You Are Gay?

League of Villains designs from XEBEC (2024)

"Toya there are other things besides being a hero!"

"Are you gonna do them with me dad so I can still feel worthy of your love and attention?"

"Haha, don't speak bullshit I have Shoto to train now."

Just Endeavor being ugly and unhinged

with awful personality

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. 

You’re right. Horikoshi does a disservice by framing abuse through the abuser’s perspective. What’s even more irksome is that he glorifies Endeavor’s minimal efforts to atone while downplaying the victims’ own efforts to heal. I mean, no one in-universe is making a big deal out of Rei potentially getting better enough to be discharged after 10 years in the hospital?

he glorifies Endeavor’s minimal efforts to atone

yeh, this this thiiiis. the past chapter was all about how big of a realization it was for the dude to just. fucking leave his family alone. i know it probably is a huge realization for a self-centered ex-abuser, but so many readers have all been saying it was necessary as like a basic first step; so why make it a Big Deal by writing it from his perspective, rather than from the perspective of anyone else so they can have a “wow so it’s finally clicking for him, huh?? huh????” moment. that’s all it takes to flip the narrative from being about how Tragic the dude’s decision is, to making it about how he’s taking his first baby steps!! to being a decent person.

on ur point about the victims, that’s another big issue i have!!! like…where did all the trauma go sdfkljsfkljg. where are the lasting consequences of growing up with an abusive or neglectful parent? why is everyone just okay, and the biggest hurdle to overcome is their willingness or unwillingness to forgive? i hate that the story is going ‘well all he has to do is make up for things sufficiently and then they can maybe be a happy family!!’ like, where is the ptsd and the complexes you develop from being unloved by a parent?? why can’t we see the lasting effects that domestic violence had on rei, rather than just being told?? why not show us the work the victims put in to get to a mentally stable place?? i mean, the answer is obvious, but i hate it lmfao.

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.

Fall is coming !

The temperatures have dropped, I can wear clothes again ! I missed drawing these two so I drew them to celebrate it.