danmei hell

Me & Not Me 【是我非我】 龟仙人龟娘 [½]

夜雨凉晚风入梦 吹落几度海棠

The rain at night is cold and the wind enters my dreams, blowing a few haitang blossoms to the ground

白衣寒九歌离断 人间又参商

The white clothes are cold and Jiuge is no longer whole, our time together in this life is short and fleeting and once we leave one another we will be thousands of miles apart

…and so do I, so here’s my dumb white English-more-or-less-only (I speak a small amount of Japanese…it vaguely sort of kind of helps) speaking ass, doing a little homework that hopefully will help others? This is not exhaustive, not complete, not better than resources others have made, but I checked things I personally cared about, and since I’ve done the research, I figure I might as well toss the info out into the wild.

First - as Suika linked, HERE IS AN AMAZING GUIDE TO HELP YOU MAKE A JJWXC ACCOUNT and it teaches you how to use it. It was created by Shoko Translates and it’s incredibly clear and easy to use and you should use it and trust anything they say over literally anything in this post, because I only have the vaguest idea what I’m talking about but they know their shit.

Google translate on Chrome works decently to make the site English…but doesn’t work well in any other respect; overall it functions WAY better on Firefox even if it’s umpteen times harder to figure out what anything says.

Use the guide to make your account; I couldn’t get it to successfully send my phone a text, but I had zero problems when I switched to e-mail. Chrome translate is definitely easier for making the actual account, but then it’s better to switch.

Once you’ve got the account and you log in…

…so, I have no idea what either of those two I’ve circled say (USE THE LINKED GUIDE, IT’LL TELL YOU) but I know that if you click either of them, you get a huge list of authors and book titles, with genre notes, hits, publication date, etc. More importantly, you get a search bar - you can see it right below my silly black circle.

Congratulations, you can now find the things you want to support using search! The first option in the search drop down is book, and it brings up the actual book but also a lot of superfluous stuff. I had way better luck searching by author, which is the second option on the drop down menu.

Now that you know how to search - when I sat down with this today, my goal wasn’t yet to actually pay for anything, I just wanted a sense of how many points things would cost, and I wanted to be able to look that up. So, that’s this post’s goal, and sorry I’m a little disjointed in presenting that out, I got like no sleep last night. Anyway. The point is, based on that link I provided (DID YOU USE IT YET? YOU SHOULD):

10,000 points on JJWXC cost approximately USD 17. Convert as needed for your own currency. Or, one point costs 0.17 cents. (To be clear: that’s about 2 tenths of a cent, not 17 cents.)

With that basic conversion, once you have an account, you can see how many points things cost, and therefore calculate how much they’d cost you in $$$ to support the author. Anyway, I haven’t actually figured out ANY of the money parts of this yet, because I wanted to figure out how many points the books I would want to support were before I even attempted money stuff. My thinking with this post was - if you, like me, were holding back cause you were wondering about expense…well, here, have some answers about expense, and probably in a day or four I’ll sit down and try to figure out the money part, and I’ll do another post then. Or, you can just use that guide I linked. Cause that’s what I’m going to do.

So, what/who do you want to support?

Priest (search for author: priest)

镇魂 (Zhen Hun/Guardian). Point cost: 1,742. In USD: $2.96

天涯客 (Tian Ya Ke/Faraway Wanderers/Word of Honor). Point cost: 943. In USD: $1.60

有匪 (You Fei/Legend of Fei). Point cost: 3,031. In USD: $5.15

默读 (Mo Du). Point cost: 3,506. In USD: $5.96

杀破狼 (Sha Po Lang). Point cost: 2,673. In USD: $4.54

七爷 (Qi Ye/Lord Seventh). Point cost: 934. In USD: $1.59

(This is not an exhaustive list, but you can search for others - the Priest Wikipedia page gives a full list of Chinese names, translations, adaptations, etc.)

