this wouldn’t leave my head (version without dramatic shading underneath!)
i know you've touched on this subject before but it really pains me to hear how people voice their want for touya to die instead of being on life support despite the fact that he, himself, still wanted to live. "there are still arguments I want to have, and things I still want to say," after all.
i think people misunderstand a lot of touya's feeling about taking his own life at the end of it all. from what i took about his character, as soon as he reclaimed is name again, he regressed back into how he was emotionally as a child, and it only got worse from that point.
a damaged child, especially a neglected one, will always hurt themselves and care little when they've been shown no care. so how do they get that care? hurting themselves, and if necessary, ending their life. but he doesn't need to do that anymore.
he wanted to live, and though his circumstances are saddening (or well was, let's hope he can finally do things considering there was no confirmation), it's a good thing he showed some kind of regret about the fate he nearly had, and expressed a desire to still continue.
I think this is fully on how Horikoshi depicted the situation with needlessly cruel horror that feels really unnecessary.
If Ch 426 put more care into depicting Touya:
1. Not being in pain
2. Getting relief from his family coming to see him
3. Getting affirmation that he’s loved and always was
4. Showed that people were in fact grateful for being saved
People wouldn’t feel like Touya would have been better off dying. Think in comparison how nobody says that Spinner or Overhaul would have been better off being dead and it becomes painfully obvious how Horikoshi undermines his own narrative with the circumstances he set up, which feel like needless horror.
I fundamentally understand what he’s trying to portray, but I think his art choices are at odds with his narrative goal (if that is to depict a peaceful death for Touya as a fix-it for his violent death on Sekoto peak).
Even if he wanted to depict Touya’s hopeless, miserable state,he could have shown the chapter in parallel from an internal headspace where we can see child Touya getting emotional relief -sort of a continuation of the Ch 388 image.
I was gonna save this for my fic Interference by Half but let’s be real, idk when I’ll ever update that and this is an idea I’ve always wanted to share because I’ve hated the ‘just wear gloves’ “solution” for Tenko/Tomura, so:
If you give Tomura (pre-Deika) a pencil, and he touches it with five fingers, it’ll disintegrate. As long as he doesn’t touch the pencil with five fingers, it’ll be okay and he’ll be able to use it. Which is why Tomura is always shown grabbing things with only a few fingers, and why he was unable to decay ‘Sand’ in Chapter 160.
Gloves - whether with some of the fingers cut off, as is most often headcanon’d, or each finger is made of different material - is one solution. We see little Tenko with gloves when he is taken in by AfO after manifesting his quirk:
But, see, I’ve always thought, how annoying. How uncomfortable it must be to have to keep gloves on 24/7. Sure, you can get some super-soft, thin-cloth ones; but it must still be bothersome, wearing, washing, getting it wet, etc. What if he gets a rash? So it always made sense to me that instead, Shigaraki would learn to have meticulous control over his fingers - free hands, and able to use his quirk whenever should he need to.
For a child just starting to learn to use his quirk, this can be hard, true. So how to practice? How to keep his hands free? How can you accommodate a quirk like Decay? Instead of forcing Tenko/Tomura to wear gloves, what about spicing up his surroundings?
So I thought, to use the pencil example above, why not wrap the pencil in ribbons or yarn?
Strings of different yarn, ribbons; stickers and fancy tape; patchwork cloth of different materials. On pencils, controllers, toothbrushes, doorknobs, cups, etc. Semi-yarn-bomb the house! Decorate! It doesn’t impede anyone else living with him or using the same objects.
So that he’s never actually touching an object with five fingers. One finger on wood, one finger on a sticker, one finger on a the yarn.
It’s not a perfect solution, it’s not 100% decay-proof. There will be unlucky mistakes. Maybe I have the parameters for his quirk wrong. It’ll probably be useless once he’s in post-Deika self (or even, pre-massacre/he never loses his memories?)
But I think, for AU fics that have Tenko growing up normally or rescued, it’s worth considering what his caretakers might do to help him out, adapt his environment to his circumstances, embrace how he is, stuff like that. ‘Solutions’ or changes or a different perspective that make him feel a bit more normal, instead of “The kid who has to wear gloves 24/7 because his quirk is that dangerous”, maybe.
Keep reading
A lot of people get hung up on the fact Dabi called spinner lizard, which is considerably quirkist, but no one ever wants to talk about how after the first and only time it happened he never did it again once spinner clearly established he didn't like it. Dabi was willing to grow as a person and learn not to use the term for his teammate after one time.
I was re reading chapter 249 again for reference and I never noticed this before and it made my heart ache.
Idk if it's the translation but Fuyumi almost sounds callous. Dismissive. This is about their dead brother and she talks about it as if it was a short-term problem that the family encountered and they, esp the mom, excluding Natsu, "got over"
i just copy-pasted my message. Dumping my thoughts rn.
it's a pretty wild move for horikoshi to, mid-chapter, change the story from one of a boy who punches a lot in response to society's deepset flaws and those victimised by it, to instead featuring gentle seeing muscular and going "hey......you don't have to be evil. there is a better way" only for muscular to go "what no way i love evil so much i'm finding someone to kill right now". and they just keep going back and forth like that until the they fall in love. this is a romcom. and the rest of the manga.