Luvmon3t

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

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.

[guy who hasn't realized they're a lab animal in a cage yet voice] i love my wire mother even though her cold sharp edges cut me when i try to cling to her. she provides me with everything i need to survive and to ask for anything more would be excessive and ungrateful. this is my decision. given the choice i would make it again.

okay doc *lies down on the therapy couch* tell me about aspd Ivan

(you don’t have to obviously I’m just curious)(love you)

hello valued patient, i will very gladly tell you about aspd ivan. (love you too tysm for the question)

before i start this i just want to add a disclaimer that i do not have aspd. if anyone with aspd says i'm wrong on this definitely believe them before me, this is just a personal headcanon. (i have discussed this with a friend w aspd who agrees with me and im in a similar wheelhouse to aspd, so i have a good amount of knowledge due to that and a lot of research, which is where the headcanon stems from)

okay, so to fully speak about how and why i see ivan with aspd i'm going to also mention the other pd i headcanon ivan with because i want to fully express my perception of him. i personally interpret ivan as having an aspd/npd combination (aspd im more sure of). i see aspd as something ivan was born with a predisposition for (reduced gray matter in the brain, less MAO-A, etc) that got solidified in his very early childhood growing up in the slums and going through the whole 'hung off the top of a building and threatened with death if he didn't make the cut' thing. genetics and trauma, the usual causes. npd is something i imagine him developing later on in life ofc, slowly over time. his chosen survival method being creating a fake persona others admire and his nonexistent self worth & horrible self loathing lead to him developing it (kind of as a subconscious coping mechanism).

okay, with that out of the way, why do i think ivan has aspd?

well. there are a lot of reasons. for one, vivinos and qmeng themselves say that ivan doesn't experience emotions in the same way others do, that he has a 'twisted' personality, he manipulated others to 'play with their feelings', that there was 'something off' about him, etc. while the way these are worded are a little,, derogatory,, it's all very important to ivan's character.

ivan's emotions are muted and dulled compared to others', he literally physically cannot experience them in the same way neurotypicals (in terms of pds) can. from that and other examples in alnst (setting up the wagyein incident w mizi & till, his reaction to his win in r3, his lack of care when it comes to lying & manipulation, etc) it can be pretty safely assumed that ivan doesn't really experience empathy. that's why he learns from other's visible emotions and mirrors them, because he doesn't feel them and instead adopts other people's reactions so he can react/act accordingly/'normally' (specifying here that not having empathy does not mean someone cannot feel sympathy or care about anyone. empathy is being able to feel/pick up on someone else's emotions it does NOT mean someone is uncaring okay thanks moving on).

ivan's tendency to manipulate and lie isn't really explicitly shown much in alnst but the implications are there and very telling imo. before i get into this i want to also specify that 'manipulate' is not the big scary evil word most people think it is and literally everyone does it. to manipulate is to try to have control over a situation, to influence someone/something to get your ideal outcome/get your needs met. many people with cluster b pds learn to manipulate from a young age as a survival mechanism because it is the only way to get the things they need. in ivan's case, his entire fake persona for the aliens and his placations and straight up lying to his peers/teachers/fans etc about his feelings and personality is all manipulation to paint himself in a more favorable light so he has a higher chance of survival. i also wouldn't put it past him to casually manipulate other students at anakt when he was younger so he could learn/observe more things (which was shown with the wagyein incident but i imagine that wasn't the only occasion). i've talked about ivan using subterfuge and disguising his actual intentions behind his odd behaviors which, yk, is manipulation.

when it comes to violence, ivan really doesn't seem to be outwardly violent unless provoked, but when he is he's uncaring about the pain he's causing the other (till lmao) and more focused on what he gets out of the exchange (till's attention & expressions and, imo, a physical stress release). i wasn't sure i was going to bring it up bc i wasn't going to get into the whole pwaspd are violent thing (i dont think it's true for everyone. thoughts and urges are different than actions) but i wanted to talk about ivan's lack of awareness when it comes to it. he impulsively fights back, doesn't pull his punches, and revels in it.

there's also his apparent lack of remorse for his actions (stepping on the flower crown, fighting till, leading mizi and till into danger, all that) and impulsivity when he's not masking (though i consider ivan to be a more calculating individual, a lot of his interactions with till show him doing things impulsively). his difficulty in forming intimate emotional connections with others, his lack of self worth and general lack of care for his own wellbeing, his fatalistic world view.