墨香铜臭 (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, search for author: 墨香铜臭)

天官赐福 (Tian Guan Ci Fu/Heaven Official’s Blessing). Point cost: 5,270. In USD: $8.96

If 魔道祖师 (Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed) and 人渣反派自救系统 (Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong/The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System/Scum System/Scum Villain) are on there, I wasn’t able to find them - someone who knows more than I, and has the time to the research right now, will have to explain more to help with those, but for starters, they’re on the publishers website - Scum Villain; MDZS)

肉包不吃肉 (Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou/Meatbun Doesn’t Eat Meat, search for author: 肉包不吃肉)

二哈和他的白猫师尊 (Er Ha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun/The Husky and His White Cat Shizun/Hao Yixing/Immortality). Point cost: 7,246. In USD: $12.32

余污 (Yu Wu/Remnants of Filth). Point cost: 4,245. In USD: $7.22

梦溪石 (Meng Xi Shi, search for author: 梦溪石)

千秋 (Qianqiu/Thousand Autumns). Point cost: 2,783. In USD: $4.73

(There are many others.)

漫漫何其多 (Man Man He Qi Duo, search for author: 漫漫何其多)

当年万里觅封侯 (Dangnian Wanli Mi Feng Hou/Those Years in Quest of Honor Mine). Point cost: 1,551. In USD: $2.64

(Again, there are many others.)

I could go add titles for years, but, well, it’s my post, and these are the stories I was most interested in supporting personally. Doing ALL this research, AND writing it up for this post, took me less than an hour, and once you’re in the website and have bought points, you can select all chapters with a single click, it’ll tell you the final point cost, and with another click - bam, you’re done, you’ve bought the raws. You’ve supported the original creator. You’ve done what translators have been begging us to do for ages. And, if it’s a story that’s not all out yet - you’ve got the raws! You can mtl them! You can read them before the translators are done! Or, if you’ve got a fave author? You can read their work in progress! You can learn what’s coming next! Even without speaking Chinese (I don’t speak a word of Chinese!!!) there is NO DOWNSIDE HERE.

(also, can I point out how INCREDIBLY SMALL some of these dollar amounts are? Some of ya’ll are acting like this is bank-breaking, I mean seriously, COME ON.)

Google is your friend. Find the carrd for your fave. Copy and paste the author’s name in Chinese. Use the JJWXC search. Find the thing. Support it.

English danmei fandom, this is our chance to do better.

PLEASE, can we do fricken better??? It’s so easy. And so cheap. And these fandoms have brought so many of us so much joy.

Go forth, and do the thing.

I’m doing it.

“He’ll keep talking…”

“He was buying time because his own flames have weakened him”

Dabi immediately proves Hawks wrong but jumping down two floors and using a technique he’s never used before mid-air

Now we can assume that Dabi, the greatest strategist in this entire story, had this planned out from the beginning or that he has lost his mind enough to just do the most reckless shit, I mean how is he gonna land safely on the ground from that position if he doesn’t burn himself before then?

But we can just as much assume that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t even want to kill them.

That is similar to the panel of him noticing Aoyama in the training camp arc

Although he notices that someone is hiding behind the bush, he not only ignores it but also doesn’t even mention it to anyone.

Before Dabi attacked Hawks, the latter asked him the most burning question of the story: “Who are you?” which led to the most amazing line in the history of fiction:

Of course, maybe he really does want to kill Hawks now that he’s told him who he is and since he doesn’t trust him (his words not mine) why should he bother keeping him alive? And why should he keep alive a student that tries to protect Hawks and claims that Hawks “isn’t dirty” and has “done the right thing” when he could just burn them both and call it a day?

One reason for him monologuing is that he is a Todoroki so monologuing is in his blood

Another reason, though, would be that he doesn’t actually want to kill them.

While I don’t believe that his whole reason for being a villain is because of Stain like he claims, I do think it’s reasonable to assume that he liked what Stain was doing: calling people out on their bullshit.

