Bakugou’s violence isn’t okay, yes. That’s why it’s good to read stories critically sometimes–aka, be like “this part isn’t framed the best.” I would agree that it bothers me how the series brushes over his bullying, but Bakugou is also a heightened reality character–everything about him is exaggerated for effect. That’s why I’m reluctant to compare it to the real world standards, but I also think that his bullying is horrific and the series isn’t really dealing with that as of yet. I hope it deals with it more, but considering how it’s dealt with Todoroki’s abuse… sigh.
However, Bakugou’s development in the series, especially contrasted with whatever Deku’s development is, is by the standards of the series, excellent. That’s why people like him–because he’s a well written character. He has a clear arc, even if he isn’t necessarily an endearing, likeable character. He fails, and then he learns. He’s also a traumatized child and like no one realizes that except All Might.
It’s not impossible, that’s for sure. Bakugou’s angry routine along with his raw power caught the eye of the villains in the first place, leading to his abduction. His brash tendencies also caused him to fail the hero licensing exam. If this particular element comes back to bite him at some point, well, it wouldn’t be shocking.
It’s also possible that Bakugou’s foiling with Endeavor (good hero, bad person, even if he’s on redemption path now) will be explored more. We don’t know exactly what happened to Touya, but we have a pretty good guess. Endeavor is a bully who pushed and pushed his kid to be the best and pretty clearly it almost killed Touya–they might even believe it did kill Touya. Bakugou and Todoroki already have some further exploration of their relationship destined, in terms of them both needing to get those licenses, so it’s possible that Bakugou might be involved when whatever happened to Touya comes out, and might again be struck by the realization that hey, taunting people about being weak and not strong enough has serious consequences.
It’s really the same reason some people call a character like Kirishima Touka abusive in Tokyo Ghoul: which is to say, it is a trope within media that is prevalent in Japanese media where a woman knocks around a guy. It is slapstick comedy, not intended to be viewed as abusive. But, if you read it sans context, and cultural context also plays a role in this, you can come away with ab abusive message even though that is almost certainly not what the author is intending to portray.
It can certainly be questioned whether or not this scene is framed appropriately given the subject of abuse in Todoroki’s arc and the fact that Bakugou is a bully. I don’t particularly like this trope at all and think that in this case it is indeed poorly framed given Bakugou’s personality and his own flaws (it’s intended to show Bakugou takes after his mother in terms of being willful and argumentative, but she displays humility Bakugou does not), plus the fact that he’d just been kidnapped. But given how the story has developed, I really think Mitsuki is not intended to be portrayed as abusive, though if it is personally triggering for people–and seeing a parent hit a child can be–I understand and think that people should be sensitive to it.
Hello Anon! Are you asking about a particular kind of symbolism? I’ll just talk generally for now, but if you’re asking about a specific aspect, please don’t hesitate to come back and clarify!
Shouto’s left side is his fire side, aka the side he takes after his father with in terms of abilities. He wanted to reject this part of him because of the abuse he’s suffered from Endeavor. It’s also the side his mother rejected, when she snapped and burned his face as a result.
Dichotomies are kind of a recurrent motif with Shouto. He struggles to see himself as a full person and not as two halves, one good and one bad, by virtue of things certainly beyond his control. In his first hero costume he wears ice over his left side even though that’s the side for fire, because he wants to be one or the other and doesn’t want to see both.
As we’ve seen and as Deku reminds Shouto in the Sports Festival Arc, it’s his power and it’s his choice about what he does with it. It’s not inherently rotten because it comes from Endeavor, and limiting himself in hopes of sticking it to his father is ultimately not hurting Endeavor so much as it is hurting Shouto in terms of his potential. It’s also hurting his friends, because his not using his fire quirk is definitely part of why the villains were able to kidnap Bakugou and it’s why Dabi taunts him (and Dabi, who also probably wants to stick it to Endeavor for the exact same reasons as Shouto since Dabi is probably Touya, overuses his quirk).
If Shouto wants to be a complete, full hero, inside and out, in public and in private, he has to accept the darker possibilities and choose differently, and he has to reconcile with himself, but it’s a journey–one we’ve seen him making progress in, but one he’s still struggling with. I’m curious to see when this will be addressed again, and if it will come up in the current manga arc.
