I Need To See Shoto Eating Shampoo

✩ Boku no Hero Academia - Volume Covers ✩

Bakugou Katsuki, Midoriya Izuku, & Todoroki Shouto from BNHA Volume 26 and Team Up Mission Volume 1 cover.

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Could you speak some more on Natsuo? I feel like the general consensus is he absolutely hates his father, and I would agree with that if not for a few things. He was just as worried as Fuyumi during Endeavor's fight with hood and like you mentioned in your last post, his reaction to his father making a new house for them isn't at all positive. I'm of course not saying he doesn't dislike Enji, I just feel like his feelings are a lot more complex than people choose to acknowledge.

Sure! I love that boy!

Again, this is a personal opinion, I'm not Horikoshi, I can only speak for the feelings the story gives me and for how I interpret the scenes.

I think Natsuo's feelings for his father are more complicate than 'he just hates him and that's it'.

It would probably be more accurate to say Natsuo is totally furious with him, and that's because Enji deeply hurt him, keeps on doing so even when he doesn't mean to and he also hurt the people Natsuo cared about.

But maybe we could start from the beginning.

When Natsuo had birth, the Todoroki family was already slowly starting to break down.

Enji and Rei's marriage was one of convenience for both, she wanted his economical help for her family, he wanted her to bear his children in hope their Quirk would mix in a positive way.

I'll quote the anime because it sums it pretty well:

"It was more or less made to look like an arranged marriage, but this was a Quirk marriage. Choosing a spouse to make one’s own Quirk stronger and passing it on… The purpose of the marriage was to have babies. It’s what I wanted. If my flame Quirk and the ice Quirk of the Himura family were to mix, I thought we could give birth to a hero who could surpass even All Might. And even though the Himura family was once prestigious, they were now struggling. Wanting the status and prestige of the number two hero, and the bride price, her father easily agreed to my proposition. She could have refused. However, even knowing that it was a Quirk marriage, she became my wife for the sake of her family."

Rei though, wanted to make the effort to keep smiling. In short, we can assume she wanted to try to make it work... and, for a while, it works.

Rei's family get the money, Enji gets children who aren't the perfect mix of his and Rei's Quirk but he still think he's satisfied.

This scene is important because it shows Enji basically babysitting Touya and Fuyumi. He's looking after them, he's looking at them for something that's not training and he claims he's satisfied. They aren't masterpieces, he won't even try to train Fuyumi, but he's okay, Touya has potential and Touya will show he's delighted to train with his father.

But then Touya can't use his Quirk anymore and things start to go downhill.

This scene too is important.

It's well known Enji is a bad father but, credits when it's due, when he's told Touya shouldn't use his Quirk, he doesn't shrug it off and says who cares, I want him to surpass All Might, who cares if he does it as a charred man, no, he stops training Touya.

However... in this scene it's Enji's day off, he could spend it with Touya, even though Touya wants them to train they don't really have to, instead he's leaving. He's starting to neglect his kids, likely for the same reason he'll neglect them in the future, he doesn't know what to say and wants to dodge the responsibility. Touya reacts by training harder on his own.

Enji can't stop him, which is frustrating and painful and he can't even get what he married for, a child who would surpass All Might.

It's in this setting he decides they should conceive Natsuo.

He dresses it as something done for Touya, so that Touya will give up, but it's actually something that's done for himself, so that HE will give up.

Rei initially disagrees with the plan but in the end she likely gave up. She know she was married for the purpose of giving Enji children after all.

Natsuo though, can't be the child Enji wanted. He has an ice Quirk. We don't know if it's a powerful ice Quirk but Enji still was biased against ice Quirk or if it was just an ordinary ice Quirk, what we know is that Enji doesn't even take into consideration the possibility to train him, even though, as far as we know, his Quirk doesn't hurt Natsuo.

And this is, according to the School Briefs, how Natsuo was in his own early years:

"Even now, Natsuo would beat himself up over how he used to be before the abuse really began, recalling the period in his life that had made him feel pathetic and ashamed. Before Shouto was born, Natsuo had sought his father’s love and care, and when Endeavor was around, he would turn into an excited ball of energy, eager for attention.

But that love never came. It was only thanks to his warm and caring mother that Natsuo had survived those early years and learned to cope with the rejection from his other parent. But after Shouto was born, even their mother grew distant, though not out of indifference. Natsuo could sense how much energy she’d had to devote to protecting her youngest, her baby, from her husband’s so-called training-which most would label abuse-but at that age, Natsuo couldn’t help but feel that his mother had been stolen away from him. After witnessing his mother and brother crying and screaming on that horrible day, Natsuo had been overcome with crushing shame."

