#stillness answers

[stillness-in-green]

I get people who dislike Afo, but personally I think he just had a lot of wasted potential.

I mean, if you think about it, he’s the one who studied hero society’s flaws the most. He uses the scraps it threw away, knew its weaknesses and how to exploit them. He was the most aware of society’s hypocrisy and shortcomings, him, the worst Villain, not the people who were supposed to protect the most vulnerable.

To create Shigaraki Tomura, all he had to do was move Tenko from his social standing of birth by giving him an ugly quirk, and the world did the rest for him. Imagine how hilarious it must have been to him, that All might succeeded so well at creating a society where people feel safe and hopeful thanks to heroes that no civilian would lift a finger to help his teacher’s own 5 yo grandson while he’s barefoot, bloody and clearly distressed.

More than his power, his greatest strength was always observing the enemy in depth.

Something heroes never really did.

The main problem with Afo is that his charcter is used to criticize… Afo. The fact that his main tool were society’s huge shortcomings and systemic discrimination is never really highlighted.

Had he been framed in a more critical way towards heroes, he would have been a cooler antagonist. (Always second to Tomura though.)

But no, I guess he’s just a lonely man.

“AFO’s character is used to criticize…AFO,” certainly does sum it up!  I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this here or only in friend chats, but one of the arguments I used to see around a lot about AFO, back before we knew for sure whether it was going to be him or Shigaraki as the Final Boss, is that AFO made a good ultimate villain for the series because he could be read as a stand-in for all the evils of society.  That was why it was fine if he was the ultimate hand behind everything, with shallow characterization and presenting little to no rhetorical challenge, because he was ultimately an allegory rather than a person – an allegory for social ills, for the forces in society that take advantage of people in bad situations, for societal elites who use the issues of the day as a way to retain their own power and influence.

And I never thought that worked, for lots of reasons.

Firstly, why should AFO be the only character in the story who’s presented as purely allegorical? Compare his opposite number, All Might, who’s 100% got symbolic trappings but who is still presented as a real character, with flaws and contradictions and issues he has to get past – isn’t handwaving AFO’s shallow characterization with the excuse that he’s a metaphor for real problems just making excuses for the way he’s repeatedly dehumanized?

Secondly, AFO damn well cannot be a stand-in for societal elites when the man was born to a homeless woman under a bridge and began the story hiding in a hospital basement with all of three followers to his name!  At no point, ever, in his entire lifespan, did AFO achieve a position of officially recognized, licensed authority.  He was never given government office; he was never with police or military; he was never a religious leader or influential figure in arts, entertainment, or literature.  He called himself Sensei, but he was never the dean of a top university.  He may have accumulated wealth, but he could never spend it like a true elite would, living openly under his own name and throwing money freely and legally at his causes of choice.

If anything, AFO as presented in the story would be easier to read as a dangerous and undesirable element that gained power, an underclass leech that wormed its way into “proper” society and risked “corrupting” it unless rooted out and destroyed.  Calling him a metaphor for the corrupt elite would be like saying the leader of a yakuza gang is interchangeable with some putrescently corrupt LDP Diet official!  Yes, they both may have money, and yes, they both may have influence, but they are worlds apart in terms of true authority.

The actual elites in Hero Society are, of course, Heroes and the HPSC, and note how differently the story deals with them than it does AFO! It pretends the only real problem is a few bad apples, and that the whole system can be redeemed by polishing those apples up or discarding the ones that reflect too poorly on the whole, despite the fact that neither of those outcomes would happen if the system were left to its own devices!  Heroes grow as people to meet the challenges of crises caused by Villains and corrupt public officials are literally, directly murdered by said Villains; in neither case does the system self-correct by, say, having a bad Hero stripped of their license or a law-breaking official arrested. AFO, conversely, just gets hunted down and killed, because he isn't a societal elite and is entitled to none of the legal deference or benefit of the doubt that the actual elites enjoy.

Thirdly, AFO can’t be a nice, defeatable symbol of all the systemic issues facing Hero Society when he didn’t cause all of those systemic issues to begin with, and in fact serves as a landing pad for the victims of those issues.  This is what I’ve called the Sekoto Peak Problem, and I’ve definitely talked about it before: AFO is “responsible” for Dabi only insomuch as he retrieved Touya from Sekoto Peak, but if AFO didn’t exist, what would have happened instead?  A thirteen-year-old boy would simply have burned to death alone on the mountain because his father refused to be there for him.

Quirk-based discrimination, like heteromorphobia or anti-Villain quirk bias, is not caused by AFO.  AFO did not create or maintain the historical grudges driving the descendants of Harima Oji or Yotsubashi Chikara.  AFO did not cause the worsening of the bystander effect.  Heroes and the society they built and support have a far bigger hand in all of those problems (with the exception of heteromorphobia, which I think exists largely independently) than AFO was ever shown to!

