Darling of mine, i am ready for some television in my life so I came to ask whether i should start with fangs of fortune or chasing jade bcs both seem delightful in their own ways
Hey Kairin, long time no talk!
First of all thank you for considering Fof amongst your options, you're a real one 😘👌 I've been trying to get friends to watch this since I got sucked in, so it's nice to know I might see a familiar face in the fandom soon!
To answer your question, I agree that both shows are very fun to watch for different reasons, so it really depends on what you're feeling the most drawn to atm 🤔 I'm gonna attempt to break down what I feel are the strongest points of both shows, so maybe that can help you choose better
I think what sets Chasing Jade apart from a lot of romances that attempt to take a feminist angle and give us a strong, accomplished female lead is that this show doesn't particularly depict Fan Changyu as an over the top girlboss. Instead, she's an everyman, and despite possessing above-average martial art skills, her most defining traits imo are exactly what don't make her a"tough girl" stereotype. She's kind, good-natured, unambitious, compassionate, naive. She's not attempting to tackle the patriarchy or challenge gender roles or empowering other girls to think outside the box. Heck, in a lot of ways she's still a woman whose agency is limited by her gender and all the social and cultural expectations tied to it. And for that I think she's refreshingly real. She doesn't have a big, inspiring agenda. All she cares about is preserving her small little world — her family, her town, and living according to the teachings of her late parents to honor their memory. Even when asked to think bigger in terms of bettering her life, all she could think of was a bigger pigsty and more pigs cause that's enough to grant her and her sister a safe, stable life. Because of this, she feels human, rather than an icon of shallow feminine empowerment. And I like that about her a lot. I also love that she isn't the smartest tool in the box sometimes, and that her strength and martial art skills aren't always the easy fix she hopes them to be for some of the problems in her path. I love that her strength sometimes causes even more problems for her, and that she doesn't always say or do the right thing, but sometimes fumbles it, too.
Another thing worth mentioning is that her romance plot also builds off this strong foundation. I wouldn't say this is a gender-reversal type of drama, but another element I find interesting is that she's the one most clear-headed about her goals and her wants, while the male lead is often depicted as battling between his true wants and his goals, resulting in him being much more sensitive, dramatic and irrational and overall bad at regulating his own emotions. Which makes a lot of sense considering their backgrounds, but it also makes for an interesting developing romance imo because they don't start off from the same ground level, and it introduces some conflict in the story I'm very curious to see how it will develop 👀
Other interesting things this drama explores are the effects of war on commoners, class issues seen from the point of view of those getting screwed over by distant, petty court intrigue (which in itself is rare in a cdrama), very strong character writing even for bsckground characters that will have you unexpectedly crying during tragic scenes, and very interesting foiling between a ML with a penchant for extreme violence and a villain who mirrors him to sometimes uncanny degrees in his backstory / violent ways that leaves a lot of food for thought. Personally, something I'm wondering right now is if we're ever going to get a condamnation for the ML's strategic ruthlessness as a war commander as we did get negative framing for his villain foil's ruthlessness on a more individual scale. Kinda doubt it cause cdramas will be cdramas and the ML cannot be a 100% morally gray person (usually)... But the fact that his beloved wife almost got killed as an accidental result of one of his war ploys seems rather pointed, when in the same ep we saw his villain foil personally set war aside to prioritize the personal sphere and "save" his girl (necessary disclaimer: No I do not ship him with QianQian, he gives me the creeps and I don't read their plot as a romance, more like a psychological horror story tbh).
Novel readers who already know please don't snipe me, these are just my unfiltered thoughts as a drama-only
Okay, I think I'm gonna stop there about this show though I could probably say more.
Now, on to Fof
Though Fangs of fortune is a story about love, I will make the bold claim that it is not a romance, per se. I would describe this drama as a sort of coming of age story (even though everyone in the cast except one guy is already an adult), where the leads are growing into their adult shoes as we go. It takes the monster of the week format for the first 2/3rds of the story, but the actual monster is often The Horrors™ of one of the leads' unaddressed loose ends from their past. If you enjoy character writing and nuanced, often morally gray characters, this show is for you. It often gets very symbolic because of censorship, but less so than you'd expect tbh. One of said Horrors for example is the 2ML's repression as a bisexual (or gay?) man that manifests through the childhood nightmare of turning into a demon.
You might be wondering: but is this show actually gay or are you just fujobaiting me. Well. I wanna say that the queer subtext is a huge part of the plot and where most of the actual storytelling is at, if you are media literate enough to read between the lines of the censorship machine. So adjust your expectations going in, because most of the narrative tension is not on the straight posterboard romance, despite how that also cannot be canceled out as one of the story's strongest driving points, both emotionally and plot-wise.
Fof is, at its core, a story about love as a driving force, and a story about how much it can change a person and drive them to extremes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. It is also a story about how love can take many forms; romantic, yes, but also platonic or familial or an overlapping of multiple of those at once. This is why you might or might not have seen it described as the polycule show. It goes to great lengths to show the characters caring deeply about one another and escaping clear relationship labels, because defining what a character feels exactly for another is not the point of the show. What it actually wants you to focus on is the weight they give to that bond and the lengths they'd go to for it. And if said changes a person goes through will alter who they fundamentally are, if their hands get tainted with blood in the process.
In other words it asks, "if you've done something unforgivable, is there no coming back from that? And if there is, what does that look like?"
Because of that, Fangs of fortune has a lot of emotionally charged scenes and it shines for its character writing moments. I started off barely tolerating one of my now favorite characters because his growth actually made him see in a different light and appreciate him more. And when I tell you that you will feel for these guys I mean it cause I have lost count of how many times I've rewatched it now but I still cry like day one for some of them. That's how good it is. The acting is also peak. Anything Hou Minghao (who plays the ML) touches turns into gold, that I can promise you.
Theme-wise it can get a bit heavy sometimes, but there's excellent character writing even in the comedic beats or non-high-stakes scenes. The comedy btw is also very amusing if you're like me and you like well done banter :')
Other selling points are the beautiful cinematography, the found family, the visual storytelling and sometimes genius-like hair&make up and costuming choices, and the great ost. All of that makes this show my most rewatched drama of all time. Actually, my only rewatched drama of all time, it's that uncommon for me 😂 Underrappreciated but also worth mentioning is that all the main cast dubs themselves, which is refreshing in a cdrama landscape where actors sound different in every drama they're in. It also makes the character song (sung by the respective actors) much more impactful imo.
