Magne Piece :) I Wanted To Add Flowers But Was Worried The Piece Would Look Too Cluttered....

Why Deku's ultimatum to Overhaul is bad and he should feel bad

This is a bit outside my normal character wheelhouse, but I really need to get a rant about it off my chest, so here goes:

The Deku and Overhaul scene in Chapter 316 is terrible. It is fucking terrible.

I took a whirl around Overhaul's tag up through when the leaks first started dropping, but didn't immediately see anyone talking about why it's so fucking terrible, only concerns about letting Overhaul see Eri (understandable, but baseless, I think), some empathy towards Overhaul's current state (totally warranted!), some snark about Deku being So Done with Overhaul (haha because who cares about Deku's stated goal of trying to understand villains, right?), and, worst of all, some cooing about how Deku was being so compassionate and noble by offering Overhaul that olive branch.

Deku was not being compassionate and noble there. Deku was being arrogant, small-minded, and so shockingly cruel that it leaves me speechless that anyone could think his stunted and hard-hearted "offer" reflects well on him.

Deku's entire motivation in this arc has been wrestling with the realization that he might have been able to avoid some of the desperate battles of his past if he'd understood more about the villains he fought. He thought of three very specific people--Stain, Muscular, and Overhaul--as he reflected, "Maybe it wouldn't have had to go that way if I'd understood them better." He then thought of Gentle Criminal and La Brava, people who he’d come to some understanding of, who he’d been able to soften the conclusion of his battle with by going along with Gentle's fiction downplaying what had happened between them. The whole line of thought was intended to contextualize his newfound desire to save Shigaraki.

It soon became apparent that Stain, Muscular and Overhaul were, in fact, encounters that he would be revisiting, as a chance to see how he'd grown since he faced them, and as a dry-run on reaching out to villains that would give him a chance to practice ways he might reach out to Shigaraki when the time comes.

Well, based on his performance so far, the idea that Deku might be able to reach Shigaraki is laughable.

Firstly, his tentative questions to Muscular were ill-timed, all wrong for the middle of a battle. Muscular laughed him off, and I don’t think there’s any version of that scenario in which he would have done otherwise. Muscular was a huge threat, gleefully violent, disinterested in conversation about his history. Obviously, right in the middle of a fight was no kind of time to try to figure out what made the man tick! But Deku didn’t get the luxury of choosing the circumstances of that encounter, so yes, that battle probably was unavoidable, certainly if Deku wanted to stop him from doing further damage. But the idea that because Deku couldn't reach him right then and there, it's impossible for Deku--or, indeed, for anyone--to reach him at all is fallacious. Not every person has to be able to like or understand every other person. If Deku couldn't reach Muscular, so what? That doesn't mean it's impossible that someone might. And that means an obligation to treat Muscular like a human being, to afford him human rights, to not stop trying to find a way to rehabilitate him, even as you safeguard other people against him.

Deku's battle with Muscular being unavoidable was not some great triumph, for all that the narrative used it as an opportunity to let him show off how far he’d come in mastering One For All. In the way that matters, the way that Deku himself is currently trying to better, he hasn't advanced at all. Imasuji Goto represented his first test in the lead-up to saving Shigaraki, and Deku failed it.

His next trial was Overhaul.* Here, again, was someone who Deku was explicitly trying to understand. So what was the one thing that was most key to understanding Overhaul's current motivation? What was the one thing that Overhaul was ranting about out loud, incessantly? And what did Deku conspicuously fail to ask about? Overhaul's relationship with Pops.

This was so easy. So obvious. And Deku didn’t even try. All he could think about in the moment he was faced with that broken man was the little girl that man hurt--all thoughts of trying to understand where the man himself was coming from went right out the window, flown away in an instant. Instead of asking about why Overhaul feels the way he does, he demanded that Overhaul feel the way Deku wanted. He was essentially holding the only person Overhaul cared about hostage for the remorse he wanted Overhaul to feel.

I'm not going to try to armchair diagnose Overhaul with mental conditions. I don't have the educational background, and I'm positive Horikoshi doesn't. But it seems pretty clear that asking Overhaul to feel guilt about Eri was asking for something that he might not be capable of feeling, at least not without years of therapy that he was plainly not getting in Tartarus. And if Overhaul is not capable of feeling that guilt, then what does denying Overhaul his meeting actually solve? Who does it help? It doesn’t help Eri. Doesn’t help the old man. It certainly doesn’t help Overhaul himself. The only person who gets any satisfaction out of demanding remorse from Overhaul is Deku. And even Deku didn’t look like he found it very satisfying!

Another failure. A meaninglessly cruel, petty failure. A failure that served only to hurt a man who was already a live wire of agony, to sentence an old man to a coma he might never wake from without Overhaul's expertise, and to deprive Eri of the only actual family she had left.

And look, Pops might very well not be the ideal guardian for Eri, and I'm not saying he should get to "keep" her just because of the blood connection, but it's not like he cheerfully handed her over to Overhaul and walked out the door! He turned to Overhaul because he trusted Overhaul, because he wanted someone to help Eri and thought that maybe Overhaul could. And when Overhaul's thoughts about Eri took a very dark turn, Pops first denied his request about using her to further his research and then, when Overhaul kept pushing it, chose Eri over the kid he personally took in from the streets by telling Overhaul that he needed to leave the Shie Hassaikai if he couldn't muster any more respect for human life than that.

