#meta:shigaraki

[thyandrawrites]

Currently thinking about how Dabi still doesn't know that Shigaraki literally stepped on his dad and called him out on being obtuse and self-centered like all heroes. You know, the one thing Dabi's been seeking validation for this whole time

Better yet, Shigaraki specifically called out Endvr for hiding behind the labels of heroes and villains to justify his unwillingness to lend an ear to the other party.

... Which is exactly the kind of awareness that Dabi has been running himself ragged to get. I could scream about this for hours.

Shigaraki told Endvr that heroes trample over their families to help strangers. Endvr is literally trampling over Touya's feelings by neglecting to face him and instead fighting AFO for the greater good of the masses.

Shigaraki said "you can't understand me because you manufactured labels like heroes and villains to make our violence different on paper and feel better about your own". Endvr literally tried to murder Shigaraki by burning him alive in a wall of scorching hot fire, was applauded and supported for doing so, and then turned around and called his son a mass murderer for doing the exact same thing

Better yet, Endvr used the excuse of that divide between heroes and villains that Shigaraki was talking about to justify neglecting his three other kids for years, hiding away in what he called "the world of heroes" and delegating the weight of parenthood solely onto his wife's shoulders

I'm just. Hhhhhhhhh.

The people who could've made Dabi feel understood were always right there. Toga and Shigaraki foil him to a ridiculous extent. And Dabi doesn't even know it because he never let himself entertain the possibility that other people might've related to all the scapegoating he suffered growing up and even helped him through it by offering him belonging. Instead, Dabi's like "I don't care about your personal feelings, boss. I'll just do my own thing" and Shigaraki lets him. Because that's what Shigi does. He doesn't impose his goals and views on his allies, but he still supports them and makes room in his plans to accommodate for their needs.

Without even knowing that Endvr was Dabi's father, without even knowing that Enji was an abuser too, Shigi was like "well, my father was a dick, and I didn't take any of his shit either" and I just. Think about what could've happened if only Dabi knew that the people he's been dismissing as stepping stones of his revenge plot have been the first real people who have defended him, unknowingly or deliberately — no question asked, no personal gain in sight. And yes, I'm putting Spinner in there too because for all the mean comments he received last chapter, he's also the only character in the story so far who wholeheartedly believes in Dabi's strength and willpower

[thyandrawrites]

on the symbolism of Dabi burning down Toga's house

I haven't seen anyone discuss this yet, so in light of all the misreadings about Dabi's intentions, let's talk about symbolism.

Why the house, specifically? Has anyone tried to wonder about why did Horikoshi bother to show us that scene? What does burning a empty house full of bad memories mean, aside from a cool backdrop for a dramatic one-liner?

Well, you see. Horikoshi isn't actually very subtle. This is the third time in a row he deliberately used a house as symbolism of despotic control, and of finding your true self-expression by getting rid of the chains holding you back.

[under a cut for length]

Exhibit one: Tenko

again, since Horikoshi has the subtlety of a flamethrower, he literally showed the Shimura's house as the background of this very telling line.

Let's recap: Shimura Kotaro was a middle-class man who became wealthy pretty young. Being well-off, he built a home for his family, and invited his in-laws to live with him. As a result, as it's pretty much implied, he became the patriarch of that household. Everyone depended economically on him, and this is likely the reason why Nao, his wife, waited a very long time before starting to oppose the way he ruled said house. Arguably, she waited too long. By the time tragedy struck, Tenko's sense of self had been literally beaten to the point of snapping under pressure.

It is important to note here that despite being the main instigator, Kotaro is not the only adult to blame for Tenko's emotional neglect. The whole household contributed to it in one way or another, as we're explictly told

Nao was a loving mother, but she also refrained from stepping in until the abuse tuned from “just” emotional to physical as well. Tenko's grandparents soothed him with treats instead of defending him in front of his father. Hana broke as many rules as Tenko, but lied to get away with it by blaming her brother instead.

In other words, Tenko grew up without a single shred of validation from any of them. Instead of encouraging him as parents should, they actively tried to dissuade him from pursuing his dreams. And when that failed, they singled him out as the reason why the family wasn't happy. Kotarou tells Tenko to his face that all he wanted was to create a happy family. The implication being, of course, that Tenko was an obstacle to that.

The “peace” of that household rested on the expectation that Tenko should just “quit” his aspiration to become a hero because it didn't make his father happy. All of them let the abuse happen, expecting that Tenko would one day accept to follow his father's rules.

Tenko was (thought to be) quirkless, but he was still denied his individuality. And Shigaraki tells us this. The house he grew up in “gently denied him.” What this means is that he wasn't allowed self-expression. He had to sneak around his father's office, play heroes with his sister in secret, swallow back his protests when he got “punished”, all because the family as a unit functioned on the assumption that everyone should just act in a way that the patriarch found palatable.

The house as this symbol of rejection of your true self comes back again in Shigaraki's dreamscape. Quite tellingly, too. So when he finally frees himself from their shackles (or the choking hands, if you will),

symbolically the house appears once again, but it's now in tatters:

How does this relate to the most recent chapter, you might wonder. I'm getting there.

Exhibit 2. Touya

With Touya, the house symbolism is a lot less prominent, but it's still there. For one it's reflected in the power imbalances of the household. Much like Kotaro, Enji is an authoritative patriarch who built a home with his wealth and influence. He bought a wife, had kids, and showcased his power by buying a huge traditional-style house. It could even be argued that Rei is as dependant on her husband as Nao was to Kotaro, since the Himura family was stated to be poor and in decline.

The parallels don't stop there. In the Todoroki mansion there are no rules, but there's still roles to play, and a looming father's will that reigns absolute. Just like Tenko, Touya gets rejected for his stubborn refusal to “quit" (the training) for his own good and singled out as the reason of the family's unhappiness. This can be seen both in how the family still sees Shouto vs how they see Dabi, but also in their background. For one, instead of easing Touya's abandoment issues, Enji's idea of “fixing” the family after Touya attacked his youngest son was... to isolate Shouto. The implication being that Touya was the problem, not the parenting itself (or lack thereof).

This goes on. Shouto grows, becomes everything his father had always wanted, and Touya becomes more and more invisible in his parent's eyes. Once again, the child's ambition is blamed as the reason that legitimizes the neglect. If Touya could just give up the training. If he would just stop burning himself. If he could make friends like a normal kid and find other hobbies instead of being obsessed with becoming his father's heir.

It's the same routine as above. Instead of addressing the actual cause behind the family's unhappiness, the Todoroki all subconsciously (or not) wish for Touya to simply... deny who he is and move on. For the sake of the rest of the family. It gets so bad that they cannot even look him in the eyes anymore. If Tenko's family “gently denied him,” Touya's straight up didn't acknowledge his existence, until the moment he too snapped under that pressure.

So once again, the household itself becomes a symbol of that rejection. This is exemplified by this panel:

Where we see Dabi symbolically “crying” blood over a panel depicting the Todoroki household, the house that abandoned him, the house that didn't even recognize him when he came back. And he's pleading for them to look at him.

Annnd now we get to exhibit 3. Our girl Toga.

Toga's backstory is much more succint than the other two, so the parallels we can draw are limited. But this chapter shows that they're still very much present.

During her fight against Curious, we see Toga reject the idea that she's a deviant, that she's not the typical definition of a “normal” girl. And in her flashbacks, we learn why. Ever since her quirk manifested, she developed a fascination for blood. But instead of being nurtured with love, her parents rejected her as “monstrous” for it. They verbally abused her and made her go through quirk counseling, seeking to repress the part of herself that craved blood as just another body function.

Quirk prejudice here definitely played a role. This gets a little lost in translation but the original word for quirk, “kosei”, means individuality. The worldbuilding of the series shows us multiple examples of how this rationalization of superpowers has lead to a toxic mindset. To hero society, individuals are their quirk. They stop being seen as human beings and they become containers of powers that are either exploitable or too dangerous. This is why, for example, killing Twice made sense to an utilitarian soldier like Hawks. Twice was his friend, and he liked him as a person, but Twice was also the container of a quirk that was too powerful not to be a threat.

Hero society, and the HPSC in particular, promotes this idea that quirks have value depending on their marketability, on how easily they can be commodified by serving society through a hero license. This is why flashy combat-types are seen as the top of the social pyramid, and why those... let's say “less palatable” quirks like Shinsou's are regarded with distrust and seen as “villainous.” So the former become tools at the HPSC's disposal, and they become heroes applauded by the masses. The rest is labeled as useless at best (Spinner, Deku), and a villain in the making at worst. Since the general assumption is that people are their quirks, and quirks are either good or bad, it follows that people would be categorized as good and bad on a moral scale according to them as well.

So, to bring this back to my original point. Toga's parents obviously gave in to societal pressure. Instead of understanding her power, they got scared of it. They, before anyone else, treated it as something dirty, as something that wouldn't be accepted, and forced Toga to repress it.

her flashbacks show her symbolically wearing a mask. This of course is a visual connection to Tenko and Touya's backstories. Her "normal lufestyle" involved her lying about who she was, until she stopped being depicted with a face altogether. It's pretty straightforward, right there in the art. Her parents expected her to be that. A doll with a plastic smile painted on.

Much like Touya, she became the subject of various "if only" scenarios that were aiming to "fix" her. If only she was less weird. If only she would quit drinking blood. If only she was normal.

All three kids were asked to be someone they weren't for the sake of appeasing their parents. Tenko was told to obey rules. Touya was told to move on with his life. Toga was made to act like a watered-down version of herself. All three of them eventually snapped under pressure. All three of them left the nest in hopes of finding the means to a better self-expression. Tenko thought he found someone who accepted him for who he is in AFO. Touya thought he found a reason to live in the rejection of everything his father is. Toga thought she found a family of strays who let her live how she pleases.

Point is, all of them found a reason to just be in each other's company. Cause all of their respective households were never much of a home to any of them. But this is where it gets interesting. During this arc, the symbolism of the house becomes a larger metaphor. It's no longer just a symbol of parental rejection, but of society's as well.

This chapter does a great job of showing this. Toga's house is destroyed and full of graffiti calling her a monster; this is a reflection of how society still sees her. They don't know the great empathy she's capable of. They don't know about her emotional intelligence. They don't see a teenage girl who's just trying to be, they see a disturbance, a threat to the masses' happiness.

Dabi went on national TV to unveil his father's abuse and call for a bit of sympathy from the population, for them to hold his father accountable for years and years of domestic violence. In turn, they called him annoying, insane, gave his abuser a second chance and are now pushing heroes to just “deal” with him and reassure them that everything will be okay.

In other words, on a much larger scale, those three kids who were scapegoated and villainized by their families are still being scapegoated and villainized for the sake of keeping up a pretense of normalcy. Only now it's by the whole country instead. If they just “quit” being villains, the problem will be solved. Society will still be on the verge of collapsing, heroes will continue to be corrupt and largely in for the fame and money, but society as a whole would be able to return to brushing everything they don't want to see under the rug.

Which, by the way, is exactly what the League is trying to fight. The League of villains, at its core (not counting AFO's influence), is a group of outcasts that was born from the need to destroy the current status quo. This destruction is largely a trauma response. It's not subversive; they're not trying to build something better in its place. They're simply seeking to dismantle a system that never made any breathing space for those like them. It's reactionary. It's anger. It's hurt.

With all of this in mind, I want you to see that Dabi burning Toga's house is an act of solidarity. Where society still doesn't accept her (them), sees her as a threat to stomp on, Dabi offers her companionship and acceptance, in his own Dabi way. He burns down the house that rejected her, the house bearing the angry signs of a crowd that still largely hates them, that blames them for the heroes' failures. Yes, Dabi frames it as seeing Toga as an asset, but he makes her part of her plan to wreck this ruthless, unsympathetic society that never loved them. There's compassion in this act, but you gotta see through the layers of his denial to see it for what it is. This is Dabi acknowledging their common ground. A few chapters back he said “I didn't go far enough” while watching his father's press conference and the lack of consequences he received. Now he's burning down a symbol of their rejection, of society's unwillingness to see them as people.

And that's character development, not manipulation.

Dai went from telling Shigaraki “I don't care about your personal feelings, boss” to asking Toga if she'd made up her mind and encouraging her to smile in the face of ruthless dehumanization. Cause where the masses see a blood-drinking monster, Dabi sees a girl who loves so intensely she can bring back the dead.

[thyandrawrites]

I knew this Shigaraki panel looked familiar for a reason, and surely enough, it parallels Eri

Hori's never been particularly subtle about introducing Eri as foreshadowing of Shigaraki's eventual salvation, but the foiling here is really neat. Chisaki raised Eri to believe her existence is cursed because her quirk is monstrous and can only hurt others; AFO raised Tenko to believe he is a symbol of terror who lusts after blood, and that his quirk can only destroy.

yet, both of those things were just grooming. Their abusers used those claims to keep their victim docile. And indeed, Eri only ever get freed from the shadow of Chisaki's abuse when she started smiling, aka living a life devoid of suffering.

