Lev St. Valentine

interview with the vampire 2.05 / red dragon (2002) screenplay

who has the worst kevin complex among the aftg men.

riko is patient number 0 we have to hand it to him every time. i hate you i love you you're my other half you're a pet you're a footstool i'm jealous of you i need you i made an altar for you out of our old room i'm going to force you to see me live out our dreams you will never ever ever ever be able to leave me the people who tried to take you from me will suffer :)

Touya Todoroki has BPD.

The scene where he cries to Natsuo looks like what is called ‘splitting’ in borderline personality disorder. Splitting is a defence mechanism against the heightened fear of abandonment that borderlines have. Due to black and white thinking, people with borderline personality disorder are very sensitive to rejection - whether it is real or perceived.

When Natsuo expresses that he’d rather Touya ‘bother Fuyumi’, Touya sees this as Natsuo hating him, seeing him as a burden, and wanting nothing to do with him. In truth, Natsuo is just a child who wants to sleep (I will come for anyone who calls him a bad brother).

Borderline relationships are based on idolisation and devaluing - we either see people as completely good and perfect, or as terrible and evil. These switches in views can be rapid and don’t always have an obvious trigger, or logical reasoning. I believe that for Touya, this is most obvious with how he behaves around Enji. I think as a child, he split on Enji a lot, which is why he flip-flopped between hating him and wanting his attention.

Adding to this, it’s likely that Enji was Touya’s favourite person growing up. In borderline personality disorder, a favourite person is someone who the borderline idealises, is strongly dependent on, and constantly seeks approval from, feeling emotionally distressed without their validation. All borderline relationships are intense and unstable, but FPs even more so. There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the very basic gist, and if it doesn’t scream Touya, then I don’t know what does.

Another symptom of BPD that he clearly has is emotional dysregulation. As a child, we See Touya crying whenever he feels strong emotions (happiness, fear, anger) and this is almost all the time. As an adult, Dabi still can’t regulate his emotions, is prone to emotional outbursts, and grins when he’s grieving. Dabi as an adult also presents with an emotional numbness most of the time, which is common for people with BPD.

Furthermore, people with borderline personality disorder also have an unclear or shifting self image. This means that they may not know who they are in any meaningful way, or their view of themselves may change drastically. Both of these are true for Touya. Dabi said “as a kid I didn’t know why I existed” in the dub, and I don’t know if that is the direct translation from the sub but I’ll use it as evidence anyway. [manga spoilers: “Touya has died, Dabi is born” is an example of shifting self image]

BPD usually develops in childhood as a result of trauma. The neglect that Touya faced as a child definitely makes sense as a cause for the fear of abandonment, lack of emotional control, and unstable attachments that Touya experiences throughout his life.

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.

i have so many thoughts on why it seems like kevin's experience after leaving the nest was different. my main thought being that we just don't get to see it. neil joins the foxes months after kevin does and in the beginning he only interacts with kevin during practice, so that explains part of it.

in son nefes we only see kevin as he relates to exy or andrew (lmao). but also kevin spent his first month or so with wymack, so whatever might have been there we simply don't get to see. the extra content says that he only took his coat and wallet when he left the nest, and that in his first few months he struggled with missing his team, his inability to play, and with doubting his decision to leave.

kevin also spent longer than jean in the nest, timeline-wise it seems to have been closer to a decade, and if 5 years was enough to make jean forget the previous 14... sure, kevin was afforded slightly more decencies than jean - he had a car (who knows how often he got to use it), he had to travel for press reasons, and he had more clothes i guess. but taking it all into account we have no reason to assume it was easy for him.

but we just don't see a lot of kevin's struggles period. we don't see his thoughts we don't see all the ways in which his trauma manifests we don't see what other coping mechanisms he has besides drinking. the night training could partially be that but again. we don't know.

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.

My Hero Academia AU: Living Ghost

A little bit different than my other comics; I've never done a time lapse before.

In the Ambush Simulation notes, I mentioned that Dabi has a canon divergence in this AU where he returned home after the three years he was missing/presumed dead, but nothing in the household changed and he was still an unhinged mess.  This is the AU comic behind ‘unhinged mess’ and the partial reasoning behind his antagonistic behavior in The Summer Camp Ambush Simulation.

