“ohhhh Shigaraki won’t forgive anyone so it’s okay that Izuku murders him —”
why should Shigaraki forgive society? seriously. his experience of society has been neglect and rejection. society decided he didn’t deserve to be saved at five years old.* society condemns his friends and allows the people who harm them to flourish.** every hero he’s encountered up until this point with the temporary exception of All Might has been 100% a-okay with the thought of killing him.*** he’s a victim of the same system that Izuku is slavishly devoted to. what is there for him to forgive?
*don’t give me that “it was all AFO” line, AFO didn’t puppet-master all those civilians to ignore him.
**nobody did anything about the Creature Rejection Clan except for the LoV. it’s explicitly stated that Twice picks up criminal charges and loses his job (and goes down the path to villainy) because he was punished for something that was someone else’s fault. because that person has privilege and he doesn’t.
***Izuku himself takes action that would lead to Shigaraki’s death at USJ if Nomu hadn’t intervened. does anybody teach these kids about appropriate force? similarly, everybody on the strike team at Jaku hospital is there with the express intent to kill Shigaraki. they don’t know what quirks he received or that Super-Regeneration is in play. They’re all there to kill him BEFORE they’re aware of any of that. Which other villain is that true for? Even AFO manages to get captured alive.
The pro heroes' bright, comforting costumes cover up child soldiers and other human rights abuses. It's like. an entire thing. The very laws of bnha's Japan encourage people to give up their civic responsibility for the spectacle of "heroes vs villains." This, too, is An Entire Thing.
I'm probably not the first to compare bnha's Bread and Circuses to The Hunger Games and other dystopian death game stories. The bread grants relative stability and the circuses, funnily enough, distract people with the very thing they try to distract them from. Both Bnha and THG frame the circuses as necessary to subjugate an "other" and keep it from taking the bread.
Bnha differs from similar dystopian media in an interesting way: The spectators watch from inside the arena. They're part of the game, they can die too. Their perceived safety being at risk makes the circus interesting. And even if they wanted to, they could not leave.
Transitioning spectators to participants makes up an entire industry. The civilian education system encourages children as young as three to lay their life on the line. Of course, they all want to. Every flashy hero fight is an advertisement and threat in one.
The villains look like voluntary participants too. People don't see the poverty, discrimination, abuse and loneliness that forces them into the spotlight.
This set-up gives plausible deniability that anything is "set-up" at all. Bnha's circuses are entirely manufactured and authentic at the same time.
Stain's or the MLA's popularity and the widespread criticism of heroes during the final war show the fragile balance of entertainment, complacency and fear. But the realness of it keeps most people from turning off the TV and asking themselves what the Fuck they just saw.
Shouting at your spiraling child after completely stripping them from any kind of identity and then proceeding to shut them out completely is not good parenting, actually.
(Aka: explaining Enji’s abuse towards Touya)
Enji’s abuse towards Touya is often reduced to a simplistic argument by the fandom: Enji told Touya to stop training, Touya refused, and therefore Touya is the sole responsible for his own ‘death’ and suffering. But this argument fails both morally and psychologically. Touya’s self-destructive tendencies were not born out of ‘defiance’ or ‘stubbornness’, they were manufactured through years of ideological indoctrination, emotional conditioning, identity abuse, and parental neglect.
From the very beginning, Touya’s existence was shaped by Enji’s eugenicist worldview. Enji never laid the foundations for a loving family, he laid the foundations in order to create a successor. His marriage with Rei was completely transactional (never mind the fact that he bought as if she where an asset and not a human to sexually exploit her), built on the idea that combining their quirks could create an heir capable of surpassing All Might. That’s textbook eugenics right there: engineering a specific situation to produce a ‘perfect’ child by selecting partners for their genetics rather than other factors like genuine love or care, turning a marriage into a breeding program. The moment Touya’s quirk manifested, his body and said quirk were no longer his own, they became an instrument for Enji to accomplish his ambition. Touya had never been seen as a person or child, but as a means to an end (all the Todoroki children had been dehumanized that exact way, actually). Touya’s value was never inherent. It was conditional and based exclusively on his physical performance. That alone makes Enji not a good father from the very beginning.
