On Chapter 352/Dabi’s Hypothetical Healing Powers/Dabi’s General Arc

Not a lot very detailed in exchange for the wait, I’m afraid, but here’s what I’ve got: 

I wish the official translation were not so obtuse.  There’re quite a few lines from Shouto that made much more sense to me in the fan translations, where it’s usually been the other way around.  But when I correct for “Shouto’s lines making any damn sense,” I continue to mostly like them!  Shouto deserves a chance to declare himself against his brother’s relentless attempts to define him, and the fire/ice fusion is a lovely culmination of his ongoing attempts to find and define himself as his own person, to figure out who he is in and of himself, connected to but not defined by his family circumstances.

At the same time, him finding himself doesn’t really address Touya’s issues, nor does it do much to offer Touya a different way forward, so while I’m very ready to spend time elsewhere, I think it’s perhaps for the best that Dabi’s got a dangling plot hook in the form of whatever’s going on with his body.  Which brings me to the other ask I’ve got about Dabi: 

Honestly, anon, I have to say that I’m not nuts about either of them.  That said, I only mostly know what the phoenix theory even is and am even more touch-and-go on the ice one, so I’m not really in a place to answer this question in detail while maintaining due rigor.  I don’t really seek out Dabi and Todoroki meta, you know?  From what I do know, though, I don’t particularly think eitherof them is greatfor the story.

Mostly what I’ve seen leaves me thinking that both theories are kind of grasping at straws to explain how Dabi can survive the amount of damage he’s doing to himself, as well as looking for ways to explain his backstory survival that don’t involve taking Ujiko at his word.  But I like hatred-fueled resurrections for Shigaraki just fine, and I don’t require that the story prove Ujiko wrong about everything he’s ever said as some kind of Hayes Code-esque moral imperative, so I have no issue with Touya demonstrating spite-based longevity.

After all, he was in Ujiko’s care for three years.  Surely if his survival had anything to do with his quirk, Ujiko—likely the world’s foremost quirk expert, given all the enhanced lifespan he’s devoted to studying them—would have figured that out?

It does seem, however, that the story’s not going to rest on spite-based longevity, so maybe the theorists will be right, and there’s some other answer to the question of how Touya’s survived.  I don’t love the idea of AFO foisting a quirk off on him either—though again, it’s not like he lacked for a timeframe to do it in—so I really have no idea what’s going on there.  Honestly, left to my own devices, I’d make the strange circle on Dabi’s collarbone be a laser sight from a sniper rifle, and pick back up the HPSC agent plotline such that Shouto, having saved Touya from himself, now also has to save Touya from an uncaring world.  I don’t suspect that’s what’s going on, though.

We’ll see when we see, I guess!

One other thing, though: something I think is interesting about Dabi right now is the way he’s completely embraced we/us/our language to talk about the League, other villains, the Lost of Hero Society, and so on.  It stands out to me in particular because Dabi spent so, so long being aloof from the League, rejecting their bonds, complaining about the way they behaved, openly insulting Spinner and Toga in particular, and generally acting like he considered himself to be so much more dangerous and noteworthy a threat to Hero Society than anyone else around him, be they random back alley thugs all the way up to Shigaraki himself.

That was when he was still keeping his identity secret.  Pretty much the second that secret came out, though, suddenly it was all, again, that we/us/our talk.  He counts himself among society’s outcasts, he does (his version of) a nice thing for Toga and encourages her, he tells Shouto to burn and die for oursakes.  And I like this turn-around, more or less, because it’s in line with something I’ve always kind of hoped for from Dabi, which is that, insofar as his personal relationships go, he’ll echo Endeavor’s path: ruthlessly utilizing the people in his life he ought to care about to advance his own goals, and only stopping to look back and regret the carnage after he gets what he wants and realizes it isn’t everything he thought it would be, by which point the damage has already been done.

I never really bought Dabi as overtly soft on the League, but I was willing to accept the possibility that he had a small soft spot that he was consciously throttling in the cradle because he refused to let it interfere with his goals.  With those goals halfway accomplished, however—Endeavor’s sins made public, Touya’s own survival revealed, Endeavor personally gutted and the family’s attempts to move on from his death pretend he never existed thrown into disarray—his ice is beginning to thaw.

…Just in time for it to be too late for it to matter.  The League’s a stomach-turning mess right now for anyone who cares about them even a little, and with Dabi where he is right now, there is absolutely nothing he can do to change that.  Nothing, perhaps, save rely on the younger brother who wants both to stop and to help him.

Ngl, it would make me much more warmly inclined towards Shouto if he, in his under-socialized literal-mindedness, would take all Dabi’s we/us/our talk to heart and ask him seriously what he thinks can be done for all his villain friends, who Touya must surely care for as much as Shouto cares about hisfriends, right?  And then Dabi can be like, “Wow, you took that much more to heart than I expected you to.  Uh.  Um.  Hm.”

Crucially, Dabi can’t fix any of the League’s current problems on his own, no more than Shigaraki can make the world better by annihilating it, or Spinner can help Shigaraki by encouraging all of Shigaraki’s most self-destructive tendencies.  And the adult heroes don’t care about fixing it, because the adult heroes have never cared about the circumstances that led the villains to their current outlooks.  That’s what the studentsre have to do: take the first step, be the bridge, improve on their predecessors’ performance, do what they couldn’t, save the people they failed to save.

Admittedly, I don’t really know how that would look in the story right now.  My concern is that we’re headed squarely for a, “The students will save the villains that they happened to receive a personal insight on and never think about the plights of all the villains that they didn’t happen to receive a personal insight on,“ ending.

But again, I suppose we’ll see when we see.

Thanks for the asks! I have rather more to say about Chapter 353; I’ll see about getting something up on that front soon.