Similarly, Shigaraki has never really known freedom from his suffering, and his hatred is exactly what enables AFO's continued possession of his body:

What does this all mean? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? For Eri, true freedom from her abuser had to pass through that smile — a smile that means she's finally starting to live her life to the fullest, feeling genuine joy for the first time despite Chisaki's claims that she can only know pain.

Only then, did Chisaki's shadow that had her in his clutches fully vanish.

In other words, what the parallel here shows us is that to break free from the possession, from AFO's clutches, Shigaraki needs to learn how to feel positive emotions as well, cause the hatred only makes the shadow stronger

[thyandrawrites]

The war arc had already introduced the idea of Shigaraki feeling stifled by AFO's influence, but I find it really significant that in 330 he's finally equating the mind control to the same oppression he suffered in the Shimura household.

Even as a child, Shigaraki never blindly submitted to authority when it stifled his self-expression. He never gave up his dream of being a hero even when he faced punishment and ostracization. In that household, his father's rule was absolute; Tenko's will couldn't outweigh it. It was his father who decided what was and wasn't allowed and demanded that Tenko gave up his individualism in order to follow the "rules."

The house itself then becomes a symbol of Kotaro's despotic authority. It's not a coincidence that we see little Tenko crying outside, in the garden. Out of his father's house. There's an extra layer of text there: Shigaraki doesn't—cannot—fit in his father's world because it's a world specifically tailored to deny Tenko. So long as he doesn't obey Kotaro's rule, Tenko is an outsider in his own house, someone forced to stay out.

Yet, Shigaraki's character has always rotated around the theme of overcoming that stifling authority, of stomping down his foot against anyone trying to bend him. The more someone tries to cage him, the more Shigaraki fights back for his right to be.

Then tragedy strikes. Tenko's quirk manifests, the Shimuras die, and AFO exploits Shigaraki's stubborn tenacity for his purposes. Shigaraki's traumatized, crushed by the realization of what he's done. It doesn't set in that his relief at being freed from the abuse is a normal response to weeks of taxing emotional oppression. Shigaraki thinks it's something he ought to be punished for. The guilt is crushing him, and it makes him the perfect victim for AFO to manipulate. So when AFO tells him, “yes, it was indeed your will that caused this tragedy,” Shigaraki believes him. He doesn't realize that the abuse itself (Hana's betrayal + Kotaro's overbearing control) was the straw that broke the camel's back. When AFO echoes Kotaro's scapegoating, Shigaraki internalizes that he was the reason for the family to fall apart, after all. AFO postures as a savior, as someone finally vouching for Shigaraki's self-expression. He tells him it's okay to encourage that violence, to keep stomping his foot against authority, because Shigaraki is born evil and he must stop repressing who he is. It's simple and plain gaslighting: in the same beat, AFO validates Shigaraki's feelings by telling him it was true that his family repressed him, and reinforces his guilt by saying Tenko wanted them dead. And Shigaraki, traumatized and crushed by self-loathing and guilt as he is, all too easily falls for it. Yet, AFO is careful to subtly tilt the narrative he feeds to his victim: the stifling iron-fist for Shigaraki to fight against is hero society, not AFO's control.

Fast forward to the current arc. AFO got what he wanted, and he finally shows his true colors. He was never on Shigaraki's side, he was just curating his interests. Making it so Shigaraki could finally express himself freely was never the point. All AFO wanted was to have free reign over Shigaraki's mind, and manipulating that hatred was his only way to exercise that control over him.

So, to go back to the metaphor of the Shimura household as the signifier of Kotaro's authority... Horikoshi took that symbolism one step further. Before, Shigaraki was an outsider in his home. Now, Shigaraki is an outsider in his own head. AFO was never a savior, he only used a more roundabout way to bend Shigaraki to his will. Only, he knew Shigaraki wouldn't let AFO boss him around, so AFO planned accordingly; he made it so that “Shigaraki” wasn't an individual in the first place, but just a container.

Obviously, Shigaraki's arc has always pointed towards the end goal of finally getting rid of this other force trying to suppress him. Figuring out that his “sensei” was just another oppressor was the first step. Hopefully, the next one will be answering the question of “who am I?” with a return to his origins. To Tenko, and who that little boy was supposed to be

[thyandrawrites]

Re: the League being super chill about letting Dabi be an awful recruiter so long as he enjoys it

I forgot to mention this in the original post, but that... Chillness is quite telling of Hori's intention to portray the League as a "you can just exist without pressure" environment (totally opposite from the "you are your quirk/individuality" mentality that hero society embraces to the point that those with "weak" powers become essentially worthless). More on that, the League specifically goes out of its way to welcome with open arms anyone that hero society considers a reject not worth looking twice at.

I'm sure you're feeling like I'm pointing out something obvious. After all we can all see the found family vibes of the League, and how what was supposed to be a criminal organization ended up becoming the home of a ragtag of misfits with no other place to belong if not each other, a group of broken people finding peace and solace in other equally broken people. But, but.

My point here is not about the found family reading of it (tho it def still applies), but rather the inherent "fuck you" to the mindset of... Let's say productivity, for lack of a better term, that hero society unwittingly embodies.

As I mentioned in the original post, the League is very chill about Dabi taking on the role of the "official" recruiter despite how Dabi doesn't have anything to show for it for months on end, and in fact does the opposite of what a recruiter should do. That is, killing any potential new hire.

So... It can be argued that Dabi is really bad at this job. They all know it. They acknowledge it on screen. They tease him about it:

Yet... Shigaraki never puts any pressure on him to actually accomplish anything. The most he does is saying "I look forward to meeting this new ally" when Dabi hints that he has his eye on someone. Which is just... An acknowledgement, not an expectation or a demand. It's just a simple "okay, show me when you're ready".

This falls in line with how the League has repeatedly shown acceptance towards any member who performed "poorly", not maximizing on their full potential. For example, it's how Shigaraki was always very chill with Twice's mental block towards cloning himself. Yet, when Twice finds it in himself to do it, Shigaraki's reaction is just...

To take it stride as if it wasn't a big deal. Like it was perfectly normal for Twice to have found a way around his greatest fear, just like that. Note how it's Twice who stresses how he can be "useful" now. But Shigaraki simply takes stock of his new asset like he would look at a new tool in his inventory, and moves on to strategize like usual.

The underlining reading is that Shigaraki would've been fine with fighting alongside Twice even if Twice never overcame the mental block that prevented him from using his quirk at full power.

This reading is further emphasized when Spinner finally gets a quirk reveal in the middle of the mla arc, and it's a power with no particularly noteworthy strategic or offensive value.

It's a quirk that simply allows him to stick to walls. He doesn't have any fancier or flashier side-powers, either. Unlike Tsuyu, whose mutation quirk supplies her with several "useful" frog-like powers, Spinner's quirk is exceptional in that it is not exceptional at all. He doesn't even have regenerative powers like a gecko. He just sticks to walls. That's it.

And the narration makes it very clear, stating it both through the opposition with the mla, a militant group preaching social darwinism, and through Spinner's backstory. Spinner ended up as a shut-in and fell into a depressive slump as a result of the bullying and discrimnation he faced as both a heteromorph, and one with a "weak" power to boot. And yet, the League saw worth in him that hero society couldn't. The League welcomed him and let him define his own worth for himself, giving him acceptance and the freedom to express his voice, to pursue his goals even if his performance was less than stellar at times. Even if his power or his abilities were not up to par with those of the more 'blessed' individual with strong quirks.

Now think of Dabi again in light of that last paragraph. No, think of Touya. Someone who was repeatedly told what he couldn't be because of the limits of his body. Someone who was casted out on accounts of his failure to match up with his brother's "blessed" genetics.

And then think again about why Dabi actually stuck around for so long.

[thyandrawrites]

This might sound weird but, similar to how Tenko still exists inside Shigaraki as a child who was abandoned and left crying out for help unable to move on, do you think Touya still exists inside Dabi as a child who waited for his father to come and see him but is still trapped in the fire of Sekoto Peak, constantly in pain and burning forever?

Also, Happy St Patrick's Day!

I'm not sure if you mean this literally, as in... like... a separate entity? a split in his personality? or some sort of shadow vestige of sorts. In that case no, I don't really think that's the case. But if you just mean to ask whether I think a part of Dabi still retains Touya's childlike innocence, then yes. Absolutely. Just like how a small Tenko longing for Midoriya's help still exists in the depths of Shigaraki's subconscious, the same is true of Dabi. This:

was a direct callback to this:

because inside Shigaraki, buried deep beneath all the gaslighting AFO subjected him to, there's still a part of him that wishes a hero had reached out a helping hand to him when he was wandering the streets, lost and terrified and in need of some sympathy. This is a set up for his redemption too, by the way. Tenko became a villain because the only person who offered him a hand was All for One. A single hero could've stopped that from happening, but no one was willing to at the time. But now that's changed. There's Midoriya, who's singlemindedly determined to selflessly reach out that hand now and save Shigaraki at his moment of need, right when no one else is bothering to, once again too afraid of him to intervene (or to recognize Shigaraki as a victim still, just like back then).

When it comes to Dabi, there's the same set up at play. This:

is a direct callback to this:

because inside Dabi, buried deep beneath his lust for revenge, there's still a part of him that craves his father's (but also his family's) unconditional love and attention. Remember, when Endvr passed out in the war arc, Dabi immediately stopped his plan. If he just wanted him dead, he could've killed him right then and there, nice and easy. But that's not what Dabi's after, deep down. What he really longs for is Enji's acknowledgment. Just like when he was a child. He's even crying, still, though now his tears are made out of blood.

By the way, this is also a set up for redemption. Touya became a villain because his father never bothered showing up at Sekoto Peak, instead turning his back on him times and times again. If Enji had bothered creating a relationship with him outside of training, this wouldn't have happened. That's changed now, though. Unlike his father, Shouto is looking directly at Touya, with no intention of looking away, and he's determined to get to know his brother and to understand him.

[thyandrawrites]

I have to preface this with the fact that I don't mean any of this in a hostile tone, but am genuinely curious about what you think. Do you think that the LoV's past circumstances will/should give them leeway to get away scot-free from the consequences of their (extremely destructive/disruptive) actions that have injured common folk more than the Heroes they claim to hate the most? (1/4)

We, as readers, are aware of the conditions that drove Shigaraki, Toga and the others to do what they did but I feel that the general public won’t really vibe with the idea of reintegrating or give a carte blanche to people whose body counts number in the thousands and I feel that addressing this satisfactorily will be really difficult in the long run. The series has a hopeful tone but the populace Just forgetting the grievances caused doesn't seem that palatable, to be honest. (2/4) 

Does Touya deserve no commeuppance for his (by his own words) few dozens of victims because “It’s all Endeavor’s fault” as if he had literally no involvement in the thought process that took him to callously wreaking havoc everywhere? I mean, Shouto's gotten his ass kicked by Karma repeatedly and his actions haven't been that drastic, asides from being kind of an asshole initially (3/4) 

Society in BnHA is flawed af and needs re-structuring to address the issues it has (which is the direction is heading to) but do the people who have destroyed everything around deserve full forgiveness just because their stories were tragic? Especially in the face of people who have faced similar enough circumstances and haven’t resorted to outright villainy. This is not to say that I want them to be killed or thrown to jail but I want to know what you think. Sorry for dumping all of this on you 

*sigh* Not this argument again, please.

I want you to understand that no one is saying that they “deserve full forgiveness”. Not even the story says that, in fact. You’re forgetting that this panel exists:

or this other one:

Deku acknowledges the things Shigaraki has done. And he says he can’t forgive him for them. But saving has nothing to do with forgiving.

What Deku’s doing when he’s showing Shigaraki sympathy, when he’s resolving to save him, is recognizing that Shigaraki is a victim of AFO’s abuse. It’s recognizing Shigaraki’s hurt, and how before he became a villain, he was just a little boy crying and hoping to be saved by a hero, too.

Deku never said “I’m gonna give you a carte blanche for hurting my friends because you are hurting too.” Deku’s said “Shigaraki killed many people. He’s hurt people near and dear to me. AND YET.”

I don’t know how you can interpret that as blanket forgiveness. It’s not. It’s Deku stating that Shigaraki’s victimhood is not lessened by the damage he’s done. It’s not condoning or softening of Shigaraki’s actions, it’s an acknowledgement that Shigaraki is still a human being despite how unforgivable his actions are.