This conditioning led to what can be best described as identity abuse (not sure if that’s the actual definition/term, but it is how I’ll be referring to it). Enji builds Touya’s entire identity to revolve around his own selfish dream: surpassing All Might. Touya is being told that his existence and value as a person is completely tied to whether he’ll accomplish that goal or not, and as a result, every personal desire or aspiration he might have is dismissed or reshaped to fit that imposed purpose, leaving him unable to form a sense of self independent of Enji’s ambitions. He doesn’t exist outside that goal.
Touya is taught that being loved means progressing and training harder, becoming stronger. He isn’t deserving of love and care because he exists as a person, but because of his achievements. When Enji later tells Touya to stop training after discovering the incompatibility of his body to his flames, the psychological damage has already been done. The order to just “stop” can’t undo years of emotional and psychological indoctrination that had made him equate success with affection.
After his body fails, Enji doesn’t replace Touya’s old purpose with a new one. He doesn’t help rebuild his son’s concept of identity, and neither does he reassure him of unconditional love. Quite the opposite, actually. He withdraws and completely shuts Touya out. Touya is left with a specific message: the reason he existed is no longer valid, he failed. That’s not good parenting, like a lot seem to claim, that’s straight up abandonment. Telling a child to stop pursuing the only identity trait they have ever been allowed to possess is psychological erasure, not “concern”.
This argument of ‘Enji told Touya to stop’ completely collapses when looked at through a psychological trauma lens. Children don’t develop values and attitudes on their own. They mirror the habits and behaviors imposed on them by, you guessed it, their parents (or the closest figure to a parent that they may have). Touya continuing to train in secret is a survival response. He is not disobeying his father out of “rebellion”, he is just desperately attempting to reclaim his place in his father’s world after being taught that success was all that mattered.
Enji is pretty much aware that Touya’s quirk is self-destructive and dangerous, both to himself and those around. He also has access to the highest medical resources in hero society (hell,he was literally THE #2 Pro Hero at the time!), and yet he gives Touya no safety gear, nor access to any kind of support system (like therapy, for example). Touya is left alone with a body that burns itself, with nothing but a warning that literally contradicts a lifetime of indoctrination. That is negligence towards Touya’s emotional and physical needs.
Like we all know, Shoto’s birth was the main catalyst of Touya’s mental spiraling. And that’s because Shoto isn’t introduced to Touya as a brother, but as a replacement. He embodies all that Touya isn’t and that Enji searches for. Touya isn’t given a new role within his father’s world wither, he gets completely shut out and replaced. In a way, Shoto's existence confirms Touya’s deepest fear: he is no longer needed, and therefore not wanted by his father. Touya doesn’t just lose his father’s approval, he also loses his reason for existing. Enji builds Touya into a tool, discards him when he ‘fails’, and then acts surprised when the discarded child attempts to destroy himself (and those around) trying to become useful again.
Claiming that Enji was a ‘good father’ to Touya, or that Touya (a spiraling five year old with no support system or guidance) was the issue all along completely misses the entire nature of their relationship and quite literally goes against canon material. Enji is and has always been the sole responsible for all of the Todoroki family’s problems. Shifting the blame towards the others (literally the exact same thing that Enji does before the ‘atonement arc’ that everyone claims is the ‘best written’ part of the entire anime) goes to show how many of you Enji fans don’t even understand your favorite character.
I fucking love the different relationship Bakugou and Todoroki have with anger. On the one hand we have Todoroki who at the start of the story was closed off and the only emotion he clearly showed was anger. But having been a victim of his father's anger all his life he views the emotion negatively, so his bursts of anger are impulsive and fade quickly because of how much he associates it with the hurt his family has been through. And with his anger inevitably comes out all his frustration and hurt. It’s no coincidence that Midoriya first saw Todoroki’s hurt at the Sports Festival after he froze the whole stadium in a burst of anger directed at his father. But at the same time he uses the emotion as a weapon against his father, when the anger is projected towards and against Endeavor it becomes the only emotion Shouto allows himself to feel, canceling in a way the guilt he feels for being angry.
