Dr. Venture vs. Enji Todoroki: How to Write Bad Dads
This is a post comparing two shows about superheroes who just happen to have an abusive father figure as a central character in their narrative. My Hero Academia is a shonen jump manga that takes inspiration from both American Comic Book heroes but also previous works of the shonen genre. Whereas The Venture Bros is an adult swim cartoon that started out as a parody of the Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Johnny Quest, that grew into a seven season long character study of former child star Rusty Venture and his friends.
The idea for this post came from the fact that I have watched both of these shows and noticed a sort of "trend". A common take I've seen is that Endeavor's redemption arc is badly written because it's wrong to make an abuser the main character.
However, I always use The Venture Bros. as an example of a show where an abuser is the main character that works well. Rusty is actually a well-liked character in the venture bros fandom. So my question is if these characters are both abusers why is one of them generally accepted and the other one so controversial?
Before we begin I want to warn while abuse is a deeply personal matter, this is a story with fictional characters. We are doing literary criticism here which means we're only talking about events that happened in the text of the story itself.
This is an analysis on how these two stories TELL their abuse narrative, characters, themes, etc, and what works in one show tht doesn't work in the others. This is just about storytelling real life does not apply here.
Anyway, My Hero Academia and The Venture Bros seem like the weirdest shows to compare but they are actually pretty similiar. They are both action shows with heroes and villains that fight each other, that take inspiration from comics and also Genre Fiction as a whole.
What My Hero Academia is to Spiderman and Dragonball Z, Venture Bros is to Tom Swift Novels, the Hardy Boys, and old Hann-Barbera Cartoons. However, thy also use the genre they are riffing off of to tell stories with more personal themes revolving around family and abuse.
In a fun twist the basic premise of both shows is that the main characters exist in a society that's overflowing with superheroes, supervillains and are growing up in this weird chaotic comic book world.
1. Meet the Venture Brothers
If you've heard of the Venture Bros then you've probably heard of the premise that it's an adult parody of Johnny Quest. Johnny Quest for those of you who have a life and therefore haven't seen every old Hanna-Barbera Cartoon like I have is a show where eleven year old Johnny Quest travels around the world with his super scientist father Dr. Benton C. Quest and their bodyguard Race Bannon, going on adventures in Jungle Ruins or fighting villains. The Venture Bros is an animated adult comedy meant to poke holes in that premise.
In the Venture Bros the main character Dr. Thaddeus Venture is an emotionally abusive and heavily neglectful father who constantly exposes his sons to danger in his trips around the world. Their bodyguard Brock Samson is a hyper violent man who basically matches a thirteen year old's idea of masculinity is. The titular Venture Bros, Hank and Dean Venture are incredibly sheltered children who are understandably traumatized from the fact that people in costumes are constantly trying to kill them.
So the basic premise of the show lies in it's dark deconstruction of shows like Hardy Boys, Johnny Quest, these Tom Swift-esque stories where young boys go on adventures by showing the real dangers that children would be exposed to in that kind of life.
Between Johnny Quest, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift, what is up with these pie-eyed youths chasing pirates and international diamond thieves and stuff like that? They would get their throats cut the minute that stumbled upon a hideout. And that would be the gag. - ART AND MAKING OF THE VENTURE BROS.
The show does explore the impact the dangers they were exposed to all throughout their childhood has on Hank and Dean, but despite the title of the show they are not the main characters. The protagonist is Doctor Thaddeus Venture who is unfortunately another victim of the Boy Adventuring Lifestyle.
Dr. Venture: "Who was, for 43 years, the only son of Dr. Jonas Venture? Who, from the ages of 3 to 17 accompanied him on hundreds of adventures the chilling memories of which rouse him from sleep in a cold sweat to this day?"
Thaddeus used to travel around the world with his father the super scientist Dr. Jonas Venture who was a far more succesful super scientist and hero. He was the star of the "Rusty Venture Show" a cartoon made of his childhood spent traveling around with his father.
A father who continually neglected and gaslit him throughout his childhood to the point of not allowing him to go to therapy, and acting as his therapist instead to tell him there was nothing wrong with his childhood and he's ungrateful. It's literally a scene in the show that Jonas Venture played therapist for his son to tell him to stop complaining.
Rusty: "So I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could just be a normal kid and go out and play with kids my own age and stuff. THe only people I get to hang out with are grown ups. The only place I get to leave the compound is to go someplace creepy, like the bermuda triangle, and then I get kidnapped, by grown ups. And I'm not even sure I want to be a super scientist when I grow up anyway, but I feel all this pressure because of my fa-It feels weird telling you this stuff."
Jonas: "Remember Rusty, in here I'm your doctor not your father. Now let's get back to it shall we. You were telling me how you're ungrateful for all the opportunities your father's given you and you blame me for all your problems."
Rusty because of his terrible childhood was never able to be as good of a super-scientist his father was and remains a failure late into life. On top of that he's a washed up child star, who basically peaked when he was nine years old and never formed an identity outside of being the star of the Rusty Venture show. He drags his kids all around the world on crazy super science adventures because that's what he knows.
The central premise of the Venture Bros is that Rusty is basically stuck, both in his father's shadow, and in his days of child stardom and cannot meaningfully grow past either of those things despite the fact he is now a single father trying to raise two sons. The central theme is about the complicated nature of family, and how abuse cycles through three generations of this family. As Rusty is both the victim and the perpetrator of the abuse it makes sense he is the main character the story centers around because he's at the center of that cycle too.
It is a study of one family in particular to show the complexity of family. The themes can be summarized in one line said towards the end of the show:
"Just a watch. VMT Venture. Tells the time in two time zones. That fourth hand there? Little date window? Those are called complications. Complications make a watch special. More complications the more value. Read the engraving Jonas put on the back there. Elige Tua. It's Latin for Choose your family. Blood doesn't make a family, love does. Choose your family and remember that complications make it special."
In other words it's a seven season long show on how family is complciated, but it uses it's genre of super heroes and super villains and adventuring to tell that deeply personal story.
2. Keeping up with the Todorokis
My Hero Academia is about a lot of things, but the central premise is that in a society where power and strength of the quirk you were born with can determine a lot about your life, one boy without a quirk sets out to prove that anyone can be a hero. If Complciations make it special is the central theme of Venture Bros, then the central theme of My Hero Academia is two sentences. "All People are not created equal" and "Anyone can become someone's hero" both said at different points in the story. The story itself is about Deku's attempts to overcome the first statement, that he was not born equal but he deserves to be a hero as much as anyone else because he reflects what heros should be, a good, selfless person who will risk anything to save others.
The story isn't just about Deku though. The world and it's characters turns out to be much larger than that simple premise. We're not even going to talk about Deku in this post, but rather the Tritagonist Todoroki Shoto. Introduced in the first tournament arc of the series Todrooki is a foil to Deku someone who is born with an extremely powerful quirk, but who's been groomed from childhood to be a hero.
