for the people who like crime as much as i do here is my league of villains uquiz. i am having the time of my life
As I’m sure some may have noticed, Endeavor’s got his arc going on, where after finally realizing how horrible he is and tries to become a better person. But a problem I & many others tend to have resulting from this arc is that lots of folks talk about how Endeavor’s ‘different now’, how he’s changing, and how that makes him so much better than Thief Takami or, of course, Dabi (ugh); and as a result I think it’s important we to address is how…Bojack Horseman-y his attempts at changing have really been up until now. Think of it as in honor of Rei calling him out and hopefully forcing real progress out of him in the future, we’re going over his lack of progress so far.
So, let’s look through all his most notable attempts at changing in comparison to what he was doing before that he’s making up for, as well as anything else he’s done that might reflect in some fashion on his redemption:
-We can start with Rei; the woman who he bought, sexually abused for about a decade, psychically abused for 5 more years than that, and then had locked up in a hospital for another 10 years and which she has only just left. He tried to make up for that by having her favorite flowers delivered to her room in the hospital he had her sent to. This is about the average of what we can expect going forward, btw.
-Then there’s Fuyumi & Natsuo, who he deemed failures and neglected so much throughout their childhoods that he appears like a stranger to them, who they know more by the damage he’s done than any actual interactions. To make up for all that, he bought them a house to live away from him and not interact with him anymore, along with their mother when she leaves the hospital. (Not Shoto though, he still interreacts with Endeavor.) This is, unironically, the biggest and most selfless act of atonement he has committed thus far. All down hill from here!
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This is probably a weird note to end my time with MHA's run on; but I find it so strange how I still see people calling Tomura out on just being a destruction-hungry villain with supposedly no plan or follow up...as though he is unique for that simplicity. Especially after the ending we got. Like, Deku and All Might never really had a plan when they were reshaping society by beating up the enemy and everything worked out fine for them, but does anyone call them out for just using violence to mindlessly solve everything with no further plan? (Well, yes. Me. Right now.)
Because like, really thinking about it; how different was All Might's plan from the start of his career to take down AFO and become a symbol, and Deku's plan to end the villains and bring everything back, from Shigaraki's plan to end hero society and bring about a world accommodating to the League? It all seemed to boil down to the same basic premise of Step 1) Beat everyone & everything making things worse, Step 2) ...it all just kind of works out from there. (I guess All Might planned on being inspiring and uplifting, but then we could also count Tomura's plan to be imposing and...uplifting but for different people. Deku was winging it every step of the way though.) Everyone's getting on Tomura's case for doing nothing but destroying; but all evidence from when the heroes do it suggests violence & destruction works. And it just never fails to bug me when people call Tomura out for stuff that's fine when heroes do it.
Which, yeah, let's touch on how it did just work out for Deku that way for no logical reason, least of all anything he planned. He punched out the big bad just like All Might and now things are like a hundred times better than they were under All Might with no more Tenkos abandoned in the street. If stuff like that just happens if you punch out your enemies hard enough, then why couldn't that happen for Tomura? Maybe if he had destroyed the government & hero society it would've, idk, been so fear/awe-inspiring that all the villains would've been nice and cooperative under the PLF and everything would've been fine. Or something. No more contrived than what we saw with the old lady plot line, MHA is just a series where that stuff works out. Heck, one time it actually did just work out that way for Tomura:
Again, violence and destruction works in MHA. I mean; duh, it's a shonen manga.
Plus all this is ignoring the fact that, unlike those two, Tomura did have a follow up to the violence. He did have a step two, or at least one & a half, after "beat down all the bad guys in the country." Rather than just going "and everything will work out from there," he had his guys plan for the future so he could say "and Spinner, Toga, and RD et. all will make sure everything works out from there." (Admittedly, not much; but also, not hopes and dreams.) He did have a plan, it was just the plan from the Overahul arc, where he was last asked to have a plan: leave it to his allies.
And hey, that means it's actually better than what we saw from genius All Might and brainiac Deku. So why are we still, even after everything was over, acting like there's some expectation as a villain he didn't meet? I guess it's just in the nature of a 'tantrum-having man-child who wants nothing but destruction' to put more forethought into the future he wants to build than the society-uplifting greatest heroes.
That or maybe everyone had really detailed follow-ups for when they won that Hori never went much into, but that'd render this post a bit pointless so shhh.
something i’ve been turning around in my head for a bit: i think it’s different being disappointed when a character with no clear motivation or set of values takes a turn you personally didn’t want, versus when a character who DOES have a clear, established motivation and values has those aspects abandoned. there were so many people who were upset with the direction hox’s character took, saying it wasn’t right for him and he should’ve stayed with the LOV, but honestly hox betraying them was always a possibility and there was no established characterization that ever implied he wouldn’t side with the heroes. just because there was a lot of fanon and theories about it doesn’t mean hori “took” something from y’all or wrote badly just because you didn’t like it.
there’s more argument to be made that, for example, deku’s characterization is less consistent and the writing might be weaker with him. deku IS someone with more-or-less established motivations and values, who tells off shouto’s abuser early on but in the late series only seems to take a conciliatory approach to the todorokis’ situation. there’s at least a case to be made that deku turned way too much from his earlier stance on the issue and it felt manipulated in order to support the abuser’s redemption.
these two cases are just not the same.