And I'm gonna stop there too otherwise I'll be here typing for another three hours and my wrists will hurt lol
Oh btw feel free to tell me if you actually start either drama and like it! I cannot offer compensation for any emotional damage you might suffer but I have a shoulder to cry on lmao
Hey :) I was wondering, how would you feel if someone reblogged your art but also wrote a long comment (about the piece of art) under it? I've seen gifmakers complain about the "essays" written under their gifs and idk what artists think about it.
i don’t mind that at all! it varies by people, but most of the artists i know absolutely love hearing back about their art & fics! we read tags and replies!
but! i think this is common internet etiquette - comments and reactions are always welcome specially for content creators who share their art for free, but don’t give harsh criticism or critique unless they specifically asked. we post art to share something we made with love, not for it to be nitpicked.
so yeah, i guess, unless it’s to be rude, you go ahead and give us that essay! <3
So you’re Gellert Grindelwald… Huh. Interesting… Anyhow back on track. I try to lead these things in giving advice to a person, though I highly doubt given your position that you would listen to said advice. Hence I will start then by complimenting you. You have truly accomplished a marvelous amount and have so many people many people blindly following your stride and word. Unlike the others, I do believe that you believe you can deliver said promises you’ve made, or at least twist the opinion of the people to make them want what you want but I also believe you are being blinded by something that is holding you back. Something that if you embrace rather than flee from you will, in turn, find yourself stronger.
I think you have lost the sense of empathy. I think that you are blinded by ambition in such a matter that you do not think on the outlook of people on your cause. But worst of all I think you have lost sight to the importance of human connection and the importance of feelings and emotions, trauma from the past. You are so focused on the future that you don’t allow yourself to fully move on from the past. And I think that that will be what will be your downfall.
I pity you Gellert Grindelwald. And I fear for you.
Hmm would you recommend the summer hikaru died? Ive wanted to read it for a while but always got too lazy but now with the anime i might try it again
(tl;dr at the end)
I do! Honestly I'm neither a horror nor a MCD fan. But between the gorgeous artwork, the nuanced character writing, the eerie atmospheres, the (relatable for me) feelings of alienation as a queer person in a small rural town, and the unfolding mystery of the Great Brainsnatcher's real origins and the Indoh family's sin, it snatched my attention enough to keep following, and now I'm glad that I did.
Fair warning tho, this manga deals heavily with the theme of the loss of a loved one you didn't get to grieve properly (cause he's still around for everyone else, even if it's just a fake replacing him) and the helplessness that follows. So if you're sensitive to that topic, it might not be a story for you. The titular Hikaru dies before the story even starts, but you get to know him through Yoshiki's (his best friend and MC) memories and his (unrequited?) feelings for him, and you get attached anyway.
I'll admit that it was a rough read for me at first because of this, since I can't handle MCD that well 😭 but the story is an underrated gem and I recommend sticking with it, cause it's about so much more than just grief imo. The exploration of Yoshiki's internalized homophobia and self-hatred through the theme of alienation, of never quite fitting in, of belonging with the only other person who doesn't, who later ends up being a literal monster that can't belong in your same place of existence, lest reality as you know might crumble with him.
I have only one criticism of this story and it's the fact that the queer angle becomes a lot less overt in later volumes (tho not entirely dropped). Later on, Yoshiki's initial feelings of alienation as a gay guy in a small rural town shift into the alienation he faces at being the sole person knowing the truth about 'Hikaru'.
I've seen people dismiss the anime after learning that it's "a BL" but that's such an asinine take cause this story isn't that. It's so much more. It's not a romance, it's the story of Yoshiki's internal journey, the way he processes his romantic feelings as something shameful, something to keep quiet, to bear alone even if it tears him apart inside. Which later on becomes less a theme and more literal.
TL;dr: It's a fascinating story. An underrated gem, which I recommend to anyone who likes psychological horror and nuanced character writing, as well as the trope of monsterfucking as an exploration of queerness (that last one is a half-joke, but not quite 😂)
very ... intrigued by your recent rb and cdrama suggestion do you have any suggestions for historical ones or some with a bit of comedy
<3
Hi! Glad to hear you're considering checking them out! I haven't seen many that fit your requirements since I mainly dabble in other genres, but I do have some recs!
1) Prisoner of beauty
This one is both historical and has a side of comedy so it's probably the best fit.
The premise is that 14 years after betraying their political allies of the Wei state, leading to the death of several family members of the ML, Manman (our FL) decides to marry the leader of the Wei family, Wei Shao, in an attempt to end the blood feud between the two states and gain some leverage to stop an outright war. Enter a lot of back and forth as the two of them settle into a marital game of chess, scheming and outwitting each other at every turn, until their relationship morphs from mutual distrust into something more genuine. There's more to this than just romance tho, as some political intrigue unfolds while the two leads attempt to build a canal that will not only restore relations between various belligerant states, but also lead to an era of peace and prosperity for the citizens of their respective countries.
Watch if: you enjoy intelligent MCs, like a female character who has just as much agency and plot relevance as the male lead without subtracting from realistic historical constraints for her gender, enjoy an enemies to lovers romance that has some well-built back and forth and doesn't go from point a to point b smoothly but instead lasts until the last episodes, like costume dramas and beautiful scenography, or enjoy complex characters and nuanced dynamics.
The political intrigue isn't the only thing about this drama btw. There's also a healthy dose of fluff in the middle, and some lighthearted comedy between the ML and his gaggle of court jesters ahem, military commanders.
My only complaint about this show is that I wasn't into the secondary couple so I fast forwarded their scenes, but their subplot has some relevance in later episodes
2) Are you the one
Another historical enemies to lovers! I do have a brand fgdhhs
The premise is that the FL is the leader of a group of bandits who loses her memory after being attacked by the enemies. Upon waking up, amnesiac, she mistakes thr ML (leader of the enemies) for her husband, and he goes along with it because he believes her to be the favored concubine of the leader of the bandits, and hopes to thus lure "him" into a trap. The two go on to live like husband and wife, and the ML eventually catches real feelings, but doesn't know how to come clean about his manipulation. The FL eventually starts regaining her memories, realizes what's actually going on, and they enter their divorce arc while taking back their respective roles as leaders of enemy factions. But lingering romantic feelings complicate matters from then on.
Watch if: you enjoy a strong female lead who can hold her own without a man but isn't a cliche girlboss stereotype, like well built enemies to lovers with a betrayal plot, like a soft spoken but smart ML and a kind but headstrong FL, enjoy relationships that start out as a red flag but eventually grow into something healthier.
