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.
Anyway, on the issue of how Bakugou never gets consequences, and that generally the bad things that happen to him have no connection with his misdeeds...Aoyama's involvement in his kidnapping could have complicated that a bit
Why is Aoyama the traitor? Because his parents arranged for him to receive a quirk from All for One. Why did they do that? So that Aoyama could be "normal" so that he could be spared from the ostracization of being quirkless - i.e. to protect him from the childhood Izuku had. So more or less Aoyama is the traitor because his parents wanted to protect him from people like Bakugou.
The set up is there for this, but there isn't really any follow through with it
this game is good actually bc Dabi starts negging you every time you try to level him up
A+ game mechanic
…I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness… envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance…
…I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good… The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion…
…dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment… I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion… But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine…
For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires… I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this?
Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? …I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on… my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice…
…My work is nearly complete… Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice… Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames…
—Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus