Todoroki: The Mountain, The Hawk, And The Haunted House Part 1

It’s lonely at the top

More or less how I feel about the situation as well. I feel that so many people complain about the realism of the story and forget that this is just a shounen manga at the end of the day. Yes, MHA does explore realistic topics and what not, but I don't think its focus is realism. I mean if it was would Hori have even entertained the idea of Tenko being saved?? Obviously they should probably get a divorce but if that was where the story was heading I feel that Hori would've at the very least brought up the topic but he hasn't. If they do stay together (and I think they will) it would be nice to see the fam's dynamic.

Do u think Enji and Rei will divorce? (I know it's stigmatized or something in Japan) Despite everything I really don't think they will tho, idk if that makes me crazy or what.

Honestly I don't think so.

As usual this is my opinion and I don't know how things will go in the end but, from how I see things BNHA is meant to be a story with a happy ending and divorce in Japan wouldn't definitely be considered like a happy ending for the Todofam.

Probably in Japan even Enji's death would feel happier than his divorce... and, before someone will ask, I don't think Enji's death would be considered a happy ending either so it's unlikely it'll happen.

The most Enji and Rei might do, and I still consider unlikely they will do it, might be take a break from each other in which Enji will try to regain the trust of his family.

I sincerely doubt Horikoshi will go for the 'hey, divorce is a possible and sometimes good solution' approach.

The end goal of the hellish Todoroki family was likely always to prove they could rebuild itself if they were to accept instead than reject all its member.

Enji is likely meant to do what Kotarou couldn't, what Himiko's parents weren't interested in doing, make up with Touya (and the rest of his family which he has also abused... I single out Touya specifically because he's the hardest to make up with as he's filled with negative feelings at the moment... no one else in the family is set on murder Enji and die, after all) and create a happy family by understanding his mistakes and fixing them so as to give the hopeful message that there are parents out there that might have messed up a lot, that might have done terrible things but that will one day realize their mistakes and make up with you...

...which in real life is sadly extremely unlikely, but overall BNHA to me feels more like a fairytale where a young girl earnest words can persuade a crowd to welcome a tired boy among them even if it can be dangerous and they're all scared, not a story about the likely most realistic scenario... so as to give a message of hope.

Undoubtedly in the west the story would work even if Enji and Rei were to accept they didn't love each other and the best they could do for each other is go separate ways but still be there for their kids... but I don't think Japan is ready for this sort of message.

What's more Horikoshi often uses the microcosm of the Todoroki family to represent the macrocosm of society. Enji and Rei deciding their differences can't be reconciled would end up on representing how society, which in BNHA is currently split, can't reconcile.

I think it would get in the way of the message of peace and happiness Horikoshi is trying to pass. So yeah, I don't think there's a single chance for the Todoroki to divorce.

As usual, I might be wrong. I'm not Horikoshi after all, I don't really know how the story is going to end. We can only wait and see.

[Failure]

>>BNHA / MHA Spoilers!<<

Drew this in reaction to Chapter 350! If Touya heard Enji call him an almost perfect creation, I get that he wasn‘t ecstatic about returning.

fun fact, the font used for this is called „I know a ghost“

Natsuo is more like his father than he wants to admit...and it is both tragic and unsettling.

He does what he wants without regard for what the people around him want.

Sure, he'll go along with certain requests, like going to the family dinner because Fuyumi asked him to.

However, rather than be a polite host, he decides he'd rather embarrass his sister by being angry at their father all through said dinner and making things awkward for their guests. He didn't have to be there. Whoever he's talking to on the phone after the fact, maybe the girlfriend, he apologizes for bailing on their plans. He didn't even have to white-lie to Fuyumi. He straight up had other plans that night. So there are two ways you could look at this:

He conceded to a request to support his sister...then half-assed it.

Or he canceled his plans and went out of his way to be a prick.

He's not wrong for hating his father, that is 100% a normal reaction to an abusive parent, but he is wrong for not establishing his own concrete boundaries or respecting Fuyumi's.

Like Endeavor, Natsuo is pretty isolated within the family.

Mom’s out of the picture and contact with her is limited.

We all know what his relationship with his father is like.

His closest sibling 'died' when they were kids, but even then, Touya and Natsuo's relationship wasn't a good one. We know Touya spent years trauma-dumping on Natsuo, and little bro took it like a champ. Supporting one's siblings like that is admirable, but it does highlight a key difference between the brothers. Touya has memories of a happy childhood with their father. Natsuo does not. So he had to listen to his older brother crying for a past he knows nothing about, which had to have brought on a little resentment. "At least Dad loved you once. I never even got that much."

As stated above, Natsuo doesn't see eye to eye with Fuyumi. At least not enough that he respects her decision to forgive their father. Whether he supports that decision or not, he should love his sister more than he hates their father, and starting shit unprovoked over a dinner she asked him to be at is not a supportive decision.

His relationship with Shouto is hard to gauge. They were raised apart, sure, but they lived in the same house. So the fact that he didn't know Shouto's favorite food until he was fifteen is...odd. Natsuo never tried to have a conversation with him in passing? But I have a theory about that. With how Shouto behaved in the very beginning of the series, the mirror-image of their arrogant father, I think Natsuo had a, “Fuck, now there’s two of them," moment and actively avoided association with his younger brother. This may have contributed to him moving out even though he attends a college that's close enough that that he can casually stop by for dinner.

He Actually Does Get Violent.

Not with other people, thankfully, but he does slam his fist against the door in this scene, which is an act of aggression.

This makes for an intense moment in animation, sure, but if you saw a person do this in real life, you’d be nervous about where that fist is going next.

I already went over this in the Endeavor analysis that I made a few months back, but the gist of it is taking out your anger on inanimate objects is unhealthy because you're training your brain to associate anger with violence, which has the potential to make it harder to dissociate in the long run.

In his own way, he did abandon his family.

Fuyumi tells him to leave the family circumstances to her....and he just left her to it? She went to college to become a teacher and made a career work in spite of living in a volatile home. The series doesn't say where Natsuo is a student at, but he clearly lives close enough to home that he can drop by for a visit, so it's not like he went to some prestigious university out of town.

So yeah. Left his remaining brother and sister to their father.

The other point, though, is he's canonically studying medical welfare.

Medical welfare is the consideration of patient wellbeing, preserving individual dignity, promoting quality of life, and taking a holistic approach to healthcare that applies mental and emotional care to a patient, not just physical.

So it's ironic this is where his brother ends up and he says absolutely nothing about it. Nothing about promising to come see him, nothing about asking the staff if this really the best arrangement they could come up with, no promises to Touya that he'll figure something out. He just ghosts and, like their father, that is really hypocritical.

In the end, he puts his own hate and feelings above everyone else’s.

This one's pretty closely related to my first point, but it does bear reiterating for the finale. Natsuo's decision to never see his father again is ultimately going to hurt his family more than it's going to spite Endeavor.  Going no-contact is a healthy choice and I don’t fault him for it at all.  But if he sticks to it, it’s going to lead to some serious ramifications down the road.

If he's strict enough to refuse to be in the same vicinity as Endeavor:

He won’t attend Touya’s funeral and support his grieving mother and siblings if Endeavor will be there.

Since we see in the epilogue Rei stays with Endeavor, Natsuo visiting her is going to be complicated.

If Fuyumi gets married, she might want her father at the wedding. Is Natsuo going to skip his sister’s wedding out of spite?

If Shouto gets married and decides to let their father be there, same story.

If Endeavor outlives Rei, will Natsuo miss her funeral?

And finally, Natsuo might have to come to terms with the fact his own children may want to meet their grandfather, which is a decision he can only control until they’re legal adults.  He can tell them how much of a monster Endeavor was all he wants, but those kids may still be curious about meeting the man in person, especially if they hear stories from other family members and know the former No. 2 and No. 1 is their grandfather.

I’m not saying Natsuo should forgive Endeavor, or even stop being angry with him because he has every right to his anger. But if he still wants a relationship with the rest of the family, he is going to have to exercise some form of compromise.  Especially with his children because he unfortunately has all the hallmarks to become the next Kotaro Shimura. This is a society where kids want to be heroes, and then there's Natsuo who has a history with the dark side of hero society, no matter the good Shouto does.

touya saying 'i wanted to make you happy' in a mocking, sarcastic way, but the pause and the crack in his voice betraying that impression. please end me.

It Gets Worse | MHA Animatic [Hellflame AU]

You ever think that whenever Endeavor stubs his toe, he shakes his fist at the sky and shouts something like, "Damn you, All Might"?

Inspired by this

Rei Todoroki: The Unintentional Enabler

TodoFam Discussion, you know what to expect. Pardon my rambling.

We know Enji Endeavor Todoroki is bad and abused his family, which includes Rei. Nobody is arguing that. Rei Todoroki, as the mother of the family is no better; NOT because she had ill intentions, but because being not good enough runs rampant in the entire Todoroki family. Rei Todoroki, for all her good intentions, failed as a mother.