Maybe don't watch this if you're not big on romance tho, cause aside from that idk what else there would be for you in this show
3) A moment but forever
I'm listing this one as a comedy even tho it has its serious moments too because the comedy ones are more prominent and pretty amusing. I made an out of context list of funny things that happened in it if you want a peek: here
The premise: The FL is a goddess tasked with retrieving a godly artifact that fell into the hands of an immortal clan. Said artifact however fused with the ML, the leader of said clan, and taking it from him would mean ending his life. But since the FL knows him to be a good man who helped her at a time of need in the past, she's reluctant to kill him. She chooses to instead pose as his maid and follow him until he dies naturally, only then retrieving the artifact. To complicate this, however, the ML's clan is a bit of a cult that's so afraid of his power that they gaslit him and tortured him for years. When he realizes this he has a bit of a "what if I actually turned as evil as you all always wanted me to be and destroyed the world for what it did to me" moment that makes the other gods the FL has to answer to very eager for him to die before he can enact his revenge fantasy. Despite everything I just said, this drama is actually pretty funny, don't let that scare you.
Watch if: you like a ML who is Going Through It, have never seen a xianxia before but you'd like to be introduced to the genre with a story that's a little less focused on complex and confusing sects politics, you like pretty scenography in a drama, you want something to watch that's both lighthearted but has serious moments as well
Bonus:
4) Guardians of the Dafeng
I actually did not finish this show so I cannot judge if it was good until the end, but I liked it up to where I watched. I only dropped it because I wasn't a fan of the dynamic between the ML and the second princess and it looked like they'd develop into a couple eventually, but I was so curious about the plot that I might return to it as some point
The premise: the ML is a modern salesman who transmigrates into a fantasy world overnight, and from then on has only his wits, his brawns, and his knowledge of poems and chemistry he learned in school to help him survive the ancient world he was plunged in. Finding himself thrown into jail as a scapegoat for an unsolved theft case, he uses his smarts to crack it and earns himself a reputation as an investigator, eventually catching the eye of the Guardians, a group of fancy warriors protecting the Dafeng, and gets enrolled in it.
Watch if: you want a lighthearted comedy that makes you actually laugh, you're not into anything angsty, you like a ML who solves problems with his head more than with his fists
... I think that's all from me! I hope you can find anything that suits your tastes
I've been searching for in depth Todoroki character analysises. Especially with just his personality and how trauma impacted it. Feel like doing one or linking one?
This meta is long overdue, and I’m sorry for the wait. Fair warning: this got really long (6k words long), so make yourself comfortable and grab some popcorn before reading!
Shouto is essentially someone who is struggling with his self-perception. He’s acutely aware that the only reason he was conceived was to fulfil his father’s ambition, and that he was raised as a tool accordingly. As a result, he struggles a lot with identity. What part of himself is really him, and what part of it is the product of his father’s grooming? This is a question that Shouto hasn’t fully found an answer to yet. The entire manga so far details his process of relearning himself, first in opposition to everything his father represents, then by trying to define what his own concept of heroics is. Both ways are flawed, because both coping methods are born out of Shouto’s limited agency.
I’m going to divide this meta into two sections, and try to expand on why that’s the case.
1) Trying to deny Endeavor
Before his quirk manifested, Shouto still had a support system of sorts in place. He lived a (mostly) normal life. He watched heroes on tv and dreamed of becoming one himself, much like the rest of the kids his age. He was able to express his emotions freely, and he didn’t even think of suppressing them. His mother took care of him, loved him and supported his dream.
All of that changed abruptly once Enji decided his quirk was fit for training. Suddenly, Shouto is thrown in a world of violence: he realizes that bad heroes exist. That his father is one of them, because he lashes out at his mother when she tries to defend him. He is told over and over that he needs to be his father’s heir, but if his father is such a violent and horrible person, doesn’t that mean that Enji is trying to make Shouto become a bad hero, too? Shouto refuses this notion, and latches onto his mother for emotional support, because his mother represents stability and kindness where his father is chaos and violence. He decides he doesn’t want to be the kind of hero who hurts innocent people.
Then the kettle incident happens, and Shouto is cut off from his last stable, healthy connection. He’s isolated, lost, hurt. He’s also too young to have developed the emotional tools to process such complex feelings in any healthy way, or to understand fully his situation. All that Shouto, a five year old, can retain from that incident is that his father is a terrible person, and as such, Shouto needs to be the opposite of everything Enji stands for.
But what can Shouto do, realistically? Enji is the patriarch, and within the constraints of their house, his authority is absolute. This is where the concept of agency comes into play.
Agency is defined as a character’s freedom and capacity to live and act in a defined world (e.g. the ability to make choices, act freely, control their lives). Shouto’s agency is limited by Enji’s despotism. He cannot rebel against the training, and he cannot choose a different career, because his father forces both onto him (the latter less so because Shouto wanted to become a hero, but becoming one wasn’t really his choice). Agency is also defined by how a character decides to act when their predicament doesn’t allow much room to wiggle. Shouto decides to be reactive. The only thing Shouto has full control over is his quirk. So he decides to suppress half of it, and to rebel against his father’s authority by rejecting him as a role model.
He blames Enji for what happened, and represses the parts of himself he deems to be the product of Enji’s influence. That’s a very human and realistic response to abuse, by the way. He is a child, and he literally has no other way to oppose his father’s dominance.
In an attempt to deny Enji’s grooming though, Shouto ends up suppressing a part of his identity as well.
Repression is a key concept of psychoanalysis, where it is understood as a defence mechanism that “ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it.”
Shouto does not simply reject his fire side - which is still a part of himself - but he also subconsciously represses the memories of his mother associated with it.
He forgets Rei’s lesson: that he shouldn’t be bound by blood, and that he will be a good hero, as long as he remembers what kind of man he wants to be. That’s likely a result of trauma as well. The last thing his mother saw before she had a breakdown was Shouto’s fire side. And while Shouto outwardly blames his father for the worsening of her health, part of him also subconsciously blames himself.
So the problem with resorting to repression as a coping method is that it alienates part of Shouto’s own identity. Shouto doesn’t perceive his body as his own, but as a mere receptacle: of his father’s ambitions, of his mother’s fears. He is not Shouto, he is the sum of his parents’ quirks.
This mindset is, once again, the result of his father’s abuse. As I explained before, Shouto is acutely aware that he was born for a reason. He knows that his father arranged the marriage and then “trained” him in order to achieve a specific goal. Enji himself diminishes Shouto’s personhood on a constant basis, by reminding him that he cannot have a free will, and by referring to him as livestock.
in order to be a good hero, and thus use his body to its full capacity, then, Shouto thinks he needs to let go of his father’s shadow first and then to set his mother free; he thinks it’s partly his responsibility to do the latter, despite the fact that he literally did nothing wrong, and that the circumstances of her worsening health were entirely out of a five year old’s control.
He thinks he needs to make up to her for his existence, for being born, despite having had no say in his parents’ decision to procreate. Self-blame is also a really common reaction to emotional abuse, but in Shouto’s case it also goes beyond that. Shouto’s self-perception is inextricably tied to his father’s image.
