luvmon3t

Latest Posts by luvmon3t

So there's several layers of dramatic irony to this comment from Endeavor. He can kill a "bio-engineered freak" with no remorse here. But this was also the chapter when Endeavor met his twice over bio-engineered son for the first time since Sekoto Peak.

Like the high-end noumu, Dabi was also a patchwork existence pieced together from the dead. But on a fundamental level, Touya's existence was due to Endeavor's desire to bio-engineer his version of the perfect quirk.

It's also notable that while Endeavor's feelings about it were completely different, he used the same maneuver from this fight in his final battle with Dabi. He brought them both up into the sky until someone burned to ash

So I saw a tiktok that said Dabi never got to be a person and he spent his whole life being a product of what people did to him and that shit fucked me up

people don’t talk about touya’s quirk being influenced by his emotional state enough

when he was young, how often do you think he used that strong feeling of pride and happinesss he got from impressing his father to push his fire?

and when endeavor ripped that away from him, making him feel worthless and starved for love, how much more anguish was he in? being so used to putting that intense ‘positive’ emotion into firing up his quirk and now, instead of using that muscle and stoking the fire of his emotions to get further along in his training, he feels forgotten and doesn’t know what the point of his existence is. completely adrift and not knowing where to put that energy in almost a completely literal sense

and the second he wakes from his coma, he wants to try again. desperately reaching for that same feeling he still misses. made worse by the the fact he thinks that’s what love is and he wants his father’s love

then when he sees his father is stubbornly set in his decision to do all of this to shouto, even after touya burned alive and completely alone because of it, dabi knows he can never get that original feeling back

so now he uses his emotional connection to his fire to train with it even further, utilizing that burning anger and hurt to make himself ‘stronger’. hurting himself both physically and mentally every single time he does. not caring because he laid himself to rest already, realizing his ‘death’ did nothing to stop the horrors at home. realizing there was no point in trying to love because he was shown he wasn’t deserving of it and apparently neither was his youngest brother. he’s told that he is his power. he’s shown that he is his power. without it, he felt like he was nothing

but he’s felt so much of all of this emotion that he has some sense of numbness, too. his nerves are destroyed and he can’t feel the pain. on top of that, he has to learn how to quickly numb his intense emotion in order to control his own quirk. his self harm is all about precision, so he can keep himself alive and together just long enough to confront endeavor. he can go from being the most angry, vengeful, passionate burning light you’ve ever seen to completely numbing and stilling that rage. to pushing it all down and only crying a tear of blood. because his emotion is intrinsically tied to his quirk and even now, he only uses it to harm himself to eventually get to his father again

his quirk, something that is a huge part of him and his physiology, is based on emotion. his emotion controls his fire. and in his formative years, the foundation of the strongest relationship in his life was all based around self harm

On Heroes and Villains

(or: how I stopped worrying and learned to hate the system)

Now that I’ve gone off a bit about how Midoriya sees heroes and how he sees himself, it’s time to go off about how he conceptualizes villains. The definition of “hero” in BNHA society veers off of what we’d consider the idealistic definition, and indeed the definition that the Western-style comic books Horikoshi was apparently partially inspired by follow — a hero is someone who acts to save others, often at great risk, without being asked and without asking for payment in return. Unlike BNHA’s heroes, heroes in Western comics are sometimes viewed negatively by society and civilians (see various eras of the X-Men, Spider-Man, Batman, etc) but that doesn’t change the fact that they are heroes at their core. Heroism under the idealist/Western comic definition is both intrinsic and chosen. Heroism in BNHA draws a government salary.

That’s heroes. How about villains? In Western comics, villains are people who do bad things, often using supernatural abilities on civilians who aren’t able to defend themselves the same way. Villains are sometimes portrayed as evil for evil’s sake (ex. the Joker), but more often they’re humanized. A classic example is the X-Men’s Magneto. In his initial appearances in the comics, he’s unquestionably a villain — a mutant supremacist who believes that the human majority should be subject to the mutant minority. This is a bad look. Plus ultra bad, one might say. But when the comics reveal Magneto’s backstory, it becomes clear why he holds that viewpoint: As a Jewish character alive during World War II, he was a member of a tiny minority, persecuted and murdered en masse by the majority culture. The phrase “never again” is often used when referencing the Holocaust, and Magneto takes that concept and broadens it. Never again will he or anyone like him suffer at the hands of the majority. Magneto’s backstory, tragic as it is, doesn’t excuse his villainous actions (prior to his various redemptions, that is), but it does explain them. The reader understands why Magneto does what he does, and more importantly, the reader is meant to care. In Western comics, ‘villain’ isn’t a personality trait, but a descriptor of someone’s actions — and quite crucially, they can choose a different action at any time.