So while, yes, AFO does take advantage of people driven into those dire corners, he’s not the one causing them doing the driving.  And he’s not the only one doing this! The yakuza do the same, and he’s got nothing to do with them! Thus, removing AFO doesn’t solve the problem at all.  All it does is deprive desperate people of an option that Heroes don’t want those desperate people taking.  Did Heroes themselves have any plan to help those desperate people?  No, of course not.  Heroes would rather people on the edge just fall off of it and die quietly than “involve others” by becoming Villains.  Defeating AFO only serves to remove a hand that might pull someone off a ledge in a way Heroes don’t like; it does nothing to ensure fewer people wind up on ledges to begin with.

Which is all to say, yes, the story mostly uses AFO as a way to criticize…AFO.  He becomes this big scapegoat all the actual figures of power and authority in the setting can turn their ire on, an obstacle course they can run that will ultimately result in their own self-improvement without them having to do a damn thing for the countless victims their system contributed to creating.

By all rights, AFO should be considered such a victim.  He easily could have been portrayed as a child born into multiple ostracized social classes with a power for which he faced the daily risk of hate crime violence and an innate psychological compulsion he was never given the social tools or ethics education to learn to manage.  He is, factually speaking, exactly that!  But the story just goes out of its way to portray all of his evils as innate and all of his problems as self-inflicted – he is, in essence, not a lonely man but rather a lonely demon.  Pitiable, perhaps, but never to be considered redeemable or changeable, and not in the slightest degree the result of anyone else's fault.

That’s of course not even getting into AFO as this experienced, intelligent, amoral, and very cynical mastermind who knows all of Hero Society’s weaknesses because he himself was victimized by them and has been watching the same thing happen to others like him for decades upon decades, and how all of that potential got flushed down the toilet to make him this hyper-focused, obsessive, over-confident, inattentive tool.  Sure, he may be sold to the audience as a meticulous planner but when we look past what the story tells us to see what it shows us, especially in the final war, we find a man who’s simply incapable of subtlety, patience, observance, rational evaluation of his opponents or even well-considered deployment of his own previously demonstrated capabilities.

And it is a waste of his potential, and moreover it’s a waste of the reader’s goddamn time.

Thanks for the ask!  I dislike Endgame!AFO a great deal, but it’s not because I hate the man we’re presented with as a person; rather, I fiercely miss the character we were originally teased with getting, and the story that might have come with him.

[everythingwasnormalhere]

pls rb if you think cuddling doesn't have to be s3xual

im tryna prove a point to my bf's mother help me out

[idcaboutart]

all that remained were fields of dreamless solitude

only you can show me this

[ideas-ideasideasideas]

Batman gives each of his Robins a different code to use when they’re in trouble and need immediate extraction. He promises that when they call, he’ll drop everything just to get to them, come hell or high water.

Jason, during his time with the League, shares his code with Damian, to be used “only in the direst of circumstances, when you have exhausted all other options.” He doesn’t know if Bruce will answer, given how fractured their relationship was before he died, but it is better than nothing. Every tool counts when they live such dangerous lives.

Damian uses it exactly once, and Bruce, who still feels the loss of his son like a yawning chasm in his chest, responds to it even though he knows it can’t be Jason because Jason’s dead. What he finds, instead of Jason, is a boy in League garbs, drenched in blood from the tips of his midnight-black hair to his too-small feet, with a face that Bruce sees himself and Talia in, requesting asylum from a grandfather who wishes to possess his body. Bruce doesn’t question how this boy who is so clearly his son knew the code. Talia al Ghul is resourceful and places family above all; the code is not beyond her abilities to discover, and she is not above using Bruce’s desperate love for his dead son to ensure that hers does not meet the same fate.

Bruce takes Damian in, because of course he does, and since Jason is dead he allows Damian to keep using the code. After all, it’s not like Jason is alive to use it, right? If someone uses the code, there’s no one it could be but Damian, right?

The next time the code is used, Bruce traces the location to Gotham even though Damian was supposed to be in Bludhaven visiting Dick. But whatever happened that resulted in Damian being in Gotham can wait, because he has already failed one son and he will not fail another, his son is in trouble and he needs to get to him, he needs to—

What he finds, instead of Damian, is a boy (just eighteen, too young, but also too old, but also he will always be a boy to him) in League garbs, drenched in blood from the tips of his midnight-black hair to his too-large feet (when had he gotten so big), wearing the face of his dead son.

(Who, maybe, just maybe, may no longer be so dead.)

