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stillness-in-green · 2 years

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Sorry, but if Tenko was the "lump of lead" that causes Shigaraki's anger, Tenko would've been the first thing absorbed by AFO!Vestige. It was already confirmed that it parasites on Shigaraki's anger and hatred. It makes him stronger. If Tenko is the only part of him that isn't completely merged with AFO!Shigaraki, it's because it's everything that isn't hate. The hands surrounding Tenko are supressing him (because Shigaraki was supressing his inner child), and even more appeared once AFO noticed Tenko's presence.

"<...> and here we find Tenko, still covered in those grasping, clutching hands even after Tomura cast off all but one of them months ago." Hm, it's almost as if Shigaraki keeping one hand is the main sign that his anger and trauma didn't really go away. "His anger predated AFO, after all; it was forged in his childhood home and on that long walk where no one helped him." Tenko hated the way his father treated him and the way his family didn't do anything to stop them, yes, but he didn't really hate them. His issue with his family never was as much about his dad and how the rest of the family didn't protect him as about not being able to have closure or grieve them properly. For example, the fact that his family was going to change and Kotarou was planning to go and apologise to his kids, but Tenko never found out about that, since they all were robbed of the chance to reconcile by their abrupt death. AFO giving Tenko their hands wasn't meant to preserve his hatred of his family, it was a reminder to make him unable to properly move on from that day and hate himself. His quirk was supressed by the guilt he felt for killing them. The only reason he "awakened" in MVA was because he recontextualised the events of that day to fit the ideas AFO put in his head, and shifted the blame for their deaths from having Decay onto being born in the first place. Idk in which world deciding that "Oh yeah, actually my family dying wasn't a tragedy because they were always going to die since destroying it the only thing I was born for" can be seen as Shigaraki actually letting go of his anger surrounding what happened to his family.

I normally just delete asks that strike me as being in bad faith or based on willful misreadings of my posts, but this is just enough on the genuine side despite a few instances of passive-aggressive language that I’ll go ahead and bite. The passive-aggressive language does mean that this is going to be a bit brisk in places, however.

So, first things first, I’d like to note that I don’t think Tenko is the lump of lead. In the post where I mentioned it, I said it would be “an entirely delightful twist,” which I hope implies that I think it is an unlikely outcome, one most people wouldn’t predict, and so on. But I don’t think it’s unlikely because it’s incompatible with the text as we have it so far; I'm just skeptical that the current state of Hori’s endgame writing can support an idea that challenging.

For the purposes of canon, I think the inner Tenko is exactly what you’re saying he is: a representation of Tomura’s fragments of inner goodness and innocence that AFO couldn’t completely stamp out, the shred of him remaining that still wants to be saved.

I just think that’s easy, boring, and I’d be happy if the manga could pull something unexpected by complicating what currently looks like a literalization of the easiest moral choice in the world—helping a lost and hurting child. I’m so incredibly tired of Deku’s simplistic moral blinders that only allow him to acknowledge pain if it’s shaking him by the collar and shouting itself in his face. He is the main character of the manga and yet he has repeatedly shown that he has little to no imagination when it comes to adult villains and their motivations. I desperately want him to have to confront the fact that angry people deserve to be saved too. Especially when that anger stems from the failures of the system Deku himself has promised to restore!

Tidily partitioning off all of Shigaraki Tomura’s rage to make it nothing more than an expression of AFO’s grooming frees Deku from having to face the wrongs his own society is perpetuating on Shigaraki and everyone he represents. I’m not for it, fam.

That all said, I’d also like to make some counterpoints to the issues you raised with the theory. Again, I don’t think the canon is going to play out this way, but I like the theory anyway and think it can fit into the text as we have it, so call this playing devil’s advocate.

Hit the jump.

If Tenko was the "lump of lead" that causes Shigaraki's anger, Tenko would've been the first thing absorbed by AFO!Vestige.

In Chapter 222, Shigaraki describes the lump of lead in his heart as “providing an endless source of rage.” He further says the weight in his heart will never go away. That’s very absolutist language! Endless. Never. Vision!Tenko could be the metaphorical heart of Tomura’s rage and still not have been consumed because he’s inconsumable; he’s limitless. Hypothetically speaking, the vestige of All For One (let’s call him VFO) might not have initially realized Inner Tenko existed because he wasn’t expecting that inexhaustible fury to have gone and personified itself!

