Oh, sure. But he’s been defining himself by Endeavor, which is the point of what Deku yelled at Shouto back in the tournament arc. It’s your power. It’s on you. He shouldn’t try to be better than Endeavor, he should try to be the best version of himself.
I also don’t know that reconciling with Endeavor is the end goal of his arc. I do think it will be a part of his arc (though I don’t think an abuse victim needs to reconcile with an abuser in any way, but I do think that’s where Horikoshi is building and I hope it will be well done). But whether or not Endeavor apologizes sincerely and maybe they reconcile, that’s not (imo) the end goal of where Shouto’s development is headed. His goal is to be a good hero in his personal life and in his actual hero life.
A hero who is not known as the son of Endeavor, but as Shouto.
He’s not, at least not in the same sense as Touya/Dabi turning to the dark side of the quirk is absolutely Endeavor’s fault. It’s more of a foil situation than a direct parallel: the situations have comparative points, but also key differences.
Shigaraki is absolutely the result of Nana Shimura’s mistake in giving up her child to an orphanage because she was fearful for him–understandably so–but it was precisely that fear that put her grandchild at risk. And All Might knew about the boy and went along with it, which again, is not a terrible thing on his part since it was not really his place to do anything about it.
But because Nana put her son into the cracks of society, he died there, and Shigaraki was preyed on by All For One, despite desperately wanting someone to come and save him. Basically Shigaraki reveals the flaws in hero society that were further explored with Eri: people are still exploited, and people don’t always try to save the most vulnerable especially if it requires going against what society expects. It is absolutely not directly All Might’s fault, but as the willing symbol of hero society for many years, he put himself in a position where villains would blame him for the pitfalls of hero society… but villains, or at least Tomura, is just someone who wants to be saved as well. All Might does want to try to save him, and I am sure he will try, just as I do think Endeavor will try to save Touya.
In short: they reveal Dabi has personal motivations for everything he does. Despite his talk about following Stain’s will, and he does, he has personal motivations as opposed to a cold ideology.
He spares a terrified child and it later almost leads to the downfall of the villains’ plans.
He takes time, when he succeeds in snatching the marble, to taunt Shouto in a personal sense.
He takes time to fight Endeavor even though everyone notes how stupid it is to fight him right there, even Dabi himself.
And then the Snatch fight itself isn’t terribly insightful (ti’s cool though) but his comments afterwards are pretty insightful.
In short, he’s motivated by personal connections and emotions. Presumably a bereaved family (likely the Todorokis), a personal grudge against Endeavor, perhaps sympathy for Aoyama, and probably a personal history with Shouto. This undermines Dabi’s claim that his goal is to make the hero killer’s will a reality.
why u lying
It might very well be a philosophy he believes in, but again, I suspect the reason he does is personal (that he’s Touya), because we’ve only ever seen him making decisions from an emotional standpoint rather than a logical one.
I actually already did a post about that interaction and its significance for the plot/foreshadowing for Dabi’s probable redemption here! I don’t really have much to add, except to say that I do think that the fact that Touya had a body unsuited for his quirk is interesting from a symbolic perspective when you consider this scene.
Presuming Dabi is Touya at this point, and even taking into account the fact that Touya would not have known Aoyama had a quirk ill-suited for his body, it’s interesting because Touya probably would have seen Aoyama as a frightened kid hiding from the chaos and violence erupting around him, and quite likely that would have hit… close to home for him. Perhaps it even reminded him of himself at a point. Knowing what we know know–that Aoyama and Touya both have bodies for whom their quirks aren’t compatible–it’s kind of symbolic that even as Dabi’s engaging in his first real villainous activity (since he was noted to be a petty criminal beforehand), he’s being driven by memories of a violent family and has mercy on a kid who shares a trait he was cast away from his father’s favor for. It wouldn’t surprise me if Touya/Dabi needs to learn to have mercy on himself in many ways, because self-preservation doesn’t really seem to be his thing and I wonder if he tried too hard to regain his father’s favor, hence the scarring. We will see.
I think Dabi does not know Shouto at all. I do think he is Touya, though.
But Endeavor definitely kept them apart, and I think the fact that Natsuo, who is the sibling closest in age to Shouto, did not even know Shouto’s favorite food until recently indicates Dabi/Touya probably knows Shouto even less well than Natsuo. Natsuo also says Endeavor took care that the three eldest would not be involved in Shouto’s life “at all.”
I think it’s possible Dabi thinks Shouto is a mini Endeavor in the making. I also think it’s possible he primarily pities his brother, since he clearly knows Shouto was abused, or both–they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s possible he resents him for having all his father’s attention. It’s possible he doesn’t.
I think whatever Dabi thinks of Shouto, though, is not crafted in whom Shouto is. Instead, it’s crafted in terms of Shouto’s role in their family: victim, and their father’s chosen child. Maybe he gives one or the other extra weight, or maybe gives them both equal weight.
I hope they get the chance to know each other as actual people beyond their hero/villain dichotomy. I think they will.
Shouto’s burn covering his fire side is literally symbolic of how his fire side–the side he got from Endeavor–is scarring for him. His father scarred him, even if his mother was the one who poured the boiling water. No matter how powerful he grows and how comfortable he grows with using his fire side, he will always have a scar. It’s a realistic symbol of abuse I think. You can recover, but it doesn’t change the past. That being said scars don’t have to inhibit you, yet they’re there.