Everything Shouto does, he does in an effort to prove his own personhood in opposition to his dad’s, but he fails, because he doesn’t have the emotional tools to process it in a healthy way.
There’s a point that can be made here about how hero society exacerbated this feeling of being unable to get out of his father’s shadow, too. For the public, he’s Endeavor’s son. Every single one of his accomplishments is praised as a result of Enji’s parenting. I wrote a separate meta on how hero society is hopelessly oblivious about the darkness lurking behind Enji’s training. But, for the sake of this meta, suffices to say that all the constant shallow comparisons to his dad weren’t helpful at all for Shouto’s self-perception. They only made his wish to prove he’s different stronger. More extreme. More desperate.
His fire side then becomes just a physical manifestation of everything Shouto has sworn to himself never to become. When he accidentally summons his flames against Midoriya at the sport festival, he thinks he failed at this; so he pulls Midoriya aside, and tries to explain himself.
Since he once again cannot fully perceive himself as something separate from his father, to explain why he never meant to use his fire, he needs to overshare about his past. He needs to say: this is what my father has done in order to reach the top; I will not do the same because I’m different. He stopped at nothing. I have still a moral code.
In other words: he’s apologizing for using a part of his own power in order to reach his goal, even if he used it on instinct; but if his mind and body didn’t align, it’s because his is a conscious effort to repress part of himself. It’s not natural, because he’s not supposed to suppress part of his dna, part of what makes him Shouto. But the struggle around which Shouto’s character is based is that he can’t think of his fire side as his own, because he subconsciously superimposes Enji onto half of his identity. He alienates himself from his own body, and thus from complete ownership of it.
The symbolism is clear. Shouto wishes to hide away the part of himself he considers ugly. He covers it up, because he doesn’t want it to be seen, but it’s still there, because it’s part of his identity.
This is why repressing it is not going to work. Shouto spends most of his time trying to outrun the expectations that choke him. Trying to become someone else. He largely fails at this, because 1) he can’t ignore that quirks are just another body function, and thus he can’t outrun himself, and 2) he’s still held back by the circumstances that caused his trauma in the first place: his father is still a hero, and he’s still a large influence in Shouto’s life.
The latter point deserves to be expanded on further. There are a number of learned behaviors that Shouto unknowingly acquired from his dad, and a lot of other ways in which Enji’s shitty parenting stunted his growth.
Broadly speaking, a learned behaviour is a skill or an action that is acquired through routine interactions with others, by observing their behaviour and subconsciously or deliberately mimicking it, or by developing reactive behavioural patterns in response to it.
Individualism
Early on in the series, Shouto used to be aloof, distant and overly self-reliant. It’s not a coincidence that the very first arc shows him facing a bunch of villains on his own, and come out of it unscathed. That was both a way to introduce early on Shouto’s coldly analytical, creepily efficient fighting abilities (unnatural skills for a normal 14yo, signs that Shouto wasn’t allowed to have a childhood), as well as a visual way of showing his lone-wolfish attitude.
This is not just a quirky thing he grew past, though. Not even after Midoriya quite literally smashed through his defenses. It’s shown to be an ingrained character flaw Shouto has to actively work to smooth out.
When he’s paired up with Momo against Aizawa, he doesn’t spare a second to consider her own contribution to their team’s strategy, despite noticing that she had something to say.
During the licence exam, he ditches his classmates early on because he considers them an hindrance; they would just get caught in the radius of his ice. He doesn’t think for a second that they might be an asset.
Before entering U.A., he was so focused on his end goal of getting the best results that he didn’t even look at Inasa long enough to retain any memory of him. Worse yet, he completely brushed him off by subconsciously emulating his own father’s cold attitude. In much the same way as Enji is dismissive and rude with others because he can’t see past his nose, Shouto too ends up making a rival out of Inasa without even noticing or caring.
Later on, when he meets Inasa again and doesn’t even recognize him at first, he’s forced to concede the point that he hadn’t even been looking him in the face; Inasa hadn’t even fallen on his radar.
His excessive self-reliance is a result of Enji’s training. It’s reflected in Dabi’s behaviour as well. Both of them are slow to open up to their comrades, and both have been remarked to be the types to act on their own multiple times. This behavior is reflective of Enji’s mindset.
Shouto has been trained to take charge and not rely on others. Even when he’s paired up, he tends to take on leadership positions (cavalry battle, the aforementioned Momo scene) with people gravitating around him less because he’s actually a good leader, and more because he projects an aura of someone who knows what he’s doing.
His aloofness, his excessive self-reliance, his tendency to brush off others, his assumption that he should be on the frontlines… those are all things he internalized because of his father’s own mindset.
Socializing problems
Another way in which Enji negatively influenced Shouto’s growth is on the interpersonal relationship front. Shouto struggles to understand others and to bond with them. At the beginning this was made particularly obvious, but he does show traits of it still.
Early on in the series, Shouto was too tangled into his own issues to relate to others well. Shouto himself acknowledges this. His hatred for his dad made everything else disappear, and sort of gave Shouto tunnel vision.
His lone wolfish attitude that results in the war declaration towards Midoriya is also a learned behaviour from his dad. His father taught him not to rely on others and to consider them all rivals on his way to the top. And at first, Shouto did. Enji’s bad influence is made painfully clear by the fact that Shouto only elected Deku as a rival as soon as he perceived a fraction of All Might’s power in him.
Shouto’s true personality, though, is far from that cold and detached shell that was born out of a need to protect himself, though.
Shouto is a genuinely caring person. He’s not bright on the social front, but he does pick up on a lot of things that most others miss, if it’s something he can relate to. For example, he picked up on Tenya’s mounting hatred for Stain, and how it could’ve made him lash out violently if left unchecked, when everyone else only noticed something off in his behaviour.
Shouto is essentially a person who is strongly motivated by his emotions. He’s probably one of the most emotional characters of the series, together with Shigaraki; but just like Shig, he isn’t fully in touch with his feelings.
Shouto feels really strongly about a lot of things. Even his cold and aloof persona is a result of this. It’s not that he was actually distant and uncaring and then did a sharp 180° turn and became the mom friend of the dekusquad. Since he never had any emotional stability, since he was denied a healthy way to vent out his negative feelings, or friends and connections to shoulder them with, Shouto’s emotions began to… burst out of him wildly at times, without him knowing how to rein them in.
