All For One.

Summary: There needs to be more content for this gloriously sinister man and I am more than happy to provide! How does it begin? Will you escape his clutches or will you submit to his desires?

Warnings: Yandere Tendencies, Kidnapping, Mild mention of Starvation, Dubcon, Quirk use during sex, Mind-Break and a whole host of degeneracy.

Notes: I tried to make the reader as vague as I possibly could for insert pleasure! GN with as few details as possible so it could be anyone or anything! This is 18+, minors dni. If you’d like to block any content of this nature on my page please put Tw: Heavy Spice in your filtering options!

A/N: I really don’t know if I should apologize for this or not, you can see the point it got out of hand so please be warned and take your tastes and limits into account while reading!

A terrible fate has befallen you, hasn’t it?

• Your meeting was rather innocuous. So easily forgotten despite the feelings time with him supplanted. Long before his debut in the Kamino Ward and before his defeat at the hands of the Symbol of Peace. He wasn’t heavily deformed then, he could easily mix in with the crowds and disappear as quickly as he appeared. His shaggy white hair and piercing blue eyes matched only by his stature and smile, the consensus of the humdrum day-to-day passerby was that he was quite attractive. Not that he ever entertained their mindless and painfully obvious observations.
• The fateful event happened rather cliché all things considered. It began in a library. Wonders never ceased and he was unsure what compelled him to enter the home of knowledge and entertainment but he never once regretted it. Wandering the sea of books he looked for anything that would pique his interest, he nearly gave up the search until his eyes landed on you. An innocent, tiny thing that perused the history section for your latest essay or project, he never specifically asked why you were there.
• He was captivated, captured by your beauty. Staring there at the entrance of the aisle for so long that when you turned you shrieked, believing him to be a well dressed Weeping Angel that you had read about the night before. That was the most embarrassing moment of your life as you apologized to him and to the librarian that zipped to the location to scold you about being too loud. For once he found apologies endearing, cute even, adorable if you feel so inclined and the sheer shock that a creature like you could exist in this world was pushed to the wayside.
• The encounter was swift but profound, for him at least. Using his towering height to pull a book from the shelf you were too short to reach and place with the over growing collection. You were stuttering and blushing something fierce underneath his gaze and he had to stop himself from smirking at your bashfulness. He asks for your name and once you divulge it he responds by insisting you call him Mr. Shigaraki. After more insistence from either side hearing his name fall from your lips was like he was graced with hearing the voice of an Angel.
• Sadly that’s where the meeting ended as your time was up for whatever was going to take up your time next and you needed to scurry away. You wouldn’t be forgotten as your face was forever burned in his memory, a fondness churning in the pit of his stomach. He believed everyone else was beneath him, save for his brother, who were all ants that needed to be squashed. You were different and he needed to find out why.
• Time passes, as it always does. You forgot your encounter with Mr. Shigaraki and life went on. The day started off oddly, you couldn’t place why but the hairs at the back of your neck stood on end. A lingering sense of doom settled in your mind like a dense fog on a dewy spring morning but whatever the reason had yet to reveal itself. This too was forgotten as the day progressed until it was late, late enough for you to seek refuge in your bed. About to drift off to sleep when suddenly your whole room shook, no, the entire area shook like an earthquake had just opened the earth beneath your feet. Looking out your bedroom window you saw chaos, the entire area had been decimated and nothing but rubble remained. Heroes had appeared and began evacuating just in time for your home to collapse.
• You drifted in and out of consciousness. The moments where your eyelids were opened you saw none other than All Might, the Symbol of Peace, face down a masked villain in a suit. Shock was written on the hero’s face when you called out to him for help, accidentally gaining the attention of the villain as well. If he still had eyes they would be wide and manic, he had not forgotten you of course but there you were. He had searched for you so fervently and yet here you were right under his nose. Your presence, he could feel it using that quirk from the cat rescuer and he instantly knew it was you. What luck. The fight was abandoned when he saw this was his best chance, the rest of the heroes were too focused on fighting off his pawns and All Might was too wounded to move.
• In an instant the masked villain moved the rubble that had been pinning you in place and whisked you away.
• Your fear was intoxicating. The pleas, begs and sobs that you cried were more delicious than anything he had ever experienced. More euphoric than any narcotic, sweeter than ambrosia. The beats of your hands on his back drowned out by the drumming of his heart, his mouth was beginning to water. He could hardly wait.
• Like any self respecting villain All For One had many, many hideouts and safe houses. Many hadn’t been used in years, others were still unknown to the heroes, then there was one. The place he took you was far more special, the place he had planned to bring you after that fateful day but never used when you slipped away. Well, you wouldn’t escape this time.
• For a place that hadn’t seen life in years it was surprisingly well kept. Not a speck of dust laid on any surface, a few lightbulbs had died or exploded when he flipped on the lights but the water still ran and there was heat, it would do nicely for the time being. During the short trip via warp gate you had passed out, the silence when it had been delicious begs was disappointing but his signature smile appeared. There would be plenty of time to hear you cry while he breaks you into the perfect doll.
• After your “retrieval” he places you on the never before used emperor sized bed and retreats to the lounge chair at your bedside. He sits perfectly still, staring at you much, admiring how much you changed and grew in his absence. A hint of pride bubbles up, he’s pleased to know the lovely being he remembers became even fairer and more perfect. The feat would be impossible for any other person but you were made for him, you’re his, and you had to be for a man such as him.
• When you wake up those beautiful, blissful begs are heard by his worthy ears once again. Behind his life support helmet he sighs, a heavenly breath that you take for annoyance. You cry. “Please don’t kill me”, “Don’t hurt me”, “I’ll do anything” but oh sweet thing, you’re going to do anything he says regardless. You’re his. Why would he hurt or kill you? If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead.
• It comes as a surprise that he’s afraid to remove his facial cover. He might be the Symbol of Evil with plans of world domination but there’s a portion of him that is a slave to your desires, just as the world is a slave to his. A sliver of doubt appears as you ask who he is, if he reveals his identity and you ask for proof, his disfigured appearance would revolt you. No blue eyes to see you blush, no hair for you to run your hands through, no lips to feel yours on his.
• “Mr. Shigaraki” was the clue he gave you. It was adorable seeing your face go blank as your mind was wracked trying to remember the face. He watched with bated breath as your eyes showed recognition, you remembered him. You remember his face, his smile, his feeling. That wasn’t helpful, now you had a face to the person who kidnapped you. Who was holding you captive for…what? Ransom? To be tortured? To be his plaything? Every possibility was worse than the last, each one more dire and inescapable and bleak.
