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JASON TODD VS. DABI: WHY NOT ME?

"You haven't been here long but you've seen him, right? The batman. The batman. He lives in darkness, to find the helpless and bring them into the light. So I have to wonder...why couldn't he do it for me?" The Boy Wonder: Issue #2

This is the story of the boy who didn't get saved. The story of a boy who really ought to have been saved. Of course, every victim deserves to be saved, but this boy was the son of a superhero. Can a hero who saves everyone, but fails to save his own son really be called a hero? As for the son, how does it feel to watch his father save complete strangers but let him fall to the wayside?

Jason Todd and Dabi are two characters with similar backstories and motives (so similar it's possible Dabi is outright based on Jason Todd) which are worthy of comparison. These are two tragic arcs which explore the conflict between a hero's responsibility to act as a father, and their responsibility to save people. As I said they are tragic because in both cases the hero fails, as a father, and a hero. However, I'm comparing the two because Jason Todd's story is a well written tragedy, and Toya's story is not.

If you were to write a story of my life, it would surely be a tragedy.

Aristotle's Poetics is the first attempt to define what Tragedy is, not as a story where sad things happen but a specific story structure. He outlines not only what makes tragedy, tragedy, but also what makes a good tragedy.

The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of the agents mainly with a view to the action.

I use this quote because the painting metaphor is a great way of explaining what I'm getting at, you can have a painting with the most wonderful colors, you can have a story with really good ideas like the Todoroki family plotline but if you don't use those colors correctly all you're going to end up with is a bad painting.

In poetics Aristotle clearly defines a tight well-structured plot as the first priority for effective tragedy, character as second.

Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long

To make sure you understand, it's vital in tragedy for all the pieces to fit together. Tragedy is a specific story format. Good tragedy uses the parts of a story well, but bad tragedy is sloppy and poorly put together. In tragedy, the whole has to be greater than the sum of its parts. The Todoroki Family are all good characters out of context, but the story could have enhanced their characters but detracted from them due to how poorly it is told. The fact that a lot of MHA fans are in love with the Todoroki family out of the context of the story, but also have constant complaints for how Horikoshi handles their plotlines is, in my opinion, very telling.

What Aristotle goes on to posit is the best tragedies do not come about by accident, but rather by the direct actions of the characters.

But again, Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will thee be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design. 

Therefore Tragedies require consequentialism, like Newton's Third Law, every action will have an equal and opposite reaction. To simplify a good tragedy arises from the consequences of the character's actions (or inaction). The most basic form is that the hero of the story will have a tragic flaw that they fail to improve upon in time and then leads to their destruction. In essence, tragedy is where the hero fails. Not only does the hero fail, but the hero loses, and that irreversible loss is what defines tragedy. Medea slays her own children, Oedipus rips his own eyes off and deserts his kingdom, Creon Antigone is buried alive and Creon's son, her fiancee, commits suicide.

These events share two things in common, they are irreversible (hence why they feel like good endings), and two they evoke catharsis. Aristotle defines the goal of tragedy to evoke terror and pity. We feel alongside these heroes, Medea was abandoned by the husband Jason who she left her home and slaughtered her own brother for, Oedipus did all of his crimes unwittingly and is a victim of fate, Antigone was doing the right thing by burying her brother so his soul could pass on to the afterlife.

There's all different sorts of tragedies, Hamliet explores more here. I'd say UTRH and Hellish Todoroki Family are tragedies centered around grief.

Tragedy works on extreme emotions, and extreme hard-hitting consequences to the hero's failures. The worst thing a tragedy can be is boring.

The Tragic Hero

Now that I'm done lecturing you let's actually talk about both My Hero Academia and Batman like I promised. Both of these stories don't actually feature the central victim as their protagonist, and that is a feature not a flaw.

Rather, the story we are being told is that of a tragic hero, failing to save a tragic victim because of their own personal flaws.

These flaws are called (hamartia) or "error in judgement". A hero, being called a hero of a story is often unaware of his flaws which is central to what makes them unable to fix those flaws in time. That flaw can later lead to a moral failing, such as Othello's jealousy, initially jealousy is an understandable emotion, but then it leads to him trusting Iago over his own wife and killing his wife in a rage.

Most importantly, the hero’s suffering and its far-reaching reverberations are far out of proportion to his flaw.

Let's begin with talking of the heroes and their flaws, Batman and Endeavor. My main reason for comparing these two is in these specific stories they have the same flaw, inability to move past their personal guilt towards their son, and the same conflict the duty of a father versus the duty of a hero.

However, Batman functions as a tragic hero, and Enji does not. The summary of their conflict is right here in these two panels.

A parent is required to place their children above everything else, because they are the ones responsible for bringing that child into the world. Bruce Wayne made the decision to adopt Jason. Enji made the decision to have children, however with Enji you have the added insidious motivation of he only wanted to make designer babies and just didn't care for the ones who didn't turn out right.

Bruce attempts to do both, to act as a father for Jason and also a crime fighter as batman but he can't do both. This comes to a head in Death of the Family when Jason is having serious trouble because of his lack of a strong parental figure, and Bruce knowing that Jason is in trouble chooses still to go off and fight crime instead of staying with him. The choice to place crimefighting over the child they chose to take responsibility for has the unintended consequence of getting that child killed.

Whereas Enji makes the same choice over and over again, ignoring Toya's clear troubles at the fact his father no longer spends time with him and choosing to run away to the world of heroes because he doesn't want to face the fact that his actions are severely hurting his son. Bruce's motivations are more sympathetic admittedly he wasn't actively practicing eugenics, but the choice is the same and the consequences are the same.

Both Bruce and Enji are forced to bear witness to the deaths of their children when they are not there, specifically because they made a choice to be a hero instead of staying by their child's side. A situation directly caused by their choice to be a hero over a father, and a situation that would have been avoided if they had stayed with their child in their time of need. Jason runs off when Batman tells him to stay and gets kidnapped by the Joker, if Enji had been on Sekoto peak that day Toya would never have accidentally lost control of his fire.

This is just the backstory however, the main event that kickstart this plot is the unexpected return from the dead of both Jason and Dabi. Each story follows the same plot beats. A new villain appears to challenge Endeavor / Batman. The villain reveals themselves as their dead son. Both Endeavor / Batman are given a chance to try reaching out to their sons, but they choose not to.

Then even though they are given a second chance with a miracle of a dead son coming back to them, they choose the exact same thing they chose before, being a hero and because of that the tragedy repeats itself. For both of them they are unable to save their son again, and the son goes through a second death. History repeats itself, the lesson isn't learned.

Their fatal flaw is their guilt. This is a story about grief and mourning after all, a son who is died, buried, but never grieved properly, never mourned, an open wound on the father suddenly coming back. The inability of each to process their grief blinds them from seeing the fact the son has come back, and they have a second chance.

Toya has internalized he is a failure, because Enji literally called him that. Jason believes that Batman thinks he is a failure. In both cases the father is the one who failed, Bruce at least acknowledges this but cannot communicate it in any way shape or form.

This guilt and responsibility both Enji and Bruce feel causes them to self-sabotage. They no longer have the confidence they are in the right (they no longer feel like heroes because they have failed to be heroes to their own son).

You can also add the layer of complication that since both men chose to be heroes in the past, they do not know how to handle the situation as a father now that they're being challenged to step up as one. Unfortunately, they are not the fathers that stepped up.

The reason their grief becomes a flaw is because they put their grief over their victims. . Each man is aware too much of their own failure, and while they should feel guilty they make the classic mistake of placing their own guilt over the feelings of the victim. The guilt they feel for causing the death and the genuine grief of losing a son is given priority over Jason and Dabi who you know... actually died.

An overwhelming grief and guilt is understandable because grief is a messy and human emotion, losing a child is an unimaginable tragedy that should never be inflicted on anyone.

Yet at the same time both Dabi and Jason are grieving to. This paradox that Batman only thinks of his own grief at losing a son and never stops to think about how Jason must feel leads to one of the best lines in Under the Red Hood.

"The father had lost a son, and now the son had lost a father."

Batman's guilt is so strong over being the cause of Jason's suffering, that the suffering of the victim himself is ignored. To be fair to My Hero Academia, the Todorokis say a similar line to Enji.

However, this is where I begin to get into the difference between ideas and execution. Tragedies are stories of actions and logical consequences, every action has an equal and opposite reaction in Under the Red Hood. Batman is punished for the choices he makes, the choices he doesn't make, and the choices he fails to make in time.

The Todoroki plotline features almost none of its character making any choices of substance, and because of that the plotline says the right things over and over again, but it all comes off as tell don't show.

I'm going to quote @codenamesazanka's post right here a couple of times because they describe the complete failure of the Todoroki plotline to show us a reason why we should be feeling things for the characters artfully.

We've heard Enji say this before - I'm sorry, I intend to atone. It's indeed the right thing to say, it's exactly what he should be saying and acting. Natsuo is declaring no contact - That's fine, I'm sorry, I accept this as part of my atonement and will continue. Touya calls him a coward - That's fine, I'm sorry, I accept this as part of my atonement and will continue. The public hates him - That's fine, I'm sorry, I accept this as part of my atonement and will continue. But you can only hear this so many times before you want to snap and beat the character, the story, the writing over the head with Enji's wheelchair. Why is that? He's behaving exactly as he should, and yet...

The reason why it fails to evoke strong feelings is because of what we'd called "narrative dissonance." The actions of Bruce and Enji are the same, they both neglect to do anything, make any real attempts to reach out to their victims because they're paralyzed by guilt.

However, we are told that they have entirely different arcs. Bruce's arc is a tragic fall. He's failing as a hero. While we are being told that Enji is experiencing an arc of atonement. Enji is supposed to be improving himself, and Bruce is supposed to be experiencing negative character development but they both do the exact same thing in story. Bruce neglects Jason, we are told by the story, by the characters in the story that Bruce is failing Jason. Enji does nothing in time to actually atone for Toya or try to help him, yet, we are told again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again that Enji is atoning with nothing substantive to show us this is the case.

To show what I meant instead of telling this scene is in chapter 252.

This scene is the ending point in chapter in chapter #426.

It's just him repeating the exact same sentiment and yet in a more than 150+ chapter gap, Enji never made any action to show he was now placing his family first. Enji didn't say anything to Dabi when he revealed himself as Toya. Enji didn't look for Toya in the months before the final war arc. Enji literally appeared on live TV in a broadcast that Toya was watching and said the very selfish "Watch Me" atone for the crime of creating Toya instead of literally talking about Toya or too Toya. Well, that would have rocked the boat too much... THAT IS LITERALLY THE POINT. Enji had to somehow break from tradition or make some significant sacrifice onscreen to his social standing to show that he's willing to put his family first. Enji decides to go along with Hawks decision to not face Toya head on, making the decision to be the hero for the final time which directly causes Toya to get up after Shoto brings him down non-lethally and make one last attempt to suicide bomb for his father's inaction.

Bruce does nothing for a long time in Under the Red Hood. He ignores his initial instinct that Jason came back and instead makes a long investigation on whether or not someone can come back from the dead in order to distract himself. When Jason takes the mask off, Batman already knew but was pretending otherwise because he didn't want to face the reality.

Even when Jason takes his mask off, Bruce still takes on the "I need to investigate this" angle even though Jason calls him out that deep down he already knows it's the truth. This of course foreshadows Bruce's underlying flaw, he doesn't want to face Jason head on because he feels too much grief about what happened to Jason and his guilt is more important than Jason's own grief. Just as the father has lost the son, the son has lost the father.

What follows is several chapters of Batman fighting crime as usual and making no attempts to directly search for Jason. They cross paths a few times but when they do Bruce doesn't follow. In fact, Bruce only shows up when Jason sends Bruce a sample of the joker's hair and Bruce knows that the Joker has kidnapped him out of Arkham. Bruce almost lets Jason get killed by Black Mask because he doesn't know whether to stop Jason or save him yet again, and then they have their final showdown where Jason has kidnapped the joker to demand Bruce kill him, and Bruce finally attempts to talk him down.

Out of context it sounds like I'm describing the same plotline, to the point where if you haven't read either, it looks like I'm complaining baselessly. Why is one hero doing nothing until it's too late good, and the other bad? The difference is of course context, or rather framing. Bruce's actions are called out by the people around him (Dick, Jason, Alfred) as him handling the situation wrong. Whereas both Enji's internal monologue and other characters say that he is doing his best to atone for his actions and deserves a chance, but the events we are shown in story are the exact opposite.

Here's another example to SHOW my point. Here's Dabi with my special, hardcover edition of under the Red Hood.

I reread the entirety of the fourteen chapter plotline and the majority of internal narrations come from characters outside of Bruce observing his behavior and commenting on how differently he's acting. Jason's backstory for instance is told by Alfred, not Bruce. Dick Grayson the first Robin comments on Batman's odd behavior. The rest are the third person narrator. Bruce has four instances of internal monologues spanning a few pages each in a 378 page story. (Alfred has the most internal monologues and he's presented as a more trustworthy unbiased narrator than Bruce, to get us to question Bruce's actions).

"Information travels on many routes, sometimes it comes predictably like the tides. You just need to know where to stand and meet it. Other times it's elusive and you have to root through the garbage to find it. In the last few years I've come to rely on Barbara Gordon, Oracle, we all did. Utilizing every form of surveillance equipment she has been the eyes and ear [...] but those days are over. I can't rely on anyone anymore. [...] and tonight it's also about the company I keep. It's different with him [night wing] out here. I think about when he was younger, when I was younger, it was different, simpler and I miss it. I miss those days, for that it's hard to be around him.

This first internal monologue is a case of unreliable narrator, because as soon as finishing it Dick Grayson / Nightwing shows up, offers Batman his help and while Bruce at first refuses it the two of them are forced to work together to fight Amazo. What does this show us? Bruce is not alone, but Bruce actively acts like he's alone ignoring the feelings of the other people around him. It exhibits a flaw of Bruce and the bad headspace he is in mentally (if I remember correctly Stephanie Brown recently died in the comics while this storyline was being published. It establishes Bruce's improper coping mechanism with grief, and how he is going about it the incorrect way.

Bruce says I work alone, and then Bruce says it's easier working with Dick, I miss it, but I can't go back to those days. It's bruce's contradictory thinking patterns in the same chapter that stop him. it's bruce's fault he cannot connect to Dick, and he is actively mourning the past because his relationship with Dick has changed.

Now the final part of the monologue in that chapter.

He's quick. Not just fast, agile. He's not thinking about his next move, he's just making it. He's been trained well. And there's something about him. Something familiar. There was something interesting about before he cut the line, before it had been taught. That had to have been practiced. Either that or just plain dumb luck. No it's not luck.

This is the first hint that Bruce already suspects it's Jason from early on but is in denial about it. This unreliable narrator trope also gives an agency to Bruce's decision, he is actively choosing to ignore the possibility that it's Jason because it doesn't want it to be.

Whereas, a lot of Endeavor's plot takes away any agency from him. For example, he doesn't even know that Dabi is Toya, because if he had the sneaking suspicion and ignored it like Batman did that might have made him look bad. We can't have the main character in a tragedy looking bad now can we?

The second monologue is more denial.

