#meta:dabi

[thyandrawrites]

some pics comparisons

for science

same round jaw and soft, delicate features

round jaws run in the family btw

same wild, unkempt hair that spikes up unevenly 

same eye shape but different eye color than Fuyumi (twin theory intensifies)

Also Touya/Dabi is definitely the shortest boy confirmed

similar mannerisms

similar fighting stances

same freaked out expression

Dabi is v obviously Touya Todoroki, babey 

[thyandrawrites]

Hey! 

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 

[thyandrawrites]

I typed an entire fucking meta on discord and I phrased my jumbled thoughts way better than I usually do on here, so I'm gonna share screens of it not to let it go to waste

[thyandrawrites]

I’m asking you because I’m just really curious what other hints are there and I’m not messing with you

oh, okay, sorry! I just talk constantly about how Dabi is Touya so you caught me a little off guard there. 

In case you’re interested, I have a masterpost of all my meta on the subject that you can find here. It’s pretty long though, so in the meantime, let’s do a recap.

A not exhaustive list of hints of why Dabi is Touya (includes manga spoilers)

 1. Touya was said to have a greater firepower than Enji. Dabi’s flames are blue, thus burning hotter than Enji’s. Touya was also said to have a genetic makeup that made his body unsuited to handle fire (as it was better suited for ice). Dabi gives off a burnt-flesh smell every time he overuses his quirk because his body can’t handle the heat for long. 

2. When Dabi was first introduced, he made it a point not to say his real name to the League. From a narrative perspective, it makes no sense for Hori to choose not to disclose his name if he were a character with no ties to the existing cast. By making him use a pseudonym, and by drawing our attention to the fact, Hori wanted us to know that maybe we do already know who he is.

3. Following this pattern, whenever Touya appeared in flashbacks, we never saw his face properly. Once, he was giving us his back. The other time, he had hair covering up his eyes. Again, no need for the mystery if he didn’t prove to be someone we already knew. 

4. Dabi has blue eyes the same shade as Enji. He also almost certainly dyes his hair, and this might or might not be an attempt to hide his real identity. 

5. Dabi was introduced in the story as a follower of Stain. Stain wanted to rid society of the “rotten heroes” who are in it for the glory and fame. Stain hated individualistic heroes who only ever thought about their own gain, and almost attacked Endeavor himself when they faced each other for the first time. Of course an ideology that legitimizes the hatred Touya felt for his abusive father would definitely appeal to him enough to become a villain.

6. During his first appearance, Dabi was shown following the news report on the facts of Hosu. Officially, Endeavor is the one who defeated Stain. This is a very neat way to establish a conflict. As far as we know, Dabi hadn’t committed any major crimes before this point. Then we saw him following Stain’s case closely, sympathize with Stain’s ideology, notice his father’s involvement, and then reaching out to those who were said to have had ties with Stain, the LoV. 

7. Here’s an extensive meta on this, but despite following Stain’s ideology (at least on the surface), imho what really appealed to Dabi was the fact that Stain was the only person who addressed that there can be bad heroes, thus legitimizing his personal vendetta. He’s a revenge-driven character, not an ideology driven one, and that aligns perfectly with him being Touya Todoroki. 

8. When Enji first properly faced Dabi, his vision was blurry and unfocused. From a narrative perspective, there’s no point in that unless Horikoshi didn’t want him to immediately recognize Dabi as his son and keep the reveal for much later on. If Enji is being set up to fail as the number one, and he needs to fail to realize that his current way of “making amends” isn’t enough, then Dabi’s reveal as Touya will play a major role in that. But first, he needed to establish Enji as someone successful, in order to make his fall more impactful later on, and that couldn’t have happened if the truth about the abuse came out before the public could applaud him (it still sucks tho)

9. Dabi being Touya perfectly fits the Golden Child vs Scapegoat theme that Enji’s Narcisistic Personality Disorder has going on. If you read on the subject, you’ll find a lot of similarities with the Todoroki family dynamics. Shouto, with the perfect balance between ice and fire that Enji had always wanted, is the golden child, while Touya, with his “faulty” and “worthless” quirk that damaged his body, is the perfect scapegoat. Here’s a brief summary of how this works (source): 

Shouto was constantly asked to give up his personal wishes in order to meet the expectations of his abuser (aka being his perfect heir and the recipient for all of Enji’s ambitions). Whenever Shouto failed to meet those expectations, he was always mocked and belittled (”are you done with your childish tantrum?”). He ended up losing contact with his authentic self (until he met Midoriya who reminded him that his flames are his own power and not just Enji’s shadow). Touya was the scapegoat given cruelty (being called worthless), criticism and shaming (”he was almost perfect. Almost.”). He ended up leaving the abusive family and became Dabi. 

