oookay let’s talk about afo and yoichi.
in short, everything zen does is a fight against being forgotten. even though afo is portrayed as this in-the-shadows supervillain, his whole goal is to be memorable by making others fear him. he would do anything in order to not be forgotten by the world, and he’s found that, yeah, doing bad things makes you far less forgettable. he doesn’t want to go back to the way he was born: to a mother abandoned by society, in a dirty river surrounded by rats, his existence never recorded and his name never given.
i can’t emphasize enough the fact that yoichi and zen never actually existed outside of the physical sense of being. they did not have names, clothes, certificates, formal education, birthdays, friends, family members, holidays, community, money, prospects for a future, anything. that is damaging. they grew up in a time where their mere existence was vile, and they had zero adult supervision to give them a sense of right or wrong. if anything, it’s insane that yoichi developed a moral compass instead of turning out like his brother. afo’s decision to kill the luminescent baby (teenager, now, iirc) was only because he was jealous of their fortune and their following. like any child who never had a mother, he wants attention and he doesn’t actually care how he gets it. he cannot feel love in the way most people know it, he cannot feel fear in the way most people know it, so he can’t differentiate. it’s all the same!
even in the comics, for someone who cannot draw a line between attention out of love and attention out of fear, of course the demon lord seems the more appealing option, especially since the demon lord gets to actually exist. captain hero is much like the brothers, always hiding his location and identity, and afo hates that, so of course he’d hate captain hero and his whole story. why would anyone wanna be good if it just means you end up like they did (and mind you, the twins ended up like that by no fault of their own.) his scene where he mentions his new “dream” and he’s coming out of the moon, glowing like the sun, he’s commanding the whole planet to orbit around him. look at me, look at me, look at me.
not to push analysis but, the fact that his eyes cannot reflect anything furthers the idea of his own self-obsession. the eyes of others are a mirror to himself, and in his eyes, people cannot reflect. they don’t exist. in a twisted sense he imposes what was done to him onto others. it’s not a pretty, nor justifiable, kind of revenge, but that’s what’s happening. he has been given nothing: everything he owns, he has had to make or take, be it quirks, or clothes, or his name. i mean, he literally had to eat his mother’s corpse to survive, instead of the typical thing where the mother would give him food.
yoichi is literally the only thing that was ever GIVEN to him. he’s not the “first” gift, he is the only one. to that end, even the name “all for one” isn’t “all (quirks) for one (zen)” its “all (that i have done) for one (chance at getting yoichi back).
his insane pursuance of his brother is fueled by this idea, that yoichi was the only thing he had that he didn’t steal. again, this doesn’t make him worth sympathy, but it certainly helps you understand why the man who has everything is obsessed with the ghost of someone he killed so long ago. i’m honestly not sure whether him killing yoichi was fully intentional: i don’t think all for one thinks things through a lot of the time, despite how he labels himself as an insane planner (and he is… just not all the time). when it comes to yoichi, he literally can’t think properly. idk. maybe someone has more analysis on why he blew his brother to pieces. i digress.
basically, zen spends nearly two centuries crawling from that muddied riverbank, absolutely desperate to make an indelible impact on the world. and yet at the end, that’s how he goes out. a baby again, crawling about in the watery muck, and this time, with nothing to hold onto.
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