That device is from Kord industries. I should know. Ordered it special from them. How can he have it? No more dead ends. No more questions. No more guessing. Tonight I find out what is passing for the truth.

Reading between the lines this is outright confirmation Batman already knows.

The third is a brief reflection in his feelings for Jason.

The armor has to be light enough to fit but strong enough to protect. But sometimes a great many times, it's not strong enough. It wans't strong enough for Barbara who has to fight from her chair. It wasn't strong enough for Stephanie, other dear soldier enough dear grave. And it wasn't enough for Jason. Willful Jason. Who ignored the danger. Who spat at risk. Who was never frightened enough. I've always wondered... always... was he scared at the end? Was he praying I'd come save him? And in those last moments when he knew that I wouldn't. Did he hate me for it?

This monologue directly shows without stating it outright, Bruce is prioritizing his feelings of grief and failure mixing them in with his genuine grief over the loss of a son. it's selfish of him, but grief is a selfish emotion.

Here's the thing Bruce is allowed to be selfish and to not have the correct reaction to his grief, because the whole story is centered on Bruce being unable to get his shit together in time, and this picture into his emotions is an explanation as to why. Bruce is afraid of being hated by Jason. Jason of course has every right to hate him for failing as a father, but still I think not wanting to be hated to a person you loved so much and feel genuinely sorry over what you let happen to them is an understandable reaction.

Meanwhile we have Enji saying repeatedly all the right things in his monologue, the selfless, I don't need to be forgiven, it's okay if they hate me, I just need to atone but he never actually does anything. There's no explanation for why he isn't doing anything either, so that narrative dissonance. We're shown why Bruce doesn't act in time, he's internally a mess to be frank. We are not shown why Enji doesn't act in time because his internal monologue tells us again and again he's committed to atoning and he understands what the right thing to do is.

As Codenamesanzanka says:

Enji is still saying all the right things, but the story isn't giving him the opportunity to actually do the right things. To have his new actions matter. I have no doubt about his sincerity in his mantra, but without the 'show', it's hollow. Similarly, "Let's talk" is actually kinda bullshit too, because it's so vague. This is less about Enji, and more about the writing, how it set up this scene. "Let's talk" or "I want to talk" or any of that variation is repeated 6 times, without anything more or specific added.

There's an excess of repetition of Enji saying he wants to atone, he's ready to atone, without any of that materializing in the story.

As @class1akids says in this reaction post:

It also feels also super-hollow to say he's sheltering the family from the fallout, after they've just talked about how Fuyumi lost her job (and got a new one through the connections she herself built). How is he going to do that?

The fourth because I don't want to write it down, it's just Batman monologueing on how his partnership with Jason is still good and explaining the technical details of his fight with count Vertigo. It's in chapter 10 if you must look it up.

So four monologues total. Two monologues establish indirectly that Batman knows that Red Hood is Jason and doesn't want to face him. The third monologue establishes why he doesn't want to face him, he's afraid of being hated. The monologue is in line with Bruce's actions in the story, Bruce investigates several ways of reviving from the dead instead of looking for Jason.

The character's reactions around Bruce are also talking about how he's not acting like himself. Especially Alfred's who speaks of Bruce's indecision, on whether to put a stop to or save Jason.

"It is curious. He is lost in thought. It is not like him to spend vast stretches of time immobile, where his mind is gripped in the solitary process of deduction. This is quite different. He is hesitating. At a loss for what to do. I believe it is about Jason. And whether or not to stop him or save him."

This is illustrated in two scenes later where Jason spends a long time simply watching when Jason is fighting enemies, first in a fight against Captain Nazi, and second Black Mask. Jason even gives a direct callout of that behavior.

Jason: What the hell took you so long? Couldn't decide if you wanted to let me live. Batman: Shut up and fight.

Observed by Alfred Bruce is completely stalling and can't choose, observed by Jason Bruce can't decide whether to let Jason live or not. Bruce hesitates twice. We know why. We see it in action. It's called out as flawed behavior.

Now let's cover all the tell that don't show that is Endeavor's many monologues.

Pro Hero Arc:

I have to safeguard the future for them. That's the job for whoever's on top. What about the lives I cut short? Just demanding forgiveness isn't enough, it's too late for that. At this point I need to atone there's no other route.

Hellish Todoroki Family 1:

I'm trying to make ammends going forward. It might be too late. but I fall asleep every night thinking about it. Lately it's been the same dream. The wife and the kids looking happy at the dinner table. But I'm never there with them. It might be too late but I fall asleep every night thinking about what I can do for my family. I wish you could be here too, Toya. It's always the same dream. My whole family's there but not me. If I really care how they feel [I'll remain here].

I'm not going to read 200 chapters so I'm just going to ballpark it based on memory. Here we go.

Dabi's Dance:

My eldest, Toya didn't harbor frost within him. He didn't have a way to overcome the inescapable downside of overheating but I nevertheless sought to raise the boy as a hero. [...] Because Toya had more potential than me I placed my ambitions on his shoulders. I thought it could be you. You could have been the one to reach my eternal goal. My frustration... My envy... The ugliness in my heart... you could have been the one to smash it all to dust.

Plot twist this is the only monologue I like. It's different from all the others, and it's the only one where Enji is being emotionally honest. He put the emotional burden of his own emotional insecurities on an eight year old child, and expected to live vicariously through him and when Toya failed to live up to those expectations he just abandoned him. It alligns what we have been shown so far, Enji is not acting like a reptentant man here who realizes the harm he's done to Toya and only thinks of Toya as an extension of himself and his own regrets.

The Fight Against AFO:

My mistakes took the form as Toya leading to many stolen futures. The past never dies. Rage, resentment and even penace wound together toward the future. And the future is a path for the young. A path with so many branching choices. That's why I must win this. [I'll keep paying my penance. I'll win today and keep my eyes on Toya.]

When Enji decides to double Suicide with Toya:

I take full responsibility. I swore to bear the burden and live my life atoning for it all. However, you've been watching me all this time. While I couldn't be there to watch you. You were someone I especially needed to do right by. No I can't let you meet your end alone, but I won't let anyone else get caught up in our tragedy.

Hellish Todoroki Family Final:

I came to talk about what's to come. I'm retiring as a hero. That was my initial plan even before the war started, but now I can't even walk on my own. The hero endeavor burned to death. Your flames were really stronger than mine. [...] You're right. You know everything about me, Toya. After all you were always watching me. And you wanted me to do the same for you, but I didn't. Not matter what anyone says your heat does come from my hellflame. From now on I'll come everyday, so let's talk. It's too late now, so let's talk. [...] You're free to hate me. Anything is fine really, so throw it all at me.

This one is spoken dialogue but it's still a four-page long monologue. Every one of Enji's monologues with one exceptionsays the same thing: I'm sorry, I'll spend the rest of my life atoning for my actions.

We're repeatedly told Enji is atoning but he acts like Batman. Then, his actions should be framed as Batman, not atoning but avoiding any responsibility.

As observed by Class1akids when we were discussing the update:

Everyone else faces an uphill struggle with their lives, but we should all feel sorry for Enji atoning and being in hell. I hate Hori's compulsion to over-write his abusers and over-explain their atonement. He does this with Bakugou too but with Enji it's more irritating. It was so much more enjoyable when he just wrote the thing but didn't point at them and say -> look, they are atoning. Aren't they soooo cool??

Enji's internal monologues and the other characters frame him as some sort of martyr, while on the other hand it's clear by both Batman's actions and Alfred's observations he's not acting like his usual self. In fact, this is an interpretation of Under the Red Hood that I love from the writers of the video game Arkham Knight that does a less tragic retelling of Under the Red Hood:

Batman doesn't fight victims. He saves them.

Therefore if Batman is fighting Jason, a victim, he's not acting like Batman. I'm also fine with Arkham Knight being an Under the Red Hood retelling because it's a different story. Comics do this all the time, different universe versions, popular storylines adapted into different mediums. It also works as a commentary on the original story, by showing what Batman could have done to lead to a more positive outcome it makes Batman's choices in Under the Red Hood worse and more tragic because he could have saved Jason, there was still a chance.

So here we have two flawed tragic heroes who are meant to be both pitied and condemned for their actions. One of them is all pity with no condemnation. The other is both pity and condemnation, Batman is grieving, but also he's failing his responsibility towards Jason. Therefore one protagonist works, the other fails utterly.

I'm not saying abusers don't deserve redemption. I'm not saying Enji should have died in order to atone. I'm not saying that the underlying problem with the arc is that they decided to make Enji sympathetic and a focus of the arc. The most important problem is the breaking of one of the fundamental rules of storytelling: Show, Don't Tell.

The Tragic Villain

Not only does The Hellish Todoroki Family plotline fail to make Enji a compelling protagonist, it also fails it's biggest victim. Now, these are both stories that end with the hero failing to save their victim. So if both of these stories have the same ending, why am I saying it failed Dabi, but not Jason?

Well, let me explain.

Dabi and Jason are both villains turned victims. The stories themselves are about this ambiguity. How much should the be held responsible for their own choices? If they are actively harming innocent people, then shouldn't they be stopped? Should they be automatically be forgiven just because of the pain and grief they've suffered, even if they've been causing it to others?

Both characters are also reflective of their fathers because they are too being selfish in their grief, they want their grief acknowledged and so are violently lashing out.

Jason and Dabi both make plays at being vigilantes at first, Dabi wants to inherit Stains will, and Jason Todd wants to be a better bat-man by taking control of the drug trade in Gotham and cutting crime down by executing gang heads. However, neither of them are being honest with this and it's shown through their actions, both of them abandon their original plans.

In the final showdown all Toya cares about is facing Enji on the battlefield, and when he's on the brink of death his mind erodes to the point where all he can do is scream for Enji's attention while his flames get hotter and hotter.

Let's take about Jason first and how his narrative treats him a whole lot better and more sympathetically, with more humanity than Batman. Jason is still held responsible for his choices, he is criticized by Bruce for murdering gang leaders and passing it off as justice. He's also blatantly shown to be a hypocrite. My favorite scene from Red Hood: Lost Days, the official UTRH prequel.

"I want to kill the joker in a cool way. Just sniping the Joker from a rooftop isn't dramatic enough for me."

This scene, and the final scene of UTRH underlines Jason isn't executing criminals because he believes it's the right thing to do, or because of his stated motivation that killing the joker would prevent more future victims.

Instead his every action is to set up a scenario where he makes a selfish demand of Bruce. He wants Bruce to prove to him that he would choose him over being a hero, by setting up his final scenario. Him, the Joker, and Batman. Jason will shoot the Joker. Bruce has a gun. He can either choose to let Jason kill the Joker, or kill Jason to stop him, either way it makes it clear what Bruce's priorities are.

The underlying reason for this is similiar to Bruce. Just like Bruce, Jason is deeply afraid that Batman doesn't love him. That he thinks of him as a failure. (This is Toya's main reason too).

He also interprets Bruce's failure to avenge him to mean that Bruce didn't even care enough to mourn him. If Bruce loved him enough, he'd choose him over the joker, but he's so afraid that Bruce doesn't love him enough that he's going to force Bruce to choose.

Along the way he's also going to behead several crimelords in order to put an exclamation point on that point.

The way Jason completely unravels in the confrontation shows this insecurity, he begins with monologueing about how batman should totally kill people, until his fear that he wasn't important enough, and his grief at losing his father is revealed.

Batman: I know I failed you, but I tried to save you. I'm trying to save you now. Jason: Is that what what you think this is about? Your letting me die. I don't know what clouds your judgement worse, your guilt or your antiquated sense of morality. Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. Jason: But why on god's green earth is he still alive? Ignoring what he's done in the past. Blindly, stupidly disregarding the whole graveyards he's filled with people. The friend's he's killed. I thought killing me - that I'd be the last person you ever let him hurt. Jason: If it had been you that he beat to a bloody mess. If it had been you he left in agony. If he had taken you from this world. I would have done nothing but search the planet for this pathetic pile of evil, this death worshipping garbage, and sent him off to hell.

Direct statement, it's irresponsible of Bruce to let Joker live after killing Jason and should have put him down to prevent future victims. Reading between the lines, Batman not taking revenge for Jason is a sign that he didn't love him enough, Jason loves Batman more because he would have taken revenge.

As the confrontation continues and Jason's mental spiral worsens, to the point where he can't keep up his pretense of self-righteousness.

Jason: I'm not talking about killing cobblepot, or scarecrow, or riddled, or dent. Jason: I'm talking about him. Just him. And doing it because...he took me away from you.

The father had lost the son, and now the son had lost the father.

Jason's revenge is just a cover, for his grief at losing Bruce. I think this also shows a really positive aspect of Jason's character to humanize him instead of condemning him for his actions to ignore or even justify the suffering he endured: Jason really loves Bruce.

I mean how meaningful is the statement: "Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me."

Bruce has been afraid to hear the whole time that Jason hates him, that he won't forgive him, but Jason loves him deeply. In fact his love is almost equal to his rage because Jason is a deeply emotional person, and these little details make him human and not just like a plot obstacle that Bruce has to face. A metaphor for his past failures.

Dabi is drawn as a crying boy who wants comfort, Jason is shown to be a crying boy who wants comfort through both dialogue and action without us directly needing to be told. It's a heartbreaking line and doing it because he took me away from you and it lands perfectly because the narrative wants us to just look at Jason's grief. It doesn't add an asterisk* even though he was in pain, he's done unforgivable things that can't be justified to undercut Jason's suffering.

In fact that might be another underlying problem with The Hellish Todoroki Family, the narrative tries too hard to make you feel a certain way instead of just presenting things as they are to make you come to your own conclusion. UTRH doesn't support Jason's revenge based serial killing of villains. It doesn't say he's justified to cut off the heads of mobsters. However, it doesn't excessively state "Well, I'm really sorry what happened to you but what you've done can't be forgiven" so we don't have to challenge ourselves to feel too much empathy for Jason's suffering.

Meanwhile even when Toya tries to express his rightful anger and grief, we're always met with someone shutting him down and saying well yeah, but you're wrong, involving innocent people is unforgivable.

As said by @stillness-in-green in the replies to this post:

I think so much harm (in-universe, but the state of the Twitter fandom makes me think the messages are pretty toxic irl, too) comes out of portraying the Heroes as needing to weigh in on the *morality* of the Villains' actions before they gauge "saving" them, when that is not a thing that glorified cops have any business thinking they have the right to do. Demanding repentance before the rehab is so bizarre.

You can say someone's actions are wrong without using it as a factor to consider whether or not their suffering as a human being should be acknowledged, and like I said there's multiple instances of people just yelling at Toya how immoral he is instead of addressing the elephant in the room.

You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong.

(Okay, I understand that some people have interpreted this as a show of Honnae and Tatamae, the Todoroki's who are a very repressed household are finally talking about their feelings even if those feelings are selfish and ugly).

(I'm not criticizing Shoto for saying that the people he killed were his own choice necessarily, Shoto is a character who's actions need to be read more deeply than his words he was dedicated to bringing Dabi down without him burning himself any further start to finished. My criticism lies in the fact that Hori uses Shoto as a mouth piece because he thinks we need to be reminded that murder is bad).

However, even acknowledging that time and place man, time and place. They couldn't have done that in the aftermath, when Toya isn't burning to death?