Natsuo started out as a normal child who wanted his father's love but NEVER experienced it. He had to cope to such lack and uses a pretty strong word to define how hard it was, he said it was thanks to Rei he SURVIVED.

Now, I don't really know the original text so it can be that's just the translator using an excessive word but the bottom of the line is Natsuo had to learn to cope NEVER feeling loved by his father.

We can speculate the result was he likely distanced from him, stopped hoping... then his mother too couldn't give him all the time a small child like him needed. Let's remember Shouto had birth when Natsuo was three and, short after, it was decided he would be kept apart from his siblings. An infant needs his mother a lot and since he has to be kept away from his siblings when Rei was with him, she couldn't be with Natsuo.

But then things go further downhill, Enji begins abusing Rei.

He and Fuyumi look scared.

And then Rei is hospitalized, Shouto is scarred for life and Touya is dead. And all this should have been terribly painful for Natsuo, who was merely 8 back then, and the root cause can be traced back to Enji, his enstranged father.

Using anger to cope with pain is a really common thing.

Add to it that Natsuo also had to cope with guilt, he was ashamed of himself for having wanted Enji's love, he felt guilty for haivng felt neglected by Rei, for not having wanted to listen Touya as he vented. Natsuo should have been feeling really bad, and turning all that pain in a ball of anger directed at Enji (who definitely deserved it) should have helped him to cope.

But they didn't heal him. Natsuo is angry... but the anger is just a way to cope with the hurt.

In a tamer way he accuses his father of the same thing Touya will accuse him, of wanting to leave them behind.

It pains him and it makes him angry. He lacks a way to vent his anger.

Fuyumi doesn't want to talk about it (here but in the "School Briefs" as well), she had known the good times and wants them back. Natsuo isn't the type who, like Touya, would try to murder his father and can't even do what Shouto was trying to do at the start, get revenge on him by refusing to use his fire Quirk and becoming a Hero solely with his ice Quirk. Natsuo doesn't have a fire Quirk and no wish to become a Hero after all.

So he's with this huge ball of unresolved pain inside himself and tries to cope with it through anger.

What hurt Natsuo? He says it.

Enji never looked at him, he kept him away from Shouto, made him feel like he was a failure, hurt the people Natsuo loved, caused Touya's death.

Natsuo was hurt over and over and hid everything behind anger. When you strip him of the anger only pain remains.

Enji has left inside him psychological scars, the mere seeing of Enji causes him to remember all that and feel pain.

And to cope either he avoids Enji or he tries to summon up anger.

Staying away from Enji doesn't fix things. After all Enji kept away from him for years before he decided to start his atonement arc and Natsuo remained as hurt as he was the first day. The most staying away from Enji does, is not pocking to his wounds.

Being angry with Enji doesn't help either, it's just a temporary relief, he vents but that's all. It helps him to lower the pressure, I guess, but it doesn't heal him.

And what Natsuo truly wishes is likely to heal. Seeing Enji in troubles, risking his life, gave him no relief.

Natsuo isn't after revenge... he just doesn't know how to help himself, he's stuck with his pain and with, as only means to cope, his anger.

He doesn't know how to heal. The fact Enji initially expected him to just put aside his pain hurt and made him angry... but Enji deciding to keep away likely doesn't solve things because to him it likely feels like what his father had done his entire life... ignoring him.

And if it hurts being ignored... well, this is likely the sign inside him there's still an inner child who's love for his father to look at him...

...a bit like how in Tomura little Tenko is still alive.

BNHA has plenty of characters plagued by the past, who just can't let it go and, since the past hurt them, they claim to hate it.

It's a defense mechanism.

And Natsuo is also another character plagued by the past. He's not to the point he'll destroy the world like his brother or Tomura, he's psychologically much better than them but he's still hurt and needs to heal.

So yeah, if you ask me his feelings for Enji are definitely very complex but that's what makes him realistic and interesting as a character, after all.

At least, that's what I think. I'm not Horikoshi, I don't own The Truth, so of course other people might feel differently.

Thank you for your ask!

can someone explain to me what the "queue" tags are what does it mean 💔💔💔

og image under the cut

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.

All Might: *does anything in Endeavor's general vicinity*

Endeavor:

Dancing with Todoroki

it actually have a bit of plot on it with some dancing pose, but well it just like a story telling forward to chapter292. It still need more but my wrist is hurt like hell now. so I stop with Dabi have tango dance with hawks.

and dabi asking you for dance<3 LOL

Here is a little comic I did for Endeavor’s birthday a few days ago to say “Hi I’m back”

Also if you want to know this is the t shirt that Shouto gave him

The gorgeous Todo-siblings by Akiyama Yoco