“I feel that the general public won’t really vibe with the idea of reintegrating or give a carte blanche to people whose body counts number in the thousands“

Well, the general public gave their support to a child abuser and a murderer, so their morality isn’t exactly stellar, either. Nor are they completely devoid of blame, either. Dabi’s pov and chapter 305 show that their support and their willingness to turn a blind eye to corruption are also a symptom of everything that’s wrong with hero society. I don’t know why their opinions should have such a weight into what ends up being the fate of the villains. If the masses can be persuaded into accepting back a child abuser, they can also be persuaded into accepting back the victim of that abuse.

Besides, redeeming the core Lov in the eyes of the general public isn’t even that hard?? Literally all they have to do is help defeat AFO, the biggest threat to peace in hero history, and the person directly to blame for the existence itself of the League of villains as an organization. Without him, “Shigaraki Tomura” never would’ve existed. Without his network, without Ujiko’s devotion, the attacks never would’ve taken place. Without his experimentation on Machia, and his brainwashing into blind devotion, the destruction of those cities never would’ve happened. Please let’s blame the right person for that. Tenko was kidnapped at age 5 and gaslit into remaining feral and angry and self-destructive for a purpose. He cannot be held to the same standard as his literal abuser.

You also make it sound as if Dabi, Shigaraki and the others haven’t already been miserable all their lives. You freely mention how much they destroyed, but skip mentioning how much they also self-destructed. To bring up an example.

The hands that Shigaraki was forced to wear on his body every day were said to be the trigger of his trauma.

AFO purposefully gaslit him into accepting to be re-traumatized every. fucking. day. Because the one condition to steal ofa is a strong enough emotion, so he had a vented interest in keeping Tenko as far away from closure and healing as possible.

In fact, we were even told that Shigaraki experienced that grief like the first time every single day of his adult life. So much so that suffering has become normalized to him.

The story has been punishing them more than enough already. What they “deserve” is not to be even more miserable, but to finally be freed from the belief that there cannot be any salvation for them. That there cannot be a life outside of destruction.

They have never walked away “scot-free”. Dabi doesn’t even have a sense of self outside of his trauma. He had a meltdown on live TV but everyone seems to think he was entirely rational about his revenge, entirely present as he attempted suicide in front of a stage that didn’t do anything to stop him.

“just because their stories were tragic“

“in the face of people who have faced similar enough circumstances and haven’t resorted to outright villainy“

No. Look, I understand that you’re not trying to start an argument or to sound hostile, but this is victim-blaming. You are minimizing the extent of their trauma, and blaming them for not reacting to it in a way that you find palatable. Dabi is no less of a victim than Shouto because he didn’t have the tools to cope with his trauma in a way that society finds acceptable. Shouto had his mother’s love and her full support and reassurance. Touya didn’t. It’s not Touya’s responsibility that the adults around him didn’t give him a support system, that they didn’t provide him with emotional stability, that they refused to take care of him and to love him. If he “resorted to outright villainy” it’s because his father refused to interact with him in a context that wasn’t that of the so-called “world of heroes”. If he bothered answering just ONE of Touya’s pleas, Touya wouldn’t have had to resort to villainy in the first place. Again, please blame the right person.

Also, Dabi’s faceless, unnamed victims that you mention don’t have more narrative weight than Twice’s (a named character who invoked a strong connection with the audience) extrajudicial murder. You make it all about numbers like this is real life and not fiction. If Dabi’s kills were framed as having the same emotional and moral impact than the heroes’ mishandlings of justice, then Horikoshi would’ve made room to show those people’s backstories. The only reason why Dabi and the League killed so much is to pose a narrative challenge.

At what point does hero society stop seeing them as victims and starts claiming for their blood? This supposed line between good and bad that cannot be crossed because otherwise you’re too far gone is exactly what caused the destruction in Jakku and the nearest cities. The dehumanization of Shigaraki’s personhood into an “it” that needed taking down, X-less’ refusal to cpr Shigaraki when his heart stopped, are exactly what caused the decay rampage. Punitive justice cannot work to fix the problems here so long as the ones administering it are criminals, too. Rehabilitation can.

A lot of people seem to forget that the reason why the villains are lashing out against hero society is not because “they had tragic backstories”, but because society is specifically tailored to repress and reject them. They kill and they destroy because society taught them that they were monsters that destroyed.

Every time I see the argument that the villains’ redemption means condoning their crimes I have to stop my eyes from rolling so hard they’ll fall off my face. Literally no one is saying that. “Redemption” just means giving these broken people a reason to stop the rampage, to learn that destruction doesn’t have to be the only way to move forward.

If society cannot make room to welcome them back, to accept them after they rejected them for so long, then I’m sorry but you misunderstood the entire premises of this manga

[thyandrawrites]

Hi. I've read some of your blogs on MHA, especially on Dabi, and I really liked them. Now I would like to ask your opinion on Shigaraki, specifically his relationship with AFO. Do you think he gave Tenko Decay? I am asking because something felt off about their first meeting. The man who killed Tenko's grandmother and is All Might's archnemesis just happened to come across him after every other citizen left it to a hero to fix? More than that, he knew the boys name, what happened to him, and managed to get the severed hands of his family. As creepy as all that was, one thing was certain, he was watching Tenko for who knows how long.

What do you think?

P.S. I may have tried messaging this to by mistake. This is my first time using Tumblr so I apologize if I did.

Hi! thanks for checking out my blog. Don't worry, you are using tumblr just fine!

To answer your question, yes, I think AFO gave Decay to Tenko. I talked a little about this topic in this post here. The circumstances are just too odd for their first meeting to have just been up to chance. AFO is a planner. The fact itself that he groomed Tenko for 15 years to get a vessel proves that he's not above waiting for the seeds he planted to grow into a tree. I always assumed that he had been keeping his eyes on the Shimura for a while, waiting for the perfect opportunity to make his move. When you think about Shigaraki's backstory, there's a little too many elements that "just happen to" work in AFO's favor.

- Tenko, an abused child who routinely gets upset enough to cry his eyes out, "just happens to" develop a quirk that is not only emotion-triggered, but that becomes stronger the stronger the emotion is

- The quirk "just happens to" be destructive in nature

- The quirk "just happens to" be impossible to turn off at will, even after he perfects it as an adult, enough so that it takes him Ujiko's vat juice to make it possible for it not to activate by default

- Tenko "just happens to" wander the city in search for help for days without finding anyone willing to help him despite living in a neighborhood that's said to be filled with heroes

and most tellingly,

- AFO "just happens to" give him one of Nana's severed hands amongst the ones from Tenko's family members. Bear in mind that Nana died when Koutarou was a child, so her hand was specifically preserved for over a decade to be presented as a "gift" to her nephew, alongside the other disembodied ones. Almost like... you know... AFO was planning this from the start

Besides, given how unsubtle Horikoshi is with foiling and parallels, I think it makes a lot of sense for Tenko to have been a former quirkless kid who received a power from what would then become their "mentor" figure, just like Deku. And I'm putting mentor in quotes because that's too generous a word for what AFO did. But just like Deku had a "you can be a hero" moment, Tenko had his own "you can be a villain" speech from AFO that only further convinces me that he was originally supposed to stay a quirkless nobody too if not for an external intervention

[thyandrawrites]

I would like to ask your opinion about 3 views I have.

First is the idea of how Shigaraki, even when he was groomed to become a destruction machine, the moment AFO and Kurogiri (the ones he obeys no matter what) are out of the picture, he instantly thinks on protecting. Protecting the league, not as an organizationz but as the individual members he lates veiw as family. This leaves me thinking that any good in him is not only from Tenko (the pure but traumatized kid), but that Shigaraki Tomura (the vengueance-thirsted villain) also is by nature a relatively good person, just needing GUIDANCE (not fix nor correction) to project his ideals, which are even correct.

Second is how Toga said in the manga that she had a normal life, and I believe, in one way, she has. She has what she WISHES, was a normal life. She can be herself comfortably, people around her don't treat her as a freak or a monster (she even HAS FRIENDS), adults around her care and even parent her (as much as a group of walking disasters with no means to confront trauma can actually parent). Shouldn't that mean someting?

The last thing will be shorter, as, have you watched Naruto? Because a good amount of people liked to imagine Touya as Itachi (the older brother complex guy that sacrificed everything, accepting all the evils of the world, for a better good), when he actually was like Sasuke (the brother that wasn't as talented, so neglected until a tragedy, wanting revenge when wronged, mentable unstable as he discovers he is being used again and again, leading him to form a revolution so he doesn't have to suffer at hands of others anymore).

I would love to see your coments on these ideas as they aren't as developed as yours tend to be. Thank you for the attention, and sorry if you don't understand as english isn't my first language, besaides is too long.....

Your english is perfectly understandable! And your thoughts are interesting so I don’t mind answering.

I definitely agree with your take on Shigaraki! leadership-wise, he’s very different from the model AFO projected and tried to mould him as. I think that AFO’s plan was to raise Tenko in isolation and in constant exposure to his trauma triggers to instigate violence as a coping method, so that he would be more unstable and “broken” when he finally faced off against All Might. What he didn’t expect was for that isolation to serve the opposite effect: once Tenko grows up, once he has trusted comrades, the ties he forms with them are genuine. He does want the best for them, and protects them fiercely in that ruthlessly revengeful way of his. He’s a character who not only has known loss, but whose entire life has been shaped, moulded, distorted by it; so the few bonds he has, he hold on to.

The fact that he cares about his comrades as more than just pawns to use for his own purposes is also what makes him the opposite of AFO as a leader. AFO only seeked out blind devotion. He posed as a messiah, as a saviour. He gave powers away in order to gain followers who would be indebted to him, who would look up to him as an almost god-like being granting them mercy. Ujiko even went as far as comparing him to a buddha. The religious undertones are put there to emphasize that AFO positions himself as several steps above the masses that follow him. He doesn’t see them as individuals, only as a faceless army he can use and abuse at his will.

On the other end of the spectrum stays Shigaraki, who... well.

who is so up and personal with his comrades he lets them grab him, point a knife to his throat, yell at him... Lmao imagine someone grabbing AFO’s collar like that and shouting at him. You’d dream of doing something like that without getting murdered with someone like AFO. But with Shigaraki, it’s perfectly fine, because Shigaraki doesn’t think himself above them. Sure, he IS the leader and demands the respect he is owed for it, but at the same time, he’s a very community-focused type of leader.

He not only gives all his allies freedom to pursue their own goals (even when they directly clash with his), but he also makes time to listen to their needs, to talk at eye level with them. One thing I’d like to point out here is that when the chance presented itself to form an alliance with Redestro’s army, Shigaraki chose to do so specifically because he remembered Compress’ complaint about their homeless, penniless status following Kurogiri’s arrest.

so yeah, the League definitely has distinct found family elements ever since its direction fell onto Shigaraki alone, and yeah, he’s always been more than the tool for destruction that AFO tried to raise him as.

Moving on to Toga. I am 1000% convinced that the reason why she snapped and killed that Saito guy in middle school was because her family (and society) tried too harshly to convert her into something she wasn’t. They made her repress herself to the point where freedom to her ended up taking the shape of a violent rebellion, cause her life up to that point was the expectation to be a “good girl” who behaved herself and didn’t act like a “monster”. But when you take a closer look at her writing, you notice how backwards that narrative of monstrosity actually is. Ever since she joined the League, aka ever since she was free to be herself fully, free to drink as much blood without being shamed as a freak fot, ever since she was fully accepted without having to wear a mask... how many people has she killed by draining their blood? As in, completely on her own, not as a collective action with the rest of the lov? Zero. That’s right. Even Camie, who was kidnapped and held prisoner for three days as a blood bank during the provisional license exam ended up being fine. And she’s a hero in training, lol. Completely at Toga’s mercy.

The thing is, Toga showcases a remarkable ability to control herself and behave with the compassion and “normalcy” that her family demanded of her, when she’s actually treated with compassion and understanding back. She’s literally introduced through the lenses of an outcast and a freak, someone who aggressively tries to get included in things by acting creepy about friendships

cause she supposedly cannot form true bonds with people — she’s too weird, too self-centered.

And yet, she forms the strongest friendship bond of the League all on her own. And it has nothing to do with her obsession with blood, with the fascination for violence that makes her “crush” on people.

Her story shows that what makes people monsters is not nature but nurture. Her own parents called her a deviant, a monster, a demon child, they tried to make her feel shame towards a literal part of her own biology, tried to tell her to suppress it, put her through quirk counseling which is basically an in-universe version of conversion therapy, and then acted suprised when she had a breakdown and killed a kid because her biological need to drink blood became too much for her to suppress anymore. Quirks are just body functions. They could’ve let her explore her powers in a controlled way, but instead chose to treat her as a monster until she internalized that it was okay for her to be violent. She could be the monster everyone treated her as.

