“President Takami visited me yesterday,” he signed.
Shouto twitched in surprise. “Really? What did he want?”
“Seems he’s visiting all the former League members. Those still alive anyway.” He paused, thinking.
In the process of freeing up space in Tartarus for new and more dangerous inmates, the Commission had ruled the continued incarceration of a crippled, voiceless, and dying man inconsequential, and with the efforts of Dr. Yoshida affording Touya some semblance of a life independent of constant medical monitoring and support, his sentence was reduced to quiet house arrest, far from anyone. At the hearing, President Takami’s exact words had been, “Todoroki Touya’s claws have been cut. High security would be a waste of resources.”
Even now, Shouto wondered if the unanticipated mercy was a favor to their father. To prevent public outrage over the release of a perceived dangerous terrorist, even if a gilded cage was still a cage, it was announced nationwide over a year ago the villain Dabi had finally succumbed to his injuries in prison. And all the while, he’d been relocated to their family’s old vacation house to live out the rest of his life.
“We talked,” Touya signed, then corrected. “He talked. I wrote.”
“I see.”
“He wanted to know how I was. How I spend my days. If I needed anything. If I was treated well here.” He snorted. “Odd things to ask a convict.”
Shouto smiled. “And what did you tell him?”
His brother shook his head. “Nothing. Why should I tell him anything?”
“You’re afraid if he sees you’re doing well, he’ll make your conditions worse?”
“A little.” Then the familiar, malicious gleam returned to his eyes, “But I also don’t like him.”
“The war’s over, Touya,” Shouto admonished. “It wouldn’t hurt to make new friends where you can.”
Touya’s eyes went stony and he raised his hands in a sharp, angry gesture.
“Of course. Forgive me, I wasn’t thinking about Twice.”
Chapter 431
You know how ‘no body, no crime’ refers to how you can’t prove there was a murder?
The same applies to fiction. No body, no death.
Technically, I can still run with this plot and call it canon compliant. Except not really. It’s canon-ish.
It’s honestly so upsetting to see that the majority of people just don’tunderstand that Tomura doesn’t actually get enjoyment from killing people.
Tomura has literally felt so sick to his stomach that he has thrown up when he has killed people before.
The difference between all of the times Tomura has felt physically ill from killing people and all of the times that Tomura has gotten “enjoyment” from it(Tomura doesn’t feel enjoyment,he feels relief.) is that each time the person he killed had hurt him first.
Killing the people that hurt him is just genuinely the only thing that Tomura can think of to get them to finally stop so that they won’t hurt him anymore.
Tenko had originally reached out to his father for help, only for him to be struck by him with a gardening tool…and only then Tenko killed (with purpose) his father to stop him from hurting him again:
Tomura only wanted to kill the two drunk men after they had hurt him for literally just walking down the street:
Tomura wanting to kill the heroes that had hurt him (with the intention of killing him):
Tomura still doesn’t get enjoyment from killing people who hurt him, but he does experience relief from it…
((Edit: I would just like to clarify that the relief that Tomura feels from killing people that hurt him comes from knowing that they can’t hurt him anymore (relief that he is safe, even if temporarily) It does not come from him getting rid of the “itch” that he experiences (it always comes back, even after killing), like AFO groomed him into believing. I saw someone add that in the tags, and I realized that I never fully explained my thoughts on it. LOL.))
Not to mention, Tomura was literally GROOMEDby All For One (which is something that people just like to ignore for some reason…) to even have this desire to kill people in the first place.
And even then Tomura doesn’t have the desire to kill people in the way that AFO wants!
His want for destruction stems from his inherent empathy for others, and his inability to understand how people are able to ignore the suffering of others. Not what All For One has groomed him into believing.(That Tomura’s want for destruction is an impulse that’s something inherent to him.)
Tomura has continued to have empathy for others despite AFO’s grooming, and has showed genuine kindness to the league on many occasions…
All of this is such an important aspect of Tomura’s character and being able to actually understand him, and it’s so disheartening constantly seeing people completely overlook this part of him.
Convenient for a “i want to end this as soon as possible” mindset.
