Anyway, On The Issue Of How Bakugou Never Gets Consequences, And That Generally The Bad Things That Happen

All the better, honestly. Shiggy’s a union guy!

Dabi is a very Tim Burtonish character if you ask me

mhatwt will be on tumblrs ass and then write a whole analysis on how touya was to blame for rei pouring boiling water on shouto

Eri's touted as sort of a 'Tenko But Things Went Right', which isn't wrong, but I feel like her save relied a lot of luck too. And luck shouldn't be a determining factor in child welfare??

It was by pure chance that Deku and Mirio first encountered her. 100% random bump. Nighteye had no idea about any child in the Shie Hassakai compound, despite having staked it out for at least a few days already.

The rescue effort was launched to save Eri, yes, but only because the Heroes had that one lucky detail to connect “DNA inside bullets” to “visibly injured child”. Without that...who knows? If Heroes had no compelling evidence to storm the compound, would they have just continued a routine drug investigation? If they raided the compound but didn’t know about the child beforehand, what would’ve happened to her? Shunted off to an orphanage because she’s ‘a criminal/yakuza’s child’? Place under HPSC supervision because of her relation to the bullets?

The manga itself stated that Eri was going to be sent off to an orphanage, BUT her out-of-control quirk was cause for concern and fortunately there was the one (1) guy who can suppress her quirk and help train her - who happened to be a teacher at a private educational campus run by a multi-millionaire who can afford to take her in as a ward. How amazingly lucky!!!! (And everyone themselves said that they were hoping to teach Eri how to use her quirk so that she can cure Mirio. How nice that her quirk is deadly but also has this miraculous healing ability that lends this additional incentive to take her in.) Eri is still only in custody of UA because her last living blood relative, her grandfather, is still in a coma. Would Pops ever want her back, if he ever wakes up? Would UA let him? Good thing UA has the resources and connections to win a custody battle, in this case.

Plus, before all of that, Eri was already another abandoned child, way before the Heroes ever learned of her. Her mom abandoned her; then her grandfather took her in, but when he fell into a coma, she ended up with the worse possible caretaker. Yeah, Overhaul is Overhaul, but a relative falling ill and being unable to take care of a child is something that can happen to any family.

Eri was abandoned by her mom because she killed her dad. What on earth was the police doing then? Did her mom is not report this? Five seconds after the dad disappeared, the mom immediately plopped the toddler in the car seat and drove her off to Pops? Or is it more likely the mom screamed and panicked and called emergency services, but it turned out that there’s nothing to be done about the dad… and then emergency services also apparently did nothing about the mom or Girl With Newly Lethal Quirk or the beginning of quirk counseling so that the mom could understand the accident as ‘mutant quirk’ and not ‘curse’??

There were points where Eri could've been saved, before she ever bumped into Deku, before Overhaul put Pops in a coma and started cutting her up.

Similarity, saving Tenko shouldn't have just been 'Hero happened to be in the area and wasn't busy and was able to spot this injured child and go help him' (if it doesn't turns out AFO was behind this too lol), or 'if only there could've been a Hero 15 years ago who could handle his quirk, hold his hand, and give him relief'. It should've been 'first person who saw this injured child called the police or took Tenko to a police box'. It should've been 'Kotarou's last act of parenting was not to pick up garden shears and whack his kid with it, but know to keep calm and know what to do in a quirk emergency' or whatever. It should've been 'the three other adults in the household had enough conscience to not let Kotarou bully his toddler'. Hell, it should've been 'All Might and Gran kept tabs on the Shimura boy'.

idk. I just don't think 'Luckily a Hero noticed!' is good enough.

He looks like a volleyball

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.

Some more negative reactions to 426 in Japanese fandom

we can't see Spinner's left hand and Shigaraki's right hand. they're secretly holding hands.

Twice was my main man inside the Recovery zine ( @recoveryzine ) and this is the whole piece for it, thank you for buying the book!! Leftover copies will be up soon so keep an eye on it!

I’m a little confused, what does rei telling shouto about rejecting bloodlines have to do with himura mutant phobia?

(Re: a comment I made about Shouto's Sports Festival flashback in my post on Chapter 387.)

It’s not a direct correlation!  I was pointing out that Rei has early dialogue that can potentially be read as foreshadowing for the familial issues discussed by Geten 350 chapters later.  Basically, that Horikoshi might have chosen to specifically frame the conversation in terms of bloodline—mangling an explanation of All Might’s catchphrase to do so*—because he was already aware that fears about the sorts of things one can inherit via bloodline were significant to the characters in the scene.

Shouto is afraid of inheriting his father’s willingness to hurt Rei, but what sort of fear of bloodline inheritance has Rei already faced in her own history such that she can now reassure Shouto that blood is not binding?  It could simply be a generic assurance, not connected to Rei’s history at all, but what if it isn’t?

What if Rei is able to reassure her son that one isn’t bound to one’s bloodline because she already has personal experience with the consequences of excessive regard for bloodline?  And given that she’d later burn Shouto out of fear of his resemblance to Enji, did she really even believe it at the time, or is it the same as when she tried to get Touya to change course and he lashed out at her for lecturing him about choices, save that, unlike Touya, Shouto was young and attached enough to believe her?

To look at it another way, when Horikoshi was brainstorming the Todoroki family’s general situation, he would have had to figure out Endeavor’s obsession and the forms it took—the attempts to wrangle genetics, the failures that came before the success, the spiral into abuse—as well as at least the broad strokes of the ways Enji’s kids and wife reacted to it.  It’s entirely possible that all Horikoshi originally had figured out about Rei was “mentally fragile because of the abuse; gets institutionalized after she burns Shouto,” but he’s on the record as thinking a lot about the lives of his minor characters and there’s plenty about Rei that begs further thought.

For example, why would the woman with the ice powers Enji sought agree to the marriage?  Why would she stay in the marriage even after it turned sour?  Was it all out of love?  Wouldn’t it be a bit convenient that Enji could find a woman who just loved him that much given his unabashed ulterior motives?  Further, Rei was open to her mother about the dire straits she was in—why wouldn’t her mother step in, call child protective services, tell her own husband, do anything?  Rei’s family being traditionalists, with old-fashioned ideas about marriage and commitment, works to answer the question.  Then, on top of being traditionalist, Rei’s family needing the financial resources Enji brings to the table bolsters that answer even further.

The questions that follow logically from that scenario are what tradition looks like in the world Horikoshi’s created, and why Rei’s family need money?  If they were an old-money family but lost their fortunes, what caused that?  Geten provides the reader with the answers, but it’s not impossible that Horikoshi’s known them from the start.  If that’s the case, then even Rei’s earliest lines in the series can be read as speaking in light of her family history, and that family history is intimately entwined with heteromorphobia.

It's somewhat reachy, I acknowledge, but I hope that explains my thought process a little better? Thanks for the ask!

* The conversation on TV is so weird.  What in god’s name does self-love and the DNA inheritance of quirks have to do with All Might’s, “I AM HERE!” catchphrase?  That’s nonsense, counter to everything else he’s ever said about the meaning of the phrase, which is supposed to be both reassurance to those in danger and threat to those endangering.

It’s an awkward and baldly contradictory contortion of a response that, so far as I can tell, serves no real purpose save to suggest a question from the interviewer that upset Shouto because it implied that his blood doomed him to grow up like his father, and give Rei a chance to answer in the same framework.  What question could the interviewer possibly have asked that would have both given Shouto that impression and prompted All Might to respond, “Yes, quirks are naturally passed from parent to child.  However, that’s not the only thing that matters.  It’s not just blood ties…  Instead, one must recognize and appreciate oneself!  That’s what I mean when I say, ‘I am here!’”