• He did his best to comfort you albeit in a deleterious manner. The Emperor of Darkness’ weight was displaced from the lounge chair and moved to the bed, his near gigantic form towering over you. Knee pressing into the mattress, causing your body to naturally shift into him. You couldn’t move. There was no gap to dash through if your body would get over being paralyzed in fear. The hand that could cover your head was placed on your cheek with uncharacteristic gentleness, a soft gesture that was masked by the sinister appearance staring down at you.
• “Fear not, My Sweet.” His voice is slightly muffled by the life support, the emotions were unbridled, intense and all together unhinged. He’s wholeheartedly delusional, diluted enough to believe he’s going to the the greatest Demon Lord who ever lived and would dismantle the world, rule it all the while having your love. He craves it, he needs it, he’s desperate for it. It drives him mad and being this close to you sends him to the brink of insanity.
• Your limitless stubbornness is as wonderful as it is infuriating. All For One can’t have the object of his love be a pushover from the gate, at least not yet. He has to experience the pleasure of breaking you, making you submit to him before you’re allowed to follow his orders. He has to make you his Doll first, his obedient, beautiful Doll. That’s a tall order and as the days pass his desperation grows. The itch in the back of his mind needed to be scratched and it was becoming clear his tactics were having the effect he desired. You stymied his every attempt, reacted the exact opposite of how he expected. He loved it, the last flame of your fighting spirit getting snuffed out in his raging insistence. He was beginning to wear you down, headway was being made and the inevitable end result was near.
• All For One’s machinations had increased in cruelness, once he had left you enough water to last a week and nothing else. The food vanished and all you were left with were bottles of water. He was gone for two weeks, it only took ten for you to teeter on the edge of sanity. Devoid of any interaction from the outside world. Only you, your thoughts and the dwindling “supplies”. When he returned he was pleased he was greeted with showers of affection, your touch was smothering and your body was pressed to his as close as humanly possible. The last of your will had fled in his absence and now his Doll was in the perfect state to mould to his liking.
• That night it begins. You’re so needy, so greedy. He decides to indulge you and removes his helmet, confident you wouldn’t be repulsed by his scarred visage. He’s correct of course, when you were met with the invitation to express your desperation you take it. Your lips wander. Pressing messy and half-opened kisses to his neck, jaw, and whatever remained of his own lips as his massive hands lead you towards the bed. You don’t notice until the back of your knees hit the edge and suddenly you’re falling.
• He’s on you in an instant. The bed sinks with his added weight and the heat he radiated replaced the warmth provided by your clothes. Before you knew it his thick yet dexterous fingers were pushing into your hole unprompted, sheathing them down to the knuckle before they were retracted. He was going to take immense satisfaction by making you climax until you were babbling incoherently before even preparing you for his villainous cock.
• Which was exactly what he did, denying you orgasm until you were red in the face and sobbing. All For One sat back on his knees in victory, smirking as he watched you wiggle and writhe at the loss of attention. There was one final thing: hearing you finally give into him. He owned your body but he needed to own your mind, your soul, your spirit, everything.
• “Say it.” In the moment his voice was low, gruff, reverberating throughout your clouded mind to send heat straight down to your nethers. You might’ve been aroused before but nothing compared to what his voice did to you.
• “S-s-say w-wh-wha?” Barely able to form a sentence you willed yourself to speak, if only to repeat whatever he wanted so he would continue with his mind numbing ministrations. The lack of sending you in a desperate rut the likes of which you had never experienced. He was cruel, further denying you what you wanted. His hand so near to your skin that the tiny peach hairs picked up the presence but when your hips bucked to force him to touch you? He left entirely.
• “Beg. Beg for me to fuck you, to ruin your body, to corrupt your mind and make you mine. Mine alone.”
• That was quite the mouthful and you weren’t sure if you could say it back but that’s what he wanted. Mustering your frenzied will you commanded yourself to speak, to plead for what you so desperately wanted. “Please, please fuck me. Please I need you, I need you, please make me yours. I want to be yours, please!”
• Every second, every breath, every thought had been leading up to this moment. All For One was in Seventh Heaven upon hearing your final submittance, exultantly triumphant. Your reward was swiftly delivered, the bulbous head of his cock pressed against the entrance of your hole and with one swift thrust he inserted himself to the hilt. The sharp edge of his hips cutting against the plush of your inner thighs, it hurt, it hurt so much. He had prepared you, scissoring and stretching you, it wasn’t enough. Tears pricked at the corners of your eyes as the full stuffing of his cock inside you was enough to make you regret begging him to fuck you, sensing this he didn’t move. Giving you time to adjust and acclimate while licking away your salty tears. The heat of his heavy breath oddly comforting.
• Once your filled hole stopped fluttering all bets were off. His hips snapped expeditiously in the customary manner of fucking ones Doll till they came undone and fell into unconscious from the exhaustion and pleasure they felt. He was unrestrained. The initial softness and care he showed was the furthest thing in his mind now all that was left was a feral need to fuck his Doll till they were bedbound. He makes sure you know who owns you, using his numerous quirks to let you there was no escape. Musculoskeletal Coiling to make his already bed shattering thrusts harder. Proliferation, creating several pairs of arms and hands to tease you in places all at once. Reaching to grasp at your neck, fingers tweaking your oversensitive nipples all the while more teased and played with places unimaginable. Once using his Air Walk quirk to suspend you both amidst the impactful love-making.
• Time had no meaning. Whatever seconds you counted to remember how many times he had made you climax were a distant dream, black spots appeared in your vision, your body somehow numb and pained all at once. The lightest touch was like you had been set on fire. In one particularly lucid moment you swore a drop of his milky cum was sliding past your nose but you don’t remember blowing him or snorting it out but in the haze who knows what had happened. Finally the peaceful sleep wrapped you in its arms and carried you off to a safer place for a time.
• Just as you passed out All For One finally came. Engorging you to the very brim, his fingers acting as a stopper to keep his demonic cum from spilling out. Whatever was left of the wrecked bed was used as All For One took your limp, sleeping body and wrapped you up in the soiled duvet.
• The afterglow shone brightly like a halo while he laid with you. Keeping you flush against him. The plotting began again. Awaiting your eventual awakening to show you the other quirks at his disposal. He was far from done with you. It hadn’t been a day since your submission and he intended to keep you as his Doll till you were well and old and your last breath was the escape from his eternal love.