But it’s in the League that she learns true compassion and empathy, enough so to actually connect to someone — unlike her failed attempt with Tsuyu and Ochako at training camp. It’s when Twice treats her like a friend, that she learns what actual friendship is like, and is able to give Twice comfort in his moment of need, offering him her hankie so he wouldn’t fear ‘splitting’ anymore.

So yeah Toga is already living a normal life. All she needs is for society to finally give her the freedom and the understanding that the Lov already offered her, cause that’s the true key to make her “stable” and “normal”. Not violent suppression.

As for naruto, yes I’ve read it! And I agree with you, Dabi’s more like Sasuke than Itachi. Itachi believed in a superior state of things, unlike Dabi believed in institutions over individual morals until his very death, not to mention he was always a golden child, while Dabi was the scapegoat and the disillusioned kid.

[thyandrawrites]

So I know you don’t like predicting, so to clarify this is not me asking you what you think what will happen! Not what HK will do… But instead, if you were writing the story, how would you have the villains be saved by their counterparts?

Hey there!

If I was writing the story, I would work towards two main goals.

1. Addressing the failings of hero society that made the League fall through the cracks until they turned to villainy in order to fight back for their right to exist, and

2. Have the main hero trio reach out emotionally to the villains and establish a true connection based on empathy.

I think these are the very baseline requirements for any "saving" to take place. Like. The League presents a challenge that the main cast hasn't yet faced properly. So far, their job was kind of easy. They only rescued crying kids asking for help by beating the bad guy who was endangering them. But the Lov is different cause they are the bad guy, and at the same time, they are lashing out against hero society because no hero came to save them when they were crying kids asking for help, too. So saving them requires a bigger effort on the heroes' part. It needs to involve an acknowledgement that if it got this bad, it's because there was a certain set of circumstances that let it get this bad. The villains aren't evil because they were born evil, but because the system who should've offered them a way out of their suffering enabled their falling through the cracks of hero society, and then made them targets of the heroes' violent suppression instead of addressing the reasons why they turned villains.

In other words, I think there should be an acknowledgement that the villains have a right to their anger. And I'm just saying their anger, because it goes without saying that no amount of hurt justifies taking a life to feel better. I'm not trying to state that they should be condoned and forgiven blindly. But their suffering shouldn't be condoned, either, or swept under the rug because it manifested in a way that society doesn't find palatable. If anything, the fact that kids who were originally well integrated into society ended up as criminals should be a wake up call that something is horribly wrong with the system, so that should be addressed and looked into.

The criticism the League aimed at hero society (the fact that heroes are self-absorbed and they care more about appearances and protecting the status quo than they care about actual justice and safety) is no less valid and spot on just because their methods to gain a voice are violent. Hero society was violent to them first, and warped them into the people they are today. This is most notable with Toga. It is literally stated in more than one occasion that she's capable of great empathy when treated with kindness (the handkerchief scene with Jin), but that she was called a monster by her family and peers enough times that she eventually embraced that narrative. Cause she would be treated as a freak no matter what, so she might as well own it. In fact, it's stated that she even dressed up as a school girl in order to be treated with less violence. Dabi and Shigaraki were denied a reason to even exist.

So. Back to my point, I think there should be an acknowledgement that the villains have a right to be angry that they were failed by the people who were supposed to look after them.

I'm not super confident that this will happen in canon. After all, Kouta kinda sets off a precedent. He had a right to feeling upset at his parents for choosing their job over him, even when that inevitably caused their deaths, and he had a right to resent heroics cause it deprived him of his childhood and took away his parents, all for the sake of an abstract "greater good". But when he was "saved", Deku fails spectacularly at addressing this, and the story tells us that Kouta simply... Changes his mind about heroes just like that. Gone is his legit anger, all because "heroes are cool". And so there's virtually no consequence, no critical self-reflection on the heroes' side. Kouta's pain is a tolerable compromise if heroes get to feel cool while they keep doing what they've always done. It doesn't matter if their actions hurt their loved ones.

Imho this approach wouldn't work with the League. Like. Would you accept that what was done to Touya was acceptable simply because Endvr got to feel awesome and heroic as he kept neglecting his duties as a parent and a spouse? I sure as hell wouldn't.

There needs to be some sort of accountability there. There's no way I can buy that the Lov simply... Accepts heroes as cool after they "save" them. Cause in their case, saving isn't a black and white matter. Horikoshi could always twist it as a "let's beat up the bad guy who's hurting them and then rescue the hostage and call that saving" by making AFO be the Muscular to the Lov's Kouta or the Chisaki to the Lov's Eri. But imho that would be extremely weak and fail to address the social commentary the Lov always brought forward. What's the point of stressing the failures of hero society to this extent, if the system stays the way it always was even after the League is done terrorizing the country?

When I say that I want the heroes to reach out to the villains, I mean that I want the heroes to make an effort to understand the motivations of the villains. I want them to struggle with their internalized blind worship of the system and see that even the brightest of lights still casts a shadow somewhere. Some people have to be sacrificed in order to protect the greater good. And their pain is very real and very raw, and so far no one has bothered to legitimize it, or even acknowledge it.

Saving the League can't just mean beating AFO and then reintegrating the Lov into an unchanged society. Because that doesn't address at all the causes of their villainous radicalization. It simply brushes the matter under the rug the same way it brushed Kouta's feelings under the rug. It's a non-conclusive ending.

Eri was introduced in the story as foreshadowing for Shigaraki's saving, since she functions as a foil to him. This page here gives me a bit of hope because it shows that Horikoshi knows that saving someone from abuse isn't a linear process, and it doesn't just involve the removal of the victim from the context of immediate physical and psychological harm. It's a journey. Eri wasn't saved the moment she was separated from Chisaki. The scars he left on her weren't just physical but emotional and psychological as well. Aside from her remaining antsiness, her social anxiety, her inability to smile easily, Chisaki also hindered her healthy development. She's about seven but she was never socialized to know how to behave and what to expect from staying with big groups of people. She appears clueless about festivities too, which shows that her isolation was pretty severe while growing up. All of this clearly slows down her recovery, and is in fact addressed on screen.

Deku's naivety here shows through, but it's a learning experience for him, and writing-wise it could be a set up for even more growth later down the line. What happens here is that Deku sees how socially stunted Eri is, and for the first time realizes that a true hero's job isn't over the moment he puts the bad guy in handcuffs. The real challenge comes here, in the aftermaths of the rescue operation, when the flashy part of heroism is over. And this is his narrative challenge. In what way can he be the best hero there ever was? The answer should be: by being a hero even behind closed doors, and by being dedicated to making a difference even when there's no spotlights shining down on him. That is, by helping a victim get out of the chokeholds of a self-harming mentality caused by intense abuse. Eri was told that she exists to curse others enough times that she believed it. Shigaraki is the same, except he was told he exists to be a symbol of terror lusting for destruction. Deku was shown to be the first to show Eri the gentle side of her quirk, and thus help her redefine amd reclaim the meaning of her power in much the same way Deku redefined the meaning of the word "Deku" and reclaimed it as an empowering word instead of a belittling one. I reckon that Deku will be thr first to reach out emotionally to Shigaraki the same way, and show him a better way to channel his self-expression into that will finally free him of the burdens AFO placed on him.

Now, I don't really expect bnha to delve deeply into themes of recovery, or to even show it realistically. After all, Eri was "cured" simply by attending a concert. But the fact that there's an acknowledgement on screen that a hero's job isn't over the moment the bad guy is in cuffs is a start, at least. I want to hope that it's a set up for when the main trio will rescue the League. If I was writing the story, I would definitely use that set up to properly test the heroes' resolution to help out people. After all, what greater challenge than helping someone recover from spending 2/3 of their life stewing in their pain and hatred by learning better coping methods and finding a more stable environment to finally get closure? I don't think the League can properly be saved so long as their wounds aren't treated. In their case, the wounds are even deeper than Kouta's or Eri's, because they were left alone for three times as long as those two kids were, until they eventually grew up into emotionally and psychologically unstable adults / teens. But that just means that their healing process will be a longer journey, not that it cannot happen at all

[thyandrawrites]

I've seen that you're also wanting a restorative justice ending for the league (as am I). Do you think that's likely to happen? I feel like society has been portrayed in shambles to prepare readers for an ending where there just isn't time to focus on stupid trials and prison (also prison system is down). I feel like as far as fiction goes, the LOV should be taken back in by society so they can help rebuild what's been destroyed. I feel like that should be enough, but many don't think so.

Yeah, I think that’s what the story is building up to.

There’s no way that a punitive ending is gonna work here, not after what we saw of the reality of prison life. This is how the guards talked about the prisoners:

Maggots would be treated better than this. They aren’t even recognized as human beings, just as a problem for the “good” citizens. As something unsightly that needs to be locked up for life so that no one else has to look at it. This is exactly the same behavior that Toga’s parents exhibited towards their daughter by the way, and the reason why she ended up running away from home and becoming a villain:

“despite our best efforts, she turned out bad”

“that demon child”

This is why locking her (and the rest of the League) away doesn’t really cut it. It’s not a solution. It’s just giving her more of the same abuse that she suffered through her whole life. Hero society has consistently been presented as flawed and full of holes. There’s a whole crescendo of things that address that corruption with increasing clarity, and it’s past a point where they can just... be ignored without any critical thinking spent on it. Those holes need to be fixed in order to give the story an ending, otherwise it’s just sweeping the entire premise of the story under the rug and calling it solved. Which is why the only narrative that would make sense and that would give a conclusive ending to what’s been set up till now is a narrative of rescue.

Thematically, if a prison ending had been enough to solve the problem, the prison system wouldn’t have been thrown into chaos and dismantled.

I’m using Toga as an example here, but what I’m arguing for can be applied to all the core lov members. She’s always been seen as a problem child, and forced to deny her sense of self and play the part of the good, obedient kid in order to make her family happy. She was asked to sympathize with everyone else’s definition of “normalcy” and to cater to their needs instead of her own, and scapegoated when she rebelled. So were Tenko and Touya. But no one ever tried to sympathize with her. To cater to her needs. They simply washed their hands of her until her only way to be accepted fully was to join a band of criminals. She even tells us that she started dressing up as a middle schooler because the whole world was less violent towards her when she appeared younger. So clearly an ending of her journey where she’s subdued with even more violence is not gonna be an effective way of rescuing her.

Can it even be called “rescue” if she’s given no choice but to surrender? That’s what Hawks attempted with Twice. Predictably, it didn’t work, now did it?

The thing is, none of the Lov members can truly be “saved” so long as they don’t accept that helping hand. And for them to accept it, they need to have a reason to want to abandon their path of destruction. They need to believe that society will truly have a place for them once they’re back, because as things are presently, there isn’t one. Shigaraki for example wasn’t just overlooked by the heroes. He was also rejected by his own family, who never stood up for him in order not to oppose his abuser. Dabi can’t go back to his family, if they keep talking about the things Dabi did as a result of their lack of care as something that needs cleaning after, like he’s still as much of an inconvenience and a problem child as he was when he was 12.

For them to stop in their plan to raid hero society to the ground, they need to be convinced that hero society can redeem itself. It can be made to look at villains like them as people, not just as “monsters who mingle with society because quirks have warped the standards for humanity.”

That’s also what Dabi was trying to accomplish with the broadcast, by the way. He wanted hero society to abandon “thoughtlessness”. That is, the uncritical idolization of heroes of the majority of the citizens that allows corrupted heroes to keep their jobs despite their own misdeeds.

And that’s the narrative challenge that the story is presenting to the new generation of heroes. Hero society as they knew it has been thrown into chaos. Things can’t go back to the way they were before, because so much changed in such a short time. Heroes resigned. So many were killed, both heroes and civilians. If the way things are currently handled had been enough, or even an effective way to stop villainy, then the current lawlessness wouldn’t exist. If hero society was a fool-proof system that didn’t need any revising, villains like Shigaraki would’ve never existed, let alone destroyed as much as they did. So heroism itself has got to change.

Imho, the story is currently at a turning point. This is where the hero kids will be asked to prove themselves, and to put in the real work to make society a truly fair place. I’m not saying that it’s right for a bunch of 15 year olds to shoulder the weight of fixing up the fuckups of their predecessors, but this is a shounen manga and they’re the protagonists, so this is their role in the story, and dealing with the League in a way that is more effective and permanent than just punching them and then locking them up is Deku and co.’s narrative challenge.