And then we have Bakugou who in a way uses his anger to show all his range of emotions. Every time he cries, he’s frustrated, there’s always a layer of anger under the surface, because feeling anger comforts him. For Bakugou anger is an overall positive emotion that helps him to understand and release all his other feelings. It's the emotion he processes best and the one that helps him process all his other emotions. His anger can be grounding, it can be the brust of energy he needs to keep going whether it's a fight or something else, it can be a force to fight against to discover his true feelings. It guides him, if he manages to control and own it. When he shows anger or is aggressive if we pay close enough attention we can see that it's protecting himself from letting others see what he's really feeling.
Bakugou uses anger to hide his true feelings from others. Todoroki uses anger to hide his true feelings from himself.
You know, I think this ending would have been slightly less of a fucking disappointment if the heroes hadn't been so unfairly favored by Horikoshi compared to the villains. I mean, seriously
Deku destroys every bone in his body multiple times throughout the story and is warned that if he continues, he'll permanently lose the use of his limbs ? Everything's fine, his body's just got used to being reduced to a bloody pulp somehow so there's no consequences for him. In fact even when he literally loses his arms to Shigaraki, he gets them back two minutes later thanks to Eri because guess what ? Her horn still works even when cut off from her body. How convenient.
Gran Torino gets his ribcage obliterated by Shigaraki ? Don't worry guys, he'll survive that despite his old age and injuries, and this to have no particular role in the plot afterwards.
Bakugo dies heroically trying to buy time before Deku arrives ? Lmao, did you really believe it ?? No of course not, Edgeshot just uses his last-minute Deus Ex Machina to save his life at the cost of his own and- Oops nope he's fine too, my bad !
Hawks murders a criminal fleeing for his life in cold-blood ? The best Hori has to offer is him completely free and in charge of the HSPC.
And no, losing his quirk isn't a real consequence for him because not only it literally played a major part in saving the world with Vestige!Hawks raising an insurrection among AFO's quirks, but also because his quirk has always been the element through which people exploited him.
Endeavor abused his family for years and completely destroyed his eldest son ? No jail time and no media backlash for that, the only blame he received was due to the heroes' failure to stop the League during the Raid Arc.
And don't even get me started on this bs about facing hell or whatever for what he's done : He's literally free and wealthy ; he has Rei, Fuyumi, Shoto, his sidekicks and Hawks on his side ; and all the difficulties he's apparently going to suffer are off-screened.
Deku had to sacrifice OFA and his future hero career to save the world ? Guess what, Bakugo invested all his time and money to make him an Iron-Man suit and now he can still be a hero with everyone else.
There are plenty more examples of this but I think you get the idea. Now let's take a look at the villains' ending :
Toya is now a piece of charcoal kept artificially alive for the few years he has left, unable to move a finger, and whose few minutes a day during which he can stay awake will be spent talking to his father who abused him as a child.
Toga, a literal teenager, killed herself to save Ochako and because she knew it's still better than rotting at Tartarus her whole life.
And not only did she die but she did by bleding to death. Let me repeat for those who have trouble grasping what I've just said : In a manga where the heroes can survive having their heart blown to bits, being impaled Kakyoin-style or smashed against buildings like a fly on a windshield, one of the main antagonists died of a fucking hemorrhage…
As for Shigaraki, after learning that his very birth and all the tragedies of his life have been orchestrated by AFO, after all this development and narrative promises about him being saved in the end... Deku just kills him.
Because despite all his speeches about saving him, it seems like the best our MC could do was beating him both physically and mentally until he crumbles to dust…
Compress on his side is apparently locked up for life and kept alive by machines too.
A begging Kurogiri tried in a desperate attempt to save Shigaraki, only to be unceremoniously blown up by Bakugo and dying off-screen without anyone giving a shit, including Aizawa and Mic.