You could say that he represses and represses until the dam bursts. His cold and aloof persona was just him being unable to see past the overwhelming anger he felt towards his dad. But once Midoriya breaks through his walls and triggers the re-examination of Shouto’s motives, he starts warming up to his classmates. He keeps a close eye on Iida when he thinks he might do something stupid; he starts bantering with Bakugou; he hangs out with everyone for the dorm king competition despite feeling sleepy; he backs up Mina’s proposal for the culture festival and suggests a solution that will make every party happy.
The manga details Shouto’s growth as both a process of relearning himself, and of learning how to connect with others. He attempts the latter a lot, but in doing so he often encounters the struggle of not really knowing how to relate to people or form meaningful relationships.
It was easier for him to reach out to Iida because he saw his own past self in him; so he knew what kind of words were most likely to get to Iida while his mind was clouded by anger and despair. With Deku, it was less his choice to become friends, and more of a given: Deku basically planted himself in Shouto’s close circle, and refused to leave. Plus his connection with Deku was also sealed by the fact that Deku unknowingly repeated Rei’s words to him.
So. Connection through shared understanding is something Shouto can do. But connecting in general, and processing social situations, don’t seem to come easy to him.
Times and times again, Shouto is shown not to be able to pick up social and situational cues. He takes a lot of things literally, missing out on the intended meanings. I see a lot of people calling him stupid or dorky or even sassy because of the things he says in those panels, but honestly, intelligence doesn’t strike me as a relevant factor. He’s actually a pretty smart child, and not just bright on the academic front (he’s top of his class); he also shows the ability to think on his feet, and under the right circumstances, he picks up on people’s most negative moods.
I wouldn’t say he’s particularly observant, because he does show several signs of being oblivious and kinda in his own bubble. But he’s certainly attentive. He can’t read people well, because he struggles to understand and relate to them, but he does spend a lot of time trying to.
His struggle to pick up situational cues and his interpersonal relationship problems seem then to be the result of the isolation he faced as a child; sometimes children have a hard time picking up social behaviours when they aren’t socialized from a young age.
Shouto wasn’t socialized like a normal child. He was cut off from his mother and his siblings pretty early on, and encouraged to keep all his feelings inside to avoid encountering his father’s ire. His own relationship with his siblings is stunted.
He appears surprised when Natsuo first fights their dad to defend him; he’s still confused when Fuyumi laments that they cannot be a normal family.
I think that Shouto basically doesn’t know how to reach out to people, and his process of learning is akin to that of a child approaching social situations for the first time. His evolving dynamic with Bakugou proves this point. Thanks to the remedial lessons, he spent time with Bakugou, got to know him better, and assumed they were friends as a result. I think he was being completely genuine when he declared that. No teasing, no sassing involved.
You can see how abstract and theoretical his thinking is. It feels like he’s quoting off a rule book. “Friends spend time together”. Bakugou, understandably, notes that (“forced”, from his perspective) proximity alone is not a good way to judge the emotional closeness of two individuals. But Shouto didn’t take that into account. His is a coldly analytical - if surface-level - assessment: Bakugou and I spent a lot of time together lately + spending time together is what friends do + Bakugou banters and roughhouses a lot with people he considers friends (Kirishima and Kaminari for example) + Deku now trusts him = Bakugou and I are friends.
Personally, I think there’s merit in headcanoning him as falling somewhere on the autism spectrum, because a lot of his actions can be read that way. The aforementioned difficulty at figuring out bonds and social relations, his struggle at picking up situational cues, and even his special interest in / obsession with soba. But that might just be me.
Point is, Shouto struggles at relating to people and at forming meaningful relationships, and this might or might not be related to his trauma as well.
Shouto is stubborn and impolite
I already touched on this but to make it more clear… Once Shouto makes up his mind, you literally cannot sway him at all. He stuck to his vendetta for years, despite how hard it must’ve been to talk back to his father. He was ready to throw hands with the chief of police over a divergence in ideals. He got into an argument with Iida because he refused to learn from his near-death experience in Hosu, and decided to embark into another one. He visited his mom against his family’s protests. He tried to out-stubborn Bakugou several times during training camp, when Bakugou refused to be cooperative.
So, one of Shouto’s character traits, and a learned behavior from his dad, is that he’s super stubborn. He doesn’t let anyone boss him around, not even his teachers, not even the law.
Then there’s the impoliteness factor. For one, Shouto never uses honorifics. This can be sometimes indicative of closeness between two friends. In Shouto’s case, it’s more to show that he’s rude. In Japan, not using honorifics when referring to your seniors and to your teachers in particular is considered pretty impolite.
This probably also refers to that time he talked back to Tsuragamae. He wasn’t just aggressive in both his tone and his body language, but he also used an anti-heteromorph slur.
That’s something Dabi has done before as well. Several other meta writers have commented on this parallel, and it’s really likely that both Shouto and Dabi are rude as a result of Enji’s own severe conservatism and brashness.
Mistrust of authority & of lawfulness
I think we have established that Shouto isn’t submissive, and that he’s not afraid of speaking up. He talked back to his abusive father since the tender age of five after all. But it goes beyond that. Shouto also acts out against authority if he thinks they’re wrong.
He was ready to throw hands with the chief of police because Tsuragamae was daring to punish him for doing what Shouto believed to be the right thing.
Shouto, understandably, doesn’t trust authority figures by default. Nor does he blindly believe that the law will always safeguard everyone. And why should he? The law did jack shit to protect him and his family from Enji. Enji who is still an authority of his own, and a symbol of justice amongst others that actually deserve the title.
That is why Shouto embarked in not one, but two unlicensed rescue missions. Shouto has a strong moral compass, and he does believe in justice. However, he also believes that bending the rules a little is something that can be overlooked, if the end result far outweighs the negative consequences. Shouto acts within the law, as a hero (or a trainee one), but he also isn’t afraid of getting around the law when people’s safety is at stake. I guess we could make a point here that human life is worth more to him than rules.
The reason why he gets so mad at Tsuragamae, the literal chief of police, is because Tsuragamae at first made it sound like he prioritized keeping up appearances by choosing to give more value to rules than to human lives. That’s something Shouto cannot condone, and isn’t willing to compromise on. Again, a result of his father’s influence. This time in opposition to Enji’s mindset.
Enji is also someone who managed to keep up appearances despite committing domestic violence for over 22 years. Shouto is understandably pissed at the mere insinuation that people’s safety should come second to lawfulness. On top of that, Enji is a pretty rash hero. Of all the three times we’ve seen him fight, he’s always rushed into battle without a care for his surroundings. He isn’t known for being the type of hero who holds back.
In Hosu, Gran Torino had to contain Endeavor’s damage twice; first, by taking out a noumu before Enji could get to it and roast the two civilians who were too close to the battle zone, and then by shouting at him not to attack Stain and harm Izuku in the process.
