My problem with Hawks losing his wings as a symbol of ‘liberation’
Recently, on tiktok (like always lol) I entered a debate with a bunch of Hawks fans that were hellbent into claiming that him losing his wings was symbolism to him becoming ‘free’, and while the OG creator blocked me, I can’t stop thinking about it. It genuinely left this weird taste in my mouth and I NEEDED to rant about it.
One thing that’s always bothered me about the “Hawks loses his wings and stays with the Commission, but he’s finally free because they can’t use him” is how easily it shifts the blame. On the surface, it reads as symbolic: wings as chains and antithesis of freedom. But narratively, it ends up placing the weight of his exploitation onto his quirk rather than the institution that deliberately stripped him of agency in the first place. Because once you frame his loss of autonomy as something that happens because of his wings, you ARE implying that the wings were the problem. And that’s… just not it.
Hawks didn’t lose his autonomy because he could fly. He lost it because the Hero Commission made an active, conscious decision to weaponize a vulnerable child.
If Hawks hadn’t grown up in poverty. If he hadn’t been neglected. If he hadn’t lacked any form of protection or adult supervision. Would he have been utilized the way he was?
It genuinely doesn’t mattered what quirk he had (as long as he caught the eyes of the Commission). Wings, fire, speed, something flashy, something discrete, etc. none of that changes the outcome. That’s because he was molded into a tool because he was available, disposable, and easy to isolate. His wings had nothing to do with that.
That’s the part that gets erased when the narrative leans too hard into the wings-as-chains metaphor. The Commission didn’t exploit Hawks because he was useful. Plenty of children have quirks that make them useful, some even more than Hawks’. They exploited him because he was usable. Because he had no safety net. Because no one would question where he went or what was done to him. Because he could be trained and conditioned without resistance.
His wings made him useful. But his vulnerability made him usable.
So when the story frames the loss of his wings as the moment of “liberation” or “freedom,” it completely destroys the social commentary it’s supposed to represent (even if it had been an accidental commentary, which I believe it was, with how inconsistent Hori is). It suggests that removing his wings solves the problem, when the problem was the system that decided some children are resources instead of people.
Keeping him with the Commission after that, especially without directly interrogating that power dynamic, risks turning institutional abuse into some kind of tragic inevitability. Like this was always the cost of being Hawks. Like it couldn’t have gone any other way.
Hawks’s story is only meaningful as social commentary if we keep the responsibility where it belongs: on the institution that saw a child in crisis and decided to sharpen him into a weapon.
Taking away his wings doesn’t undo that. And pretending it does lets the Commission off the hook far too easily.
