It's So Fascinating To Me That Dabi & Hawks Are Fraternal Foils, Yet There's Nothing About Their Dynamic

it's so fascinating to me that dabi & hawks are fraternal foils, yet there's nothing about their dynamic and constellation with endeavor that signifies fraternity, they're in relation to each other as sons of endeavor (emphasis on him, not them). their sense of worth depends of endeavor the patriarch, they center him the way a child centers their parent and it's crazyyy how endeavor indirectly sets up dabi & hawks against each other as filial rivals the way he sets up touya and shoto.

the difference is that touya & shoto have a more tangible rivalry going on while dabi & hawks compete with each other thematically, they have similar experiences with childhood neglect & abuse and choose polar survival strategies so to me, dabi vs. hawks boils down to the dialectics of which post-traumatic survival strategy (fight vs. fawn) leads to the parental attention their inner child desperately craves.

and tbh? idek who actually gets what they wanted or a "kinder" conclusion. dabi dies for the sake of revenge and hawks comes out alive, but it is ultimately dabi who gets to move on from endeavor and focuses on his little brother & the unconditional love he experienced despite everything he put him through, meanwhile hawks is still deeply attached to the endeavor he chose as a pseudo-paternal figure as a 5yo like he doesn't get to move on at all and doesn't receive the fraction of unconditional love that dabi does. it's crazyyy to watch hawks go through all of that and act like nothing happened, as if dabi's presence never challenged his stance on endeavor/abusive men/the way he copes with what happened to him as a child.

and ofc hawks can't do any of that, endeavor as a "redeemable" character only works if hawks is there to remind the reader of his good deeds, which only works if hawks doesn't get to progress and reflect. It's sad but also funny on a meta level because there is a very clear analogy between horikoshi reducing hawks to a tool that suffers from bad writing for the sake of another character's writing and the hpsc reducing hawks to a tool that suffers mentally for the sake of the establishment. (dog motif works so well for hawks but i digress)

idk, one thing i really like about the todoroki subplot is that it's good at showing how an abuser messes with a family's dynamics and renders it dysfunctional, there was no way for touya to be normal about his little brother and ofc he saw shoto's birth and his own death sentence, and there was also no way for dabi & hawks to have a normal relationship either because endeavor is an omnipresent patriarch in their fight. horikoshi barely scratched the surface of dabihawks' dynamic in relation to endeavor and completely ignored it the final arc to ride endeavor a little harder, but the implications are there and i won't let anyone ignore them!!!!!!!!!!!