BNHA takes a different viewpoint. Villain isn’t a description of a person’s behavior, but an intrinsic trait. And this gets problematic when one thinks about the fact that all someone needs to do is use their quirk in the committing of a crime to qualify as a villain.

Moving on. At the beginning of BNHA, there’s no evidence that Midoriya or anyone else has much sympathy or even a desire to understand the villains. Notably, the first villains we’re shown are thieves — the purse snatcher on the train, who activates his quirk out of panic when he’s caught, and the Sludge Villain, who by virtue of his heteromorphic quirk is using his quirk at all times. (That begs an interesting and horrible question. Some heteromorphs are theoretically using their quirks all the time. Would getting a parking ticket while “using their quirk” then classify them as a villain?) In any case, the motivation of these characters is identified as greed or enjoyment of stealing. But there are a lot of reasons why a person might steal. I don’t expect Midoriya to ask those questions in Chapter 1 as a fourteen year old who idolizes heroes. But it would bother me less if it hadn’t turned out to be a harbinger of things to come.

The first villain Midoriya encounters as a hero student is Shigaraki, who at first glance during the USJ attack appears to be the least threatening of the main trio. He’s also the youngest and the most physically vulnerable of the group. Unlike the previous villains, Shigaraki actually has a chance to explain his motivations — which are admittedly not phrased well, and are thoroughly infected by All For One’s ideology. However, Shigaraki is given multiple chances to explain his motivations, and his ability to articulate them improves by leaps and bounds. Shigaraki also has something in his back pocket that villains such as Toga and Twice don’t have: He’s related to a hero, and particularly a hero that All Might holds in the highest esteem. And yet, while Midoriya can sympathize with or “understand” Stain and Gentle Criminal, he can’t or won’t reckon with Shigaraki. (He also fails to understand Overhaul, but there’s an important difference in that Overhaul has no desire to be understood, saved, or stopped.)

On the surface, this makes no sense. Stain explicitly targets heroes, members of a group Midoriya is aiming to be part of. Gentle Criminal threatens to ruin the school festival, which Midoriya and his classmates have worked hard for, and unlike Stain, Shigaraki, or Overhaul, Gentle Criminal turns his villainy into a performance. His motivation is entirely selfish. Stain’s motivation doesn’t arise from a personal grievance. Why can Midoriya acknowledge common ground with them and not with Shigaraki?

Because in Midoriya’s worldview, “villain” isn’t something a person does. Villain is something a person is.

On some level, Midoriya is able to identify with Stain and with Gentle Criminal. Because he can identify with them, he makes a small but significant leap in logic — they’re like me, and I’m not a villain, so they can’t be villains, either. Under this paradigm, Gentle Criminal’s selfish crimes are relevant only where they might put Midoriya out. Under this same paradigm, Stain’s murders become a misguided offshoot of his veneration of All Might. Villains that Midoriya personally understands are seen as people. Villains he can’t relate to aren’t.

Shigaraki and the League of Villains have legitimate grievances, causes of their misery that they’re able to name and point to. The bystander effect, heteromorph discrimination, the school-to-prison pipeline, general intolerance, parental abuse, and so on. They also get chances to articulate these viewpoints to the heroes. But because Midoriya can’t personally relate to Shigaraki, because Shigaraki got angry in the face of his mistreatment instead of accepting it in silence like Midoriya did, Shigaraki never escapes the category of villain.

A villain in BNHA society is effectively unpersoned. They can be injured with impunity, to the point where villain-specific hospitals exist to treat the injuries caused by heroes. They can be imprisoned under inhumane conditions. They can be written off completely. This inverts the Western comic understanding, wherein heroism is intrinsic and villainy is a choice; under BNHA’s paradigm, heroism is a choice, and villainy is intrinsic. Villains can’t be saved, and it doesn’t matter, because there was nothing there to save in the first place.