If it had a realistic resolution then, it would have taken into account that once the main villans are defeated, there would be a power absence in the criminal world, and there would be MORE villans trying to get into power, but that wouldn’t be convenient so other criminals just, stopped trying after the big bad was defeated.
In a realistic ending, other characters would question ochako quirk program, which main premise is “let’s play with kids and hope for the best” any character with a bit of grey matter would question her method, and put in spotlight the many ways it can fail, but that wouldn’t be convenient, so every character accepts it and praises it
The end of a war would make people feel relief at first but also feel scared and more open to question heroes, specially after watching people die on national tv, but naaah that would require time and we need to end this now so everyone is fine with it who cares.
Deku after losing ofa choosing to focus on being a teacher instead of focusing on hero work even when he never had a previous interest in teaching isn’t realistic, if it were, then whe would’ve an arc or previous mention he enjoys teaching but that would require time and that’s isn’t convenient so lets just wrap in the last two chapters that teaching is fulfilling to him but also let’s give him a hero suit to sell figures and have a excuse for the inevitable “my hero academia 2: more academia than ever, now with deku son beku”
Convenient, to marketing, to storytelling, to just getting rid of this, event’s in this no longer have a weight or consequence, things just simply happens according to end it all.
You all know how much I HATE, when people call mha ending “realistic” it’s dumb, it doesn’t have a basis, and is misinterpreting the concept of “realism” because to some people realism is just, misery and bad, sad endings, because reality = shit, when that’s not the case, realism in writing is just an objetive view of reality, an exploration of the life of people with the purpose to make a change, not every realistic work is miserable and hopeless. Realistically oppose fantasy so mha is at its core unrealistic, just because deku end in a job with a suit that he didn’t really wanted at first doesn’t make it a realistic ending, it simply makes it a bad ending.
I had a dream the other night that Horikoshi released another epilogue chapter for My Hero, and one of the pages showed Touya was still alive and Shouto was his designated caretaker.
There are many fanfictions/one-shots that write about Touya’s past and compare him to the reader’s/OC’s past, but they make one crucial mistake. Correct me if I’m wrong, but what broke Touya wasn’t Enji’s hard training, but the fact that Enji stopped training him and not gave him the attention he needed.
He broke because Enji ignored him, not because he HAD to train too much.
He broke down because he didn’t understand why his father had stopped training him.
To me, it’s as if Touya compares training to fatherly love. And when he was no longer allowed to do so, he did everything he could to get that attention back, which ended in “death.”
We teach history like it’s a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.
And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don’t learn to comprehend it, they don’t learn to learn from it.
This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.
I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.
And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.
The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.
It was terrifying.
At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn’t enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else’s team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)
By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.
I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.
The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.
Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.
The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.
We had spent a month learning about this. About how this “bad guy” inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We’d all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We’d been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.
But we hadn’t learned. We hadn’t really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren’t watching out for it.
The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn’t fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?
He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they’d done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate “team spirit.” That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.
They didn’t have to.
All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren’t there because those other people are taking them from you.
The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.
The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn’t the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn’t suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.
It was just full of people like us.
This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn’t watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We’d be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.
That could happen. If we weren’t careful. If we forgot the lesson we’d just learned.
After he’d let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn’t our fault. The point wasn’t for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn’t actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.
He’d known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.
And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.
Sadly, most schools don’t have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they’d probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I’m extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.
It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.
Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.
Teaching history requires such a broad high level picture of trends and an up close look at specific events and the ability to weave the two together that it’s no wonder we come up short.
death to softcore conservatism, fascism and racism especially IN QUEER SPACES. GET MORE GAY AND LINK YOUR ARMS WITH YOUR SIBLINGS. PROTECT LOOK OUT FOR BLACK PEOPLE, FOR TRANS PEOPLE, FOR WOMEN. STAND FOR HUMAN RIGHTS GLOBALLY. GOOGLE INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM RIGHT NOW
“in prison dabi has black hair” “in prison *Touya* has white hair” both wrong. in prison where hes subjected to the most restriction and freedom and agony and peace all at once, *Dabi*, has shaven hair, signifying a new start and complete surrenderance of self in a semi religious semi psychological breakdown sense.