But, you know, Eri is so cute with Aizawa and stuff. And Pops was a criminal. Probably. Maybe? I mean, he was yakuza, anyway, so he obviously must have been a criminal even if the police never actually arrested him. Apparently, this means it's okay to just leave him in a coma forever! Even though Overhaul absolutely has enough medical expertise that letting him talk to a neurologist about what he did to Pops might enable them to figure out how to wake Pops up even without Overhaul being able to use his quirk to undo the damage. Hell, Overhaul is also the person alive who has the best handle on how Eri's quirk works. He might even know what her accumulation condition is. Maybe a better thing to ransom his access to Pops with would be Overhaul telling Aizawa everything he knows about Eri's quirk so Aizawa can use the knowledge to help her get a better handle on it.

But no. Obviously undoing some small part of the concrete harm Overhaul did was less important than how Deku felt about that harm.

And there's more! Oh, is there ever. I called Deku arrogant before; let me circle back to that.

Deku said that if Chisaki would feel the way Deku wanted him to feel, then Deku would uphold the promise to let Overhaul see Pops. But where in hell did Deku get off making that claim? Deku is a student. He's not a pro. He has no authority, medical, legal, carceral or otherwise. He has no say in where Overhaul goes or who he's allowed to see.

What the fuck? What the actual fuck? What kind of strings did Deku think he could pull that he could just casually make that claim without so much as going into a huddle with Hawks and Endeavor about it first? How inflated has this kid's sense of importance gotten that he made Overhaul that promise without even stopping to think about whether it was something he was in any position to ensure? It was such a bullshit ultimatum, not only because of how needlessly obstructive it was, but because it was so formless.

"If only you would feel a wish to apologize to Eri…" Okay, so what if Overhaul goes back to prison and, three days later, calls out to say, "Okay, I thought about it and I really feel like I want to apologize, now can I see Pops already?" Who gets to make that judgment call? Deku? Is he going to drop his faux-vigilante act and come visit Overhaul in prison just so he can squint at the man really hard to see if he's lying? Is Deku going to delegate the call to someone else? All Might? Hawks? A prison warden? A psychologist? Who? Who gets to be the one to say, "Okay, I think his remorse is genuine."

Then, once that call has been made, how many people have to arrange for Overhaul to be escorted out of prison and to whatever hospital Pops is in? Will Deku get to oversee that visit? Does he think he can overturn a warden declaring, "The scum doesn't deserve a visit, and the old man probably doesn't either," or a doctor protesting, "I'm not letting that man anywhere near my patient!"

The hell of it is, I think Deku could do all of that. He's got a close personal connection to All Might, who was basically a demi-god to this society for decades; he has the ear of the current top three heroes. Everyone is apparently convinced that the power to save this society rests solely in Deku's hands; I'm sure he could ask for anything he wanted. But the fact that that is the case suggests that this society is not even slightly turning away from its dependence on heroes dictating its morality. A hero having the sole right to dictate, out of hand, based on his personal feelings, the fate of people designated "villains" while the rest of society turns away is exactly what Shigaraki is angry about.

The only thing worse than Deku perpetuating the worst problems of hero society in an arc that's supposed to be about him finding a better way is that he didn’t even stop to think about it. It never even occurred to him that that was what he was doing. He thought that what he was asking of Chisaki was just and fair, and thus, he didn’t need to ask for any second opinions or permissions; he didn’t need to think about what would actually be feasible, about what was best for the people involved. He'd made his judgment call about a villain, and that's all there was to it. The villain could fall in line or--nothing. There isn't actually another choice. Hero's way or nothing

I hate it. I hate it. I don't care about whether Overhaul "deserves" to suffer; heroes making the cold decision that they will make him suffer is antithetical to everything a carceral system intended to rehabilitate prisoners stands for. And yes, Japan does at least claim on paper that the goal of incarceration in state hands is rehabilitation.

Restorative justice is superior to retributive justice. It's better for society and it's better for individuals. It is kinder, it is more compassionate. Retributive justice poisons people. It perpetuates suffering for no reason but moral grandstanding. Individuals are allowed to forgive or not forgive anyone they want, but a society should conduct itself with an eye to the long-term welfare of all of its people. That means that even the worst kinds of criminals still have human rights. It means not inflicting pain that serves no purpose.

I've gotten off-track here. Yes, I think that if Overhaul could feel regret about Eri, that would obviously be a positive development for his character. It'd hurt like hell, but it would be a hurt that indicated he was becoming a better person, a person who wanted to do more good, less ill, with his life and efforts. But you can't mandate that someone become a better person. No ultimatum handed down from on high is going to change Overhaul's heart. Telling someone, "I'll help you, but only if you only feel the way I want you to feel. Otherwise, you can just stay there and suffer," is not reaching out to help people who are suffering in the dark, which is, again, what Deku claimed he wanted to do, what he begged for Nagant's help in doing, the way he insisted to the vestiges that OFA should be used.