Dabi… I think once we know exactly what happened it will be easier to analyze, but for now I’d say that he’s literally trying to keep himself together (like when his staples separate when he’s mentioning regrets and going crazy and dead families) but his scars separate him from the world.
They make him identifiable, because presuming Dabi is Touya, his anger over his abuse/scars on his soul is indeed a major part of his identity and how he sees himself. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, either, but of course Dabi is not channeling this towards a healthy development. If he is indeed overusing his quirk, and in the above panel where he fiddles with the skin, it’s shown that he’s still hurting and not healing currently, and I hope and believe he’ll get the chance to do so some day.
Hm. Not exactly. I do believe Endeavor has traumatized Shouto.
I think this is a question that needs to be answered sensitively, because Shouto is an abuse victim. I don’t think he is on a path to be like Endeavor because he has very clearly been checking himself (as we see during the Licensing Exam). Dabi, presuming he’s Touya, is the one I would say is actually more becoming like Endeavor than he would want. Shouto, for example, is afraid to use his flames; Dabi overrelies on them, like Endeaqvor.
That being said Shouto does have a tendency to rely all on himself, which is a defining trait of Endeavor’s as well–but for Shouto, this comes from trauma. He was deliberately isolated from his siblings and then Rei, his mother who cared for him, snapped and was committed to a hospital. He was always having to rely on himself. He tends to focus on the goal more than on the people around him, but he’s been moving away from that via his friendship with Deku and others. I don’t know if this is so much taking after Endeavor as it is a child never getting the chance to be anything else but what his father was trying to make him into in order to survive, and then as soon as he gets the chance unlearning and learning how to be himself, but it’s a painful process for him and yet he’s brave enough to deliberately choose not to be like his father even when it means confronting the less flattering parts of himself.
So: I do think Shouto is dealing with the effects of trauma from Endeavor, which is a negative influence of sorts, but I also see him overcoming them and find that beautiful to watch.
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.
I’m guessing these are from the same anon. 😀 I’m always happy to talk Dabi.
It’s stated in the text that something awful happened to Touya and that is related to Endeavor directly. Natsuo says it twice. The first time I don’t have access to the official Viz translation, but the translator noted that Natsuo is using a term in Japanese when he says “you and Shouto” that implies “you, Shouto, and another sibling who is explicitly not Natsuo himself.” We know now it’s Touya.
It could be abuse or abandonment–which is a type of abuse that produces just as harmful long-lasting psychological effects. Yes, Endeavor did something to Touya.
Dabi clearly has a personal grudge against Endeavor, seeing that he joined the League of Villains because of Stain’s philosophy against heroes who are bad people in their personal lives (Endeavor exactly) and targets Endeavor and plans to target him again.
And we know Dabi has a hang-up about family/something related to why he is a villain now has to do with family.
Not to mention Dabi’s personal grudge against Endeavor–I can’t think of what else would make narrative sense at this point. He’s just someone who Endeavor wasn’t nice to, or a friend of Touya’s who saw a friend suffering? That could in theory work, but we already have that kind of character challenging Todoroki in Inasa (who comments on how Todoroki and Endeavor have the same eyes, which btw, Dabi also has).
So that option no longer makes sense, because it’d just be a repeat of Inasa but villainized and Inasa I like you but you’re just not that important.
Dabi being Touya honestly seems like the only narrative option I can think of that explains why Dabi has a personal grudge against both Endeavor and Shouto (in Japanese, the “too bad, Todoroki Shouto” is very familiar and it’s supposed to be unnerving).
My guess is we can look to Inasa to understand why, perhaps, Dabi if Touya would want to mock Shouto–because Touya might think Shouto’s just like Endeavor. If Natsuo didn’t even know Shouto’s favorite food until chapter 192 I’m guessing Touya knows even less about Shouto, so it might make sense in a sad way for him to presume that the son who’s trying to become a hero like Endeavor was raising him to be might be just like Endeavor–but, of course, Shouto is not.
No need to apologize for your English; it’s written very well and there’s never a need to apologize for speaking more than one language! I should be praising you 😀
As for your question:
I LOVE TSUYU
Ahem. Lol. I think Asui actually has more focus and more of an arc than almost any other female character besides Uraraka! It’s not perfect, of course, but I do think there is focus there.
Her role has to do with her being a friend to everyone in her class. She truly cares about everyone in it. We see that from the very beginning, when her first focus comes when she, Mineta, and Deku are fighting the villains in teh shipwreck zone. They work together and she ultimately saves both of them, and says this:
She praises them. Her chief defining trait is that loyalty and care for her classmates, but she also has, like Iida in some ways,a desire to do the right thing, and in Tsuyu’s case it comes down to caring greatly about the wellbeing of her classmates–not just for the rules’ sake, but because she wants her classmates to be the best people they can be in every way. This comes out when she confronts the people who are planning to rescue Bakugou:
She then feels extreme worry for her friends and concern about her relationship with them. She truly, truly cares about them all, and her standing with them. She feels responsible for their wellbeing, and at the same time knows she needs to trust them:
She takes a very mature approach and explains to them what she’s feeling. Tsuyu is really the mom friend. And as a result of opening up, everyone talks acknowledges they’re anxious. Essentially, Tsuyu is in many ways at the heart of 1A as a class…
Which is why I think when the traitor, whomever they are, is eventually
revealed, it will devastate her, and I hope we might see more Asui
development from that struggle to come to terms with it.
hamliet 