Whatch AFO be monomas dad or something

Being a last collection of asks and replies-to-replies on 350.  One long one about Touya’s chances of survival without AFO (re: my repeated claims that Dabi doesn’t exist without AFO, not because of AFO’s manipulations, but because Touya just dies on the mountain without him), and two shorter ones about the plot holes and the narrative implications respectively.

Hit the jump!

By this point, I don’t recall what the early translations had to say, but from the official release, I don’t think Ujiko really said anything to that effect?  He had no concept of how Dabi had survived all this time, so wanted to ask him straight out; his conclusion afterward was simply that Dabi’s powerful grudge kept him going.

That’s not very realistic, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s terribly out of place in the shonen genre on the whole nor BNHA in specific.  This is, after all, the series that gave us, on the one hand, Nighteye’s deathbed speech about “wishing energy” allowing Deku to twist fate, and, on the other hand, explicit narration that Shigaraki died for real, but revived himself out of sheer hatred and the desire to pursue his apocalyptic dream.

If Shigaraki can literally wish himself back from the dead out of pure loathing, I don’t think we really needan explanation for Dabi’s survival beyond, “Spite is an excellent motivator.”  Particularly since it’s coming from Ujiko, it mostly feels to me like Hori giving us a cheekily wicked twist on the uplifting scene where a patient pulls through something the doctor never expected them to survive, and the doctor enthuses happily if somewhat confusedly over what a miracle it is, and really, it’s thanks to the patient’s determination.  You know the scene.

As to a quirk awakening, it seems to me that we already have one strong possibility: Touya’s fire turning blue the winter of his death.  It’s possible his fire turning hotter was simply his body continuing to develop, the same way his cold affinity took time to make itself known, but given that he’d been out training in secret, I also think it’s perfectly plausible that he unlocked that particular upgrade through his doomed backstory efforts.  It’s not exactly the combat awakening we seen in most cases, but they don’t haveto be combat-driven exclusively, as Geten’s proves; they can come about because of sufficient emotional upset.  And Touya would have been both pushing himself harder than was safe to do andgetting pretty worked up out on the mountain, given everything we know about him.

Could he have survived without AFO’s help?  I mean, I guess in a world where hate-fueled resurrections are possible, any level of truly ludicrous injuries are surviveable with the right emotional motivation.  It doesn’t feel like the best thing for the story to me, though.  Touya “dies” on Sekoto Peak; it’s one of the Todoroki family’s foundational tragedies.  Him surviving changes the entire course of the family’s plot—it might have been the one thing aside from actually getting the Number 1 spot that could have shocked Endeavor out that pursuit.  Him surviving might have been the push Rei needed to become the woman we see come to confront her husband in Chapter 301 (as, indeed, the same thing led her to said confrontation canonically).

Alternatively, none of that might have happened in Touya lived; they might all have fallen back into old patterns in time.  That’s in keeping with what we generally see from the Todoroki family, which is that they require outside intervention to change.  Endeavor doesn’t change until he gets the Number 1 spot through no effort of his own.(1)  Shouto doesn’t break out of his spiral until Midoriya shouts some sense into him at the Sports Festival, without which Shouto doesn’t go to see Rei, triggering her own improvement—which is then catalyzed by Dabi (who by that point definitely counts as outside intervention himself) projecting his video to the world.  Touya surviving feels the same way to me: it doesn’t happen without an outside hand.

There’s also the logistics to consider.  At the time AFO found Touya, he (AFO) had basically whatever quirks the story needed him to have, possibly including that empathy quirk he could have used to zero in on Touya’s location, as well as a teleporter and a mad scientist doctor.  He could have gotten Touya to help extremely quickly.

Conversely, per Chapter 302, Endeavor was still pushing through crowds when the entire mountain was already ablaze; we didn’t see him in the woods until the fire had already passed, whereas AFO appeared against a backdrop of still-raging flames.  Even if Endeavor was able to find the fire’s origin point relatively quickly,(2) he still would have been at best precious minutes later than AFO, and would have had to either physically carry his son off the mountain (at a time before he’d figured out flying, no less) or hope for an EMT chopper that could drop down a lift, which would then have only been able to give emergency care on the agonizingly long trip back to the nearest hospital.

It’s a far cry from AFO being able to have Kurogiri warp them right into the heart of Ujiko’s lab nigh-instantaneously!

Also too, even setting aside the narrative and mechanical considerations, it’s probably worth asking if Touya had the will to survive at that point.  It’s something I’ve thought a bit about in the wake of all the expected AUs coming out of this reveal: if Touya had stayed with his family, if Endeavor hadcome for him after the blaze, would he still have had that emotional drive to go on?

On Sekoto Peak, Touya was in despair, angry but more upset; it’s all too easy for me to imagine that, if he’d opened his eyes to see Enji’s frantic face above his own, there would have been a real danger that he would have felt some awful satisfaction, and thereafter acceptance, and would have simply, quietly passed away, because his dad came for him; his dad was looking at him, and that’s all he ever really wanted.

