You ever regret getting involved in this shitshow in the first place? I certainly do
No. It's provided infinite entertainment in analyzing where it went wrong. It was also when I decided I'd never get para-socially invested in a piece of media again.
MHA is like the really bad relationship that utterly broke you of several bad habits and made you look for better partners in the future. You enjoy the good times. You reminisce about things.
But you realize you never actually knew them to begin with. They were never who you thought they were.
When they talked about the issues in society, you thought that was going to go somewhere and meant something.
Actually, no, it was just set dressing.
The story has good bones to it and some interesting ideas. It's just that you realize the author never actually cared about any of those things.
I stopped being angry a long time ago. I've already mourned the story I thought this was, the characters I believed I liked, and the idea of what could have been.
When I look at MHA, I see that it was always this.
It's a series built on highly conservative Japanese values where it appeals to a meritocracy fantasy.
The schools aren't responsible for making you strong, nor are your teachers. Nope, it's just you, being an awesome person who put in hard work.
Poor Deku wants to be a hero but can't because he doesn't have a quirk. Let's give him the strongest quirk on the planet by his favorite hero.
What about all the other quirkless little boys and girls who don't have an All Might to make it so they can be heroes? Too bad for them. They should have: lived in this part of Japan, got captured by the Sludge Villain, got saved by All Might, clung to his leg as he jumped away, got him to trauma dump his history, happened upon their bully being held hostage, rushed into save him, inspired All Might to act and shorten his hero time via pushing himself but it reignited his heroic spirit, and THEN be selected as worthy.
The universe says that if you can't do all of that, it's a skill issue .
Same deal for the so called "villains" who got "redeemed."
Gentle Criminal was always a hero. He was trapped in a world that screwed him for trying to be heroic. He never truly wanted to hurt anyone and he was just jealous that he couldn't be a hero.
Lady Nagant was also a hero, who was told to kill people by the government. The former president of the HPSC tried to shoot her so she shot him. She never had a problem with being a hero, she just had an issue with the government corruption that the series doesn't care about or bother addressing.
The villains, on the other hand? Well, sorry. If you were never a hero student or a hero, then you get lifelong imprisonment and/or death.
The tragic backstories are just there to make you feel a little sorry for the villain before they're killed or imprisoned.
You'd think that "be the greatest heroes" means this new generation is going to surpass the old. You would be incorrect. While they are in some cases much stronger than existing pro heroes, they use the same methodology and achieve the same end results.
Except for when the narrative cheats and delivers them a utopian ending.
The story gives us a "realistic" ending where UA was able to shelter the majority of the population of Japan within its walls, where not a single person on the hero team died, where only villains were killed and arrested, the prison system can somehow hold the thousands and thousands of people arrested, and where AFO's defeat, somehow caused his allies across the world to also lose their own attempts coups.
Where the president of the united states, despite his country being under siege by a criminal army, sends his defenders to Japan to help a country that already won its battle. And there are no negative consequences of this.
To put this in perspective let's examine the first war arc.
The hero team lost:
-A bunch of heroes who were created just to die in that arc or who got barely any characterization before then: Funk Man, Eel Boy, Crust, X-Less.
-Midnight, who hadn't been relevant since the final exams where she was used for Mineta's character development.
-There were numerous fake out deaths for people like Bakugo and Torino that got walked back.
-A bunch of heroes walked out on the job. This has no tangible effect on the heroes' battle power and no one of any importance actually quit their job as a hero. The people who left weren't missed or cared about by the audience.
The League Lost:
-The majority of the MLA's forces and their entire political party
-Machia, Twice, Compress, Geten and all of the big wigs of the MLA except for Skeptic
-Garaki got arrested and they lost numerous high end nomu as well as Johnny.
-Shigaraki got possessed
It goes to show that consequences are things that happen to villains, not heroes. The series ending with zero "good guy" casualties is expected.