The three main characters–Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki–all have a negative foil that they are trying to be better than, but the main struggle for them is to grow up, and to do that they have to overcome their own insecurities. Deku is trying to be All Might, Todoroki’s trying not to be Endeavor, and Bakugou’s trying too hard to be himself at the expense of others around him, and they all need to kind of find a healthy medium via overcoming their insecurities.
Nejire is lovely, but thus far, she doesn’t really have focus. She has potential though and I really hope it gets developed.
Tamaki and especially Mirio, on the other hand, are well done AF. Tamaki’s anxiety makes him interesting to me especially given that he wants to be a hero, but doesn’t appear to jive with the fame or esteem that comes with it. He just wants to be a hero.
His friendship with Mirio is also endearing, and Tamaki and Mirio’s relationship foils Bakugou and Deku’s. They are two childhood friends, but without the rivalry Deku and Bakugou come with, and are wholly supportive of each other. My guess is we’ll see Bakugou and Deku growing in this direction even if they’re never like BFFs.
Mirio in particular seems to foil Deku in that he notes his family wasn’t able to be heroes because of their quirks (rather than Deku not being able to be one because he didn’t have a quirk in the beginning) but he works really, really damn hard to not only get into UA but become a candidate for OFA and a strong hero. His relationship with Night Eye definitely parallels Deku’s with All Might (and, tbh, it’s end is exactly what I expect for Deku and All Might) in how much Night Eye believed in him. Mirio’s relationship if you will with his quirk also is the inverse of Deku’s with his quirk: Deku starts out without a quirk, Mirio ends up without one (currently. I do think Eri will give him his quirk back eventually).
And Mirio also shows that you don’t have to have a quirk to be a hero: you can still save people without one. You can still be someone’s hero, as he tells Eri he is her hero. He is the utmost of Deku’s ideal of a hero: someone who saves people, and he can do without his quirk too. Mirio therefore is a refutation to Endeavor’s philosophy of having to develop the strongest quirk to be the best hero.
Well, Bakugou’s negative foil has always been Endeavor instead of a villain–he’s not at risk of becoming a villain, but he’s at risk of becoming a hero who is actually a person who hurts those closest to him. So Endeavor is proof that, well, heroes don’t have to be under scrutiny–though he’s redeeming himself slowly. And Bakugou I think is starting to learn to make choices that will help him avoid this path (slowly empathizing in his own angry way), as seen in how he seemed to realize his comments about parents hitting kids was extremely upsetting for Todoroki and respectfully backed off.
So the week after the anime airs the episode in which All Might defeats AFO, but loses his quirk and therefore his status as the number one hero (and it’s all televised), the manga drops a chapter in which the new number one hero, Endeavor, is seemingly defeated on television.
Whether or not Endeavor’s actually defeated or just down for the count right now + disfigured in a karmic way (I really don’t think he’ll die), Endeavor and All Might have always paralleled each other very very closely in terms of their relationships with each other, with their respective proteges, and possibly with villains. They are great foils, and I expect that foiling to continue.
This isn’t me equating them btw; All Might is a hero inside and out, even though not without his flaws, but Endeavor is a hero on the outside but a complete asshole of a human being and everything wrong with the hero world. That being said the narrative is clearly aiming for redemption for him so w/e.
Parallels with each other: Endeavor & All Might
Endeavor has always been Bakugou’s negative foil, in that they are heroes (or a hero in training) but not great people, with bullying tendencies that’s blatantly abuse in Endeavor’s case. Bakugou could become just like him if he isn’t careful. All Might is, of course, a foil for Deku, but not so much a negative one… though in some ways he is, but I’ll get into that later.
There’s this idea of the new UA heroes in training surpassing the heroes currently in existence: Endeavor takes this literally, talking about strength and breeding his kids to do just that, but the story seems to be suggesting that the kids need to surpass the current heroes in terms of being better people and not making the same mistakes. For example, All Might is exactly whom Deku has always wanted to be, but he isn’t a perfect person, just like his mentor Shimura Nana was not perfect. Like, she sent her child to an orphanage ostensibly to protect him, but as a result of this, her grandson has become a villain, and All Might wasn’t able to save him (yet), and Shigaraki hates him for it.
If Nana’s neglect was pretty directly a response to tragedy that led to more tragedy, All Might’s desire to honor her request is far more understandable and less condemnable narratively. Yet a repeated motif in the story is that the UA kids will break the rules to save people, and while they do need to like balance that, the underlying principle thereof is something heroes could use a bit more.