So, in summary, for a lot of reasons, I don’t think Touya could have survived Sekoto without AFO’s rescue, at least not for more than an hour or so.  We’ll see if there’s some kind of quirk-based explanation in the wings, but I’m not really expecting one.

Thanks for the ask, anon!

1:  Other than all the effort it took him to hold onto that Number 2 spot as long as he did, I mean.  But that just got him to Number 2; it took All Might retiring to get him to Number 1, and that, he didn’t have any influence on.

2:  As a fire user himself, I could buy Endeavor being able to rapidly navigate to origin/heart of a blaze through intuition or long experience.  He might also have known about where to look, if Touya was using the same training spot he himself had used.

———

Yeah, it’s an issue either way.  Either he had some additional resources he was sitting on and didn’t expect Touya to ever call him out on the blatant contradiction(/the writing fumbled the moment), or, as you said, he was just sounding out his personality for Noumu base potential, which begs the question of whether three years of intensive care and life support were a cheaper alternative than just making a judgement call at the outset on what level of Noumu to build him towards.

———

Yep!  No, I really have nothing else to say about this; you have summed up in one paragraph everything I’ve been saying since my first post on the topic pre-leaks.  Good work, anon; I applaud your brevity.

Those all answered, this will, I think, be my last round of asks on 350.  Feel free to reply to any of my posts on it or send comments in, but after this, I make no promises about answering anything else about this chapter.  I have said about all I can imagine saying on it and I’m very ready to move on to other topics.

Chapter 350 Ask Round-Up (I Think We Hit a Plothole ver.)

As you can see, it’s a whole Thing.  Hit the jump!

Plot Holes I Have Counted So Far:

  ●  Why is this only coming out now?  If Ujiko has been so willing to talk about his and AFO’s plans that he’ll do so basically unprompted, why on Earth didn’t this come out the moment someone sat down and asked him what he could tell them about the League of Villains?  Seriously, Ujiko’s unsolicited little opinion column here is material that it’s all too easy for me to imagine Tsukauchi getting out of him with very little difficulty in the first week of his captivity.

Obviously, Ujiko wouldn’t want to tell them anything that would tip them off in a serious way, but just telling them, Oh, by the way, Dabi surviving his injuries is my work; what do you think?  Isn’t he something? doesn’t actually tell them anything especially helpful. The only difference is that Endeavor and Shouto could have found out about it weeks ago rather than Shouto having to go and ask.  The latter’s better for the drama, of course, but these concurrent explanations from Ujiko and Dabi himself feel awfully conveniently timed.

  ●  Speaking of Ujiko’s captivity, it’s been a solid month since he was taken into custody.  Why in heaven’s name is he still in lock-up at a police department?  I might normally assume ease of access for interrogations, save that the chapter repeatedly suggests that the cops are not interested in anything he has to say, no matter how revelatory.  Honestly, if this is the approach the system takes with all villains, it’s no wonder even relatively minor or accidental offenders like Jin and Gentle Criminal had their lives completely fall apart the moment they got in any trouble at all.

Possibly the system is already reeling with trying to process the 115,000 other people arrested that day, so Ujiko, presenting exactly zero physical danger to anyone, was just left at the police station.  Still, though, while Ujicakes is not dangerous himself, he is, one has to assume, a pretty high priority target for a villainous rescue effort—or a murder to silence him.  So why still in police station lock-up?

  ●  No explanation for how AFO is tracking all these promisingly resentful children.  I know he has empathy and all, but seriously, how did AFO even find these people?  My going theory is that he habitually keeps an eye on the families of heroes—probably good quirks, fair odds at resentfulness due to the conflicting demands of heroics and family life, and easy to Arrange something if he really wants someone.*  It’d be nice if Horikoshi would stop waving the magic wand of “AFO has friends everywhere” and actually show us that process at some point, though.

  ●  What was up with AFO telling Touya, “You’ll never exhibit the power you once did,” and, “Despite our best efforts, we failed,” only to immediatelydo a full 180 to, “I might just be able to restore your flames to their full glory”?  Is that not a blatant contradiction?  Did he just think Touya was too distraught to notice and call him out on it?  Did he expect that hitting him with a one-two punch of, “You’re weak now but I can make you strong,” would just totally bypass any questions like, “But you just said you did your best to restore me and failed.  What, did you come up with a new idea in the last fifteen seconds?”  I’ve complained before about how the writing AFO has been saddled with since the breakout is blunt to the point of caricature, but I think this is a new low.

  ●  What in the holy fuck is the point of tying Overhaul to any of this?  See my prior post for some more breakdown on that topic; it is its own complete trainwreck.  That’s the case for a lot of reasons, but the one that I can’t shake is, “Why include an out-of-nowhere play for sympathy via the possibility that Overhaul is so messed up because he spent his formative years in an evil orphanage, when the last time Overhaul was in the story himself, the extent of the sympathy it could muster for him was Saint Deku the All-Saver stonily telling him that he, Deku, wouldn’t be doing squat to alleviate Chisaki’s suffering until he ‘wanted to apologize to Eri.’”  On so many levels, what the fuck?

  ●  So did this evil childrens’ home just happento be in not only the same town as the Todoroki home but also not even very far from the neighborhood?  Because Touya sure did flee from a burning building penniless and barefoot in PJs with an obviously traumatized and desperate look on his face, and apparently made it all the way back home without getting reported, waylaid, or intercepted by a concerned hero.  How convenient!

This is, of course, exactly the same thing as happened to Tenko—a stricken kid goes right through urban surroundings and gets no help at all despite how obviously he needs it.  But the plot hole here is not that Touya wasn’t intercepted, but rather that the orphanage and the Todoroki house were so close together that he could get there on foot and unaided rather than e.g. running a ways, wearing himself out because he just woke up from a coma and he doesn’t even know where the building he just set on fire was located, and finding his way to a police booth because he’s Todoroki Touya, Endeavor’s son, and he’s alive and just escaped.  People might have thought he was a nutjob, but I bet the phonecall would have gotten made.