Shoto's father Enji Todoroki is All Might's ultimate rival, he was unable to surpass him in life always second place. In the world of MHA not only are there tons and tons of heroes, but they're highly commercialized and ranked by popularity and achievements and Enji has been number two his entire life. Unable to overcome his rival he decided to force his dream of number one hero on his son. He purchased a wife with an ice quirk for an arranged marriage with the purpose of having a child with a hybrid fire and ice quirk that would be more powerful than Enji himself. He had four children, and ignored the other three to train Shoto up as a hero, ignoring what Shoto wanted, training him until he puked, and then beating his wife when she tried to intervene and protect Shoto. Which culminated in the mental breakdown of his wife who threw boiling hot water on Shoto in a moment of weakness and was institutionalized for years after the fact.
That's a lot and I didn't even cover all of it. After this reveal of Shoto's backstory, Enji seems like he's only going to be a one note abuser to give Shoto a tragic backstory to angst over. However, later on in the show Enji is given what he wants and finally becomes the number one hero only to realize how empty his lifelong dream has been. He feels remorseful for the family he destroyed in pursuit of that dream and goes back trying to make ammends. After this point, Enji basically becomes the second most important character of the "Todoroki Family" story, a story about both the family's attempts to move on from the abuse and Enji to atone for his abuse of his wife and children. A lot of focus is put on Enji's remorse and atonement to the point where some accuse him of stealing the spotlight from his victims.
While the Todorokis are a sideplot in MHA, whereas the Ventures are the main focus of Venture Bros these two plots have a lot in common. They are basically families who are not allowed to have normal lives because the patriarch of the family is a costumed hero. The hero is also someone who is generally well-respected and is considered extremely succesful in their chosen career, but are terrible to their family members. They are a hero to the world and a villain to their own family. Both are analyzing this one specific case where a man has chosen to be a hero over being a father over and over and over again and the damage it's done to the people around them.
If there is a central premise to the Todoroki Family outside of MHA's analysis of what exactly makes a hero, it's this:
Todoroki Shoto: "As a hero this endeavor guy is pretty darn amazing. But it's just like Nasu said. I'm not ready to forgive you... for abusing mom. So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?"
The challenge is if Endeavor can choose his family over being a hero, and if Shoto can find a way to reconcile with his family as a whole and find some sort of normalcy with them. They are the two main characters of this plotline, Shoto wants to reconcile with this past and grow into his own person outside of his family whereas Enji wants to atone for the damage done to his family.
It is a pretty solid premise for a story and as I've said above I actually have no problem with an Endeavor like abuser being one of the main characters of this plotline.
You can even see some parallels in Venture Bros, as Rusty's main struggle is to try to be a father to his twin sons and help them grow up while at the same time struggling in this dangerous worlds of heroes and villains and super science. Rusty is a super scientist constantly getting chased around by guys in costumes, but he's also a normal father trying to raise two sons into adulhood with basically no idea what he's doing because his father didn't allow him to have a normal childhood either.
With both of these there's this comic booky setting where the dad going out and fighting costumed villains, but he's also expected to be a dad and raise a family which mixes the fantasy comic book stuff, with the more realistic themes of familial abuse.
However, as I said above in Rusty's case it's pretty uncontroversial that he is the main character of his story, whereas Enji starts fights within the fandom very time he appears onscreen.
Why is this exactly?
It's not because it's offensive to have an abuser be the main character, but rather how these characters are written in both of these stories, and how well they fit into those stories. As I said Rusty is naturally the main character of his story because he's the central link in the chain of abuse, but should Enji be the main character of the Todorokis? Does he fit as well as Rusty?
3. Who's your Daddy?
So as stated above Enji and Rusty simultaneously exist in worlds where there are heroes and villains in costumes running around and yet they are also normal people who are expected to have jobs, provie for their families and raise their kids. They both exist in what is basically the marvel universe, though in the case of Venture Bros it's the Marvel Universe fused with old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Because it's such a highly fantastical world some of the things both Enji and Rusty do are things that have no real life parallels. For example Rusty once created a machine using the soul of a dead orphan as a power supply. You can't do that in real life so I'm not going to use that as an example in talking about his parenting.
They're both high fantasy stories that depict things that would never happen in real life like costumed battles between heroes and villains but at the same time, they are drawing on real life parallels of parental abuse I'm going to be talking about those to tell what kind of neglectful parent each is.
Rusty raised Hank and Dean Venture as a single parent with the assistance of their body guard Brock Samson. They live on the Venture Compound and only leave when Rusty needs to take a trip around the world. Obviously, there's not many real life examples of parents taking their kids into egypt to fight mummies.
However, Rusty's main flaw as a parent is how much he shelters his children not allowing them to live their own lives or make their own choices. They are homeschooled until they are eighteen and almost never allowed to leave their home unsupervised. They are raised in special "learning beds" instead which educate them in their sleep which doesn't really have a real life parallel but he could be compared to a helicopter parent that feels the need to micromanage every aspect of their child's lives, sheltering them so much they're unprepared for the real world.
Rusty is a weird combination of controlling and neglectful, because while he doesn't let either of his children live normal lives or go to public school and they barely get to interact with kids their own age, he constantly exposes them to danger. He is often disinterested in his kid's lives and puts most of the burden of protecting them and raising them on his bodyguard Brock, while he chases after whatever super-science project is occupying him at the moment. Despite the fact he controls every aspect of their lives he doesn't seem to want to put the actual time and attention into raising his kids that they require. He's neglectful to dangerous extents too considering there are actual villains constantly targeting him and his family
Also, he lets them die a lot.
Hank and Dean have died several times over, only to be replaced by clones that Rusty grew in a lab with all the same memories. Once again there's no real life parallel to this, but it's interesting in the context of the show itself. Rusty isn't just putting his sons into situations that could get them killed by taking them on his journeys with them, he has gotten them killed several times over. Then he just clones them and keeps going. That in itself should make Rusty irredeemable but the show presents it in a more ambiguous light.
Dean: "You're telling me I'm a clone, that I'm not even Dean, that I'm some stupid science experiment."
Ben: "No, no, no. You're Dean. There's no other Dean, you're it, flesh and blood. Look I was conceived in the back seat of a packard, you were conceived in a tank. So what?"
Dean: "So I have no mommy? No nothing!?"
Ben: "Dean, you have it all wrong. You have a mommy, and your dad is your dad. They made you by getting drunk and forgetting to wear a condem like everybody else, and your dad loved you so much that when you got a boo-boo, he kissed it and made it all better and made it go away."
Dean: "You brought me back to life."
Ben: "Yeah okay, well you and your brother had some pretty big boo boos. Have a kid one day, Dean. Hold it's lifeless body in your arms, and then tell me how wrong it is. Jonas, me, and yes your dad, saw it as nothing more than a fucking band-aid for a really big boo boo."
In the story itself it brings up the argument that if any parent was holding their dying child in their arms and they had a chance to see that kid with all the same memories and the exact same body that they'd be tempted to take it. That in the logic of the show this is practically the same thing as using magic to revive someone from the dead, just with super science instead. At the same time it's still terrible because Rusty let his sons die on multiple occasions and then just kept replacing them with clones because he had that safety net he didn't change his neglectful behavior.
Super-science aside, it is kind of a metaphor for Rusty as a parent as a whole for the first three seasons of the show, he's very controlling of them even to the point of playing god to bring them back from the dead when they die nd won't let them grow up into their own people. Hank and Dean have been cloned so many times that despite being nineteen years old they still believe they're sixteen. At the same time he's not interested in bonding or raising his children and so he just keeps on neglecting them to the point where they're continually exposed to danger.