The hands surrounding Tenko are supressing him (because Shigaraki was supressing his inner child), and even more appeared once AFO noticed Tenko's presence.

Two problems here. First, the hands don’t represent the suppression of Shigaraki’s inner child, at least not as far as Shigaraki knows, and it’s his psychology we’re dealing with here. What AFO told Tenko about the hands—both his family’s and those of the thugs—was that he should use them to preserve the emotions associated with their deaths. And in the case of both the thugs and Shigaraki’s father—by far the most significant of the hands for most of the story—the principal emotion in question is frustrated rage.

I also don’t particularly think that Shigaraki is suppressing his inner child anymore, at least when he’s in his own mind. Look at the mindscape scene in 270. There, he fluidly shifts between his adult self, black-haired Tenko (with the eye scar he gave himself from scratching but without the lip scar from Kotarou/the gardening tool), and the boy with graying hair from the streets—he’s recognized and amalgamated all those different selves; he even tells Nao and Hana that it’s fine, that he’s okay. He kills Kotarou again with a smile, fully in control and aware, even in the body of his five-year-old self.

Secondly, regarding the contention that more hands appeared once AFO noticed Tenko’s presence, that’s just patently false. No, there aren’t any hands on the Tenko that Deku describes feeling when he and Shigaraki clashed at Jakku, but that’s because that Tenko is just a flashback to Tenko crying right before Decay activates, and only Deku’s description of his impression, at that. But once the audience starts seeing Inner Tenko directly, rather than via Deku, the hands are already there.

On the left is Inner Tenko at the end of the scene with the “death” of New Order, well before VFO had picked up on his presence; on the right is the scene after Tenko’s outburst to Mirio. In fact, there are more hands in the scene from before Tenko is discovered (though the disparity is not so stark that I get the impression Horikoshi meant for us to go in and count)!

Looping back to 270, there are a lot of hands in Shigaraki’s vision there, but they’re all ambient, just kind of floating around, not grabbing at him until the memory of Kotarou appears. Shigaraki destroys that one, and is again hand-free until he goes to approach VFO. His family appear again and Shigaraki rejects them, destroying all of them and telling them not to reject who he is. While he retains control, Shigaraki is able to push the hands aside, just as he discarded them in Deika. It’s only the Inner Tenko that surfaces after Shigaraki loses control that sits surrounded in and clung to by those hands, never making an attempt to push them away—hands the explicit purpose of which was to preserve an emotional state.

Tenko hated the way his father treated him and the way his family didn't do anything to stop them, yes, but he didn't really hate them. His issue with his family never was as much about his dad and how the rest of the family didn't protect him as about not being able to have closure or grieve them properly.

This one confuses me. I would buy this if you were saying that Tomura’s issue with his family is a lack of closure. Tomura went most of his life without knowing anything about his family other than, at best, tiny jumbled fragments that came to him in times of extreme physical stress, and Sensei’s claim that Tomura had killed them. He had no memories of them between the ages of five and twenty, so of course he was lacking closure! And of course he would have done better if he’d ever been able to process that horrible tragedy.

But you said Tenko’s issues, not Tomura’s, and I would contend that Tenko’s issues—and especially Inner Child Tenko’s issues—are all about the way his family treated him, and about his long walk. That’s the moment he’s trapped in, the moment he can’t get away from, the moment he was never saved from. And his feelings about his family in that moment? He says it at the end of 235, “I hate everyone.”

And yeah, of course, that’s him as an upset child; obviously the words of a 5-year-old in emotional distress do not represent the totality of his feelings when he isn’t in a crisis situation. But it’s not like Tenko resenting his family is some kind of huge swerve or fluke; everything Tomura narrates through his flashbacks at the climax of Deika is about how he was rejected. We can see on the page a representation of his resentment growing, a tiny drop that spreads further every time someone in the family takes his father’s side over his, until by the end it doesn’t even take being rejected to trigger him: the final panel below, on the far right, accompanies his mother’s horror-stricken face before she even has time to react one way or the other to his distress.