As she takes and accepts her share of the blame in the story, I want to explore that! Rei is a really interesting character that is martyred by the fandom (understandably) but I want to explore her wrongs and shortcomings more. I love to do that with Enji, so his better half gets the same treatment.

Unreliable Narrators; throughout the series, the kids give their insight on the situation of their parents. All of which unreliable, because kids never know the full story. Least trustworthy of all is Dabi, a liar who will do anything and everything to get back at Endeavor, at the expense of his own siblings. He’ll twist the truth into something that benefits him (Hawks killing Twice) and hurt everybody in the process. The only person, therefore, that I am going to take at face value with what happened to Rei is Rei herself. The kids' perspectives are valid of course but they’re not Rei, so she’s the only one I’m listening to.

“Eugenics”; People love to throw the word around without realising what it actually means when referring to Enji wanting a child with both ice and fire, but let’s run with it for this thread. Rei comes from a family of, by this logic, eugenicists who have tried to keep the bloodline pure, at least since Quirks made an appearance because of their distaste of heteromorphs and general superiority complex. The concept of marrying people for status, genetic reasons and money is the norm to her, every corner of the Himura family does that. If she hadn’t married Enji, she would’ve either married the next person fit for her or be married to a distant relative. Thus, she is just in as much fault for agreeing to a Quirk Marriage as Enji is for even thinking of it.

“She had no choice”; Incorrect, Rei says as much. She had every choice, and Enji was the best choice when it comes to the Himura standard. Powerful Quirk, self-made high status as Endeavor and a lot of hard-earned money to provide a financial comfortable life. Rei was fully aware that she was agreeing to a Quirk Marriage, and had absolutely no problems with it, despite them being frowned upon by society, because all the Himura do this sort of thing. Rei and Enji had a miai/omiai, which is incorrectly translated as an arranged marriage. It’s a formal, traditional way of meeting someone with the serious consideration of marriage, which includes the parents/guardians. Like matchmaking. It is NOT a forced marriage, it’s a cultural difference that the west doesn’t have, so this set up is NOT coercive/weird. There are different steps to it, and one of them is ‘kotowari’, a refusal. Rei had that option but she didn’t take it “for the sake of her family”. Enji never forced her into it, her family did pressure her, but at the end of the day, it was her choice to accept or refuse.

Rei too wanted a child for a purpose; A second child was her desire that Enji agreed to, so that Touya and Fuyumi could support each other. A natural desire for siblings of course, but in the end, Fuyumi was conceived with the intent to be a child for her siblings to depend on her, which led her to being the older sister desperately trying to fix a family she once had, something she takes from Rei (‘smile through it’). Just as Touya, Natsuo and Shoto were conceived for a purpose, so was Fuyumi, and as unintentional as it was, Rei placed that heavy burden on Fuyumi, which Enji acknowledges and apologises for.

“Rei didn’t want more kids”; We don’t know if she didn’t want more kids, but we know that she was worried that more kids would negatively affect Touya because he now knew what Enji was aiming for. You can still want more kids while not acting on that want for various reasons. All we know is she was worried (rightfully so), but she saw that Enji wasn’t thinking rationally anymore (yippee mental health).

“Enji raped Rei”; I see why people think and interpret it that way. I don’t, for the simple fact that Rei herself never accuses him of such. Horikoshi is VERY show AND tell (emphasis on tell) storytelling style; if he doesn’t hold back on showing little kids getting beaten up (Deku, Tomura, Toga, Shoto, Shoji), he’d have no qualms in making Rei say that that’s what Enji did. Again, the kids are unreliable narrators and don’t know what happened between their parents, Natsuo doesn’t even know Enji as a father or person. Enji became terrifying to Rei because he was spiralling into insanity, and anybody who’s had a mentally unstable relative in their household will tell you, that’s terrifying. You end up walking on eggshells unless you’re willing to confront and deal with the problem, and until after Shoto’s birth, Rei simply didn’t.

Smile and pretend it’s all okay; Rei, seeing that her husband was spiralling into insanity because of Touya’s injuries, his inability to beat All Might and general stress, saw that emotion was taking over his rationality (yippee mental health). Instead of pushing back against Enji and try to make him see reason (cough cough like Touya cough cough), she decided to fulfil her duties as a mother and wife best she could while smiling through it. In her desire to keep her family together instead of confronting the problem at the very beginning (very hard but necessary thing to do), she enabled Enji, and by the time he started training Shoto and things got violent, it was too late. That’s where Fuyumi gets it from.