It's also probably relevant to mention that Rusty himself is a clone and died and was replaced multiple times much like his sons, and the technology for cloning Hank and Dean was invented by his father Jonas.
However, after season 3 the cloning lab gets destroyed, and the body guard Brock leaves the family. There are no more extra Deans and Hanks running around so if one of them dies this time it's permanent. With the safety net removed Rusty actually starts taking a more active role in both of his child's lives. This is basically a mirror to Endeavor's moment of realization after getting number one hero that his entire family has grown up without him and they all resent him.
Season four onwards Hank and Dean develop into their own people outside of Rusty. He responds to them in different ways but he's actually parenting them this time instead of shoving them away like annoyances. Hank becomes rebellious and fights back against Rusty for a long time after Brock leaves because he no longer has a role model and Rusty's response is to always get strict and punish him hard for the strongest disobedience.
Whereas when Dean rebels not only does Rusty tolerate it, he also spends a lot more time in Dean's life trying to push him into the direction of being a super-scientist like him, supporting his efforts to go to college, while basically ignoring Hank. It's a running gag in the show that Dean is obviously Rusty's favorite, but even when playing favorites Rusty by this point in the show has reasons for why he's making those parenting choices.
Rusty: "Dean believes in this crap! He should have been Rusty Venture, Boy adventurer. Hank got this life thrown at him. And he fights against it. Just like I did."
Rusty playing favorites comes from an attempt to overcorrect for both children. He rejects Hank because he believes Hank doesn't want to be a boy adventure and therefore is trying to push him away from a lifestyle he doesn't want for his own sake. Whereas, he believes that Dean embraces the super scientist lifestyle and he tries to mentor Dean into another scientist like hismelf therefore he gives Dean most of his attention because he thinks Dean needs that guidance from him.
Of course, Rusty is totally wrong about his sons. If anything Hank is the one who wants to be an adventurer whereas nervous and anxious Dean just wants a normal life and to be his own person outside of his father and is family but the way Rusty misunderstands his sons is pretty understandable. Parents don't always understand their children. He's not actively malicious, he's just misguided in what he thinks is best for each of his sons. He's not really even playing favorites in this case he's choosing to parent his sons differently based on what's best for each of them, it's just in this case father doesn't know best.
Rusty isn't a stagnant character, but also there's no big redemption arc for him the way there is Endeavor. Rusty has no point where he faces the screen and narrates about how he has to atone for the sins of his family. He just sort of stumbles along as the same dysfunctional mess, but over the course of seven seasons he gets bonding moment with his sons and we see him acting more and more like a parent, like Rusty himself grows up from eternally clinging to his childhood stardom while letting his sons grow up into adulthood. The fact that Rusty doesn't really have a "redemption arc" also means that the narrative isn't really trying to spin his actions anyway. It's just showing you Rusty as he is, and with all the bad things he does he's still capable of loving his sons.
The question isn't really "Is Rusty redeemable?" but "When is Rusty gonna grow up?"
Then there's Endeavor (everyone starts booing) who is simultaneously a much better, and far worse person than Rusty.
Enji is honestly more comparable to Jonas, an incredibly succesful hero who built a career and an empire in heroics and fame and then tried to force his son into that same lifestyle. A person who is beloved by the public and has skeletons in their closet in regards to their own family. He's the exploration of that same idea a supposedly great man with skeletons in his closet. Enji technically has saved thousands of people (such as Hawks one of the other main heroes) with his actions as a hero, but then he went home to beat his wife.
Enji is at least a better hero than Rusty, because Rusty is an incompetent mad scientist who does stuff like accidentally mutate college interns and build death rays.
However, as a parent strip away his status as a hero and Enji is little more than a show parent, pushing his children into a life they don't want in an attempt to live vicariously through them. Once again, resembling Jonas more than he really does Rusty.
As stated above Enji gave up on his ambition to be the number one hero and so he decided to create a son with the right quirk to surpass All Might. He then pressured a woman into an arranged marriage, basically purchasing her from her parents and conceived four children with her only the last of which he actually raised. He also forced the last one to basically train nonstop since childhood and controlled every aspect of his life forcing him to follow in his footsteps while neglecting the other three.
Chapters 301-302 the wrong way to put out a fire, detail the slow descent of the Todoroki Household from Enji entering an arranged marriage with bad intention to create an ideal child to be heir to his legacy, into a full on child abuser. Enji is written like a normal person falling into a cycle of abuse, he never intended to hurt his children at first. In fact he's shown positively bonding with his first born son who seems eager to learn to use his fire based quirk. He even mentions multiple times that he was alright at the time with the idea of Toya being the one to succeed him and he even gave up on the idea of breeding a genetically perfect child.
Enji only had kids to carry on his legacy, and only bonded with Toya because Toya was eager to participate in the training and become his heir. However, to give Enji some backstory it's quite clear the death of Enji's own father at a young age left him with no idea on how a father should act.
At a young age Enji witnessed his father attempt to save an innocent girl only to end up a burnt up corpse, and probably at that point conflated strength with being a good father. If his father had been strong enough he would have survived and continued to be a father to young Enji. At that point it's almost understandable that Enji thinks in his mind that earning his keep as the patriarch of the family, and being a powerful hero who will come home alive is the same thing as being a good father because his own absent father failed him simply because he wasn't strong enough to defeat a villain.
So Enji conflates toxically masculine ideals of strength and heroism with being a good father, all the while not actually showing up to parent his kids. Strength = Good. Weakness = Bad. When Toya seemed like he could live up to Enji's expectations and be strong as a successor everything seemed fine.
However, Toya turned out to be disabled at which point everything in the household began to decline. After learning Toya could not use his quirk without burning himself, Enji tossed Toya aside and left raising him entirely up to Rei and then pressured her to have more children until one with his ideal quirk would be born.
Toya did not like his father ignoring him and began acting out for his attention. The response of everyone in the household was to politely tell Toya to shut up, because Enji wielded all the money and authority in the household and no one could stand up to him. When Toya's acting up gottoo out of hand, Enji would even hit Rei instead of just personally dealing with his son.
At the same time Shoto was finally born and being given his perfect heir after four attempts, Enji eagerly began training him. When Shoto did not want to be trained the same way that Toya did, Enji stepped up to threats of physical violence and long grueling training sessions to force him to learn. All the while Toya continued to mentally spiral.
One day after his flames turned blue Toya asked his father to meet with him on Sekoto Peak. However that day Enji didn't show up, and Toya lost control of his flames starting a massive forest fire that killed him. Enji's neglect of his own son literally got him killed and afterwards rather than changing anything about the way he parented his kids, he just pushed Shoto even harder.
So on paper Rusty looks like a far worse parent, because he got his kids killed multiple times and replaced them with clones. Enji only let one son die. That sure was a ridiculous pair of sentences to type.
As a parent though Rusty is far less malicious. He neglects his kids similiarly to Enji at first, but when the safety net is removed and he can't keep cloning them anymore he actually does start taking a personal interest in their lives. Maybe it's too little too late because it's the 14th version of Hank and Dean but he does hear the wake up call and change his ways as a parent.
Enji always doubles down on ignoring his sons in favor of heroics when given the chance to be a father.
