I'm not a troll no I was being serious, I understand there is trolls going around but I was being serious!
Thanks for clarifying!
Um, we saw Endeavor beating the crap out of his 5 year old. Hitting him with hard objects, punching him so hard he puked. It was pretty black and white. I’m honestly not sure what else is needed to classify it as abuse.
These aren’t real people but to me personally, working in the field with this specific population of families, it’s very obvious that Hori is going for a very complex and realistic portrayal of abuse in a family. It’s not just convincing, in my personal opinion based on professional experience, it’s realistic. Which makes the Todoroki plot really hard to swallow for some people. (The Shimuras were incredibly realistic as well imo) People react to abuse differently. Each sibling shows those different reactions, and Shouto doesn’t voice his own victimhood. He knows his father is an abuser, he knows his father destroyed their family and home. But he doesn’t direct his frustrations at his own situation, that’s correct. However that doesn’t mean he doesn’t consider it abuse, just that he’s more angry at how his mother was treated and how it’s affected all of their lives in general. He really doesn’t talk about himself much, and I think Shouto refusing his victimhood to an extent is definitely an issue. But it manifests in Shouto just wanting to have a restored family, finally. But—
If you’re thinking that you need the child’s confirmation to consider it abuse, then the world would be a lot uglier.
If the world worked that way, if the investigation and disposition of abuse worked that way, hardly any interventions would ever be done for families. The fact of the matter is, in reality kids cover up for their parents all the time. You send investigators out to homes and they lie, say nothing happened, say nothing is happening—IF they’re smart enough or old enough to understand what’s happening. Younger kids may tell the truth of what happens, but they’ll still say they feel safe at home, because to them they are safe. It’s their home, it’s where they live, and they don’t want to be taken away. A lot of kids who have been removed (which means abuse or neglect undeniably happened), those kids are legitimately terrified of CPS workers. Because they don’t want to be taken away again. Even if their home sucks, they don’t want to go. Much of the time when kids are taken from abusive homes, they aren’t happy or excited or relieved. Not at first at least. They’re upset and scared and want to stay home with their parents. It’s a hard pill to swallow and a lot of people may not understand it, but it’s the reality for a lot of families.
Not so fun fact: During my time with CPS we had to file many run away reports because foster kids and even adopted kids ran away from their foster placements and adoptive families and, amazingly enough, ran back to the birth families they were taken from. Seriously, it happened many times.
So just because those kids wanna stay home and wanna be with their abusive parents, does that mean it’s not abuse?
Um, no.
Kids are unreliable narrators. Their world is small and at that point their families are their entire world, so no they’re not gonna want to lose that. You can’t just go off of a kid’s POV. That’s why we’re shown the Todoroki situation from an outside perspective as well as the characters’ perspectives. That way it’s undeniable that regardless of how the siblings react to the situation (i.e. Fuyumi’s reaction to be considered here) you know it was an objectively bad situation. No ifs ands or buts.