…

All right, so canonically Dabi is a walking, half-dead, Lovecraftian nightmare of mental and physical health issues who's keeping himself going through sheer willpower/hatred.  Ujiko says that after waking up from the three year coma, he should not have survived longer than a month as a result of the injuries he sustained from the fire.  So even in an AU where he was reunited with his family after the fact, that’s still the reality of his situation.

Enter Endeavor: In this scenario, at that point in his character arc, I think he would have retreated back into his usual pattern of refusing to face the issue. The Todoroki family got Touya back, but they also learned that he wouldn't be with them long. If a missing/presumed dead child turns up after three years, they're immediately going to a hospital to establish mental and physical condition, so the health issues resulting from the fire would have been discovered almost immediately.

From the point of view of Endeavor, Touya's return was cause for celebration and was initially viewed as a second chance/an opportunity to repair some of the damage he'd already done to his family...but then the severity of Touya's prognosis becomes apparent and they're told he has weeks to live. In Ambush Simulation, Endeavor takes the coward’s way out and leaves the problem for everyone else to deal with so he doesn't have to face Touya.  He told himself it was a way of not getting attached and so on, and no matter how much he tries to deny it, the avoidance is his guilty conscious.

The same goes for Rei. She refused to see Touya after he came back just so she wouldn't have to say goodbye to him a second time.

But Touya doesn't die.

Despite what the doctors predicted, he survives '...albeit with complications, various emergencies, experimental treatments to delay the inevitable, no clear answer on how the hell he was still breathing, and no promises that he would ever live a full life...' And now, just like in canon, he has 7-8 years of simmering resentment with the trauma of a near-death experience, the realization of having lost three years of his life due to the coma, the fallout of terminal health, and the crushing disappointment of what should have been a heartfelt reunion turned into a second abandonment.

In this AU as a vigilante, Touya has the Pandora’s Box of being an outrageous public menace and a potential family embarrassment because he figured out the only time his father pays any attention to him is when he’s ‘acting out’ and he decided he’d rather be the problem child than the invisible child.  And unfortunately, this mentality has also ruined his relationship with Natsuo.

In some respect, canon is a happier outcome for Touya because at least in canon, the poor bastard has a purpose instead of reduced to a living ghost.

…

The piano panels are him rehabilitating his hands.  Technically after a three year coma, he should not have been walking and talking as quickly as he did.  Not with that kind of atrophy.  So I’m balancing that inaccuracy out with the headcanon his fine motor skills were likely completely ruined.

Plus, if your life is a train wreck, have at least one positive hobby.

...Yomaha...

Heyy! You said someone should ask you about Kevin under this post about Kevin's struggles from the nest of which we don't know enough... So I'm asking you about Kevin! Please tell us your Kevin thoughts! You always make very good points and I like reading your thoughts!!

cody my friend I am so glad you asked but you might regret it. i hope you're prepared from an unorganised huge convoluted MESS of a ramble

i've been thinking for a few days about this one like... what would a kevin POV look like? what is he hiding? how does he cope? WHO IS HE?

the kevin we ""know"" is a "coward", an insufferable bitch, an asshole and a hardass. other people's opinions and view of him makes up the entirety of our impression of who he is. but that's not who he is. that's just who we're supposed to believe he is.

kevin, born and bred to have this... borderline psychopathic lack of empathy, who can look his teammates in the eye after being told seth is dead or andrew is being committed and say, "what about the game?"

but when the raven's are switching districts; his sense of danger and fear is paralysing. he's three steps ahead trying to figure out how to please riko, how to keep himself safe, willing to put himself back into the centre of his abuse just to stop riko from finding him and killing him. he has to get blackout drunk to deal with any amount of riko. he's frozen with fear by being in the same room as him.

kevin knows where jean's mind and body goes to when hes panicking, knowing his worst place is right back in the nest being drowned by riko. kevin telling neil "do you know what he'll do to you?" and "he'll break you" when neil asks for his ticket. kevin's text to him before he goes into the nest, and staring at neil like he'd seen a ghost when neil returns after the nest (when he looks like the butcher). his comforting "i know what he's like" or "i know how he sees you, i know it means he did not hold back,".

kevin nervous breakdown panic attack day vs kevin smile for the cameras one track exy mind day

im so intrigued by him. how does he cope? his mother is dead, probably killed by the mafia family he was raised by. he grew up into a cult, he was only a child watching neil's father cut a man into pieces in front of him. how many other's had he seen?