Instead of just killing everyone who disagrees with his beliefs, he makes some valid points about the flaws in heroes.

He even pointed out how messed up it was that the heroes brought students along to this attack, which I think is due to Dabi generally being against kids being used as pawns by heroes. Going with the Touya theory, it’s obvious why he opposes that: he was born to be a pawn, too. But, unlike Hawks or Shouto, he broke free from that and is now trying to change things for the better. Maybe to get revenge, maybe also to prevent anyone else having to go through the same thing he had.

Why bother trying to change someone’s mind when you plan on killing them?

But how would he change things if he just killed them? It would be far more effective to fight them just enough for them to not fight back anymore but still keep them alive so that not only is he better than them since Hawks killed someone during this and he didn’t; by keeping them alive he is also giving them the chance to change their views.

Tokoyami may still be on Hawks’ side now because Hawks is his mentor and Dabi is still just another villain to him, but maybe Dabi’s words will stick with him and start making him question hero society and his own beliefs.

So instead of monologuing to buy himself time because his quirk weakened him, he’s monologuing to buy them time and make them understand that the villains are fighting for their right to live.

 [Because we know more than you think.]

Here is the funny thing: At this point we have more information about Toya’s entire childhood, than we have about Hawks’. So let’s be faster than Horikoshi thinks is good for us, and reconstruct it accuratly.

There are three big things to “assume” before I start. First: Dabi is not a Nomu. Second: Dabi is not an undercover hero. (I saw “theories” about this and I won’t waste time by listing up all the reasons this is impossible.)

Third: The “Hawks’s parent was a thief”-theory is true. (Their names are written in the same kanji; There was no need for Ending to mention this name in ch. 250, other than plot-setup; It fits chronologically in both Hawks’ and Endeavor’s history etc.)

So, Let’s tell the story of Todoroki Toya. - For this I elaborated an extreme professional graph:

Looking at the dates and following the canon rhythm of all Todoroki siblings being around 3 years apart, Dabi is currently 26.

In the picture of his shrine, he wears a traditional middle-school uniform, which means he “died” between age 14 and 16. This perfectly fits in line with the information we got from Fuyumi, which told us that Toya died, shortly after Rei left the house respectively after Shoto got his scar. (Meaning, we talk about a time-frame in which the Todoroki-children were left ‘alone’ with Endeavor.)

His scars are neat and symmetrical, which means Dabi’s scars are self-inflicted. The placing of Dabi’s facial scars perfectly matches the locations of Endeavors flame-beard, which means he tried to copy Endeavor’s looks.

We know that Endeavor stopped training Toya to focus on Shoto. (Because Toya was allowed to play with his siblings, while Shoto was dragged away. Toya had to be 12 - 14 when we saw him playing soccer with them in ch. 39.) So Toya lived at home before he died.

[We know the hard trainings-program of the HPSC would not allow many breaks to play with siblings at home. We know from Natsuo (in ch. 250) that Toya often (!) played with him. The HPSC would also have informations about a unforgettable quirk like his, if they had any conection with his “death”.]

This hilariously sad, because it means: Toyas death was not a trainings-incident inflicted by Endeavor nor was it inflicted by the HPSC!

Toya Todoroki died because of something he did himself. (Every clue points towards this and I can’t believe how many people get this wrong when theorizing.)

But this is where the thrill starts: Because we also know that Toya cared for his siblings…

And to tell you my own bloody theory: Toya wanted to proof that he wasn’t a “failure” and he wanted to protect tiny Shoto from the painful training. So he tried to impress Endeavor by teaching himself how to use fire like him - and he forced himself to handle the pain. But the flames where too hot and Toya set a huge fire. Seriously injured, in fear, shame and rage he run away from home. Since the fire had destroyed the surroundings, his family thought his body got incinerated within and declared him dead.

And Dabi was born.