AFO had Kurogiri by that point; they could have put Touya literally anywhere in the country!  But no, they apparently just plopped him right down in his own neighborhood and called it a day.

  ●  If Touya’s body was going to die within a month of waking, and the kids were being kept as vessels, why did AFO and Ujiko bother with preserving Touya?  It seems clear that AFO and Ujiko were lying about having done everything they could; if Touya was still a consideration for being a vessel, they must have had further ideas about how to fix up him up, and AFO even told Touya there might be a way to restore him.  But if those options were available to them, then why let him go so easily?  Why pour the time and resources into saving his life and preserving him for three years if they would just shrug and call it more trouble than it was worth the moment he rejected them?  It’s not like they didn’t have all the time they needed to get his quirk or a copy of it off him, and if they could fix him up enough to be a vessel, they could presumably fix him up enough to be good base material for a Noumu.  And it’d be much less of a security risk than letting him live, however briefly, to tell the tale.  On which note…

  ●  What was the plan for if Touya did reunite with his family?  Ujiko and AFO thought Touya had just a month to live, but they didn’t have any way of knowing he’d run back to his house and see something that upset him so much he immediatelyturned around and left again.  Indeed, the fact that he was so set on returning to his father suggests that he’d do exactly that—go back to his father and pick up the obsession right where it left off.  And what would have happened, then, when the boy’s family, frantic with relief and desperate to know where he’d been for three years, called in the police?  How was sunflower guy going to explain to the cops and social services how the son of the Number Two Hero came into his care and why he never reported the presence of this horrifically injured burn victim to the proper authorities?

I can see these questions being an excellent reason to just let the building burn after Touya lit it up—fire makes the clean-up so much simpler—but even in that case, wasn’t Ujiko, noted paranoiac, concerned about the authorities investigating the place, digging up a paper trail, anything at all?

Is This or Is This Not an Evil Orphanage?

That last point leads into the biggest issue I have, which is the wild disagreement between whether this is a creepy prison orphanage or a fairly up-and-up facility, and how that impacts AFO’s decision to let Touya go even though him having a month left to live meant he had a month left to talk to cops about howhe lived.

There’s a lot to this one, so bear with me here.  

POINTS IN FAVOR: 

  ●  Touya is told when he wakes up that he can’t go home; he ishome.

Though it’s judging someone by their body type, and there are of course exceptions, that sunflower guy is waytoo brawny to come off as just some normal childcare worker.

  ●  Direct line to AFO on the computer.

  ●  “A seedbed of ferocity and hatred.”

  ●  Kept Touya hidden for three years right under Endeavor’s nose, apparently without fear of being found out by any routine inspection from whatever bureaucratic office is in charge of overseeing alternative childcare facilities.May have let the building burn because it’d be easier to cover their tracks that way, since there’s pretty much no way to explain to police why your Totes Legit Children’s Home concealed the presence of their Mr. Sleepyhead for three years.

  ●  Dabi assuming that he’d have been Noumu fodder if he stuck around.

Overhaul apparently came out of this or a near-identical facility, and we all know how heturned out.  

POINTS AGAINST: 

  ●  The building is just out on the street, with an obvious playset outside and a big sign on the wall.  It’s clearly not any kind of secret facility, and that means there’s a limit to how Obviously Evil it can be.

  ●  Further, it’s a matter of public record that Garaki Kyudai founded a number of orphanages and is accepted and respected in many communities.  This means that at least some portion of his facilities haveto appear on the up-and-up.  They can’t have a reputation for kids dying, going missing, or turning out nothing but hateful little misanthropes.  They have to be accessible to and capable of passing government inspections.  Not to say that he couldn’thave secret, more evil orphanages, but if those were on the table all along and Touya was at one of them, why even bother mentioning the existence of the legitimate ones?

  ●  Those kids are not being trained up on ferocity and hatred, come the fuck on.  I know we only saw them for three panels, but they pinned up Get Well Soon signs for their house’s coma patient.  They folded paper cranes for his recovery.  They were thrilled to see he’d woken up, excited to welcome him into their home and family, and perfectly happy to share what they knew about his situation with him.

  If those kids were supposed to be possible back-ups for Shigaraki, who was having his hatred honed and cultivated to be as strong as possible; if Touya was saved and placed there specifically because of his potential as a warped seed, we really needed to get literally anything other than bog-standard Energetic Child vibes from them.  For god’s sake, they weren’t even as surly as Kouta, which you’d think would be the bare minimum.

  ●  Touya was apparently only permitted to escape because his body was in such rough shape and his obsession with Endeavor was ruled too difficult to manipulate.  Neither of these were the case with Chisaki, but for some reason, if he was from one of these places, he was able to escape and get himself adopted by yakuza with no difficulty worth remarking on.

  ●  Chisaki could further leave the orphanage still ignorant of its real purpose, which I wouldn’t expect him to understand as a child, but certainly when he started hearing about a supernaturally long-lived Emperor of Darkness who lives in the underworld and can give and take peoples’ quirks, I’d expect him to have been just as capable of connecting those dots as Dabi was, ifthe orphanage was so obviously evil to the children living in it that said evil is why he ran away.  That he still said, later, that All For One was just an urban myth to his generation, suggests strongly to me that he, as the meme goes, didn’t connect shit.

See the trouble here?  All the signals are in conflict with one another.  I’m damned if I can make heads or tails of exactly what we’re supposed to make of the place, much less how in the hell Overhaul’s character is in any way served by being associated with it.

On Anons’ Points

I got that first one back when leaks were just dropping, but I think the full release made it pretty clear that not only was the computer placed by AFO, it was actually just him talking in real time.  I touched briefly on how he might have known about Touya and Sekoto Peak in the first section up above, but to reiterate, I think it’s mostly down to this manga’s difficulty in establishing exactly what AFO’s support structure/web of evil actually looks like.