how many other injuries cover his body, in places where the cameras can't see? how many rapes and assaults was he forced to watch in the nest? how many beatings was he forced to participate in? what did he have to say to jean in french that he didn't want riko to hear?

he needs someone with him all the time because of the nest. he's a "health freak" because of the nest. his sleep schedule, his anger, his anxiety.

did he say "what about the season?" re: andrew after drake because he doesn't care, or did he think "i've seen this happen too many times. and they've always kept playing,"? did he think "andrew is the strongest person i know. andrew is stronger than me. he would never let this destroy him," knowing that it has?

nobody has protected him in his life apart from the cameras and andrew.

he's scared. he doesn't know what love is supposed to look like.

he's only been a human for a year.

his scars are healing for the first time in his life and they're not being replaced by new ones, but every day he's afraid that that's going to get ripped out from underneath him. his entire life already got flipped upside down when he left the nest. of course exy is the only thing he "cares" about.

because it's the only thing that's been certain in his life, and even for those few weeks or months where he thought he would never play again, he trained and trained, and learned how to use his non-dominant hand because he can't lose this. he can't lose exy like he's lost everything else.

kevin has never had anything stable in his life except for violence and exy. now he has people he's supposed to care about, and he has to change his priorities. he has to learn how live a life that isn't fueled by self-preservation for the first time ever.

jean was only in the nest for five years; and look at him. look at what the nest has done to his social skills, his view of himself, his self esteem. look at what it's done to him, how he expects violence and contrition, coach and always waiting and waiting and waiting for the punishment to come.

kevin might not have had the same level of physical abuse that jean had, but he was there far longer. the ravens existed before him; their mindset and their abuse and their violence and their poison.

he's been drinking the raven poison since his childhood. the only difference between him and jean other than those things above is that kevin had more pressure to hide it, because he was half of the face of the ravens, half of the face of Exy; media trained or PR trained or a master at being a fraud and faking the way he speaks when he's being recorded.

kevin knows how to hide his abuse because he has always had to, and he's had quite a lot of practice at it.

kevin has only been a human for a year. kevin has only been kevin for a year.

so who is he? does he even know?

or is he just Kevin Day, Raven Fox starting striker, number two, six foot two, left handed right handed left handed, heavy racquet, stick size five? is that all he will ever see himself as?

anyways. or something like that. maybe he is just an insufferable bitch for no reason at all. who knows!

This is kind of out of nowhere for my blog and I feel like I'm going against both canon and fanon when I say this, but having mostly caught up with how My Hero Academia tried to wrap things up in its ending, I think Decay should've been Shigaraki's original quirk. A lot of the fandom likes the idea that Tomura was born quirkless until AFO got to him, since it parallels so well with Izuku. I do think that's a cool idea, but it's not my favorite theory for reasons I'll get into later. Unfortunately for most of us, it's been confirmed that he was born with a quirk, it just doesn't matter what it was because AFO took it and later gave him Decay. From what I can tell, that's not a particularly well-liked explanation since it puts AFO in the position of 'mastermind who organized literally everything bad that happened' which I imagine most people find lame. But consider this: even if Tomura was quirkless originally, wouldn't that leave AFO in the same place? I love the League of Villains a lot and consider them to be horribly tragic characters, but I think Tomura's situation in particular would've been more tragic if the whole thing was just one awful coincidence. Even if his bio family weren't who they were, Decay would've showed up eventually and almost certainly would cause a lot of problems. And I also think it would've been a whole lot more fucked up if AFO just picked him up on a whim because it was convenient, and learning about the kid's relation to his nemesis afterwards was what gave him the idea for his own legacy plan. When I think of tragedies, I usually look at them from the lens of "was there anything else that could've been done?" With Decay as Shigaraki's original quirk, no, there really wasn't. Alas, it is ultimately a story of good triumphing over evil, so there needed to be some bitch behind everything and AFO is that bitch. They needed an ultimate villain to blame instead of acknowledging the faults of their own system, and all of the bad guys connected to him needed to be dealt with in order to 'fix' everything. I wish the story as a whole could've been handled with a little more respect and nuance, but I guess I'll settle for self-indulgent fanfiction instead.

Lev St. Valentine