MHA is a series that is at its core intellectually dishonest and abandons all sense, logic and reason for a utopian fantasy of the status quo: world where all systemic threats are neatly vanquished without the heroes having to sacrifice anything core, change their methods, or confront their own institutions' rot.
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.
That brings up an additonal stupid pet peeve of mine actually: The series' tech level. Cool shiny gadgets are abundant, freely available and can do literally fucking anything if its to help a Pro Hero but anyone else who's lives may be improved or social issues that may be addressed can go piss up a rope I guess. We're straight up supposed to be horrified at the thought of civilians enjoying the same benefits of technology that heroes do, even. (Also, my butt's still really hurt about this so I'm gonna say it: Unless you're Dabi, in which the bizarrely specific medical device exists but it's to Literally Just Torture You)
It was fine. Emphasis on was. They had some future tech up front. Giant robots, sentient AI, holograms.
Things like Muscular's prosthetic eye, which apparently you can just plug and play with those.
It painted a picture of a world that is massively ahead of ours in some areas while functionally looking like a world in the early 2000s.
But then we get the mech suit. That terrible, terrible mech suit that absolutely destroys the power scaling and retroactively makes Momo one of the theoretically most broken people in the setting.
If there's a limit to the power of tech, then someone who makes tech is limited by the strength of their tech.
But the limits they placed on Iron Might, that the development of his gear took a long time and he used up all of his wealth for it...do not apply to Momo.
Momo could whip one of these up in a month if she wanted to, with the schematics. Even less time once she gets the hang of it. I'm likely high balling her production times: Momo could do it faster.
She could fill them with UA's sentient AI and have a fleet of Ironmen.
The final war arc could have effortlessly been won if All Might had said anything to Momo because she'd have manufactured several of these suits.
More, if they had Monoma copy her quirk and produce some components too.
As far as civilians go, the story doesn't care about them. They're just here because this is a policeman show and you need people to save on that.
Heroes get cutting-edge support gear, instant-limb prosthetics (Mirko), and city-leveling mechs (Iron Might).
Civilians get... nothing. The staggering medical tech that can graft a functional eye into a villain's socket is nowhere seen aiding the quirk-disabled, the chronically ill, or victims of villain attacks. The narrative is utterly disinterested in this, because civilians are set dressing, not citizens with rights to improvement.
The story certainly won't express any concern for their disabilities or issues. Any concerns that do exist are just the villains like the MLA wanting to enact their agenda by loosening who gets support gear.
If you aren't a hero in this world, you don't matter.
In a super-policeman story, technology has only two valid uses:
Enhancing the force's effectiveness (hero support gear).
Controlling the populace (Tartarus, Dabi's prison tube, surveillance).
The idea of technology as a tool for liberation, equality, or social uplift is alien to this framework. It would destabilize the hierarchy. Why would you give civilians tech that makes them less dependent on heroes? That would undermine the very reason the hero system exists.
We talked about how much LoV are a bunch of loser. And what about the heroes?
Let’s cut to the chase: Hero society in MHA is a rotten system, and the story kinda fumbles its own critique.
First off, the heroes are hypocrites, full stop. They drag kids into warzones, park high-value targets in hospitals they know villains will attack, and stay silent when one of their own gets exposed as a domestic abuser or a murderer-for-hire. Endeavor screams about Shoto being his “masterpiece” (read: tool) in public, and nobody cares. Not All Might, not the media—nobody. If the #2 hero can openly treat his kid like a science project and still get worshipped, what’s stopping other heroes from doing worse behind closed doors? Spoiler: nothing.
Then there’s the redemption double standard. Lady Nagant murders people for the government, pulls a half-hearted “I’m sorry,” and gets to walk free because she’s “useful.” She chooses to stay in Jail. Hawks would have let her out. Meanwhile, Stain—who at least had principles, even if they were insane—gets butchered for trying to save All Might. Machia? Brainwashed, used as a meat shield, and left to die. But Gentle Criminal, a dude who wanted to be a hero before life kicked him down? He gets a cozy ending with his girlfriend. The lesson? If you’ve ever dreamed of being a hero, the system will cut you slack. If not? Enjoy the ditch.
