My Heart Is Breaking In A Million Pieces Because Tomura Thinks He Can Destroy The World And Go Back To

my biggest pet peeve concerning dabi’s design is the staples and especially the fact that we’ll probably never know when and how he got them

his scars deteriorating over the years could make sense tbh, depending on what we imagine dabi has done until he joined the league, but the staples?

they’re a way to say “hey his body is falling apart” and that (has op said) doesn’t really make sense with the information given during dabi’s introduction.

and even if you justify it by saying that, quirk usage or not, his body deteriorated, how did he get them?

if ujiko had been the one stapling touya’s body, it would’ve made more sense + more gruesome. imagine the scene when touya sees himself after he wakes up but his face is also stapled together?

anyways, i still love all the justifications/headcanons in fanfics to explain the staples

dunno if I should call this a headcanon or a theory and I know Horikoshi just went with what looked cool but the more I think about Dabi's initial design when he came to the League in the context of what we learned about him and what we saw happen to him during the second war, the less sense it makes that his body was already in that state.

according to the anime, he was learning by watching Endeavor's videos online. before Sekoto, he wasn't learning from any source at all and went about his training intuitively, but after Sekoto I strongly doubt he would be actively practicing his quirk, for a multitude of reasons. his body was still healing from the skin transplantation, the trauma associated with accidentally burning himself to death, plainly not having a place to train a fire quirk, which tend to be flashy and to use your quirk in public, having a provisional license is required, otherwise he risks getting arrested. he did a very good job staying out of the public's eye for the 7 years since he escaped AFO, who was also implied to be unaware of Touya surviving for so long.

so as far as we know, all he did for those 7 years is lay low and be very online. which makes his remark to Spinner hilarious ngl, at least Spinner sprung up to action as soon as he saw something that had inspired him, while Dabi had spent 7 whole years sitting on his very personal trauma and not going to therapy.

when Giran brings him to Shigaraki, he doesn't share any information about Dabi save for him being very invested in Stain's ideology. no criminal records, maybe, but not even a word of his absurdly strong quirk? no mentions of arson at all? they did discuss Toga making it to the news, so Dabi being left out like that was a bit weird in the context of the conversation, like him seeking out Stain's contacts was enough reason to let him join the League. he won't be useful to you, Shigaraki, but he's got the spirit. please take him in, he has nowhere else to go?

if you really look at the way Dabi uses his quirk until MVA, it's noticeable how he seems to have no idea what he is doing. there's no technique, no finesse to his moves, just throwing out huge blasts of fire with his hands and hoping for the threat to leave him alone.

when Shigaraki attacked him (fully provoked) his reaction was too slow to summon any flames at all, and if it weren't for Kurogiri, that would have been it for Dabi.

When he is fighting Geten and starts going beyond his limit, he scares himself with the increased fire output. because, yup, overusing his quirk by accident was the source of his trauma.

the databook puts his technique as the weakest of his stats. his power is huge and eventually allowed him to become the strongest fire quirk user in the BNHA universe, but his technique was extremely lacking.

all of the above just doesn't paint the picture of someone who has been consistently mastering his quirk for 7 years. rather, it gives the picture of someone who had just started using his quirk for the first time in years, having background training from his childhood.

it's not even that Dabi isn't hardworking as hell or doesn't have the potential to be trained, because he's a complete opposite. continuously going beyond his limit, despite his own body getting in his way, mastering Enji and Shouto's complicated techniques they have worked for weeks/months/years on in a matter of minutes after just observing it. surely, he has been watching Enji and learning the way his father uses his quirk for years, but putting theory to practice? i doubt he even had the chance, before joining LOV.

he had to wait, because starting to actively use his quirk sets the clock into motion, counting down the time he has left. he is like a candle, destroying himself with his fire, until nothing is left at all. he had to make sure his plan of revenge will have a chance to succeed before fully committing to the 'Dabi' route, a slow and agonizing process of cremating himself by continuously using his quirk. because when he really starts using his quirk for long stretches of time? this is what happens to him.

to conclude this post, I know why the final design was chosen (because it's cool as fuck) but after analyzing the crucial points of Touya's story and his relationship with his quirk, I really think him joining the League with post-coma design would have made more sense. once he had started really using his quirk, his body would slowly degrade to the state Dabi's was in, because his fire literally melts his skin. but his body already having 40% surface third degree burns, when he didn't even use his quirk the entire time, perfectly holding up up until the first war arc and then quickly starting to burn down? idk, seems a bit inconsistent?..

anyway, i love the concept of Dabi's skin slowly and inevitably burning down after he had joined the League. him losing more and more skin until there's barely anything left, when he reveals himself to his father and is bitter at the lack of recognition, because burning himself to the point of being unrecognizable was one of the many sacrifices he had made to be finally seen by Endeavor.

also, more of this. because this was bittersweet as hell

i just read the last chapter of mha

the izuku in me might make a post of all the thoughts i have (good and bad)

somehow i’m not as disappointed as i thought i would be

heroes: we hate you but you know who we hate more

villains: ???

heroes: afo

villains: you’re so valid for that

anyway. if bnha was actually good, the second war arc would have been about LOV and the heroes joining forces to save Shigaraki from AFO, not about the heroes separating them to beat and slaughter them in unfair battles

gradient map / alternative colors

Mr. Compress, in a jail cell.

Guard, standing outside the cell.

Mr. Compress: “Would you like to see a magic trick?”

Guard: “Make it quick.”