10. Dabi’s burns are on the same ares of skin from where both Shouto and Enji emit their own flames. 

11. Here’s a meta on this, but Dabi has an established pattern where he always mocks heroes for prioritizing saving people over anything else. He shows this with every pro hero or hero trainee he meets, except for one, Enji. Enji who is an abusive piece of shit who never cared about anyone but himself. 

12. When thinking about Snatches’ words (“didn’t you think of how their families would feel?”), Dabi was shown in a sympathetic manner, hinting that family is a sore subject for him too. 

13. Dabi and Shouto have A LOT of things in common and here’s a good list of them. (I made one too but Rina’s actually a serious list unlike my own, lol) 

14. Dabi’s panicked expression mirrors Rei’s (see here). 

15. When they go all out, both Dabi and Shouto can summon massive amounts of fire/ice at the drop of a hat, and both are shown to have very little restraint and concern about their surrounding when they’re in a tight spot. Here’s a visual of what I’m talking about. 

16. Dabi and Shouto also show really similar fighting style, suggesting they were trained by the same person or raised observing one: 

17. Rina already mentioned this if you read their post, but let me just emphasize it again: much like pre-development Shouto, Dabi shows signs of being uncooperative and highly individualistic, mirroring their father’s mindset. While Shouto later on learned to trust his classmates though, Dabi never did. (here’s another meta on this)

18. Whenever Dabi met a Todoroki, he always called them by their full name. He only ever does this with the Todorokis.

19. It’s possible (if not implied) that the reason why Dabi was willing to listen to Hawks despite Hawks being a very recognizable top hero and also very good at his job, was that Hawks insulted Enji’s approach on heroics on live television.

20. Dabi has beef with Endeavor specifically, because not only did he change the plans for the attack in Fukuoka only after he learned that Hawks had brought Enji along, but he also shows an incredible amount of emotion (something very unlike him) when he might just be able to finally kill him, something he very likely spent a lot of time fantasizing about. He was positively thrilled, and he was smiling so hard his staples almost tore his skin. That’s a pretty big hint that it was personal.

21. Dabi started really hating Apocrypha after he made a speech that really mirrored Enji’s own mindset. 

I’m probably still missing some because as I said before, there’s loads of hints. Forgive me in advance if that’s the case 

[thyandrawrites]

Do you think Dabi feels empathy? I like to argue that he does, mainly because of the panels at the end of chapter 191. But a lot of people I’ve talked to on twitter seem to disagree.

Well, a lot of people also write Dabi as a rapist for kicks, so I generally tend to form my own opinions instead of trusting a widespread fanon portrayal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it saves me a lot of arguing

To answer your question, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe he doesn’t have empathy. The thing people seem to forget a lot when they talk about how problematic Dabi is… is that Dabi is literally a villain. What else is he supposed to do? Dance the conga? Villains have skewed morals by definition. Of course he’s not gonna be your usual morally white protagonist. He’s gotta bring conflict into the story and oppose the main cast in some way, otherwise he wouldn’t serve any narrative purpose. But having skewed morals doesn’t necessarily mean he is morally black. Or that he likes killing.

As a matter of fact, Hori likes to write his villains with a lot of nuance. With the single exception of Afo, who is a megalomaniac power-hungry bastard, and a really morally black villain, everyone in the Lov is portrayed as a really human, layered individual. Dabi is no exception. 

Dabi is a follower of Stain. Stain didn’t kill for kicks, for relishing in the despair of his opponent when they realized they had lost (like, say, Afo). Stain killed for a motive, which means he had a moral compass. A really skewed one, but still a moral compass of sorts. Dabi is the same. 

He recruits Hawks because he sees worth in him that sets him apart from the lowlives from the underworld. Hawks is a hero who saves people. The lowlives Dabi executed were ready to gang up on him and kill him because he looked at them wrong. Good morals vs senseless violence: guess which one Dabi prefers? 

He didn’t even try to kill Apocrypha until the latter started spouting off quirk essentialist bullshit. There are two entire panels dedicated  to the shift in Dabi’s demeanor when he realizes his opponent’s true colors. Only then does the killing intent, the spiteful resentment, make an appearance. Until that moment, he was just desperately trying to melt off all the ice that kept coming for him. 

Honestly, what both of those occurrences tell me is not that he lacks empathy, but that he has issues with people who misuse their power to harm others because they think of themselves as above others. 