We see this same visual effect in 234—before the full delve into the Shimura backstory even begins—slathered across the center of Tenko’s chest in the flashback where AFO is telling him to keep the hands close so that “these feelings” never fade. “These feelings,” i.e. the ones associated with the visual effect, i.e. his frustration at his family’s rejection.

It’s important to keep in mind, about the Deika flashbacks, who is narrating them, and from what point in time, for any given line. Tomura does a lot of projecting his current thoughts back onto those memories, so you have to be careful, in analyzing them, to distinguish between what Tenko thought and felt in the moment as opposed to what Tomura is reading onto himself in retrospect. In that sense, one moment that’s always stood out to me is the panel in 237 where Tenko is looking at the retreating back of the old woman who approached him but then shied away.

In assessing the nature of Tomura’s grievances, you have to consider what he already knew and thought before being picked up by All For One. And here, we see that even as a child, Tenko had a conception of what his itch was, what it meant, the causality he himself drew between him killing his family and his itch disappearing, only for it to return when people on the street rejected him. His frustration is not inherently AFO’s doing, nor is it adult Tomura being an unreliable narrator.

Inner Tenko—if we must insist on viewing him as some kind of separate-ish entity that VFO is trying to stamp out and Tomura is trying to suppress—does not have an issue with a lack of closure; he has an issue with no one helping him when he needs it. That’s the entire point of his reaction to New Order saying a hero will come to stop him; that’s the vision of him Deku sees at Jakku. Like, this isn’t even in the context of the Tenko as the lump of lead idea; this is what the canon is saying, that this boy, regardless of who he is, needs to be saved. Of course that’s what his issue is, not a lack of closure on his family’s deaths.

Now, that sounds perilously close to me saying that Inner Tenko is just a sad baby victim Deku needs to help, but see, that’s what I like about the lump of lead idea. If Inner Tenko is a representation of the boy AFO gave those hands to, an emotional state preserved in amber for 15+ years, well, we know what Tenko’s reaction was to “not being saved”—it’s the frustration and anger directed toward people seeing him in pain and then averting their eyes from him. Deku may see this as a crying boy who needs help, but Horikoshi has been pretty consistent in his writing of victims as getting stuck in their own heads, needing some kind of shock to get them to reconsider whatever negativity they’re laden down with: Early-roki Shouto, Kouta running off to blast resentful craters in rock walls, Eri’s state of emotional shutdown.

I don’t want Shigaraki to be a less nuanced victim than any of them, so Inner Tenko as the origin point of Shigaraki’s rage is an extension of that. He’s not some pure innocent, he’s angry—and he has a right to be! Deku saving only the innocent part of Shigaraki while not addressing his anger is basically reinforcing the message that only victims who look and act the right way “deserve” to be saved. And I really am not here for that.

AFO giving Tenko their hands wasn't meant to preserve his hatred of his family, it was a reminder to make him unable to properly move on from that day and hate himself.

Give or take the self-hatred, this contention doesn’t strike me as incompatible with what I said in the initial post? My comment was, “AFO gave Tenko his family hands to preserve the negative feelings from that day.” Saying that AFO’s intent was to render Shigaraki unable to move on from that day strikes me mostly as semantic quibbling. I agree that AFO’s intention was to stop Shigaraki from healing—he says so straight out in 234! But the method he chose to prevent Tenko from healing was to give him his family's hands and tell him to never forget the frustration he associates with them. The two ideas go, forgive the pun, hand in hand.

The only reason he "awakened" in MVA was because he recontextualised the events of that day to fit the ideas AFO put in his head, and shifted the blame for their deaths from having Decay onto being born in the first place.

??? He did nothing of the sort??

Where in this panel do you see Shigaraki blaming his family’s deaths on his very existence? Heck, when did Shigaraki ever even think his family’s deaths were due to an accident with Decay? What he grew up being told is that he murdered them, and he didn’t remember enough to say otherwise. When he does remember, he simply affirms the judgment. Heck, even in the brief, nebulous in-between period, after the deaths but before AFO found him, he still believed, “I killed my family,” not, “I had an accident with my quirk.”