Mr. Compress, holding out a deck of cards: “Pick a card, any card!”

Guard, takes a card.

Mr. Compress: “Now close your eyes and hold the card to your forehead.”

Guard, following his instructions.

Mr. Compress: “On the count of three, open your eyes!”

Guard: “1… 2… 3.”

Guard, now standing in the jail cell: “What the—“

Mr. Compress, now outside the jail cell: “Reveal your card!”

Guard, flipping over the card, seeing an Uno reverse card: “Ohhh! Hey, that was pretty good!”

Mr. Compress: “Thank you, I’ll be taking my leave now.”

Guard: “Haha, okay— Wait, no, get back here!”

Mr. Compress running out of the room.

rei recognizing her son immediately at first glance when he came on that tv but endeavour failing to do so in their fight pre-war knowing that he’d probably seen pictures of him on the news beforehand and still not seeing touya through dabi will forever break my heart

NO LIKE LITERALLY THOUGH!!! it’s genuinely so heartbreaking!!! but i also think a mother can just recognize their spawn like,, that’s her eldest sitting on that couch. her eldest baby, scarred and sutured to shit. her eldest baby, admitting to murdering 30+ innocent people. her eldest baby, presumed dead until this very moment.

speaking of rei and touya, i fucking love the way she goes to reach for him in chapter 426 when he starts coughing!! like !!!!!!!!!!! oh my heart just shattered when i saw it, especially since i rly do believe that touya is 90% his mother.

You look up from your book to see your husband standing over the bassinet with his arms crossed, his brow raising as he looks down inside of it with a tiny scowl. He stays like that for about a minute. You sit up in your shared bed, then call out to him. “Ryo.” 

“Hm.” He doesn’t look up. 

“May I ask what you are doing?” 

“The little brat is staring,” Sukuna says simply. “I am simply staring at her in return.” 

Inside of the bassinet, your baby daughter coos. Her scarlet eyes—exactly like her father’s—glitter in interest. You hear her giggle, and you scoff lightly and return your gaze to your book. “She thinks you’re playing a game.” 

“I am doing no such thing.” 

You flip a page. “Put a hand over your face for a few seconds.” He doesn’t respond, but you know he listens. “M’kay, now lift them.” There’s silence for a few seconds, then your daughter bursts into a fit of giggles. 

Sukuna rolls his eyes. “I do not understand what is so entertaining about that.” When you look up again, you see that he’s covering his face again, then revealing himself to get the same reaction from the baby.

“It’s called peek-a-boo. It’s a game most babies love to play.” 

The little princess babbles as she lifts her arms up, and Sukuna tilts his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

You snicker. “One: You’ll figure out what she’s saying the more you talk with her. Two: She wants you to pick her up.” 

He sighs dramatically, then reaches into the bassinet to pick up the small girl. Though she has her father’s eyes, she has your hair, the shape of your nose, and your ears. She also has your fearlessness, because she smiles directly in the face of the king of curses. Now at his eye level, she reaches her arms towards him excitedly. “What is it now, you brat? I’m already carrying you.” 

He looks over at you in question, and your smile grows. “She wants to touch your face,” you say. 

“Why?” 

“Because she’s a baby, and she’s curious.” 

Sukuna pulls her closer, and once in range, his daughter lays her tiny hands against his marked face. She giggles more, and you can see his eyes soften. “Hmph. You have your mother’s smile.” 

— — — —

The next morning, you walk into the kitchen where you hear Sukuna speaking with someone. When he turns to the side, you see your daughter nestled in the crook of one of his muscular arms, staring up at him as he concluded whatever story he was telling her. 

“...At the end of the battle, only I remained. Victory was mine.” 

The baby babbles excitedly, and Sukuna scoffs. “Ha, you will do no such thing. How do you expect to join me in battle when you aren’t even a year old, brat?” 

Her face scrunches in what looks like annoyance, and she repeats to him what he taught her the night before. “Hmph.” 

You burst into laughter, and Sukuna raises a brow at the little girl in his arms. “Great. Your mother’s smile, and her attitude.”

Movie Night

"If there's one good thing about not being Dad's favorite, it's not having your diet or your bedtime controlled."

...

Out of all Touya's siblings, Fuyumi's the one he's closest to in this au. True to canon, when he returned home after the coma, he did intend to leave, but Fuyumi found him instead and derailed that plan entirely.

He doesn't have a relationship with Shouto and his relationship with Natsuo has gone sour. (I've actually got a separate one-shot in progress that'll go a little more in depth as to what went wrong there.)

With Rei and Endeavor abandoning him to his terminal prognosis and their brothers pulling away from him, too, Fuyumi has the apprehensive sense that she is the last person tethering Touya to their house.

“He’s difficult, but he’s my brother and I love him.  So I listen to him when he’s upset, I try to calm him down, I take care of him during his bad days even though he hates it, and I make sure he knows that whenever he does something stupid that home is still a safe place where he can come back.  Losing him once was hard enough.”

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

Now that MHA manga has come to an end I would like to thank Dabi for existing.

Never did anything wrong, all his actions I forgive and he had all the rights to do what he did.

Was the coolest character and carried the whole show for me. Coolest desing I have ever seen. Best tits in the show. Has been a core part of my personality the last four years.

Got me through the pandemia we dont talk about. Got me through long days at job when I wanted to smash my customers heads. Was the reason I got my autism diagnosis.

The ending he deserved would be that he lives on a small island with cats and grows flowers. (And endea**** in grave)