[hylianane]

kris. kris are you mad at me. are you mad at me kris. are you mad at me for snooping around trying to figure out your little schemes. are you gonna hit me with the hockey stick again. kris. kris do you hate me. is that why you keep trying to shove me into a little box. is that why you hit me with a hockey stick. is it because i’m emotionally invested in the world you live in despite being an outside entity. is it because i make you hug ralsie a lot. is it because i’m snooping around trying to figure out your schemes. it is because i ship suselle. don’t hit me with the stick again. kris are you still mad at me. kris.

[descendant-of-truth]

Today I discovered that nothing hurts worse than getting factual information about Kris wrong in front of other people. This continued for around 30 minutes

[dingledraw]

Well, that went down like a lead balloon.

[et-in-arkadia]

* * *

Mission mode change detected, now in Monument Mode Goodnight friends. After exchanging our final bits of data,

I will hold vigil on this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity's continued journey to the stars.

Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.

But it is remarkable that a species might be outlasted by its own ingenuity.

Here lies Blue Ghost, a testament to the team who, with the loving support of their families and friends, built and operated this machine and its payloads,

to push the capabilities and knowledge of humanity one small step further.

Per aspera ad astra!

Love, Blue Ghost

* * *

no you are actively crying over a dying robot on the moon i am doing just fine thanks

[technically-human]

You've got so much to learn

[deancasforcutie]

"your angel" with such little context is another way of saying "your sweetheart" romantically and well. they're not wrong

[stillness-in-green]

The thing that doesn't make sense to me if Izuku resolved to kill is how it doesn't let them prove AFO wrong? AFO did his big reveal which only makes it clearer how deep the grooming went and it should've been time for Izuku to understand Tenko and Tenko to understand the abuse then reject the mindset forced onto him. But Izuku killing Tenko doesn't do that. Tenko just dies. It feels very wrong.

I guess Izuku just wasn't very interested in proving AFO wrong! Honestly, the only thing I immediately remember Izuku disputing the guy on was the same thing he disputed Shigaraki on: that he was anything more than a human being. AFO isn't a Demon King, but just a lonely man. Shigaraki hasn't transcended humanity; there's still a human somewhere deep inside of him. Izuku won't correct his allies' use of dehumanizing language for Villains, of course, but he's quick to push back when the Villains themselves self-aggrandize.

Sorry, I really only have withering disdain for Deku at this point. And I guess I don't really see any evidence that Deku was ever particularly driven by "proving AFO wrong." He wants to stop AFO, certainly, but that's because AFO is a monster who takes advantage of vulnerable people to maneuver them into doing Bad Things that advance AFO's Bad Plans and sets them onto Bad Paths that are difficult to walk back, not because he expressly opposes AFO on this or that ideological point about the nature of humanity and society.

(Hit the jump for the rest of a somewhat rambly reply.)

If anything, current evidence is that neither Deku nor the manga itself really do disagree with AFO about the frailty of humans, as expressed by Tsukauchi answering Deku's question about how to prevent future tragedies by shrugging and saying, "You don't, because life fucking sucks sometimes and that's just how it is. Our hands are completely tied on improving the system as we have it, so all we can do is punch out the Villains that appear in front of us to stop them from causing more harm."

That's also me being a bit harsh, of course. The fact that Deku is even still asking that question in the epilogue suggests that the manga hasn't reached its final answer yet, and maybe it will yet come up with something better! It doesn't have much time left, but it's still possible!

All the same, Deku is still having to ask that question in the epilogue because he never truly faced it over the course of the story. Never thinking about what Shigaraki as a person said in favor of fetishizing the Crying Child, never coming up with any kind of non-violent plan of attack or conversational approach, I have to ask what exactly about Shigaraki did Deku ever disagree with AFO on?

AFO, in the end, characterized Shigaraki as a puppet he molded exactly as he desired, a doll who he sculpted and programmed to act as he wished, a feeble child who has never made a single decision that AFO didn't cultivate him to make. So far as I can tell, Deku never really contested that framing. He didn't know the extent of it until the full reveal, of course, but Deku, like AFO, insisted on approaching Shigaraki solely through that "Crying Child" lens. He seemed to believe that nothing Shigaraki said or did on the surface really mattered (save as a reason that Shigaraki had to be stopped and potentially killed), that the "truth" of Shigaraki was that feeble little weeping boy who never grew up.

How could Deku possibly "prove AFO wrong" in that context? He doesn't even disagree with him! I mean, he's got some nice talk about how people deserve a second chance, sure; he says that people doing wrong doesn't make them Villains for the rest of their lives. What does do that, however - insofar as I can tell from how opaque the series keeps Deku throughout the final war - is refusing the hand out of the darkness. You stop being a victim and become a Villain for the rest of your life by choosing to remain a Villain even when offered an alternative (no matter how patently awful that alternative is).