When Enji couldn’t do it anymore, neither could Rei; Up until Touya’s attack of Shoto (who Rei was holding), it seems and is my interpretation that only Enji ever tried to dissuade Touya from using his Quirk. Enji is always the one shown to try and talk him out of it, encourage him to make friends, and Rei never seems to be the one having those conversations with Touya. After Touya attacked Rei and Shoto and Enji had to stop him, he decided to seclude Shoto from his siblings. Rei (rightfully) points out that he’s running away from his fatherly responsibilities. Touya just wants Enji to look at him, but Enji is scared of enabling his behaviour further. All Enji knows is the hero world, he only knows what he's self-taught ever since his father died. He has no knowledge on how to deal with this situation. He can’t deal with it anymore, so he tells Rei that he’ll hire someone to help her with the house and kids, and to keep an eye on Touya. The one single time we’re shown her trying to do this, she fails horribly, which was always going to happen; Touya calls her out on her bystanding, enabling and being complicit in the entire thing (a reoccurring theme in MHA) but is incorrect about the details of what happened (as kids typically are). Nonetheless, Rei is unable to stop her preteen son from harming himself, and after that single scene, we have no idea if she tried ever again. Rei never had a chance to stop Touya. Unlike with Shoto, Fuyumi or even Natsuo, we are never shown a scene of Rei being tender to or holding Touya, not as a baby, not even growing up. The most tender we see her is when he’s Dabi and literally burning them all to death. Enji was and always will be Touya’s entire world, and Rei quite simply never could replace him. If Touya wasn’t going to listen to Enji, he certainly wasn’t going to listen to Rei. This is its own topic, but Touya is never shown smiling at nor looking for Rei’s attention, only ever Enji’s.

Always at home, yet never there; Rei is a stay-at-home mother, an important and demanding role that's severely overlooked and underappreciated. However, in that, even with help from the matron, she fails at, especially when Shoto is born. Enji is the breadwinner; he needs to be out and doing his job as a Pro-Hero because that’s his responsibility and that’s what how he provides for his family. And considering that he’s never around (shown by how Touya says he’s always waiting for him to have a day off) if it’s not training Shoto, Rei is the primary influence on the kids. But because she was always focusing on Shoto (like Enji), she ended up unintentionally neglecting Touya, Fuyumi and Natsuo (just like Enji). In School Briefs, Natsuo even reflects on how he started disliking Shoto for taking their mother away (because he’s a kid and didn’t know what was going on) and wanted his father’s attention too, who is a stranger to him. Just like Enji, Rei unintentionally neglected her other kids because she was focusing on Shoto (for obvious reasons).

“Enji was always violent and beat his family”; Again, no. He started becoming violent at home when beginning Shoto’s training. No other instance is shown. Still absolutely horrendous, let’s not minimise that. In the early days, Rei watched Enji and Touya train, which was their way of bonding, and she’s peaceful. He only got brutal with Shoto, and by this point, it was too late to make Enji stop. The one of two times we’re shown Enji hitting Rei, he’s pushing her out of the way that turns into a slap because she’s trying to make him go easier on Shoto. Different topic but, “he’s already five” in my interpretation is because Touya was further ahead than Shoto by this point. Rei was blindsided by Enji’s brutality with Shoto, because he wasn’t like that before. She tried smiling and going with the flow until it was too late. Based on the hospital scene after the Touya reveal, it’s clear that they never spoke in a way that mattered. The two times she tried, Enji was already spiralling and it was too late.

No communication; Enji is a mentally unwell man with heaps of unresolved trauma and issues. Rei was born into an old money family that had lost its influence and prestige a long time ago, that comes with a heavy sense of duty. They’re also traditionally Japanese to a fault. I remember seeing a thread discussing how the Todoroki are a criticism of the traditional Japanese family. Point is, both Rei and Enji leaned into their gender roles so heavily that instead of being a team, they had absolutely no communication, to the point that when Rei was unable to stop Touya, she didn’t even tell Enji. Understandably so, she would’ve been afraid of his anger and his blaming of everyone around him for his own shortcomings (inferiority complex go brrrr). Due to that, as far as Enji was aware (not at all), Rei was being successful in stopping Touya from training at Sekoto Peak. He could just focus on being a Pro-Hero and training Shoto. So when he realised that Rei had failed (like him), he snapped and projected his anger unto her for failing as a mother (like he failed as a father). His frustration is valid, his anger and violence is not. His anger would be valid if it was healthy and correctly managed, but it’s not, so he slaps her in front of Fuyumi, Natsuo and Shoto. That’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, and after that, the incident with Shoto happens.

