I wonder if the toa mata recognized themselves in their own memories from before mata nui.
I dont know, i think theres possibilities to be explored about that. Suddenly remembering yourself and what you find being a complete stranger is a common thing for amnesia plots i guess but also i think this could be even more jarring. Like a more genuine difference between killing machine and living being.
Its less a matter of nature vs nurture and more a matter of nature with a certain type of nurture. Nature dictates they are powerful and driven and well meaning, but the way they are brought up produces completely different people.
Their first taste of life was a sterile room with nobody but each other and a disembodied voice reading out their duties, establishing an arbitrary hierarchy within them, and then sending them to a glorified bootcamp where a ruthless instructor worked on making them into skilled combatants and nothing else, teaching them how to use their elements as tools and weapons without indulging in them; they got a vague sense of what and how a community feels like with the Av-Matoran - as outsiders, as its protective shield, there for them but not with them - only to get that stripped away from them too because their role as life saving tools to be preserved under glass just in case of a crisis was more important.
I wonder if the Toa Mata, the ones who were taken to the Koro of Mata Nui and listened to the Turaga's tales and reprimands and would have moved mountains for the Matoran who treated them like older siblings, return with their minds to things they said or thought or did from before the Island of Mata Nui and stop in their tracks. Whose memory is that, they think? That can't be mine. I am not like that. My siblings are not like that. Some things are perfectly right, they cant deny that; but just as many if not more are so wrong that they almost feel like a really cruel joke somebody planted into their heads.
Kopaka and Tahu got along, even if they dont want to admit it because they need to bicker like children or theyll die, but are more surprised that they werent as tentatively close with anybody else. Lewa remembers so much frustration and tedium and anger that if he stalls in his memories too much he genuinely starts feeling queasy, Pohatu has remnants of bitterness and passive aggression that still cling to him like the smell of a cigarette on someone who gave up smoking, and they both hate that because its nothing like them. Onua and Gali feel like theyre peering into some kind of imperfect clone's brain when they try to remember - its themselves, they know that, it has to be, but there are certain things they know about themelves that are just completely missing and its kind of dizzying to realize that.
Im not even sure they liked each other. They work together because its their destiny, but they don't seem to seek each other out for fun or anything else. In their training days they had to be shoved in each others direction or they would have never solved their obligatory group assignments.
I wonder if their terrors and flaws could partially come from this first life that they had too. Gali's fear of her anger and Lewa's disregard for duty stemming from Hydraxon's methods - she internalized his reprimands about feeling guilt for living enemies, but without any memory of him she believes the words resurfacing in her mind from time to time are her own, and is appalled by their cruelty; he was forbidden from enjoying himself, from indulging in any form of fun, of entertainment, of joy, and unconsciously now he rebels by shirking away from responsability to do whatever he wants.
The responses to Tahu's decision regarding the codrex haunt him, the whole situation, really; how he stripped his siblings of any say on their fate because he was the leader, not even telling them or explaining himself until they had no other choice, and if he could treat them like that once then what would stop him from doing so again and again until he doesnt even think about it? Kopaka is uneasy about it too. He knew the plan and supported Tahu only because he tagged along, but hes very, very acutely aware that he would have been left just as much in the dark as everybody else otherwise, and he would gave not even had anybody to seek any comfort from because hes fairly certain none of the others would have liked him enough to care.
Onua as @cantankerouscanuck pointed out to me mightve taken Hydraxon's teachings to heart, hence why he's so quiet: no use in expressing weakness, right? But karda nui must have been hellish on his senses, with all that light - a tangible physical discomfort that would bleed out into an emotional one as he becomes conscious of how none of his siblings go through this, thus he must be damaged in some way, faulty, out of place, and so he seeks to be alone, digging himself away. And its not hard to imagine how Pohatu (who hasnt had the chance to grow into the affable, kind toa his siblings can always lean on when they need to yet) would become convinced of his uselessness within the team and seethe about it.
They arrive on Mata Nui as broken war machines with no clue who they even are and suddenly find nature and community and love, and in a moment theyre people.
I wonder if the environment helped. Being thrown upon a beach in the open air with nothing but a whole world that is so alien and yet feels so right beckoning them to come closer. Discovering their powers and their domains freely, immediately - first thing they did was dive into their respective elements without a second thought, naturally magnetized, taking after them like it was the simplest thing in the world, because they are the first toa, the first beings capable of harnessing these powers in their whole universe, and its in their nature to be so connected to them. Maybe it helped. Maybe it made them feel connected to their own selves enough to figure themselves out in a way they couldnt have done so before.
