...which is just to celebrate the characters that ended in the top 10 of most voted ones. It’s nice with its fantasy theme but that’s it.
We resume with the story and with Ochako and Tsuyu following Himiko. The line ‘We still haven’t had our chat about romance!’ seems more a memory than something that gets said. Still Himiko, transformed in a Twice among the countless Twice clones, notices she’s being followed, protest the girls can’t take a hint and that she’s no more a blushing schoolgirl in love… which is really one of the saddest things she said because it implies she has… given up.
The people she loved, Ochako and Midoriya, who’re both heroes, won’t accept her or try to see things from her perspective. They don’t get her struggle, they acted like everyone else, telling her to just drop being different. We go back to what Jin said, they’re not ‘heroes’ to her.
This is not the moment to discuss Midoriya and Ochako’s (completely understandable) reasons for failing to understand Himiko, it’s just the moment to watch the resulting wreckage of this miscommunication.
Himiko has given up on the people she loved (her own way) and this has caused her to unleash her power over the heroes. For want of a nail, the tide of the battle was completely overturned.
Because no hero managed to connect with Spinner, Himiko or Touya, Kurogiri was freed, Himiko was taken away from the island and now she’s unleashing her sad man’s parade and Touya is setting the place afire.
It’s meaningful Himiko doesn’t say Ochako-chan, but just calls her ‘hero’. Himiko wanted to connect with her, wanted to see her as a person, but now she sees her as just ‘her job’, a hero.
We’re reminded heroes are still the good guys when one of them claims they’ve to move away the villains they tied up so as not to have them die burned by Touya’s flames.
I’ve mixed feelings about this. I mean, the story wants to address the corruption of the hero system but then tends to show, more often than not, heroes being good (or implying they’ll get redeemed like Enji) and mostly failing out of mistakes more than due to genuine ill will.
Heroes who’re all but heroic and with no hope of redemption are just mentioned in passing (as victims of Nagant for example) or small sidecharacters (like Tokoname Tatsuyuki/Slidin' Go) who aren’t really shown doing anything too terrible.
So yeah, good that the heroes want to stop the Villains from ending up roasted but... some bad heroes were needed to be seen in a more substantial way.
Tsuyu worries, hoping Shouto and Shoji are okay before the girls regroup with Kyouka and Tokoyami and they states how they’re now in serious troubles. Ochako again thinks they’ve to stop Himiko or all Japan will be buried. It’s meaningful she said so, because this is the task she set upon herself. I wish for her to wonder something else instead.
Ochako is noteworthy for wondering who protects heroes when they’re hurting, but I wish she could also wonders who protects villains when they hurt, and when I say ‘when they hurt’ I mean not in the physical sense, we just saw in this chapters heroes moving tied villains away so they won’t be burned, but in the psychological one, when they are emotionally hurting who protects the villains? Because things are escalating because the more the villains are hurt, the more ferociously they attack. Same as how AFO pointed out physically wounded heroes get more dangerous, emotionally wounded villains gets more dangerous as well (note how the more desperate Tomura, Himiko, Touya and even Jin and Mr. Compress and Spinner get, the more they get dangerous and capable of crazy stuffs).
Still, I find hugely ironic that now that they’re outnumbered heroes complain this is not a proper battle anymore because their divide and conquer strategy has failed (and Himiko’s Sad Man’s Parade is gonna outnumber them while Dabi’s fire makes impossible for them to keep fighting).
Now, it had been discussed endlessly if Endeavor’s reaction to seeing Touya (worrying for Shouto’s survival completely ignoring how Touya’s body is barely holding together due to how burned he is) is… acceptable.
Normally, an instinctual loving parent’s first reaction in seeing him in such a shape, would be being shocked and worrying for him, then connecting the dots, realizing he might have been reduced like that by his other son and that said other son, who’s conspicuously absent, might have been reduced to ashes in return. Or not. As his elder might have just managed to escape with his life thanks to Kurogiri and Shouto’s move from a battle that, up to minutes ago, he was declared to have lost.
Todoroki Enji is still in a place in which he prioritizes Shouto. Even in chap 355, when he thought at both his sons and he had already heard about how Shouto took Touya down and how AFO was the one to find Touya after he burned at Setoko Peak (which implies the mental state in which Touya is could be the result of AFO’s manipulation as well as Enji’s failure at, at least, finding him first or keeping searching for him), he first worries for Shouto (the supposed winner of the battle) and then for Touya (the supposed loser).
Even in chap 357, when he think at the future, the path he wants to protect is the one of Shouto AND OF THE OTHER KIDS HEROES, without being shown worrying about Fuyumi and Natsuo (I don’t mean to say he doesn’t worry about them just that the manga shows his first concern was for Shouto, for his path as a hero toward the future).
And then adds he’ll pay his penance, he’ll win today AND THEN he’ll keep his eyes on Touya, postponing his duty as a father to his duty as a hero.
