I for sure agree that Dabi did terrible things! I'm in no way trying to justify that at all. I was merely trying to say that most people who dislike Touya tend to not understand the gravity of what severe neglect can do to a small child. This isn't to say that Touya going off and being responsible for many deaths is fine, but his personality and the kind of person he became is definitely a result of that neglect, his home environment and the perceived abandonment by his family and I truly understand why that is.
As for Shoto, I also don't think he would have reached the extreme of becoming a villain, but he does say himself that if never had the support of Izuku and their friends, he would have likely ended up as lost in his hatred as Touya, which is why I say they're similar and barely ended up as different people. I don't mean to say that Shoto would have ended up as a villain, but I do think he could've ended up as miserable as Touya.
A lot of MHA's villains (Shigaraki, Toga, Dabi, etc) can be chopped up to people who were failed in some way and never received the support or escape that they needed, thus ending up down paths they should've never gone down. Shoto is a prime example of someone who was following a path that would've likely ended up with his own misery and isolation, similar to younger Touya who poured his soul into trying to prove himself and be useful to Enji and isolated himself in the process, but with the help of Class 1-A, his first genuine support system, ended up being able to release himself from his hatred and learned to accept others into his life.
Touya never really got that and suffered for it majorly. It's very obvious that his mental health was incredibly poor as a child. It was a very steady decline that happened with him after he was discarded by Enji and because of how turbulent his home was, he couldn't receive the kind of support he needed and when there was an attempt by Rei, it was too late for him then because he was already so far gone into his need to be useful and prove himself. He was already severely affected by the neglect he'd been facing and kind words weren't going to be enough.
When Touya woke up after Sekoto Peak, it would've been a perfect time for him to get his second chance. He even wanted to apologize to everyone. He wanted a second chance. But when he did go home and saw that things had only gotten worse, that his "death" had done nothing to change things, that they'd seemingly moved on from him, it was the nail in the coffin and he lost himself completely and became that cruel, terrible person.
I'd never try to justify the extreme of him becoming a villain and causing widespread harm to innocent people. At the end of the day, MHA is a shounen manga and there's always going to be extremes because of that. I simply mean to say that, as someone who lived in a family incredibly similar to the Todoroki family, people don't try to fully understand how Touya got to that point and especially don't try to understand that severe neglect can affect someone just as much as physical abuse, to the point they become bad people. They don't understand that it's incredibly realistic that Touya ended up very differently from his siblings.
Every victim of abuse or neglect is different, some can come out of it fine and able to cope with the gravity of their trauma and some can come out of it imperfect and flawed because they were never given an opportunity to heal (there's a reason why a lot of abusers are also victims of abuse, more often than not they're never able to heal from their trauma and thus repeat the cruelty they faced or witnessed as children).
A lot of people invalidate Touya's neglect because it wasn't "as serious" and that he got off lightly compared to Rei and his siblings when it's not a matter of "how serious" the abuse/neglect was, it was the fact that he was never given the chance to end up as anything other than a cruel and terrible person. As Touya says, he was only ever taught [by Enji] how to burn everything. He could not be supported in the way he needed to be or steered down a better path and it only lead to him sinking further and further until he seemingly couldn't be reached anymore (which is proven wrong later on after the war and goes to show how easy "Dabi" could've been prevented had Touya had that support from his family from the get go).
A lot of people look at Dabi and only see a villain, which is fair because he is a villain and we meet him as a villain, but in this they also refuse to see Touya who came before "Dabi" and refuse to try to understand him further, which is something I don't think is fair and frustrates me a lot. It leads to a lot of incorrect perceptions of victims of neglect and abuse; that if they don't end up as good people, their trauma doesn't matter, which just isn't true. It also causes a lot of victim blaming rhetoric to be spread that only brings harm to real life victims.
I reiterate again, I don't think it's okay that Dabi committed the crimes he did and I would never say it is. I simply find it frustrating that some people refuse to acknowledge that he's just as much of a victim as his siblings and his mother, to the point that they'd rather invalidate him and his past and call him weak or a "bum" instead.
