The Real Change That Dabi Went Through Is From 🌸pastel Icon🌸 To 💀goth King💀, Good For Him,

#1 stan.

also got this bright idea from a friend.

when i was a teen i was the only one out of my sisters to have a part-time job which gave me a lot of sway in the household as the one who could help mom with money and also buy my sisters treats (nevermind all the money they stole from me and my insane complexes about having to buy love). point is that i was the one who paid for like 90% of the music on my and my middle sister's shared iTunes account and also paid for stuff when we walked downtown together.

anyways one day me and my sisters are walking downtown and me and my middle sister are arguing about the lyrics of rem's orange crush. things get heated, maybe i pushed her onto the road, there were no cars that she couldn't safely escape. whatever. in any case when we got home later that day i looked up the lyrics we were arguing about, realised i was in the wrong, and promptly deleted the song off my iPod and our iTunes account.

all of this is a long-winded way to say that i think yoichi and all for one could have this exact same scenario except that all for one would try to find a way to kill rem entirely from existence.

So I had a thought:

Dr. Garaki straight up says that due to his catastrophic injuries, Dabi shouldn’t have survived a month after escaping the facility and because of that, none of All-For-One’s cronies bothered retrieving him, and everyone involved was pretty shocked when he turned up years later for the villains’ social upheaval/anarchy quest.  The explanation we get for this medical improbability is he remained alive because of his absolute hatred for Endeavor and need for personal vengeance/validation.

Me:  “There’s no scientific or medical explanation that makes this remotely plausible outside of bullshit anime willpower and——*side eyes H.P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air*——You!”

Long story short, Cool Air is one of Lovecraft’s lesser known short stories about this guy Dr. Muñoz who is technically dead, but through sheer willpower, he’s able to keep himself alive, and through the use of a janky cooling system he keeps in his apartment (an air conditioner, it's an air conditioner) he’s able to keep his body from rotting.  The contraption fails one night, and in a desperate attempt to stave of the inevitable, he recruits his downstairs neighbor to keep him supplied with ice until they can get the machine fixed.  They can’t fix it in time, Dr. Muñoz dies, his horrible secret comes out, and that’s pretty much the plot.

To sum up, a technically dead guy who keeps himself alive through sheer willpower…and ice…?  And Rei’s Quirk is…

It’s still implausible because Lovecraft should never in a million years be taken with any kind of scientific/medical seriousness, but neither should My Hero Academia, so my new headcanon is Rei’s Quirk manifested way earlier than everyone thought it did and Dabi just never noticed it and credited his survival to the aforementioned hatred and determination.

In short, Dabi is a Lovecraftian abomination.

...

And for good measure, when I re-watched Overly Sarcastic Productions video on Lovecraft to see their rundown on Cool Air, this description of Dr. Muñoz came up:

This shitpost is writing itself.

I tried to make it funny but can you feel the scream from the bottom of my Mariana trench soul?

Disclaimer 1: I haven't read the manga since about summer, 2020, but this is the impression I got from all the spoilers that, well... flooded my dashboards. I also felt physically ill about the thing in the middle panel and felt it all over again while drawing it ngl.

Disclaimer 2: Hawks is both drowning Deku and Dabi, but with an added layer of "why are you even here" bc has he ever actually... DONE anything to prove his character development (apart from not fighting Toga) that no one else could have done, or was it all say, no show?

(ps I know these don't apply to class 1A for the most part, instead it's about... basically everybody else)

rei todoroki is such a difficult character to talk about because I think people have legitimate reasons to be…some level of uncomfortable with her, but at the same time most people who bring that up don’t do so with anywhere near enough nuance or empathy for a woman with an abusive husband, and lots of them outright victim blame her (as I posted about before, people straight up blame her for being raped) and don’t see the way horikoshi is treating her lately as a problem. 

watching the responses to her these last few chapters…………the misogyny and people’s inability to care about a battered woman made my stomach churn. people have become so quick to jump on her before questioning the writing at all. 