Hey buddy, you're being selfish.

Toya: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I'M MELTING, I'M MELTING.

This is I feel the underlying problem with the way the arc is written, not because the Todorokis are a very traditional Japanese family and there are cultural reasons they express their emotions differently, I'll give a caveat to that it's a nuance I might not understand.

However, I am arguing the actual problem is tell don't show. Horikoshi thinks that we as an audience need to be told multiple times that murder is bad, and we cannot be trusted to interpret that on our own.

Under the Red Hood shows both sides of Batman and Jason's debate, and let's us just come to the conclusion that Jason is in the wrong because revenge isn't justice. Horikoshi reaches no shit sherlock levels of telling us that we're not supposed to approve of Dabi's murders.

it's also a matter of giving Dabi narrative space to express his feelings, like every time Dabi tries to talk he is continually shut down (Shoto does engage Dabi talk to him and listen to why he didn't come back though I'll give him that) and it seems to be to push forward this weird idea that you shouldn't sympathize with the pain Dabi has endured or the ways he's dehumanized unless he does something to prove he deserves to be treated like a human being first.

Jason gets to monologue and make an entire argument, and his argument also shows the depths of his love for Bruce and what a deeply feeling person he is, and how those feelings being hurt and twisted could logically lead to his lashing out.

Compare this to Dabi who doesn't get a final monologue, but is instead reduced to a completely mindless state where he just cries out for his dad's attention. He doesn't get to make his argument.

Jason and Dabi both choose to blow themselves up, but Jason gets enough character agency to show this is a deliberate choice he's making even if it's the wrong one. He retains his character agency and ability to make decisions until the end of the narrative.

Jason's also you know physically crying. The end result of the narrative is about wrong choices that both Bruce and Jason make together, and then suffer the consequences together. Bruce watches the same failure play out again and he isn't able to save Jason, Jason doesn't get what he wants, he doesn't get revenge and he doesn't get to reunite with his father. It's tragic for both of them, and brought about by decisions both of them made.

Whereas yes Dabi makes a lot of bad decisions leading up to the last war arc, but in the end his final fate is up to a choice Enji made to not face Toya in the final battle.

However, while the final consequence of the battle is brought about more by Enji's decisions than Toya's, it's Toya who endures all the suffering and punishment. It's Toya who is in an iron coffin, and doomed to slowly and agonizingly die with all of his skin burnt off unable to move. Toya doesn't even get agency after the arc is over. Enji still has a wheelchair, Enji can still move around, Enji's still fucking rich, he's not in prison for his actions, he as Rei wheeling him around.

Toya's agency and choices are all taken from him, presumably to serve the plot purpose of making Enji save him to finish off his arc, and then ENJI DOESN'T EVEN SAVE HIM.

Also I think it's important to mention, Bruce's tragic ending is brought about by him attempting to save both, trying to save the joker and Jason with the same action. Whereas Enji's tragic ending is brought about by Enji NOT LIFTING A FUCKING FINGER TO HELP. Yet, it's Dabi who has the lion's share of suffering, and is sentenced to this horrific state of being skinless in an iron coffin and only being able to be awake a few minutes a day with no choice but to waste away.

Bruce is also immediately called out for his actions, by the Joker of all people, you handled this all wrong, it's your fault. Bruce is right to not kill the joker, killing the Joker would not have solved any of Jason's problems, but the fact that he put off facing Jason for so long, and his inability to communicate that he loves Jason is what leads to Jason thinking that the only way to prove Bruce loves him is to force him to choose. It's because Bruce has utterly failed to show him in any other way that he is loved.

Joker: Oh my god, I love it! You manage to find a way to win, and everyone still loses. I'm going to be the one who gets what he wants tonight, badda bing, badda boom."

I'd also like to add that a lot of agency in Enji's actions are taken away too, to make him look more blameless. It's not Enji's fault that he didn't say anything to Dabi during Dabi's dance, he passed out because he had a punctured lung. It's not Enji's fault that he spent a month protecting Deku instead of searching for Toya, he had to protect innocent people. It's not Enji's fault that he didn't go immediately to face Toya in the final war arc Hawks told him not to.

It's not Enji's fault that he made Shoto and Toya fight like Pokemon instead of cleaning up his own mess, and also he feels really sorry for it and as soon as he's done punching the bad guy he'll look after Toya he promises.

Enji does get called out for this behavior but it falls flat because it only comes from the villain AFO, and Toya himself. As I stated above too, the ending is more influenced by Enji's actions not Toya's (because Toya's agency is stripped away until he's mindless) but Toya is the one who has to die while Enji gets to live and atone.

That is the real sticking point for The Hellish Todoroki Family, the way it ends.

Themes Are For Eight Graders

The underlying problem with the whole arc and why The Hellish Todoroki Family fails as a tragedy, is because it wasn't written to be a tragedy.

The above quote is from an interview with the writers of the widely hated Game of Thrones Season 8, which took a sudden tragic turn for Dany's character, gave her an incredibly dehumanizing ending of being put down like a rabid dog by her own lover, an ending that was neither foreshadowed nor did it match with anything written before.

In this meta here by @hamliet it goes far more into depth that Game of Thrones isn't a tragedy, but a piece of Romantic fiction (not a love story, Romanticism is a genre of big emotions, the beauty of life, larger than life ideas hence why it fits well with fantasy genre, it can be sad but it doesn't follow tragic structure).

Dany is a romantic heroine, a deconstruction of the idea of the classic warrior princess trope, and you know a colonizer, but she's not meant to be written as an inherently bad person. There are people who say that Dany was going to die in the original books. I'm one of those people. Me. However, context and framing matters, Dany for all her colonizing ways does genuinely want to do the right thing, so it's likely she'd die a heroic death as a reflection of her selfless intentions (and intentions do matter for fictional characters) whereas in the show she's put down as a villain.

Now watch me I'm going to coin a term for future literary critics to use: Narrative Gaslighting.

Narrative gaslighting is different then Show Don't Tell, where an author has just failed to properly show what they're trying to tell you in the story. Narrative Gaslighting is when a narrative deliberately tries to mislead you, straight up lies to you, or just insists things that did not happen totally happened guys. Much like real gaslighting, Narrative Gaslighting makes you feel stupid for interpreting things a certain way and insists you were wrong all along.

Narrative gaslighting is when Tyrian gives a speech that everyone should have suspected Dany when she burned slavers alive that she was secretly evil and would one day turn on them.

Like, no.

Dany is flawed because she is a foreigner, interfering with the politics of a different country that she does not understand in order to gain enough resources and men to return to her home country and invade that country to exercise her right as a Targeryn to uphold the divine right of kings.

Game of Thrones doesn't mention any of that shit that's in alignment with the previous actions in the story, it's just insisting the very ableist notion that Dany was insane all along and her violence towards other people is the result of her mental illness.

(Also before anyone says, so if she's a colonizer than how can she have good intentions, everyone is Bad in Game of Thrones, they're all waging war to vie for a throne, monarchy is bad guys. IDK how to tell you that Game of Thrones has gray on gray on gray on gray morality).

(Also this aside ties into the hangup of MHA and most popular fandom culture on Twitter, that Dany's moral failings somehow disqualify her from her humanity. In spite of the fact that on top of all of that she's a rape victim, and like, Dany's only on that continent in the first place because she was sold as a bride.)

But here's the same weird subtext that Horikoshi's writing of Dabi. The fact that Dabi was continually victimized and denied human dignity does not need to be addressed, because he did the bad things and didn't atone properly enough for it first.

In essence this random post on the gunnerkrigg court forums I found on the same day the chapter came out, displaying apollo's gift of prophecy.

"When someone is persecuted, it's important to inform everyone about their flaws. That way you don't have to feel anything about all the times that they were denied human dignity."

So, Dany is not written as a tragic hero but a romantic one, we as an audience are both meant to acknowledge her flaws and sympathize with her, not demonize her in an ableist way for being insane, and even if Dany is meant to die the tragic way she dies does not match up with all of the narrative foreshadowing that was built before that.

Like, for instance a lot of POC after the show ended kept telling everyone that Dany's actions in a foreign country were seriously problematic, and not only did the audience not listen but the showwiters didn't acknowledge it with the same subtlety as the books. So those people especially were able to pick up Dany's character flaws, and when the show finally acknowledged them it's not even in the way that critiques of the show were pointing out Dany's flaws it was just "she was insane all along." Not like taking time to go "no matter what the intention, interfering with the politics of a foreign country is wrong."

The problem with the Todoroki arc is essentially the same, down to the ableism (because outsiders continually call Dabi either a maniac or insane Demon without even giving credence to his grievances about hero society he's just reduced to an insane fringe element of society, and Dabi himself is reduced to a completely mindless, childish, insane screaming state where he can't make active decisions).

The Todoroki Arc is not set up to us as a tragic one. The ending is pretty clearly telegraphed to the whole audience. People are not wrong for thinking that Toya's ending would be either rehabilitation like Rei with the eventual hope of being welcomed home, or some kind of house arrest where he still gets to be with his family.

Everyone happy at the Dinner table and Enji not sitting with them.

"I wish you could be here, Toya."

"We all have to go stop, Toya."

"In that case, I'll make him sit down for a bowl with me."

Even Shoto's efforts to take down Toya non-lethally are rendered completely pointless, because Toya gets back up again and then burns himself alive (completely by his own choice so no one has to feel bad that they failed).

The story sets up the expectation that Toya is going to be brought home and sit down for a meal with his family. Then it makes you feel stupid for going in an entirely different direction. It was always going to end this way didn't you know The Todorokis are a tragedy?

Well, I just spent a very long section of this thesis statement illustrating that if it's supposed to be a tragedy, then it's still not written well.

It's a written as a romantic story of a family healing, and the villain getting saved, only for the villain not to be saved and the story to just keep on going like not getting saved isn't a huge failure. This is something that should permanently destroy the main characters, that they got the chance to repeat Sekoto peak and be there this time and they all utterly failed. I feel bad for Shoto most of all because he did everything right, and he still loses his brother, but does the story show that?

The problem is the story is blatantly lying to you about the fact that Toya was somehow saved, even though he LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE HELLRAISER. To quote Codenamesanzanka again:

But I feel the story couldn't give us that because it will remind the reader and everyone just how much Touya will be missing. In-story, talking any more will overburden Touya's heart - and how apt is that metaphor? So let's talk about how we'll talk, but that's all that's allowed here for this scene. Else we'll see how unfair it is that Touya has to be confined to this room, he isn't with his family and they have to come to this prison just to tell him about their day, and soon he will be gone. Details make it real, and it would've exposed the lie that Touya was saved in an actual way. The story knows it too - "this extra time Shouto gave us." This is all 'extra', and not the core. [...] If the story was sincere that this is a case of "it's simply too late" - as it should be!!! imo, to really drive in the clear point that they failed, they did not get the save they wanted, because that's the truth - the tone of the chapter isn't tragic enough for that. The tone is going for 'Making Peace With This'. We've skipped the stages of grief and all we have is acceptance. The characters have accepted this, and so must the readers as well.

Therefore it's narrative gaslighting, the story is making us doubt our perceptions and trying instead to manipulate us to feel a certain way. We don't have to question the unfairness of Toya's fate, because look at all the people he's hurt, and look how Enji is atoning and taking responsibility.

The story builds up the idea that Enji will choose Toya. That he will choose being a father over being a hero. Enji doesn't do that, and it's Toya who suffers the horrific, painful consequences while Enji gets off mostly scott free. Mind you it's also ableist to suggest that being in a wheelchair is some sort of life-ending consequence like he's fine. The story even goes out of its way to say how avoidable this ending could have been if Enji or Rei or someone lifted a single finger to give Toya the acknowledgement he wanted, and then gives it a "Too little, Too Late" conclusion but doesn't acknowledge that this is where it's ending and instead tells us that Enji has successfully atoned.

"Everyone's watching me. So this is what it's like. If it was such a simple thing, then why not sooner?"

If it was going to turn out this way Toya should have just died here, not because death would somehow be a mercy compared to life in prison, but because the Todoroki Family doesn't deserve to get to pat themselves on the back. If they let Sekoto Peak happen a second time, then they should have to deal with the consequences of that.

It would be consistent is my point. This is written as a "Too Little, Too Late" kind of ending, but we don't get the emotional response from the Todorokis that they've let Toya die a second time.

On the other hand, UTRH has the exact same tragic ending but it doesn't make me angry because it's honest about it. The Todorokis let Sekoto peak happen a second time. Batman let Death in the Family happen a second time, but look at how even the narration and comic panels of the story acknowledge it.

"Fate is a funny thing. It swells up like a raging current and we are forced to travel. It provides us no exit. No deviation. It drops us in a bottomless ocean and compels us. We either swim, or drown, and sometimes as we struggle against the tide, a great truth arises."

One ends with Enji meaninglessly stating that he'll spend the rest of his life atoning for Toya and watching over him (which I guess will be like two months tops) for the fifth time. The other ends with Batman being lectured by the Joker of all people of how he chose wrong and being forced to watch once again as a warehouse blows up, and he's completely helpless to save Jason.

UTRH ends with the message that Batman sucks, Enji's atonement arc ends with Natsuo calling him cool for atoning and UTRH makes me like Batman way more as a character. Whereas at this point I feel nothing from the Todoroki Family, except for a disgust for the way that Toya not only has to die, but has to die a slow, gruesome death while the rest of his family walks away with the small comfort of "oh at least we'll get to say what we need to say before Toya passes."

Especially with the fact that Toya's greatest fear was that when he died, he died meaninglessly because his family never grieved him and all moved on with their life. I guess we don't have to analyze how gross the underlying message that criminals don't deserve to be sympathized with because themes are for eighth graders.

EPILOGUE

The post is finished but apparently everyone expects me to cover every single possible angle even in posts this long.

You didn't address the cultural aspect. Under the Red Hood is a western story, and Todoroki Family is based on eastern concepts.

The post isn't about that. The post is long enough I can't cover every single topic. Here's someone who covered that topic thoroughly. This one discusses more about the nuances of collectivism.

Also, since the Todoroki Family obviously copied Under the Red Hood's homework, it warrants a comparison. Especially since it seems to critically misunderstand what made the original work.

Which is a valid form of Literary Criticism, as Ursula K Le Guinn once said:

 It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does.

The Todorkis aren't all to blame for Toya. Natsu, Fuyumi and Shoto are innocent:

You're right. It's just easier to refer them as the Todorokis then specifying "Enji and Rei" each time.

You didn't mention Shoto once in this post:

I have no cricism for Shoto's role in all this. In fact I think he's the best written part. I praise it here.

Shoto is a good boy, and he deserved to spend more time with his brother. The fact he won't be able to sit down and have dinner of him, is the greatest tragedy of them all.

The Identity of Deku's Dad

Has anybody else been so hyped after reading the latest chapters of MHA (418-422) because of the hints that the identity of Deku's father will be revealed soon?

In chapter 422, The U.S. president is shown, stating that all American heroes are to come to Japan, so perhaps Deku's father might be on that list of people arriving to help out.

I know there is still the possibility of the reveal being Dad for One, which is an interesting theory in my opinion, but the other chance that it might be an individual who works with heroes or is one of them also seems very intriguing.