And let’s not pretend the heroes have moral high ground. They break rules, cover up crimes, and let abusers keep their jobs—just like real-world power structures. Cops with 40% domestic abuse rates? Swap “cops” for “pro heroes” and it’s the same story. Endeavor isn’t a freak exception; he’s the product of a system that says, “Be strong, and you can do whatever you want.” The narrative acts like his abuse is a personal failure, but where are the checks and balances? The oversight? Nowhere.
The kicker? The story wants us to root for these heroes while also showing them as incompetent, reactive, and morally bankrupt. They win not because they’re better, but because the villains are written to trip over their own shoelaces. At the end of the day, it’s all monkeys flinging shit—heroes just have nicer costumes.
TL;DR: MHA points out hero society’s flaws but chickens out on dismantling them. It’s all “Endeavor feels bad now!” and zero “Let’s burn this corrupt system down.” So yeah, why should we respect these heroes? They’re just villains with better PR, who get rewarded with a completely unearned utopian ending that magically solved all of the issues off screen.
You see, the problem with All Might beating All For One to death is that he didn't do it on live TV and in front of witnesses, and he also didn't finish the job.
Deku beat Shigaraki into dust, and so that solved crime forever. That's why he's better than All Might and the greatest hero.
Have you wrote a post on what you feel about the LOV’s endings yet? Or their deaths? I honestly for one can safely say I think Touya was only kept alive in that ghastly tank so Enji could keep his promise of “looking at Touya” finally 😒 more than closure for Touya!
MHA if you're a hero: infinite second tries, low stakes, and the narrative will only kill off minor characters. Midnight died and she was so unimportant that her two alleged best friends didn't even discuss her death. No one cared about her as a person, and Mina, the kid who decided to avenge her...only talked about how she found her classes fun.
Characters like Crust had no backstory or time spent on them before being killed. Characters like Majestic are introduced just to be killed in the same arc to try and get some cheap, unearned emotional beats. Nighteye was fridged to remove his setting breaking quirk, especially after they showed Izuku could beat fate. Had he survived it would have been an unlimited narrative crutch, so he had to die.
The story bends over backwards to make sure you're alive and happy and you don't lose anyone the audience cares about. You get endless training arcs, get to live in a billion dollar facility, and can count on a plot induced power up even if you're unprepared for the events you find yourself in.
You can even betray the heroes and lead directly to a classmate getting abducted and held hostage, but if you say sorry they instantly forgive you. Consequences don't exist for you.
Lightning Round of dodged hero consequences:
Iida got a major arm injury from Stain which has zero effect on his character or fighting style going forward.
Mirio loses his quirk just to get it back again.
Gran Torino got turned into a donut but is still alive in the epilogue.
All Might brings an ironman suit into a battle with a man using the Radio Waves quirk, which has previously worked like an EMP which he used to break out of prison. AFO simply decides not to do this.
Dabi burned Hawks' wings off and turned Endeavor's sidekicks into charcoal. All of them proceed to make a recovery.
MHA if you're a villain: A horrible tragedy where a single mistake costs you your life. Your enemies play for keeps and your fate is either a summary execution or life in prison with the possibility of state execution on the table.
The story demonstrates this when Magne is instantly killed and Compress' arm gets blown off.
Expect to actually be nerfed as the story goes on because the author bubble wraps his precious hero characters and can't bear to see them hurt or, god forbid, have to actually struggle. You're not allowed to do any meaningful damage to society, your enemies, or the status quo, and even a state of total anarchy across Japan will be completely fixed within months.
You exist to create fake states before being beaten, killed, or forgotten about. Our supposed empathetic moral center of the universe paragon main character will tell you he doesn't forgive you for killing people as he punches you to death.
