I just read your Fuyumi character analysis and it made me see her in a totally different light. I was one of the people that thought she was easily forgiving her father and forcing her siblings to do the same but after reading your analysis I realized that was wrong. I see now that she isn’t selfish as I first thought. I can see that her actions are more of defense and self preservation than forgiveness and it made me feel some sort of appreciation for her struggles and her love for her siblings.
So I wanted to ask if you had a Rei character analysis because I would love to read it. Your analysis are awesome.
Hi! Thank you for taking the time to read my Fuyumi post. I’m pleased to hear you found it an interesting read, and I can only be glad if it gave you some food for thought on a character I love so much :’)
To answer your question, I haven’t written anything extensive on Rei yet, and certainly not anything solely focused on her. Because of how little screen time she gets, I find it much harder to get a cohesive read of her goals and motivations. Her lack of backstory and internal narration leave a lot of unanswered questions. But I wanted to thank you for asking about her anyway, because your ask gave me a push to try and get something together. It won’t be as thorough as my other todofam meta, and it will contain a lot of guessing, but I’m putting it out there anyway. Maybe I’ll add more to it later on, if we ever get some more info on her.
On Rei, and the double-edged sword of Choices
As the title prefaces, Rei puts a lot of importance on making your own choices. Despite the fact that she’s often depicted as having little agency, a core belief of hers seems to be that even when your options are limited, you can make the most of them and find happiness by confidently choosing your path forward, and sticking to it through the end.
[more under the cut]
It’s because of this mindset that she’s able to see marrying Enji as her own informed choice. From her perspective, she didn’t agree to it because of external pressure from her family, but rather because Rei wanted this for the Himuras’ sake. Now, whether this is entirely true or not, and she was “sold off” for money and prestige like Touya says, we don’t know for sure. But for the purpose of this speculation, it's not really important to determine whose choice the arranged marriage really was; what matters is that Rei thinks she walked into it by her free will.
What she says to Shouto here (read right to left) gives us a little more insight. This is her response to Shouto's fear that his circumstances (=being trained by a cruel person) will dictate the outcome of his actions.
Essentially, Shouto's scared of going along with Enji's will, because he doesn't want Enji to make him into the type of hero who hurts others. And Rei steps in and tells him, "it's okay, you wouldn't end up like that, because being a hero is something you want for yourself, not just to crown Enji's aspirations. You wouldn’t be a puppet in his hands that does what he wants, but your own person pursuing your own goals. Keep your eyes firmly set on the man you want to become, and you will get there."
Envisioning the future you want to achieve is the crucial part here. When the proposal of an arranged marriage was on the table, Rei tells us she didn't have many options in front of her. In that sense, she too was limited by her circumstances and by her blood. But she agreed to it, and I quote, "hoping, if nothing else, that [she] would keep smiling." In other words, Rei might not have wanted to marry Enji, per se, but maybe she wasn't as opposed to the idea of making a family of her own. A part of her thought she'd still find happiness (maybe even fulfillment) as a wife and a mother.
And at least at the beginning, I think she might've been, too. Happy, that is. At the very least, she loved her children. Back then, Enji was still an… okay father. He planned to live vicariously through his children, and that's not the ideal mindset behind having a child, but he had yet to act on it; the family dynamics weren't as tense and toxic as they become the longer he went without achieving his ambitions. Fuyumi's birth wasn't planned as a replacement like her younger siblings, a demand from a man obsessed with his goals. It was Rei’s idea to conceive her, to give little Touya a sibling close in age so that they could support each other.
What this tells us is that even if Rei knew she was expected to bear Enji’s children, up to that point, she still had a vision of a future where her kids were healthy and fulfilled, and Rei too, with them. Thus, she actively took the initiative to make the family a happy nest despite the not so happy circumstances behind the union itself.
Then Enji starts growing more and more obsessed with an heir, and Rei starts properly fearing her husband.