I’m not saying that he’s right in doing those things, or that his actions are justifiable. But he’s indeed a villain, and villains are not exactly morally upstanding. Dabi falls in a gray area, and implying that he has no empathy because he’s murdered people before is kinda a stupid argument imho. Again, you gotta keep in mind nuance. 

There are strong hints that Dabi embraced violence as a result of growing up in an environment that was violent. There’s this parallel with Tomura; there’s the fact that quirk society idealizes hypermasculinity, while Dabi is a disabled character who’s been called worthless on screen for having a weak body; and that’s without taking into account how he’s likely a victim of abuse, and thus him getting back at people who misuse their powers is his way of getting back in control of his narrative. The once powerless kid who makes them pay, even if he literally has to burn himself to death not to be ‘weak’ anymore. This hardly speaks of someone who is evil just for the sake of being evil, or for harming other people for fun. His entire character trait is that he loathes people who hurt others for fun. 

It would’ve been really easy for Horikoshi to make him grow a big head as a result. To make him relish in his newfound upper hand and think that he himself was justice. Instead, what we get when he’s confronted for the first time with the reality of what he did, is a scene that shows us the direct opposite of that. 

This is not a man who cannot feel remorse. This is a man who doesn’t even know where he stands on the moral front anymore. This is a guy who is so torn up by the decisions he’s made that he lost his sanity. 

This is a guy who has issues, who is broken, and has never had any healthy coping method to move past his self-destructive behaviours. This is a man who compartmentalizes to keep himself focused on an end goal. Kinda like how Tomura keeps focused on the end goal of destroying everything he dislikes even though he’s perfectly aware that it’s not gonna make him feel better, but he still gotta do it to keep the itch at bay. 

The bottom line of his character is that violence cannot fix violence. Selective cleansing of rotten heroes isn’t going to stop people like Enji, who are obsessed with status and with strength, from obsessing over status and strength. Killing Enji won’t give him any closure just like making All Might retire didn’t make Shigaraki feel less empty inside, less depressed. 

People who argue against the fact that Dabi is a redeemable character by appealing to his crimes and how “too far gone” he is not only don’t understand the first thing about Dabi’s character, but are also completely missing the point. It’s the system that made him “too far gone”. Fixing that is what will give back credit to the hero system. 

Besides, when people write Dabi off as an unempathetic irredeemable character are just perpetuating a trope that makes for reaaaaally bad writing. To quote from TVtropes: 

Good victim, bad victim

A morality trope about the arbitrary distinctions writers make between certain sorts of victims. If a character in fiction has a problem or ailment or social situation, and the creators intend him to be sympathetic, the character will have acquired the problem in the most socially acceptable way. If the character isn’t sympathetic, then he will have contracted the illness through “your own damn fault”. Compare and contrast Loser Protagonist.

Note that for some people this trope can be justified. They consider a person who gets carpal tunnel syndrome from writing a Nobel prize winning novel is a bit different from someone who gets it playing World of Warcraft is a bit different from someone who gets it by spending too much time whipping slaves. Regardless of how they got it, they are still victims. Whether you have sympathy for them is another matter.

People who want to push the agenda that Dabi is a ruthless villain and a problematic character, are usually either fiery asshat stans or end//kws stans.

Dabi and Shouto are brothers. Saying that one of them is the good egg while the other one shouldn’t be perceived as a victim because he’s Evil and Bad and Problematic just makes you an abuse apologist tbh. I advise you be really careful around those people on twitter 

[thyandrawrites]

Interestingly - as I’m sure we’ve all noticed by now - the steam is coming out of his seams (and nowhere else, as it seems)

this gives a whole new purpose to the staples. It could help make sense of why they’re so far apart from each other. If their purpose was just to help him keep himself together, they would’ve been closer to each other to better allow for the wound to close. But they’re not, and we all kinda rolled with it and assumed he didn’t much need them anymore, and kept them up for aesthetic purposes (x, x). 

Well, it would seem that they had a purpose after all. holding himself together while also providing an... “air vent” for all the unbearable heat that builds up inside of him every time he overuses his quirk 

[thyandrawrites]

I know dabi is distant with the rest of the Lov but the way he interacts with them he’s always visible irritates with them and when ever someone’s comments are on point with dabi he would comeup with a clever comeback

When dabi has the upper hand he would taunt others when he’s conered like with geten he doesn’t have is taunting phase that’s when you know he’s conered Dabi who always comes with ways to taunt his opponent is cornered by geten

Hey! Sorry for the late reply! Life got a little busy.