For some further food for thought on that topic, try to reconcile this idea:

• All Might spent decades taking out the bulk of AFO’s supporters, smashing “everything [he] worked so hard to build.”

with this one: 

• All For One has friends everywhere, even internationally, such that the instant he gets out of prison, he’s able to slide right back into easily inserting multiple moles into UA and pulling strings with international contacts to have them start stirring up trouble in other countries.

Basically, All For One has all the contacts and resources he needs to do whatever the story needs him to do at any given time, be that having a miraculous line on every discontented child in the country or the ability to say a word and start shit in othercountries so bad that it impacts their international policy decisions!  And yet we’re still meant to believe that All Might was so effective against this man that AFO foresaw his defeat and sent people like Gigantomachia into hiding years before his and All Might’s backstory fight.  Okay, BNHA, whatever you say.

On subduing Touya, setting aside the fact that he wasn’t there in person, it does make me wonder about what, precisely, he and Shigaraki were thinking about when Shigaraki asked for his help with subduing/convincing/otherwise dealing with Bakugou.  For a man of such profound evil, I’m sure he could have subdued Touya somehow or another; I think the main explanation there for why he didn’t is that he thought Touya’s body wasn’t long for the world, so it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.  See the point above about the conflict between Touya as potential vessel and Touya as more trouble than his body’s worth.

Regarding the matter of Endeavor’s home security system, that actually didn’t jump out at me because, well, Touya lived there.  He would have come and gone perfectly freely, at least to school and whatever else he and Natsu and Fuyumi got up to in their spare time.  Sure, if whatever the security system is required a card or something, Touya wouldn’t have that, but if it was something like a gate with a keypad, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that he’d know the entry code.  A bunch of locked doors would be trickier to bypass without damaging them, but I also don’t have much trouble buying that living in the home of the Number Two Hero, a man with the reputation Endeavor has, means the family mostly feels pretty safe from outside threats.  It’s a wrinkle, but not nearly as much of one to me as the distance from the orphanage to the Todoroki house being quickly traversable on foot.

That all said, I don’t have a neat wind-down here.  I’ve always been entertained by the comedic potential of Dabi’s six weeks spent with Ujiko, so I was happy to see a flashback to that with Ujiko being his old bubbly self.  And I mostly liked Touya’s emotional material in the chapter.  I think the most I’ve ever felt for him was when he was crying alone on the mountain because his dad hadn’t come, so getting a callback to that moment via Touya immediately starting to rationalize it was legit affecting!  I like how telling it is that his response to seeing Shouto’s training at its most brutal was not to try and help his brother, but rather to double down on resentment without even sticking around long enough to check on Natsuo and Fuyumi.  And I do appreciate that if we had to get AFO’s hand here, it was extremely minimal in terms of its effect on Touya’s mentality.

But a funny Ujiko flashback and Touya having a coherent emotional throughline don’t make the rest of this chapter any less of a mess.

Thanks for the asks, everyone!

—

*Yes, this would mean he probably knew about Koutarou from the beginning.  If we’re heading in that direction anyway, I may as well try and get out ahead of it with versions I don’t hate.  Here, that means that circa Nana’s death ~40 years ago, the “vessel” and Noumu research were still underway, so all AFO and Ujiko were doing at the time was keeping an eye out for good quirks, not next-body candidates yet.  Still, they were aiming in that direction, so AFO kept an eye on Nana’s boy as he grew up, never addressed his abandonment issues, and started passing his damage down to his own kids—until the house went down unexpectedly one summer night, and, well, at that point you might as well call it fate.

Chapter 255 Thoughts

Herein: Endeavor, Jirou’s big moment, and me lamenting the long-lost AFO With Nuance.

On Endeavor

 •   The discrepancy in Enji’s recollections of his sons is, in fact, completely great.  Shouto with the glare but the small sweatdrop of awkwardness, and Touya with the big happy deranged grin.  One of your sons is so happy to see you, Enji!  It’s also notable—as others have talked about at more length than I will—that Endeavor’s thinking directly about Touya for the first time since the reveal.  He’s previously shied away from it somewhat, using kanji/furigana mismatches to conflate “my son” with “a villain,” and being extremely vague every time Shouto tried to pin him down on the matter of going and doing something about Touya, but here his thoughts are aimed directly at both of them, “facing” them even if only in his mind.  A positive sign, I feel.

 •   I think it’s interesting that he lists “this fight” among the things he brought on himself.  The wound, sure; he slipped up and let AFO get that attack in.  But the fight itself?  Hawks and All Might planned those match-ups; the most Endeavor did was go along with it against his own misgivings and guilty conscience.  Should we take this to mean he’s now thinking he should have put his foot down and gone to face Touya instead?

 •   People (both in the fandom and in the chapter itself) seem very confident that Endeavor will be right back up, and they’re probablyright?  But I wonder.  Endeavor tries to get back up, but he falls, and then there’s that close-up of all the blood in the grass, spreading ever farther.  It feels ominous. I don’t think Endeavor’s going to die, and frankly after all the hurt he’s taken in previous fights, it would feel a bit odd for one wound in his side to take him down.  The manga has ever been inconsistent when it comes to how much lasting effect any given injury is going to have, but since that inconsistency typically resolves in favor of “whatever’s going to make things more convenient for heroes,” Enji staying down because of this would be a swerve, and a welcome one.  I guess we’ll see.
   

On AFO and “Extras”

I kind of hate this.  I’ve complained about it periodically before, and maybe it’s just sour grapes from having read him wrong, but late series AFO really is such a disappointment  This is a man who built an empire out of little people, one power exchange, one favor at a time.  At Kamino, he said he hated All Might for taking out his support network, for standing atop a pile of bodies of AFO’s allies.  He always recognized Tomura’s choices in allies.  His nemesis is One For All, a power built up through the lives of “small” people.  Hell, if you take Vigilantesas canon, it’s only been a few years since Koichi’s big finale, in which AFO explicitly recognizes the power of ordinary people to rise to the occasion in extraordinary circumstances and calls that a specific danger to him in modern times.  So why on earth is he so dismissive of “extras” now?

