#horikoshi critical

[suchusoid]

Sadly Hot take:

A writer woobifying abusers does not make a story nuanced. It just makes the writer an abuse apologist.

[0ceanray3]

I love how Mha shows us how flawed hero society is only to act as though all of its problems were fixed after the main antagonists died.

“The outlaws of society died, so everyone can go back to ignoring all that lead them into war in the first place!”

Quirk/less discrimination, Heteromorph discrimination, the HPSC grooming children to do their dirty work, civilians refusing to step in because they put so much faith in heroes, false heroes who only saved others for recognition or status. None of that mattered in the long run.

[mysticpentagram]

Tartarus existance makes Hero Society undefendable

The existance of Tartarus is one of the things that makes the Pro Heroes look the worst.

Like, this isn't your standard "comic book super prison" for the most dangerous criminals.

Were its just a normal prison, so still not a good place to be, but super hard to escape.

This is explicitly a place were they send people not because they are extremely dangerous, but to make them suffer and abuse them, for "defying society" or something.

Stain is just a dude good with swords and knives, he dosen't wins straight fights, he is an ambush predator. So max security isn't necessary for him, since his Quirk is not that dangerous.

He was sent to Tartarus to make an exemple of him.

Same with Overhaul, without his hands and Quirk, and with his gang disbanded, he was just a Quirkless and emotionaly wrecked disabled man with serious mental issues.

He was not a danger to anybody anymore, except himself.

They sent him to Tartarus to make an exemple of him.

Lady Nagant was sent there to silence her after she turned against the HPSC, and they even framed her for crimes she didn't actualy commit!

Such blatant human rights violations are completely outside what we see the "good guys" of any other story do.

Like, the only worse thing i can think of is Azkaban from Harry Potter.

And that is because its explicitly the ONLY prison, were they send even petty criminals to be tortured psychologicaly and spiritualy.

How am i supposed to side with Hero Society knowing this stuff?

Like, Tartarus is worse than anything we see most of the Villains do on screen.

Only Overhaul and Garaki with their experiments can compare.

Even Shigaraki mass murders look tame in comparsion to "hell prison to torture political dissidents and criminals for the rest of their lives"

[fandomluver-101]

The whole "Touya's perfect world has no Shoto" doesn't upset nor disappoint me because it's accurate to the mental state of a traumatized and horribly abused and groomed person.

Why would Shoto exist in his "perfect world" where his father never replaced him? Because I think people, namely Endeavor stans, forget that Shoto legit only exists because Endeavor deemed Touya a "failure" and decided to try again with his eugenics bullshit. For Touya, the conception and birth of Shoto was the end of his own existence - because also remember that Touya was not raised as a child, but as a tool for Endeavorl to live vicariously through.

The reality is that no version of Touya sans one raised by a decent family wouldn't imagine a world without Shoto. Fuyumi and Natsuo weren't replacements, they were products of Endeavor wanting multiple backups (there's a reason the age gap between Touya and Fuyumi is eleven months). Shoto was his replacement, Shoto marked him having no use.

And instead of taking that out on Touya/Dabi, how about you guys go at Endeavor for causing that level of trauma.

[cherrycloy]

Bnha's pseudo-cop copaganda is quite basic: Miruko kicks to kill, Gran Torino refers to criminals as 'its' and Eraserhead interrogates with torture. The likeable heroes protect the likeable villains from Endeavor but never report the man himself. The schools teach violence first and safety second.

However beneath the obvious, there's a second, less obvious layer.

Now, I believe that the premise of one group having more rights to enact violence than others is fundamentally rotten. But, I've seen irl police violence and it feels contrived to compare Aizawa breaking Dabi's arm after he tries to kill him and admits to the Vanguard Action Squad targeting the students to peaceful protestors being beaten and pepper sprayed, officers shooting unarmed civillians and escalating conflict into needless violence.

To achieve this effect, Horikoshi decided to have every major activist or group vying for societal change escalate to violence first.

Stain sends his message by murdering and disabling the heroes he deems fake. The League was genuinely wronged by society but try to bring a new world order through raw destruction and fear. The MLA's leaders are quirk supremacists who kill and torture to reach their goals and eventually ally with the League.

Even small time goons feel no remorse trying to kill 15 year olds and white collar criminals like robbers possess black market high-tech or are inhuman blobs who kill children bodysnatcher style.

The notable exception from this pattern, Jin's death, goes out of its way to frame the responsible hero as downright villainous.

Bnha presents a world in which the cops are in the right most of the time and called out when they aren't. We're not only told to tolerate police violence, we're shown over and over again that it's necessary, because the [insert marginalized group/political opponents] are out out to kill you. It literally reflects irl police training methods.

Vigilantes, while still flawed, paints a more realistic picture: The heroes' violence is frequently portrayed as unjust, excessive and frightening. Fatgum beats up a man for making him drop his food and well. Endeavour is a monster with zero regard for human life and often 'villains', either victims or genuine small time criminals, don't instigate but instead react to the heroes' violence.