It could also be the president himself, given how he is always in the shadows, but I honestly feel there is a slim chance for that to be true.

I can't be certain how Horikoshi will put the puzzle pieces of who Izuku's father is together, but I feel the president panels might be a piece of the puzzle somehow. His face is in the shadows...

...but again so was AFO's face for a long time.

I still feel really strongly about the DFO theory. On one hand I do see how people might be displeased by it, because AFO does insert himself in a lot of characters lives and influences them from the background, but precisely because of that I find him a very interesting and fleshed out character. So desperate for attention and love, even when he has it he doesn't know how to respond to it. He is also quite a charming character, which I feel you would have to be to impress the lovely Inko Midoriya. She is just too amazing, I also feel that he would be drawn to her as well because of that. Or perhaps because she bears resemblance to a certain Shimura? But again, Inko is very different to Nana, as in, she appears much softer as a character than Nana does, and I feel AFO would crave that from a person given that he wasn't taken care of and had to help his brother out and grew up in a very feral state and an incredibly hostile environment for anybody, let alone a child. Even though he does end up using people, I do think that that is because of his defense mechanism and constant living on survival mode affecting him.

AFO is also someone who doesn't want people to know the real him, his weaknesses and inner thoughts, his human side. The memories he does share with Deku and Tomura are only to traumatize them and break them up; in short: they are carefully curated.

If DFO does come into play, I feel that Tomura/Tenko will have a hand in the reveal. Perhaps helping or saving Izuku from within the vestige world? Maybe he will be able to help by seeing Izuku's memories and altering them like Deku did for him, because in the case that does end up happening, Deku will be the one needing a helping hand in coping with the reveal, and who better than the boy who that man was a father figure to as well. And in the end Deku and Tomura could also together "defeat" AFO by seeing his memories and saving the defenseless child he once was.

This is probably overthinking, but I wanted to share my thoughts with you guys. I love trying to guess what will happen and still being surprised by Horikoshi's amazing execution each time. I would love to read what you guys have to say on the topic.

And the manga delivers...

The “Uselessness” of Midoriya Izuku

Today, Hori shares an interesting fact through his author’s note:

The poem is called Ame ni mo Makezu in Japan, written by Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, and it is a very famous poem. The verse Horikoshi is referring to is [ミンナニデクノボートヨバレ] (originally written in katakana) or “minna ni deku-no-bō to yobare”. Translated straight, means “Called useless by all.”

I’ve always wondered why Izuku never really gets credit or widespread acknowledgement whenever he wins villain fights, of how he doesn’t seem to be known more than being ‘the boy who broke his bones during the U.A. Sports Festival.’ The shared victory against Stain was credited to Endeavor, his personal fight against Overhaul was never televised, and his defeat of Gentle Criminal was never relayed to his classmates.

Even now, he’s known as ‘the cryptid who saves people.’ In the span of the entire manga, Deku never really sought popularity nor money. The closest he did this was when he was told by All Might to announce his presence to the world via the Sports Festival, but even then, he prioritized saving his classmate over winning and wasn’t recognized for his previous victories. He didn’t even receive a single internship offer aside from Gran Torino. Plus, Deku doesn’t exude a natural charm when it comes to scripted interviews.

The poem:

The poem illustrates a person who lives simply, who helps those who are in need of help, and doesn’t get praise for it (nor desires to be praised.) So aside from it’s other meaning ‘dekiru’ or ‘I can do it!’, Deku as a hero name means that he doesn’t seek credit for doing what should come naturally.

But since Izuku choosing it for a hero name is yet another statement: he still hopes to become someone that everyone aspires to. That is, by asking people to call him Deku, he becomes a ‘No One who can save everyone.’

And that is the theme of BnHA. Izuku is supposed to symbolize the turning point, the revolution against the broken Hero Society, the society which is built upon the self-interests of “Heroes” barring a few. Izuku choosing Deku as a name means to impart that anyone who ‘helps/reaches out a hand to those who needed saving without expecting anything in return’ is already a hero.

Read More: The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku

RELEVANT UPDATE: ‘MiddleSchool!Kirishima hearing stories about a certain middle school student that saved a classmate from a villain’ is validated by canon.

The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku

Following the post that explains the connection of the hero name Deku to the ‘deku-no-bou’ line in the poem Ame ni mo Makezu (of which is famous in Japan, hence most Japanese readers likely getting the reference from the get-go while the out-group hasn’t) and details as to how Izuku choosing ‘Deku’ as his hero name shows that he never sought praise nor credit for his heroic acts, is a series of heartwarming reactions where people echo the inspiring yet bittersweet sentiment of the poem.

Some express that the realisation had made them cry. Others feel rather satisfied, saying how it adds yet another layer to the hero name. And lastly, most importantly, quite a lot noted how it fits Izuku’s character, if rather lonely and tragic for him, because—already—speculations arise that him being ‘The Greatest Hero’ by the end of the story will only be known to the readers…but not in-universe.

So let me offer some reprieve.

But first, let us establish first how outsiders perceive Izuku, and what exactly he is recognized for at this current time. (Because he is talked about a lot, even more so than we realise.)

After all, our storyteller, Midoriya Izuku, is such an Unreliable, Non-attention-seeking Narrator, which is why the narrative is framed in such a way that doesn’t put Izuku in the spotlight… nor does our MC’s point-of-view linger upon the positive impact of his own actions.

However, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t seen at all. In fact, history certainly has both eyes on him.

Without further ado, let’s talk about the popularity of—no, not Deku…

The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku.

Izuku is most commonly known as the ‘kid who broke his bones and kept on fighting during the Sports Festival,’ while his more incredible feats like single-handedly taking down A-Rank Villain Muscular (twice!), defeating Shie Hassaikai Leader Overhaul, and saving the U.A. Cultural Festival (by stopping Gentle Criminal) were not—and might never be—common knowledge.

Truth be told, whether they’d realized it or not, people started looking at Izuku before the Entrance Exams. That was when Izuku ran to face the Slime Villain, while the other pro heroes were just standing around waiting for the arrival of a ‘better match-up’ against the enemy. Not sure how canonical the light novels are, but in one of them, Kirishima internally mentioned a certain ‘middle school student’ who went against the Slime Villain w/o use of his quirk, which sparked discussions on the internet. Certainly, cameras could be rolling during the villain fight, so copies of Midoriya’s act might have gone around.

If in manga canon, people already began watching him when he smashed the Zero Pointer into pieces. That’s certainly a very memorable feat. They called him ‘special.’ Furthermore, later on, we see that Izuku was immediately popular amongst his classmates. Everyone wanted to talk to him. They praised his moves (with an emphasis at times on how he was doing great even w/o use of his quirk—in fact, his quirkless moves and dodging garnered more praise than his final Smash move) and were inspired by him after the Battle Training round. Izuku was rather overwhelmed. For the first time in his life, his classmates weren’t ganging up on him to tease him nor make fun of his dreams!

Despite his crazy performance in the Sports Festival and not having a single pro hero interested in sending him an internship offer, Izuku was still popular amongst the civilians. They complement his hard work, they encourage him… When he patrolled the streets with Mirio in the Shie Hassaikai arc, he was recognized by two ladies and they smiled at him as they passed by.

If you also notice, outsiders acknowledge his incredible progress even more so than Izuku’s internal narration. They put him in a whole other league, as if there was no question at all whom really is the strongest one. They talk about his training, how he’s developed new attacks… Midoriya Izuku seems to be a popular topic around U.A., to the point that gossip about him circulates fast, with the details known by almost everyone the very next day. Furthermore, he mainly gets talked about in a positive light despite his supposed ‘delinquent’ actions. Most U.A. students respect Midoriya Izuku.

And they know him by name and will call out his name! (As the random guy from the concert crowd demonstrates, whereas he’d only referred to Aoyama as ‘Laser Boy.’) Pro heroes like Gang Orca also knows that bone-breaking kid as “Midoriya” (Gang Orca also internally mentions his name in the anime!!!). I don’t know why I’m excited over Gang Orca calling out Izuku’s name, but…yeah, I am. I’m just a fan of pro heroes knowing and seeing Izuku and referring to him as Midoriya-kun. :’)

And of course, Midoriya is also very much known to some villains, and in a positive way as well. Gentle Criminal and La Brava immediately remembered Izuku’s tenacity and determination the moment they identified who he was. He was someone to look out for. Spinner, on the other hand, derived his own assumptions about Izuku being a ‘true hero’ based on Stain’s actions on saving him. He was watching Izuku that closely.

Midoriya Izuku doesn’t stand out at all; Horikoshi says that it’s better the plainer he is, since ‘Deku’ is supposed to stand for that faceless everyman who doesn’t hesitate to do kind acts unconditionally. But in spite of that, in other words, people from different walks of life still notice plain Midoriya. 

It’s true that he doesn’t get loudly applauded for his every victory. The cameras are nowhere to be found when he accomplishes something particularly All Might levels of media-worthy.

But is it really tragic for Izuku that he simply does saving for saving’s sake?

Behold, the reactions over the poetic explanation of Izuku’s hero name.

Because let me tell you now, the post that talks about the “uselessness” of Midoriya Izuku reflects how his kindness is already celebrated.

Izuku still gets the recognition he’s due for his heroism, albeit in ways that we don’t usually think of as “enough.” People he saves or meets get internal revelations when they meet him. They change their views, they would start aiming for the better. Even from the beginning, his are acknowledgements that are more personal. It contrasts against All Might’s, whose goodness and greatness felt so distant and unattainable it created a hierarchy and a divide.

In-universe, Izuku’s kindness endures, his kindness demands change. With a little push from Uraraka’s kind act of teaching him how to reclaim Deku by pointing out how it sounds like dekiru (I can do it!), he gains confidence and makes the revolution last further. Deku is a phenomenon, and a society built upon the premise of ‘being a deku who can save everyone’ is a worthy thing to be remembered by all on its own. By making Deku his hero name, Deku becomes timeless (like the poet of Ame ni mo Makezu on his deathbed). All Might won’t be almighty forever, but anyone can be a ‘nobody who lends a hand to those who look like they’re asking for help.

And that, I think, is the best recognition of all.

The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku

Following the post that explains the connection of the hero name Deku to the ‘deku-no-bou’ line in the poem Ame ni mo Makezu (of which is famous in Japan, hence most Japanese readers likely getting the reference from the get-go while the out-group hasn’t) and details as to how Izuku choosing ‘Deku’ as his hero name shows that he never sought praise nor credit for his heroic acts, is a series of heartwarming reactions where people echo the inspiring yet bittersweet sentiment of the poem.

Some express that the realisation had made them cry. Others feel rather satisfied, saying how it adds yet another layer to the hero name. And lastly, most importantly, quite a lot noted how it fits Izuku’s character, if rather lonely and tragic for him, because—already—speculations arise that him being ‘The Greatest Hero’ by the end of the story will only be known to the readers...but not in-universe.

So let me offer some reprieve.

But first, let us establish first how outsiders perceive Izuku, and what exactly he is recognized for at this current time. (Because he is talked about a lot, even more so than we realise.)

After all, our storyteller, Midoriya Izuku, is such an Unreliable, Non-attention-seeking Narrator, which is why the narrative is framed in such a way that doesn’t put Izuku in the spotlight... nor does our MC’s point-of-view linger upon the positive impact of his own actions.

However, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t seen at all. In fact, history certainly has both eyes on him.

Without further ado, let’s talk about the popularity of—no, not Deku...

The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku.

Izuku is most commonly known as the ‘kid who broke his bones and kept on fighting during the Sports Festival,’ while his more incredible feats like single-handedly taking down A-Rank Villain Muscular (twice!), defeating Shie Hassaikai Leader Overhaul, and saving the U.A. Cultural Festival (by stopping Gentle Criminal) were not—and might never be—common knowledge.

Truth be told, whether they’d realized it or not, people started looking at Izuku before the Entrance Exams. That was when Izuku ran to face the Slime Villain, while the other pro heroes were just standing around waiting for the arrival of a ‘better match-up’ against the enemy. Not sure how canonical the light novels are, but in one of them, Kirishima internally mentioned a certain ‘middle school student’ who went against the Slime Villain w/o use of his quirk, which sparked discussions on the internet. Certainly, cameras could be rolling during the villain fight, so copies of Midoriya’s act might have gone around.

If in manga canon, people already began watching him when he smashed the Zero Pointer into pieces. That’s certainly a very memorable feat. They called him ‘special.’ Furthermore, later on, we see that Izuku was immediately popular amongst his classmates. Everyone wanted to talk to him. They praised his moves (with an emphasis at times on how he was doing great even w/o use of his quirk—in fact, his quirkless moves and dodging garnered more praise than his final Smash move) and were inspired by him after the Battle Training round. Izuku was rather overwhelmed. For the first time in his life, his classmates weren’t ganging up on him to tease him nor make fun of his dreams!

Despite his crazy performance in the Sports Festival and not having a single pro hero interested in sending him an internship offer, Izuku was still popular amongst the civilians. They complement his hard work, they encourage him... When he patrolled the streets with Mirio in the Shie Hassaikai arc, he was recognized by two ladies and they smiled at him as they passed by.

If you also notice, outsiders acknowledge his incredible progress even more so than Izuku’s internal narration. They put him in a whole other league, as if there was no question at all whom really is the strongest one. They talk about his training, how he’s developed new attacks... Midoriya Izuku seems to be a popular topic around U.A., to the point that gossip about him circulates fast, with the details known by almost everyone the very next day. Furthermore, he mainly gets talked about in a positive light despite his supposed ‘delinquent’ actions. Most U.A. students respect Midoriya Izuku.

And they know him by name and will call out his name! (As the random guy from the concert crowd demonstrates, whereas he’d only referred to Aoyama as ‘Laser Boy.’) Pro heroes like Gang Orca also knows that bone-breaking kid as “Midoriya” (Gang Orca also internally mentions his name in the anime!!!). I don’t know why I’m excited over Gang Orca calling out Izuku’s name, but...yeah, I am. I’m just a fan of pro heroes knowing and seeing Izuku and referring to him as Midoriya-kun. :’)

And of course, Midoriya is also very much known to some villains, and in a positive way as well. Gentle Criminal and La Brava immediately remembered Izuku’s tenacity and determination the moment they identified who he was. He was someone to look out for. Spinner, on the other hand, derived his own assumptions about Izuku being a ‘true hero’ based on Stain’s actions on saving him. He was watching Izuku that closely.

Midoriya Izuku doesn’t stand out at all; Horikoshi says that it’s better the plainer he is, since ‘Deku’ is supposed to stand for that faceless everyman who doesn’t hesitate to do kind acts unconditionally. But in spite of that, in other words, people from different walks of life still notice plain Midoriya. 

It’s true that he doesn’t get loudly applauded for his every victory. The cameras are nowhere to be found when he accomplishes something particularly All Might levels of media-worthy.

But is it really tragic for Izuku that he simply does saving for saving’s sake?

Behold, the reactions over the poetic explanation of Izuku’s hero name.

Because let me tell you now, the post that talks about the “uselessness” of Midoriya Izuku reflects how his kindness is already celebrated.

