly solve everything with no further plan? (Well, yes. Me. Right now.)

Because like, really thinking about it; how different was All Might's plan from the start of his career to take down AFO and become a symbol, and Deku's plan to end the villains and bring everything back, from Shigaraki's plan to end hero society and bring about a world accommodating to the League? It all seemed to boil down to the same basic premise of Step 1) Beat everyone & everything making things worse, Step 2) ...it all just kind of works out from there. (I guess All Might planned on being inspiring and uplifting, but then we could also count Tomura's plan to be imposing and...uplifting but for different people. Deku was winging it every step of the way though.) Everyone's getting on Tomura's case for doing nothing but destroying; but all evidence from when the heroes do it suggests violence & destruction works. And it just never fails to bug me when people call Tomura out for stuff that's fine when heroes do it.

Which, yeah, let's touch on how it did just work out for Deku that way for no logical reason, least of all anything he planned. He punched out the big bad just like All Might and now things are like a hundred times better than they were under All Might with no more Tenkos abandoned in the street. If stuff like that just happens if you punch out your enemies hard enough, then why couldn't that happen for Tomura? Maybe if he had destroyed the government & hero society it would've, idk, been so fear/awe-inspiring that all the villains would've been nice and cooperative under the PLF and everything would've been fine. Or something. No more contrived than what we saw with the old lady plot line, MHA is just a series where that stuff works out. Heck, one time it actually did just work out that way for Tomura:

Again, violence and destruction works in MHA. I mean; duh, it's a shonen manga.

Plus all this is ignoring the fact that, unlike those two, Tomura did have a follow up to the violence. He did have a step two, or at least one & a half, after "beat down all the bad guys in the country." Rather than just going "and everything will work out from there," he had his guys plan for the future so he could say "and Spinner, Toga, and RD et. all will make sure everything works out from there." (Admittedly, not much; but also, not hopes and dreams.) He did have a plan, it was just the plan from the Overahul arc, where he was last asked to have a plan: leave it to his allies.

And hey, that means it's actually better than what we saw from genius All Might and brainiac Deku. So why are we still, even after everything was over, acting like there's some expectation as a villain he didn't meet? I guess it's just in the nature of a 'tantrum-having man-child who wants nothing but destruction' to put more forethought into the future he wants to build than the society-uplifting greatest heroes.

That or maybe everyone had really detailed follow-ups for when they won that Hori never went much into, but that'd render this post a bit pointless so shhh.

He has a habit of challenging God.

cant ya see kun’s hair is pink///

you know who else might have pink hair and that’s why Enji might have done FAN SERVICE?

I was gonna save this for my fic Interference by Half but let’s be real, idk when I’ll ever update that and this is an idea I’ve always wanted to share because I’ve hated the ‘just wear gloves’ “solution” for Tenko/Tomura, so:

If you give Tomura (pre-Deika) a pencil, and he touches it with five fingers, it’ll disintegrate. As long as he doesn’t touch the pencil with five fingers, it’ll be okay and he’ll be able to use it. Which is why Tomura is always shown grabbing things with only a few fingers, and why he was unable to decay ‘Sand’ in Chapter 160. 

Gloves - whether with some of the fingers cut off, as is most often headcanon’d, or each finger is made of different material - is one solution. We see little Tenko with gloves when he is taken in by AfO after manifesting his quirk:

But, see, I’ve always thought, how annoying. How uncomfortable it must be to have to keep gloves on 24/7. Sure, you can get some super-soft, thin-cloth ones; but it must still be bothersome, wearing, washing, getting it wet, etc. What if he gets a rash? So it always made sense to me that instead, Shigaraki would learn to have meticulous control over his fingers - free hands, and able to use his quirk whenever should he need to. 

For a child just starting to learn to use his quirk, this can be hard, true. So how to practice? How to keep his hands free? How can you accommodate a quirk like Decay? Instead of forcing Tenko/Tomura to wear gloves, what about spicing up his surroundings? 