During the fight against High End, Enji immediately jumped into fight mode and expected Hawks to rescue hundreds of people by himself.
During the recent fight against the Glass Manipulation villain, he showered burning hot glass on top of the civilians who were unfortunate enough to be underneath him during his attack.
So basically: Enji is the type of hero who cares more about how strong he looks by immediately jumping to the flashy side of a villain attack, the fighting; he has to be held back from directly injuring civilians in the crossfire of hero work. Shouto is instead the type who focuses on people’s safety instead of on overachieving results, and doesn’t trust people who care more about appearances and about keeping a facade of lawfulness than doing the right thing.
Shouto vowed to be the kind of hero that is essentially the very opposite of everything Endeavor is. And while sometimes he succeeds, sometime he also shows the signs of his upbringing.
I think it’s worth mentioning again though that Shouto acts within the restraints of his limited agency. He can’t fully get away from his father, because he’s still a child living under Enji’s roof (even if he’s now at U.A., his dad is still technically his legal guardian). He can’t fully escape the expectations, because for the public he’s still Endeavor’s son.
As a result, a lot of his choices, even the most reactive ones, tend to reflect his limited agency. As that’s the case with a lot of victims of abuse, he’s acutely aware of certain patterns of behaviour he has inherited from his father, but remains oblivious to other internalized behaviours he subconsciously also picked up. That happens because the environment he grew up in was toxic, but it still shaped his way of thinking; so it stands to reason that even when he tries to retain a modicum of freedom, he only knows how to do so by subconsciously using the tools that his father taught him.
But this changed slightly once he finally stopped repressing half of his identity, something that triggered the beginning of his real growth.
2) Trying to learn from / exploit Endeavor
When Deku shouts “It’s your power” at Shouto, something shifts. Those words act as trigger for Shouto to retrieve a long-suppressed memory; with it come a lot of confusion, self doubt, and the first steps towards developing a better coping method for his trauma.
Recovering that memory acts like the cannonball that puts a giant hole in Shouto’s walls. His mother, the one person he thought he’d wronged, the one person towards whom he’d harboured all that repressed guilt, was actually the one to encourage his dream in the first place. Rei had originally acknowledged his personhood, and reassured him that he wouldn’t be the same as his dad.
All that unbalances Shouto. Recovering repressed memories is already a taxing and overwhelming experience in itself, but this particular memory is emotionally charged, incredibly so. It’s a memory that stands against everything Shouto has believed for an entire decade. It’s too much to process at once. Plus he’s in the middle of a fight, so he cannot slow down and sort out his feelings properly.
As a result, his emotions go into overload, and in the exhilaration that follows, Shouto temporarily loses all inhibitions. He uses his fire, because in that moment the feelings of inadequacy and guilt that prompted the repression in the first place are overshadowed by something drastically opposite.
Afterwards, he tells his father that he “forgot about him” because his mother’s acceptance temporarily freed him of the burden of carrying a legacy he’d never chosen to endure. In that moment alone, Shouto’s fire was his own. Shouto was acknowledging his own personhood, and taking ownership of his body, instead of denying and surrendering half of it to the ghost of his father’s shadow.
It was, however, just a temporary freedom.
His issues with self-perception aren’t magically solved when he allows himself to think of his fire as part of himself. Quite the opposite, actually. After thinking of his fire as a destructive and bad thing for so long, he’s unbalanced when he finally has to account for it.
To make peace with it, he needs to understand it. He needs to figure out what it means for him to use that kind of power. He needs to set his own boundaries again. What is allowed and what isn’t? How can he tame it to avoid it getting the better of him and everyone he cares about? And most importantly, is it okay for him to be freed of his father’s legacy, if his mother is still held prisoner by it?
From then on, Shouto’s journey details his process of acceptance towards the other half of his power, and the continued struggles with self-perception that follow.
The first step is, of course, bridging the gap with his mother. Shouto is determined to be the kind of hero who doesn’t leave anyone behind, so he can’t ignore that his mother is still suffering. In other words, his first step towards self-acceptance is proving to himself that Rei had been right about him.
That, despite the shared dna with his father, he can still be a hero who doesn’t hurt others.
It’s barely a step forward, because as you can see, he still thinks he needs to prove something, to catch up to an invisible standard of goodness he somehow still think he fails on because of his blood. But it’s a step forward nonetheless; from then on, his goal becomes less that of proving his father wrong, and more that of proving to himself that he can self-improve.
With this shift in perspective, he’s finally able to realize that his vendetta was giving him tunnel vision. As I mentioned above, he starts a process of relearning himself, and of learning how to relate to others.
Shouto finally internalizes Rei’s words, enough so to try and pass them on to Iida. A good hero is someone who decides to be good. Doing the right thing is a choice.
Since then, Shouto consistently chooses to be the kind of hero who keeps people safe. He rescues Iida from going down the same path of hatred and revenge he used to be stuck on; he makes a valid effort to protect Bakugou against the League, and then embarks on an illegal mission to save him.
The latter in particular is indicative of his newfound resolve. Shouto admits that his motivator to save Bakugou is entirely selfish. That people will not thank them for it. He’s doing this both because it’s the right thing to do, and because he wants to prove to himself that he can.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Hori chose Kirishima and Shouto as the catalysts of the rescue mission. I think that they were meant to foil each other a little there. Kirishima was motivated by his frustration, by his need to prove to himself that he’s changed from his “weak” and cowardly self. He wants to take action because it’s what a hero would do, and because he wants to be true to his ideal of heroism.
Similarly, Shouto is also motivated by frustration and by a need to figure out what being a hero means to him personally. Dabi literally snatched the Bakugou marble from his palm and taunted his efforts.
Not exactly in this words, but I always read this line as Dabi saying “How sad of you to think you can save anyone, Todoroki Shouto.”
I think that’s probably how Shouto read it too. On a symbolic level, there’s another added layer of meaning there. Dabi is someone who uses his firepower freely. He doesn’t hold it back the way Shouto does because he’s afraid of it. How can someone who is still holding back, how can someone who is still prisoner of his own body and of his circumstances be a proper rescue hero?
So, if Hosu was Shouto’s starting line as a person, as someone who can be good despite his blood, Kamino was his starting line as a hero. Someone who rescues and who does the right thing, minimizing casualties and taking rules into account. Avoiding violence when necessary, because heroes know when to pick their battles.
His fire doesn’t doom him anymore but it becomes instrumental in his growth. Using it means accepting that he has a responsibility over others, and that he consciously decides to use his fire for good.
In order to do that, to learn how to use it properly, he then feels like he needs to intern for his dad. We, as readers, are able to discern that he had other options. In terms of field experience, Hawks would’ve been an equally good choice as a mentor. Especially since Hawks and Shouto share basically the same idea of what heroics is about. But, once again, we have to take into account that Shouto’s agency is influenced by his circumstances.