Even post redemptoin arc Enji behaves in the same way. There is no point in the story so far where Enji actively chooses to help or be a parent to one of his sons, when he can choose to be a part of a big important battle instead. Let me break out the list:
In the Pro Hero Arc Shoto sets the challenge for Enji to show what he can be like as a father rather than a hero.
In the internship arc Enji trains Shoto up as a hero but not a father. When he brings the family home to dinner they're attacked by a villain and Enji stands and watches as his son Natsuo gets kidnapped y a villain because he felt like it would be too awkward if he saved Natsuo because then Natsuo might feel inclined to forgive him.
In the War Arc aftewards Toya is revealed to be alive the entire time, and when given the chance to see his dead son come back to life, Enji not only does nothing but he sits and watches as his oldest son tries to kill his youngest without trying to talk to or appeal to Toya.
After the war arc, Enji doesn't bother looking for Toya and goes back to his job as a hero hunting down AFO. He also makes a promise to Shoto that they'll search for Toya together, only to break that promise multiple times.
In the second war arc, when Enji is given a chance to face Toya face to face, he instead sends his other son Shoto to fight him, while Enji fights against the big bad instead as the number one hero.
When Toya is literally dying and about to burn himself alive in front of him, Enji who has chosen to run away from Toya too many times by this point picks the murder suicide option and chooses to try dying with his son in a heroic sacrifice.
Every single chance he is given to act like a father, he acts like a hero instead. Enji Todoroki never steps out of the role of the hero Endeavor. While we are given several moments of his redemption, his remorse for his actions, his internal struggle with how he can possibly atone, and even moments where he realizes the error of his ways and apologizes for them we never see him actually act like a parent.
Which is I think a fundamental difference in Rusty and Enji in how they're written. Rusty is a heavily flawd parent, but he's still a parent.
He does favor Dean over Hank, but that favoritism takes the form of him giving Hank more chores when Hank acts out, but when it's time for Dean to rebel giving him space and letting him have his own separate room in the attic. It's Rusty letting Dean have access to the family checkbook so he'll have spending money at college, but cutting Hank off from the checkbook because they agreed if Hank didn't want to go to college he needed to find a job to support himself.
Rusty is parenting these children. He's parenting them very badly, but he's still their parent. Enji wanted to be a parent to begin with he wanted a kid he could coach into becoming a hero stronger than All Might. Then twenty years later he realized he has three children he's never even raised and the one he did raise resents him.
I'm not saying that Enji is irredeemable, just that Rusty is a heavily flawed parent but Enji hasn't been a parent in these kid's lives whatsoever. He's more like their abusive gymnastics coach trying to push them towards the olympics.
If you ignore the fantastic circumstances, the heroes, the villains, the clones, the mad scientists, then you're left with how they treat their kids. Rusty has absolutely no idea what he's doing because of his own childhood raised by a man far worse than him, so even when he has good intentions he screws up. Enji doesn't have good intentions for his kid, he had those kids to surpass All Might. He controls everything in his household. He isolates Shoto from his siblings all so he'll have complete control over his heir. Rusty has no idea what he's doing, Enji knows exactly what he's doing, he's intentionally doing all of these things to raise an obedient heir. As opposed to Rusty who exposes his kids to the dangerous boy adventuring lifestyle because that's exactly how he grew up and he doesn't know any better.
Enji for most of his life didn't want kids, he wanted heirs. He even purchased a woman so his heirs would turn out with the right genetics, and tossed aside the ones that were disabled or born with the wrong quirk.
Rusty made the decision to become a parent on his own. In the last twist in the series it's revealed Dean and Hank had no mother. They were conceived in a test tube, raised in an artificial womb by Rusty himself. He is both their father and their mother. Kids were a deliberate decision on his part. He wanted to have a family, probably because his own childhood was so deprived of any familial love.
Dean: Okay, so who is our mom?
Rusty: Seriously, Dean haven't we had enough family history for one day? I don't even know who my mom is. All you need to know is that the person who gave birth to you. I promise they do.
Remember as stated above the central thesis statement of Venture Bros is "Elige Tua - Choose your family". Rusty chose to bring those kids into the world because he wanted to be a father, it's an active choice his character makes.
Whereas the central statement of Endeavor's arc is "So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?" but we never witness Enji doing anything outside of being a hero. Enji chose to have a family so he could have a son that was a better hero than he was. Then, later on when he's come to realize how he's neglected his family for twenty years he's challenged to choose his family. Toya as a character presents this challenge to him, because he's Enji's son, but he's also a villain who's killed innocent people. If he's acting as a hero he has to put a stop to Toya, but as a father his dead son has returned to him.
We never see Enji make that choice to be Toya's father over a hero. Which is why in story he comes off as a worse father than someone like Rusty, because he never actually acts like a parent or makes an attempt to emotionally bond with his children. Rusty will sit Hank and Dean down and tell them stories from his childhood. He'll find common ground with his sons to bond over because they've both been subjected to the boy adventurer lifestyle.
Rusty: Dean what are you doing?
Dean: Hyperventilating into my knees. That smell a little like spit up... because I spit up a little.
Rusty: Dean, you just baby burped onto a speed suit. Not a super scientist alive that hasn't coughed a little acid onto his speed suit.
Dean: Really?
Rusty: Why do you think these things are like 95 percent polyester? You can clean off fear-vomit with a wet nap.
Dean: I thought you were used to this.
Rusty: Dean I remember when the action man would wake me up with a gun pointed at my head. He'd just hold it there and pull the trigger. I'd hear the click really loud because it was right against my forehead.
Dean: So it echoed.
Rusty: Right, it sounded like he snapped one of my teeth out. Click! Then he'd go, "Not day Rusty. Not Today."
Dean: Golly, and you took it because you had to?
Rusty: No Dean, I took it because I was Rusty Venture. Boy adventurer. I didn't ask for this life, Dean, but it's mine. Sure, I fall down in the Speed Suit but I get up and Wet-Nap my puke off.
We never get any moments like this with Endeavor and his kids.
He only goes so far as apologizing for his past abuse, he never choses to be a father instead of being a hero. Some people might argue about whether Enji's apology is "enough" or "sincere" or whatever, but that's kind of missing the point.
Whether Enji is "redeemed" for his past actions or not is kind of an irrelevant, because the question was "What sort of dad are you going to be?"
The narrative challenged him to learn to act like a father to his family, and he never did. He stayed in the role of hero from beginning to end, so we can only ask if he's redeemed as a hero now. You could make an argument he is in that sense, because he's less selfish, he's remorseful, and he's now fighting for better reasons to protect others instead of just to be the strongest.
They're both awful people but at the end of the day Rusty is a father, and Enji is not.
Stories are kind of like essays your english teacher used to force you to read. You need to make a thesis statement in the story itself, and then have evidence to support that thesis statement. The theme of Venture Bros is choose your family, and family is complicated, and in support of that theme we have Rusty's decision to bring kids into the world and then bonding with both sons over how complciated being a "venture" is.
The actions Enji takes in his story don't line up with his thesis statement. The Todoroki Family subplot is supposed to be about how one family was messed up because Enji only chose to have a family to further his career as a hero, and choosing his career again and again made things worse. The thesis statement was that Enji needed to choose to be a dad, but then he never actually does that in the story proper.