And Spinner will now spend the rest of his life struggling with the extra quirks inside him that affect his body and mind, while having to cope with the thought that his boyfriend best friend and companions have either died alone or are locked away for life in horrifying circumstances.
Clearly not the same as with the heroes...
Now don't get me wrong, even if they suffered just as much from the consequences of their actions or the plot as the League, this ending would still be a disaster in terms of writing but AT LEAST it wouldn't reek that much of hypocrisy.
Ok here the hot ask: does shig has any canonical beliefs? Bc to me, and I blame Hori,he is just a man, a puppet of afo who is shouting he will destroy all. MVA is a great arc but it cements to me how shig only thinks his worth is tied on destruction.
Saw many back and forth about how shig wanted to created a society for LoV. And sigh, I may be alone one this, but a society for villains is not as cool as some fans think ....it means crime is legal. (I have saw people, linked to politics, wanting to do that, the people weren't happy)
I can't see shig as a revolutionary, at least not without Izu. Strangely enough, I can see they working: Izu wants to help people, Shig wants to destroy...destroy HC and make smth better.
But shig with canon LoV? No. He is just destruction.
To me, the way I see it: shig never had an ideology aside "destroy all" hori never allows it, same how Izu never changes it. Shig can't change, bc the villain can't be right, not by this conservative writer with very conservative ideas (shocked he didn't went and say how doing crimes against humanity is not that bad in his manga! Bc why not? His message is awful as it is)
Shig never saw a future for himself.
Shig never had a chance. Afo all along makes sure to clear all the civilians who didn't help Shig ....bc if they did afo would have killed.
Shig is a puppet first and foremost. Even if afo is clearly not giving a fuck about him...the puppet remains.
I just think Shig is dumb, has to be dumb.
This is not hate towards him. I do think he had potential to explore in fics, but in canon...I just feel bad for him, but he is a punching bag of the author as Izu is too.
Shigaraki IS a revolutionary.
The thing about revolutions is that they don't necessitate you build something after doing it.
It's just that when you make the decision to do one, you decide that what currently exists is so intolerable that you must tear it all down.
It could be decades, as history has shown, before something better, if at all, is built in its place.
His goal was destruction. He'd tear down everything except what his allies wanted preserved.
In practice, this probably meant he'd have spared a section of Japan with cities and farms, took out all of the heroes, and then chilled.
It's anarchy, but it's anarchy he rules. He and his friends are on top.
The MLA people folding into his group gave him an "after." It's full of professionals and people with resources who could move into the places he emptied out. They become the new ruling class because they're the strongest and have his favor.
We, sadly, don't get to see what ELSE he was thinking because he spends so much of his time possessed.
His point, and the League's point, is that the society they lived in rejected them.
Discrimination, in the case of Spinner.
A criminal record ruining his life, for Twice.
Compress never believed in the system I guess.
Toga suffered quirk repression until she has a psychotic break and then went from there once unleashed.
Touya is the product of eugenics and was created as a monument to the corruption and a desire to beat a single man.
Shigaraki himself is the result of being abused in his home, with his dad doing so because he was traumatized at his mother dying.
Even if we take AFO out of the equation with Shigaraki's absolutely ridiculous backstory with this guy planning out everything.
Kotaro still abused him. And Kotaro did it because he was maladjusted after Nana Shimura died. There was NO help for Kotaro. There was no punishment for Kotaro when he hurt his family. He lived in a society that, as it dealt with Kota, would tell him that his mother died heroically and for the benefit of society. They glorify his mother's death even though the hero system cost him both of his parents.
Does this justify his abusive behavior? No. But hero society creates lots of Kotas, lots of Kotaros. And has zero protocols for how to deal with them beyond telling them to suck it up.
People DID ignore Tenko as he walked down the street. Society saw a bleeding boy who looked "creepy" in their eyes and ignored him, thinking he was someone else's problem.
Now, would AFO have killed anyone who did try to help him? Absolutely. Garaki stated that he can alter memories. AFO would have engineered Tenko's walk so that it turned out exactly as he needed it to.