Deku writing people off because they don't conform to his expectations, because they can't be "good" the way he wants them to be, nor even "bad" in ways he can understand, is him failing to live up to his own expressed ideals. "I wish you'd feel bad about hurting people," wasn't enough to reach Muscular or Overhaul, and it damn well shouldn't be enough to reach Shigaraki.

Cruelty does not beget kindness. You cannot treat people with only callousness and severity, then condemn them for not taking the opportunity to grow. You have to give them opportunities to better themselves. For Overhaul, giving him an opportunity would be letting him help the man he wronged and then moving forward from there. Telling him to feel regret about Eri or else? That's doing nothing but sweeping his pain back under the rug.

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*I have more or less exhausted my outrage over Lady Nagant in chats with friends, so I'll spare the rant on how disjointed, contradictory and ludicrous her turn was; the gist is "very, on all counts."

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P.S. Anyone who says that Overhaul "has nothing left to live for" is being a level of ableist that defies description. Prosthetics exist. Assistive devices exist. Speech-to-text software exists. Overhaul is intelligent, driven and highly educated. Even if he never got prosthetics at all, there would still be things he could contribute to the world if he were motivated to do so. The better thing to do, though, would be to get the man some damn prosthetics, hook him up with the neurologist consulting on Pops' case, and let the two of them get on with the matter of waking up the old man.

P.P.S. Overhaul spent six months in solitary confinement. The United Nations considers solitary confinement exceeding 15 days to be a form of torture. Solitary confinement creates severe mental health issues and exacerbates existing ones. It frequently leads to a deadening of empathy, something Overhaul has in little enough amounts as it is. It is absurd to ask a man who's just come out of these conditions to "feel sorry for what you did to Eri," especially if you're planning to turn around and send him right back to solitary. Tartarus is inhuman, and the only reason more of the escapees aren't total wrecks like Overhaul is because Horikoshi clearly didn't bother to do the reading on the wide array of problems that those characters should be experiencing physically, mentally and socially.

y is ur carrd oumazoo. what's ur lore

Cos I like oumazoo...

@baezetsu submitted: was saving this for a meta, but damn am I tired of ppl arguing this so pls… (Both are Viz translation, by CC, for both school briefs and chapter 31)

THANK YOU for your service ✊😔

hey tenko, do you still want to be a hero?

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

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.

I think Rei's writing is actually quite consistent, unlike another person we won't mention here. I think you actually answered your own question in your post, the reason why Rei reacted to Shouto's and Touya's situations differently was because they were different situations. It's the same logic to why Shouto and Touya reacted differently to their abuse and when you apply the same logic here it becomes easier to understand why Rei approached them differently (continue)

(continue) I think the other issue though is that Rei also didn't understand Touya either. She understood more than Endeavour but didn't understand fully which is why she wasn't able to reach out to Touya. I think the problem is Rei believes only Endeavour can get through to Touya. This was the case 16 years ago when Touya was 8 and this is still the case when Touya is 24. The only difference is she's more demanding but she's still missing something vital when it comes to understanding her son.

You bring up a lot of good points that I don't totally disagree with, anon, and that's fine! But I still maintain my conclusion in my original post.

I think the issue with Shouto vs Touya is that Rei applied the same tactics to Touya as she did Shouto, but it didn't land because Shouto's existence was justified and celebrated by his father for the sheer fact that he was born with the "perfect" quirk. His internal conflict arose not from his existence, but his similarities to his father, which he feared would result in him becoming exactly like his father, since that's essentially what Enji was gunning for -- creating a child that could be the perfect version of himself, rather than working to be that version of himself.

Whereas Touya was born "imperfect," so trying to meet his father's expectations against all advice and despite all the pain it caused him was never about being a hero and was all about validating his own existence. So I actually think the issue there was that Rei approached them the same, when Touya required an approach that acknowledged and validated his different circumstances.

Also, I agree that Rei didn't completely understand Touya because she couldn't fully relate to his experiences, but she definitely understood enough to know that Touya was aware of his father trying to replace him and that this would impact him negatively, hence his acting out and continuing to train, because we get confirmation of that in the flashbacks of Ch 301 & 302.

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.

Ch 226 - the Toga family’s response to Himiko

Ch 302 - the Todoroki family’s response to Touya/Dabi

Filing this one under parallels that are painful to think about too long.

I’m wondering if the current storyline with Dabi will or could affect Toga by reminding her of her own family. 

Essentially what happened to her seems like (for now) what’s going to play out with Touya. Dabi will be demonized in an attempt to take the heat off Endeavor / the heroes – that’s what I’m guessing, what with Best Jeanist saying he would help Endeavor prepare a response to Dabi’s accusations – and his family will publicly denounce his actions while taking responsibility. 

Plus, the Top 3 heroes have already decided to go after Touya, exactly like heroes came after Toga – a sixteen-year-old child – after the attack on her classmate. It is sad turn of events, and these two deserve better, but I would be consoled if at the very least, they got to bond over their shared experiences or team up to fight the Top 3.