I wish she was written with more care and actual thoughtful, complex characterization–I think her relationship with shouto sorely needs to have actual work put into writing it because what she did to him was pretty awful and traumatizing even if there were obviously extenuating circumstances. shouto doesn’t blame her, but with ten years of distance between them after the incident to stew in their feelings and suffer alone there’s a lot to explore when they reunite. and I think healing from trauma your mother caused because of your mutual abuser is much more worth exploring than putting all kinds of screentime into forcing him to build a better relationship with his dad, but a lot of what seems like obvious baggage he carries from his relationship with his mother has never been unpacked. 

same goes for her relationship with touya. I’d be interested in exploring his anger towards her more but we’re probably not going to get that, because these days she’s only relevant when she can be used to make endeavor look better (and before that as an accessory to shouto’s character). the way touya reacted to both his parents was very different despite resentment that built towards both(desire to please endeavor mixed with resentment over being tossed aside vs. what seems like complete dismissal of his mother), and I think that’s worth looking at. also I think, with what you can extrapolate from her relationship with her parents and then the way endeavor abused her, her inability to help touya is partially learned helplessness(on top of the fact that…there’s only so much she could do when she was being abused the way she was). 

AND I get that they’re not major characters the way shouto and now touya are but it’d be nice to get more on what natsuo and fuyumi think of her, too, especially since they’re the only ones who visited her for ten whole years! they saw a stage of her life everyone else missed entirely, have maintained a closeness with her no one else has. 

pssst. while forgiveness is an option that the survivor can make for their own sake, the way it’s written in bnha is not a good handling of a forgiveness narrative. this is because all of the arcs dealing with forgiveness have so far been narrated through an abuser’s thoughts, prioritizing his hopes and unfulfilled desires (desires that are unfulfilled because of his abuse), rather than the emotional journey of his victims. shouto started softening his stance not when the story explored shouto’s thoughts, but when the story began exploring the thoughts of his abuser. as a result, what happens on the page is the abuser stops abusing and starts to feel bad, and therefore shouto begins to have a more positive relationship with him. rather than forgiveness resulting from a survivor coming to terms with his abuse and making the decision to forgive for his own peace of mind, the forgiveness is primarily framed as the abuser doing and feeling things, and therefore forgiveness happens. shouto does not make a decision to start forgiving; his abuser makes a decision and gets forgiveness in return.

forgiveness can be an empowering decision when made by a survivor with their full agency. its portrayal in fiction is not always empowering, especially when the narrative focuses on the feelings and thoughts of the abuser over the survivor. that is propaganda, plain and simple, particularly when we as a society already vastly overestimate the importance of an abuser’s feelings both in general, and in relation to stopping their abuse. in a social climate that already promotes forgiveness—not for the sake of the survivor but for the abuser—it’s difficult to write about forgiveness in a way that won’t be taken as modeling the behavior of “good” victims. we cannot treat characters like independent human beings, who all make “valid” decisions in response to their abuse. how are their decisions framed? who are we being told to sympathize with? who is being prioritized narratively? we can’t engage in discussions about representations in fiction without considering these kinds of questions.

super quickly sketch

- Did you have a shitty childhood? Bad parents? - No! I had a good family. Two brothers and one sister, and wonderful parents. And we all lived happily in a beautiful house. - And what happened? - I’m.

Me: I'm done yapping

Reads Viz's translation for chpt 427

Actually no I'm not.

Let's talk about Izuku Midoriya, intense hero fanboy, everyone he looks up to is a hero, ect ect

Passively listening to Spinner as he sorrowfully tells him "he was my friend. He was my hero".

Like??? Midoriya doesn't even bat an eye but at the least that should resonate some with Midoriya. He can at least imagine what it'd be like to (permanently) lose All Might/Toshinori. Or Bakugou who was dead for long enough in the Sky Coffin. And we get.... A close up of Midoriya, showing some dark circles under his eyes and a blank stare. What. The. Fuck. Does he have so little empathy once people turn into "villains"? That he can't sympathize and try to ease their pain? And we're supposed to believe he has this incredible heart that's so inspiring to even antagonistic characters who've otherwise lost hope in hero society? (I'd maybe say that he's still processing the end of the war, dealing with his own stuff, ect ect and excuse that lack of interaction if not for the fact that he quips back "make it a comic book" - which he's not a big quip person so it's not like that's in his character to do, especially not during emotional exchanges. I'm sorry but it's just... callous at worst, tone deaf at best)

If someone can explain this chapter's Deku to me - not with suppositions, but with canon only evidence - that'd be great. But I no longer believe that Midoriya has such a great heart. Show don't tell, but we had plenty of telling and little showing.

37 + spinner

bloodhail by have a nice life

bonus sketch :)