This is where things get complicated, and also when Rei betrays her beliefs. As I went over, she puts a lot of weight into making your own choices, but when Enji’s temper gets worse and worse and he stops asking, Rei begins surrendering to his will. This, despite knowing how Touya will see right through the intent behind Natsuo’s conception, and realize they are finally replacing him.
To her credit, Rei does attempt to protest, to stand her ground. She’s not unkind, and she doesn’t want to cause unjust suffering to her kid. She's aware that being replaced will crush him, and that knowing so and persisting anyway is cruel of them. But for someone who values choices so much, she chooses to stay. She could’ve walked away with the kids and gotten out of dodge. That wouldn’t have stopped Enji, of course, he could’ve gotten married again, but she wouldn’t have been an accomplice.
I want to make clear that this is not me condemning her for being too scared to oppose Enji in any substantial way. It’s the story itself that draws attention to this. Touya spells out her complicity, and it’s something we are asked to take notice of. Despite trying her best, Rei is depicted as a flawed mother who made mistakes as well, particularly in raising Touya.
It’s subtle, but it’s there, and this line here is particularly telling. We know that Touya pushes back against the idea that Rei had the option to say no to marrying Enji. Since she was poor, and her family needed it, Touya states that she only had the illusion of a choice. Agreeing to it was an inevitability. Like training until he can be stronger than All Might was inevitable for him, too.
Now, Touya thinks of it that way because has a sharply different mindset than her. From his perspective, both him and his mother have no other options than to perform the role they’re thrown into. While Rei thinks she’s responsible for her decisions, Touya reckons there was only ever one path in front of her (and him), aka that of bearing the burden of one's legacy. By being born into an impoverished family that used to have prestige and power, Rei’s destiny was already written for her. Just like how, by being born as Endvr’s son, Touya’s fate was already decided as well. This fits into his idea of predestination, of the straight or warped tracks he mentions to Shouto.
So Touya frames Rei as someone lacking agency, someone who cannot change the tracks of her life. He does it to make a point about himself, to state that doesn’t have any alternatives, either. But his word choice happens to be… brutally ironic.
When he says “you had no choice” in the panel above, in Japanese he’s echoing his dad.
Specifically, he’s echoing Enji when he said he “had no choice but” to have more children. Nominally, to make Touya stop training in secret. In truth, to have a more suitable heir who could beat All Might.
I'm not sure if Touya's wording itself is intended as a callback, but the fact that he accuses Rei of "being guilty too" in that same scene makes me think we're supposed to think of it anyway.
We know that somewhere after Touya snapped at Rei here, she had just as much of a hard time facing him as her husband did. The given reason is that she sees Enji in her children, and her fear paralyzes her and makes her slip away a little more every day, until her eventual breaking point. But I think that there was another component at play here: guilt.
If we assume that in that moment Rei was thinking of Enji's stubbornness—as it's hinted at by her equating their narrowed, angry eyes—then Touya's words might've hit a nerve there.
Mind you, this is very much unconfirmed, so I could be completely wrong about it. But notice how it's only after Enji mentions All Might that she drops all protests. Before, the topic was Touya's wellbeing, and the morality of inflicting this onto an innocent child who just wanted his father's attention. But the second Rei is abruptly reminded of the reason behind this contract between her and Enji, the goal of producing a fitting heir who will beat his rival, we see her expression shift. She's no longer frantic, she's stricken. A bead of sweat rolls down her face, like she's digesting this. Realizing what it means, what will happen.
Of course, we could attribute this to fear; she could be seeing Enji's true colors for the first time, or realizing that nothing she can say will ever stop him. That has been my interpretation so far. But what if there was more?
What if she felt pressured, similarly to how she might've felt pressured by the Himuras' circumstances, and ended up folding and defaulting to do what was expected of her as a result? And then calling it her decision, despite how it’s clearly not what she wanted?