In fact, the only way Midoriya is comfortable acknowledging Shigaraki is by acknowledging that he was once Tenko Shimura — an innocent child, a victim of All For One who should have been saved. This viewpoint has the benefit of being uncomplicated and not requiring Midoriya to think too hard. To reckon with Shigaraki as an adult, Midoriya would have to accomplish the Magneto dialectic; that is, acknowledging that while Shigaraki’s actions are terrible, the person taking those actions didn’t spring fully formed into the world as the Symbol of Fear. Shigaraki is still a victim of All For One, and arguably the victim who suffered the most at his hands. It’s entirely reasonable for Shigaraki to be hurt and furious that he wasn’t rescued. But rather than understanding that the innocent child and the adult villain are facets of the same individual, Midoriya separates them — which allows him to metaphorically “save” Tenko while literally murdering Tomura.

To summarize: Unless he’s able to personally relate to the villain in question on a superficial level, Midoriya makes no distinction between person and action. “Villain” is seen as an intrinsic, immutable trait, a label that effectively dehumanizes the individual it’s applied to. In BNHA, the only “redeemable” villain is a dead villain, and neither BNHA nor its main character ever takes issue with this premise. At least not enough to matter for the villains themselves.

I’m going to take a second to vent about this heroes act/villains are bullshit. We see multiple heroes take actions while on the job as heroes that should disqualify them from the label. Even as a full-blown hero, Bakugou is an utter shit whose main interests are becoming Number One and beating Midoriya, rather than actually helping anyone. Present Mic, as much as I love him, attempts to murder Kurogiri in cold blood even knowing that Kurogiri used to be his friend and that there’s at least a possibility that his friend’s consciousness is still present. Hawks straight up murders someone on camera. These characters aren’t even acting like heroes at this point. But as long as they don’t earn the label of “villain”, anything can be excused…and is excused, by the narrative, by BNHA society, and by BNHA’s creator.

“stabbing is a metaphor for penetration” ok can we talk about biting. biting his stomach. the soft fleshy part that hides his intestines. can we talk about being the eagle aiming for prometheus’s liver. because that’s dabihawks, baby. corner the bird and that beak will tear you to shreds. hawks may have learned restraint but keigo is a wild animal, and all it takes is one wrong move for those teeth to find your gut. i don’t mean cannibalism in any serious regard, but almost. almost. when the passion’s all there, you’ll wish it was. forget penetration and stabbing and sex. this is about consumption, how a bird eats just like a fire. what’s it like to be the fuel that keeps someone going. what’s it like to be so hungry it hurts. i said it before in a different poem but i’ll say it again for you now—it’s not enough to have someone. you need to swallow them whole.

can we talk abt touya's medical trauma more please

you know what? quite literally the only reason Dabi didn't kill anyone during the summer camp arc is because of plot armor. Aizawa shouldn't have had time to move out of the way of a point blank hit like the one thrown at him. Vlad King and the students in the classroom should have received some nasty burns at best. Shoji and Midoriya were burned, but probably not as badly as they should have been from that amount of heat. Hawks should have lost his wings entirely and honestly probably should have died considering that it was a point blank attack like with Aizawa.

mha villains: i love my friends so much that with the power of friendship we will change this world so that everyone can live in peace and not get ridiculed and abused for their differences! and i kill people.

mha heroes: i think youre creepy so stand still while i bash your brains out. i like fighting so much i'll hurt anyone who crosses me. victims of abuse should shut the fuck up about it cause i dont care and neither does anyone else if they know what's good for them. i refuse to change if it means someone else's life might get better, but i'll be out of a job. and i kill people.

my brother's keeper

togachako wedding ft himikochan touyanii siblingry saga. part 1

if you were curious abt the logistics of dabis 2nd fake death in my own line of story its this

my brother, my wound

And it wasn't for love that you went back home

the fact that virtually nothing changed in mha society is giving me hives because what do you mean the hero ranking system - which is so deeply capitalist it makes my blood boil - is still in place? what do you mean every member of the lov is either dead or in a worse position from where they started? what do you mean that people in society who everyone ignored or that whole entire systems let down were just thrown away like trash? what do you mean no heroes were held accountable for the harm they caused? i’m about to write so much fucking fic because how the fuck else am I to move on

“The corruption begins with the mouth, the tongue, the wanting. The first poem in the world is I want to eat.”

