Gran Torino and the Legacy of Dehumanisation
Oh boy. Time to make another sect of bnha fans hate me. These are always fun- and always seem to come after I browse the bnha spoilers tag.
So after the 281 spoilers hit, once again, the fandom seems to have been divided into two very vocal camps - those who are celebrating GT’s death, and those who are offended that anyone would dare do such a thing. The former hated GT (and in some cases Miruko, too) for being openly degrading towards Shigaraki, labelling him an ‘it’, a ‘thing’ or a ‘monster’, and the latter say... well of course he did. Shigaraki is a monster. He’s violent, destructive, aggressive, he’s purposefully modified his body in order to destroy, he’s the villain. And we can’t hate on a beloved mentor character for being mean to a villain.
Now, my own opinions on the situation are... very meh. I wasn’t particularly invested in GT’s character, I held no particular affection for him, but neither did I virulently hate him. That being said, I do think there are some very interesting things to think about in regards to the whole debacle and people’s reactions to it.
To an extent, I do think that a certain amount of it is played up for kicks, or happened as a result of a subset of the community playing hype-man for each other until a tiny gripe became a massive point of contention, but more than that I think a lot of it boils down to what the villains (specifically the LOV) represent to the reader. The LOV seem to have separated the hero stans and the villain stans more than any other bit of media I’ve been a part of the fandom for, and seem to be the source of a lot of these conflicts (see: Hawks v Twice, Dabi v Endeavour). And I think that is largely because Horikoshi has put so much effort into humanising them. I’ve mentioned before in an offhand way about how of course the LOV resonate with people, they’re a bunch of young adults who are considered to be some form of ‘degenerate’ by the general populace, who are dissatisfied with a corrupt system and want to see the perpetrators held accountable for the suffering they’ve experienced. They’re a perfect microcosm of all us LGBT+ kids, us poor kids, us disabled kids, us POC, all the young adults who feel like society would rather see us locked up or dead than simply existing as we are. Of course, they’re also wilfully violent, and fictional violence is a contentious point these days. Some find it unforgivable, some find it justified, some might be living out a power fantasy about hurting their own oppressors through it, and some simply don’t care, because a fictional murderer never actually killed anyone. So now you’ve got groups of people who dislike the villains because they’re violent and aggressive, groups of people who sympathise with the villains but can’t justify their actions, and groups of people who both sympathise with the villains and consider their actions a reasonable response to the abuse they’ve gone through.
And now we come back to Gran Torino. The beloved mentor of All Might, the man who taught Deku to use his power without breaking himself, the living proof of a legacy of heroism. The thing is that I think he represents something very interesting. Where Endeavour is the epitome of the corrupt system, where All Might is the accidental arbiter of complacency, where Izuku is the hope for a better, more compassionate future, Gran Torino is the visual representation of tradition. He’s a classically successful hero, he was fairly well-known back in his day, he took down a fair few villains in his time, and he lived to train not just his own successor, but his successor’s successor. He’s been kicking villain butt since his early years. I’ve seen people getting angry that GT seems to blame Shigaraki for villainous doings that are not his fault (see also: Mic/Eraser blaming Shigaraki for what happened to Shirakumo), and I think that’s because he didn’t view Shigaraki as an individual with the capacity for right or wrong, he viewed him as a symptom. A symptom of that disease called villainy, the one to blame for the suffering of the people he cared about - Toshinori and Nana. Nana didn’t give up her son because she was a heartless mother, or because she didn’t love him. She was forced to because of a villain. To the heroes, ‘villains’ are an angry, violent monolith that needs to be dealt with, and individual villains are symptoms of that intangible evil.
To him, Shigaraki isn’t a hurt child, an abuse victim, a person to sympathise with. He’s an immediate threat, and a synthetic monster put together by AfO and Ujiko to act on that villainy. He’s a boss fight. And no one feels bad when they’re kicking a boss’s ass, because that’s just what you’re meant to do.
And so to circle back, I think that’s where the divide comes from. On one side, you’ve got people seeing Shigaraki the villain, Shigaraki the threat, the aggressor, the boss fight. And on the other you’ve got people seeing Shigaraki the victim.
And the thing is? He’s both. And for as long as the characters in universe fail to see the root causes of villainy rather than seeing villainy as the root cause itself, they’re going to keep creating new villains themselves. Because how many of us, given superpowers and the ability to change the world around us, would become villains in the name of bettering society for ourselves? Violence for the sake of violence isn’t acceptable, but dehumanising the violent and stripping away the environment that cultivated them won’t do anything except perpetuate the cycle.
So was Gran Torino a bad person for attacking Shigaraki? No. Was he wrong to dehumanise him, and doing harm by doing so? Yes. Once again, as most of these things I write seem to come to the conclusion of, the answer is somewhere in the middle.