Psychologically, it would make sense. It's not too hard to make the jump from "I walked into this myself. It was my choice" to "I chose this life. It is on me. I can't pretend I didn't know what my role in it would be, and I have to play it."
If Rei fell for that kind of reasoning, maybe even subconsciously, it could help make sense of why, despite witnessing the worsening of the abuse and of her own mental state, she clings to her hope of eventual happiness for years. Or why, despite having been complicit in punishing Touya with two more replacements, she still doubles down on her belief about the importance of choices, enough so that she passes it down to Shouto. Like allowing Touya to be hurt like that wasn't also a deliberate act; she took part in it knowing the harm that would follow, so ethically speaking, she can't hide behind a lack of better alternatives. She can't deny ownership of her actions by claiming she was blinded by foolishness, like Enji later does. That, too, was a choice, but since Rei cannot bear this weight, I think she coped with it by telling herself it was part of her duty, of her role, and thus accepted it as an inevitability, too. Something that she surrendered to because her "options were limited" to quote her rationalizing of things. It would be a defense mechanism of sorts.
If a part of her justifies what they did as part of her marital contract, then she can frame it as something she had to endure for the sake of her family, too. In the process, she can avoid the guilt attached.
But when Touya calls this out, she cracks, face stricken in fear, and she cannot say anything to defend herself. He sees through her, and she cowers from it. His self-awareness makes it impossible for her to soothe him with easy words like she later does with Shouto. She has no legs to stand on. Her words ring empty, and she knows it. A lie to keep up the pretense of being in control.
Though Rei had entered this situation hoping she would find happiness somehow, the truth is that she hasn't been happy in years. She's exhausted, jaded, wrung out. The family she had pictured doesn't match the broken one she can't keep together despite her best efforts. So, what use was walking into this of her own accord, with her own agenda (however simple), if she couldn't make the most of it, and instead ended up succumbing under the impossible weight of her role?
By then, Enji had given up on even pretending to be involved in Touya's life. He was similarly neglectful to his other children as well. And by giving in to his demands for more kids, Rei co-signed the destruction of whatever normalcy they could've ever hoped to achieve, because Touya knew exactly what they'd done and why, and it made him restless. By the time a fitting replacement came around, the family was as good as gone, and with it, Rei's aspirations.
But acknowledging this means acknowledging her agency in it. And she can't. She can't look Touya in the eyes and insist again about how many other paths are available to him aside from becoming a hero. Not when Touya pointed out that she had paths, too, and still walked the one written in the tracks of her life.
In this light, her avoidance of Touya from then on mirrors Enji’s. She's running away from facing things about herself she doesn't want to confront, things that Touya brings to the forefront of her mind by being their unfortunate victim and byproduct.
Interestingly, though, Rei later shows a bit more of a willingness to face the past.
Shouto's influence helps her in that sense. When he finds the courage to reconnect with her, despite how he should've hated her, she gets a taste of what actually sticking with your choices means. And it spurs her onto action herself.
As a child, Shouto told her that he didn't want to become the kind of person who would hurt her. He already believed in kindness, and aspired to be a hero who rescued others, like All Might was shown doing in that TV interview Shouto was watching with Rei. But then Rei was hospitalized, and she spent ten-ish years away from Shouto, thinking the entire time that he resented her for having burnt him.
In truth, Shouto was simply afraid of meeting her. Since he saw himself as the cause of her mental break, he feared that his visit would be unwelcome, or maybe that she would get worse because of him. But in the end, he pushed through those fears and went to the hospital, and then kept coming back and writing letters with the purpose of reconnecting. Shouto could've easily kept things as they were, but he decided to confront her, to seek a conversation, to seek healing. He didn't want to leave those loose ends unaddressed, or to hide behind his insecurities, his anxieties. Shouto was obviously afraid of rejection, of facing her and finding out she still saw his father in him. He was trembling when he arrived at the hospital that first time. But that didn't deter him. Like his mother told him to do all those years ago, he firmly set his eyes on the man he wanted to become, and that man was someone who had a relationship with his mother again.