Anyway, about that... The main difference about those two examples imho is the different relationship Dabi has to those people. With the lov, he does act snappish and is rude on purpose on certain occasions, but even when the other lov members make fun of him, it’s never quite done with the explicit purpose of undermining him as a person, or his worth as a leader. It’s never actually malicious. They’re not looking down on him, or assuming that they know everything about him based solely on what they can observe from his behaviour. 

So we have Twice making fun of his tendency to burn down everything without really accomplishing anything useful for the rest of the lov, but then a few chapter later Twice includes Dabi in his group of friends and genuinely banters with him; or we have Toga telling him that he’s bad at recruiting or that he’s sore about being uneffective against Machia, but we know that it’s just meant as lighthearted teasing because she still follows his orders when he’s the one leading them. 

All in all, we’re not meant to take their jabs (and Dabi’s biting responses) seriously, but just as lighthearted banter between friends. If I were to compare their dynamic to someone else’s to better explain this point, I’d say that Dabi and the lov interact with each other in much the same way Kaminari and Bakugou do. They won’t actually kill each other. They just like to roughhouse a little too much. 

On the other hand, we have Apocrypha/Geten. Those taunts were meant to hurt and belittle Dabi. 

It’s not just that, either. Apocrypha admitted to having spent a good portion of his life training. He boasts about his strength with the self-assurance of someone who believes in the survival of the fittest: 

If you have a weak quirk or a body unsuited to handle your own power, you’re worthless. That’s what Apocrypha believes, and has devoted himself to. 

It’s basically spelled out in Dabi’s expression and his entire demeanor from then on, how intimately aquainted he is with that sort of bullshit, and how he despises that sort of rethoric. Dabi, with extensive burns over a good half of his body and his intolerance for high temperatures, is essentially a disabled character. Even without taking into account the todobroki theory, those words definitely hit a huge sore spot. They’re no lighthearted banter. They’re straight up discrimination. 

But since it’s canon that he’s Touya by now, we can also talk about the other implications. Dabi reacts with barely concealed disgust at Apocrypha’s words because the latter’s mindset almost directly parallels Endeavor’s own. Endeavor is someone who also believes that a person’s worth is dictated by the strength of their quirk: 

Touya was “almost” perfect because he had an overwhelming firepower, stronger than Endeavor’s own. But Touya also had a handicap, his lack of tolerance to heat. So he was worthless, and was ultimately discarded for a younger, improved version that was in possession of a better balance between ice and fire, Shouto. 

It’s not only the same mindset, but also the same extremely unempathetic view of people as objects. Either they’re ‘useful’ to your goal, or you can toss them away without a second thought. Again, something Dabi has huge issues about. 

Then there’s the aforementioned fact that Apocrypha has been ‘honing’ his quirk for literal years. 

Sounds familiar yet?

Jeez, I wonder why.

Apocrypha was brainwashed into thinking that he had no inherent worth until he proved himself stronger than the average person. So he trained tirelessly to reach the elite represented the group of executives that got to sit at Re-destro’s table. 

Similarly, Enji believes that the only indicator of being the best hero is physical prowess, because he never cared about anything else, and never even tried to reach the top by playing nice because to him, that wasn’t the point at all: 

Again, as long as you’re not the strongest, then you’re worthless. That’s what both of them are saying.

It’s not so much that Dabi can’t come up with a clever reply to Apocrypha’s taunts, imho. It’s just that he just remembered how much he despises his father, and that made him incredibly homicidal

look at that chilling fury. He’s out for blood and in his shoes, I’d be too

[thyandrawrites]

I know you already did an analysis on dabi in the flashback seqence but i was wondering if you would elaborate on his character in the flashback sequence.

mmh I think the only angle I haven’t yet analized is the “motivation” front. 

Dabi gets introduced in the story as not only a follower of Stain, but also as someone who seems deeply set on picking up where Stain left off and succeeding where Stain failed. 

He pretty much takes it upon himself to fill that role. Yet, fast forward to the present arc of the manga, he’s not the one who starts questioning Shigaraki about their lack of distinct goals or motivation to move forward, as one would expect. That role gets filled by Spinner instead. 

It is questionable whether there were traces of Stain left to begin with, but it has become more and more apparent that as of late the League hasn’t made a single step towards the end goal of destroying the status quo. 

Their last biggest showdown was against the Eight Precepts of Death, and mostly it entailed containing the fallout of a failed partnership with bad parties. The League ended up getting ownership of the quirk erasing drug, but it was a tool they couldn’t put to use properly, unless someone truly studied its composition and managed to duplicate it. 

So this arc shows possibly the lowest point the League has ever hit. Kurogiri and Afo are both gone, they’re out of funds, they’re basically scraping by, and no one is working towards a goal anymore. 

