Lets have an unconfortable talk about Eraserdust, Tomura and EndHawks.
TW: Mention of child abuse and depersonalization.
I think Tomura is an incredibly complex character that people don't quite understand. He's not evil for the sake of being evil; he's a child who suffered terrible abuse and was never able to make a single decision in his life that wasn't manipulated by someone else. Which, I believe, makes him incapable of fully distinguishing his own emotions, internalizing them, and therefore, processing them in a healthy way.
He's a child whose sense of ownership over his own body, emotions, and thoughts was annihilated. This is the root of it all. When you don't own your own body, how can you own your decisions, your emotions, your identity? All For One not only gave him a purpose (to destroy), but also robbed him of the possibility of desiring anything else. When everything in your life has been orchestrated by someone else, you don't develop the tools to ask yourself, "What do I want?"
In the canon, the only real decision he makes is to DIE; it's the first time he decides something on his own, because he has fulfilled his purpose. In the strictest sense of the word, he did destroy the hero society, filled them with questions, and dismantled an entire system. And the saddest part is that the decision wasn't even truly his, because the destruction, the objective he ultimately achieved, remains something imposed on him by AFO. Here, I want to do something different: Aizawa lets him make decisions constantly, and accepting that, making it normal, isn't an easy, linear process, because going from having no decision-making power to being able to decide even the most basic aspects of his existence is no small feat.
Gratitude (towards Aizawa) immediately turns into hatred because it's an emotion he doesn't know how to handle. Aizawa treats him like a human being who IS WORTH IT. How are you supposed to accept that when your first memory is being the symbol of fear? Tomura's hatred towards Aizawa is, in reality, hatred towards hope. Because hope hurts. Hope implies that there is still something to lose. If Aizawa treats him as a worthwhile human being, then Tomura would have to confront the possibility that all his suffering, all his atrocities, could have been avoided. And that is unbearable. If he isn't the monster, then who is he? And if someone can see him without monstrosity, then perhaps he was never inherently evil. And that would mean that all the pain he caused was… avoidable? That burden is heavier than any guilt he could carry as a villain.
Eraserdust is a very niche ship. To be honest, BNHA has ships with much larger fandoms, whether I like them or not, for example bkdk (which I strongly dislike but I don't think this is the place to delve into that). So I always knew, when posting this work, that it wasn't going to reach a huge number of people, but that those it did reach would truly enjoy this pairing as much as I do.
Which brings me to something I was discussing the other day with a friend with whom I have an Erasercloud (2 baka +1 on my profile is the story before this roleplay), and she told me she didn't see the point of this ship. She also really fangirls over the ship of Keigo Takami and Enji Todoroki. That's something I've encountered quite often: why those two but not Eraserdust?
My conclusion is: why EndHawks but not Eraserdust? Because it's uncomfortable. Both ships stem from the same thing within the fandom: one character being a fan of the other. But in Tomura's case, they treat him as an obsessive fanboy (to the extent that AO3 is full of extremely unpleasant tags for them), while Keigo is treated as the boy who wanted to be saved by his hero, and that's cute.
Keigo is a person who found redemption and ended up surrounded by people who could give him the tools to get out of where he was and find some kind of redemption within his pain.
Tomura did not. Tomura was punished for the same thing for which Keigo was glorified: basing his actions on what someone else wanted because he lacked a sense of belonging. Which leads me to think that either the fans didn't fully understand the work, or Horikoshi's work got too big for him. Because in the end, fans mercilessly punish villains for being villains, exactly like the work itself. Heroes can commit atrocious acts and not suffer for them, because they are heroes.
I think the Eraserdust ship is, in every sense, uncomfortable, harder to romanticize, rawer, and more violent to read. It's a ship that builds connections on pain and on exposing traumas and realities that are much easier not to see. You're bringing together a character who is self-destructive to punish himself (Aizawa) and a character who destroys because he doesn't believe himself worthy of anything else (Tomura).
But both live under the idea: "my existence causes harm." And that creates a very strange, heavy emotional compatibility that doesn't fit into more "consumable" fandom dynamics.
The audience tolerates trauma as long as it remains aesthetically comfortable.
EndHawks has a structure that people already know how to process: admiration, famous heroes, salvation, mentorship, emotional dependency, and the desire for approval.
All of that comes packaged within the hero system, so people read it as something "tragic" but "beautiful."
In contrast, Tomura is the rotten product of the same system.
Eraserdust, on the other hand, has: self-destruction, dissociation, bodily violence, fear of touch, institutional trauma, dangerous emotional dependency, guilt and self-loathing.
Keigo and Tomura share MANY foundations: both were instrumentalized from childhood, both built their identity around another figure, both were used as weapons, both developed a deeply distorted relationship with admiration, both learned that their value depends on serving someone else's purpose.
The difference is that Keigo ended up being useful to the system. Tomura ended up being a threat to it.
And the fandom replicates exactly that.
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