But he didn't have to. The bystander effect was in full effect for Tenko. None of those people were AFO plants or controlled by AFO or AFO in disguise. Just everyday citizens who saw a child in need and kept walking.
The people Shigaraki associates with are the dregs of society. The people who exist to be fodder for heroes to beat up.
I'll actually approach this in a direction other people don't talk about.
Hero society is a death cult. Or, if you'd prefer a different term, an institutional death spiral. Or a permanent branding.
Which is to say, the pipeline is as follows:
Commit a crime and get a conviction (even a minor one, as we saw in Twice's example and with Gentle Criminal) -> Become unable to work because of your criminal record -> Turn to crime -> Get arrested -> Be branded a villain -> No one will rent to you or hire you and people also vandalize your home -> go back to crime -> get arrested -> repeat until you either: kill yourself, get killed by a villain, get killed by a hero, get arrested and end up in tartarus for life, or be executed by the state. To be a villain is to eventually be killed. Your life is over at your first conviction.
The rare few who manage to break that cycle only do so if they can solve the economic issue there. They need food, shelter, and a job.
But hero society isn't actually designed to fix any of this.
The system is setup for more and more people to become heroes. Which requires more villains. If there are fewer villains, it means less work and less money for heroes. You struggle to rank up with fewer villains.
So why would hero society want to reduce the number of villains?
You have to think about the fact that this is a business and heroes are products.
How many other businesses run on the backs of heroes? Analysts, managers, support gear engineers and companies, prison owners, sponsors, merch producers, politicians.
Reduce the amount of income to heroes, and what happens to all of them? The money starts to dry up.
Something else you have to understand which MHA acknowledges in practice but would never state out loud, is that the most powerful man in the world is not Izuku or All Might. It's a man in a suit who controls Izuku and All Might. Men in suits control the world. Men in suits tell them what to do, who to fight, and what the laws are.
Heroes are tools of the state and they enforce the state's will. The only time the League struck at the right target was when that Redestro clone blew up the HPSC. And then, not really. The HPSC aren't the government. They're a government agency. Killing Madam President is not assassinating the Prime Minister.
The PM can just assign a new leader, and presumably did: Hawks.
The series has the League focus on Heroes, but the League could have collapsed society within a day if they did a terror attack on a diet meeting. Take out the head of state and all the big decision makers, and what happens? There's not even anyone left to declare martial law. No one knows what to do. The heroes don't get paid anymore. The country descends into tribalism as heroes defend only their own territories while they wait for orders that aren't coming.
That's how they could have won, and it's precisely why it would never happen in this series. It's an attack heroes are entirely unequipped to handle.
I showed you my essay before.
https://www.tumblr.com/lacunammmm/793227125744418816/examining-the-premise-of-hero-society-can-you
The way you solve crime is by investing in social safety net programs.
If Twice could have gotten a job, he would not have been a criminal. Let that sink in. If the government had assigned Twice a job after his legal troubles and he could work a 9 to 5, then one of the greatest super villains of all time would still be a courier. Or a postal worker.
In a world where mutant discrimination was punished properly, Spinner would be a regular guy. In a world with better mental health care and where crazy people like Toga's parents aren't allowed to demonize her quirk, Toga is a regular high school girl.
Are there still going to be some people who become villains? Yes. But the number is greatly reduced.
All For One himself wouldn't have been the demon lord if his homeless teenage prostitute mother hadn't died down by the river by herself giving birth.
If he grew up with a normal life without discrimination, he'd have still been a self serving man. But becoming the ultimate super villain? Traveling to another continent to assassinate someone just because he was upset people liked the glowing baby more? Deciding to LARP as a comic book character since he likes being feared and respected? No.
Most likely he'd have been a more mundane or banal evil. Or he'd have become a hero and been used as an instrument of the state to control the quirked. What better deterrent is there, to quirked criminals, than a man who can take your power away and use it against other people?
There wouldn't be any One For All, that's for sure. Hero society would never do this. Its focus is on creating more heroes. Demonstrably, heroes do not prevent crime, they react to crime.