Maybe it helped to find out their collective destiny each on their own, in their own environment, at their own pace, surrounded by younger siblings who look at them with awe and curiosity and frustration sometimes, guided by people who know how being alive works with all its good parts and messy bits and who can tell what having so much power means when youre barely aware of how to use it or what to do. And maybe it helped to find out who their siblings were in a similar way, introducing themselves as they wanted, as they felt like, without a specific order, and learning to recognize each other as siblings with all the things that make them insufferable and all the things that make them the best and what makes them happy and what makes them angry and how they sound when theyre worried and how likely they are to chase you down to the other edge of the island for doing something stupid, and like real people they grow and develop and change and stay the same, and then they meet the memory of themselves from before becoming people and its...
Idk. Its like the realization of who they used to be and the distance between themselves and those selves, and the fact that they dont like them.
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sorry, didn't see the answer until today. thank you for that but I mean proving AFO wrong that Tenko is filled with hatred and destroying and no one can accept him. we know thats a lie now but Tenko still dies?
Hey again, anon. So, I went back and tried to fit this follow-up context into your original ask—answered here for anyone who wants to look over it again. My initial answer was based on you meaning that AFO should have been “proven wrong” in his assertions about human frailty and how, once someone has been rejected by society and become a Villain, there’s no way for them to come back. Reconsidering your issue (that Deku killing Shigaraki doesn’t prove AFO wrong) with the knowledge that what you meant was him saying Shigaraki is only capable of hating and destroying things…
I guess in the end I don’t think the story believes AFO is wrong about that either? I mean, obviously he was, back when he first told those words to at-the-time-still-Tenko. But now? Not so much, at least in the author's eyes.
Below, if you want to subject yourself to my reasoning again, you can follow along as I talk myself through getting to that quite jaded conclusion. My apologies if I misunderstand or misrepresent you again anywhere along the way! Admittedly, based on my experience with the fandom and what names we choose to use in talking about the characters, I suspect we’re coming at them from radically different positions, but my position is the one I’ve got to offer you. Please know that, to whatever extent we might disagree on how much "Shigaraki Tomura" was ever a legitimate persona, we are united in our opinion that Deku should have done more for him if the story was serious about him being the Greatest Hero.
......
So, okay, the biggest issue with asserting that Shigaraki has any kind of moral core or personality independent of his AFO-instilled hatred/destructiveness is that the best arguments for it all revolve around the League and how Shigaraki wants to be their “Hero,” how that’s contiguous with his personality even from when he was “Tenko” because both fit a pattern of reaching out to the outcasts that everyone else around them ignores or mistreats.
I believed that too! I still do, in fact! I want to be clear that I think Shigaraki still has legitimate grievances and that his desire to make a world in which Villains will be happier is still, in its own way, noble and true!
But.
But that glorious spread where Tomura says that even if every bit of his hatred is smashed, he’ll still keep going because he has to be a Hero for the Villains that need him? That spread comes before the montage showing AFO’s involvement in the Shimuras’ lives from before Tenko was even born. And part of that montage is the absolutely buffoonish reveal that AFO even influenced Tenko’s sense of heroism by leaning on Tomo and Mikkun (the aforementioned outcasts) to encourage him to be a Hero. I tend to assume that the two of them were from one of Ujiko’s orphanages—I can’t imagine how else AFO would be in a position to give two random children direct orders!—but whatever the case, it means that even Tenko’s draw towards standing up for outcasts is something influenced by All For One.
If you take that away, what else is left? I could pick a few little traits here and there, but ultimately, what Shigaraki comes back to in the end, in that very last conversation with Deku in the shared mindspace, is destruction. He pursued it to the end, his last expressed regret is that he couldn’t carry it out, and his final messages to ally and enemy alike revolve around the destruction he sought—telling Spinner he died fighting for it and telling Deku that it’s up to him and his whether any of what he destroyed actually stays destroyed.
To me, that suggests that the manga does believe that Shigaraki Tomura was, ultimately, an existence that could only destroy, and the fact that some of what he targeted deserved to be destroyed doesn’t negate the fact that he was still ultimately defined by the destructiveness that AFO meticulously crafted him to embody. Even Deku seems to think that, in the end!
Like, really working through the timeline here? Deku did want to believe that the Crying Child indicated that Shigaraki had some drive other than destructiveness at his core. One of the (vanishingly rare) times he actually spoke to Shigaraki during their fight was his refutation of Shigaraki’s claims that he’d successfully devoured The Crying Child and thus transcended his humanity.