“Rei should’ve left with the kids”; Rei was never going to leave, with or without the kids. Rei was brought up with a sense of duty as a wife and mother. She didn’t leave until Enji literally sent her away for injuring Shoto (which she instantly regretted). In her desperation to uphold her family values, she stayed. If she tried to leave, the only children willing to go with her would maybe be Natsuo and Shoto. Touya would rather burn alive than be taken away from his father, Fuyumi would be desperate to keep the family together even at that young age, and if Touya and Fuyumi aren’t going, Natsuo wouldn’t. Shoto is shown to desire a happy family as well, and he’s the only one at this point in time that Enji wouldn’t let be taken away. I’ve already talked about before if Rei could’ve left (I think she could’ve, but Enji would’ve been angry at her while letting her leave), but she simply never would have.

Too little, too late; We don’t know Rei's relationships with her parents. It’s distant for sure, and based on traditional values, she was most likely brought up by her mother more than her father (thus she tried to do the same). When she realised that she couldn’t deal with the kids anymore because they were all looking too much like Enji, she called her mother. We have no way of knowing if her mother knew what was going on or if this was the first time Rei reached out to her. Based on what we’re shown, I’m assuming she never spoke about it. But it was too late at this point. Just like Enji, Rei didn’t notice herself spiraling until this very moment, and it ended up with her reacting to Shoto and hurting him, just like how Enji reacted to Rei’s failure and hurt her (although Rei instantly regretted it, and it took Enji a whole freaking decade to realise; mental health is weird like that).

Gone for an entire decade; This was the best thing for Rei so she could get the help she needed, but her being gone for a decade with little contact with the kids, as necessary as it was for herself, made them feel abandoned. Shoto and Natsuo rightfully blame Enji, Touya kinda, well, died, and Fuyumi filled Rei’s role by ‘smiling through it’ and sweeping the problems under the carpet. The kids were never barred from seeing Rei by Enji as far as we’re aware, probably the hospital let the family know when they’d be able to visit her, which Fuyumi and Natsuo do, Shoto doesn’t until after the Sports Festival, and Enji does very often to bring her flowers but never visiting her (obviously). Only then, distanced from the fire, can she reflect and attempt to understand how all of this happened without getting hurt. That’s why the hospital scene is even possible.

“She recognised Touya during the reveal”; Personal pet peeve. She did not. Nobody did. They all thought him dead (even Enji who had obsessively looked for him; again, lots of telling, Horikoshi, not much showing), he looks and sounds completely different, fire is a common Quirk. Rei realised it was Touya after he LITERALLY SAID THAT’S WHO HE WAS. Neither Rei nor Enji realised he was their firstborn until he revealed himself as such.

Conclusion (it’s just me rambling at this point); Rei is half of the problem.

Take her out of the image and the TodoFam timeline doesn’t happen. It takes two to tango and Rei enabled Enji by knowingly agreeing to a Quirk Marriage and the two never getting to understand each other. Rei says as much, she doesn’t understand how his mind works, they never talked about their pasts or got to know each other on a deeper basis. Rei was in an impossible situation, and there’s a million ‘she should’ve’ statements, but none of them are relevant because she simply didn’t. She’s a victim as much as she is an unintentional abuser and enabler. The road to hell is paved with good intentions while the road to heaven is paved with good action; Rei tried her best, but like with the entire TodoFam, it wasn’t enough.

Rei is such a fascinating character, and the western fandom doesn’t allow her the depth and nuance she deserves. There’s no such thing as a perfect victim, and Rei is by no means perfect. She tried, but in the end, she wasn’t a good mother. She wasn’t present (for obvious reasons) until the Touya reveal, and even then, she puts the weight of being the family’s hero on her youngest. Enji was absolutely terrible and an abuser, Rei was one of his victims, but she unintentionally enabled him and became an abuser in her own right.

That’s why she takes her half of the responsibility as one of the two parents, that’s why she stops having good intentions and ACTS instead by trying to cool Touya down from exploding. Enji didn’t want her to die, and she didn’t want either of them to die neither. Instead of avoiding the problem like she and the family had for years, she finally ACTED when she was needed, her and Enji finally working together as the parents for a moment in their direst moment. Enji knows he’s the problem, that’s why he builds a new house for them to live in while he stays at the Abode, that’s why he always has that dream where his family is happy without him, and he wants them to be happy. And despite that, despite telling Rei she doesn’t need to bear this, she makes the choice to be present and strong, just like how Enji has stopped running away.

TL;DR, Rei is a deeply flawed, imperfect character that is wonderfully nuanced, like the rest of the TodoFam.

Trying her best but never good enough.

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