they get along great
Reference to my fanfiction, The Hero's Complex!
Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.
Today is a very sad day because I am about to do something I genuinely dislike: I am about to defend All for One. In order to cope, I shall make fun of him the whole time.
AFO and Yoichi's backstory is finally out, with AFO narrating it, and there are two possibilities: he is either completely lying about it (boring) or he is lying a little about it (very in-character for him) because he is also lying to himself.
The narrator (AFO, seriously, it's AFO) says things such as "The baby drained the lifeforce of both his mom and his brother.", "It was born an arrogant baby." and such but it really reads at AFO villifying himself to add to his own legend.
That's what babies do. Children, before they're born, kinda have to take their strength from their mother. That's why pregnant people aren't supposed to do anything taxing.
AFO and Yoichi's mother didn't die because baby AFO drained her like a vampire. She died because she was a homeless woman who had access to nothing and had to go in labor alone.
Same thing here: during twin birth, a twin is often bigger than the other (well, probably not to extent of Yoichi and AFO, but you get my point).
(First slaughter by Baby AFO shown in that chapter.)
There are two things that are strange in this scene (apart from... you know.... a baby murdering people...)
AFO had no reason to go after them because they don't have any quirks to steal.
It makes no sense for someone to attack a group of people with nothing to gain. I doubt that's the kind of behavior you have when you're in survival mode as you're barely surviving in the street.
However, a previous panel points at some context we might be missing.
The same panel that indicates that those guys don't have a quirk to steal also shows that they are wiling to do some "preventive attack" on a bunch of quirked people who might or might not be those who assaulted a protest group (reminder that in this context, that protest group are protesting the rights for quirked people to exist).
I could be wrong but odds are that they did something to be qualified as a threat to All for One and we are missing the additional context.
(Second slaughter by Baby AFO shown in that chapter.)
Now, the poor souls who just got absolutely wrecked by a toddler wearing what I suspect to be a garbage bag have quirks, which makes more sense than the previous scene.
However (and thank you for @aimportantdragoncollector for pointing that out to me), we also have this panel.)
Yoichi is shown with bruises on his face and might be broken teeth.
Probably because those same people AFO is shown killing attacked him.
(Just... Just ignore the rats.)
AFO didn't care about Yoichi so much that the very conscious first act of his life might have been to swim a river upstream while dragging his brother above the surface with what must have been the deathgrip of all deathgrip.
AFO didn't care about his brother so much that Yoichi was fed and clothed by an AFO who was malnourished enough for his ribs to show and who wore what's basically an improvised toga.
But he just keeps sacrificing what little he has for someone he doesn't care about one bit, that's just his first possession. Nothing more.
Okay, I am going to be clear: anyone who sees that panel and thinks that it's the proof AFO didn't like his brother... You just outed yourself as an only child.
Siblings punt each other for no reason. (There is a reason why the first recorded murderer was an older sibling.) In this case, the reason was Yoichi throwing a can at him.
AFO: "You're not inviting me to a fun activity? You're leaving me out, in the cold, unable to partake in brother bonding activity? Oh, vault for Little Brother! Vault for Little Brother for one thousand years!"
AFO: "Nevermind, we're reading together. All is well, I guess."
Still laughing about AFO's flawless reasoning... "Comic books heroes' life suck. Better to be a villain. I already did the whole struggle thing, I want an easy life."
AFO killed the glowing baby because he was jealous. It's as simple as that. The glowing baby was considered the first official quirked individual (even though it's not true), was protected by his family (if I remember correctly, the mother of quirks was his mom) while AFO and Yoichi had no one but each other (EDIT: I was wrong, the Mother of Quirks was Destro's mother. thanks to the people in the tags), and had a ton of people following him (while, for some strange reason, people start running away screaming when AFO shows his quirk... What a mystery...).
The last panel was basically AFO saying "I want to be loved' but not having the frame of reference to even know what love is.
While AFO is definitely a bad guy and a monster, he didn't begin his existence as one. He just wants people to believe that. Because his pride and his ego can't allow him to admit that he lived a childhood full of horrible trauma where he was a victim abandoned by society (to an even greater extent than the LOV) or he would probably combust out of rage and mortification.
Ergo facto, AFO is a lying liar who lies, especially to himself.
hello gamers. your favorite guy is being attacked by porn bots.
it's so fascinating to me that dabi & hawks are fraternal foils, yet there's nothing about their dynamic and constellation with endeavor that signifies fraternity, they're in relation to each other as sons of endeavor (emphasis on him, not them). their sense of worth depends of endeavor the patriarch, they center him the way a child centers their parent and it's crazyyy how endeavor indirectly sets up dabi & hawks against each other as filial rivals the way he sets up touya and shoto.
the difference is that touya & shoto have a more tangible rivalry going on while dabi & hawks compete with each other thematically, they have similar experiences with childhood neglect & abuse and choose polar survival strategies so to me, dabi vs. hawks boils down to the dialectics of which post-traumatic survival strategy (fight vs. fawn) leads to the parental attention their inner child desperately craves.
and tbh? idek who actually gets what they wanted or a "kinder" conclusion. dabi dies for the sake of revenge and hawks comes out alive, but it is ultimately dabi who gets to move on from endeavor and focuses on his little brother & the unconditional love he experienced despite everything he put him through, meanwhile hawks is still deeply attached to the endeavor he chose as a pseudo-paternal figure as a 5yo like he doesn't get to move on at all and doesn't receive the fraction of unconditional love that dabi does. it's crazyyy to watch hawks go through all of that and act like nothing happened, as if dabi's presence never challenged his stance on endeavor/abusive men/the way he copes with what happened to him as a child.
and ofc hawks can't do any of that, endeavor as a "redeemable" character only works if hawks is there to remind the reader of his good deeds, which only works if hawks doesn't get to progress and reflect. It's sad but also funny on a meta level because there is a very clear analogy between horikoshi reducing hawks to a tool that suffers from bad writing for the sake of another character's writing and the hpsc reducing hawks to a tool that suffers mentally for the sake of the establishment. (dog motif works so well for hawks but i digress)
idk, one thing i really like about the todoroki subplot is that it's good at showing how an abuser messes with a family's dynamics and renders it dysfunctional, there was no way for touya to be normal about his little brother and ofc he saw shoto's birth and his own death sentence, and there was also no way for dabi & hawks to have a normal relationship either because endeavor is an omnipresent patriarch in their fight. horikoshi barely scratched the surface of dabihawks' dynamic in relation to endeavor and completely ignored it the final arc to ride endeavor a little harder, but the implications are there and i won't let anyone ignore them!!!!!!!!!!!
i don't think horikoshi has ever seen a reptile cause why the hell does spinner look like that
anyways i based him on an anole instead of a gecko because anoles are very very good at climbing and imo spinner looks more like an anole than a gecko
Associated fic: Nurture My Nature
Wasn't sure if I was going to post any art for this fic given that the subject matter is extreme, however since it's not gooner shit... If you do decide to read this fic: PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD READ THE TAGS.
half return