Spoilers for My Hero Academia chapter 350
With My Hero Academia feeling like it’s in “the endgame now,” there are some pretty significant battles going on with each new chapter. Currently, Shoto is getting ready to face Dabi, who he now knows is his older brother, Toya. It’s bound to be an emotional battle, as Dabi is determined to get revenge against his family, and Shoto is caught in the middle of a feud that isn’t his fault.
The buildup of the mess that is the Todoroki family has been a part of the series for a long time, and we’ve been getting bits and pieces of the story from different perspectives. The big secret didn’t get revealed until the late 200s of the manga chapters, and now that it’s out, Dabi’s ready to go.
How we (didn’t) learn about Dabi at first
When talking about the Todoroki family, it was often from the POV of Shoto and his father, Endeavor. Occasionally, we’d get some from Shoto’s other siblings (Fuyumi and Natsuo), and even Shoto’s mother, Rei, has gotten a chance to speak her piece after everyone found out the truth about Dabi.
What’s interesting about Dabi is that the fandom figured out he was a Todoroki years ago! This was THE big fandom theory of the series, and it turned out the fandom was right! Dabi is Toya Todoroki, the son of Endeavor who everyone thought was dead.
That doesn’t mean it was confirmed right away. If anything, it felt like Horikoshi was taking his time in letting us know who Dabi really was. There would be moments in the series where we would learn about other members of the League of Villains, but Dabi would be left out in those “flashback of a character’s past” moments. That or his speech bubble would be blacked out so we couldn’t see what he was saying. Brilliant? Yes. A giant tease? Also yes! But eventually, we would learn the truth—in separate pieces, of course.
Dabi’s dance
Dabi is, undeniably, that bitch. It’s not like he quietly told Endeavor who he was, he literally interrupted everyone’s regularly scheduled television program to broadcast the news! Everyone gets to find out who Dabi is, furthermore, they get to find out about Endeavor’s abuse toward his family – something we’ve seen through Shoto, but not something that everyone else was aware of.
After that, we get the story of what happened to Toya … partially. As to be expected, since we know that Endeavor pushed his kids too damn hard, Toya was set to carry on Endeavor’s ambitions of becoming the number one hero and surpassing All Might. Unfortunately, the fire of his quirk was too hot for him to handle, and further training and too much use of it would cause serious damage to his body. Instead of vocalizing genuine concern for his son (because this is Endeavor before he started to change), he deemed him a failure.
This upsets Toya because, well, of course it does, especially when Endeavor sets his ambitions on Shoto, who looks to be the “perfect” child that he’d been longing for. Toya leaves home and tries to prove that he can handle his quirk so he can carry out Endeavor’s wishes, but the power overwhelms him.
Revenge is a hell of a drug
In this latest chapter, we get to see what happened next, as Dabi decides to tell his little brother, Shoto, how he became Dabi. He was picked up by the doctor and brought to an orphanage, and had been unconscious for three years. The real gut punch is that when Toya woke up, he immediately wanted to go back home because he thought his father would be worried about him. He’s soon told that his body had to be restored due to being so burnt up, and he’ll never be able to “exhibit the power you once did.”
Toya is offered a chance to be raised by the doctor, but he refuses to be trained by anyone else but Endeavor. He burns down the orphanage, and we learn from the doctor that he (and the children at the orphanage) were meant to be spares in case things with Shigaraki didn’t pan out. Now considered a failure (again), we learn that the doctor actually decided it would be best to let Dabi run loose on his own.
Dabi is basically alive because of the grudge he now has against Endeavor. Unbeknownst to Endeavor, Dabi did return home, only to see that everyone had moved on without him and Endeavor had put all of his efforts into Shoto. By all counts, Dabi should be dead, but as the doctor said, “He’d kept his dying body tethered to this world through a pure, blazing grudge.” Dabi’s actually perfectly okay with dying, but not before he takes away everything Endeavor holds dear.
The most interesting thing about this, to me, is that this is another example of a villain who may have turned out okay had their parent actually supported them. Shigaraki had a terrible father, and All For One came around at just the right time. The same can be said for Dabi, even if Dabi didn’t fully join All For One and the doctor and is only there to satisfy his desire for revenge. Still, things may have turned out different had Endeavor been a better parent, and that’s something that Endeavor is going to live with for the rest of his life – which he is fully aware of.
(Image: © K. Horikoshi/Shueisha, My Hero Academia Project)
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