what do you think that dabi feels around shoto?
I donât think narratives like Dabi unconditionally loves Shouto or wants to protect him are correct. I think itâs far more complex. I think there is resentfulness there, too.Â
My friend wrote something a few years back that I still think applies to Todoroki family dynamics: the golden child/scapegoat dynamics.Â
In short, this is a family dynamic where one child is âis the cause of all the ills of the family, and the golden child is exaltedâ.Â
As @dabistits wrote, âTheir abuser simultaneously blames Touya for failing, warns Shouto not to fall into the same pattern, and sets them up as competition so that Shouto has someone he can aim to be better than. We donât have much indication on whether it worked or not, since Touya and Shoutoâs relationship is still a mystery, but the intent is very much present.â
What Iâm trying to say is we have a clear case of how Enji treated his children. He deprived them of love and affection, managing to both neglect and micromanage them (Natsuoâs food wasnât good enough for Shouto, and so Natsuo was no longer allowed to cook, leaving Fuyumi, the sole woman left, to do soâŚ), separated Shouto from his siblings(mostly Natsuo) to the fact they are sometimes like strangers, while emphasizing his âfavoritismâ of Shouto.Â
Of course that came with physical abuse of Shouto and his status of the Golden Child was never ârewardedâ. Touya was clearly compared and discarded once Shouto came into his quirk, and from what we can tell, Touya was âtrainedâ.Â
So this paints a nightmarish picture: if Touya was the only one who knew what it was to be the Golden Child in the family before Shouto, there was an understanding of what exactly Shouto is going through. At the same time, losing attention of a parent, even an abusive one, is hard. Changes in how parents treat you, when youâre a child, hurt, especially abruptly.Â
Shouto was âperfectâ, Touya was âalmostâ. Not good enough. It might not be rational, but I can understand resentment and pity stemming from that.Â
Additionally, Shouto and Touya have a large age gap between them. Since it seems Touya is not Fuyumiâs twin, heâs older than Shouto by the very least eight years (Fuyumi and Shouto have a difference of seven years and a month), likely more. Now, I donât have any siblings, but from observations and articles Iâve read, this is a large age difference. It would be mean, given Touyaâs gakuren, that Shouto was probably no more than seven when Touya left their life.Â
So, all together, I thinkâŚTouya doesnât really know Shouto. Doesnât know who he is, besides his brother. I think he can guess what Enji has done to him, knows the parenting style very well, but thereâs a gap there. Not insurmountable. Iâve always maintained the brothers are quite similar in temperament.Â
Now this is a very half-baked meta by my standards, but I do want to draw attention to something.Â
These are all the different translations of this very important line by Dabi. As far as I understand there isnât plurals in japanese, might be a suffix or just context. As you can see VIZ went the route of saying that Dabi was talking about all of them, and Hawks speaking of all of them as students, but JB and Mangastream (RIP!) went different.Â
Someone taking a look at the raws would greatly help but when I first saw this discrepancy I immediately thought MS was a good âin-betweenâ them. Dabi referring to one person (probably Shouto), Hawks misunderstanding and just being, âChill they are studentsâ (also deflecting attention of them, but thatâs for another meta).
So, to add to potential resentment and pity, and Dabi does treat Shouto like a hero (mocking him and his efforts, much like he does with other heroes), I think he also doesnât know what to think of Shouto; heâs watching, waiting to see who Shouto is. We know he thinks of family - his one moment of vulnerability, alone in his musing was, in response to a question about how families felt, âWas thought about it so hard I went crazyâ.Â
The thing is, even in a relationship mired in a forced competition, in resent and pity, and distance, Shouto and Touya are brothers. Brothers in circumstances that their siblings canât fully grasp either, as they were never golden children, nor scapegoats. For all the rage that might leak through from what he feels for Enji, Dabi should know Shouto is as much as a victim of Enji as he is. Maybe at one point he loved his baby brother, too.
Dabi doesnât know what to think of Shouto.
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