After All Might's retirement, there were more heroes than ever before at that exact moment, and yet, a crime wave started because All Might wasn't a hero anymore. All Might was the crime deterrent. The other heroes were not.
Well, up until the narrative cheats and decides to gift the heroes an unearned utopian victory where magically crime has become rare despite them changing nothing.
So, in a better story, Shigaraki would lay out what I just described. He can't, because opponents of hero society have to be unreasonable or blatantly evil. The system can't handle valid criticism that isn't instantly walked back or superficially solved.
I believe I talked about somewhere else how Shigaraki exists to be scaled to the level of the story where he has to lose to 15 and 16 year old children.
So he needs to be a problem that can solve. His ideals are simplistic, his strength can be countered, and everything can go back to normal after he's defeated.
Your instincts about Izuku working with Shigaraki track. Because Izuku himself never self actualizes.
Izuku Midoriya does not work to be the best Izuku Midoriya, Deku, he can be. He's trying to be All Might all the way to the end. He finishes the series' final battle in an All Might t-shirt. Because the series is telling us that All Might's ideology is correct.
Izuku can't grow up, he can't be his own person, he can't question anything and he can't change, not himself or the world around him. Because becoming a better Izuku means becoming more than the system. It means doing something different.
The system doesn't want to change. Izuku's goal is to be a pillar: which is to say, he wants to maintain the status quo exactly as it is.
This is why his character stagnates at around the sports festival.
He doesn't have anymore growing to do because he's a complete character. A fake paragon archetype.
He wants to BE the state. Its ideals are his ideals. He questions nothing and wants to change nothing because society is already perfect.
He's the good boy victim who was rewarded via nepotism, by the ultimate state actor and chief commander, All Might, and given a seat at the table.
Why does he never think about or seem to care about the quirkless? Because the status quo doesn't. They're completely irrelevant. Sociey does not venerate anything about the quirkless. They are non-factors.
Being quirkless was just a flaw he solved so now he can be a hero. It's set dressing for his backstory. With his problem fixed, now he can be a hero.
So when you think that they should save society together, it's you completing the circuit.
Shigaraki, with his god like power and access to immense resources and talent, finds something worth creating after the destruction.
And Izuku takes a look at the world he lives in and decides he wants to do better than All Might.
Izuku is the system's perfect heir. Shigaraki is its ultimate reject. For them to collaborate, one would have to fundamentally betray their core: Izuku would have to critique the institution, or Shigaraki would have to seek to reform it. The narrative cannot allow either.
This is why they could never be friends or understand each other in canon, and why Shigaraki could not be saved.
To justify his entire existence, and that of the universe he lives in, suffused with a conservative, authoritarian worldview where the institution is sacred and the only acceptable change is a change of personnel within it, Izuku must kill Shigaraki.
i don't like the growing opinion that people are being 'too hard' on deku for his failing to save shigaraki.
i've seen quite a few people complaining that a lot of the bnha-critical crowd are being too mean to deku for getting tomura killed, arguing that it isn't really his fault, and that hes a 16 year old child soldier who's been failed by almost every adult in his life, why should we be putting all of this on his shoulders? hes just a kid after all?
and the truth is, they're right. deku IS a 16 year old boy whos had the fate of the world thrust on his shoulders. but the story itself just plainly refuses to acknowledge this.
the narrative doesn't acknowledge how fucked up having a school that trains literal children how to be combo cop-celebrities is. it only tentatively acknowledges the fact that a universe having combo cop-celebrities is fucked up, and even then the only people who ever point this out are antagonists, who are portrayed and treated in-universe as untrustworthy. the narrative doesn't care how fucked up dekus circumstances are. the narrative treats deku like hes a fucking messiah here to touch the hearts of the evil depressed villains with his magical empathetic heart of gold before they get blown up or just sent to fucking superhell for daring to challenge the status quote.