Running on the desperate certainty that Shigaraki was wrong/lying, Deku smashes his way into Shigaraki’s core and metaphorically uproots his hatred and psychically holds his hands, and Shigaraki still says that even so, the Villains still need him… And if it ended there, maybe we could say that AFO was “wrong” in the sense you describe—that while the method Shigaraki uses to Be A Hero For Villains is warped by AFO’s influence, his desire to be that Hero is genuinely his own. But then we get That Reveal, and even the parts of Tenko that seemed to predate AFO are revealed to be just another aspect of AFO’s machinations—Tenko’s heroism, his sense of injustice, even his very existence, all are indelibly stamped with AFO’s mark.
After that reveal, Deku never again pushes back against claims that Shigaraki can only destroy. He never pushes back on AFO’s claims of authorship of Shigaraki’s life; he never tries to encourage Shigaraki by insisting that his bonds to the League are real regardless of how AFO raised him. Heck, he never even suggests Shigaraki still has the chance to figure out who Tenko could be as long as he can break AFO's hold and reject his teaching. No, Deku just…accepts AFO's premise, apparently.
And so I come back to the same conclusion I did before: Deku is angry at All For One, but he does not disagree with All For One.
I genuinely think that, as far as the narrative is concerned, the tragedy of Shigaraki’s ending is thus:
Anyone Shimura Tenko was or could have been was overwritten by All For One’s grooming long ago. Maybe this could have been prevented if things had gone differently—if Nana had beaten AFO, if someone like Deku had been there to intervene the day of the tragedy, if someone on the street had reached out to him before AFO—but as it stands, Shigaraki Tomura is too far gone to save.[See Note] Deku can end the monster that was behind it all and try to honor the victims that Shigaraki’s actions brought to light by changing the world that created them for the better, but he cannot save Shimura Tenko because Shimura Tenko was lost long before he and Midoriya Izuku ever met.
(Note: One of those "Maybe If..."s the story dangles is Spinner taking some ill-defined step to help his friend, but my opinions are that disingenuous suggestion are just a long string of profanity. Suffice to say, if Shigaraki could still have been "saved" all the way up to the start of the second war, then the Heroes bear way more responsibility for failing to do so than Spinner ever could, and Deku is even more of a fuckwit for not arguing with AFO's assertions that Tomura is nothing but what AFO made of him.)
Of course we wanted more than that. Of course we wanted Deku to do more than that! We spent all that time watching Shigaraki grow and bond with the League—why, if the only reason for that growth and those bonds was to prepare him as a vessel for AFO? We watched Deku resolve to try to save and/or understand Shigaraki’s heart no matter what—why, if everything in that heart was written in someone else’s hand?
The story told us that the best heroes always manage to both win and save, and that we were reading the story of how Deku becomes the best hero—why, if the story was only going to conclude that Shigaraki’s death at Deku’s hand was inevitable because the harm All For One did was impossible for either of them to overcome?
And to me, at least, that’s why Shigaraki’s death and Deku’s role in it feel so wrong: not for the in-universe reason that Deku and Shigaraki don’t disprove/disavow AFO’s claims, but for the meta reason that My Hero Academia lied to us and wasted our goddamn time. It spent over two hundred chapters building up Shigaraki Tomura—as a villain, yes, but also as a victim, a friend, an enemy, an ally, someone who existed in the world he was rebelling against—only to then turn around and spend its remaining two hundred chapters tearing him back down to nothing and then telling us that’s all he ever was anyway.
All For One killed that crying child a long time ago, and all Deku can do is wipe away his tears and then wave him goodbye.
By punching him to death.
It’s hard to imagine a bleaker outcome for the “Tenko” that started Horikoshi’s whole career as a mangaka, but I guess that’s what happens when your chosen career brutalizes you so badly that you come to define a Hero as someone who helps people endure their suffering instead of saving them from it.
...…
...Uh. So, this got pretty bleak itself in the end. Sorry, anon, everyone. I write that way to get my point across, and I’m no little bit bitter about the whole thing myself, but ultimately, I just want to remind everyone that the story is over. I’m not going to try to turn this whole thing into a positivity post all the way at the end, but just embrace that much: your obligation to care about the things Horikoshi wrote—to the extent that that obligation ever existed—is fulfilled. If you hate the ending, well, so do I. But now and forever, we and everyone else can go and do what-the-hell-ever we want to do with the characters and world that Horikoshi left us.
I hope we do. I’ll be rooting for us!
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