Bakugou and Deku’s relationship parallels Endeavor’s and All Might’s: they’re rivals, and one of them is kind of a jerk in a lot of ways and resentful of the other, but they do care about each other and have a grudging respect.
However, Bakugou and Deku push each other to become better, whereas Endeavor projected his insecurities and resentment of All Might onto his kids, trying to force them to become better than All Might since he couldn’t be. If All Might was too hands-off with Shigaraki, he at least is very hands-on with Deku and he is a great father figure. Endeavor is extremely neglectful of some of his children, as Natsuo notes:
And unlike All Might who is very good with Deku, Endeavor is truly abusive and awful to Shouto. He’s too controlling, refusing to so much as let Shouto have fun with his siblings because he has to focus on training instead.
Which brings me to the next foil I want to discuss.
Parallels with their kids: Endeavor & Shouto vs All Might & Deku
Both Endeavor and All Might also have a mentee/kid in the UA class: Deku again, but for Endeavor it is Shouto. Todoroki and Deku first connect when Todoroki asks Deku if he’s All Might’s secret love child.
And Deku isn’t, of course, but he doesn’t have to be All Might’s biological kid to essentially be his kid. Deku is mentored in a paternal way by All Might.
And the way in which All Might mentors Deku sharply contrasts with how Endeavor mentors his son. Deku was born quirkless and was chosen to inherit One For All because of his heart. Endeavor married Rei to gain her ice quirk presumably, as this most recent chapter suggested, to temper the side effects of his own quirk:
And Shouto is chosen over his siblings because of how perfectly his quirks compliment each other; in contrast to All Might’s selection of Deku, it has nothing to do with whom Shouto is as a person, and Endeavor abuses him.
Endeavor focused on trying to get Shouto to surpass All Might, but in reality surpassing All Might and/or Endeavor means nothing if you’re not a good person, as Endeavor’s kind of starting to (maybe) realize right now. In that way, it’s possibly too late for Endeavor to ever surpass All Might, but Shouto does not want to be his father and will probably surpass him in terms of being a decent human being. He’s already the opposite of neglectful of his mother.
And there’s one more foil I really will be surprised if we don’t see because of how well it works:
Parallels with their kids’ negative foils: All Might & Shigaraki vs. Endeavor & Dabi
All Might’s mentor’s grandson, Shigaraki, became a villain because no one came to save him and AFO manipulated him as a result.
I really will be absolutely shocked if the parallel does not extend to a kid Endeavor ignored being a villain as well (Dabi). It just works so well on a paralleling level.
For All Might, the moment he found out who Shigaraki actually was during the fight where he lost his quirk. While I don’t expect Endeavor to lose his quirk or even his status really because losing his quirk doesn’t add anything to his character (strength isn’t going to redeem him, if we really are headed down that path and we pretty clearly are, whether I like it or not, it’s got to be through making amends to his family which is not going to be easy), the parallels between these two situations do make me wonder if this is going to be the arc where it comes out that Dabi is his son (if he is. Which I do think is likely but you never know).
What good is being a hero if you can’t save your loved ones? Shimura Nana could not save her husband, abandoned her son, and so her grandson faces a worse fate. All Might did not do anything nearly so bad, but he respected Nana so much he obeyed her request not to seek out her child and, well, that didn’t exactly work out. Endeavor protects people but hurts his family. Compare this to the kids at UA, who as I mentioned routinely flout rules if it means helping their friends (though they have to learn to balance this).
Basically: to be a true hero to everyone, you might have to break a few rules. I do think All Might will have something to do with Shigaraki’s strongly hinted redemption arc. It probably won’t be pretty though, but you don’t need a quirk to save someone’s heart.
And if Dabi is Endeavor’s son, Endeavor will probably have something to do with his, as well. It’s kind of the only way I would actually buy a redemption arc for Endeavor, if he sacrifices his reputation, his strength, his everything, to save a son he hurt.
Sacrificing himself (whether or not he dies and I’m speaking of a hypothetical future event not this current battle) for Shouto or any of his other kids wouldn’t likely cost him his reputation. Being knocked down by this Nomu is not a decisive moment (though it definitely matters for his redemption & is a good step) because it is not a decision Endeavor is making; in fact, he’s still focusing on his strength by thinking “that’s why I had all of you” instead of on “sorry I was a shit dad.” For him to prove that his family matters more than his reputation, he’ll have to make some kind of choice at some point, and imo a really powerful narrative way of doing that would be to save his son.
hamliet 