First Tumblr Post In My Life…

The family🍃😔

For the thrill of the fight

Bonus: messed up boys

im sick of my parents trying to reconcile

i was never as optimistic about the ending of bnha as some villain stans were, but i never thought it'd end so badly it left me wondering why horikoshi ever bothered to humanize the villains or make them complex characters at all.

like-- i expected that at least 1-2 of the 3 villains who were heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the narrative as people to be saved would be, you know, actually saved. i didn't think that was a high bar. i've been let down before in fandoms where everyone was certain a character would live and then they didn't, so i tried to keep my hopes low. AND YET.

what happened to tomura was upsetting, but i wasn't that shocked after how disinterested the manga has seemed to be in him for like, the past 100 or so chapters. a bit surprised, because you'd think if anyone would succeed in the 'saving' mission it would be the MC, but whatever. dabi, well, they've spent a lot of time showing the way his quirk destroys his body even before this arc, so that also sucked but at least it didn't feel completely out of left field.

........but they're not even letting toga live???

i just-- what have we even been doing here? when zero out of the 3 characters that were marked out for saving were actually saved, you have to acknowledge that something has gone seriously fucking wrong with the storytelling. not even just from the perspective of a villain fan but from the perspective of someone who likes stories to be thematically consistent or satisfying in any way.

you can set up an expectation of these characters being saved and then subvert that and turn it into a tragedy- if done well that could even be worthwhile and interesting. but you can't turn it into a tragedy and then just... keep trucking along with the happy ending messaging and act like anything in the manga has been resolved and that the characters have somehow successfully completed their heroic origin stories.

like, maybe i shouldn't have expected this much from a shounen- at the end of the day it is still a shounen so i didn't expect to feel that it truly satisfactorily wrapped up all the themes it brought up around societal ills. but i expected it to at least resolve those things in a shounen-y way where they punch the problems and help these specific people and then you can feel good assuming that the state of things will continue to improve in the post-canon world of the manga.

instead we got... uh, none of that. the story refused to answer a single one of the larger questions it's been outlining for the past 400+ chapters. in the end, it was all flash and no substance, which again could've been fine, if it weren't for the way the story seemed to spend significant chunks of time trying to delude you into thinking it had substance.

truly makes me wonder what horikoshi thought he was doing the entire time. can it really all be blamed on burnout? the most that can be said for this ending is that it is, well, an ending. fuck dude, it is that.

and that's just... such a sad way to end a project that took up 10 years of your life.

Thinking about the parallels between how much red is in each Todoroki's kids hair and their opinion of the father they got it from.

It's not a direct comparison based on quantity, but that does play a factor. The more key element is the placement.

Shoto's is the most obvious. His white and red hair is literally split down the middle and after his revelations at the sports festival, he starts feeling more torn about his feelings surrounding his father. Eventually settling on seeing him as a good hero but a flawed father that hasn't been forgiven but has room to change.

Natsuo as all white hair, which makes sense. He's the one that's the most vocally critical and hostile to Enji in the household and is never shown to have fond memories of him. The red isn't there and never was, and neither is love for his father. ..or is there.

Natsu did have red in his hair, at least for a time. But I believe it is still there, hidden and tucked away in his current hairstyle. It's always been there, even if it stays a few small strands, care for his father will always be there whether he wants to acknowledge it or not.

At first glance Fuyumi is a similar way, her care about Enji being small and understated. She has less red than white afterall. But Fuyumi has red strands integrated throughout her hair. She is clear that she doesn't support what Enji has done but she has clear memories from before that point and that has colored her perspective. What she wants, more than anything, is for Enji to be integrated back into the family, for the family to be whole. Her red hair is inseparable from the rest of it because to her, more than any of her siblings, their father is an integral part of their family. And she's not ashamed to say it.

And then there's the juicey changes with Touya. He was born with a full head of red hair, very obviously symbolizing his adoration of Enji. He was eager to be the prodigy Enji wanted and their relationship was positive, at least at the start. It's not an accident that Enji commenting on the first few strands of white in Touya's hair comes right before the first time we see him burn himself.

As his relationship with Enji strains, he gets more white hair until there's nothing left, until their relationship has completely decayed and Touya sets himself on fire. It's gone further than Natsuo's aggression and dismissive attitude. And that hatred spreads to the entire family. His white hair isn't enough to show that, so he breaks from the family completely, with pitch black.

But it's not the whole truth. At the end of the day, it's still artificial dye and by removing that dye when he comes clean about his family ties, he also leaves himself open to that family coming back into his life.

I wonder if that red might come back too.

And it wasn't for love that you went back home

i havent drawn ANY sfw stuff lately, but i finally watched dunmeshi the other day and ive completely fallen in love with marcille. i love that she is endlessly tormented by her party. 2024 is the year of failgirl elf wife torment. i also love how much inspiration itll give me when i eventually get to play in my dnd campaign again!

Happy Birthday, Enji