While he forgave a former hero who was also a government sanctioned assassin who killed more heroes than you did. While he also contributes to a cover up and doesn't in anyway reveal the horrible crimes he learned of from said assassin, thus implicating himself in a conspiracy. And then he proceeds to teach the sanitized history that the new regime presents while they knowingly framed you entirely as a mad dog while scrubbing all nuance and humanity from your backstory.
You're not the result of: societal neglect, abuse, a super villain's machinations, and a desire to help others who similarly fell through the cracks, no. You're just a monster who exists to be slain. They'll only mourn the child you used to be because you can't be forgiven for crimes when you're not a kid anymore unless you're a hero.
Your killer is then rewarded for his ultimate failure with: a shonen pity romance with an utterly generic super supportive vanilla waifu. An ironman suit he did absolutely nothing to earn or contribute to obtaining. A hero ranking that lets him leap frog over all of the other lesser characters who spent the last 8 years actually doing hero work. And a utopian ending he obtained by murdering you on live TV and not through addressing the root causes that created you and your band.
On the subject of Dabi and ice Quirks... Is it just me or was that whole thing pretty fucking stupid? Like, what did it even add? It feels like something thrown in at the literal last minute to make his backstory even more aggressively depressing than it already is. My brother straight up missed the reveal during our anime watchthrough and had to have it pointed out to him after. Could the idea have Worked with better writing behind it, you think?
I mean, I personally like it because it makes Endeavor look like even more of an idiot.
Potentially Natsuo and Fuyumi might have secret fire quirks just waiting to be pulled out of them.
But Endeavor didn't even TRY with those two. That's what this is saying here.
I think the idea of how it happened was ridiculous though. Touya previously burned himself nearly to death and had to be saved by AFO.
So where was his ice back then? Why does his ice save him when he was about to be just as dead previously?
I'm digging the idea of all of the Todo kids being secret gods but Enji brute forced it until he ended up with Shoto, the one who displayed dual quirks from the start. Does it make Shoto less impressive? A little. But it's what canon gave us.
As far as better writing? I'd have had Dabi stab Endeavor with a sharpened ice dagger he manifested during their battle and then he'd give the reveal of his ice quirk. It would have happened shortly after Dabi's dance.
If the point of this reveal is that Endeavor gave up on him and ruined his life when he was "perfect" the whole time, then we're going to REALLY let the guy feel it.
The idea that Dabi was Touya and actually, he had a secret ice quirk he kept hidden from the League this whole time just so he could use it against his dad right at this perfect moment?
Well, it fits his character. It's very dramatic. And having a dual quirk would be a key giveaway of his true identity. No one knew Touya had that, but there's literally only one other person on the planet who does this so it's not hard to put 2 and 2 together.
He canonically spares Endeavor because he wanted him to suffer more, so we end up in the same place.
It's just that he discovered his ice moments after he woke up when AFO saved him. He saw he was exactly what he did wanted. He ran home and saw Shoto being abused, and then he plans revenge.
My opinion is that Touya manifested ice for the express purposes of saving Endeavor so he didn't blow up. The author needed more time for Shoto and the Todofam to get to them, so this was a stopgap. It allowed the author to escalate while explaining why he wasn't dead and also why he didn't go supernova on everyone.
It wasn't for Touya's benefit, it was for the hero side's.
So, Dabi's my favorite character and a guy I analyze the fuck out of. Even with the knowledge he's badly written even by MHA's abysmal standards, in the rewrite project I'm doing with someone more and more things just keep getting pointed out as making zero goddamn sense and it's like *muffled screaming* Such an interesting character with a cool design but it's just increasingly obvious not a single goddamn thought was actually put into him at any step of the way. Wasted Potential Academia at it again
Dabi is objectively a better character than Tomura and would have made a more coherent and grounded final antagonist.
Forget about the convoluted plot AFO did to make Tomura by convincing his dad to have another kid.
Tomura's being Nana's grandson never amounted to anything. No shade against the man himself given the author didn't stick the landing, but let's look at the facts.
