I Love That Kevin Grieved Riko. Like, Of Course, He Did. Don’t People Say That Grief Is The Final Form

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

when I attempt to analyze Todoroki Touya's character, I get a distinct feeling Horikoshi's spreadsheet for him before chapter 290 looked like this:

'DABI IS TODOROKI TOUYA (hint at him being Todoroki Touya as much as possible) (make something up for his backstory later)

that's not how you write a secret evil relative subplots. the goal shouldn't be making the reveal as dramatic as possible. especially in the corruption 'break the cutie' type of stories. to make the readers feel for this character, you shouldn't be dedicating your time to teasing them with the possibility of the reveal, you need to also tell the actual damn story.

and Horikoshi just. forgot to do that.

to make the reveal hold any weight and not just serve as a delayed gratification clickbait after years of teasing the readers, you have to establish who the character actually was before they became the villain. if you don't do this, the reveal alone won't do anything to make the audience sympathize with the character, because by that point it will be too late to sway the established opinion with an angsty backstory alone.

Arcane tells a very similar story of the family conflict, but to have the audience be interested in the sisters reunion, to have them feel bad for Jinx despite the horrible acts she commits, you have to first see Powder, the troubled unfortunate and insecure child who loved her sister. only once we are emotionally attached to that innocent and unfairly suffering character, we will start questioning her motives and our emotions once the corruption starts.

if you show the before as a sympathetic character, the after becomes painful not only to the in-universe characters affected by what their once close person had become. if you show the after and hold off the before until after the characters have already reacted to the identity revealing event, your audience will react with 'cool motive, still murder', because they never developed any emotional attachment to said character, no matter how much you make them cry in the flashbacks.

loose reimagining of the family arc under the cut.

and it was so stupid to skip this step because Horikoshi didn't even have to do much. the first point of view we have on the Todoroki family history is Shouto, the youngest sibling who had been isolated from the rest for most of his life. he didn't know much about his siblings, but let him know something! especially with how closely his and Touya's stories are paralleled by design, he should know about Touya the most out of anyone, and Touya is the sibling he should be most curious about.

think about it from Enji and Shouto's pov. Touya was the heir Endeavor created for fulfilling his dream, and after Fuyumi he wasn't planning on having more kids. it was Touya's incompatibility with his own quirk, the eugenics experimentation failure, that is the only reason Natsuo and Shouto even exist. and Shouto is the chosen heir, perfectly fulfilling all conditions demanded by Enji. so he trains him like he wanted to train Touya, but that's not all of it. while Shouto is genetically fit to be a perfect replacement for the role Enji had prepared for Touya, his father had never emotionally connected with him the way he did with Touya. and he made sure Shouto was aware of that, because he talked to Shouto about Touya.

Shouto, who had been miserable because of his father for most of his life, knows that Touya was the older brother who should have been in his place, and he escaped that place. he stopped his training and left the dojo to live a normal life, together with his siblings. and Shouto wanted to have that life more than anything. he begged his father to let him join his siblings, he wistfully observed them through the windows, he imagined what his siblings are like, he asked his mother about them. and the entire time, the sibling he knew the most about was Touya, his eldest brother whom he had to replace as father's training dummy.

there's so much space for depth in there! you can do so much by briefly sharing the intensity of Shouto's complicated feelings, by giving a bare glimpse of his rumination about his siblings. just don't lump them all together into a faceless blob of happy children that unhappy little Shouto wanted to join, because their history is so much deeper than that.

inserting the flashback of Enji talking to Shouto about Touya during the Sports Festival arc would have been the best way to set up the intrigue. just a bare glimpse of Enji using Touya as the example little Shouto was failing to follow, cut to Shouto observing his three siblings through the window.

and that would be enough to connect the initial story threads of the Todoroki family and nudge the readers in the right direction. Iida also has an older brother who is a hero. with that example in mind Shouto not mentioning Touya at all would be suspicious enough to have people start questioning the mysterious older brother's identity, because surely, if the number one hero, who trained Shouto to be the most proficient hero in his class trained his older brother as well he would be a licenced hero already?

then, the lack of said brother's presence in the story starts to become glaring. the simple mention for Enji having trained Touya and telling Shouto how good his brother was with his quirk, separates him from the faceless group of Shouto's civilian siblings who are out there doing their boring civilian stuff and not necessarily needed to be in this story about kids becoming heroes. Touya being dead is a reveal put away for later, but to drive up the intrigue, he needs to be a ghost haunting the narrative. make it inconsistent and confusing, make characters talk about him and omit saying anything outright.

then you can use Natsuo as a red herring by not introducing the siblings by names when they visit Rei together. he's Shouto's older brother, he is weirdly hostile to Endeavor, he lives away from the family. well, this checks out. but wasn't this weirdly anticlimactic?.. also didn't he say he doesn't do well in hot temperatures?

later, during the Todoroki family dinner arc introduce Natsuo by name and confuse the readers even more, because the new brother turned out to not be Touya whom we have been anticipating to meet since Shouto had first talked about his family. make Shouto, who is still adjusting to being able to interact with his siblings, start asking about their childhood. he wants to express that happiness he feels about being together with them, so he wonders out loud if Touya also felt this happy when father allowed him to play with Fuyumi and Natsuo more. his brother and sister's faces turn weirdly grim at that remark. Fuyumi offers some stories from their childhood, trying to lighten the mood. that's the readers first proper glimpse at Touya in the flashbacks. Fuyumi talks about him always being on his computer, how impossible it was to drag him outside to play. Natsuo reminisces how the slightest stretch of intense activity was enough to have him fall to the ground and refuse to get up. Fuyumi talks about the time Touya and herself made 8 years old Natsuo carry both of them. Natsuo proudly reports that he didn't even break his back. the atmosphere in the room is light and comfortable, Shouto listening to their stories with undivided attention, his eyes glistening. after a moment of idle silence, Natsuo glances at him. he tells Shouto how usually it's hard to read his face, because he is so unexpressive. but he remembers when Shouto was little he was a total crybaby, just like Touya was.