So Enji as a character seems like he doesn't fit in with his narrative. Which is what I said at the very beginning about Rusty and why he works as a main character. Rusty is the center, because he's had this horrible life inflicted on him by his father, and he's in the process of raising his sons but he still has a chance to choose to be better.
Enji could also work as the center of his story, he has a chance to choose his family over his work as a hero, but he's ultimately not the one who does that, it's Shoto. Which yes Shoto is the "main" main character of the Todoroki plotline, but by the end Enji's gotten as much screentime as his son. If the plot was going to focus on Shoto and his choices to begin with then he should have been the central point. You spent a lot of in story time asking this question with Enji on whether or not he's going to be able to choose to be a father over a hero, only to not answer it in a satisfying way.
This again has nothing to do with Enji the person and whether I think he's likable or not, because Enji's a fictional character. He's an idea. If writing is communication, then a writer is trying to communciate some idea with every character in their novel. We're asking what is the author trying to say with Enji, and do they do a good job of getting that message across?
4. What's the Big Idea?
So the above section was mainly about the personal arcs of each characters: How do both of them fail at fatherhood and do they learn to be better fathers over the course of their narratives?
However, these characters are part of a much bigger world. How a character interacts with both the world around them, and the extended cast of characters is another way a story relates it's theme.
Venture Bros and My Hero Academia both exist in comic book worlds. There are people running around in costumes calling themselves heroes and villains and fighting each other on the streets.
In My Hero Academia heroes are basically professional athletes who sell sports drinks and pose for ads and compete for rankings on a big board, and heroics for the most part has been reduced to a day job for people with particularly powerful quirks. Heroism is an entire industry that's for profit, and run by the shadowy hero council who has far more power over their society than they let onto. You could compare Endeavor being the top hero to him being an incredibly succesful and wealthy salaryman in real life japanese society. Though he'd probably be like a CEO or something.
Ironically, the worldbuilding of Venture Bros is pretty similiar. In Venture Bros. the villains are all unionized. There is a super villain trade union. It's a secret organization known as the guild of calamitous intent, which makes villainy into a bureaucracy.
All villains in the world have to register with the guild. If you're a part of the guild you receive the protection that the guild offers, as long as you follow the guilds rules and regulations. There's lots of small rules, like you can't torture someone who's having a medical issue, and if you're fighting a good guy and they have a doctor's appointment you have to let them go.
They even rank heroes and villains by their threat levels called "EMA LEVELS (equally matched aggression) and then assign you a hero who's about your equal so you won't get killed by someone way stronger than you. The guild basically decides who you're allowed to fight as a villain and picks a hero for you. The act of being someone's arch villain is called "arching" you show up to harass them once a week like a saturday morning cartoon villain, fight them, then do it again next week. You're not allowed to kill your hero and you're supposed to follow specific rules. The tradeoff is the heroes won't kill you either, because you have guild protection.
The Monarch: I don't know, just keep it cat and mouse not cat and missile.
JJ:: So it's a game? We fake fight? That's ridiculous.
The Monarch: No, it's like fencing, it's about the art of the fight.
JJ: Well, I'm about to deliver my killing stroke. Then what?
Dr. Girlfriend: Then the guild steps up their game. You throw a rock, they throw a knife. You throw a knife, they come to your house when you're sleeping and murder your family.
The Monarch: Look Dr. Venture you call the guild and you get the damn rulebook, I'll be waiting.
The justification for why the guild exists is that in world if you didn't give the villains a system with a bunch of rules, then you'd have a bunch of crazy people in costumes running around causing havoc.
Brock: You wanna what? Shoot him? And all his men and his wife? You could steal his cattle, too. Maybe burn his village down?
JJ: It's an antiquated system. I mean my father did this fake arch enemy nonsense in the sxities. Maybe my brother is good with this namby pamby guy in a costume chases you around nonsense, but I'm not.
Brock: Hey no disrespect Jonas, but it isn't so easy. These guys like their system. It's what they do. You take that away and you're looking at a bunch of pissed off nut bags with ray guns, and giant -- i don't know, a giant octopus / tank with laser eyes.
The villains and the OSI (who are like the GI JOE) of this world have signed a very long and detailed treaty that keeps both sides in a cold world stalemate and lets them fight every week like how the good guys and bad guys fight in saturday morning cartoons while keeping a status quo.
In MHA heroics is a commodity. It's commercialized and sold to the public. Heroes are like professional athletes selling you sports drinks, it's a spectacle to the public, and it's even intentionally made to be that way by the Hero Commission who use heroes as a bright shining light to distract the public while they do shady things like assassinate anti-government protestors from behind the scenes. The entire of hero society in MHA is built on the spectacle of heroes.
In Venture Bros heroes and villains are a spectacle too. It's just a job to them. Heroes and villains both show up to work, get in their costumes, fight each other and then go home. In Season 6 of Venture Bros, a parody of the Avengers is actively charging people to provide their services as heroes in the city of New York and you have to sign up for a protection plan if you want to get saved. Then the local mob boss takes a cut of the protection money they're charging.
In both settings the ideas of heroes exist, comic books exist, but the heroes themselves are incredibly mundane, they're just people showing up to jobs and making money for the most part. The only difference really is that in MHA the villains are societal rejects and trauma victims, whereas in Venture Bros they've unionized. In Venture Bros the villains and heroes basically fake fight under strict rules. Even in MHA though the villains need to exist in order to give the heroes someone to fight in front of the public. "Villain" is an actual legal term for a certain kind of quirk crimminal with more than three stirkes who gets sent to a super max prison if they're caught.
Both of these works are making comic book heroes and villains seem a lot more mundane by deconstructing them with this layer of realism. By making the roles of "hero" and "villain" seem much more mundane, and therefore more human, it also asks us to look at the characters who call themselves heroes and villains as human beings.
The Venture Bros like many richer takes on superhero stories really likes to play with the concept of identity. It's the idea that Good and Evil, Heroes and Villains, are just roles we play. They're not something fundamental or innate they're constructed by the world around us. In the show the main villainous organization the GCI is really just a bureaucracy of larpers sustaining their violent rolelplaying through organized crime. Rich and powerful lunatics who built the world around a game they wanted to play. There's really nothing of substance keeping Rusty on the "Good Guy" side. The good guys are also a mix and match. Shield, GI JOE, FBI. Another exmaple of people who never grew up. Only these people are running things, playing out their childhood power fantasies. They're barely less insane and blood thirsty than the bad guys. So what's even the point of being a good guy in the first place? That's the world Rusty is caught between...[x]
MHA and Venture Bros are both works that feature societies that divide people into two distinct categories "hero" and "villain" and then go on to show that these two categories are not as black and white as they would like us to believe.
Venture Bros features Brock Samson, a character who is ostensibly on the side of the good guys who is also the most trigger happy character in the show, who probably has the highest body count of nameless henchman who we see him gleefully kill onscreen over and over again. There are members of the OSI who are just as trigger happy as the guild so what's the difference between them besides what they've decided to personally identify as? On one side you have the larpers who are roleplaying villainy, and on the other you have people who think that they're in GI JOE.
