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.
something i’ve been turning around in my head for a bit: i think it’s different being disappointed when a character with no clear motivation or set of values takes a turn you personally didn’t want, versus when a character who DOES have a clear, established motivation and values has those aspects abandoned. there were so many people who were upset with the direction hox’s character took, saying it wasn’t right for him and he should’ve stayed with the LOV, but honestly hox betraying them was always a possibility and there was no established characterization that ever implied he wouldn’t side with the heroes. just because there was a lot of fanon and theories about it doesn’t mean hori “took” something from y’all or wrote badly just because you didn’t like it.
there’s more argument to be made that, for example, deku’s characterization is less consistent and the writing might be weaker with him. deku IS someone with more-or-less established motivations and values, who tells off shouto’s abuser early on but in the late series only seems to take a conciliatory approach to the todorokis’ situation. there’s at least a case to be made that deku turned way too much from his earlier stance on the issue and it felt manipulated in order to support the abuser’s redemption.
these two cases are just not the same.
and the other layer for me i guess is what the shounen fight usually represents, not only a physical determination of who’s stronger but also of whose ideology is more legitimate, and it just sucks that dabi loses on both counts, which is. rough. considering how much of his character is built on the pain of being deemed a failure and the narrative just goes “yeah the inferiority is true actually”