all of these are symptoms of aspd. im not going to pull out the dsm-5 (ew) because i hate the way it words things (love stigma against mentally ill folks), but all of the things i talked about go along with aspd, which is why i personally think ivan has it. a genetic predisposition, a fuckton of trauma in early childhood (qmeng refers to his time in the slums as a 'dark past') and onward through anakt and beyond, and his lack of emotional understanding. all of it lends itself to aspd. i think this adds a whole new level of understanding to ivan and his reasons for things and just. why he is the way he is. and figuring this out for myself made me love ivan all the more. all of the alnst characters are just traumatized kids who never learned how to live and be human and ivan having an even different baseline than most others put him even more at a disadvantage.

i just want to, like. give this guy therapy or at least make sure he knows that it’s not his fault that his mind works the way it does and there’s nothing wrong with it. and with that, i shall end it here LMAO. tysm rock for the ask ik i asked if you were okay with an essay but this is longer than i anticipated skxjsn i hope you liked it!! and if anyone has any other questions about aspd or npd ivan lmk personality disorders are one of my special interests i love talking about this stuff ajxnsn

This looks like when u try to bring your bf to a metalcore concert and he doesn’t like the experience very much krkrkrkr  anyway happy dabidance day y'all.

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

“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.

my brother's keeper

I am amazed

That the Todoroki family is as functional and well put together as it is, I really am. This isn't me going, 'they shouldn't want him back!', btw... though I do still think that, for the record. It's more that they go through all that, and at the end of the day only Dabi goes on to not be a productive citizen.

I'm... not really going anywhere with this, it's just... their dad is an abusive asshole, yeah, that's the baseline. He's rich, sure whatever. The important bit is, I think, is that he's a hero, and you have to remember that in that MHA context: a hero, in MHA, is more than just a celebrity, more than just a public servant. The only way I can really put it is like this; in MHA, a hero is expected to hold up the sky, and so is treated as such.

In a society fracturing under the weight of overreaching government restrictions, escalating societal pressures, civil rights movements that are starting to bloom into terrorist organizations for the sheer lack of progress being made, heroes are the glue holding it all together. They are that big, that important, that beloved.

And the Todorokis were raised by, and abused by, one such hero. But he's not just a hero, oh no: he's not some down on his luck no-name barely scraping by, or struggling to manage his job, he's Endeavor, the Number Two Hero. He's second only to All Might, which might as well mean he's first among all humans. His face and image is on toys and posters, his name known to every man, woman and child in Japan, and probably by substantial amounts on other continents as well. In short, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that he, and the other top heroes, are pillars of society.

That is the man that abused them, that is the man that ruined their lives: a man who symbolizes the very society they live in.

I'll say it again: the fact that only Dabi snapped, and went on to reject their father and everything he stands for, astounds me. After driving their mother into a psychotic break, to the point she spends the rest of her life locked away, after driving their brother into suicide, everything he does to them and they just... go onto being normal people.

In my imagination, Fuyumi is... the leader of a motorcycle gang. Why? I don't know; I don't even think one could possibly exist in a society where law enforcement can come down out of the sky and casually flip an eighteen wheeler, but... still, that's my mental image for her. I think it's the sheer level of repression she has going on being released in cathartic violence and wild rampage.

Natsuo, meanwhile, I picture having a normal job, a normal life, but being just... super subversive under the surface. Maybe he hacks hero's bank accounts, maybe he joins some crazed revolutionary organization (MHA has enough of them), or is some guerilla reporter devoted to exposing heroic corruption or something; I'm not sure which, but him having that level of secrecy in his rebellion when he's outwardly the most straightforward about his anger amuses me.

For Rei? At some point, Endeavour comes to visit her, and she's the one to give him that scar on his eye.

As a treat.

And as for Shoto? In a timeline without Midoriya correction... well. I always imagined he'd go to school and become a hero, as expected. Endeavour tries to force him into his agency, but he refuses, goes his own way, does everything he can to avoid the man, even if it damages his career prospects, but above all else he refuses to bow, refuses to bend even an inch to his father.

But Endeavour refuses to leave his prized creation alone.

And then, one day, he just... snaps. Goes full Sephiroth, in fact. He snaps, kills his father before he even knows what's happening, and just kinda... wanders off, to accidently his way into becoming a feared villain, either still not emoting at all, or again like Sephiroth (or his brother), just going full in on the crazy.

And for bonus points? The last straw that drives him over the edge? Endeavour's eye getting scarred, Endeavour looking more like him, both of them marked by Rei's hand; that last, unwanted, connection to the man he hates most, laced with some of his deepest, most unresolved trauma.