Izuku still gets the recognition he’s due for his heroism, albeit in ways that we don’t usually think of as “enough.” People he saves or meets get internal revelations when they meet him. They change their views, they would start aiming for the better. Even from the beginning, his are acknowledgements that are more personal. It contrasts against All Might’s, whose goodness and greatness felt so distant and unattainable it created a hierarchy and a divide.

In-universe, Izuku’s kindness endures, his kindness demands change. With a little push from Uraraka’s kind act of teaching him how to reclaim Deku by pointing out how it sounds like dekiru (I can do it!), he gains confidence and makes the revolution last further. Deku is a phenomenon, and a society built upon the premise of ‘being a deku who can save everyone’ is a worthy thing to be remembered by all on its own. By making Deku his hero name, Deku becomes timeless (like the poet of Ame ni mo Makezu on his deathbed). All Might won’t be almighty forever, but anyone can be a ‘nobody who lends a hand to those who look like they’re asking for help.

And that, I think, is the best recognition of all.

The “Uselessness” of Midoriya Izuku

Today, Hori shares an interesting fact through his author’s note:

The poem is called Ame ni mo Makezu in Japan, written by Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, and it is a very famous poem. The verse Horikoshi is referring to is [ミンナニデクノボートヨバレ] (originally written in katakana) or “minna ni deku-no-bō to yobare”. Translated straight, means “Called useless by all.”

I’ve always wondered why Izuku never really gets credit or widespread acknowledgement whenever he wins villain fights, of how he doesn’t seem to be known more than being ‘the boy who broke his bones during the U.A. Sports Festival.’ The shared victory against Stain was credited to Endeavor, his personal fight against Overhaul was never televised, and his defeat of Gentle Criminal was never relayed to his classmates.

Even now, he’s known as ‘the cryptid who saves people.’ In the span of the entire manga, Deku never really sought popularity nor money. The closest he did this was when he was told by All Might to announce his presence to the world via the Sports Festival, but even then, he prioritized saving his classmate over winning and wasn’t recognized for his previous victories. He didn’t even receive a single internship offer aside from Gran Torino. Plus, Deku doesn’t exude a natural charm when it comes to scripted interviews.

The poem:

The poem illustrates a person who lives simply, who helps those who are in need of help, and doesn’t get praise for it (nor desires to be praised.) So aside from it’s other meaning ‘dekiru’ or ‘I can do it!’, Deku as a hero name means that he doesn’t seek credit for doing what should come naturally.

But since Izuku choosing it for a hero name is yet another statement: he still hopes to become someone that everyone aspires to. That is, by asking people to call him Deku, he becomes a ‘No One who can save everyone.’

And that is the theme of BnHA. Izuku is supposed to symbolize the turning point, the revolution against the broken Hero Society, the society which is built upon the self-interests of “Heroes” barring a few. Izuku choosing Deku as a name means to impart that anyone who ‘helps/reaches out a hand to those who needed saving without expecting anything in return’ is already a hero.

Read More: The “Popularity” of Midoriya Izuku

i wouldnt say ultra impact provides anything of major substance to any of bnha, and of course you run into any issue of arguing its canonicity.

but i do feel very strongly that it is very good at portraying the characters, like the writers get the essence of a character even if nothing of bombast is being done with them.

yes this is entirely because i am consistently happy with what materials the game provides for 1B, we got a 1B monoma-centric event which understands both that he is a competitive little prick who really would like to stick it to 1A, while also being intensely aware (in a very humble way) that he is NOT better at utilizing the quirks of his classmates after pulling off a fairly complicated strategy

Of course, he immediately undercuts himself by going back to his, "and with this we will be better than 1-A" schtick, but that too is part of his character.

on bakugous hero name

[ SPOILERS FOR MY HERO ACADEMIA CHAPTERS CHAPTER 293 maybe beyond ]

Okay so like I said I was going to write that post about Katsuki Bakugou’s hero name some time ago, anyways I’m getting around to doing that right now! So we need to address something vitally important that I should’ve done earlier but now is an apt time as any. 

“Ground Zero” as a fandom hero name for Bakugou is something I am personally chill with. It is, however, no longer chill with it when people say things like “Bakugou’s hero name should have canonically been ‘Ground Zero”. 

I really don’t think I need to get into the reason why, but I’ve been proven wrong already so we have to do this now. 

My Hero Academia (Boku no Hero Academia) is a JAPANESE anime and manga series.

“Ground Zero” is defined as “the point on the Earth’s surface closest to a detonation“ when used in relation to large bombs and nuclear weapons

For those who do not already see where “Ground Zero” maybe being an issue as a canonical hero name I will go more in-depth.

Japan suffered two nuclear bombings in August of 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Furthermore, as a result of the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, the cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had a meltdown causing everyone within 10km to have to be evacuated (at the time of writing, I do not believe people have been allowed back into this area). 

Alright now lets get into the meat of this.

“Ground Zero” is a term highly, highly associated with nuclear weaponry and other weapons of mass destruction when discussing bombs and such. Guess which country has actual generational trauma relating to the destruction of their cities and home via bombs? Japan!

Guess which hero name would be the WORST name that has bombing connotations to give to an audience that in recent history of having to live through horrible nuclear events, and have a horrible history regarding bombing and nuclear bombing in particular? Ground Zero!

And before anyone! Brings up the prototype design sheet of Bakugou, this picture! 

Just because this prototype design says “CODENAME: 爆心地” which does indeed translate to “center of explosion; hypocenter; ground zero”, that does not give you any reason to not consider the emotional impact that it potentially has towards a full on generationally traumatized society. 

Unless, of course, you truly do not care about people for who this media is directed towards because you know insensitive western-centric mindsets who don’t actually care about people other than themselves and their own enjoyment topped with a likely, extremely U.S. mindset that nukes are just “good”. 

Frankly, I would like to also discuss the implications of this mindset possibly stemming from anti-Asian discrimination or a fetishization of some sort or general disrespect for the literal people that this work of media is intended for, but I don’t quite know how to word it nor do I have the patience to make it easy for everyone to understand. Hopefully people still understand it anyways.

tl;dr: it’s a highly self centered and culturally ignorant thing to say that “Ground Zero” should’ve been canon for Bakugou’s hero name, which takes absolutely no care for the generational trauma of the Japanese who have suffered due to horrific bombings. fandom name? a-okay by me. Bitching that the name isn’t canon? leave!

Horikoshi recently revealed that Endeavor was supposed to die during the PLF war and that honestly validates something I've been feeling but couldn't quite articulate: "Horikoshi doesn't know who the central Todoroki is" (or he does, but he changed it halfway through to the worse option)

Endeavor dying would have been AMAZING if Shoto were the central character in the Todoroki subplot. The main reason this is so is that Endeavor would be out of the way. Shoto would have full reigns on how he wants to handle Touya (the "final villain" of the Todoroki subplot), and the rest of the family can play a role in this as a supporting cast.

However, Shoto is NOT the central character in the Todoroki subplot. Or, at least, he used to be, but he's not anymore. He's not allowed to have a final fight with Touya because Touya needs to still confront Endeavor. Regardless of how that fight ends, whether it's Shoto saving his brother or knocking him out, Shoto isn't allowed to end the conflict until Touya and Endeavor interact.

At the start of the series, it was really obvious that Shoto was the central figure (and was our pov character) for his family drama. During the sports festival, HE'S the one who shared the backstory. The flashbacks are framed around what HE saw. HE is the one taking a step forward to fix his family, and it starts with reconciling with his mom. At this point, Endeavor is what I'll call "the instigator". He is the cause for the family drama, and though we may not know Touya at this point, Endeavor has already released the future final boss of the subplot into the world.

In the Pro Hero arc, Endeavor becomes his own central figure as a pov character into the world of pros. He then overlaps with the Todoroki subplot by wanting to atone and remove himself from the role of the instigator. The thing is, he can't. What was done cannot be undone, and the most he can do at this point is try to make things better for his family moving forward. At this point, he and Shoto can coexist as central figures because the final boss has not yet been introduced.

The second Touya confirmed his identity, either Endeavor or Shoto had to stop being the central figure. Having Touya need to fight two heroes before being able to come to any end just feels sloppy, and since Shoto was given the first fight, it makes him seem like the less important figure. Even Touya doesn't care! He spends a good chunk of the fight talking about how he'd rather fight Endeavor. This makes Endeavor into the central figure as he is now the one to end the fight. HE'S the one the final boss has been waiting for, not Shoto.

The thing is, this started as Shoto's story, so it would have made sense for it to end as Shoto's story as well. Even if it meant killing Endeavor to force Shoto to be the ONLY central figure (probably to Touya's dismay) it would have allowed Shoto the space he needed to lead the ending he deserved, rather than be pushed to a side character.

TL;DR Endeavor surviving forced Shoto into the role of a supporting character in a plot line that started as SHOTO'S plot line.

Hawks, Spinner, Their Heteromorphic Influence and How Society Views Mutants (featuring Quirk Exception theory)

Something I’ve realized about the heteromorphs of BNHA is that there’s a distinct difference in reaction to our very own Heteromorph Representation - that being Hawks and Spinner

See, when Hawks was introduced, we see instantly that he’s a mutant. He has wings (and maybe some kind of eye thing going on but idrk what that is)

But he’s never actually seen as some kind of inspiration for heteromorphs, is he? Like as far as I can remember, he’s never had some mutant come up to him and say he’s an inspiration for representing heteromorphs by becoming the Number 2 Hero

In fact, nobody really seems to talk about him in a Representation For Mutants way. Every time we see him with fans, he’s mostly regarded for his looks rather than what he is. The fans are even petting his feathers as he addresses others about autographs

And there’s that one heteromorph girl in the crowd with the phone scene, but apart from that, we can’t see any other mutants in the crowd

And while Hori could have just not shown us Hawks’ effect on people his kind yet, it makes me think about the difference between his influence and Spinner’s influence

Hawks is a heteromorph. Ideally, he should be seen as a step-up for the mutant race, right?

But here’s the thing, the thing that is so important between both of these characters

See, Hawks doesn’t look “ugly”. Lets think about the possibilities that Hawks could have had for a wing quirk related to birds; He could have had a beak, clawed feet, he could have had feathers sprouting around his body, he could have even squawked and chirped like a bird. But he doesn’t do any of that at all, and he has none of those features

Hawks isn’t “ugly”, because he doesn’t look like the standard heteromorph, the kind that have extra limbs pointing out, the kind that look the wrong side of odd, or, say, even the kind with scales over his skin

But you know who does? Spinner

Spinner is “ugly”. His heteromorph body is covered in scales and there’s no escaping that. As much as he wants to, he can’t hide those scales unless he does a full body cover-up like Compress, and I doubt that he’d even want to

And, see, that’s the difference - Hawks isn’t “ugly” so he gets away with fame, popularity, shrieking fans (and murder). Spinner is “ugly” and he’s been discriminated against since he was a child

Spinner KNOWS what it’s like to be abused over who he is, to be discriminated against, to be scorned from the world so much so that he didn’t even want to go outside anymore

Hawks, as far as we know, hasn’t had any kind of discrimination over him, and I suspect that’s because he “passes” as a human being

Hawks only has wings on his back, and eye thingies that make him look stylish. Apart from that, he’s literally a human man. And thats pleasing to the eye, right? Hori created him as someone who is “nice to look at”

Spinner though? Spinner has scales covering the whole of his body. Spinner has a beak. Spinner has claws. He’s been discriminated against for the way he looks. He’s not “nice to look at”.

 And the thing is, nobody has said anything about Hawks’ placement in the ranks as a representation for heteromorphs because of this I think. At least, it isn’t shown to us that mutants look to him for inspiration. Hawks looks “normal” so he’s basically a human, right?

But Spinner? Spinner created a movement. He has inspired fellow heteromorphs, just like him who don’t have “conventionally attractive” features, to rise up and start rebelling. They even dress like him!

There’s a big big difference in how Spinner and Hawks influence mutants, and it’s incredibly important to acknowledge this difference, because its an example for how heteromorphs are treated

Miruko for example! Miruko is a mutant with a rabbit’s kick. She has bunny ears and a tail. It’s assumed, as well, that she has bunny feet. But she “passes” as human

The ears and bunny tail could be seen as sexy (Hori draws her as a part of fanservice but you think I haven’t seen you people thirst for her and her bunny rabbit look? I see you fandom. Don’t think I don’t), the feet are just feet (as in they aren’t important and can be ignored), and apart from those, she’s literally a human person. She covers up her feet as well, obviously for armor, but it’s one way that it doesn’t seem that much of a problem and adds to her “sexy image”

And when we think about it, a lot of the heteromorph Hero kids are quite “conventionally attractive” too. Tokoyami does have a bird head, but he mostly has a human body. Mina is just pink with black eyes and cute lil horns. Ojiro is a whole ass human with a tail. Tsuyu has more human attributes than frog. Kouda doesn’t have any features sticking out and he just looks like a shy lil boy. Shouji does have his multiple arms, but he’s been seen to keep them down and make them look more like one arm, and apparently, his face is the scariest. And what does he do? He covers his face up

All of these kids “pass”. They look mostly human. Does it matter if they actually are human? No, but does it matter that they look mostly human? Yes. Definitely

And this is why Hawks really isn’t that much of a “representation” of mutants, because he only has his wings, he’s mostly human, and because of that, he looks attractive

One example I want to bring up is Ryukyu as well. While she isn’t a heteromorph, her quirk allows her to turn into a big dragon, and I think that could also tie in with how she is viewed

Because it makes me wonder if a quirk that turns you INTO something is an exception in the publics eyes. I could definitely see that being something they would let slip, because outside of her quirk, she’s “attractive” and human

But I want to briefly touch on how she covers her eye with a big mask. Because it’s not just a hero costume thing, it’s a civilian thing for her too

And it makes me wonder if, like Shouji, she’s covering a mutant part of herself to “pass”. I have no evidence for this, and it could easily just be simple character design, but it’s something to think about. Focusing more on her quirk though, the dragon could be seen as “ugly”, and if in another universe where she was a dragon heteromorph, I can see her being not as popular as she is now

Because look at this

She says “I’m honestly not sure I deserve this…” and you know what? That makes me think about how, without her human form, she would be a heteromorph. She would be seen as “ugly”. But because of her human form, she’s “normal” and “attractive”, and circling back to the eye-covering thing, she’s possibly covering a part of her body to pass

She even fell a rank. It makes me think, why? When she’s so useful, when she becomes so big but doesn’t do any damage to the surrounding area she’s in? (And when she took a role in the War Arc with trying to stop Shiggy but that happened later. It does show how useful and incredible she is though). There’s a lot in this scene that makes me think about why she fell a rank, and her reaction to being in the top 10. That scene has always been quite interesting to me

(This Ryukyu part is mostly just speculation, so don’t take it too seriously as solid evidence for this analysis. Who knows, Hori could reveal something about her or focus on other things, but it does make me think a lot about her character)

The same thing could be said for Amajiki, who is human but can acquire all sorts of features to defeat an opponent (cows hoof, squid tentacles, chicken feet etc etc). His quirk could have an effect on the public similar to how Ryukyu is seen; as an exception. This is only speculation though, based off the Quirk Exception theory.

Fully circling back tho to Hawks and Spinner, I focus on these two more because they are both people who have had a great impact on the story. They are also very opposite sides of heteromorphic features.

