Endeavor Remembering His Dream And Interpreting It As Foreshadowing For His And Touya’s Tragedy

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.

Shouldn't have placed all those words on his head...

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allegory of psyche

my mob psycho fanart piece from this year :)

24x32, oil on canvas

Enji, surrounded by the white walls of the hospital and the beeping of the heart monitor attached to Rei, holding his son for the first time and being in complete awe. He holds the baby so gently, like one wrong move would destroy the fragile peace between the three of them. The child blinks at him with beautiful blue, oh so blue eyes, the same color as him and he just falls in love right then and there. Rei is looking at him with such fondness, and he decides right then and there that he'd do anything to keep this child happy and loved.

Cut to two decades later, no. 1 hero Endeavor kneels on the battlefield, the broken and burned body of his first born cradled in his arms. His son, who had only wanted to make him proud. Who he had abandoned and ignored in a pursuit of a legacy that has only left him with an absent wife and a quiet home. The same legacy that led to his son burning alive twice, first for his love and the second for his death. He looks at the empty shell of a man lying in his arms, heart breaking on how his beautiful baby boy had succumbed to such a painful life because of him. That the promise he made once upon a time to love his son unconditionally will forever remain unfulfilled.

What if

We know that Rei found out about Touya in the hospital, but was Enji brave enough to tell her about their son's death himself? I doubt it, but still...

えんじ🔥 by しろしろ@shiroshiro69

my little brother’s gonna be a doctor!

Miguel O’Hara icons

touya's dance