There’s a point that can be made here about how hero society as a whole idealizes a concept of strength that comes pretty close to Enji’s own toxicity. The kind of strength that comes from defeating villains in flashy fights using strong offensive powers. The more Enji defeats big bad scary villains, the more he gets praised by everyone as a true hero deserving of the top spot. Enji is physically strong; his power is flashy and attention-grabbing, and his obsession with victory means that he’s often on the frontlines. Shouto understandably looks up to that kind of experience.
So despite the fact that he had options, he chose Enji based on a cold, purely logical assessment. His father is the most experienced fire-user Shouto knows, and as such, his fine-trained control is something Shouto needs to learn.
Shouto himself acknowledges that his control of his fire is not yet on par with his control of his ice. He’s been suppressing it all this time, so it’s only normal that it wouldn’t come easy to him. There’s psychological as well as physical reasons for that.
Of course it would’ve still been better for his mental health if he chose to distance himself from his father more. But it’s worth noting that Shouto remains clinically analytical of his situation. He doesn’t cut Enji any slack. He’s just there to train his fire side and learn how best to be the kind of hero he wants to be. Forgiveness is nowhere on his radius. Ch 247 made that particularly clear, so I don’t think I need to expand much on that.
He still has no intention of seeing Enji as a role model, or to welcome him back in his life. Shouto is still modeling his hero persona after All Might, because All Might inspired him as a child. At the same time, though, he’s acknowledging Enji’s strength and field experience, because he’s been trained to value those things as necessary skills for a hero. So it’s a complicated issue, really. His wish to exploit his father’s knowledge might be read in a positive light, as him finally standing up for himself in front of a crowd, but also in a negative one, as him still having to prove his personhood in opposition to his dad’s, and him still internalizing a concept of strength that’s biased and unhealthy.
To sum up this mess of a post, I guess I could say that there are a lot of ways in which trauma shaped or otherwise influenced Shouto’s personality. I chose to analyse the ones that are the most blatant for me, but there are probably more. Shouto is a flawed character, so a lot of his choices are also flawed, and rarely as clearcut black and white as he makes them out to be. A lot of his issues have to do with self-perception, and with the lack of understanding and help he had to endure growing up. He’s a beautifully relatable character though, and I really love that complexity of his. I hope my overview managed to do his character justice!
Hit me up if you found this an interesting read (it sure as hell wasn’t easy to write down. His mind is… complicated), or feel free to add up to this post if you have anything to contribute!
That’s a good question. I’ve wondered about it myself ever since I saw this post by hamliet. If you’re looking for a much more concise and well-written meta, please refer to that post, as my thoughts tend to get jumbled and incoherent
If you don’t care about that, then keep reading! Warning: this is really long and really rambly.
I want to say that there’s no way that Dabi is gonna work as a redemption token in Endeavor’s arc, but to be honest, I think there is, unfortunately, a good chance of that happening. The current Endeavor feels bad about what he did to his family and wants to make amends. The point is, intentions only get you that far. When it comes to actual actions, Endeavor is falling short of what he set out to do. To explain why though I kinda have to take a little detour first.
Case in point: Endeavor still lacks compassion & self-awareness.
We are told early on in the story, through Izuku and Bakugou’s conflict, that a good hero is someone who balances between saving people and defeating villains. Caring about just one of those things and ignoring the other is consistently framed as bad. Izuku breaks all his bones, barely escapes a permanent injury and nearly dies a couple times because he convinces himself that other people’s lives are more important than his own wellbeing; he almost gets pulled out of UA as a result, nearly wasting everyone’s efforts to help him become the greatest hero. Bakugou gets kidnapped twice as narrative punishment for how he keeps refusing to admit that his actions have consequences on other people, and is too self-centered to realize how his actions make him look to an outsider’s eye; he fails to get his hero licence because he cannot see anything past himself.
How does this relate to Endeavor? Well, Endeavor is like early Bakugou.
Even after realizing that he involved Rei and then their children into his personal search for unequaled strength, he still fails to realize the extent of the damage he did.
Notice how they pop up in his mind when he’s confronted with the reality that he’s too weak to defeat a strong opponent. it's not that he regrets forcing Rei into a marriage and to have kids for his own agenda... what he regrets is having a weakness that required involving someone else to make up for it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a step in the right direction, that’s for sure... At the very least he shows he can have a conscience. But it’s not enough to warrant atonement yet. He still objectifies his family as a receptacle of his own feelings. They are there not because he ever cared about them as a family, but because he needs them to cater to his inadequacy and to help him accomplish something. What changed is merely the objective he forced onto them, but not the attitude. If before he thought of Rei and Shouto as means to an end, becoming the number one, now that he is number one, he just shifted their purpose. They became the people who need to validate his position.
And I say “validate” not because he thinks he doesn’t deserve the title of number one, but because he feels like he didn’t get there on his own terms. Enji is all about brute force. About proving yourself with a fist fight. He’s your stereotypical shounen manga rival who can’t process his own emotions and instead needs to prove his strength to get some sort of external validation of his own worth. He devoted his life to becoming the number one, but only got there as a result of All Might retiring. He never got to one up him. He never got to prove to the world that he deserved first place because he was the strongest guy in Japan. So that leaves him feeling self-conscious.
“If crimes rates aren’t going down and my popularity is still as low as ever, does this mean I’m a bad hero?”
(Yes. Yes, you are, but not for the reason you think)
The thing about Endeavor is that he doesn’t understand simple emotions. He thinks that the reason why All Might became so popular is because he plays the crowd-pleaser and smiles to everyone. The fact that people love him because his confident smile reassures them that everything will be alright completely flies over his head. He thinks, what’s the point of doing that if you can help people feel safe by defeating the villains, aka what’s making them feel afraid in the first place? Well... the thing is... reassuring people is as much a hero’s job as beating up the bad guys is. That’s why Bakugou got points docked away when he shouted at injured grannies to ‘stop whining and help themselves.’
But he never quite gets to realizing this simple truth. To him heroics is all about being the strongest guy with the flashiest attacks and longest record of solved cases (yeah, it’s been remarked that he’s the hero with the most villain apprehensions under his belt, and doesn’t that say a lot about him? All Might gets remembered as the guy who saved over 100 people in 10 minutes, and as he symbol of peace always with a smile on his face)
So, follow this absurd reasoning: if being the strongest equals getting respect and recognition, then not getting any validation means that he’s not strong enough. Therefore, the way to be a better symbol is to fix that by becoming even stronger.