And it makes me think about how someone like Hawks got into the HC so easily and was given his own agency at such a young age possibly because of that privilege. While Spinner is someone who hit the bottom of the barrel and was hated by everyone, to the point where he couldn’t stand it any longer and left

He became part of the League Of Villains and became friends with people who appreciate him for who he is. While Hawks doesn’t even have a “who he is”, because he has an entire persona, and mostly acts as someone popular and on duty, never seeming to relax

Actually, the only time he relaxes, as in puts the persona down, is when he’s threatening Twice. And maybe when he was smiling at Nagant (I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how that was a Real Smile, and I think they are right to an extent) but apart from that, he never puts everything down. In his job, he can’t do. He always has to be on duty and working

One last thing to note as well is that this

is Hawks beta design. I think I remember Hori said that he asked for advice about this design and the response wasn’t exactly negative but it wasn’t that positive either. But when he introduced the Hawks design we have today, his staff loved it and so Hori decided to go for that one. I think I also remember him saying something along the lines of “I chose this design over the beta design to make him nicer to look at.” (Please take this with a pinch of salt because I’m not sure if thats exactly what he said or not)

I wonder how differently things would have been if this was the final design for him

Regardless, Spinner and Hawks have a lot of influence over people, and yet have two very separate reactions from citizens and other heteromorphs. It’s very interesting to think about, and it makes me wonder if Hori will focus on this at some point

It’s certainly relevant, and it’s definitely something to think on

Thank you for reading!

This analysis is dedicated to @villainsandvictimsalliance because they made this post and it got my brain gears working lol. Idk if this is what you were talking about in your post, but regardless, you inspired me to write about this, so thank you for that!

I don’t know if Hawks has made any actual dent in heteromorph representation or anything, or if he ever will, but from what I remember, he’s hasn’t really elicited any reaction within the mutant world, so I thought I’d talk about it

There is the possibility of such a thing as Mutant Solidarity I think, similar to Quirk Solidarity, but maybe its just reserved for those who are on the same level as mutant i.e. a squid person seeing an octopus person hero or smthg

There is the slight possibility of him and Miruko having had an impact, which I would love, but when I saw your post, I mostly thought about Spinner and Hawks and how they conflict each other in terms of who they are and as mutants. So I hope you don’t mind that lol

EDIT: okay so apparently I have to actually say this, but I don’t think Spinner is actually ugly. This wasn’t about me saying my opinion on their looks. From what I’ve gathered, a lot of mutants seem to be judged on how they look and I’m under the impression that maybe this has to do with how much discrimination some characters may get. I mean Twice wasn’t mutant but he still got judged on his looks and ended up in a really bad position, so who’s to say those with mutant features don’t get the same or even worse treatment? Again, this hasn’t been shown to us, but sometimes I do look at the Hero kids with heteromorphic features and see a pretty stark contrast between those like Spinner and other heteromorphs and the Hero kids who got into UA of all places. It just makes me think about how the world of BNHA works, and I think its something to consider when looking at new characters or even characters we already know. Thats also why I used quotations for ugly and attractive, because its not about if they actually ARE ugly or attractive, its how I think society could view them. Same with how I used quotations for the word Pass because I don’t like thinking about how some characters are more accepted than others, but its the way that I can see Hero society operating in that shallow kind of way, y'know? Anyway. Little disclaimer at the end here because I just wanted to make it clear why I wrote it the way I did, and not cause any confusion

IMPORTANT UPDATE!

@sanssa​ had some great comments about stuff that I didn’t get to go in depth about or just straight up didn’t mention in the analysis, and imo explained it better than I ever could!👏👏👏

What’s your guess to the year? Keep in mind that Tiger was born on a leap year and Hawks said that quirks have been around for the past 2 centuries.

Incredibly belated answer on this, but it, uh, turned into a project. Because of course it did. Hope you find the result interesting, anon!

To get started, the Tiger thing is easy to look up, which I did, but does anyone have a citation for this Hawks line?  I feel sure I would have remembered it; it’s exactly the kind of worldbuilding detail my HeroAca chat would have jumped all over.  On the other hand, we might not have heard about it if it was in e.g. the World Heroes’ Mission movie or TUM or something.  (To be clear, if that is the case, I’m probably going to disregard it.  Vigilantes is the only spin-off in my heart, and I certainly value it above the material the anime sees fit to thoughtlessly tack on.)

That aside, I did actually hammer out a timeline for myself back in 2020, in which I set BNHA’s current action (designated as Deku starting UA) as kicking off in 2180, with the glowing baby born somewhere around 1980.  I peppered the time between with significant births, deaths and events, generally giving myself an unofficial “these dates rounded to the nearest five years” sort of leeway.

Back in 2020, however, we hadn’t yet had that Oji Atsuhiro reveal, nor the tidbit about Shinomori being, at eighteen years, the second-longest bearer of One For All.  I’ve been needing to revise for a while now, being something of a pedant about my MLA timeline, so this ask was a good opportunity to revisit it.

Hit the jump to join me on a ~magical number-crunching adventure~!

Note that this is a cleaned-up and formatted version of what started life as me brainstorming and hypothesizing until I arrived at my conclusion.  It has a few detours and cul-de-sacs because I was working it out as I went.  If you just want the TLDR, it’s as follows: 

Having considered all the new evidence, I would put the glowing baby’s birth circa 1985 and Deku’s freshman year in 2139.

    Front-End Dating

Let’s look at the beginning of the timeline first, as it’s the one that involves somewhat more guesswork.  There are a few reference points in looking at the timeframe for the glowing baby, if you’re willing to get unbelievably anal about worldbuilding details Horikoshi may or may not have even thought about.  I am absolutely willing to be that person, so when I first started ironing this all out, there were two hard dates I went looking for right off the bat: the invention of the taser, and the first Japanese publication of Marvel comics.

Point 1: Tasers

The existence of tasers is mentioned in a stray comment during Deku’s dream flashback to All For One and Yoichi: the quirkless man who gains a spike quirk from AFO is mentioned as carrying one for self-defense.  Tasers were invented in 1993, ergo, that scene must have taken place sometime after 1993.

It’s possible—even probable—that the scene could take place significantly after 1993, for two reasons.  First, we don’t know how long it took quirks and the chaos they brought with them to become widespread.  If it took decades for the world to realize what it was dealing with, the taser could have existed for years before the scene in question.  There’s also the matter of the technological crash brought on by quirks.  If said crash took place over an extended period of time during which tasers were still in development, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have been completed until sometime after 1993, taking even longer to reach civilian/black market availability.

Could the advent of quirks have sped up the development of the taser, answering the suddenly widespread demand for a self-defense/less lethal police weapon?  I could see it, but it would be a departure from what we’re told about other technological developments in that period.  it’s also worth noting that the very first taser available for sale, circa 1976, used gunpowder as its propellant, leading to it being classified as a firearm.  It’s therefore unlikely that Japan, with its extremely stringent gun laws, would have had much access to it at all that far back.  The 1993 date refers to the modern, non-firearm electric taser.  1976 is an interesting date, though, as I’ll discuss in the next section.

The taser gives us a starting point.  Assuming that its development wasn’t an aberration in a time of collapsing norms, the OFA scene post-dating it must be likewise post-1993.    

Point 2:  Japanese Publication of Marvel Characters

If you look at the narration about the origin of quirks in Chapter 1, you find a handful of silhouettes, fictional characters who represent the “fantasy” that became “reality.”  Since the narration is delivered by Midoriya, not an omniscient narrator, we can assume that those media properties did exist in-universe and, further, that all of them were viewed as fantastical prior to the advent of quirks.  Therefore, even the newest of those characters must have first publication dates that predate the Advent.

Of the lot of them, the Marvel characters are the newest.(1)  Spider-Man’s first appearance was in 1962; Wolverine’s (if the figure with the sideburns and claws is intended to be Wolverine) in 1974.  Marvel comics were even being localized and published in Japan by the early 70s, which would have begun familiarizing at least some people with those particular “fantasy” characters by that time.  Ergo, quirks must not have come about before the mid-1970s.

Knowing that also helps shore up the taser point by keeping the historical timeline on track up at least through its initial 1976 creation.    

Heretofore Unnumbered Point 3: The Technology Crash

My last consideration when I was originally running the numbers was the developmental crash brought about by the Advent.  Specifically, the world of My Hero Academia generally reflects a modern-ish Japan, so I default to wanting modern technology—and modern social reforms—to still feel modern to the characters.  Thus, the point at which society stopped developing needed to predate the full flush of the Digital Revolution, which really began to hit its stride in the mid-to-late-80s.  It could perhaps be the case that some developments were brand new and subsequently lost along the way, or simply never reached their full potential due to the spreading chaos of mysterious superpowers, but modern digital technology needed to not exist in any widespread form prior to the bottom falling out.

That’s my working window for the start: The glowing baby should be born no earlier than the late 1970s, the world should be recognizing the danger and starting to turn its attention towards the new problem by the late 1980s, slowing the development of other technology, but with total collapse not yet having come about by the early 1990s.

That’s the front end.  Before I get to the back end, let’s look at the middle: How long after the glowing baby’s birth was All For One’s?    

Bridging the Gap

The Shigaraki Brothers & Captain Hero

All For One provides an immediately accessible reference point for the timeline at large.  He’s over a century old, so quirks must be so as well.  However, we can assume that he isn’t past or closing in on two centuries, else that’s how Gran Torino, in talking about him, would have described him.  Whatever AFO’s age is, it needs to be something that’s in keeping with that estimation.

One thing to emphasize here is that we don’t know how long it took quirks to become a widespread, fully acknowledged issue.  If they started appearing all over the world in large numbers within a matter of months, that makes my calculations different than if it took years for enough quirks to surface in enough countries for them to become the subject of widespread panic.

Another thing that’s unclear is whether the brothers are themselves in the first generation—and therefore that they grew up watching the world spiral out of control—or whether quirks had already existed for quite some time before they were born, and they never knew anything but that widespread chaos.

One thing that gives us a lens on those issues is Yoichi’s beloved Captain Hero comic.  While the Captain could be from any number of periods in which that image of an American-style superhero exists, the Demon Lord is a bit more specific.

Particularly in Japanese media, that fantasy Demon Lord (Ma-oh/Maou) archetype was basically invented wholecloth by Dragon Quest, especially Dragon Quest III and its villain Zoma.  DQ3 came out in 1988 and had manga tie-ins in print that same year, therefore we can assume that comics inspired by this type of villain have to post-date 1988.

The Captain Hero comics are also another example of a piece of media described by a character (AFO) as “fantasy” that is now being reflected in “reality.”  Because of that fantasy/reality proviso, we can further assume that heroes as a job class didn’t exist at the time of the manga’s publication—which would make sense, since AFO in the dream flashback highlighted that the world was totally without order, whereas heroes being codified were a sign of the chaos beginning to settle somewhat, so obviously they wouldn’t have existed at the time of the flashback.

This gives us a somewhat limited window.  If the comics can’t predate 1988, but I still want to stick to my guns on the, “Panic about quirks superceded the nascent Digital Revolution,” qualifier, it pretty much dictates that the world was in full-tilt collapse by the end of the 90s.  This also lets me scrape by on my taser window of 1993.

In any case, seeing as Captain Hero depicts a pre-quirk vision of popular J-fantasy, to say the least, the comic’s fairly retro by the time the brothers are talking about it as adults.  I might even go so far as to say that they probably weren’t new-new when the brothers were reading them as kids.  They have the feel of something old, like maybe a collection the brothers’ father owned, or that they bought on the cheap somewhere just to have some meager entertainment in their lives.

Where does all that leave us, then?  I would probably call the Captain Hero comics something that came out in the late 80s/early 90s, some publisher’s attempt to capitalize on Dragon Quest’s popularity and those American superhero comics that had been floating around the edges of the zeitgeist for a decade or so.  They were probably published right in that nebulous period when the glowing baby had been born, and there was growing unease with the mysterious powers popping up around the world, but since there wasn’t yet a mass panic, entertainment companies were still trafficking in a lot of their usual fare; elsewhere, the taser reached mass market readiness.

Then, the bottom dropped out.  Media pivoted to be about what meta-abilities were and what they meant; old-fashioned things like Hero vs. Demon Lord comics plummeted in popularity and wound up in bargain bins(2) or put into storage.  In this fashion, some of them eventually find their way into Yoichi’s hands.  If he or his big brother actually bought them, they’re probably no more than a few years old—say maybe 3-5, which would put Yoichi reading them in the mid-to-late 90s.  If they’re something of Yoichi’s parents’, and AFO and Yoichi were born quite some time after the glowing baby, that could make the comics older, anywhere from a decade (if Dad was still around collecting when the brothers were very young) to closer to 30 or 40 years, if Dad bought them in his own childhood and just held onto them).

For myself, I prefer a read that the collapse was pretty fresh when the brothers were growing up, and some math further down the line in this analysis has led me to the conclusion that AFO and Yoichi were pretty early in the history of quirks, meaning that the collapse had to be pretty rapid in order for both of those things to be true.(3)  That being the case, let’s go with the more conservative read and say those comics were less than a decade old when the brothers picked them up.  That, then, leads to the next part of this analysis: How old are the brothers?    

Back-End Dating

I’d peg AFO as being in his early 30s during the flashback, and Yoichi in his late 20s; I assume that at that point, both of them were still appearing as their natural age,(4) which gives us AFO as 30-something during the events of dream sequence when he forces the quirk on his younger brother—the genesis of One For All.    

One For All’s Age

I’m going to jump around somewhat here, broadly working backwards, but circling around as necessary and tallying as I go.

Bearer 9, Deku

Easy-peasy.  Deku has carried OFA for a year and change—he received it in late February and the manga is currently in late spring/early summer of the following year.

Running tally for age of OFA: 1 year.    

Bearer 8, All Might

All Might has carried OFA for 40-ish years—possibly a few more, but not so many that Yoichi, talking about this in Chapter 304, would be better suited to say, “For over 40 years, Yagi maintained his grip on One For All,” instead of simply, “For 40 years, (...).”  All Might’s in his mid-to-late 50s now; he was still in school when he got it from Nana.  He was possibly in middle school when they first met, judging by his uniform, but presumably he wouldn't have been able to go to UA without it, so he must have had it by the time he started there at 15.  He was clearly seeing himself in Deku, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he was exactly 14 when he met Nana, and 15 when he got OFA just in time for entrance exams.

Running tally for age of OFA: 41 years.    

Bearer 7, Nana

Nana carried it for at least a few years, but we've never been explicitly told which she got first, OFA or her husband and kid.  You can make a good guess if you do the math, though, so here's some math+guessing:

The mothers in the series whose ages we know (the mothers of Deku, Bakugou, Tsuyu and Jirou) all had their first child in their early-to-mid-20s.(5)  Let's assume Nana was the same and put her at, say, 24 when Kotarou was born.  He then died at 32 (having turned so only recently), meaning that, had she survived, she would have been around 56 at the time of his death.  Tacking on the time since the Shimura Massacre using Shigaraki's age, that would put Nana at 72 today.    

All Might, again, got the quirk ~40 years ago; if he was echoing his own experience in the way he raised Deku, he would have been 15 at the time.  That would have made Nana 32—and Kotarou 8—at the time she gave Toshinori OFA.  She was killed when he was 18, his senior year.