— Erica Jong, from “Where It Begins,” Fruits & Vegetables: Poems By Erica Jong (Holt, 1971)

I'm ngl to you guys, I wish a man would look at me like this.

with fucking deranged need.

where he fucking hates me but he has to admit he needs me too and perhaps it is better to be hated and needed than never held at all.

loser older brother luka that me and My Good Pals @clemnoir @wisteriasymphony made up in our minds

I love to draw art for ships that almost no one knows about (T_T)

Letting go of this old thing for good…

parallels

i 🫶🏻 yoichi isagi glazers

THEY LOVED EACH OTHER THEY HATED EACH OTHER THEY WERE THE END-ALL BE-ALL OF EACH OTHER'S EXISTENCE RIKO SAW KEVIN AS A FOOTSTOOL KEVIN SAW RIKO AS A COLLAR THEY ACHIEVED A BALANCE THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE THEY WERE OBSESSED WITH EACH OTHER'S POTENTIAL BECAUSE THEY KNEW WHAT THEY COULD BE TOGETHER BUT THE ONLY THING THAT COULD REALLY MATTER TO EITHER OF THEM WAS EXY

the more we see of kevin and riko's relationship, the more insane it feels. like what do you mean andrew calling kevin "his" was the thing that set riko off and made him target andrew? what do you mean kevin was able to carry on a conversation about exy with riko while riko tortured people? what do you mean kevin just looked like riko's soulless exy-sidekick to outsiders when he was in the nest? what do you mean kevin hated all the ravens (with the exception of thea) that riko didn't consider "his"? so much of who kevin was (and in many ways still is) seems to have been shaped by fear and abuse it's no wonder he still has trouble separating riko's voice from his own mind.

isagi yoichi the perfectly normal sports anime protagonist

Beautifullllllll art piece I commissioned from @bysarahada of my fave boys. I couldn’t be happier about it I love it so much and am so so stoked and over the moon. Thank you thank you!!!

my brother's keeper

Dabi inspired by the song Indigo

touya & fuyumi

...And they were brothers.

From the start, Endeavor has pitted his own children against each other. Now we’re seeing the complex dynamics of an abusive household, Todoroki Shoto Endeavor’s  golden child and Todoroki Toya Endeavor’s scapegoat, play out on a battlefield. At first glance, Shoto looks like the good brother fighting on the side of the heroes, and Toya the bad brother who cares more for plotting villainous revenge than anything else. However, it’s more complicated than that: a look at abusive dynamics and the character foiling between Shoto and Toya underneath the cut. 

Keep reading

A Moral Scapegoat for who?

All For One is a shit character, he is presented as a massive threat, but we never see him get a win, similar to the dissonance between the All Might we see and the context in universe.

And in the end, he becomes a moral scapegoat... for the heroes.

What is a moral scapegoat?

A moral scapegoat is (usually) a character used to excuse the actions of other characters or a system. Character A may have done XYZ but Character B was the one manipulating them and/ or is so much worse, so we can excuse A's actions. Or helping defeat B acts as pence for their past actions. Etc. And to a degree it makes sense, getting people to believe a character has changed and should now be considered good both by the characters and the audience is hard. So having some bigger bad to blame takes the pressure off the desired character(s).

While the term is typically only brought up negatively, like the use of Mary&Gary Sues, there are good ones. Commander Zhao in Avatar of the Last Airbender is an early moral scapegoat, used to say yeah Prince Zuko may suck, but there are a lot worse out there. My Little Pony Friendship is Magic has a moral scapegoat, right in the pilot, Nightmare Moon for Princess Luna, sure Nightmare came from Luna but it is presented as a curse, something that was cured, fixed. The Hobbit uses Dragon Sickness as a way to both corrupt and excuse King Thorin's actions when they have retaken the mountain; he is not in his right mind, and shouldn't be considered solely responsible for his actions

In certain ways, Pink Diamond (due to the audience learning her arc in reverse, when it has such an effect on the plot of Steven Universe) is a scapegoat for the remaining Diamonds, even though it makes a lot less sense for her to be the scapegoat when considering the actual sequence of events in universe. And while most people don't think Pink/Rose's actions excuse the Diamonds (especially White), she does work with Spinel. Another rocky moral scapegoat is Horad Prime from She-ra & The Princesses of Power, he is the big bad of the show and is meant to be a scapegoat primarily for Horadak who was the previous big bad, and mildly a scapegoat for Catra. The big problems with his sacrificial slaughter is that there isn't enough time to really settle in that this is the true big bad, and both Horadak and Catra's issues were both way more on screen and show up well before we ever hear of Hoard Prime, with them operating separately.