So I thought, to use the pencil example above, why not wrap the pencil in ribbons or yarn? 

Strings of different yarn, ribbons; stickers and fancy tape; patchwork cloth of different materials. On pencils, controllers, toothbrushes, doorknobs, cups, etc. Semi-yarn-bomb the house! Decorate! It doesn’t impede anyone else living with him or using the same objects. 

So that he’s never actually touching an object with five fingers. One finger on wood, one finger on a sticker, one finger on a the yarn. 

It’s not a perfect solution, it’s not 100% decay-proof. There will be unlucky mistakes. Maybe I have the parameters for his quirk wrong. It’ll probably be useless once he’s in post-Deika self (or even, pre-massacre/he never loses his memories?)

But I think, for AU fics that have Tenko growing up normally or rescued, it’s worth considering what his caretakers might do to help him out, adapt his environment to his circumstances, embrace how he is, stuff like that. ‘Solutions’ or changes or a different perspective that make him feel a bit more normal, instead of “The kid who has to wear gloves 24/7 because his quirk is that dangerous”, maybe. 

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As I’m sure some may have noticed, Endeavor’s got his arc going on, where after finally realizing how horrible he is and tries to become a better person. But a problem I & many others tend to have resulting from this arc is that lots of folks talk about how Endeavor’s ‘different now’, how he’s changing, and how that makes him so much better than Thief Takami or, of course, Dabi (ugh); and as a result I think it’s important we to address is how…Bojack Horseman-y his attempts at changing have really been up until now. Think of it as in honor of Rei calling him out and hopefully forcing real progress out of him in the future, we’re going over his lack of progress so far.

So, let’s look through all his most notable attempts at changing in comparison to what he was doing before that he’s making up for, as well as anything else he’s done that might reflect in some fashion on his redemption:

-We can start with Rei; the woman who he bought, sexually abused for about a decade, psychically abused for 5 more years than that, and then had locked up in a hospital for another 10 years and which she has only just left. He tried to make up for that by having her favorite flowers delivered to her room in the hospital he had her sent to. This is about the average of what we can expect going forward, btw.

-Then there’s Fuyumi & Natsuo, who he deemed failures and neglected so much throughout their childhoods that he appears like a stranger to them, who they know more by the damage he’s done than any actual interactions. To make up for all that, he bought them a house to live away from him and not interact with him anymore, along with their mother when she leaves the hospital. (Not Shoto though, he still interreacts with Endeavor.) This is, unironically, the biggest and most selfless act of atonement he has committed thus far. All down hill from here!

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Élégie

wait, do people who read bnha realize that there's no such thing as 'quirk suppressants' or 'quirk-cancelling' handcuffs/drugs/etc. in the HeroAca World currently? There's nothing. There's only Eraserhead and heavy sedatives to stop a person's conscious altogether (and formerly Overhaul's bullets that were the first of its kind).

Like, that's the reason for why Heroes are allowed to use heavy force, and why Tartarus and it's straightjackets are a thing? A good part of the conflict hinges on the fact that the world can't easily take away a person's supernatural ability - that's why quirk use is so suppressed and Villains are treated so harshly and no one had any idea what to do with kids like Toga or Eri (before being taken in by UA/Eraserhead) who couldn't control their quirks besides telling them to not do it, or that they're bad for not controlling themselves, and finally abandoning them.

When you have no good way to inhibit someone's quirk with a simple injection or electronic collar, you'd end up trying to prevent them from using their quirk in whatever physical way possible: restrain them by tying up their arms or putting a muzzle on them, lock their hands in metal boxes, put them in a confined space with a gun trained on them, keep them under anesthesia for months on end, and so on. You end up treating them like they're feral, rabid beasts that can't be controlled, as ticking time bombs monsters who are capable of any thing at any moment and needs to be subdued as quickly and completely as possible.