On the topic of “fixing”. Hero society as we know it hasn’t always been the norm. Before the HPSC took over and created quirk regulation laws to control society with, heroes didn’t even exist. They’re a fairly recent development. Before that, there used to be vigilantes. Coincidentally, now that heroism is facing a crisis and that the HPSC is in shambles, vigilantes rose once again, and they’re attempting to “fix” society themselves. Of course, they’re doing more harm than good, because when you make laws that forbid unlicensed civilians from exploring their quirks, they never learn how to use them properly. But I don’t think that Hori set up a second era of vigilantism just for shit and giggles, or just to add to the current chaos and social unrest. The fact that vigilantism surfaces as people’s primary solution when the law fails to be effective is a glaring hint that heroism only rose as a way to regulate and control what society was already doing en masse. They couldn’t stop people from using their quirks in public, either to help others or to commit crimes, so they just... put in place a system of regulations and laws limiting what kind of quirk use was tolerated, and what kind was “villainous”.

Nothing wrong with that in theory... except that with time, heroism as an ideal became corrupted, heroes focused more and more on appearances and on rankings than they did on actually helping people, and when the flaws of such a system started showing, they were swept under the rug, and the villains who addressed them sent to jail without a critical examination of why villainy never stopped despite how many heroes were given licenses every year.

I think that this second age of vigilantism is supposed to address that. To make it very apparent that the current status quo isn’t effective in dealing with changed times. What the existence of the PLF points out, thematically, is that there’s a huge chunk of Japan’s population (we’re talking about 17k people and those were just the ones that got arrested) that is dissatisfied with the current status quo, with quirk laws and the present social hierarchy. With this I’m not saying that the Liberation army has a point and should be allowed to have their way with their fucked up quirk elitist bullshit. But the fact that so many people bought into an anti-establishment ideology (one that posed such a big threat that the HPSC literally had to stage a military assassination to kill the revolt in the womb) proves that the system as it currently is, isn’t fit to regulate society as effectively as it might’ve done in the past. The fact that so many Liberation cultists were heroes themselves shows that heroism needs to change, if terrorists managed to slip into their ranks without anyone noticing. Quirk laws need to change to adapt and correct the social inequality that leads to the birth of well... for lack of a better word, fascist groups from becoming prominent.

In other words, just because the existence of the hero system makes it look from the outside like everything’s fine and dandy and people are safe and protected, that doesn’t mean that’s the truth. Which, ironically enough, is something that Shigaraki has been telling Deku from the start:

People are able to smile and to be carefree even as a villain is literally holding a child hostage in front of their eyes because the existence of heroes lulled them into a false sense of safety. As Dabi would say, they’ve become “thoughtless”, they stopped thinking critically because they believe in a superior state of things that will protect them no matter what. And that blind faith is exactly what needs dismantling, because it was what caused all the core league to fall through the cracks, slipping unnoticed and forgotten about.

If the kids want to build a society that’s actually fair, a society where people like Shigaraki won’t fall prey to villainy, they need to correct the way they think about heroes and about villains alike. They need to redefine what “saving” means, and they need to finally open their eyes and realize that what HPSC has done till now was just putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.

Until that change happens, the league cannot be saved, and thus there can be no solving of the thematic knot of the story.

[thyandrawrites]

People often discuss how Dabi's personal agenda brings him apart from the lov, bringing it up as the perfect example of how little they actually cooperate, but like. I feel like one argument they always fail to make when mentioning that is that Dabi has always had Shigaraki's okay to do so.

When people say that Dabi "doesn't care about the League", they often take it to mean that he acts against orders and ghosts them to avoid duty. But that's completely fanon...? Please don't forget that this panel exists.

Dabi literally checked with Tomura before he went off to do his own thing and Tomura let him.

That is trust.

Do you really think that Shigaraki would've let Dabi be the Vanguard Leader if he had so little faith that Dabi could act as a good second in command to vouch for Shigaraki's will when Shigaraki himself wasn't on the frontlines?

Or have we forgotten that Dabi has literally never been shown to act against Shigaraki's orders, either?

Let's do a recap. Training camp arc: Dabi successfully kidnaps Bakugou with minor losses on their side, and - ironically - he only loses the members who weren't sticking to the plan and went off on murdering sprees of their own. Shigaraki's first mission as a leader, the Usj attack, ended with a lot more losses on the League's ranks, not to mention the loss of the noumu he was entrusted with, also unlike Dabi. Just saying.

Chisaki's arc. Dabi was absent for most of it, true. But when he came back, he was literally on the frontlines again. He did his part in Snatches murder, even when we were later told he had some amounts of regrets over orphaning families.

Machia's arc. Dabi was, once again, there on the frontlines. His flames were useless against the giant, so it makes perfect sense when he told Shigaraki he wanted quits. Remember, Dabi's prolonged use of his quirk burns him. This wasn't Dabi not caring about helping. This was Dabi realizing that he was more useful elsewhere. Like recruiting Hawks, who he thought was an helpful asset for the league at the time. And again. Shigaraki let him.

Plf arc. Dabi gets dragged back. He shows reluctance about being pitted against an army, and I mean, who the fuck wouldn't? Let's be real. They were only six vs thousands. And Dabi is painfully aware of his own limits, so much so that he avoids fights whenever possible. But he sticks around all the same, and fights seriously too. Dabi. Who is all like "I don't care about your personal feelings". "Why do I have to fight them". "I don't care about the League". That Dabi. He stayed, and he fought.

Dabi, who still gets to be a leader even after Shigaraki's ranks expand, because he still has Shigaraki's trust.

Current war arc. Dabi, who is still painfully aware of his limits, goes back for Twice. Let's not forget here that Hawks has been taught to fight with his eyes closed since he was a child. Meanwhile Dabi has no hand-to-hand combat skills and can only rely on a quirk that burns him when he uses it for too long. That Dabi still went up against a Hawks at full power. Hawks who had all his feathers, and could still arrest him in his sleep. For Twice. When Dabi's prior precedent for trying to fight Hawks and Endeavor was waiting for them to have a foot in the grave. When Dabi literally had no reason to even march back to where Jin was, because there was a war outside that he was meant to fight. I mean, sure, some might argue that he was there to settle some kind of score with Hawks and nothing else. But then why going out of his way to reassure Twice? Why the high five, why the reminder that Toga and Compress were counting on him? Those are not typical things Dabi does. He's not buddy-buddy. Those were done for Jin's benefit, because Dabi saw how distressed he was.

So. Newsflash, Dabi does actually care about the League. And he IS cooperative, even if he bitches and moans about it. That doesn't mean that he's not also a lone wolf, or a rude asshole, or that he doesn't have an agenda of his own. It just means that Shigaraki is aware of it, and that is fine with him.

And before anyone argues with that, too. Let me remind you of another important panel:

Shigaraki is absolutely the kind of leader who lets his underlings pursue their own goals.

When Spinner showed doubts about his leadership, Tomura didn't force him to stay in the League. Rather, he showed him better leadership, and gave him a reason to stay.

Hell, he never even forced Bakugou to join their ranks. Sure, he kidnapped him. But then he also untied him and gave him a chance to speak up for himself, and when everyone else protested, Shigaraki reminded them that they should've treated Bakugou as an equal, if they wanted him to be one of them. Basically, he gave Bakugou the choice of expressing his wants (when the heroes chained him up to a podium and forced him to take a medal he didn't want).

So. All of this to say... People want to think that Dabi is a lot more independent and self-reliant than he actually is, but I feel like in doing so they not only mischaracterize him, but Shigaraki as well.

[thyandrawrites]

I haven’t cried since my tear ducts got burned

or: The good of the many vs the existence of the Others: aka what the foiling between Dabi, Hawks and Shigaraki tells us about hero society’s bias on victimhood

Alright, so I’ve been seeing a lot of confusion and unrest in the fandom ever since 267 dropped and Dabi claimed that he doesn’t care about the League, so I decided I’d wear my meta hat and go over the reasons why we’re not meant to take his words to heart there. 

It’s not just that he was lying or that he was being sarcastic. It’s deeper than that, and it touches a few thematic points of bnha as a whole, so it’s worth exploring past the very obvious reading, which is that he’s grieving and he’s angry and he’s not in his right mind. I’ll also go over the shift in his agenda, and the symbolic reason behind his inability to cry. So, without further ado, let’s delve into it. (under a cut for length)

1. Hawks and Dabi are foils. Two sides of the same coin. 

Alright, so a few people might’ve forgotten this detail, with everything that’s happening right now. It’s understandable. So allow me to remind you about this very important key for reading both their actions. 

Foiling is a technique that writers use to draw parallels between two characters. Sometimes those parallels are perfect overlappings, sometimes they work as sharp contrasts between the two. This is used to highlight certain sides of said characters, be it personality traits or mentality / goals / ethics.

So, Dabi and Hawks are foils. How so?

Both are light haired little kids who were completely helpless to change their fate. Both were raised in environments where the choice of what to do with their future was taken away from them by the authority figures in their lives. Both were trained since a very young age, and both were only valued for the heroic potential of their quirks. These are the things that overlap. But there’s also things that position them on two very opposite sides of the same spectrum. While Touya “died” and got free, Keigo remained in his cage. While Touya willingly gave up his name and formed a new identity that gave him meaning, Keigo was forced to give up his and was handed a new identity that depersonalized him. So when Dabi became an agent of societal change, Hawks became the very tool that’s charged with the goal of upkeeping the status quo. 

So, they’re two sides of the same coin. What does this tell us about them, and why is it important now? 

Hawks’ narration informs us that he “doesn’t let sentiment trip him up” in order to carry out his goal. He fully believes this, to the point that it’s only when Dabi reminds him of his civilian persona, the identity he was made to leave behind, that Hawks finally goes for the kill. 

The intent here is clear. Up until this point, Hawks was toeing the line between his own personal wishes and his duty as a hero. We see the two sides of him battle each other. He selfishly wants to capture Jin alive, and tries everything in his power to incapacitate him so that he doesn’t have to kill him. Something that’s worth mentioning here again is that here Jin serves as a physical narrative tool to show us Hawks’ personal wishes. Jin is everything Hawks is not allowed to be by the Hpsc. Jin is free. Jin can relax and “sit back with a nice cold one”. Jin has friends. Jin is valued not for how useful he is to his comrades, but as a person. Jin is what Hawks would be if he wasn’t made to become a hero. However, “Takami Keigo” is no more. Takami Keigo is not allowed to exist, because he gave up that identity, and his duty here is to be The Winged Hero Hawks. 

So, as my friend Linkspooky pointed out in her own meta lately, when Hawks goes for the kill, Hawks is not only a victim screwing up another victim, he’s also making the conscious choice to perpetuate the system - and in doing so, he’s also killing his old identity and the part of himself that wants things in order to be who he needs to be for the job. Because the greater good is more important than his personal wishes. 

How does this relate to Dabi? Well. There is a clear parallelism at play here: just like Hawks tells himself he doesn’t let himself be tripped up by sentiments in order to carry out his goal, Dabi is pretending he hasn’t grown attached to the League because he’s only there to carry out his ultimate revenge against hero society and his dad. 

Both are characters who left something behind in order to be who they needed to be. Hawks, his real self, with all his wishes attached. Dabi, his family and everything else that can distract him from his revenge. 

Just like Hawks, Dabi is not a very upfront character. Both characters repress and compartmentalize a lot, but they just express this in two opposite ways. Dabi by projecting his own self-hatred onto his dad, and Hawks by constantly punishing himself instead and by throwing away the key of his own cage. One's hatred is directed outwards and the other inwards but they're the same feelings of inadequacy, because they are foils. 

Both of them are aware that their methods are wrong on a purely ethical level, but they push that self-awareness to the back of their minds, because their objectives are noble in theory. Hawks is sacrificing himself to take down the league even if it makes him a scummy hero, so that there can be a real peace and heroes can have leisure time. And Dabi is constantly burning his own body to take down fake heroes, even if he had to make his family mourn him to gain freedom, so that there can be a society with no heroes, a place where corruption doesn't exist anymore. Both mindset are flawed, and both are trying to cure a disease by working on the symptoms rather than the causes. And both repress and compartmentalize the things that get in the way of achieving those goals. 

So on the one hand, you have Hawks killing the part of himself he sees reflected in Twice, and punishing himself for wanting things by cutting  short the life of the only person who saw him as a human being and not a tool. On the other hand, you have Dabi insisting that he doesn’t give a shit about the people around him, both allies and enemies, even if caring too much about the family he left behind is exactly the reason why he went crazy. He also keeps inflicting his same fate by burning people to a crisp, subconsciously mimicking the violence and lack of tolerance for weakness or “unworthiness” he was brought up with, in a way essentially punishing the people who remind him of his weak, defenseless past self. 

2. Dabi cannot cry since he “died” because hero society didn't allow him to be a victim. 

So. Dabi being unable to cry can, of course, be just read literally. He bears the scars for it, and it makes sense that he got out of the incident with a few disabilities. However, given the context where we are first informed of it, this serves also as symbolic commentary. 

There is a certain theme at play in bnha. The people we get to witness Deku saving are always little children crying and begging for help. First, Bakugou during the sludge villain incident. Deku only jumps into action when he recognizes him and sees the frustrated, terrified tears in his eyes. 