…So is there anything more to think ab-

“Yeah Sherlock- How the fuck does Dabi know Hawks’ real name?”, a rhetorical (and a little rude) reader might ask.

Great question! To be honest, I’m just as confused as Hawks. (But before you throw your tomatoes, let’s see if we can change that:)

First of all, I’ll assume Dabi didn’t pay black hats to hack into the database of the Hero Public Safety Commision, because firstly, this would make his persona completly non-essential to this knowledge - and secondly, they litterally have “Safety” in their name - So I’ll fucking hope their firewalls are…  hot.

From a writing point of view it makes way more sense that Hawks shared his name with Toya Todoroki in person.

So let’s look at Hawks’ life in the graph. Hawks was born in Fukuoka, which is a five-hour-ride away from the Todoroki’s mansion in Mustafu. Tiny Hawks spent his first years of life in a dumpster. (”Ah, pardon, Sir. My bad, I failed to see the floor, because of the trash piles NEXT TO YOUR FUCKING CHIL-!”)

However there are two possibilitys:

1.: Keigo and Toya met in the HPSC in Mustafu.

If this is true, it probably happened in the (2 - 4 year) timeframe after Hawks got scouted and before Shoto got his “perfect” quirk, where Endeavor found himself still enraged about Toya’s “wasted-potential”. So forced Toya to train with the “government-kid” (…which was a prodigy in contrast to his own “failure of a son”.)

In this scenario, Hawks broke the rule of “never using his real name again” and told Toya during the match. Back then Hawks was only around 6 - 8 years old, so its plausible for him not to remember Toya’s face well. … But on the other Hand: If Toya had ever participated in the HPSC-training, the Comission would have informations about him and his unforgetable quirk. Its unlikely that they wouldn’t recognize Dabi’s describtion in their data base.]

2.: Keigo and Toya met in Kyushu in autumn.

We know Endeavor captured “Takami”, before Keigo was recruited and forbidden to use his name.

We know it happened in autumn and we can assume Keigo was younger than seven years. There are many possibilitys- Maybe the thief Takami exploited Keigo’s quirk for criminal activitys and that is the reason Keigo was so skilled at a young age. Maybe Toya was with his father that day…

- But at this point it feels like throwing stones in the dark: Eventually we will hit something, but it might be fucking bruised.

Or what do you think? Did I make a horrible mistake somewhere up there?

This last chapter just made Dabi way more interressting to me.

Until now he just looked like this one “mysterious” dude, who didn’t really need strong characterization because he had this whole “It’s not a phase, dad”-going on.

But now we finally get something about him.

Dabi didn’t trust Hawks, because he trusts no one. De does not care about the league members, at least not more than a soldier cares about their weapons.

He recruited Hawks because he saw the advantages and didn’t care if he puts the league in danger for it.

And then Hawks killed Twice - (an extremly strong weapon for Dabi’s cause.) And Dabi grins. Because he is so extreme fourious, and doesn’t know how to react otherwise.

He forces Hawks to the floor and burns his wings to the bones. (Hawks said earlier in this Chapter that his weak point is fire.) Dabi triggers the flashback of tiny Hawks getting told that-

…he won’t ever be called “Takami” again.

[Also: LOOK AT THIS SMILE. HOLY SHIT. Tiny Hawks agrees to the verry hard training, determinded to become as shining as the hero who saved him from abuse. (Probably Endeavor, since Tiny Hawks smiled (oh god, look at this precious smile) at the doll while saying that.)]

Hawks: “Who the hell are you?!”

Dabi answers something but we don’t understand it. There is another burst of flames, but Hawks doesn’t struggle anymore, he just looks really shocked.

Dabi clenches his fist: “Instead of Shigaraki… or Twice, you should have kept your eyes focused on me.”

(Hawks doesn’t answer)

Dabi: “There is no such thing as real heroes. I don’t give a fuck about the League. This is a world where one man’s obsession can change everything. - See you in hell, Hawks… I couldn’t care less if you life or die.”