Hi, I’m Link And It’s Time To Talk About My Terrible / Horrible / Amazing Taste In Men. If You Are

Hi, I’m Link and it’s time to talk about my terrible / horrible / amazing taste in men. If you are a bastard who is planning to destroy the world because of your unresolved trauma, please call me. Kiss kiss.

Also I’m tagging @thyandrawrites​ and @inumaqi​ who by law have to do this with me. 

Shigaraki Tomura - MY HERO ACADEMIA

“What I really despise is everything. Everything that breathes pisses me off.”

I like how Shigaraki is severely mentally ill. He’s one of the most raw portrayals of an abuse victim.  He murders his abusive father, and the story takes his side. He develops violent tendencies, he refuses to grow up, he can’t forgive. He’s just holding all of his negative feelings inside of him as he slowly rots inside out, and that’s just great.

Shigaraki is so shaped and moulded by his abuse, but he still chooses who he wants to be. He was literally raised in a basement to be a carbon copy of AFO, and yet he’s so different from AFO it’s obvious he could never live up to his Sensei. He’s too bad of a person to ever be a hero, but he’s also too good of a person to ever be the king of evil and what you get is this really chaotic mess in between.

It’s interested to see who Shigaraki chooses to be, in spite of how much he has been indoctrinated towards a cause and how many choices are taken away from him. Despite being a character with supposedly little agency you can see he always tries to fight for his own agency. Don’t deny me. He can’t be with his family even though he loves them, because they’ll never accept him for who he is. Tenko was a kind boy who played with the bullied kids. Shigaraki fights for the people who would never be saved by hero society because he wasn’t saved. He gives them what he doesn’t have, freedom and a place to belong. It’s an interesting character to see how much of him has become the unpredictable ball of trauma that Shigaraki is, while the core of him Tenko still remains in his humanizing moments of how he interacts with the league. Shigaraki who has so many choices taken from him, chooses to reach out and sympathize with the feelings of others, especially those who have been ostracized the same way he has.

Shigaraki is introduced to us as an inhuman  monster, and we see him slowly work his way back from the edge. We see him regain his humanity by coming to care about the people under his wing. It gives you the message that there’s no such thing as a point of no return.

All of the heroes are good people in mha but that feels more like an informed character trait. We’re supposed to root for them because… they’re the heroes, they’re good. They have to look good because they’re the good guys. Shigaraki is allowed to be ugly and unlikable, he gets worse.  But then he still always chooses to fight for ugly victims like him. I like both sides of him, I like the volatile explosive bomb that just wants to blow up and destroy others, and the gentle way he interacts with the rest of the league.

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