#i get that endeavour is a bastard and it's satisfying to dunk on him don't get me wrong

[villains-with-benefits]

Playing the blame game, and other pointless endeavours

A reflection on BNHA Chapter 291

Before and after: or, How to violently radicalise an abuse victim in five easy steps

I think a lot of the people throwing blame around or trying to declare that one character or another is the One True Villain™ or the One True Victim™ need to stop seeing personal responsibility as a zero sum game, because it really isn't.

Arguing about whether Dabi and Endevour should each have 50% of the blame or if it's more of a 60/40 or 70/30 split (in either direction) is pointless. Endeavour is 100% responsible for his abuse of his family and general failings as a human being, and Dabi is 100% responsible for the lives he's taken and people he's hurt in retaliation because of it.

Sure these two things are absolutely related in that good ol' cause-and-effect sense, much like how an earthquake at sea will cause a tsunami. And much like them neither happened in a vacuum, the surrounding environmental conditions needed to be just right for a perfect storm of this magnitude to occur. It just so happens that in this case both the earthquake (Endeavour) and the tsunami (Dabi) are not faceless forces of nature, but human beings with superpowers who chose to take action based on their deep-set mental and emotional issues at everyone else's expense, either because they think their needs are more important, they think the price paid is worth being the means to the end or (most likely) a combination of the two.

Please note, I don't say this to excuse or condemn either character, the readers who are taking sides, or even Horikoshi's writing. It's pretty well established by now that one of the biggest themes in BNHA is that there is no perfect black and white when it comes to people and society and morality, and just about all the conflict is driven by just how badly their entire system (which is built and determined to die on that hill) messes it up for absolutely everyone on all sides. Saying Dabi is a Bad Victim while Shouto is a Good Victim is just as pointless, because you're missing that the real villain is their broken society, of which everyone is a victim, even Endeavour.

Again, Endeavour was the one to abuse his family and he gets no passes for that so don't even try to argue that's what I'm saying, but he didn't wake up one day and just decide to do it. If Chapter 291 has done anything it's shown how escalation is nine tenths of the law in cases like this. He was already an asshole narcissist with a raging inferiority complex, we've heard from his own POV in an earlier chapter that he purposefully chose Rei to have kids with to eugenics a solution to his problem, he was never an upstanding guy.

While we don't see Endeavour's own upbringing there's a reason he's been such a strong narrative parallel with Bakugou, so we can make an educated guess from what we've seen of his what it must have been like having a powerful Quirk and ambitions being fed by the people around him, and the way Bakugou has clashed with characters like Deku and Shouto when he was confronted with the reality that he wasn't going to get Number One effortlessly, we can guess how well he took realising he was always going to be Number 2.

Pictured: the hero equivalent of always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

At least with Bakugou's rivals they're his own age and acknowledge him as a rival, All Might is at least a decade older than Endeavour and he's always been a loner who didn't get to know his colleagues that well. As readers we know All Might keeps his distance because he's kinda awkward socially, and because between the threat of All For One and maintaining the flawless image of the Symbol of Peace he wasn't ever able to let his guard down or it might risk people's safety. But just like Bakugou assuming Deku was looking down on him, from Endeavour's perspective it probably looked like All Might was looking down on Endeavour too.

Again, not excusing Endeavour. He's an asshole and needs to be held accountable for his actions. But just like Bakugou he didn't spring fully formed from the womb as an asshole, sure he had all the ingredients for it but their society is what decided it was a good idea to put the lime in the coconut and mix it all up, just like he's the one who broke Touya which ultimately led to the creation of Dabi.

Which brings us back to Dabi not just calling out his abusive dad but making a spectacle of it, and while again, yes, he's done a lot of murder and that's not okay either, he is absolutely justified in this. Especially because the part of his reasoning for his actions which isn't just maniacal laughter (also totally valid) is that he's correctly identified, much like Shigaraki, that while specific individuals have hurt them and must pay for it, that the overarching problem is hero society itself.

Shigaraki attacked All Might at first because Sensei said so, but later on because he was the symbol of everything he felt wrong with society, everything he's done has been to attack the pillars of the hero system like All Might and UA. Dabi attacked Endeavour, his abuser, but not just physically attacking him as a man and a father, but by attacking his reputation as the Number One Hero and the new pillar of society.

Pictured: an asshole who's realising that no matter how badly you think you done fucked up, another asshole can always come along and point out just how much worse it actually was than you thought.

Endeavour's sin was always acting as a hero first and a father second, if ever, and even then it was usually still to further his own ego and ambitions, which was tied so tightly to his role as a hero that Endeavour pretty much didn't exist outside of that. So Touya with his healthy sense of dramatic irony is naturally retaliating by treating him as a hero first and a father second, if ever, because that's the standard of behaviour that Endeavour himself set. Before discarding him for the new model he made it clear he wanted his son to be powerful, aggressive, independent, and to take down the Number One Hero without regard for anything else, and that's exactly what Dabi is doing. He's giving Endeavour exactly what he wished for and is making him choke on it.

Just like he said, Touya's making sure Endeavour reaps exactly what he sowed because it proves his point, that if he hadn't been such a violent, toxic narcissist none of this would be happening. His desire to call out his abuser is both personal and justified (regardless of how he's going about it), and it shouldn't be condemned because it has nothing to do with his family. His family, who he was the scapegoat of and who he hasn't seen in probably around a decade, and who are still keeping silent about the abuse even though as far as they know it killed him. I'm not saying he hates the rest of his family like he hates Endeavour (though it probably comes closest with Shouto, there's a lot to unpack there) but it would be a very complicated web of love and grief and resentment and guilt that he'd need a weapons-grade therapist to unravel, which he's clearly never gotten considering this is how he's dealing with the trauma.

tl;dr Touya is a victim just like Shouto, and all the awful things he's done as Dabi don't detract from that, just as his victimhood doesn't excuse his actions either.

In conclusion, you don't have to reconcile or find explanations or excuses for Endeavour's abuse or how any of the other Todorokis have been dealing with it, especially Touya. They are all established facts and exist as objective truth regardless of our feelings on the matter. Instead of making moral judgement on the characters (or the readers who love them/hate them) maybe we all need to stop and think about it critically first, especially when chapters are still incoming and we don't even have the full story yet.

If we can all spend some quality time thinking objectively about all the sides of the story and what lessons we can learn from them, I can guarantee that little things like 'having compassion', 'listening to victims and survivors before they have to resort to domestic terrorism to be heard' and 'learning from the mistakes of the past' will get us all much better results than just sharpening some pitchforks, no matter who they're pointed at.