He later even tells him that the reason he couldn't wait for the right hero to come to the rescue was exactly that: he thought Bakugou had the face of someone who was begging for help. 

From then on, this theme is repeated. We see Kouta crying and hiding behind Deku when the threat of Muscular, the man who killed his parents, comes up. We see Deku refuse to let go a terrified, glossy-eyed Eri and almost screw up the whole operation, and we later see Deku reach out a hand for a sobbing Eri who's desperate to be given a better option than succumb to her abuser.

Crying as a visual narrative tool for invoking help from the heroes is very much a theme in bnha. And it's always small children who do it. Because when a hero sees a small child crying, how can they turn down their help? We are told that this is exactly what heroics boils down to. 

However, we are also told that there are kids who don't get saved. Children that hero society overlooks, and who later end up falling through the cracks. Todoroki Touya was one of them. 

The fact that two of the main villains in bnha, Shigaraki and Dabi, share eerily similar backstories that unequivocally point out the flaws of the Hero system is not coincidental. Both were left to fend off on their own against their respective abusers, both were overlooked by the heroes who should've come to their help when they were small kids crying and begging for help, and both ended up as the main protagonists of their respective tragedies as a result of the heroes’ negligence. 

We are told that Shimura Tenko lived in a neighborhood that was overflowing with heroes. Yet, no one saw the signs of the abuse he lived through daily at the hands of his father. No one was there to prevent the horrible consequences of his quirk activating for the first time. And most importantly, no one was there to offer him shelter and emotional stability in the aftermath of losing all his closest relatives in a blood bath that is on par with a scene straight out of a war zone. Worse yet, adults saw the signs of ptsd on little Tenko's face when he was left to roam the streets in search of a helping hand, and still left him vulnerable to Afo's kidnapping because they counted on heroes to show up. Eventually. They saw a clearly distressed child and didn't even make sure he was looked after while they waited for the heroes to be less busy. The reason why Tenko was kidnapped by Afo and later became a murderer is intentional negligence by the heroes. 

This is a repeated theme in bnha. 

Remember when Bakugou was left to fend off the Sludge villain for minutes on end, even as he was literally being choked and fought to stay conscious, and all the heroes on the scene stood there, unmoving, just waiting for someone else to handle it? 

In a world where there is a surplus of heroes and not enough villains to justify it, it's only normal that heroes lose sight of what heroics should actually be about - putting your life on the line and doing the scary thing that would scare away everyone else, but could potentially save lives - and instead regard heroics as a purely transactional job, an intersection between demand and supply that needs to meet certain criteria in order to unlock the heroes’ help. 

We know that Hori wants us to pick up on this theme because it's presented over and over. The fact that heroics as a whole, as a profession and as an ideal, has been corrupted so deeply, is stated as part of bnha’s worldbuilding. 

It's thanks to this fundamental fallacy, this fundamental negligence, that things like the public’s ignorance of Endeavor's domestic violence can be explained away. 

Shigaraki tells us what’s the psychological mechanism at play here. “Heroes will come to rescue me,” says Deku, someone who has blind faith in hero society. “No they will not. Look at how many fucks they give about you,” says Shigaraki, someone who literally has been in that same position. Waiting for heroes to notice his distress. And was left alone.

I’ve seen people brush Shigaraki and his rightful claims off by virtue of the fact that Shigaraki is a ruthless killer. But it’s exactly because Shigaraki wasn’t born as one, that his words hold meaning. Shigaraki here works as a signifier of just how people fall through the cracks in the first place: because everyone, including heroes, feel too comfortable in their own bubbles. In an age where heroes are constantly patrolling the streets, or punching up bad guys at every corner, or smiling back at you on tv show or maxi digital screens in the middle of town, no one expects evil to lurk out in the open. Sitting at a mall, holding a deadly hand on Deku’s throat. Because All Might’s catchy phrase “I am here” made them constantly feel protected. Watched over. This way they can walk by Shigaraki and Deku and not notice a single thing wrong. They can turn a blind eye because they were taught that someone else is handling it, that someone else is watching. 

But we know that’s not true. Otherwise cases like Shigaraki’s wouldn’t exist.

So. If civilians are turning a blind eye, and heroes are busy watching civilians and villains, who is keeping watch on the heroes? 

This kind of fallacy is exactly how Todoroki Enji could get away with domestic abuse without anyone noticing for more than 22 years. No one, including heroes, ever bothers questioning why Todoroki, a flame user, has a burn scar on his face. No one questions why Todoroki has a very obvious grudge against his (hero) dad, despite being his pupil. Despite having every reason to look up to him as a role model. No one questions that Enji might not be a good dad, not even after they witness the obvious, not even hidden tension between father and son. All Might even obliviously asks him for parenting advice once. And wait for it, it gets better. Rei’s room at the hospital she’s been locked up in for the past ten years has a plaque on the door that reads Mrs. Todoroki. Right there in plain sight for everyone to see. Yet no one ever questions it. Todoroki Touya died young, very likely as a result of Enji's actions and choices, and to this day, even though Enji openly admits to his culpability, even if his own children still can't forgive him for it, he has yet to be held accountable for it by the public at large. The public who a few months ago, back in december, crowned him the number one hero and symbolic heir of All Might, the person who can beat up bad guys and keep everyone (but his own son) safe. 

If no one expects Endeavor to be an abuser, it goes without saying that no one recognizes Touya’s status as a victim, too. By denying his victimhood, they also deny him his right to be a crying child begging to be saved. They doomed him to die alone instead, and be snuffed out by his own fire. While his father walked away without any legal consequence, and was free to finally reach the goal he abused his kid for, becoming number one. 

So. Dabi cannot cry - both literally and symbolically - ever since his tear ducts burned up when he “died”. This is when the thematic transformation began. By “dying”, he also stopped being a victim altogether. He became one of the punishers instead. An adult who cannot cry, and who turns on the evils that wronged him and left him to deal with his demons alone. Aka corrupt heroes. Like Endeavor. Like Hawks. 

The fact that Dabi cannot cry, but also refuses to show sadness when Hawks murders his friend in front of him, is relevant as more than a simple statement about his disabilities. It’s also a symbolic way for Hori to make a point on a deeper level. 

I talked in point 1 about how Hawks is a violent tool put there to guard the continued existence of the current status quo. In this post here I explained why more in detail. But basically: when he takes Jin down, Hawks dehumanizes him. He refuses to listen to Jin’s words, refuses to see him as person and understand his point of view. When Jin begs and tries to reason with him that the league is what gave him a home and understanding, that the league is not the faceless monster Hawks thinks they are, Hawks shoots the clones down with his feathers. 

What we can take away from this is pretty straightforward. Hawks the hero cannot empathize with villains, because empathizing means seeing his own share of responsibilities. It means accepting that hero society is not as righteous as he claims it to be, and if he starts thinking of it that way, he cannot be a tool for the system anymore. He’d lose his entire remaining sense of identity. So what he does instead is sticking to self-absolution. Intentional negligence. He refuses to see Jin’s begging and crying, and keeps holding a sword to his throat. Comply, or I’ll have to kill you. Because Jin’s personal feelings don’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. 

By trying to force Jin to reintegrate with the society that casted him out and sent him spiraling, without acknowledging that hero society did those things to him, Hawks is pushing for a reading of this whole affair that justifies his own actions - but not Jin’s. What Hawks is saying is that villains are people who choose to be monsters. They are not victims. Jin is the only good egg, because he is a good man, uncorrupted, but if he resists him, if he doesn’t wanna be wiped clean by the heroes “justice” then Jin also becomes a subversive element that needs to be taken down. See what’s happening? Jin’s victimhood can be entirely stripped away from him the moment it inconveniences the upkeep of the status quo. 

So when Dabi cannot cry in front of Hawks - Hawks who once again, is a symbol of the hero society he’s defending - it’s not just because he’s physically unable to. But also because hero society didn’t let him stay a victim, either, and instead stripped that helplessness away from him, painted him as an unfeeling, bloodthirsty monster, until Dabi eventually became one. 

3. It’s the Heroes’ fault / There are no real Heroes

Once again, Hori is intentionally drawing a parallel between Dabi and Shigaraki here. 

There is Dabi who cannot cry to express his grief and there is Shigaraki who cannot mourn because he’s wearing the hands of his victims on his body. 

There are two kids who weren’t rescued when they needed heroes the most, and there are two kids who end up hating heroics as a whole as a result of being left behind. Shigaraki hates All Might’s “I am here” catchphrase because All Might wasn’t there to save him. Dabi hates the rhetoric that heroes rescue people, because even heroes who are famous for being the types to rescue others, arbitrarily decide to label people like him and Twice as ruthless monsters that need to be taken down. 

Those smiles are a rebellion in their own right. They refuse to comply to the expectations of hero society. Hawks’ words when he faults Dabi for not showing sadness show once again how much he dehumanizes him. He literally just killed Dabi’s friend, and five seconds later he bitches to Dabi for not mourning according to easily understandable standards. 

What they end up embracing is instead a violent form of lashing out. While it’s certainly true that both their narratives address the flaws of the hero system and directly call out on screen the consequences of those flaws, the consequences Dabi and Shigaraki embody, it’s also true that neither one of them is actively looking for social revolution. It’s quite the opposite. What they’re seeking out is the violent destruction of the status quo. 

Shigaraki wants to destroy everything he doesn’t like (with the sole exception of the things his friends like). Dabi wants to rid the world of heroes. 

I waited for the official scans to check because they’re usually more reliable in terms of nuance, and Dabi says “there are no true heroes”. There is a significant shift in Dabi’s agenda here - or there seems to be, according to Caleb’s translation. Before this arc, Dabi’s vengeance was fully directed at fake heroes. The corrupt kind. The heroes “riddled with holes” according to a different past translation. Back then, Dabi’s words sounded more like the vendetta you’d expect from a guy who had a grudge against a single person. As a matter of fact, I did write several posts myself about how I thought (and still think) that back then Stain’s ideology was just a front for him. it gave him a good reason to go after his dad, but that was it. I don’t think he was doing it for a bigger goal other than killing Endeavor, not even for his family, because if societal change was really what he wanted… well, he could’ve easily destroyed hero society by revealing his identity forever ago. 

I’ve said this before, but Dabi is a character who relishes in having the upper hand over his opponents. He shows this by shouting out their full names in front of them, showcasing that he knows something that the other doesn’t. Dabi is a character who is purposefully and consistently shown to hold his trump card close to his chest, because he is aware that it gives him an advantage. Dabi knows his own weaknesses all too well. He knows he cannot overpower his enemies by relying on brute strength alone - it’s why he often only barges into a fight when he either has an easy way out or a clear advantage. He did this with Hawks too, waiting until Hawks was “tripped up by his personal feelings” to catch him off guard and gain the (momentary) upper hand. His awareness of his own weaknesses is exactly what makes him rely on his smarts and on strategy. 

Right now, Dabi is quite literally the most dangerous character in bnha. The information he keeps to himself is so powerful it could undo hero society. He could  destroy the status quo any moment if he were to reveal that the number one is a violent domestic abuser who killed him, and that similarly the number two hero is also a murderer who not only killed a villain on the job (something we were expressly told heroes aren’t supposed to do), but also sacrificed the beloved Best Jeanist, a fellow “good guy”. 

Yet, he never before now made use of that information. Had he wanted to truly expose the hero system for a violent police state that uses armed oppression of dissent by design to upkeep its privilege, he could’ve easily done that ages ago. All he’d have to do was gain notoriety as a villain and then tell the League who he was. Yet, he kept that card close to his chest because he presumably only wanted to reveal it in his showdown with his father. 

Until now. 

This is a pivotal change for his character. 

When he says “there are no real heroes” he is denying that there can be good heroes, the ones who aren’t fake, ones that actually do save people. He’s saying that everyone is the same. They’re all corrupt, because they all work to preserve a system that lets people like Jin die. People like Todoroki Touya die. And I mean. He’s right. 

This is a Dabi who just went through the shock of seeing Hawks kill someone. And with this I don’t mean that Dabi trusted him. We know he didn’t buy that Hawks was a villain sympathizer from the start. He knew Hawks only wanted in as a spy. We don’t know why he let him join, possibly just to exploit him, but I also think Dabi did seriously not see this coming. 

Before this plot twist, it can be noted that Dabi’s way of interacting with Hawks aligns perfectly with how he addresses other pro heroes, not fellow villains. With the league, he’s rude, dismissive, he insults them plenty. When he is talking to Hawks, though, he’s chatty, jeering, smiling. He taunts Hawks by telling him Hawks saves people like all heroes are supposed to do instead of proving to Dabi that he is actual villain material. 

Dabi thought Hawks was a hero through and through, and didn’t trust him as a result, exactly because Hawks was the type of heroes who always made sure to save everyone. 

