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.