Hey everyone, this is gonna be a bit different than my usual posts. Trigger warnings for bullying, abuse, murder, and r@pe.
“The past never dies” - Dabi’s dance is a moment that anyone even vaguely familiar with the series knows about, and is possibly one of the biggest moments in the story. It’s when Dabi reveals himself to be Endeavor’s son, and it’s when he shouts his most famous line.
Three of MHA’s biggest themes are forgiveness, redemption, and correcting injustice. Now, we can argue about how well or poorly the series handles these topics, but I think everyone can agree that Dabi’s line is very important to the themes in question.
However, what does “the past never dies” actually mean?
I can hear most of you scoffing and thinking “dude, it literally means what it says.” Naturally, you’d be correct, but I want to dive a bit more into the phrase.
Let’s start off with the simplest meaning: what happens in the past can’t be changed or erased. Each and every thing a person does is a permanent part of their lives and the lives of everyone their actions might affect.
When people search for redemption, they often aim to correct the wrongs of the past. This can be through apologies or actions.
The thing is, you can never truly right a wrong. The wrong in question already happened. Any corrections you make won’t erase that moment.
In addition, even if you change now, the version of you that’s hurt others will always exist. Perhaps not in the present or the future, but the impacts have been felt by others already, so the damage is done.
Does that mean redemption is impossible? Despite everything I’ve said appearing to be nihilistic, absolutely not.
See, you can’t change the past, but you can control how you’ll act in the present and the future. Your past self is permanent, yes, but it’s also your baseline for what you have to work on. True redemption involves sitting yourself down and questioning what fueled your actions, and what you’ll do to prevent yourself from repeating such behaviors. Once you’ve figured out this part, you can then take the necessary steps to make up for the things that you’ve done to someone. Unfortunately, what you did will be a permanent part of life, but a simple apology can help remedy some of that pain that you’ve caused, even if they end up not accepting it. To have the strength to accept that you made a mistake/were a bad person and deciding to do something about it is what redemption really means.
With all that being said, now I want to turn the attention away from the one looking for redemption and instead focus on the victims and the idea of forgiveness. As I’ve said before, your actions will stick/impact someone, and you can’t go back and erase it from happening. The past never dies, remember? This is important when talking about trauma. To victims of trauma, the event(s) that caused their trauma stick with them like a tick does to an animal. Whatever they’ve experienced has altered the way they perceive things and who they are. And there’s no “getting over it.” It takes a lot of time and resources for someone to be able to overcome the effects of trauma, and it’s never a 100% “recovery”. Oxford Dictionary lists one of the definitions of trauma as an “emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may be associated with physical shock and sometimes leads to long-term neurosis.” Bullying and abuse can all cause trauma. Do note that not everyone’s the same, and that goes with what we consider to be traumatizing. One person’s experience might not be traumatizing to another if it were to happen to them, but that doesn’t diminish the trauma that those events caused the first person.
So why do I bring this up?
Well, it has to do with the concept of forgiveness.
See, for a trauma victim, “the past never dies” is an understatement. It’s something that has permanently altered them in some way. It’s why the phrase “it was in the past” is harmful. To them, they’re still feeling the effects of “the past” to this day and will keep feeling them for a while. You can’t exactly claim something you did was in the past if it’s still affecting someone in the present.
Tying this back to forgiveness, some people have it in their heads that trauma victims should forgive the source of their pain if a certain amount of time passes and/or they apologize. The thing is, whether they want to forgive someone or not is up to them. They’re the ones whose lives have been impacted by their abuser’s actions, and those actions have put those people through such pain that they can’t live a normal life. A lot of victims are going to be rightfully angry at the ones who’re responsible for their pain. The person may have changed, but that doesn’t erase what they’ve done.
For the record, I think people seeking to better themselves is a great thing and I actively encourage people to support that process. However, I don’t support having a victim be involved with that process itself unless they wish to. What’s done is done, and some people can’t look past their abuser’s misdeeds even if that person pulls a 180. If they want nothing to do with their former abuser and if they keep hating them even after they’ve bettered themselves, they have every right to. Forgiveness is not a right, it’s a privilege, and only the victim can decide if they want to grant that privilege. Now, it’s important for the victim to not let hate cloud their judgment and to pursue therapy to hopefully weaken the effects that their abuser had on them, but that’s a totally different conversation. Still, even after therapy and healing, they’re not obligated to forgive the one who hurt them in the first place.
Another thing: going beyond the victim, if a person betters themselves, no one’s obligated to forgive them or welcome them into their circles. If your friend, a victim, forgives their abuser, you’re not obligated to do so too. Their past actions are a good enough reason for why you might not them around you.
It should also be mentioned that some acts stick with a person for the rest of their lives and defines who they are. A thief can become a former thief, but a murderer will always be a murderer and a rapist will always be a rapist. Nothing that these people can do will ever change that. It doesn’t matter if they become upstanding citizens, the fact that they committed such crimes is permanently part of who they are, and it’s not something that they can ever move past.
You’re probably asking yourself: “so why are you bringing all this up? You’re a blog that shits on a fictional character, not Socrates.” And to that, I say that the reason why I did so was to point out MHA’s shortcomings when it comes to tackling the themes of forgiveness and redemption. A lot of what I’ve said is missing from the arcs of characters such as Katsuki and Endeavor. The criticisms people have about these characters aren’t something that comes out of nowhere.
“The past never dies” and yet we never get Katsuki actually confronting his past. Izuku, the victim, does have moments where he thinks about the past and how it affects him, but they go nowhere. Am I saying Izuku shouldn’t forgive Katsuki? No. I’m just saying that it needs to be written better. Let Izuku actually process that Katsuki was an absolute monster who hurt people for fun, and let Katsuki process that too. Let Katsuki’s goal actually evolve, and let his story go at a normal pace. Watching him made me feel that Hori was simply checking off boxes from a generic “how to write a redemption arc”, so a lot of the moments that are supposed to show Katsuki’s growth end up feeling like they came out of nowhere instead of being the actions of someone growing.
“The past never dies” and Endeavor doesn’t get any pushback from the public. The number 1 hero has been revealed to be a serial domestic abuser and you’re telling me that the only reaction we get from Hori is a poorly made caricature of Endeavor critics saying “he’s so over”? I get them siding with him during the final battle, as he is one of their most powerful assets against the group of mass killers, but there should’ve been more blowback from the public. People literally go “we don’t care” about Endeavor’s sins which is a horrible mistake when writing a character that is meant to undergo a journey of redemption.
I know that this is Shonan, and Shonan isn’t known for its complex themes, but if you introduce those themes, you should be able to do the bare minimum.
Ultimately, MHA fails at recognizing all that go into the themes of forgiveness and redemption. Dabi said it best, “the past never dies”, and that past comes with consequences. However, it seems Hori wants to skip over those consequences and focus on forgiveness/redemption, not realizing that the certainty of the past is what actually fuels such stories.