When Rei witnesses that unshaking resolve, that determination to stay true to himself and his choices, she becomes stronger as a result.
She finally faces Enji, despite admitting to still being afraid of him not too long before.
And when the topic of Shouto's scar comes up, she owns up to it. Her expression is serious, unflinching. She's not feeling sorry for herself the way she looked away from Touya, eyes downcast and expression laced with visible guilt.
That's a step towards healing for her. Burning Shouto wasn't a conscious action on her part (it was a fight or flight response to fear), but the fact that she is willing to look head on at the past instead of avoiding it is a nod in the right direction.
Before, she let that vision of a happy future slip away from her. She let herself be swept by her circumstances, and lost sight of herself in the process.
Losing sight of yourself because of said circumstances is an idea that gets explored through Shouto as well, by the way. To further underline it. Shouto, too, temporarily let his family situation cloud his vision and push him off his original path. For a handful of years, he was too angry, too bitter and resentful to remember that the things that had motivated him to become a hero was kindness and compassion. He almost nearly becomes cruel like Enji. But remembering himself, setting his eyes on the kind of man he originally wanted to become, puts him back on track. Thanks to that, he's able to successfully rescue Iida from Stain.
Similarly, Rei's misstep is letting her fear get the best of her, and letting herself forget that happiness was still within her reach. Because of that, her challenge is to fix that and face Touya again. In that sense, she can prove she has a choice. She isn't there just to provide the ice genes to make the perfect kid. She still has the power to create a family that isn't dysfunctional, if she commits to the idea that choices were never about making the most of limited options and adverse fate, but rather sticking to your guns and making your future happen despite those adverse circumstances.
Her challenge, then, is to make a family that will be happy for real. With Touya as an integral part of it, this time.
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✮ tags ; gn! reader, established relationship, fluff, alcohol.
"Shouto,"
"Hm?"
"You're drunk,"
Your boyfriend leans his head on your shoulder and makes a noise in the back of his throat. "A bit."
More than a bit, you think. In actuality, you don't think you've ever seen him this drunk before. He's okay with alcohol, usually - but tends to stay away from drinking too much. You think the last time you saw him get actually drunk at all, you were both twenty and he was barely tipsy then.
He doesn't like getting drunk, he's told you before. A few times. The lack of control and hazy memories make him just slightly anxious, so he's careful around liquor.
You've been dating for years now, and unless he's living some double-life (a different one than being a hero) - you've never seen him get this wasted. Ever. To everyone else in your surroundings, it probably doesn't look that way.
But you've spent enough time to know him, and he's not like this usually. Nowhere near as absent minded he is now, at least. He hasn't been able to sit still since he downed that last bottle of shochu. He went to go play with Bakugou's cat, Momo and you couldn't find him afterwards. You lost sight of him for about half-an-hour until you finally found him in the living room while everyone else was outside, feeding Momo some treat that squeezes from a tube.
(You still don't know where or how he found where Bakugou kept the treats, but you decide it's better you don't ask. Plausible deniability, or something.)
You're both grown-ups, and you're not one to worry about his liquor intake. Still, though - you're worried. Even if it seems like he's not different to everyone else, you can tell. And it's bothering you.
"Shouto," You call out to him, your hands reaching to pet the back of his neck. He's a head taller than you, and a little heavy. Palms smooth against the prickly ends of his hair - tapered and neat. He presses his cheek to your shoulder. "Shouto, love."
"Oh," He says, suddenly remember where he is. He stands up but doesn't back away far enough to give you space. You're in a far off empty corner. Most people are in the backyard but Shouto wanted some air - so you're crowded against a wooden fence and wall with your boyfriend locking you in out by the entrance. He smells nice, you think - clean with a soft touch of aftershave. You look up at him. "Hi,"
"You're drunk," You repeat, watching him blink rapidly - bleary eyes and the faintest line of a smile whenever he glances at you. He's bent over, staring at you hard. "Is something wrong?"