From a Watsonian perspective, I favor the explanation that he went kind of crazy in Tartarus; it’s also about the only explanation I don’t find exceptionally tiresome, but sadly one that is almost certainly not the intended read.  It’s just so easy, so unchallenging, so plodding.  And frankly, it makes AFO act stupid.  If he can’t imagine that little people could pose a threat to him, it leaves him completely flat-footed when they do, and that’s just the deadliest fuckin’ thing for his believability as a “mastermind”-type villain who can’t shut up about all the different paths and plans he has available to reach his ultimate goals.

He and his vestige have been trending this way for some time now—certainly since Jakku!—but it’s reaching new heights since the beginning of this arc.  It’s like I’m watching Horikoshi flanderize this man in real-time.
    

Jirou and Friends (and AFO and Bakugou)

Man, I wish BNHA actually had the ensemble chops to land this moment.  But like, if we were really supposed to buy Jirou getting angry about her friends crying, maybe we could have had a) any more significant relationship between Jirou and Midoriya than him helping her organize her notes that one time and b) any relationship between Jirou and Aoyama at all.  

The most generous read I’ve got is that Midoriya and Aoyama were on Jirou’s mind because she’d been thinking mere seconds prior about how those two have been living with the terror of AFO’s looming threat,(1) but it would have hit so much harder if Jirou had had any significant presence in Deku or Aoyama’s arcs before, or had been shown as the type of character who’s overtly friendly with everyone.  Hell, what would be so wrong with letting her get up in arms for her own sake, wanting to prove she’s no extra, or that AFO is wrong to spit on the efforts of people like her just because he doesn’t think her quirk is duly impressive?

When you put it together with the A Band reunion back in Chapter 327 and the total lack of pay-off on that thread, it’s enough to make a blogger wonder if there was something else originally planned for Jirou and this is a hurried sub-in moment after that idea was scrapped.

You know who feels like he oughtto be having this plot?  Mr. “Extras Should Just Get Out of the Way” himself, Bakugou Katsuki.  Honestly, with as over-the-top as AFO is getting with the extras talk, I very much wonder if Bakugou will end up having to fight him after all—maybe if Kurogiri gets sprung and shuffles the fights again?  AFO having nothing but derision for weak quirks and thinking that extras serve no purpose but to make him look cooler in their defeat feels so precisely calibrated to mirror early Bakugou that’s it’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy AFO getting ganged up on by relative randos! And that, too, is thematic in its way. Jirou (and maybe Tokoyami next chapter?) getting something like this is very cool. But I wish it could come in a context where I was more convinced by BNHA as an ensemble piece. With any luck, this will be a first step of the series finally properlyturning away from the mentality the heroes still have, of using big “important” people to fight important fights.
    

AFO and Vestiges (What’s New, Pussycat?)

Once again, AFO gets all the good vestige drama.  I ask you, gentle readers, why didn’t we ever get to see Deku have to struggle with vestige interference?  Why can’t Shigaraki get some assists from vestiges who hate AFO more than they have any opinion about this new kid?  When will we get to see Vestige!Ujiko?

This is another case, though, where it’s difficult to credit that this should be such a surprise to AFO.  Has he really never had a (non-New Order) vestige try to fight him before?  Would they not have contributed their efforts when All Might drove him into a corner in their backstory fight?  I largely like the idea of them banding together only when it seems that their efforts could make a crucial difference, but it would carry more weight if we had ever gotten to see their perspective before.

And there’s even an easy prospect for that!  AFO has Search, Ragdoll’s quirk, so why haven’t we ever once seen her in any of these vestige scenes?  Hell, she could even have gotten a line or two explaining why this is only happening now, maybe a flashback to what it’s actually like to be a psuedo-sentient quirk ghost trapped inside AFO. She could be the one leading (or maybe coordinating, given the nature of Search) the charge, because that’s one of the things heroes do: inspire others to take up the mantle themselves.
    

Jirou’s Injury: Is It Sexist?

Here’s my opinion: The talk getting around about Horikoshi being a big gross sexist, possibly one with a fetish for brutalizing women, because of Jirou getting one ear jack blown off is not entirelywithout merit, but it is pretty oversimplified.(2)  Only two women have been irreversably maimed beyond simple scarring thus far: Mirko losing two limbs, and Jirou losing half her quirk.  Compare Aizawa losing an eye and the lower part of one leg, Mr. Compress an arm, Re-Destro both his legs, and Overhaul both his arms and his access to his quirk, and you’ve actually got twice as many men as women taking those lifelong, irrecoverable injuries!

Also too, that’s only talking about people who were significantly and, thus far, permanently impacted by their wounds.  If you expand the scope somewhat to people who were maimed with less severe impact on their combat effectiveness, you get people like Jeanist and his lost lung, and Hawks and all his lost feathers.  You also have to talk about people like Mirio or Shigaraki, whose maimings were severe but temporary, or Gran Torino, who didn’t lose an obvious limb, but who still doesn’t seem to be back in fighting shape, given that we still haven’t seen him out of a hospital bed.  

Virtually all the characters in these latter categories are men; the only female character I can think of that fits any of those particular bills is Lady Nagant, who at present seems to be in the Gran Torino tier.  Two women compared to four men, or three women compared to nine men: it’s not exactly the clear-cut damnation a lot of people talk like it is!  And Mirko bounced back like a damn jai alai ball, while Jirou still has enough oomph for supermoves, whereas Aizawa’s big contribution at the moment is holding hands with Monoma, and Overhaul can’t access his quirk at all!

That said, the numbers absolutely do get much worse when you start folding in deaths.  I would say that twice as many prominent/significant women have died in this series than similarly placed men—Nighteye and Twice compared to Magne, Curious, Star & Stripe, and Midnight.(3)  It looks even worse when you consider the percentages of women overall in the groups that lose them: three women versus eleven men in the UA staff; one woman and four men in the MLA; two women and six men in the League circa meeting Overhaul.  And so on; in all cases, men drastically outnumber women, but women die at exorbitantly outsized rates.

