It's not just you! That's what I meant by "the mentality of their mentors." Older pro heroes all agree on one thing: when individuals become a threat to the status quo, they get asked to give up their fight and take it in silence (see the heteromorphs) to keep the peace or to die quietly for the sake of the masses (see the villains).
We've seen this mentality in action many times now. When Aoyama was discovered as a traitor, the general consensus was that he should've let AFO kill him and his family instead of giving in to his demands. Which is just another way of demanding, "please die for our sakes." When he didn't, the act of wanting to protect his family labeled him a villain, and he was thrown in jail for the crime of not taking it for the greater good.
That's always the expectation from those who fell through the cracks, btw. Suffer in silence so that others don't have to, and die quietly if you can't. That way, others can use the tragedy of your premature passing as inspiration instead of questioning why society left you to die alone.
For the same exact reason as Mic here, when Touya came back from the dead and confronted his father, Enji's reaction was "that's a despicable lie. Touya is dead" because he much rather keep using the memory of his son as an excuse to hang on to the number one title than face the very son he's supposedly been mourning and missing so dearly all this time. Enji has been telling us that his greater regret is that Touya can't sit at the dining table with the others anymore, yet the second his son proves he's still alive and could claim that seat back, Enji turns his back on him again. He cannot face a Touya who is a separate entity from the child he remembers, a son who isn't a powerless victim anymore. When Touya went from an idealized martyr who died "for the cause" (achieving number one) to a "mass murderer" and a villain, his memory suddenly turned sour. As long as he was dead, he was a good kid who didn't deserve the abuse. Now that he's fighting the status quo, though, he becomes a threat to "stop," and that justifies the continued neglect of refusing to face him.
This pattern is repeated with all the villains, btw.
Shigaraki ceased being a "good" and sympathetic victim when he didn't stay dead, and instead let the poor innocent Shimura Tenko morph into the ruthless "manchild" Shigaraki, a monster who only lusts for destruction and "tramples over Shimura Nana's memory"
The heroes do this all the time. Using an idealized memory of someone who passed away to justify having no sympathy for living, breathing people, because their society is funded on the "heroic" sacrifice of those who suffered in silence and died "for the greater good."
The expectation is that people who suffer the flaws of the system continue to die for the sake of protecting that idealized lie, and when they refuse to, they're punished with the heroic fist of the "sometimes death can be a mercy" rhetoric.
killing can be another way of saving... What, exacty? Certainly not the person whose life you just took. The only thing it protects is the filthy, rotten system itself.
... Not that the kids ever question this. Deku is supposed to do better than Gran Torino, to see something worth saving in Shigaraki that no one else did. But because he's stuck idealizing the prev gen and its teachings, he accepts the cape and he wears it, and that's precisely why the two sides haven't reached an understanding yet. There can't be one so long as the kids keep echoing the "well, maybe you are the problem" argument that so far has only ever defended the establishment at the expense of those wronged by it.