Kotarou looks noticeably younger than 8 when we see him as a kid being given up.  He looks much closer to Tenko's ago, or his obvious parallel Kouta's, those ages being 5 and 6 respectively.  So I think we can assume Nana gave up Kotarou at least a few years before giving Toshinori OFA, which would certainly explain her surety, in the letter, that the fight would be the death of her.  If Kotarou was, say, 6, that’d make Nana 30 at the time she gave him up.    

We don't have any further idea how long Nana was carrying OFA herself before the transfer, only that it was less time than Shinomori, and not long enough to start taking a heavy toll on her(6) despite her being several iterations down the line from him.  I would guess it was fewer than 10 years, as 10 would put her at only 22 when receiving it, and I would tend to think that she wouldn't have had a kid if she'd known the full extent of what she was dealing with—she obviously saw the state En was in when he passed it on, after all.    

So, let's assume she'd already been a hero, trained and licensed, and already married with a young son when she came across En and didn't realize the extent of what she was getting herself into.  Some time between Kotarou's birth and turning let's-call-it-6, she takes the quirk, gets the world’s worst wake-up call when her husband is killed, and gives Kotarou up to the state.

Let's say it takes a year or two to realize the full extent of excrement you've stepped in with AFO.  Two years with a mysterious new quirk she got off a dying stranger before the mess led her to give up her son (at 30) would put her at getting the quirk at 28, when Kotarou was 4ish.  If she gave Toshinori the quirk around 32, that means she would have carried OFA around 4 years.

Running tally for age of OFA: 45 years.    

Bearers 6+5, En and Banjou (Take One)

En and Banjo are big question marks.  We have no idea how long they each carried OFA, other than, again, "for less time than Shinomori."  So to start narrowing down a timeframe for them, let me look to something else: heroism in general.

We know that Banjo, two bearers previously to Nana, was a professional hero—Lariat.  Heroism, then, must have existed in his era.    

We don't know specifically how long Pro Heroes have been established in Japan, but we can make at least one educated guess: Harima Oji was active when, quote, "the present system was just beginning to settle into place."  Thus, heroism has been around for the generations following him, as well as some years prior to his own vantage point.  That factoid gives us four generations (his child, grandchild, great-grandchild, and finally his great-great-grandchild, Sako Atsuhiro) plus however many of Harima’s own years heroes have existed for.  

A generation is usually considered around 25 years, which tracks with the known parental ages in the series.  So if the stretch of time between Harima's child's birth to Sako's birth can be estimated to 75 years, plus Mr. Compress's age of 32, that means it's been at least 108 years since Harima's child was born.  We don't know when said child was born relative to his criminal activity—maybe Harima had already become a father by the time he was thieving; maybe the family came later.  Let's just round it to 110 years that we can say with relative confidence included heroes in them.    

Heroes have existed for at least/around 110 years.  Our estimate of OFA's lifespan, meanwhile, currently stands at 45 years.  As noted earlier, it seems pretty apparent that heroes did not exist at the time One For All was first created; AFO’s climb to the top happened in those early chaotic years before the legislation of heroism.  So that leaves us at least 65 years we need to fill between Nana getting OFA and the very first licensed hero, and then an uncertain number of years between that first licensing and OFA’s creation.

Keep that 65-year figure in mind; we’ll be using it going forward.  For now, let's put a pin in En and Banjo and move on.    

Bearer 4, Shinomori

Shinomori is easy.  He carried OFA for 18 years, and says his own times were awful—he must, then, have been much closer to those chaotic years (which would track with Shinomori’s direct successor Banjo saying that the Japan Deku’s sojourning in post-Jakku reminds him of his own time).  18 years off our remaining 65 leaves us with 47 years OFA must have existed such that it at least parallels (and ideally predates) the Hero Institution.

Running tally for age of OFA: 63 years.    

Bearers 2+1, [?] and Yoichi

Skipping Bearer 3, another big mystery, for a moment, if AFO would rather his brother be dead than free, and if AFO wanted to both take back that power and take some really horrible revenge for stealing his brother away, I'd be shocked if Yoichi and Strawberry Bakugou made it as much as a decade between them.  Let's call it a decade for ease of rounding, though, and add 10 years to our tally.

Running tally for age of OFA:  73 years.    

This brings us down to the three bearers we have the least information on: #3, Banjo and En.  We still have 37 years to account for to get us in the ballpark of that Year 1 of Heroism, and more would, again, be welcome, as I assume the first hero didn’t get sworn in on the very eve of OFA’s creation.  (It might be thematic, but it runs you square into Destro and the original MLA, and evidence I’ll go over later would put them later in the timeline.)

Moving on, let’s take a brief aside to consider the vestiges’ appearances.  It might seem likely that none of the early bearers carried OFA for very long, given that they all look the same in the OFA mindscape as they do in the scene where 2nd and 3rd kick down the vault door hiding Yoichi, suggesting they died without having the chance to get significantly, obviously older than they were in that moment.

On the other hand, we don’t know enough about quirk metaphysics to say that the appearance of the vestiges would match their living appearances.  Given that we know there's a certain amount of connection between All Might and his vestige, it could be that the vestiges mirror their living selves' appearances until the end.  We can't really call Vestige Might definitive, though, because he's the only one that isn't a quirk vestige, but rather just an impression of All Might's (literal) personality.

Perhaps, then, the others’ appearances are imprinted when they're first incorporated into One For All and then they just stick that way?  Or is it more about their self-image, the age they tend to think of themselves as being?  Or is it the age that marked the most important part of their lives with OFA?  The lines beneath Nana’s eyes kind of come and go, but they’ve never been consistent enough that I’d call them a definitive sign that the vestiges’ appearances are fluid.

Deku’s fluctuating appearance—both how much he’s covered in mist and even his age, as shown when he talks about how he wants to save the little boy he felt inside Tomura’s rage—would seem to point towards a fluid manifestation, but Deku also can’t be considered definitive because he, like All Might, is both still alive and not appearing in the mindscape via his quirk, because he doesn’t natively have one.

So comparing the bearers’ appearances in flashbacks versus their mindscape selves is a dead-end.  What else do we have?    

Bearer 5, Banjo (Take Two)

I might guess that since All For One seems to have largely lost track of the bearers during Shinomori's time—seeing as he died of "old age," rather than at AFO's hand—it's possible that Banjo had a very good run before AFO caught up to him.  OFA was weaker back then, so the effect it had on Banjo's power levels might not have been so noticeable in a sea of heroes that it jumped out right away, especially with Yoichi's "voice" still being ill-formed.  Banjo's also by far the oldest looking of the lot, give or take Shinomori's difficult-to-measure signs of age.  That being the case, let's give Banjo 15 years—fewer than Shinomori, but long enough to take a good chunk out of our remaining span.

Running tally for age of OFA: 88 years.    

Bearers 6+3, En and [?] (Take Two+A Tweak to Nana’s Numbers)

That takes us down to 22 years to split between En and Mr. Fa Jin to get us to the bare minimum point where heroism would be brand new circa OFA's creation.  It's pretty much a toss-up, how one imagines that going.  My last point of evidence to consider, then, is Banjo’s statement that AFO tried to steal OFA from both him and En, and it didn't work.  They clearly survived to pass on the power, however, and not to anyone under AFO's direct control.  So, is it possible that, by this point, AFO was coming to understand that he couldn't just neatly steal OFA?  That he needed to adjust factors somehow?

That being the case, while I expect he would have tried to keep Banjo and En around (the better to have them available to test out new methods on!), he might not have been in full search-and-destroy mode, because he didn't have a solution yet, so it didn’t really hurt him to let OFA's bearers run about for a while, meaning En could have had a pretty good stretch of time with the power.  Heck, that might even have had an effect on the amount of time Nana had as well!  I estimated two years between getting the power and realizing the extent of her danger, but if AFO was in full cat-playing-with-its-food mode by then, it might well have been longer.

On the other hand, if AFO lost track of Fa Jin-san such that he was able to pass OFA to Shinomori without being detected, it would seem he slipped AFO's net as well, so he could also have had a pretty solid run.

Twenty-two years left, but En—if his appearance is even remotely relevant—is the clear youngest outside of Izuku, and I don’t see him and Banjou having a senpai/kohai relationship if En was a literal child at the time.  So to avoid having to hang too much time on him, let's wick a year or two back to Nana, reflecting that perhaps AFO’s danger was not quite so immediately apparent as I first supposed, and make her OFA run 6 years instead of 4.

Running tally for age of OFA: 90 years.    

That gives us 20 years remaining between En and 3rd that we know need to exist to get them back to even Harima Oji's time.

Let’s go ahead and assume that En was at least 18 when he got the power from Banjou—while we can imagine situations outside of official, professional relationships, Banjou was a hero, and En called him senpai, so the Occam’s Razor explanation is that En was also a licensed hero when they were forming that relationship.  If En was a licensed hero, he’d need to be old enough to be issued that license.  Even if he didn’t go to a hero school—that many years in the past, did hero schools even exist?—I have to think he’d need to be at least 18.  And we see how old he looked at the time of his death: exactly the same way he does in the mindscape.  I’d guess he’s around the same age as e.g. the twenty-somethings in the League, so at best I’d call him 25 at the time of his death, giving him a maximum possible run of 7 years.

That leaves Fa Jin-san 13 years with OFA to meet my scaffolded-out-into-thin-air bare minimum.

Running tally for age of OFA: 110 years.    

So, OFA has to be at least 110 years old to even get the point of its creation back to Harima Oji, and that’s reachable while staying within the bounds of what we know.  I personally still think it’s still a bit on the short side, however.  Again, the OFA dream very much gave the impression that AFO was running around attracting the masses in the full-tilt chaos years, not the ones where the Hero System had already been adopted and was beginning to settle.  So let's bump it back 10 more years—before Harima, and anywhere between that same 10 years to only a few years prior to Destro and the original Meta Liberation Army, depending on how contemporaneous Harima and Destro were.  We can scratch those 10 years together from, for example, stretches of months (like Deku’s three months on top of his base year) that the above analysis is too broad-strokes to cover, as well as granting an extra year or two here and there to bearers whose numbers we can only guess at.

FINAL TALLY FOR AGE OF ONE FOR ALL: 120 years.    

Shigaraki Yoichi and AFO’s Ages (Interim Answer)

Recall that I estimated Yoichi at the time of the dream as being in his late 20s.  Tack that onto our age of OFA, and we get just a bit shy of 150 years from the time of Yoichi's birth to Izuku entering UA.  This would make AFO a few years over 150—over 100, but not so close to 200 that you’d expect Gran Torino to say that instead.    

Putting It Together

I estimated the Captain Hero comics as being from late 80s/early 90s and supposed that they were less than a decade old when Yoichi and AFO first picked them up.  Chapter 333 gives us a quick flashback from AFO to Yoichi reading them; Yoichi in that panel looks less than 10 years old himself.  So let’s ballpark the comic and Yoichi as being around the same age and put their publication and Yoichi’s birth in 1990.  Adding on the previous ballpark of “a bit shy of 150 years” to get from Yoichi’s birth to today, that puts us at “a bit shy of 2140”—or of 2141 for the manga’s current events!

Now we can use Tiger’s age+birthday to settle on a final number.  Tiger’s birthday is, as stated, February 29th—he’s already had his birthday for the year and is currently 32.  If 2141 were exactly correct, that’d put him being born in 2109—not a leap year.  Luckily, the estimation is “a bit shy of 2141,” so let’s bump that birth year back by one to have him being born in the nearest leap year of 2108.  32 years later, he and we find ourselves in…

|| The current year is 2140, with Deku’s first year at UA being 2139. ||    

Going back to the beginning, then, to try and backdate the glowing baby, my suppositions are as follows: 

 •   AFO and Yoichi are from relatively early in the Advent period, within the group of people deemed the first generation.      •   “A generation” can be ballparked to 25 years.      •   Yoichi was born in 1990.  Being of the same generation as the glowing baby means his birth needs to be within 25 years of the baby’s birth.  25 years back from Yoichi’s birth would put us in 1965, which is much too early, so it must be a narrower window.        o We also know All For One is younger than the growing baby, if possibly by very little.  If AFO is 3-5 years older than Yoichi (again, early 30s versus late 20s in the flashback dream), that’d put him being born sometime in 1985 to 1987.        o I don’t want to push the baby’s birth any further than 1985—the collapse being rapid means I need to keep it as close as I can to my taser datum in 1993—but let’s aim for a middle way and call AFO 4 years older than Yoichi, born in 1986.  That puts us with a final analysis of…

|| The glowing baby was born in 1985.  Quirks are 155 years old. ||    

Checking My Math With Doc Ujiko

If AFO is currently 154, then even assuming Ujiko’s Life Force quirk had a retroactive effect, AFO should look in his mid-70s, which he clearly doesn’t.  However, I’ve long figured that AFO had to have been running on a life-extension quirk of some kind even before he met Ujiko.  Even just working with what’s explicit in the manga, he looked more or less the same when he fought All Might as he did when he fought Nana 40 years prior, and more or less the same as that when he created One For All far longer prior still!  A simple “2 years lived=1 year aged quirk” wouldn’t explain that continuity of appearance, and AFO certainly doesn’t seem to suffer from Ujiko’s reduced vitality.

Also, Ujiko is, per Mic, over 120 (thus presumably under 130).  He presented his Paranormal Singularity Theory to the world 70 years ago, during a time when the world was “struggling to end the turmoil and reclaim peace.”  Assuming my numbers are right, 70 years ago would put AFO at 84 years old.  One For All would have been created 50 years prior.  This makes AFO around 30 years older than Ujiko.(7)    

A (New) Finalized Rough Timeline

Note: Years are estimated, favoring five-year increments for ease of calculation.  Most events could be tweaked earlier or later by a year or two.  It does not include the One For All bearers; recall that I wedged in an extra decade to their time, to be distributed in chunks of months or more generous year allotments than my first pass.  Not having specifically divvied out those years, they’re not represented below.

1985:  The glowing baby is born

1986:  The child who will become All For One is born.

1990:  Shigaraki Yoichi is born.

~2015:  The child who will later call himself Garaki Kyudai is born.

2020: One For All is created.

~2032:  Harima Oji’s child is born.