It’s interesting to me how Horikoshi decided to use Spinner as the voice of that dissatisfaction, of those doubts. Up until now, Spinner had always been treated as a supporting character, someone who appeared frequently on the sidelines but was never quite the focus. With the only exception of the training camp arc, whenever Hori wanted to bring back Stain’s ideology in-universe, it was always through Dabi. Dabi was the one who gave edgy speeches about the corruption of the hero society:

Dabi was the one constantly facing off against pro heroes, and with his repeated taunts he established himself as the voice of Stain, as the one who had taken his mantle: 

And yet, he’s not the one who starts questioning his place in the League the more time goes on without them ever getting anywhere with Stain’s prescribed purge. Odd, isn’t it? 

One might even start to wonder if all his “Stain this, Stain that” isn’t just a way to cover up his own personal agenda. 

Notably, when the League is finally doing something that aligns with Stain’s ideals, meaning, when they’re killing a bunch of nazis who preach racial purity and quirk-based discrimination, Dabi isn’t even there.  

Instead, what the heck was he busy doing? 

… Recruiting Hawks. 

Now, narratively speaking, Dabi being away from the rest of the League always serves a purpose. As I explained in this post here, imho his absence always underlines a certain trait of him that we’re meant to pick up on. To quote from that meta: 

- He was absent from the entirety of Chisaki’s arc, an arc focused on the growth of the League as a group of comrades instead of pawns that could be sacrificed for a distant goal;

- He’s now absent again in an arc meant to solidify the League’s loyalty towards Shigaraki;

His absence from the raid at the CRC’s headquarters imho is also something we should be reading into, because not only was he MIA, he was also off doing his own thing. And usually, when a character is being repeatedly singled out from a group that is otherwise cohesive, it’s with purpose. So what’s Horikoshi’s intent in making him skip out on that particular narration? 

Well, my guess has always been that Dabi is not so much an ideology-driven character, but rather a revenge-driven one. In my opinion, Stain did not appeal to him because he believed in his ideal of reforming society by only letting the good heroes live, but rather, because he was the first person to address that there were bad heroes. 

(One bad hero in particular)

So then on the one hand we have Spinner who follows Stain’s wishes like a guideline to the point of choosing them over Shigaraki’s explicit orders, but still somehow sees himself as part of the League. His adherence to those rules is exactly what ultimately makes him realize the gap in motives between himself and the rest of the League. He sees himself as ideology-driven, but comes to question if he really should stick with the lov once he realizes that they aren’t driven by the same thing.

On the other hand, we have Dabi who literally never showed neither the same fervor, nor the intention to stick to Stain’s rules as closely. Dabi, who deliberately often acts on his own and with an agenda that occasionally distances him from the rest of the League. It’s debatable even how much he cares about his comrades, having basically left them to fight an opponent who vastly overpowered them all for a month and a half. Dabi’s individualism and his resolve to stick to his own agenda rather than accepting the lov’s collective objective are made painfully clear when the topic of Shigaraki’s goal is brought up, and Dabi just goes: well I don’t care about any of that and I’m still gonna do things my way. That cool with you, boss? 

Interestingly, Horikoshi decided to frame this arc in such a way that Spinner ended up voicing his doubts to Toga, rather than Dabi, because, once again, Dabi was absent: 

when between the two of them, Dabi is very obviously the one who’s still to a certain degree fighting for (a simplified version of) those ideals. 

Now, I wouldn’t be stressing this if it wasn’t a deliberate choice on Horikoshi’s part. The fact that he didn’t get to question Dabi sounds like just another way to hide his real intentions to us readers. 

So, back to the point. 

Does Dabi not care about Stain’s ideology at all, then? 

… that doesn’t seem to be the case. Interestingly the only part of Stain’s ideology he consistently sticks to, is the bit about gauging people’s worth on a case to case basis, and then purging without any mercy all the ones who don’t make the cut. 

That’s right. His cleanse seems to be methodic. There’s this great meta by @ echodrops that analyses how Dabi responds negatively to people using senseless violence, and in general seems to value people according to his own personal standards and morals: 

as op puts it in their post, 

Are they garbage because they all had weak quirks and Dabi somehow sensed that–or are they garbage because Dabi’s standard for “worthy” is based on his ingrained personal values, some of which might (ironically) have to do with how people treat others? At the very least, it’s kind of interesting that the generally pleasant Twice recruits an absolute monster, while the only person Dabi’s even close to recruited for the League is a hero.

And that brings us back to the topic: what has Dabi been up to, after ditching the rest of the League? Fittingly, he took the proffered opportunity to act on his own agenda.