There’s an interesting split in the HeroAca reader/viewership about Endeavor (which I guess isn’t surprising in that they generally can’t agree about anything except they love to complain). It’s not so much about whether he’s a good character (which he is, very) – most are affirmative on that. But as we edged into this point in the manga, there was a lot of “I feel so sorry for him, so broken”, which was then met with a lot of disbelieving rage from those who disagreed. And I’m starting to see that pattern repeat itself with the anime.
As for me, it’s… complicated. I love that Endeavor forces us to consider questions which don’t have easy answers, because most mangaka frankly don’t have the guts to take a major character hardcore down that path. There are so many questions with this loser. Is his current regret genuine? Almost certainly. But if so, is it genuine contrition or just self-pity? That’s less clear. What’s important for me is this – Endeavor’s problems are entirely of his own making, entirely avoidable, and ended up hurting (and worse) a lot of other people. That puts a pretty restrictive cap on just how much sympathy I can really have for him.
These flashbacks were extremely well-done and, unlike the vast majority of shounen flashbacks, appropriately used in context. They certainly changed nothing for me in how I felt about Endeavor, to be honest. He was an extremely lucky guy – he was born with a quirk powerful enough to rise to #2 in Japan. But petty envy ruled his life, and guided every decision. Who he married, how he raised his kids, basically every decision about his family – all of it to surpass All Might, which is about as petty as it gets.
The extent you can say Touya too was responsible for his own fate is debatable, but to me that narrows exponentially when we’re talking about a child. Touya was if anything too smart and self-aware for his own good. It’s normal for boys to want their father’s attention, but Touya had the ability to grasp the underlying dynamics of the situation. Endeavor went through the motions of trying to push Touya away from using his quirk when it became clear his body couldn’t handle it (nature’s cruel revenge for trying to make a designer baby). But it was Endeavor who lit the fire under Touya (just as Touya charged), and Endeavor who made it clear Touya mattered little to him once his potential as a broadside against All Might was gone.
Just as surely, Endeavor was wrong to isolate Shouto from his siblings once his potential became clear, and to obsessively groom him. Endeavor was a cruel, shallow little man – a terrible father, a tyrant to him family, a curse on his wife. Rei’s responsibility in all this is another difficult matter to consider. She was effectively sold off by her family. She tried to make the best of it for her children but she had a breaking point, and Endeavor pushed her past it. I consider her more of a victim that anything, just as I do the children. And how unfair it is for Shouto to have the responsibility for putting everything right dumped on his shoulders.
All that makes the “Hellish Todoroki Family” decision to rally around the bastard now hard to swallow. I choose to believe they’re taking one for the team here – what’s happening outside the hospital may be largely Endeavor’s mess, but it’s the world’s problem now and all hands are needed on deck. Endeavor doesn’t have the luxury of self-pity at this point – the only thing he can do to try to make amends for his sins is to try and prevent any further damage. And his family knows that. As do the #2 and #3 hero, who show up (and eavesdrop) at the hospital to try and sweet talk some sense into Endeavor and prepare him to deal with Dabi.
Hawks is once more key to everything. He sees a lot, he’s smart, and he rose from nothing to get where he is. He’s focused in on the crucial part of Dabi’s video that no one has talked about – “One For All”. Hawks’ instincts told him this was important, and of course they were right. There are enough clues out there now connecting Deku to All Might that once that train of thought leaves the station, it gathers momentum quickly. Deku is in another place, communing with his OFA forebears, but the world he wakes up to is going to look very different from the one he left.
Riv
January 29, 2023 at 2:43 amI’ve experienced that divide in opinion about Endeavor in the BnHA fanfic world. As you say, it puts some tough questions to the reader/viewer and certainly makes for a compelling story. Although I like Midoriya and enjoy the whole One for All plot, I do find the character arcs of Endeavor, Shouto, Bakugo, and others more compelling. They definitely give the story a richness that you don’t find in a lot of the other big name shounen, as you’ve often pointed out.
Nadavu
January 29, 2023 at 3:05 amI did feel that the flashbacks changed my opinion somewhat to the better with Endeavor. Basically, he turned out not to be the absolute worse father he could have been. Still pretty shit, but he didn’t blame Toya for his genetics nor forced him to keep on training. His decision to completely ignore him at least showed he had some minimal care for his son physical health, if not his mental well-being. The fact that he got upset at Rei when learning about Toya’s secret training sessions at least places him above Hawk’s dad, and while that’s certainly an extremely low bar to clear, at least he has that.
To reach this point with Endeavor as a character in mid-season 6 when the Todoroki family story already went so many itterations and switching narratives is truly the mark of great writing.
DukeofEarls
January 29, 2023 at 8:43 amGood point about Hawks’s dad – Hawks is uniquely qualified to be the one who understands that Endeavor isn’t the pit of moral corruption that Dabi wants the world to believe him to be.
DukeofEarls
January 29, 2023 at 7:32 amI have to include myself in the sympathetic camp for Endeavor here. I consider him to be a confused person, as so many of us are in this world full of contradictions and opportunity for internal confusion.
The thing is: every human society is competitive and it is almost seen as a moral failing to not unlock your truest potential (Protestant work ethic, meritocratic East Asian cultural mores), but it goes even beyond humanity. The animal world is brutally competitive too. Not pushing yourself to higher limits means you and your offspring become lunch to a hungry lion.