[viewer-02]

Why the Quirk Singularity disappoints me

The Quirk Singularity could have been this amazing biological ticking time bomb, but Hori....sidelined it. Quirks via mixing and breeding, would get exponentially stronger to the point where the human body likely wouldn't be able to handle it. The younger the kid, the stronger the Quirk. How do you fight your own DNA? Your own Quirk? You can't punch DNA or a Quirk (usually), so how would you fight it? Gene therapy? Mandated Quirk supressors? Anti-Quirk marriages to dilute Quirk genes?

Horikoshi gave us potential glimpses of what the Singularity could look like—Dabi's body failing, Shigaraki's decay evolving, Eri's uncontrollable rewind—but by keeping the Singularity as background lore, he avoided having to dismantle the classic superhero genre he was working in.

He set it up and abandoned it. And that's just bad writing.

At least Vigilantes is smaller scale and more contained. Trigger is simpler and easier to manage thematically.

[legendary-lunatic]

One of my pet peeves is when people cite Touya attacking Shouto as something that makes Touya inherently bad or unhinged.

Like, that was a literal child that was hurt and being systematically abused and targeted to feel intense jealousy by having his world foundation ripped out from under him.

Real, normal kids get jealous of their siblings and even try to punch each other and stuff all the time when they get upset, and in a world of quirks do we really think Touya is the only one that lashed out with his quirk? I really don’t think he was thinking about some long term scheme of erasing his competition so much as he was overwhelmed by his parents intentionally trying to replace him.

That was a single volatile moment of immense injustice and frustration that he even felt guilty about later. There are plenty of kids in this series shown using their quirks to do malicious shit- Exhibit A: Bakugou using his quirk on Izuku unprompted.

Touya was not being outright sadistic, nor was he an inherently violent child- he was a child having an emotional breakdown. That’s entirely different and a completely reasonable response for a Kid to the helllhole his parents were creating for him.

———

Touya was raised by his father to equate training with parental bonding, and love as conditional on his quirk- Shouto in that aspect is the clear favorite, and it’s everything Touya wants to be. And that’s not his fault, it’s Endeavor’s.

I think it’s ridiculous for so many fans, many of which should have some sort of mature thought process by now, to expect a young child to make objective rational decisions when his worldview at such a young age is entirely built by his parents, not to mention expectations of heroic legacy supported by other kids his age as well as society on the firstborn son. Which he states he feels, even though the conflict is about his neglect not heroics. DONT misconstrue Enji’s ambition for Touya’s, it was never about heroics for him, it was about being abandoned and made to feel broken. He was learning to feel self hatred and lack of meaning because he knew he was a product of Eugenics for a purpose, and he just wanted to be loved and validated.

His worldview is narrow and his emotions are volatile because that’s how he was raised to be, and it’s absurd that people blame him for not making adult choices in moments of high stress instead of his abusive father, who should have been looking out for him, or his mother, who should have took action for him (that’s a whole other debate, she can be both a victim and an enabler.)

It Grinds. My. Gears.

If you think Touya was the only child to lash out with his quirk in a world where CHILDREN have super powers, you’re off your rocker. That doesn’t make him bad. He certainly needed therapy, as does the rest of his family, but to hold a kid to adult rationale or not at least understand how him having a moment of frustration is a clear cause and effect on an adolescent psyche, just displays ignorance and negligence towards mental health and child development. Especially for a traumatized kid who knows he’s being targeted by injustice. Of course he lashed out.

It wasn’t planned, it was an emotional flare up by a CHILD. And I challenge anyone who’s ever had siblings or even been around kids to think of one that was perfect and never had a fit at some point, let alone consider what that would look like if they spontaneously combusted when they cried.

[thr0wnawayy]

Where does Rei todoroki age stated? In your reblogs you said that its not hc that she was 16 when Enji brought her. I search wiki and couldnt find it and and i knew that wiki sometimes is not truthfull, so im curious.

It's all in the math.

Rei is Canonically 41, this puts her exactly 4 years behind Enji in terms of age. Rei has 4 kids, all in the double digits and 3 being legal adults.

Dabi is 24, Fuyumi then must be 24 or 23, Natsuo is 19 and Shoto is 15.

The hitch? In order for Dabi to be 24 and Fuyumi to be 23, Rei would have been 16 when inseminated & 17 when in labour.

Natsuo would have been born when Rei was 21 and Shoto when she was 24.

Additionally, Shoto says Rei had been institutionalized for 10 years. Meaning Rei would have been just 30 when the Kettle incident occured. Meaning Shoto had to be born 5 years prior at 24.

Enji graduated UA at 18. It's said he gave up after only 2 years (pathetic) to beat All Might on his own and turned to human trafficking Quirk Eugenics. He'd have been 20. Meaning he'd have bought Rei that year and forced her pregnancy possibly on the wedding night (harrowing shit)

The 4 year age gap is consistent with other couples in MHA (Rocklock and his wife are openly stated to be 4 years apart, Mitsuki Masaru are 4 years, with Mitsuki being younger.)

This was fun to answer, I will write a post detailing further & deeper analysis of this topic, so stay tuned for that!