For all that Enji claims he wants to atone to his family, he still isn’t shown prioritizing it. Even prioritizing Shouto over Touya isn’t quite as prioritizing his family, because he views Shouto as a future hero, not just as his kid. In that moment he doesn’t think at his dream of his family eating happily together, he thinks at Shouto walking to reach the other kid heroes.
Enji knows it’s his fault if Touya turned out the way he did, that’s why he says he wants to pay penance, that he wants to atone. But he still presented as approaching the thing as a hero, not as a father. He defines it as his duty, not as something he feels he has to do out of love, something he wants to do because he has caused pain to his child and seeing him in pain, hurt him back. If there’s love inside him (and there’s probably some, partly because Horikoshi tried to imply it but MOSTLY because it’s hard for him to get a redemption if he doesn’t care about his kids on an emotional level), he’s buried under layer upon layer of hero duty and he doesn’t seem at all aware of how to tackle it. And even if he views what happened to Touya as his responsibility, his approach to the whole thing is the one of someone who let a rock fall from a cliff and it created a landslide, not of someone who has pushed a person off a cliff causing such person to react violently.
Now… this is how it looks like from a Watsonian point of view.
But authors show things in their story for a reason so I’m actually going to wonder WHY, despite implying Enji should go on a redemption path, Horikoshi is still waiting so long to give us glimpses of him thinking as a father and not as a hero.
So… theories ahead.
1) Well, for start the whole redemption thing can be a red herring. Enji might never manage to get it, because he’s really not putting much efforts in acting as a father.
2) Or it can be the surprise/drama factor. Horikoshi is withholding Enji finally acting like a father would for either surprise factor or drama factor. We’re still meant to wait a little longer because Horikoshi hadn’t had Enji realize yet that what his family wants from him isn’t playing his role as Endeavor, the hero but his role as Todoroki Enji, the father. And so he’s working up a surprising or highly emotional scene in which it finally dawn on him or something like that and then finally, FINALLY, his redemption arc will start with him righting the first wrong he did, ignoring his son (after all at the end of the chapter he said he wanted to see him… it’s only a matter to see if he’s capable to do so or his own are just pretty words and he’s merely seeing what he wants to see and still needs more time before being capable to truly see Touya).
3) The short amount of pages of this chapter can also be to blame, if Enji was actually meant to spend a decent amount of thoughts toward Touya Horikoshi might have decided to move the whole thing in the next chapter due to lack of pages. It’s still not great to see Enji worry about Shouto FIRST, but this can easily be switched once the story is released in the volume.
4) Or this is just Horikoshi failing to notice Enji isn’t acting as a father because this is a story about heroes and so he subconsciously prioritizes heroes and heroic behavior even if actually his story seems to imply Enji should just act as a father, because Horikoshi wants him to act as both but can’t quite find a way to balance the two well.
5) Or on the whole it’s a warning to readers we shouldn’t care about Touya. Garaki implied Touya might not have long to live, Touya himself is on a suicide mission and his body is in a sad state. Enji is not going to redeem himself by saving his son, he’s meant to fail Touya again (the only villain getting saved being Shigaraki and, maybe Himiko) and let him die and this will be the trigger to push him to save at least Shouto. In this case it’s convenient Shouto isn’t currently around because, if Touya dies, his death will be on Enji and not on Shouto also. Enji can die heroically to save Shouto and so that Shouto can continue the path to the future. Mind you, I hate this idea of killing characters, but it’s a really convenient way for authors to deal with morally questionable characters. If Touya dies (doing something good or not) it spares Horikoshi from having to deal with how people would feel if Touya, who had killed people, were to survive, and the same goes for Enji who abused his kids.All those pesky questions about how to punish them for what they did would be out of picture because you can’t really punish who’s dead. It’s the cheapest solution ever but, for authors it’s oh so simple and so often deployed… and it doesn’t really help how Touya (same as Enji) in a way, parallel Darth Vader, because Vader is the one that gets redeemed in the eyes of his son by saving him and then dying short after (which results in him also saving the galaxy in the process).
I honestly don’t know which is the right answer, if the fact that Enji prioritizes asking about Shouto is due to a Doylist reason (lack of pages for exploring his mind or simply not the right moment in the story to show he cares) or due to a Watsonian reason (he’s prioritizing Shouto and heroes and hasn’t changed at all/yet from how he was before).
We’ll see.
Said all this no, it’s not wrong Enji asks about Shouto, that he worries about him, Shouto is his son too… but humans are normally simple creatures. They worry first about what’s under their eyes and then connects the dots and worry about the implications of what’s under their eyes.
Touya’s body is in such poor conditions even Shouto and Enji’s helpers had no idea how he could still move so it would stand to reason than, seeing him in such a state, if Enji cared about him or cared about him as much as he cared about Shouto, his first reaction would be worrying ABOUT HIM, and then connect the dots and realize if Touya is still standing and Shouto didn’t follow him, it might be because Touya managed to turn tables and worry for Shouto.
So yes, Enji’s apparent lack of concern for Touya’s state doesn’t really speak in favor of Enji’s feelings of care as a father.