And All For One is a worst example of all of them (that I mentioned)

For starters the more we saw of him the less ultimate intimidating evil he portrayed, nor did we get a satisfying he was actually pretty pathetic. Really trying to have your cake and eat it too. Looking back he's very cartoonishly evil, but lacks the presence, he's boring. I've seen many good portrayals of him in the fandom, but canon is just boring. His background of miscellaneous evil deeds, don't really go into how they were evil, just that Yoichi (& AFO) clearly believes them to be, both come across as very childish to me, seeing the world as black & white.

He lacks the moral complexity of complex villains (like Magneto), meant to be an ambitiously evil man, whose evil for the sack of being evil. But he lacks the presence found in Classic evil Disney characters like Jafar, Clayton, and Ursala. In a way he's like King Magnifico (from Wish, the only recent hated animated Disney movie, that I agree deserves to be shat on), trying to have both but failing to capture either

In the present, he has little involvement on screen, and once he's out of the picture, Shigaraki (& the League) really bloom as villains and characters. The story could have had a slow realization (for Shigaraki, the League and the audience) that he was holding the League back, and that meant either he was nowhere near as competent as he was portrayed, or he wasn't actually helping Shigaraki, setting up for the body suit plan

But my biggest issue is who he's the sacrificial goat for.

And who is he the scapegoat for? The fucking Heroes and their shit-ass society, including the H PSC crap.

The ending reveal that he was behind everything that happened to Tenko, from him being born, his name, the kids he chose to play with, the issues with his quirk, and only having him; fails. It doesn't work! Mainly because of what that scene ignored the walk, and the complicity of the family. It ignored that the family were directly ignoring that Tenko was being abused, trying to placate him after the fact. It ignores that Kotaro Shimura chose to follow his friends advice, over his wife too. It ignores that even though AFO would have killed anyone who tried to help Tenko, no one tried. It also doesn't make sense either, normal kids are shit actors, not to mention Tenko was the one to reach out to them, not the other way around. And with the sheer amount of heroes, and cops, and regular citizens, how was it literally no one tried to help him, it's not AFO.

What else does it ignore, oh yeah, Tenko isn't truly unique in having a tragic backstory. Sure he was planning on taking advantage of the Endeavor's awful legacy plan, but we never see that AFO has done anything before kidnapping Touya. It's implied that he helped stroked Heteromorphic discrimination for his own gain, but that doesn't change that Spinner had pesticides thrown in his face, by 'innocent' civilians, that Shoji was mutilated as a child, for saving a child, by 'innocent' civilians, that the Ordinary Lady was attacked and denied shelter in the middle of an active warzone, by 'innocent' civilians. Himiko's abuse was enabled and furthered by quirk counselling, we don't even get a he was secretly to blame all along for this one. The commission has assassins, ignore. The homeless have to resort to villainy to survive, ignore. Once someone is considered out they are abused by this society until they have to lash out, ignore. The big bad was taken down, so nothing has to be done about these systemic issues, cause the heroes say so

There's a pattern, he was only able to do this, because the society he was in was already doing it.

And AFO being a moral scapegoat could of worked.

IF the Hero Public Safety Commission was similarly a scapegoat.

To begin, AFO should have been the scapegoat for the League, and the villains as a whole. The heroes would instead have the HPSC as their scapegoat.

Hawks should not have been made president of the totally different PSC, not only is he a known murderer, he doesn't regret it, he has never criticized the Commission's (or any other hero's) actions. If he's not going to see the issues, and hypocrisy right in front of him, he shouldn't have any role at all in it, and a very small one if he does recognize them. Giving this to Hawks screams nothing is actually going to be fixed, any changes are going to be for the worse.

Going into the final Deku vs Shigaraki battle, as well as the dreamscape crap, I had hope in this series. I thought that Deku would finally be forced to have the long over reality check of the Villains are right, what are you going to do about it. So instead of hyper-focusing on one tiny moment that with any and I do mean any additional context would show that it's not just this tiny shit moment. Rather than murdering Tomura for not abandoning the League (the same reason Hawks murdered Twice), have Deku convince Tomura that they can make a better society. That Deku's peaceful(ish) method is what's better for the League we have seen he loves.

From there they could have come up with a deal where either (these are simplified) everyone is held accountable for their past actions (as in the villains, Endeavor, Hawks, the Commission, everyone responsible for the sky coffin, etc). Or the clock is restarted, and everyone is hence forth held to the same standard. The villains are around to make sure the actual issues to their problems are dealt with, hint; Himiko's problem wasn't lack of access to quirk counselling. Happy satisfying ending for everyone

whatever i literally dont care 😎 <- cares so much that it feels like my organs are tearing themselves apart in my chest