OMG I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS TOO

midoriya-sensei!

the doctors: we’re sorry, but he won’t survive longer than a month

the todorokis: *crying because there’s no way touya could survive this*

touya: ahah BET

“8’years is a long time skip so dabi might as well be dead” mfs did yall forget when he was 16 and even the doctor said he’d die soon but he came back exactly 8 years later to join the LOV, still alive and kicking? Yall want Dabi dead so bad it’s pathetic at this point

touya is a drama queen (/pos), you can’t just fit him in a tiny case

if he had been there he would have stolen the show (as he should). you know that time he made a dramatic bow during the final fight? that.

the only thing that could’ve fit in the epilogue would’ve been seeing him eat soba with shouto and/or reading spinner’s book. but anything related to the Todoroki Family Drama™ would’ve required so much more information. you can’t tell me touya wouldn’t have spent an entire chapter roasting endeavor if he had been given the opportunity

my hot take is the reason we never saw anything of Touya in the epilogue is because anything with Touya would require several pages of explanation, you can't stuff it into a tiny frame.

him dying in the thingamabob? would need room to show the family's reactions and especially Shouto's who if this were the case would have failed to save his brother, Rei's about saving her son's life from being killed by Endeavor only for him to still die, and Natsuo, who was the closest to Touya and hasn't interacted with him at all since learning he had survived the fire.

Touya recovering and outliving yet another pessimistic prognosis for his life expectancy? what would he even do with his life, after the people who were his friends were slaughtered and captured by the oppressors they had fought against, and lost? the only reason he didn't share their fates is his relation to Enji.

him cutting off Endeavor? took Natsuo three pages to do, no way to fit it into a brief montage.

Touya escaping with the League? that's a whole another manga of its own.

the aizawa obsession is still going ✨strong✨(reference picture below)

^reference picture

Y’know, a lot of people think that Aizawa wouldn’t want Midoriya to become a teacher so he can “have some peace”, but honestly, after everything that happened in the war, I think he’d enjoy having someone from 1A around. He cares so much for those kids. Now he can only watch them be heroes through a TV screen. At least having one nearby to check on, maybe share lunch with, grade papers, and talk about the new generations of heroes together.

And think about it. They both had a highly sought after quirk that they both lost in the war. Aizawa’s really the only person at UA who knows exactly what that’s like.

Midoriya would also help with anything involving Eri. Need someone to make food for after band practice? Got it. Need someone to take you to competition? Absolutely. The two are unstoppable together.

And honestly, I think Aizawa sees Shirakumo in Midoriya. He sees a dream that was taken too quickly. He asks Midoriya if he’s lonely, because he knows how painful it is to be separated from his friends. He may still put up a gruff exterior, but I think he really wants Midoriya to do his best, take pride in his work now.

I headcanon he put in the recommendation for Midoriya to come teach. Just like Nemuri did for him.

gradient map / alternative colors

Just a friendly reminder that Horikoshi always intended for Tomura and Touya to be the closest thing to soulmates/eachother’s identical parallel. Their thoughts and the reasonings? Practically the same. They’ll tear themselves apart just for a shred of validation; a plea for someone to see them, even as they destroy the others around them. Who cares is innocents get hurt, right? In the end, the result will be far more valuable than a couple of stranger’s lives.

Dabi’s entire philosophy is quite literally to burn everything around him into ash, including himself and Endeavour, all to liberate himself and others from the false shackles of hero society. This ideology *perfectly* coincides with Tomura, who not only wants to carve out a place in this dejected world for all of his followers, but to also liberate and destroy. Even as children their ideologies would have agreed with one another, which is, “Why should my father’s limitations on me restrict who I am? I just want to be free.”

The meaning behind their names. Tenko ( 転弧) & Touya ( 燈矢); Tenko’s name has the kanji with the meaning “bow” in it. and Touya’s name has the kanji with the meaning “arrow” in it. Hand in hand. Another interesting fact of their names is that 燈(Tō) means "lamp", or "light”, and 転 (Ten) means "turn", or "revolve”, which could signify the instinctive nature of humans (or Tenko himself?) to ‘revolve’ around light (or Touya’s fire/heat in a metaphorical sense).

If we also want to talk metaphorical, ‘light’ could be used to describe the lightheartedness of Touya’s character before Enji destroyed him at the seams, and we know that as a child, Tenko was a loving, empathetic child, attracted to ‘light’ (the softness and kindness of others). He played games with rejected children, defended them, and acted as a ‘hero’ in his own way. This parallel of Touya needing a savior and Tenko readily taking in others who need it, is very interesting to see, especially when we literally see this acted out later on in the LOV!

One more theory I have…now hear me out…also alludes to their name meanings. 矢 (Ya) means "arrow”…but 弧 (Ko) means "arc," indicating a curved path or trajectory. Now, arrows typically travel in a straight line or path when shot. Except for when they’re deemed, “defective.” You know where I’m going with this. It’s almost a completed story with those two characters. A defective arrow that lead a curved path, all because of a manufacturing/crafting issue. Sorry if that hit you hard, me too.

I’m so delusional about them. It’s totally okay.

Todoroki family and chap 430

In case it wasn't obvious by now, I was very invested in the Todoroki family storiline and one of the things that sadden me the most about chap 430 is this image.

We've Enji, or maybe I should say Endeavor, Rei is pushing his wheelchair as he goes somewhere, we don't know where, some want to think he's visiting Touya but it's not said and, around him there are 3 men and a woman.

It's not his children, it's his sidekicks and Hawks.

The final chapter doesn't touch what happened to Natsuo and Fuyumi, we've to assume Fuyumi is happy with her work and Natsuo with his marriage.