So while I think there are philosophical undercurrents throughout humanity that try to get at an “objective” truth that absolves us of this destructive competitive urge (Buddhism, Stoicism, etc), it’s very, very hard for people to separate the concept of being dependable, responsible, and morally upright in the sense that you are a valuable member of society, from this competitive, brutal urge we all have in both our DNA and our human cultures, to varying degrees.
Endeavor is a survivor – and maybe his survival instincts have gone haywire and been bended out of place by the immoral failings of envy and greed, but he feels all too human to me. He was trying to do what he thought (and was likely taught by his own parents and society) was the right thing.
Don’t get me wrong – society teaches you not to act as a despot to your children, but like I said, both society and our DNA provide conflicting messages. It’s a state of confusion, which allows negative thought patterns like envy to go unquestioned internally. He was corrupted in an understandable way — his actions unforgivable, but the root of his confusion all too human.
Not to get too meta, and I mentioned this in a previous comment, but I’m perhaps set up to sympathize with Endeavor quite a bit as I see a lot of resemblance to my own father: a good man who made mistakes as a byproduct of doing what he thought was right and responsible. We don’t see much of Endeavor’s childhood, but my dad was just repeating the cycle that was taught/inflicted upon him for hundreds of years by our ancestors.
I’d imagine Endeavor is much the same based on how he’s depicted here – there are aspects of pure “goodness” within him, but they are twisted by confusion that invited immoral actions into their behavior. Immoral actions that we as viewers find reprehensible, and rightly so, but actions which may have been encouraged and reinforced by a long line of familial (and societal) culture.
Guardian Enzo
January 29, 2023 at 9:21 amI would say (if it wasn’t already obvious) that I’m broadly less sympathetic to Endeavor that most of these commenters.
Hawks’ father is a low bar. He’s a common murderer. I don’t think Endeavor is a good man who was just confused and driven by societal pressures – I think he’s a selfish, shallow man who has no issues using others to fulfill his own egotistical goals. What he did with Touya maybe wasn’t 1/10 parenting (which would have been forcing him to keep working his fire til it killed him), but it was maybe 2/10. It was emotional abuse. Just as his parenting of Shouto has been. And let’s not forget what he did to Rei.
In the end, he made this bed and he has to lie in it (and get the hell up and out of it). He can’t undo the evil he’s done, so suck it up and try to make amends any way you can and stop lying there simpering.
DukeofEarls
January 29, 2023 at 9:56 amI feel your interpretation is somehow rejecting the nuance the author is trying to convey (just my interpretation, of course). Which is fine and valid – that’s nuance in and of itself, how we as individuals perceive things differently. But I don’t think the narrative was intended to cause us, the near-omniscient viewers, to view him as a complete moral failure. His whole story arc seems to me to be one of redemption – pumping the brakes on intergenerational trauma, even if it takes multiple generations to halt the inertia completely (Endeavor’s middle life crisis as the #1 hero, and Shoto as the next generation).
Guardian Enzo
January 29, 2023 at 10:00 amI agree that’s where Hori-sensei is taking it. I just don’t happen to agree personally.
“Redemption” is kind of a buzzword and it can mean a lot of different things. What does it mean for Enderavor? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, he was a complete moral failure. Is a redemption still possible?
ibtachi
January 29, 2023 at 11:45 amI find myself immensely sympathetic to Endeavour, largely from a bias of personal experience.
I come from a household of perpetuated generational traumas & abuse, something that ruled over large parts of my childhood. It started to improve once my family moved cities and the stressors causing these problems were removed from the equation. I held on to that resentment throughout my teens, but as I grew older and returned home, I started to see the caring man my father was deep down, and how genuinely he had begun to desire to be doing good in his later years.
This is why I adore the Shoto\Endeavour’s arc. The nuance in those flashbacks was that you can’t change past ills or expect forgiveness for them, but you can chose better in the future and hope people accept the new you. Hawk’s saying to Shoto that he’s “so cool” was on the mark as well because it requires a lot of maturity to recognise your parent is human after all – and accept that who he is now may genuinely want to do right by you.
random
February 4, 2023 at 12:48 amI’ll never understand why folks are willing to give Endeavor so much grace, when the narrative is clear he was an awful father and deserves the bed he made. One thing I disagree with is I don’t think the narrative is trying to give Endeavor a redemption arc because the damage has already been done. Instead, I think we should think of his arc as an atonement arc. He isn’t entitled for his family forgiveness or the viewers for that matter, but how can he truly atone for his past abuse so that his family can move forward without him?
To be honest, I’m not that interested in what happens to Endeavor, but more importantly, I’m interested in seeing how his family’s characters arcs will be completed. How the hell do we resolve the Dabi question? The guy is soo far gone that I literally have no idea what the conclusion to his arc will be. Before folks come at me, I don’t condone his actions (except the reveal that shit was warranted), but I’m hella empathetic on how he got here. Abused children lash out in so many various ways that I’m glad there has been a conversation on social media by folks that came out of foster care that have given so much good insight on how childhood abuse and neglect works. It’s mindboggling to me how folks are willing to ignore the emotional abuse and neglect he enacted on his kids. Emotional abuse and neglect is as bad as physical abuse and I wish the general audience would understand that.
I saw this mentioned on social media, but the light novel christmas chapter focuses on Fuyumi and Natsuo’s feelings about the abuse so I’m hoping if Enzo has time, he can check it out!
Nadavu
February 6, 2023 at 5:05 amSo if it turned out that Endevear was also neglected as a child and that’s why he was a terrible father you’d be sympathetic to him as you’re are to Dabi?