That ties into a further disparity, which is the gender balance on which characters are allowed to keep contributing to the plot after their injuries, versus which ones die or get booted off-camera.  

For the men, you once again have Twice and Nighteye, and I would add Overhaul as well—his brief return doesn’t see him doing anything remotely significant save giving Deku a quick moral trial.  You could possibly count Gran Torino as well, though he at least got to give Deku some words of advice for the road, and it remains to be seen whether he might make an appearance at e.g. the hospital Spinner’s currently attacking.  That’s four men significantly removed from prominence out of a list that I would probably say constitutes eleven men overall—add on Aizawa, Mr. Compress, Re-Destro, Best Jeanist, Hawks, Mirio and Shigaraki.

For the women, conversely, Jirou and Mirko are the onlytwo who have bounced back, from a list that would in full include Lady Nagant, Curious, Star & Stripe, Magne and Midnight.  Fewer women on the overall list than men, but the men have much better rates of recovery.  There’s no getting around the fact that Aizawa wakes up in a hospital after chopping off his own leg like a badass while Midnight dies on her hands and knees.

Which also brings up the topic of how sexualizedwomen’s injuries are compared to men’s.  Off the cuff, and without going back over all the relevant scenes in detail, I feel like there’s at least some measure of reflexive sexualization of women’s bodies going on there, stuff that is being read in a worse light than Horikoshi intended it.  I would call it a factor with Midnight and Mirko for sure, though, and I might think more with some research.  The only male counter-examples I’d even consider broaching would be Mr. Compress (shirtless, posing, dramatic reveal of his hair and unmasked face; it’s all very intentional and agency-having compared to the women) and Shigaraki, who we really do have to watch get brutalized, shirtless, at profoundly uncomfortable lengths and extremes; he does far more agonized floorbound writhing, for example, than Mirko, though their respective outfits mean you see a lot less of his thighs when he’s doing it.

So, yeah.  The trouble isn’t the simple number of women taking bad injuries, nor even the extent ofthose injuries.  The trouble is how impactful those injuries are on the whole, and what percentageof women are taking them compared to the men.

That said, Jirou’s not out of the fight yet—again, she still had the oomph for that big supermove—and as a 1-A student, I don’t expect her to be bowed out of what remains of the plot entirely, at least not more gallingly than any number of the second string 1-A kids.  Her injury was not sexualized at all, and while it was somewhat graphic—that panel of her severed jack!—I wouldn’t say it was more graphic than, say, Shigaraki getting his fingers pinched off by RD, or pretty much anything going on with the remnants of Dabi’s face.  We’re also very early in this fight still; there’s lotsof time for more students to take more injuries, so the full scope of how 1-A’s girls fare in this fight compared to the boys will not be apparent for some time yet.  

That all said, while I would call Jirou’s injury part of a larger pattern, I’m not prepared to jump to “Horikoshi was just sitting at his desk slavering at the chance to brutalize this teenage girl.”  Frankly, I’d far rather see girls out there taking an active role in fights against major threats like AFO and Near High Ends and taking their licks for it, like Mirko and Jirou, than girls sequestered in support roles on the sidelines and never getting anything interesting to do, like poor Momo.  And I will feel even happier about it if some boys—anyboys—take some comparable licks too.

Stray Thoughts

 •   “I could tell from the sound of his breathing, which my feathers picked up on.”  Lawd, this is stilted.  Why would Hawks need to tell himselfthe bit about his feathers?  Surely he himself knows the method by which he detects Endeavor’s breathing?  Some of his lines here I could chalk up to him being a very methodical thinker in combat—as is the case with, “We go forward with that assumption!”—but some of it just feels like a combination of Horikoshi holding the audience’s hand(4) and C.Cook’s translation being awkwardly phrased.

 •   Dark Shadow asking after Jirou: what a cutie.  I like it when he interacts with other people—Tokoyami, of course, but the rest of the class as well.

 •   I’ve really enjoyed the dynamism of this fight.  I’m deeply tired of the BNHA fight scenes all boiling down to Deku punching and/or kicking something really hard, or people like Bakugou, Shouto and Endeavor all having these huge elemental-based attacks that might be distinguishable in color, but just aren’t very interesting in black and white.  Also, like, none of those people can truly fly;they can only propel themselves violently in a certain direction.  So the high maneuverability of a true aerial combat between AFO, Hawks, and Tokoyami-carrying-Jirou, with Hawks in particular zipping around with a pair of swords, and Jirou and AFO’s attacks tending towards more serpentine visuals, has been a welcome corrective.

—–

1:  Which is a fair cop for Aoyama, but is on thinner ice where Deku is concerned, seeing ashe and AFO never had a direct encounter at Kamino, the Jakku encounter was AFO’s vestige rather than the man himself, and the post-Nagant material was spurred on entirely by a prerecorded video.  Deku had never met AFO face to face until literally the beginning of this combat.

2:  And, tumblr being tumblr, wildly over-accusatory.

3:  Counting all nameddeaths evens the raw numbers somewhat, but I categorically refuse to grant side characters and one-offs like Native, Majestic and Snatch the same prominence as arc-starring characters like Star & Stripe and prominent arc villains like Curious.  Crust comes the closest to making my cut, but he’s just such a one-joke character, completely lacking the slightest hint of interiority, that even though he’s in twice as many chapters as, say, Curious, he doesn’t have half of Curious’s motivation, personality and clear sense of history with her compatriots.

4: 1:  I wonder, sometimes, if Horikoshi was a little traumatized by that whole thing where he had everyone writing in to ask him about Deku using OFA One Million Percent against Muscular and having to explain that that was just Deku thinking1,000,000% to get himself hyped up, not a literal representation of his power output.  The BNHA fandom is full of pedants, East and West alike, it seems.  (I say this as an unbelievable pedant myself, of course.)