In My Hero Academia you have the slightly less funny version of heroes who are essentially state sponsored peace keepers who suppress anyone who disrupts the status quo with violence, and villains who are rejected from that status quo who eventually turn into violent terrorists. While yes heroes have the responsibility of protecting innocent civilians, most of what heroes do is fight villains, in fact heroes with quirks suited to rescuing people aren't nearly than ones with flashy violent quirks like Endeavor. You have two sides and one calls themselves villains and the others heroes, but they both use extreme violence as a way to accomplish their goals.
Rusty and Enji are two characters who are caught between these two categories which seem distinct and seperate but really blur together and become the same.
Enji is basically the first deconstruction of heroes in MHA. He's a hero who's not interested in saving people, or giving the public ease, but instead wants to be the strongest and does everything out of a selfish pursuit for that goal. He's simultaneously the hero with the single most resolved cases in history, who's constantly praised as being extremely good and efficient at his job, but at the same time he's always number two to All Might because he's not "super" enough of a super hero. In a manga where Deku's natural desire to save others make him a candidate to bea hero even without a quirk, we have a character who's a hero for purely selfish reasons. One that only cares about having the strongest quirk because being the best is all that matters to Enji.
In many ways the way Enji treats his family is more like a villain than a hero. AFO himself comments at one point he wasn't able to manipulate Toya, because his father did too good of a job manipulating him already. In fact you can draw a parallel between his actions of manipulating and grooming Shoto to be his heir, to the main villain of the series AFO treating Shigaraki Tomura the same way.
However, this is a good thing. By making Enji a hard to swallow character who's simultaneously done heroic things, and yet done awful things we can't easily label him as hero or villain and it makes us think about who he is as a person instead.
There's an entire episode dedicated to a villain Mentor named Dr. Henry Killinger, showing up and basically mentoring Rusty Venture when he's at a low point. He gives Rusty money, workers, gets his business up and running again and at the very end reveals that he's setting Rusty up to be a villain to arch his brother as a hero. Rusty is tempted with the idea that he'd make a much more succesful villain than he ever would be a hero (because as a hero he's kind of just a loser who can never measure up to his dad or brother) but he still chooses to be a hero at the end of the story because he doesn't want to fight his brother. At which point his mentor, all his hired men, all just walk off and he loses all the money he would have gained and he goes back to being a mediocre super-scientist.
"Doc has the whole thing laid out for him clear as day. This role is here for you. Waiting for you to claim it. You have your nemesis. You have your means. You have the ability and the pain. You can do this and you'd be good at it. And Rusty can look at all of that, everything he's been through and say, "Yeah... but I don't wanna be evil." [x]
Rusty walks away from the chance to be a villain, but he's not exactly a hero either. He runs illegal cloning farms, he brings people back from the dead and sells them to the us military, he builds disintegration rays, he does lots of unethical scientific stuff and he's not even remotely the hero his father was considered to be. He also usually doesn't go out of his way to save people unless you cajole him into it.
Because he doesn't fit well into the category of hero or villain, the show instead asks you to evaluate who Rusty is as a person. He's one of the few characters in the show that's capable of stepping out of those categories.
"That's the great thing about him. Sometimes being disillusioned just means you can see through the whole thing. Sure the whole super science villain game feels stupid. It's not going anywhere. No one's accomplishing anything. It's all violence and roleplay. But at the end of the day it's still real. And it still means something to us. Choosing to be a villain means choosing to be a bad guy. It means relinquishing the premise that you could ever do better, ever actually help anyone. And that's not who Rusty is. He's a scum-bag, but he's a grown up. Even in a show with brilliant characters, old pros, and actual supermen, Rusty is the adult. And adults don't put on rubber masks and terrorize people for fun because that would be fucking silly." - [x]
Rusty spent his entire childhood being terrorized by guys in costumes, he's so used to the hero and villain shenanigans that it's placed him in the role of cynical straight man. He's the one normal person among the crazy people who like to dress up in costumes and fight each other. What makes him the sane man is because he doesn't fit into either role of hero or villain.
Rusty is just too incompetent to ever be like his father. Jonas Venture is a scumbag like Rusty, but he's also a well-respected scientist and a world wide hero. Everyone in the scientific community thinks that Rusty is a joke, and his friends just barely put up with him. The world remembers him as a child star, he basically peaked when he was nine years old and it's downhill from there.
Jonas gets away with it because he perfectly fit what society's idea of a hyper masculine strong hero was, and no one questioned it or how he treated his son, whereas because balding, impotent, pathetic Rusty falls so short of toxic masculinity's standards he doesn't get the same respect or leeway that Jonas did. Jonas Venture continually got away with murder, and Rusty can't get away with anything. He's a pill-popping, middle aged man who ran his father's business empire into the ground who continually gets laughed out of any scientific conference he tries to attend.
He can't be a hero. He can't be his father. He can't reach the impossible idea of toxic masculinity his father represented. The only way in which he's better than his father is that he's a much better father to both of his sons. His greatest triumphs as a character come from him just being a better person than his father, and a better father in his son's lives something his father for all of his great accomplishments wasn't capable of because he didn't really care about anyone but himself. Jonas Venture is someone who perfectly fit society's standards of masculinity, but he wasn't a person outside of that.
"Jonas Sr realized this too, but to him, it was a joke. To him it meant being above everyone. Rusty can't be above everyone so he has to meet them at eye level. Part of the bitterness of growing up is realizing that we're all just chidlren who got old. No one knows what they're doing and when you come to terms with that you can look down on people or give them the respect everyone deserves. How you treat children says a lot about how you treat people which in turn says a lot about you." [x]
Now returning to Endeavor we run into the same problem that we did earlier. This whole post is comparing Rusty and Endeavor because they are the protagonists, but Endeavor is far more like Jonas. He's someone who sees through the hero system and only cares about climbing to the top out of his own self interest.
Enji even sort of looks like Jonas.
They're both extremely bulky men who are at their peak levels of physical fitness, they're what you think of when you think strong, masculine man. Meanwhile Rusty is a balding, unattractive and out of shape middle aged man.
In story onas is still widley beloved by the public and is constantly praised, while no one but Rusty is aware of his faults, but there'a a reason for that. Jonas is someone who is basically allowed to do anything he wants, because he fits perfectly into the box of what society considers masculinity to be. Jonas is also someone who literally uses his position as a hero to manipulate people into getting what he wants and glorify himself.
Jonas can casually destroy people's lives, all while still believing he's the good guy because in his world being good guy is just a role to play and he plays it well. One of the best three episodes of the series is the Morphic Trilogy, the opening to season 7 where some of Jonas's past crimes are revealed.
In the past he tricked a married man into making a sex tape with him, and then when that man Don Carraldo aka the Blue Morpho turned out to regret that, he used the tape to constantly blackmail him into doing his dirty work. Killing people in secret while Jonas Venture remained Squeaky clean. After years of being forced to act as a mercenary for Jonas, the Blue Morpho died in a plane crash. Jonas then revived his best friend as a cyborg. He got bored of his new cyborg within a few months and reassigned him to babysit his son Rusty. THe cyborg glitched and started to strangle Rusty and then he snaps his friends neck, and throws the cyborg away in the garbage.
Jonas can use his power and influence to just completely destroy a man's life because he has the power to do so. Because everyone around him enables him and no one is going to stop him. Because this is how people in power act when they're given too much power. Because might does not make right.