The reader can certainly see that he had a horrible accident with his quirk, and we can see the way he rationalizes that accident as intentional, but Tomura himself didn’t “recontextualize” anything, because he never believed it was an accident from the start.

As to it being because he exists at all, let me finish up with this:

Idk in which world deciding that "Oh yeah, actually my family dying wasn't a tragedy because they were always going to die since destroying it the only thing I was born for" can be seen as Shigaraki actually letting go of his anger surrounding what happened to his family.

Again, this is a vast mischaracterization of what Shigaraki actually says. He embraced agency in killing his father—“I wanted to kill him so I did.” That is not remotely the same thing as Shigaraki believing this fateful inevitability you’re insisting on.

I assume you’re probably thinking of something like this panel instead:

(This comes before the flashback, but we can assume it’s still in the context of the flashback, as Shigaraki’s already talking about how he’s remembered everything.)

I ran the raw of this by Translator Sis just to get a grasp on what all the nuances are here, and one of the things that the English phrasing here elides is a distinction between all the speaker can do as contrasted with all the speaker does. A more accurate phrasing would be, “All I do is destroy.” This doesn’t imply that Shigaraki feels he’s incapable of doing anything else, but rather that he is not actively choosing to do anything else. Translator Sis suggests that there’s a sense of the elemental here, of a natural disaster doing what it does because that is what it is, not because there’s some question of whether it’s capable of doing anything else.

Is Shigaraki talking about himself like a natural disaster dehumanizing? Sure! Absolutely. But you seem to be presenting it as some kind of “gotcha” for the whole lump of lead concept, as if Shigaraki not sincerely letting go of his anger disproves the idea, and I’m not sure why you think that? Of course Shigaraki hasn’t completely let go of his anger—the hands are the representation of that, and the fact that he keeps the one recovered in Deika and goes back to wearing it (albeit somewhat intermittently) speaks volumes. And of course his decision that lashing out in a moment of rage and pain made him a willful murderer at the age of five is flawed!

But like... People are not perfect logic machines. Their reasoning can be flawed, skewed by a thousand different motivations, and they’re not going to inherently detect that about themselves like someone ran a grammar/spellcheck on their psyche! People can and do tell themselves all sorts of things in trying to intellectualize and make peace with traumatic, senseless events, even if a therapist would look at those rationalizations and go, “Oh, no.”

Shigaraki’s self-actualization at Deika can be foundationally flawed and still reflect meaningfully on his mental state. He can tell himself he’s accepted his family’s deaths, as in 237; he can look back with an adult perspective and claim that he’s over it, as in 270. That doesn’t mean he’s right.

When I say that he cast off the hands AFO gave him as a child and the anger associated with them, what I mean is that Shigaraki believed he’d come to terms with his past. It doesn’t mean I agree with him. Still, you can see via his manifesto in Chapter 281 that he’s resigned himself to being rejected, and has made the decision that, if the society heroes built will do nothing but reject him (and others like him), then he will reject that society in turn—violently.

Not because there’s nothing else he can do—because there’s nothing else he will do.

Resignation can, after all, look an awful lot like serenity from the outside.

In summary, please don't assume that just because I think Tenko had negative emotions of his own accord, ones that AFO did not personally carve into him, I therefore believe he is a 100% rational actor and a reliable narrator of his own tragedy. I do not. I just don’t think it serves the story to sterilize and damsel its longest-running antagonist because, whoops, the author can’t come up with a way for the main character to meaningfully overcome the conflict he presents otherwise.

#bnha #shigaraki tomura #shimura tenko #lump of lead theory #deku semi critical #that last injunction goes to everyone who's ever gotten mad at me for acknowledging that villains have real character flaws #as if i think that makes them less worth saving #i support saving a character named DICTATOR guys #i literally cannot be made to shut up about Hero Society's crimes against humanity even when they only affect villains no one cares about #shigaraki's justified anger and dabi's mild heteromorphobia are kiddie fare #stillness has salt #salt in the tags #stillness answers #my writing

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