When Dabi attacked Hawks from his blind spot, he was counting on Hawks to get Jin out of the way. This wasn’t him just being careless with the league’s lives. This was him getting an accurate if partial reading of Hawks. Hawks was trained to always prioritize saving people. What Dabi does not expect is for Hawks to be trained to be little else but a tool. 

It’s only when Hawks gets unmasked as another fake hero, just like his dad, keeping a front of moral rectitude only to hide the skeletons in his closet, that Dabi finally shifts. He no longer wants to rid society of fake heroes. He wants to rid it of heroes altogether. This way, he basically aligns himself with Shigaraki’s agenda. Much like him, he’s not preaching for selective cleansing or societal change. Hawks’ life doesn’t matter to him anymore. No one else’s life matters to him anymore. He wants the indiscriminate destruction of the status quo, and he positions himself as the first domino piece to set off that chain reaction. Sure, he might think that a factory reset might eventually lead to a change, to a better society emerging from the ashes of the corrupt one, but for the moment, his goal aligns with Shigaraki’s. It’s destructive, not constructive. 

Hawks, like the society he represents, denied Dabi his victimhood and then doomed the whole league to die by choosing not to save the one guy who was arguably the least villainous of them all. 

Dabi responds by finally embracing his role as a destabilizer. He reveals his trump card, his real name, and relishes in the final upper hand he has over Hawks.

Shigaraki said: “The king has returned”. 

Dabi says: “You should’ve kept both eyes on me.” 

Both are destroyers, and both have legit reasons to turn against hero society. 

4. Dabi wasn’t there when Magne died.

We finally reach the last point! 

Magne’s death, bloody and graphic as it was, served the narrative purpose of finally cementing the league as a unit, fighting together for the same goal. It also served the purpose of letting Shigaraki grow into the leader he is today. Someone who doesn’t let his friends behind, and someone who makes his enemies pay for hurting his comrades. 

The point of interest here is that Dabi was absent during her death. This was significant plot-wise, because removing Dabi from that gorey sight, and from the emotional bonding amongst the League that followed, Horikoshi meant to draw him apart from them, to make him go off on his own on occasions, to show us that he had a different goal that Shigaraki didn’t share. 

This time, the reverse is happening. When Twice, the core of league, is killed in a gorey bloodbath by an external agent coming there to disrupt the League’s unity, Dabi is the only person present to witness it. 

My guess is that this was not done by chance. It’s Dabi’s turn to let the loss of a comrade make him grow. Possibly grow closer to the league, too, and finally share his goal with Shigaraki. But it’s definitely his screentime. Quite likely also Tomura’s, given the huge amount of narrative foiling between them I just went over, as well as the fact that Shigaraki has been markedly absent from all the action so far. 

Predictions? I don’t dare making any yet. It’s a bit too soon to delve my toes in the theory pot anyway. But whatever is the direction Hori intends to take this… with this amount of foiling at play... there’s one thing I can say for sure. It’s gonna be even more intense from now on. 

[thyandrawrites]

I'm glad that you are able to return to doing things you enjoy! I can completely understand how draining it can be not doing them for awhile. I look forward to the zines and wip you're workin on! I was curious if you'd be willin to do a meta on the dynamics that the lov have w/ each other. I'm still tryin to play catch up with the manga, but they have my soul atm. I'm workin on a few wip as well as an LoV au, n' I wanted to know your input. (if u can, THANK U, if not, 100% understandable)

Hey there! Thank you for being so nice :’) I’m glad you’re enjoying the content I put on this blog.

Anyway, to answer your question. Simply put, the League has very deliberate found family dynamics. I think that’s the reason why so many fans warmed up to them once they actually got an arc of their own. Cause they’re not just cruel bad guys, they’re complex and layered individuals fighting for things that we can actually empathize with, and whose struggles that make them grow closer to each other are always portrayed on screen with lots of depth.

Basically, the Lov is set up as a group of outcasts - all the people that don’t fit in hero society or who for one reason or another fell through the cracks. Putting aside guys like Muscular, Moonfish and Mustard, who were all some degree of unsympathetic (and in fact were removed from the core League early on), everyone is pretty much a victim of their circumstances. Not only that, but they also are often part of some kind of marginalized group.

(from here on, I talk about manga events so please keep that in mind if you don’t wanna get spoilers)

Starting from Shigaraki, he was the son of a strictly controlling patriarch first and later became the brainwashed heir to a crime empire. He was gaslighted into believing he exists to destroy and kept away from human touch for all his formative years.

There’s Toga who was called monstrous by her own family, who couldn’t understand her fascination for blood and her wish to explore a part of her identity, her quirk.

There’s Dabi, whose disability brings new focus to the theme of quirk incompatibility with one's body. His backstory has yet to be confirmed, but he also so very clearly holds a grudge against heroes as rescuers, because he wasn’t saved.

There’s Twice who dropped out from school at 16 to work to sustain himself when he lost his family, and who was pushed into villainy by a series of misfortunes ranging from poverty, loneliness, and lack of empathy from the law enforcers who saddled him with an unfair criminal record.

There’s Spinner who was a hikikomori (a shut-in) because the prejudice and hate he suffered as a heteromorph (and as a weak one to boot) made him lose all aspirations in life and fall in a depressive slump.

There’s Magne, a trans woman who experienced discrimination, who became a villain to fight for a world that would accept her for who she was.

There’s Kurogiri who should’ve never ended up the way he did, if only people had paid more attention to youths and how to better pace their development to wait until they were ready to take on dangerous situations.

And there’s Compress… Admittedly we don’t know much about him, but allegedly lost status or wealth, since he pretty much still acts like it.  

The reason behind this wordy introduction is simple. The League is where all these mismatched people found a place to belong, a group of individuals who were equally broken or equally determined to lash out against the establishment that ruined their life and then didn't help them when they most needed it. One thing I find interesting about them is that despite the fact that they did have a goal at the beginning of the story, it has changed and evolved with time, the longer they spent with each other and got challenged by their losses.

Compare all the above with how they evolved:

Shigaraki did become Afo’s heir, but also rejected his will; he chose to be his own master, and to use his new power for his own goals. He also rejected the kind of leadership Afo wanted him to embrace. Shigaraki doesn't lead the Lov like Afo did with his crime network; he's not a puppeteer behind the scenes. He’s always fighting on the frontlines along with the rest of his comrades, and often he’s bearing the brunt of the attack to shield them. Think of how during the highway scene after Chisaki’s arrest, Shigaraki chose to be the distraction, charging the police car (and the only hero there) head on to give the others room to stop the convoy.

At the beginning of the story, Shigaraki was very much a detached sort of leader. He bossed people around and threw fits when things didn’t go according to his plans. He still charged head on, but Afo’s influence on him was clear, because he didn’t think of his comrades as valuable people, only assets to defeat a boss.

That has changed drastically after Magne’s death. That loss made him face the reality that he was still lacking as a leader, and he grew immensely from it. Not only he devised a plan to destroy Chisaki’s empire by exploiting their “alliance”, but he also chose to do so specifically for his comrade’s sakes.

A far cry from the brat who let dozens of low-rank villains get arrested at USJ cause they’d already served the purpose of acting as decoy.

Shigaraki’s character growth is the best one depicted in the manga imho. A lot of his character is defined by his interactions with his peers. He’s like a sponge because he’s constantly absorbing things - both from his allies and from his enemies - and making them his new strengths.

What I find interesting about him is that Afo's gaslighting hasn't undone who he is deep down. Tenko was an aspiring hero and someone who made sure to include all the kids when he played, leaving no one out. Those traits of his show through to this day. A lot of the time, I feel like fans glide through the fact that Shigaraki isn't at all a bossy leader anymore. In fact, he keeps his comrade's wishes and complaints in mind at all times.

I think this misconception came from the fact that when he's challenged by an enemy he dislikes, he always retaliates tenfold until he completely destroys them by taking what matters most to them (he did this with Chisaki by stealing the quirk erasing drug, his life's work, and his hands, the only thing that made him a leader. He also did this with Redestro, dusting the tower that symbolized his power and dominance from above, and stealing his empire & network for himself).

But… with his comrades, he's not like that. We've seen him face insubordination twice so far, and he always took it stride without even getting mad.

When Twice and Toga threatened him after hearing that he planned on continuing the alliance with Chisaki even after Magne's death, Shigaraki replied evenly, with confidence, showing that he had thought of their feelings and this wasn't a rash, detached kind of decision. He had a plan, and he didn't intend on letting Magne's death mean nothing to him. For a character so greatly impacted by loss from a very young age (whose given name literally means "mourning"), you can probably gather why for yourself.

Another insubordination he faces calmly is Spinner's.

He lets him grab his collar and scream at him and he barely blinks. He doesn't make excuses, either. At this point, the Lov was broke and homeless, on the run with nowhere to crash, they'd just lost Kurogiri and any sense of purpose. It's not like Shigaraki acts brilliant and pretends like this was all part of the plan. Or that he urges Spinner to stay with them despite his doubts that they're after a goal anymore. Cause to Shigaraki, the rest of the League is a bunch of people with free wills. He does give them orders as any leader should, but at the end of the day, he's also always allowed them to have goals of their own.

On this topic, here's a post on why he's also cool with Dabi & Toga having separate agendas that don't align with his desire for systemic destruction. You could also argue that this chill and lax attitude towards leadership is also a subconscious way of rejecting Afo’s upbringing. Afo was controlling even when he set things out to make Shigaraki feel like he was taking his own decisions. Shigaraki is pretty much the opposite.

He even changed his own purpose a little (“destroying everything”) to account for Toga’s personal goal (“destroying everything except the things my comrades want to keep”). That’s because Shigaraki is aware that the League is a bunch of people that doesn’t really fit in anywhere else in hero society.

This found family aspect is also shown in a lot of other things. For example, it’s Toga finding true friends who accept her for who she is in the other League members. We are told early on that quirks are just another body function. Yet, hero society found Toga’s to be monstrous and demanded she repress it and forced her to wear a mask of normalcy that ended up only amplifying her desire for violent rebellion.

The thing about treating a kid like a monster all the time, is that at some point that kid is gonna believe you and start acting like one. What is labeled as “Insanity” in her case is just the reflection of the dehumanization that the adults in her life subjected her to.

As pointed out here, Toga is not an unsympathetic, bloodthirsty demon. She’s a layered individual, and she’s the protagonist of the the most empathetic scene of the story. It’s not a coincidence that she only ever shows that more human side when she’s with other lov members, while she is perceived as freaky and crazy by people on the hero side. Because hero society only ever treated her with violence, while the lov gave her a safe space to explore her identity without judgement. As a result, she treats the rest of the lov with kindness and acceptance too. This prompts her character development.

Toga’s character revolves around the theme of connection. As stated above, she never really fit in. She had no friends, and her own family shunned her. What happened then was that she internalized that to have connections, she needs to suppress her identity and take up a new one. She killed her classmate, Saito, in middle school because he was popular, smiling and friendly and she wanted to be like him. People, and children in particular, tend to copy the behaviours they perceive as successful, because emulation is part of a child’s normal process of learning the world. Hers is... an extreme case of emulation that ends up becoming literal because of the way her quirk works.

Without going too deep about it, basically suppression of the self is freedom to her because she can fit in better than when she tries to be “normal” as herself. This is shown in particular when she manifests jealousy towards Ochako as the subject of Deku’s trust. She too wants to be trusted unconditionally like Ochako is. Her character basically boils down to her desire to be close to the person she loves, the person she has a strong connection to.

The lov was the first group of individuals who never tried to mold her into something she wasn’t, and you can see how this impacts the way she forms connections with people. With Twice, she was able to form a meaningful relationship with another person that didn’t revolve around her obsession for blood, and that was full of empathy and companionship.

Now, I could go on and explain how the League is thematically the place that gives belonging and legitimacy to all the lov’s members reasons to resent hero society. I could because there’s so much more to say, particularly in regards to Twice & how Hawks fits in that, but it’s too hot to keep typing this on my pc without any a/c, sorry XD brain melty

The short version is that the lov is deliberately written as a group of outsiders - each in their own light - and each one of them explores a different ramification of the failures of hero society. The bonds that they form with each other then are not just born out of necessity, but often become a rebellion in and of itself. When Hawks then tried to pry them apart by offering Twice the chance of reformation in jail, he also unconsciously repeated the abuse they suffered at the hands of hero society: splitting them apart into “good” and “bad” victims, people who could still be saved and hopeless cases, when the truth is that none of them should’ve become a villain in the first place, if only heroes had been more competent and noticed the cracks of the system sooner. 