He's the gold standard. He's the ideal. Who would question him?
Enji occupies a similiar position in the story, where he fits the role of a hero so well that even when his family abuse is revealed to the public basically every character and their mom is tripping over themselves to defend him.
Jonas is constantly praised in story years after his death and every bad thing he's done is swept under the rug, but that's because number one Jonas was a manipulative monster, and number two it shows the ideals that Jonas is supposed to represent, the ideal of masculinity, is actually false and toxic. When people bend over backwards to defend Endeavor what does it say exactly? Because we're supposed to believe that Enji's a genuinely remorseful person on his way to redemption who knows he's done wrong things in the past and is willing to work for redemption even if people don't forgive him. We're not supposed to think Enji is a manipulative monster intentionally bending people around his finger like Jonas was.
There are some ways Enji is like Jonas, especially in his backstory. He did use his money and influence to buy a woman. Rei was definitely not going to get the option of divorcing him if she actually wanted to leave, something that's hard enough to obtain in japanese society without a rich husband who has the purse strings.
However, in the present time we don't see Enji doing the kind of manipulation that Jonas does, because really he doesn't have to. Hawks does it for him. There is a character in the narrative named Takami Keigo who is a little boy that Enji indirectly saved as a child by putting his father in prison. Because of this he is obsessed with making Endeavor live up to the hero he imagined him to be when he was young, and does everything he can to prop Enji up behind the scenes and make him look like that hero to the public.
Hawks is a whole other can of worms, but in effect what this means is there is someone manipulating public opinion in favor of Endeavor so he'll be able to shine in spite of the numerous skeletons in his closet, it's just not Endeavor himself. Hawks also takes away a lot of the active decisions on Endeavor's part. When Endeavor chooses to ignore Toya in the latter part of the story, it's not Endeavor's choice, he's just following Hawks plan.
The result is that Endeavor comes off as less of a Jonas, after all he's not manipulating people on purpose, that's Hawks doing it for him... he's no longer the seflish egotist manipulating both his family and the public opinion for his own personal gain... but if he's not Jonas then who is he in the story?
The entire point of this post is to compare Enji to Rusty, but Enji's far too succesful to be Rusty. Rusty is a failure in basically everything he set out to do in life. He's the butt of the series jokes. He's the victim in as many ways as he's the perpetrator. He had a lot of money and then wasted it all. None of his inventions are succesful. The scientific community thinks he's a joke, or they don't even know who he is. Women won't even go near him. Even his friends barely tolerate him. No one ever defends him. At no point in the story does someone stop and say "Hey, Hank I know your dad's an asshole but he's really good at science so that makes it okay."
Rusty's such a failure at being a hero that he's forced to be a person. He compeltely fails at the toxic masculinity ideal he's striving for, and shows us how empty it is. He's as equally narcissticic and toxic as his father, he treats women like objects for sex ad comfort like his father does, he just doesn't get away with it. There's nothing to glorify about Rusty because he's just an out of shape bald guy. You can't point to some heroic feat of his that justifies his toxic behavior because he doesn't have any.
The story however can't stop singing Enji's praises for what a good hero he is. He's never forced to step out of the role of hero and be a person like Rusty is, and because of that the message of his character becomes confused.
Are we supposed to think he's a manipulative narcissist like Jonas is?
Are we supposed to think he's an incredibly flawed individual trying to figure out how to be a father late into his kid's lives like Rusty?
Rusty has a clear role in his story, and Enji's role is unclear and messy. I know what the writers are trying to say with Rusty, because the writers crafted him with a clear vision in mind.
Everyone praises Jonas to death and no one can see him for the terrible purpose he is, because that's the point. Venture Bros is about failure. It's about the death of the space age. It's about how much the boomer generation sucked.
From the Radiant is the Baboon Heart Commentary.
Question: Did Jonas only keep Rusty around for the press and his cloning tech or did he actually care about him?
Answer: . The show has a villain called the monarch, but if you watch all the show the villain is Jonas Venture Sr. He is a bad dad. What you need to realize is that in this kind of baby boomers gen x millenials kind of thing we are of the generation that had bad parents. For the good and the bad of it. The good was we were all left alone by our parents, and we had a freedom in our thought that I don't think the millennials have. Because we made the millennials, and we were like You know what Our parents suck and we're gonna be great parents." And they helicoptered them and they gave playdates. [...] I did hate the boomers, they were awful fathers they were terrible people they did horrible things to our world, and at the time they were celebrated as good people. They were a bunch of hippies and they failed and they did everything wrong that they wanted to fix [...]. You and I are lost people we observed our generation. We are fully aware of it. We observed our parents generation. My actual father was a classic distant father, very bright had a lot of work to do, but I observed that generation and the way that toxic masculinity was set in stone. Just branded onto their tombstone. Toxic masculinity. Our generation grew up wanting to be adults, childhood was something that was not examined. When people were growing up we wanted to be grown ups, we wanted to wear suits, it was something you guys don't have. It was a very different way to grow up. So we wanted to be like this generation that immediately we looked at and went oh my god they're monsters. So Jonas Venture Sr. is a monster.
Jonas is a commentary on how much the boomer generation is glorified, and how much they suck if you look at them critically at all. It's written by authors who were observing basically three different generations of parenting, the way boomers parented, the ways Gen-Xers did in response to that and now the way millenials act as they reach adutlhood. Rusty can't escape Jonas' shadow because Toxic Masculinity is set in stone.
The role of Jonas in the story is to serve as an antagonist to Rusty and be the cause of Rusty's struggles, and also his impetus to change bacause Rusty doesn't want to be like his father. Rusty and Jonas both exist as characters to show the author's observations on parenting through the generations, and yeah it's a very american idea of parenting and family but it's you know... a cartoon made in america.
What is Endeavor's role of the story? If he's a criticism of toxic masculinity he's not criticisized enough, because the story spends just as much time glorifying him for his heroic traits as they do criticizing him. There's no scenes like this for Rusty to show off how cool he is, or how determined. The story wants you to believe that there's something redeeming in the fact that Enji is always struggling to be the greatest, even though his obsession with being number one is what caused him to abuse his family in the first place
It's crticizing and praising Enji's obsession with power in the same breath, because My Hero Academia can't fully deconstruct toxic masculinity the way that Venture Bros can. It would never treat Endeavor the way it treats Rusty, constantly humiliating him or making him the butt of jokes. It would never make Enji out to be weak or pathetic the way Rusty is.
The central concept of Endeavor is struggle. Endeavor means to try hard to achieve something and Enji means effort. His entire character is based around the concept of struggle. His central struggle is that he's a normal guy trying to compete with a superhero like all might, and everything he does he struggles with even if that struggle is pointless.
However, in the actual narrative itself he doesn't struggle. He definitely doesn't struggle the way Rusty does. Rusty's a lazy, incompetent, and entitled man sitting on a pile of money he didn't earn who thinks he's entitled to more who fails at all he sets out to achieve. He is constantly getting his butt kicked by the narrative for being a flawed person. Rusty never gets what he wants, and even when he does get what he wants like when his brother leaves him a billion dollar corporation in his will, he bankrupts that company in two seasons. Struggle means that the world isn't going to give you what you want and you keep fighting anyway.