2070:  Soon-to-Be-Garaki Kyudai presents his Paranormal Singularity Theory.

~~~generations pass~~~

2139:  Midoriya Izuku receives One For All; begins first year at UA.

2140:  Manga current events.

...Et voilà!

P.S. If the Hawks line turns out to be in the main canon, I will cry. And then I will do my best to adjust this accordingly.

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1:  Of the ones I could identify, at least.  Others include Superman, Ultra Man, Devilman, Kikkaider, etc.

2:  Entertainingly enough, this would offer a parallel between Yoichi clinging to his reduced-price comics and young Takami Keigo with his clearance-bin Endeavor plush.  Sometimes, it’s not what a thing is, it’s what the thing represents that makes all the difference.

3:  Specifically, I’d initially wanted AFO and Yoichi to be at least in the second full generation, with the collapse happening gradually over the course of the first generation and accelerating into full meltdown as the second generation began to appear.  I would later roughly define a generation as being 25 years, however, and a 25-year gap between the glowing baby and AFO proved to be flatly irreconcilable with the math that came out of backdating One For All and the history of professional heroism.

4:  Since Yoichi was never under the effects of an anti-aging quirk, if AFO already had one back then and Yoichi didn’t, Yoichi would have appeared to be the elder of the two.  That Yoichi still looked younger suggests that, if there was an anti-aging quirk on the table at that time, it was still very new.  More likely, though, AFO simply hadn’t found one yet.

5: In order: 26, 22, 26, and 21.

6:  At worst, she looks to have just started developing lines beneath her eyes, visible in some of the scenes of her towards the very end of her life and not present in her younger days.

7: Ujiko would have been in the vicinity of 55 at the time, and thus physically appearing merely in his upper 20s.  About the same age Yoichi was, way back when…

The choice of wording used here is something that I find very fascinating. I mean, it would’ve been enough if Monoma simply taunted Izuku by saying that Katsuki isn’t as great as he thinks / a bad hero, by calling their relationship delusional, or by criticizing Katsuki’s abrasive behaviour. Izuku could’ve gotten angry enough to create an opening for OFA to explode from just that alone and we all would’ve bought it.

But that isn’t what happened here. Horikoshi specifically had Monoma mock the fact that Katsuki continues to smile / laugh (depending on the translation) despite causing the end of All Might. That’s the truly messed up thing about all of this. This isn’t just normal playground teasing or jealousy. He’s implying that someone like Katsuki doesn’t deserve to be happy. It isn’t the damaging of Katsuki’s pride, his honour, their rivalry bond, or their shared dream that is presented as being Izuku’s weak spot, but the idea of someone threatening Katsuki’s happiness as a person. Someone mocking the emotional turmoil and resulting strength that Katsuki gained after moving forward.

I think that says a lot about how Izuku thinks of Katsuki. He isn’t just some beacon of victory for Izuku to admire and idealize in his head or a fellow hero to put a lot of expectation on for the sake of chasing after. For Monoma to decide to poke this nerve in particular and for Horikoshi to decide to have this be what triggers him into losing control, the message really seems to be that Izuku just wants Kacchan to be happy no matter what he’s doing in life. Counting by the severity of the situation, he feels this way the strongest out of all other feelings he may have concerning Katsuki.

And that’s just the sweetest thing.

Win to save, save to win

Or just a bit of meta from the perspective of the original Japanese. EDIT: replaced “symbol” with “image” because i am a clown and forgot that it is image and not symbol 

So, it’s already been established that Bakugo is a source of inspiration to Deku, with the latter explicitly acknowledging that his language becomes a lot dirtier and crasser when he is fighting to win–like Bakugo’s. 

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Thinking about how Nine literally has the smile of Yoichi...

Secretly Nine is just a himbo

They seriously deserve to meet each other.

Give us the Shigaraki family reunion please 🤍🌩

Introducing the Shigaraki family

We have:

One angry dad

One angry mom

And their angry son

Why are they so mad?

I haven't seen anyone commenting about something weird on how AFO is represented in the recent art by Horikoshi:

That being the fact this is the "prime" version of him with his face restored, but wearing the final war outfit and maskless. Something clearly not possible in the story itself, as obviously that outfit was gone when he used rewind on himself for avoid die by the fire of Endeavor.

But the interesting part is that this isn't the first time Horikoshi draw AFO in this particular way, mixing his restored look with the purple jacket outfit.

The other time was in that cover in which he's facing Deku (a battle that never happened in the story, or at least not directly against his main body).

In that other art AFO also has a unique look for his mask not being seen in the story, that looks vaguely like it was still broken and almost melted by Endeavor but pieced together again while still being red hot.

Also do you notice in neither of those arts AFO has the rewind effects over him? Considering it was the plot reason he recovered his face in the first place, is a bit weird that the art of Horikoshi doesn't present him being under rewind.

And yeah I know all this can be attributed to simple creative freedom and Horikoshi though mix both designs was cool or something.

But I can't help and make my theories about this.

Can these arts be a sort of "what if" scenario?

As I said before is interesting to remember that Deku never actually fight against AFO directly on his real body, they never even encouter each other in that state for that matter, they only interacted via ShigAFO.

So maybe Horikoshi at some point had a totally different display for the final battle? One that involved Deku vs AFO and a different use of rewind.

Considering in both arts "prime" AFO appears maskless with his outfit intact, I wonder if the real revelation moment when the heroes managed to destroy his new mask wasn't seeing his potato face, but he already got his face restored offscreen.

Which could also explain why Horikoshi didn't drawn AFO with the rewind effects in the art. As probably the idea of him being on a time counter that will banish him wasn't originally part of the story and only was a leter addition.

So in this alternative scenario rather than go back to fight ShigAFO directly, Deku instead for some reason ends up in front of the original AFO and they have a real battle, just as it was represented in the cover art.

Don't know how the story should continue from that point, as it probably would change a lot more of how the rest of the final battle will play.

Love the fact the anime made the three AFO users share the same (or almost the same) shield quirk:

Nine.

Shigaraki.

All For One.

Which is funny and notice I said the anime, because in the manga neither Shigaraki or All For One are using (or have) shield quirks.

They likely use air cannon or some blast quirk in those scenes ->

But Bones specifically changed that into quirks that resemble Nine's Air Wall quirk.

I like to think it's a tribute to my king 🤍

However the shield quirks of the other two seem to be much weaker that Air Wall.

AFO shield quirk in particular is probably the worst, as it only covers a very small radious and it was destroyed by one Jet Burn from Endeavor.

Meanwhile Nine's version of the quirk can cover a gigantic radious if he user wants:

Also Air Wall can stack multiple shields into one and it was powerful enough to stop a charge from Deku going full 100%

All this makes me think Air Wall is such a boosted quirk in general.

No wonder why Nine stole that one. Smart boy.

People seriously sleep on how much attractive and fine looking All Might was as a teen...

I mean:

Big pretty blue eyes, tall, tan skin, golden hair.

Also the hairstyle sures help.

Weird how his old and skinny look seems to have more simps than the younger versions lmao.

Kinda ironic and poetic to think despite being one his favorite quirks, AFO probably has no idea about spearlike bones being his mother's quirk.

I mean realistically he doesn't have any way to know it, but I think he has an unconscious sentimental connection with his mom quirk as corny it sounds.

His favoritism even seem made him collect quirks that resemble spearlike bones in look and functionality, such as Rivet Stab and one unknown "drills" quirk. Both used at the same time during his last battle with All Might btw.

Also how we can forget the fact spearlike bones is also the last quirk he ever used? (On his original body at least)

Horikoshi definitely knew what he was doing here. I can't help but think it's brillaint despite the whole story is far from perfect.

one could almost believe that yoichi birthed nine himself (afo fathered him)

I do believe it, hard to not when Nine looks like they got mixed into one person.

Most perfect genetics ever!

This is the real Dad For One theory right there.

If you show this to someone who doesn't read MHA or don't have much context about the story, would they guess these are two separate characters?

Lol, it would be a fun experiment.

The resemblance between Yoichi and Nine is uncanny.

I know! Nine in general would be an awesome villain for the main story, I'll die on that hill.

At the same time if AFO actually had eyes and was able to see Nine directly, he would have ended up in a vault Lmao. No way our dear demon lord let the perfect Yoichi clone to escape.

Horikoshi actually likes to imply a lot the idea of AFO projecting his obsession with Yoichi in different persons, like Shigaraki for example (even if in this case the parallel doesn't work quite well as with Nine). Or in a lesser degree with Dabi too.

We have panels like this as well:

And of course Nine and Shigaraki share their own set of visual parallels, which for a story standpoint makes sense as they're both in the same line of numerical experiments (another subplot totally wasted btw).

In general it feels like all this details and parallels were part of a bigger storyline that was cut short in the end, never reaching it's full potential (Shigaraki doesn't interact with Yoichi either for example).

So anyway we were robbed of having a big and interesting subplot with all the members of the Shigaraki family. Is a shame because it feels like AFO could have been a much more fully fleshed character.

MHA fans shouldn't ignore how beautiful Nine is.

Have you seen how gorgeous this man looks?

He should be bring into conversations about the most pretty male character more often.

Especially when Horikoshi draws him.

I don't think this need more explanation, Nine is something else.

The resemblance was subtle as a brick to the head:

Lol, but also Nine got a lot of traits from AFO as well. He's like their perfect mix.

Yet I can't help but wish the story actually did something with all this parallels between Nine and the shigabros. There's a lot of stuff implied but nothing really explored.

Nine is such a great character and his existence could've added a lot of the story of AFO and Yoichi.

MHA fans shouldn't ignore how beautiful Nine is.

Have you seen how gorgeous this man looks?

He should be bring into conversations about the most pretty male character more often.

Especially when Horikoshi draws him.

I don't think this need more explanation, Nine is something else.

MHA fans shouldn't ignore how beautiful Nine is.

Have you seen how gorgeous this man looks?

He should be bring into conversations about the most pretty male character more often.

Especially when Horikoshi draws him.

I don't think this need more explanation, Nine is something else.

If Mustard stayed relevant, how would you characterize him? I mean things past his baseline "pragmatic psycho" thing he has going on.

Interesting question, as I do agree that Mustard would need more things personality wise to work with if he's going to be a more long term character.

At first he's indeed very pragmatic, especially compared to the rest of the league and his implied age being probably the youngest even behind Toga.

But as pragmatic he can be he's still a child with an inmature side, and we can see that when he gets angry at Tetsutetsu and can't help himself but act less carefully and being a bit overcondident. He also seems to destile some represed anger on what he considers an easy target.

I would like to explore more that side of him, as Mustard seems to be very resentful against the education system for some reason, maybe is his "villanous" quirk that left him without the opportunity of being a hero? Who knows, but his dialogue can be interpreted as he wants something about hero schools and hates the ones who have the privilege of go to UA for example.

Other thing I would do with Mustard is explore the idea of him not fitting with the LoV.

Because let's be real, he doesn't fit there at all. His style and approach to crime sooner or later will clash with the rest of the members, especially Shigaraki at that point of the story and I can't see Mustard taking his bs once AFO is out of the picture and crusty boy has to lead.

Mustard might be a child but probably he has more clear ideas than the rest of the LoV and once the initial hype for shooting people and do random chaos he would think Shigaraki ideas of destroy everything are worthless crap, so he obviously will aim for better objetives.

I can imagine Mu having a bit of superiority complex and leaving the LoV for look better oppotunities with people who can aspire to bigger plans. Probably the Shie Hassaikai following the canon timeline.

But also, I would like give Mustard a more vulnerable and human side outside being just a gunnuts.

The fact he's a child in a world of crime and danger might have more downsides for him than he initialy realizes.

I can see Mustard sometimes feeling alone and out of place next to a lot of people way older than him.

He might want to have friends of his age like a normal child would do, even if he tries to negate that idea.

Also where is his family? Mustard would likely want to have a place to call home and feel loved, despite tries to convince himself to no need such basic things.

That's what I can think for now. Mustard had a really cool concept to imagine scenarios if he stayed as a recurrent character.

I love this fan translation of Nine's origin chapter way more than the official. More specifically the first line of dialogue:

"Storms calm my heart" just sound much more powerful in context and express a lot more of Nine as a character, and how he find comfort on storms and by extension his own power.

In case you wonder how the official translation is, here's the same page just colored:

The 2nd part of the dialogue also sounds great in the official translation, in a sense the line is more raw than ambiguous. But that's not bad at all.

Whatever it is the official or fan translation, it's certainly amazing how much we can learn of Nine in just a single page of manga and how much Horikoshi was able to tell us about him in so less.

Oh boy, what could have been if Nine was a permanent part of the main story.

My reason for calling Overhaul the best Villain in the main series is because he's way more competent, driven and has a real threatening presence to him, compared to the other Villain Leaders.

AFO (Post Kamino) & Shigaraki aren't in his League.

They don't give off that feeling of dread. Shigaraki got AFO quirk to try and make him seem more imposing, but it wasn't enough since having a strong power isn't the only thing Overhaul had going for him.

AFO was decent until after his interrogation with All Might, where he became too comically evil for the sake of it (imo)

Re-Destro wasn't there for long but he did a ok job. The MLA did sell me as a competent group, considering the amount of money and connections they had. As well as their goal of free quirk use.

The only thing that was off was there belief of quirk supremacy, since the organisation's strength came from wealth and connections.

But other than that they were ok, it's too bad they were shoved to the side during the War.

Sorry for rambling

But yeah, that's my reason for Overhaul being the best Villain in MHA

Your reasoning for think that is almost the same as mine.

But also Overhaul ideals and objectives felt different and way more grounded in the sense it doesn't feel like he blames society for everything and his only answer is mindless destruction.

He actually persue change but in way that almost makes sense, and his mindset offers a very interesting perspective about quirks that this series always avoid to exploit. Like is funny how Horikoshi puts constant references to the doomsday theory being something very real, yet no one in verse tries to do something about it and any character who doesn't like quiks is treated as a crazy monster to invalidate their opinions.

Chisaki is also different to other villains in the sense that despite his life is pretty tragic he never gets victimized by the author, something I can appreciate because honestly the most annoying part about the LOV for example is how the story constantly pats them in the back and tries to pretend their are just victims when they passed that point long ago.

Kai on the other hand gets a treatment so harsh that makes me wonder if Horikoshi actually hates him with passion, because holy hell since his defeat Horikoshi really doesn't hold back on try to put him as miserable as possible and with no chance of improve his situation even a bit. It felt like a massive double standard when you see how much the LOV gets glazed.

Well... this kinda became a rant on my part, but I need to express it as Overhaul really deserved a way better treatment because in terms of villains he was the peak and MHA never had something similar again.

A detail people tend to overlook (cause the anime fucked up the timeline) is that Geten and Cider were introduced in the same chapter in the manga.

And Re-Destro speech juxtaposed with Cider presentation.

So we have this two boys of a similar age, both have water/ice based quirks, both have white/blue-ish hair, both have the same blue eyes, and we didn't know their real identity at first (and in Geten's case is debatable if that's his real name).

What a big coincide huh?

My theory of C.H leader being a lost Himura gets more and more crazy everytime I think about it.

I love the idea of Geten and Cider, who I call Mizunami Himura, being lost siblings. And by extensions the lost cousings of the Todorokis.

This is such a fun scene when you think about the context, cause is supposed to be from Chrono's perspective.

Chrono really think he can fool us and make us think Chisaki, a person with severe misophonia, would voluntarily enter in a cage fight shirtless AND without gloves?

Especially considering we have another flashback of the same or a similar situation from Rappa's perspective and we clearly see Chisaki doesn't take off his clothes for "fight".

Is Chrono so thirsty for Kai that he unconsciously imagines him shirtless?

Well I can't blame you at all Hari... I do the same thing all the time.

Fun trivia: In the character page for Nine in the Volume Rising, we can see in Horikoshi sketches that the palms of his hands were supposed to have the little holes that allow an AFO user to physically steal quirks.

Same holes All For One and Shigaraki have:

Yet, in the movie itself the holes are totally absent from Nine's hands despite his gloves are clearly designed with that specific function in mind.

I guess the production just totally missed that detail in the translation from Hori sketches?