deku isn't a person. he's barely even a fucking character at this point. he's a plot device, and a mouth piece for the objectively shitty themes bnha is trying to spout. the themes that tell you that if you're mistreated by society and want to do something about it, you're a villain. that disrupting the status quote and refusing to repent to some random teenage boy spouting empty platitudes at you means you deserve to get sent to fucking superhell. the themes that portray people fighting for civil change as mass murdering supervillains. the themes that look the audience dead in the eye and can call deku the greatest hero to ever live.
deku, who barely spared a second thought to lady nagant telling him the truth about the hero commission. who spouts meaningless platitudes about heroism and morality at nagant, and aoyama, and toga and shigaraki, when even the thought that he should question the world around him comes up. who's constantly talked about as this truly kind, empathetic person, but hasn't spared an empathetic thought to literally anyone who is classified as a villain. who listened to every authority figure around him except the ones who asked him to question his worldview. who saw la bravas tears, shigarakis various breakdowns, himikos plead for understanding, chisakis catatonic state, lady nagants truth, and barley batted a fucking eye. deku, who killed tomura shigaraki.
people don't criticize deku for failing shigaraki because they just hate deku. people criticize deku because of what he represents. because hes a mouthpiece for the atrocious morals and themes of this ideologically rotten manga. because any character he had was chopped up to bits in favor of the incomplete husk we have now. people criticize deku because hes the main character of my hero academia. theres nothing more damning then that.
About Dabi, I love body modification, when I saw all his piercings, I loved it. He has a quadruple helix on each ear and a triple nostril, so I assumed the rest were piercings too. And that Vol.21 Back Cover art really looked like piercing to me. But getting into the fandom, I saw that people call them staples or medical staples, which made me think I misunderstood. Are medical staples in Japan different? Has it ever been explained in the manga or interviews what he actually has on his body?
Hum...
I seem to remember reading a translation of an interview/note in which Horikoshi mentioned how Dabi's staple were iconic and this reflected in his clothes too but I can't find it at the moment so I can't check if I can find the Japanese text and what it exactly said.
I do know the Japanese fandom, to talk about them calls them 'STAPLE' (ステープル) or 'HOTCHIKISU hari' (ホッチキス針 "stapler's pin") or 'HOCHIKISU ato' (ホチキス跡 "staple marks/signs") and I do know there are multiple instances in which Touya's face/skin is referred as a 'TSUGIHAGI' (ツギハギ/継ぎ接ぎ "patchwork"), the implication being those staples hold it together in a way that is similar at how Delores, Beetlejuice's soul-sucking ex-wife, stapled her dismembered body parts back together using an industrial stapler, leaving visible, thick staple stitches throughout the film.
It is also worth mentioning Frankenstein's monster in some movies also had staples (this time they are likely surgical staples) holding it together and Touya's look was also inspired to Frankenstain.
Anyway, are Touya's staples 'piercing staples'' or 'surgical staples'?
I don't know.
The color doesn't help as both types can be silver (like in the anime) or gold (like in Horikoshi's illustrations) in color.
We know that after the first war Dabi switched the position of the ones on his hand as the burns on it increased. Since both surgical and piercing staples need to be set by professionals they are likely fictional staples that can be and can do whatever you want.
Still, since those staples have the purpose to hold together Touya's skin, I guess I would more likely go for surgical staples than for piercings, as piercings have more an aesthetic purpose, while he has them because he needs them for a purpose.
On the other side the image on chap 300, when he is starting on moving them, might even be of him holding a piercing...
...though the image is unclear and it might be me seeing things, mixing up lines that are meant to represent something else since either Horikoshi forgot to blacken a part of the image or Touya's hand is drawn wrong or he is holding something bigger than a staple/piercing.
The anime doesn't help as he is holding nothing in it, just touching his own hand.
So who knows? Maybe they are all ring piercings like the ones in his ears. Maybe they are staple piercings. Maybe they are surgical staples. Maybe they are just staples which would be much easier to find than the ones mentioned above.
I couldn't really find a canon source I can't really tell you what they should be. If someone has more info I would apprecciate it if they were to share them with me!
Sorry if I couldn't help you more and thank you for your ask!