Credits when it’s due, not even Himiko was shown to care this time (while in the past she cared because his arm was burning), which might be because either she knows Touya went in the battle planning to die so she has already given up on him or because she’s just that focused on killing Hawks (but still she managed to react to Ochako and Tsuyu so it doesn’t work so well) or again, because there just wasn’t time for this in the chapter.
We’ll see.
Honestly I really hope we’ll finally see Enji acting as a father because this whole redemption arc thing has been going along for way too long. I think we’re to a point where the story either addresses it or just gives up on it.
Anyway, while Enji worries about Shouto, we’ve Touya commenting on how his grand dream will never come true…
...and I wonder if he gave up on his dream of carrying out Stain’s will.
In hindsight his focus on Stain’s will was probably a way to distance himself from the emotional aspect of the whole thing, as it did for Spinner, carrying out Stain’s will gave him a sense of purpose that was… better structured than just… returning the pain that he received from his father. His personal vendetta and his ideal might have seemed to overlap but he’ll be likely asked to chose one or the other, because allowing AFO to prevail would also go against Stain’s will as AFO presents himself as a hero in a way but he’s just using people even worse than heroes. AFO won’t bring forward the world Stain wished for, Stain’s world was one in which heroes would reform, not where AFO would rule.
Interesting enough Touya admits he didn’t manage to kill Shouto (when it would have probably hurt Enji more if he had said he killed him, especially if he were to manage to end the battle BEFORE Shouto could reach them) but insists he wants to steal from him what he holds dear, what he’s trying to protect.
The easiest choice would be to go for Hawks (which Touya knows is close to his father) or, at the very last, for the kid heroes (Ochako, Tsuyu, Kyoka and Tokoyami). I would chose Hawks because, as said before, he knew Hawks and his father were close and because Hawks killed Jin so it ironically kills two birds with one stone. But whatever, again we’ll see.
AFO decides now he’s in advantage since Touya and Himiko are taking care of his opponents.
He mourns the fact he didn’t take for himself Kurogiri’s warp (yeah, he should have had Garaki make a copy of it for himself, it’s weird he didn’t but I guess for this plot reasons are to blame since we aren’t given an official in story explanation) but decides to go to Shigaraki.
Hawks gets in the way because, although he called for killing immediately that guy, which we all assumed was Twice, he’s apparently of the idea he should kill AFO first. I really wish that sentence had specified who Hawks wanted to kill first but whatever.
Haws gets pushed back, AFO mockingly tells him to go face Jin but Hawks points out AFO is on a timer due to the rewind effect he used and asks him if he has doubts on Shigaraki’s ‘perfect’ body.
For reasons that I can blame solely to either overconfidence or plot AFO confesses Shigaraki’s body isn’t complete yet so this version of him is essential… and really, I don’t think it’s a bright idea to tell Hawks all this even if he believes he had the upper hand, but whatever.
Hawks, who’s evidently the strategist beyond this whole thing (it was implied in the past it was also due to Hawks’ plan that it was Shouto who was sent to fight Touya) makes the point of the situation and tells Enji the only way out of that pinch is for him to ‘put a stop to Touya’.
Well, at least he hadn’t said to murder him.
So far no one of the kids has reacted to him saying they had to murder ‘someone’. It’s kind of disappointing but whatever.
AFO points out his request is cruel because… Enji isn’t in the best physical shape and this would mean he’s abandoning his duty. Not because Enji is Touya’s father and fighting his son might pain him. Despite all his previous teasing it seems AFO too believes Enji doesn’t give a damn about Touya.
Hawks, as a good Endeavor’s fanboy, points out Endeavor beat AFO once so Endeavor isn’t abandoning his duty. AFO isn’t impressed, apparently he finds it very much an excuse.
As Touya moves closer Enji thinks at his duty and decides this time he’ll really see Touya.
‘Shimei... Kondo ore ga miru’
使命... 今度俺が見る
As I said before, I’m not really seeing it as a good thing that he connects the whole thing to his duty, his mission (‘Shimei’ 使命 can also mean “mission”) and I’m not sure he can really ‘SEE’ Touya. He might be a better fighter, after all he created all the moves Touya uses (we still have to see Touya coming up with an attack of his own, so far he was always using other people’s moves), has more experience and, despite not being in a great physical state… well, Touya looks worse physically. Touya’s fire is stronger, yes, but he tends to get overemotional when his father is around, which damages his ability to think with a cold head so, although Touya isn’t bad at strategizing and at noticing things, he might fail this time. Or burn himself even more than he manages to burn Enji because he loses even more control of his flames. It’s hard to tell.
On a positive note ‘miru’ (見る) can mean “to see” but also “to look after", “to keep an eye on”, “to take care of”, so maybe it’s not meant to be just seeing him but also taking care of him (even though the whole theme of the Todoroki is that Enji and Shouto are bad at seeing things, opposite to Touya, so it makes sense it’s just ‘to see’)... we’ll see.
Anyway, for being so short, it was an interesting chapter but not one that had the heroes acting as saviors. They seem to be here just to beat their enemies, not to do some saving or some serious introspection on how to stop this situation without using punches. But well, the chapter was short so there’s hope.