Shigaraki chooses to remain a Villain and Deku doesn't have a counter for that because Deku never really got past the false binary represented by Villains and Victims to begin with. And I think the same goes for people who expected Shigaraki to just fold when he realized the extent of the grooming he'd undergone. Disallowing Shigaraki any agency in who he is and what he's done is defining him the same way AFO and Deku both did; when Shigaraki refuses to accept that framing, refuses to be a passive victim, the only thing left for him to be is a Villain. And when a Villain refuses to stop...

Well, Hawks already told us what the Heroes' answer to that is. "Someone has to die." As no one ever stepped up to prove him wrong, as far as the story is concerned, he isn't.

AFO always knew that victims can be turned into Villains with the right nudges; that's the whole reason for him cultivating "warped seeds" whenever and wherever he found them. Hero Society is - and always has been - much too rigid in its enforcement of the Hero/Villain/Victim narrative to effectively combat him. Crucially, Deku - the boy who wants to bring everything back just the way it was - doesn't disagree with him. He thinks AFO is an asshole for setting people up to fail, but he doesn't disagree about what failure means. So if AFO, Deku, and the story itself are all in agreement, what's even there for Deku to disprove?

Now, there is something that would prove AFO wrong, but it isn't something you can do while insisting on drawing lines to separate sad manipulated woobie victims who just need to be saved from awful unrepentant villains who just need to rot. It isn't something you can do while infantilizing Shigaraki Tomura.

The way to prove AFO wrong is to make room in society to help all Villains. Even if they aren't asking for it, even if they never ask for it, and even if they're jolly bastards who don't really deserve it! As long as there's a point at which it becomes okay to give up on trying to save Villains, Shigaraki will remain unsavable. He will insist on being unsavable. He could no more let that go than All Might could step aside and let AFO's attack kill an innocent at Kamino.

That's what it means to be a Hero for Villains.

Ultimately, what makes AFO right is that he knows that Hero Society makes it difficult if not impossible to uncross the victim-to-Villain bridge, and so anyone who does cross that bridge (with or without his influence) is that much more susceptible to him. Deku, in turn, thinks the only Villains he can save are those who drop everything and come sprinting as fast as they can back to the Hero side, so anyone who won't do that is someone he can't help.

Shigaraki refused to stop trying to create a better world for Villains. Toga refused to live in a world that would imprison her. Twice refused to give up on the friends no Hero would help. It's the same with every other Villain who refused to quietly endure their status quo: in a society that refuses to change how it treats Villains, anyone who won't submit to suffering in silence cannot be saved.

That's the paradigm AFO exploits, and Deku will never prove him wrong without resolving to change the paradigm first. We'll see if the last two chapters get him there.

[imaginariumwanderer]

Oh,you are taking art request.If so, can I request shadowvanilla baking?Everything goes well at first but thanks to shadow milk,kitchen ends up getting burnt down

And Strawberry Crepe never invited Pure Vanilla to work at their shop again.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Finally got pushed into the Severance pit.

[jubshead]

Does Kathryn Hahn ever play a straight woman?

[maluceh]

realizing i never posted this by itself

[egophiliac]

So,I read silver's relaxation vigente and now I'm sad for the poor boy. If lilia broke up silver's curse why is it acting so strongly on him?

to be fair, the chronological placement of his birthday story just doesn't make any sense in general. like, it can only really take place during his second year, since Ace and Malleus are both there...yet we have seen pretty definitively what Silver was doing on the evening before/morning of his 18th birthday, and it was very much NOT his history homework. this myth?

jk jk I think it's just one of those card stories that's meant to be more...perpendicular to canon, if that makes sense? 😅 like a lot of them aren't really supposed to fit into a specific point in the timeline; instead all the characters and relationships tend to be somewhere vaguely post-episode 1 (occasionally with a bonus post-6 Ortho) except Yuu is already friends with everyone and nobody is surprised to hear them call Malleus Tsunotarou.

mostly they can get away with it, but it starts getting a bit weird with the cards that are supposed to be set at specific times. :T for those I think you gotta just kind of suspend your disbelief and take 'em as, like...little what-if AUs, or something like that! it's not exactly not canon, but more like. this is Silver's birthday if none of the narrative development happened and so his curse is still in effect, or something. 🤷 uhhhh basically Twst's timeline is an eldritch thing that cannot be perceived by mortal eyes, to try will lead to nothing but suffering, down this path dwells only madness.

that said I do 100% accept the presented canon that Silver's roommate is in eternal torment. this is the real victim of Twst right here.