We don't know if Touya is still alive but, anyway, he's going to die. Even if we assume he died happily he had said smiling was why they lived their lives. He could keep on living out of anger and grudge but not out of smiles and happiness?

Fuyumi has fought for all those years so hard because she wanted back her family and she basically get nothing, not her old family as Natsuo leaves and Touya dies and it's not even hinted she has a new one as it was Natsuo the one who got a girlfriend as soon as he entered university and marries her basically a year and a half later.

Natsuo is just rushedly married to this character of which we don't even know the name. We don't know if, in the end he visited Touya again or not, we don't know if he ever managed to overcome all the anger and pain he felt inside for how his father ruined the family.

Shouto became a Hero, but his mother is not with him to support him but she is with his father. We don't see his siblings around him, cheering for him. We don't know which effect had on him to reconnect with Touya only to lose him. We're only told he became a good Hero so people don't call him anymore Endeavor's son, forgetting people also looked poorly at him for being Dabi's brother. How did he overcome that? Evidently it somehow disappeared as all the first years are already all his fans and even Dai said all the kids wanted to be like Shouto... but, at the end of the day, we aren't shown Shouto having a good moment with his family, his good moments come from being a Hero and being with his friends.

Even if we assume that, despite having to marry Enji out of duty to help her family, Rei had fallen in love with Enji while their family was having a good time before he turned abusive, and now that she had forgiven him and he stopped being abusive she's glad to be back with him... skipping this was very vaguely constructed she lost 10 years in a hospital and we can't see her with her children. She's supposed to be happy being with him with one of her children dead and one of her children keeping away from his father because just being in the same room with him makes him feel bad.

Mind you, I'm not saying Natsuo should forgive Enji or force himself to be with Enji or whatever but having a person that's related to you that makes you to feel bad just by being in the same room with you so that you've to avoid that person, is not something that's good. If Enji and Rei live together and Natsuo wants to visit his mother he has to make sure to do it when his father is somewhere else. In the past Rei was split between taking care of Shouto, who couldn't be with her other children, and taking care of Touya, Fuyumi and Natsuo, with the result Natsuo felt neglected because he was very small when all this happened and needed his mother... but likely she ended up neglecting Fuyumi and Touya too because you can't be in two places at the same time. Now, instead than having to take turns with Shouto, Natsuo have to take turns with Enji.

Ad for Enji... all his atonement for what? He doesn't manage to rebuild a relation with his children, apparently his sidekicks and Hawks have replaced them, they're conveniently of the right number. His children would have gotten where they were even without his atonement because all we hear is about others helping them, he only get the cool sentence, we see nothing of his struggle. But this is also supposed to be a happy ending for him. Who care if he doesn't have his kids? He has his sidekicks and Hawks his newfound family he would have had anyway had he focused on his work only.

The story tried it's hardest to make me think he cared about his family but then I'm supposed to think he's happy not having any of the sort apart for Rei and a new found family.

Horikishi had already established in the previous chapter Enji would have his sidekicks and Hawks' support, I didn't need a reminder of that.

I needed to see THIS image at the end...

...maybe including Natsuo's girlfriend as he could have introduced her to the rest of the family... or him holding his firstborn and letting Rei see her grandchild.

I needed to see Fuyumi finding someone with whom to form a family since she can't have her own back and she wished so badly for it.

I needed to have this being shown to me...

...or at least to see Touya out of that contraption as he died in peace, a smile on his lips since happiness somehow couldn't save him but grudge could.

I needed to be told something that Enji did that HELPED his kids, that made them be better. Not something vague, I need something concrete. Even if they would never be with him, since he's supposed to atone to them, I need him to make something more than just give them a new house and pay for the bills because he'd been paying bills through all his life so that's not new.

I would have been fine with him watching them smile from a distance or hearing from Rei how they were doing and smiling.

Mind you, I'm willing to believe in Horikoshi's mind Enji now is a changed man and very sorry for what he did and loves his family and yadda yadda but there's a reason why we say 'show, don't tell' and so far Horikoshi is more interested in telling than showing.

I get that in his mind Enji is a character more important than Rei, Fuyumi, Natsuo or even Touya, I would have been fine with all that I've mentioned being shown through his perspective because he cares about his family and so he's happy if they're happy.

If, in all that talking Midoriya does about reaching out to others, what he wanted to point out was Enji had continued to reach out to help his family even if they had cut him out of their lives.

But no, the good part is that his sidekicks and Hawks are reaching out for him. Okay, I can take this as the test trying again to point out Enji will never be a Hero, in the end he's not the one reaching out but the one others have to reach out to help but, again, it was established in the past chapter so I didn't need a reminder and it kind of steps all over his arc of trying to reach out for his family.

In the end the most he does is to just take it when they want to yell at him and let them live the live they want... I do think it's a great thing if an abuser were to realize what he had done to his victims and try to atone. It's kind of a miracle turned true... but there's just too little of it in this story.

Maybe I'm missing some deep cultural context, maybe Enji is doing something AMAZING for his family that Horikoshi thought he didn't need to show because it's obvious to Japanese readers but... but I wish he had shown it. Instead the moment Enji finally stop being a Hero and could do something for his family, the manga ends with his family disregating but I'm supposed to see it as a happy ending.

I prefer it had just been called a sad ending. Bad things happen, I can stomach them but honestly "Ano Hana" makes a much better work at portraying grief and atonement and the same goes for "Koe no katachi".

Horikoshi knew he was selling this manga also to foreign readers. I'm not saying he should have made his manga thinking to them but, if this atonement arc was so important, maybe he should have made it more understandable for us as well. This makes the diffference between a national mangaka and an international one.

I need a four hour loop of the intro of hot gum (she version) thank you please sofia