To be a better symbol, someone that Shouto can be proud of, he needs to defeat more villains to earn that recognition. to simplify his thought process, all he took away from this entire situation was this: I wasn't a good hero to my own family and made them sad. How can I be a better hero? By proving that I deserve the number one spot. And how do I prove it? By winning even more.
“But Alice, how do you know for sure that he hasn’t changed? That he still fails to recognize his shortcomings in a way that feels like he actually understands why his actions are bad? Isn’t his declaration to Shouto a proof of his goodwill?”
Nope. If anything, it’s the proof that he doesn’t understand the first thing he did wrong. He still thinks he needs to make amends to Shouto as the number one hero, not as his fucking father!!
the nerve of this man
He doesn't even properly apologize or change his behaviour. He just sends flowers to Rei and acts like defeating more villains or teach his son a new technique will redeem him to Shouto. Like any of that has anything remotely to do with the emotional damage he's inflicted to his family.
The choice of only “apologizing” to Shouto and Rei is also definitely a deliberate point Horikoshi is trying to get across here.
Endeavor decided that Rei and Shouto are the only people he hurt, so they’re the only people he needs to make amends to. That’s already a glaring signal that he hasn’t understood the severity of the domestic abuse, and how he victimized Natsuo, Fuyumi and Touya too.
Both then and now, Shouto and Rei are used as the receptacles of his ambitions. The ambition to become the number one has just been replaced by the ambition to become a successful number one hero who is liked by his peers. In his mind, Shouto and Rei exist solely with the purpose of allowing him to be closer to that goal.
He completely fails to realize that he’s lacking as a hero because he lacks All Might’s compassion, that Shouto hates him because he is abusive, and that heroics isn’t all about raw strength, but also about heart.
The pro hero arc ended with Enji gaining the public’s faith by defeating High end. While that might’ve worked with the masses, though, it certainly did jack shit to redeem him to his actual victims.
Shouto still feels zero (0) sympathy for him, and that’s because he recognizes that his father has done exactly none of the emotional labour required to even be in a position to request forgiveness. All he did was defeat some strong enemy.
Now, to go back to the original question you asked me... (yes this detour was necessary to argue something later. Bear with me)
Enji is being set up to fail anyway
The second point of this essay is exactly what the title prefaces: there’s no way that Enji is going to get what he wants as long as he doesn’t actually change.
With Hori’s work to build up towards the reveal that Dabi is Touya that’s been hinted at with increasingly less subtlety these last few arcs, I’m pretty sure that Enji’s reputation is gonna take a turn for the gutter real soon.
I’ve written before (here) how hero society is full of flaws that affect not only villains, but also hero kids themselves, and how it would benefit from the kind of shock brought by the Todoroki Dabi reveal.
Quirk discrimination is a thing that gets brought up in canon enough times to be a major theme of the series, but it never gets discussed for long. We see it mostly mentioned in passing: how quirks are ranked based on flashiness or utility in combat situations. How the quirkless are basically invisible. How marginalised communities or people with ‘villainous’ powers are more likely to turn to villainy to survive.
Hawks is very conveniently introduced in the same arc that Enji gets a major focus, and he very conveniently comes from a background of poverty and neglect that he was only able to escape thanks to his “heroic” quirk. It’s almost as if he was put there to drive a point home about how most villains of the series are only villains of circumstance, or something. Hawks was “one bad day” away from becoming a villain, and that’s a fact that often gets brushed off. But I digress.
That’s why Endeavor’s policy of just punching up the bad guys won’t cut it against the League. Sure, he might defeat them and arrest them, but that won’t stop other villains from arising in their place. The lov (and thus Dabi) is made up of people who fell through the cracks of the hero system. It’s thanks to the heroes’ failures that they turned to crime, so fixing those mistakes is what will give back credibility to the hero system.
How does that relate to Endeavor specifically? Well...
Lately it’s been mentioned more and more how fellow heroes were inspired to do better by Endeavor’s win against High End. When Dabi will inevitably expose him, the system is going to be impacted by it.
Stain managed to change hero society a lot, and he had a lot less cameras pointed on him than the number one hero. If his ideology managed to resonate so much with people they started to self-reflect and then change things around accordingly, imagine exposing the hero who got away with domestic violence under everyone’s noses for more than twenty years, and then even reached the top spot in the rankings.
The hero commission is gonna have to answer for a loooooot of shit. Like allowing people like Enji to be in the hero business to begin with. Since I like to see the glass half full, I wanna believe that this will prompt the commission to require mandatory transparency to all the licensed pros; perhaps even some supervision; definitely another decrease in number of licences they give out every year.
So, the way I see it, Endeavor might get out of this one without a job, or... he might finally realize the impact of his actions on other people. He might finally be able to see his abuse of his family for what it is.
I’m of two minds when it comes to this, really.
The former option appeals to me because quite frankly, I’m not interested in a path of redemption for an abuser. But the latter simply makes a lot of sense narrative-wise.
Although I despise Enji with every fiber of my being and I want nothing more than see him disappear from his children’s and his wife’s life, I do think that the option of him “saving” Dabi might still be on the plate.
It would make sense with what Hori’s been setting up so far.
Let’s be real, so far Enji has no good reason to start thinking of himself as the bad guy. He just got what he always wanted, the number one position. Sure, it might not have felt satisfactory to him because he didn’t earn it, but he still got what he wanted. Why should he give it up?
Truth be told, a confrontation with Dabi is exactly the kind of wake-up call he needs to realize just how downright abusive he was to Touya, and how abusive he still is to his family. How strength means nothing when it’s used to hurt people. Dabi, a villain specifically born to confront Endeavor with his actions, could easily be the push he needs to realize that his mindset of “defeating villains” won’t do jack shit to atone in front of his family. Defeating Dabi won’t make him a better hero or a better symbol, but “saving” him could be a step in the right direction to make Endeavor a better human being.
He always lacked compassion; he always skipped the emotional labour required to truly show that he understood how abusive he was. How he’ll treat Dabi once he finds out that he’s his son will determine whether or not Endeavor is redeemable, or just too self-absorbed to understand that he’s the one who failed Touya and made him a villain of circumstance
Ok so random todoroki headcanon. He's a total early bird but not by choice and he hates it. He loves sleeping way too much. So his body wakes him up at the ass crack of dawn and he just lies face down in his pillow complaining internally until it's time to get up. Once he wakes up too, he can't go back to sleep. If you try to sleep past the time you naturally wake up too, it makes you sleep. So class 1-A has to deal with a grouchy and sleepy Todo every morning.
amazing content, 10/10 would read a fic of this
Todoroki: due to personal reasons, I will now pass out on my desk
Todoroki: *flops face-first like this cat while none of his classmates even questions it anymore*