I’m a little confused, what does rei telling shouto about rejecting bloodlines have to do with himura mutant phobia?

(Re: a comment I made about Shouto's Sports Festival flashback in my post on Chapter 387.)

It’s not a direct correlation!  I was pointing out that Rei has early dialogue that can potentially be read as foreshadowing for the familial issues discussed by Geten 350 chapters later.  Basically, that Horikoshi might have chosen to specifically frame the conversation in terms of bloodline—mangling an explanation of All Might’s catchphrase to do so*—because he was already aware that fears about the sorts of things one can inherit via bloodline were significant to the characters in the scene.

Shouto is afraid of inheriting his father’s willingness to hurt Rei, but what sort of fear of bloodline inheritance has Rei already faced in her own history such that she can now reassure Shouto that blood is not binding?  It could simply be a generic assurance, not connected to Rei’s history at all, but what if it isn’t?

What if Rei is able to reassure her son that one isn’t bound to one’s bloodline because she already has personal experience with the consequences of excessive regard for bloodline?  And given that she’d later burn Shouto out of fear of his resemblance to Enji, did she really even believe it at the time, or is it the same as when she tried to get Touya to change course and he lashed out at her for lecturing him about choices, save that, unlike Touya, Shouto was young and attached enough to believe her?

To look at it another way, when Horikoshi was brainstorming the Todoroki family’s general situation, he would have had to figure out Endeavor’s obsession and the forms it took—the attempts to wrangle genetics, the failures that came before the success, the spiral into abuse—as well as at least the broad strokes of the ways Enji’s kids and wife reacted to it.  It’s entirely possible that all Horikoshi originally had figured out about Rei was “mentally fragile because of the abuse; gets institutionalized after she burns Shouto,” but he’s on the record as thinking a lot about the lives of his minor characters and there’s plenty about Rei that begs further thought.

For example, why would the woman with the ice powers Enji sought agree to the marriage?  Why would she stay in the marriage even after it turned sour?  Was it all out of love?  Wouldn’t it be a bit convenient that Enji could find a woman who just loved him that much given his unabashed ulterior motives?  Further, Rei was open to her mother about the dire straits she was in—why wouldn’t her mother step in, call child protective services, tell her own husband, do anything?  Rei’s family being traditionalists, with old-fashioned ideas about marriage and commitment, works to answer the question.  Then, on top of being traditionalist, Rei’s family needing the financial resources Enji brings to the table bolsters that answer even further.

The questions that follow logically from that scenario are what tradition looks like in the world Horikoshi’s created, and why Rei’s family need money?  If they were an old-money family but lost their fortunes, what caused that?  Geten provides the reader with the answers, but it’s not impossible that Horikoshi’s known them from the start.  If that’s the case, then even Rei’s earliest lines in the series can be read as speaking in light of her family history, and that family history is intimately entwined with heteromorphobia.

It's somewhat reachy, I acknowledge, but I hope that explains my thought process a little better? Thanks for the ask!

* The conversation on TV is so weird.  What in god’s name does self-love and the DNA inheritance of quirks have to do with All Might’s, “I AM HERE!” catchphrase?  That’s nonsense, counter to everything else he’s ever said about the meaning of the phrase, which is supposed to be both reassurance to those in danger and threat to those endangering.

It’s an awkward and baldly contradictory contortion of a response that, so far as I can tell, serves no real purpose save to suggest a question from the interviewer that upset Shouto because it implied that his blood doomed him to grow up like his father, and give Rei a chance to answer in the same framework.  What question could the interviewer possibly have asked that would have both given Shouto that impression and prompted All Might to respond, “Yes, quirks are naturally passed from parent to child.  However, that’s not the only thing that matters.  It’s not just blood ties…  Instead, one must recognize and appreciate oneself!  That’s what I mean when I say, ‘I am here!’”

Dont worry guys the sphere growing in Dabi is his homosexuality

Happy birthday Spinner.

He deserved a spot on the MVA promotional art