Endeavor's never subjected to nearly the same amount of narrative punishment that Rusty is. He's still well-respected. People defend him. His family talks to him. He's still rich. He fights in all the major battles of the series and gets victories. No one's disgusted when they hear that he's a wife beater. We are told that he struggles, that the central concept of his character is struggle but we're never shown him facing any difficulties at all that aren't fighting villains. As I've said above several times, Enji's never really forced to step out of the role as hero because he's not a failure the way Rusty is.
My Hero Academia hits some of the same notes. It's criticizing japanese hegemonic masculinity, specifically that of salaryman masculinity and the way men in japan completely put their careers over their families. Read about it here in this convenient power point presentation. Enji is essentially an incredibly succcesful salaryman who has completely disappeared from his kid's lives in order to earn money and success and believes that he's still entitled to be a father because he's performed adequately in his role as earner and head of the household.
Enji is pretty obviously inspired by Japan's idea of patriarchy. He is the head of his household, and entitled to the respect of everyone inside it despite the fact he never actually shows up as a father or even tries to parent his kids because of the ideals of filial piety.
The story does show how giving too much power to the patriarch of a household can cause a house to fall apart, because people given too much power tend to wield it poorly. It shows that traditional family roles aren't all they're cracked up to be. Enji is assigned the role of father but he doesn't live up to it. The very rigid and traditional Todoroki Household crumbles because basically everyone fails to live up to their roles. The father isn't present. The mother isn't a good caretaker. The first born is defective. The youngest is given all the responsibility of the first born. No one is able to live up to those roles because maybe those rigid set in stone roles shouldn't exist in the first place.
Once again though, that's all in the backstory. Enji has a developing story from his first appearance to his last showdown with Toya, but he never steps out of his role as being a hero and because of that the ideas surrounding his character don't develop into anything.
You can have ideas in a story, but they're not always executed well. Enji is obviously a commentary on fathers in japan, and hegemonic masuclinity as a whole. However, what the author is trying to say is unclear becuse Enji's role in this story is unclear.
Rusty is never going to be as sucessful as his father. He's always going to be mediocre, always going to be a failure, and even if he's sympathetic he's still a scum bag. However, Rusty has one thing his father doesn't have which are his two sons who he made a deliberate decision to get closer to. Unlike a serial user of people Jonas, Rusty has the ability to actually love and care for people and he chooses to make those connections.
Endeavor never chooses. Either circumstances or Hawks choose for him. He didn't choose to go to Toya's side, but that's alright because the rest of the Todorokis and Shoto showed up to freeze Dabi in time before he self destructed so there was no consequence for that bad choice. In the end he still manages to save Toya and the rest of his family despite the fact he never actually tried to. He was too busy being the hero and fighting the big bad.
Which is why Enji doesn't work as a character compared to Rusty. He doesn't fail. He's supposed to be a flawed protagonist struggling against himself, but he never really loses. He's too much like Jonas and not enough like Rusty.
"I think Jonas was something of a boy adventurer himself, and made his kid be it. But also put his kid on TV to cash in the residuals. He was just a shitty parent. When he went to bed he was just, he was moral, and he was fighting the good fight. When he woke up he ignored his son and made his son do terrible things. He voted for nixon like a good american. He was a winner and our show is not about winners. Our show is about losers and people we love."
Jackson Publick.
I like this. You made a good point , op. The point is never about him just being abusive, its how its written in stories. It doesnt matter how bad things they did, you can make a serial killer main character. You can make whole redemption arc. Its about how its explored, how its written, and to do that, they need to be just person rather than heroic or villainious person. I dont know the other show but i would like to add a few things about Endeavour.
Actually, this is what many people mean when they didnt like his so called 'redemption' arc because his character just doesnt fit. Koutaro fits his story though. But Endeavour (and Bakugou etc) just doesnt play his role well in story. For example, his character doesnt even seem to be part of story at the beginning. He could still be complex person who always gets away with things but thats not how he was shown in narratives. He is too inhumane, he is too much of idea and less person to be empathic in any way. He is also not even a good hero. Beating villains doesnt make him good hero. So even the idea of 'good hero but bad dad' narrative doesnt fit. His backstory and everything about it is too messy and too random. Its there to say good things but story just doesnt show it.
This is why people (including me) complains about his large screentimes, because he gives nothing to story despite every scene he is in. His character actually ruins almost what story is actually trying to tell you. He could just be man. All his bad ides and why he thinks this way couldve been explored too. Maybe he couldve been used as how current heroes are manipulated by old generations but he wasnt used that way. He was used to show heroes arent that bad and thats bad writing.
Also even if all his bad ideas wasnt explored, he could just written to be man. Not every bad things needs to be explored. But story is praising this character. And story itself doesnt even say 'Hey, these random characters praising this toxic character's bad behavours is actually bad, its to show how messed up society is' . This would also explain why this character gets so many screen times, to tell us a story. But instead, story is just justifying it, just telling us that he is not that bad. Because it would be too complex, too real. It wouldnt be black and white. This is why MHA and many stories fails, because of this.
When you reference a macabre children's alphabet book in your My Hero Academia fanfic and a year later you see what seems like a reference to the same book in the actual MHA manga
I made this a long time ago because I was thinking about the fact that both Eri and Tokoyami like apples and that Horikoshi said he wanted to draw them eating apples together
"Dabi is a chill / cool guy" wrong, in fact his whole quirk and emotional struggles are all about how not chill he is. He literally burned himself alive? Twice? He cries blood? He just appeared detached 'cause he is suicidal and he's trying to convince himself that nothing else matters but revenge he's failing.
"Tomura is cruel / dumb / explosive" super wrong, there are several instances of him getting threatened by the League when he either did nothing or calmly reacted to him. There are also several instances of Tomura explaining historical events or sharing facts and strategy with them.
Contrary to what Dabi once suggested on the manga, Compress is known for taking big risks to accomplish his missions and he has an active role whenever the League needs him (jumped against Overhaul and later took his arm, kidnapped Bakugo, used his quirk on himself to allow Spinner and Tomura to escape, fought against Machia with Twice to allow Tomura to rest, etc).
Twice is not just a silly guy, he has actual malice too and he acts on it. Overhaul would have been a great addition if it wasn't for his need to control. He is capable of being cruel for his family the League sake and he was with them because he wanted, not because he was being a naive man being tricked.
Spinner is not a background character but someone really important to the storyline development (maybe Dabi is the second strongest and most active league member after Tomura, but Spinner is the person they all trusted and Tomura's greatest follower).
Toga is not just cheerful-crazy, she is really serious when it matters and like Twice or Dabi or thr rest of the League, a big part of her personality is a consequence of some trauma, in this case the social mask she tried to maintain for the sake of getting approved by her parents.
The League of Villains is more complex than all the stereotypes.
Look at "Dababy!" His look says, "No. Mine! Touch and I kill you!" This is one of the CUTEST Dabi pics I have ever seen!
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Another art post that isn't mine, but I don't know the artist either. I put the link to the page on Pinterest where I found him. No identity is mentioned, it is even asked for by one of the commenters on the page. If you know who drew this, message me the identity, and I will edit it into this post. If YOU are the artist, message me either your approval or disapproval of my using the image.
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