His expression is the same as always. Unchangingly neutral with a strong and uncharacteristic rosiness to it. Your boyfriend is handsome, alarmingly so. You're aware of it constantly, but this new face knocks the air out of your lungs.
He's... pouting you think. But not fully. His lips aren't drawn together, it's subtle like most expressions on him.
But it's...there. You're not imagining it - the soft furrow of his brow, the press of his lips. His expression grows warmer and it only makes you more confused. He shakes it off, all of a sudden, a micro-expression that fades just as quickly as it appears.
"I'm okay."
"Are you?""
He blinks slowly at that. Concern aside, you can't help but think he's cute like this. His ears are pink enough to stick out against his skin, cold air making them flush even darker.
"I'm okay," He says, then looks at you. He sobers up if only for that moment. "Had something on my mind."
"Something you can't tell me?"
"It's supposed to be a secret," He mumbles. He's really drunk. You realize this late. "So I don't know if I can."
"Mm," You reply. You feel like doting on him suddenly, so you do, petting the back of his neck before hugging him a little. "That's okay."
He follows up with a light groan. You've never heard him complain like that, so you laugh. "But I want to tell you."
"I promise I'll keep your secret at least."
He smiles at you more fully that time.
He pauses for a minute, thinking it over. You don't do or say anything in return. A beat passes of you two standing and swaying with silence where Shout to grabs your hands from in front of you. You think he's being affectionate again, wanting to hold them.
He draws your hands to his pocket though. The angle is awkward, makes you bend your wrist on the inside of coat pocket until you feel something hard and square touch your fingers. It's velvet from the material. A box of some kind.
...A box?
Shouto guides your hand again, this time out. When you pull it out, his palm is over yours. It's a jewellery box. You blink a few times, confused. Shouto hasn't let go of your hand.
"I keep missing the timing," He says, hiccuping. The lack of sobriety more clear than ever from the slight slur in his words. "It's been in my pockets for a while."
Your eyes go wide open. You can feel your own confusion and excitement twist and tangle inside of you, frantic to get a better read on the situation. He smiles down at you, disarmingly and then closes his eyes. His forehead is warm as it touches yours.
"...I thought you didn't want to married. Not really, at least." You whisper.
"Me too," He says, a wetness to his laugh that tugs at your heart . "It was on a whim. I wanted to talk to you about it. But." He frowns a little "It's tough."
You chuckle, a sudden wetness to your voice too. "I bet it was,"
He smiles at you, big and stupid. "I love you," He closes is eyes and presses his forehead to yours more. "Thank you for everything."
"Shouto," You repeat, unsure of what else to say. "What brought this up?"
"Mm," He shrugs, getting sleepier by the minute. "I thought giving you my last name would make you suffer." He admits, soft and unsure. "But taking yours. That felt...okay. Felt nice."
"You're silly."
"Yes," He says, not denying it. "And I love you."
"And you love me." You repeat, a grin splitting your face. Big tears at the corner of your eyes, making your vision sting and your cheeks ache. You look up at him again. "Enough to marry me?"
He seems almost sheepish that time. "If you'll have me."
"Are you sober enough to even remember this?"
His embarrassment makes him blush and laugh again. "My heart is beating so loud I'm a little afraid of it. So yes. I'm sure I'll remember." He admits.
"Let's get married, then." You repeat to him, so achingly happy you think you could die. You wonder when to tell your friends. Bakugou will be pissed you did at his place. "If you'll have me."
He smiles. "I'd like too."
You lean up to press a kiss to his mouth, and Shouto holds you there to kiss you longer than you expect. When you're done kissing, he's smiling.
"Anymore secrets?"
He thinks on it, then hums.
"We should get a cat."
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