[thyandrawrites]

mmh... I’m not convinced at all that shiggi is gonna be the series big bad. for one, because afo never actually trained him to be his successor. actually, afo did everything in his power to stunt shigaraki’s growth and make him as dependant on him as possible. secondly, and most importantly, because while it’s certainly true that bnha is a story about passing down the mantle to the new generation so that they can fix the mistakes of the previous one, nothing about deku and shigaraki’s narrative ever pointed in the direction that deku’s role was that of defeating shigaraki. it’d be pretty pointless if that was all there was to it imho. 

shigaraki having inherited afo’s quirk does not change any of the rules. it’s merely foiling for deku having aquired not only ofa, but also the predecessors’ powers. hori simply just evened out the playing field for their inevitable conflict later down the road, but if it had just been about simply winning against the league, hori wouldn’t have spent huge amounts of screentime detailing shigaraki’s character growth, both personal and as a leader. 

sure, if you only mean that shigaraki will be deku’s real challenge as a hero, and his main antagonist, then I agree. they are foils for a reason.

but before we start catastrophizing, I think it’s important to remember that deku’s journey as a hero has always been motivated by his desire to save people. not defeating big bads. 

and I think this chapter made it pretty clear: what tenko—and then shigaraki—only ever wanted was to be allowed his own personhood. yet his father and his family always denied him, always punished him for speaking up, for having goals, for refusing to let his voice and his ambitions be stifled. even then, little tenko clung to them, in much the same way deku clung to his own hero aspirations well into his adolescence, when he finally had a chance to meet his idol and ask him to give him that same chance of proving his personhood. Can I be a hero, too? even if I’m quirkless and everyone else keeps telling me that it’s hopeless and I’m delusional?

All might said no at first. then he saw izuku’s worth and changed his mind. 

all I’m saying is that—given how it’s been set up so far, and how deku has yet to be challenged with the question of what saving others really means for him specifically—I think that deku’s role is that of reaching out to shigaraki and do the same for him. 

you can be a hero in your own right, too. 

your aspirations matter. 

especially since this chapter also made it very clear that nana failed her grandson, too. she’d rather he stay dead and in eternal mourning, if it meant not becoming afo’s heir. can you imagine how stifling that is? to be denied until your dying breath (or lack thereof, since shigaraki isn’t even breathing)?

I think the best part of this chapter was how it proved all of them wrong about shigaraki. even afo, who tried to mould him into a feral killing machine. because no matter how nana tried to keep him from joining afo’s side, and no matter afo’s insistence that shigaraki is a symbol of terror, and that he’s made for destruction... the point still stands that shigaraki only ever had a smile to offer to the people who had so thoroughly and so mercilessly silenced him. 

he might not have “saved them with a smile”, but he most definitely forgave them with a smile. 

he is not afo. he never was and never will be.

[thyandrawrites]

After the most recent chapter, do you still believe Shigaraki can have redemption?

Short answer: yes. 

Long answer: the circumstances of his abuse haven't changed simply because he's now stronger. 

The fact that he accepted to inherit Afo’s quirk doesn’t take away his redeemability from him, because the entire point of Afo’s abuse was to mould Shigaraki into the perfect puppet he wanted Tenko to be. 

Let’s take a step back for a second. Remember this scene?

This is Shigaraki literally parroting the words Afo convinced him of. 

He says these things because he believes in them, but that doesn’t make them true. For one, because he’s an unreliable narrator. 

For those of you who never studied 20th century literature, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility is compromised. A good portion of 20th century fiction was dedicated to showing how the main character status often doesn’t equal credibility. For example, in the novel Zeno’s conscience (1923) by Italo Svevo, the MC is a neurotic nicotine addict who writes a memoir under the sugestion of his therapist, but his narration is fragmentary, interspersed with lies, because he doesn’t trust his doctor and he has lots of gaps in memories and often contradicts himself. So by the end of the novel, the reader is confused because we aren’t given a solid clue of what was true and what was false. We simply were offered Zeno’s point of view. 

But unreliable narrators don’t have to be that drastic. It can simply be someone who reads reality a certain way because they’ve been conditioned to read it that way. By virtue of being a character in a story, your point of view is limited and it encompasses just your experiences. 

To quote from wikipedia, one of the ways in which an unreliable narrator can be presented is through the trope of the madman: 

a narrator who is either only experiencing mental defense mechanisms, such as (post-traumatic) dissociation and self-alienation, or severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia or paranoia.

I’m not going to armchair diagnose Shigaraki with a mental health issue, but the very baseline reading of his character involves you to recognize he’s a seriously traumatized kid who was forced to adopt a series of coping methods to deal with the unaddressed grief from losing his family. This simply because Afo never brought him to a therapist, but rather had an interest in letting Shigaraki’s trauma remain as vivid and as crippling as possible, because it made moulding him into his obedient puppet easier. 

Afo literally admits on screen that he’s using Shigaraki’s trauma and his overwhelming guilt to keep him docile.

Why am I making this digression? Because when Shigaraki says “I killed dad because I wanted to,” that’s not Shigaraki acknowledging a truth. It’s Shigaraki narration showing sings of his lack of credibility. 

Afo forged for him a narrative in which Tenko was a bloodthirsty monster with a monstrous power lurking underneath his skin, waiting for release. But quirks don’t work that way. They’re not gods that require blood sacrifices to be kept docile. Quirks are just body functions. You don’t need to “feed” them anything. 

This sort of narrative, however, is very convenient for Afo because it makes Tenko a slave to his own uncontrollable power. If Tenko cannot control his quirk’s “hunger”, it goes without saying that he lives with the constant fear of killing people he’s close with. Of repeating the bloodbath. And of course little Tenko doesn’t want that.  

Are you starting to see it? This is how Afo kept Tenko himself docile. Who would want to stay close to a kid that’s that dangerous aside from Afo himself? Stay with me, Afo told him, because no one else in the society of heroes is gonna accept you for the bloodthirsty monster that you are. Only I am kind enough to love you even if you’re a disgusting murderer. 

Except, we are shown that this entire narrative of Shigaraki’s inherent monstrosity is bullshit. Better yet, it’s an abusive tactic. Designed spefically to prevent Shigaraki from ever wanting to get away from Afo’s control, and to make Shigaraki accept the role Afo chose for him. 

How do we know that it’s bullshit? well, because Tenko never actually showed that he felt any pleasure in taking lives. 

This was Tenko facing the father he supposedly “wanted to kill”. 

He’s crying, terrified out of his mind, asking for reassurance from his father, saying that he’s sorry, reaching out for help. 

Let’s not forget that his father was an abusive dickhead that hit Tenko every day. Yet Tenko still asks him for help. 

This is Shigaraki post-kidnapping when he was out on his first killing mission: 

Note how the hand that was supposed to “claim blood” and “follow his heart” closes in a fist and retracts instead of attacking. He’d just been hit in the face by those punks. He’s lying on the floor, nursing a swollen cheek. If he was a bloodthirsty monster, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill. Yet, just like after his father’s abuse, Tenko endures the violence without physically fighting back. Because he’s not actually a bloodthirsty monster. 

Note how it’s only after Afo shows disappointment in him that Tenko starts to say that he wants to kill. He’s literally convulsing on the floor at the perspect of using his quirk again, the quirk that — let’s not forget it — orphaned him in a traumatic bloodbath. Let’s also not forget that the first time he saw the severed hands of his victims he was assaulted with so much self-disgust that he puked and cried on the floor. 

This is not a symbol of terror who wants people to die. This is a toddler gaslighted into embracing violence by being fed manipulative lies about his supposed desire to kill. 

Even as an adult, he repeats on more than one occasion that destroying things doesn’t make him happy. It doesn’t make the nausea and the despair go away. 

He’s simply doing it because rage is the only coping method that Afo taught him. He has embraced his role as the symbol of terror not because there’s something inherently monstrous about him, but because Afo purposefully raised him to embrace it. 

Even now, Shigaraki’s still following in Afo’s footsteps, constantly trying to make his Sensei proud, because he’s still under Afo’s abusive thumb. He has yet to break out of the gaslighting, or to see that Afo never cared about him, that Afo ruthlessly manipulated him for his own gain. 

From his (biased, unreliable) perspective, Afo is the only person who never denied his identity, who never tried to stop him from doing what he wanted. 

Except, that's false. Afo is unequivocally the most controlling person in Shigaraki's life. Even from Tartarus, Afo is still influencing Shigaraki's life, leaving “tasks” to be completed and “allies” for him to meet and exploit. Afo is still very much using that influence he has on Shigaraki's life to shape him into the kind of puppet he wants him to be.

He’s still dehumanizing him, still not even treating him as a human being, but only as a weapon that can be thrown at hero society to cause as much destruction as possible. Which brings me to the point I wanted to make to answer your original question: the same way Afo is doing all that, so is hero society. 

We are told pretty early on in the series that hero society has no intentions of sympathizing with Shigaraki. Times and times again, we are repeatedly informed that he's a manchild that lusts for destruction: 

In a grand show of Heroism, Gran Torino even completely abandons to his fate the grandson of his beloved colleague Nana. He sees no problem in letting him stay with the villainous mastermind that killed her, calling Shigaraki a bastard and a criminal instead of recognizing his victimhood. Implying that he deserves his fate because he chose to be a murderer for a living. 

In case that line of thinking doesn't read as bullshit to you by default, allow me to reiterate. Shigaraki didn’t choose to become a villain. He was kidnapped at age 5 by a centuries-old megalomaniac with a revenge scheme against All Might, and was raised in a basement secluded from all human contact for 15 years. The only times he was allowed to stay outside was when Afo forced him to kill. 

Shigaraki wouldn't be rampaging on heroes and dusting an entire city in a second, if heroes had bothered to rescue him from Afo at age 5. 

Heroes cannot simply wash their hands of him and pretend like villainy was ever a fully informed choice for him, not when he was groomed into it, raised with violence since a young age until he eventually normalized as a part of his life, the same way normal kids might normalize that bad behaviour ends up in getting grounded. Shigaraki was never punished for being violent. He was praised and encouraged to be. Again, because the environment he grew up in was not normal, but specifically tailored to be anything but. 

So when Gran Torino dismisses the fact that growing in an unhealthy, abusive environment might’ve affected Shigaraki's choices, he's essentially throwing him to the wolves. 

The bottom line here is clear: Hero Society isn't interested in sympathizing with Shigaraki's circumstances, because they want to believe the easier lie that Shigaraki is a monster. That Shigaraki longs for indiscriminate destruction, rather than address how it was possible for him to end up in Afo’s company in the first place. 

So they keep dehumanizing him and treating him like a dangerous object, an it, 

a “thing”

And even when they're informed that he's undergoing a clinical death procedure that the heroes now interrupted, putting his survival at stake, they don't even care about making sure that he breathes or that his heart beats again

because destroying the threat he poses is more important than preventing his death: 

And how is Shigaraki supposed to choose “good” morals over “bad ones” when the vestiges of his own grandmother can't accept his personhood? When his own family sees him as a monster and physically tries to prevent him from moving on with his life? When they’d rather he chooses death over literal survival? 

When Afo was the only person who offered a helping hand that never slapped his face or choked his neck? 

This is not to say that Shigaraki choosing Afo is good for him. In fact, in trying to obey Afo’s wishes, in forming alliances with the mla, and pursuing a power that would make him a deadlier weapon, he also caused the raid that resulted in Twice's death. So his attempt to become more like Afo is very clearly framed as a bad choice. 

But none of that takes away his redeemability from him. Actually, it only reinforces it. 

I've argued before that Aizawa is one of the key figures in the present conflict. As Eri’s (Shigaraki's narrative foil) caretaker and Shirakumo's friend, and as someone who was originally targeted by Ujiko, Aizawa should've been able to see Shigaraki's victimhood. Shirakumo had adopted Shigaraki like he had once adopted Aizawa. They were once both strays that Shirakumo took care of. Yet, Aizawa - a character based around the concept of rationality - decided that his grief overshadowed his logical thinking. He elected to ignore how Ujiko was literally experimenting on Shigaraki right in front of his eyes, the same way he had experimented on Shirakumo’s corpse. Instead, he continued dehumanizing Shigaraki and treating him as a weapon that needed to be taken care of. 

The result of that dehumanization is the chaos that follows. Shigaraki wakes up, activates Decay, and Aizawa is powerless to save Crust from getting caught in it. It's such a neat and blatant narrative punishment for his revenge plot you literally cannot read it any other way: Shirakumo died the same way. Protecting Aizawa from a hit he was meant to take. 

You see Hori's narrative intent here? 

The heroes called Shigaraki a manchild, a criminal, a thing, an it. They wanted him to be a monster. 

And now he is one, by direct consequence of their choice to dismiss him. So now it's the heroes’ job to correct their mistake, because merely treating Shigaraki like an object to dispose of only resulted in more destruction. The only way to stop him is to finally treat him like a person.