AFO created Tomura, and this had no real effect on All Might. Nana Shimura's ghost is possessing Izuku, but this didn't stop Izuku from killing Tomura. Nana herself also accepted the necessity of Tomura's death. Nana Shimura wasn't a big name who is still remembered in the hero world right now, so Tomura's lineage didn't shock anyone.
Even after his death, the public never learned the real story about Tomura and history remembers him as a dangerous monster. At best we have Spinner's account, but why would anyone believe the words of a "clearly biased source?"
So what was the point? Tomura could have been anyone. Literally anyone who is AFO's apprentice would become Izuku's final enemy. AFO could have picked Toga as his apprentice and we'd reach the same outcome.
But then you look at Dabi. Son of the eventual number 1 hero. Brother of one of the main characters. And the product of the hero system's neglect and ambition. Dabi is fully, organically integrated into the story in a way that hits hard.
No need for AFO to manipulate anything. AFO didn't make Endeavor do anything he did. All he did was find Touya before he burned to death and save his life.
Since Izuku was always going to fight whoever the AFO apprentice is, we can just condense Tomura's whole deal into Dabi and make a singular antagonist who runs the show. Dabi doesn't need to manipulate the League, the entire organization exists for his revenge and to ensure he makes sure no one like him ever exists again.
We can even take Tenko's Walk. A young Touya, after seeing his dad abusing his brother, flees and wanders the country. He has no education, no money, no street smarts and no future. We see every system that should have helped him fail him. He sees the world in a way he never did when he was at the top of society as hero family royalty and an affluent son of a respected hero.
Then AFO shows up and takes him in. They renegotiate. He's not here to turn Touya into a weapon or use him as a pawn. They'll deal with each other as equals who both see the same issues.
Of course Touya doesn't trust him but he'll use him to achieve his goals and if he gets in his way, he'll burn him to ashes.
Tomura started off great, then spent most of the series possessed, and then had the most horrific and mean spirited destruction of his aura and his character I've ever seen. Yes, the story wanted us to believe everything he ever did was AFO's designs.
Well, not Touya. His ending was terrible too but at least he had agency. He denied AFO. He made choices. He exploited the League. He pursued his revenge.
He got to have everything Tomura didn't.
Someone on Reddit told me that Horikoshi wanted to have Izuku and Ochako get together explicitly, but he decided to just imply it because he was afraid that crazy fans who shipped them with other people would come after him. Does that change your opinion of them at all?
Ignore the reddit post. It's got nothing to do with threats.
I believe he did it for the profits. The BakuDekus are the people who make the money for the series, because they're the ones buying merch. Deku fans aren't the ones who purchase loads of stuff. Dudebros are not big buyers.
The main buyers are the female fans. And this series has dick all for female representation. The women are so superfluous that you could remove ALL of them and the story would actively be better for it.
So who do they latch onto? The popular male characters.
To not alienate their cash cows, they walked back IzuOcha.
As far as the ship goes? It was always terrible because the author was writing a shonen romance. Which is to say, you do basically no development on building chemistry between the characters who are supposed to get together, and then force them together at the end of the series.
It's easily one of the worst ships I can think of in recent memory.
Uraraka isn't a character. She's a male fantasy. The author went "Wouldn't it be great if you had a shy waifu who has feelings for you but can't admit them, and she always supports you and acts as your hero and is willing to wait for you to realize you have feelings for her and then she'll say yes? And you never have to return her feelings. She'll still be in love with you. She won't realize you can't take a hint and date another guy. She won't get discouraged because she believes her cues are obvious but you're too dense to see them. And wouldn't it be hot if she fought another girl over you and I could draw them in lots of gay poses? Naturally, I'll kill Toga afterwards. Queer baiting for the win!"
Notice how her answer to fixing society is to play with kids. Her "development" was to become an idealized Japanese wife. She waited 8 years to get with Deku because it's intimidating if a woman makes the first move. So she would have waited forever if it was required.