with the picture of Touya the child painted and the question about adult Touya up in the air, Enji can join the dinner. Natsuo storms off and Shouto follows him and Enji, not understanding what caused his chill older brother to act like this. Fuyumi attempts to hold him back, to no avail. she doesn't want Shouto to hear what Natsuo has to say to their father. she also is no longer sure that keeping him in the dark is the correct decision. she sighs, 'mother, what should I do?'. she is too young for this.

insert Midoriya into the family dinner if you want your dramatic storytelling, and have him timidly ask Fuyumi why did their older brother not join them for dinner. cut to Shouto hiding behind the door, listening to Natsuo's shouts about Enji abandoning him and Fuyumi, stealing their mom and Shouto from them, ruining Shouto's childhood. 'but you know what you will never be forgiven for, not even in hell?' Natsuo asks, tears streaming down his face. cut to-

'Touya is dead', Fuyumi tells Midoriya, his pleasant smile frozen on his face, eyes growing wide.

cut back to Shouto, hyperventilating behind the palms covering his face. he doesn't even notice sliding down the wall. he barely registers the heavy footsteps of Enji going back in his direction and he can't be bothered to care about his eavesdropping being discovered. his mind is still echoing Natsuo's words on repeat.

'you can play hero all you want, but you know what you really are is a murderer'.

boom. hook, line and sinker. no need to have the characters spell out who thinks what, the '[Natsuo thinks that] Enji killed Touya' was so stupidly unnecessary it turned a mystery drama thriller Todoroki subplot into a Law and Order episode. let the characters speak their minds and reach their own conclusions! when they learn something horrible, don't send the good and righteous character rushing to correct their assumption. let Shouto be actually curious about what happened to the members of his family, let him learn their different perspectives! dont make the Todoroki Touya reveal into a singular event, an award for the readers who have been arguing about it for years. turn it into something that holds weight for the actual characters inside the story, a mystery, an investigation with the reveal being at the finishing line the characters themselves need to reach, not an inescapable event that will happen despite the characters' actions.

letting Dabi interact with the non-Enji Todorokis wouldn't have ruined the mystery, it would have given much more depth the all the characters, defined the actual drama they are going through, given them more individuality by allowing them to have different opinions on the situation instead of joining them into a Frankenstein mindless blob of 'family' taking their collective 'responsibility'.

make Dabi and Shouto's first meeting an uncomfortably long moment of staring, Dabi looking at Shouto with sad condescension, Shouto being visibly confused by the villain's loaded expression. make this about the characters themselves, and not about the readers being smart enough to connect the only villain with a flame quirk to the only family of flame quirk users.

let Natsuo and Dabi meet, make Dabi kill Hood for attacking his brother because his father was too late. make Natsuo question the villain's identity together with the readers, make him and Shouto join their efforts to unfold the mystery of what had happened to their older brother.

the question should never have been 'is Dabi Touya Todoroki?' asked by the author to his readers. it should have been 'what does Dabi being Touya Todoroki mean to the characters associated with him?'. and it should have been answered by the characters themselves.

my brother, my wound

this fandom doesn't get dabi tbh. Like outside of the aesthetic, if given half the chance, he would have become a workaholic to rival his dad. Like he'd complain about it more than Enji tho, but he'd still be out there working his ass off.

imagine being kevin day, son of exy, born and bred to be a cog in the well-oiled machine that is the edgar allan ravens. all you know being the routine of practice and practice and practice and performance and victory alongside those you call brothers.

-and then one day you wake up in your estranged father's apartment between a bottle of painkillers and a bottle of vodka and there is a knot of bandages where your future used to be. you don't wake up at 4am anymore. you sleep until noon and vomit the remainders of life as you knew it into unfamiliar toilets. you watch orange and white clash against each other from sidelines you haven't touched since you started growing facial hair.

your brother doesn't ask you to come home. you would come if he asked. the days are longer here and the food is too rich. the colors are too harsh, the language barrier is too much. you speak and no one understands.

they feel sorry for you, but not for what you have lost, instead for what you have suffered. you try to show them what belonging means, to sever parts of yourself to fit inside a uniform, but they don't understand the necessity of the blade the way your brothers did. they don't understand that suffering feels religious if you do it right.

the therapist tells you it's survivor's guilt but the only survivors you can see are on the court in black and red and they read your eulogy after the game at a press conference. you are not a survivor in any way that matters anymore. how treacherous your heart is for continuing to beat when you can't even hold your lifeline in your hand without dropping it.

you want to go home but your key doesn't open the same door anymore. you want to sit beside your brother but there is no space on his side of the table. you want to be a raven but you are a fox.

you grieve for connection until there is a knife where your neck guard used to sit. you grieve for your life until a boy offers to show you how it feels to survive. you offer to show him how it feels to live. he tells you he won't sever parts of himself to fit the uniform, but there are telltale bloodstains in the fabric from long before you asked.

you wake up at 4am again. you take turns vomiting in the toilet, you when the alcohol level dips too low and him when his smile runs out. he doesn't speak your language but he understands it. he keeps the car running when you visit the therapist. he keeps an eye on your back to watch the 02 on your jersey turn orange. the colors don't seem as harsh anymore.

he offers you safety. he offers you belonging. he offers you the only thing he knows how to give, the only thing you know how to take.

he offers you a lifeline. you pick it up with your right hand.

i feel like we tend to forget about this when we talk about kevin

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

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

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.