I HAVE FIVE MORE OF THESE TO DO hhah I’ve never animated before so its a little rough but not too shabby

Yeah, I think he was. Horikoshi even went as far as showing us a flashback of that exact question in case we had forgotten. I’d say it’s pretty straightforward. 

Yes, he was answering Snatch’s question, but why? What’s the point Hori was trying to make in the narrative by showing us this panel? 

The thing about this scene is that it’s ambiguous as hell. Since you just gave me an excuse to talk about it, I’m gonna try to break down its implications from my perspective. Once again, as it is the case with all of my Dabi ramblings, this is very much still speculation territory, so take what follows with a grain of salt. 

Given that this scene is placed at the end of the Dabi / Endeavor / Hawks confrontation, it can be interpreted as a pretty glaring hint that the “Dabi is a todoroki” fanon theory is true. Showing us Dabi’s human side perfectly fits with the agenda of revealing him later on as someone who’s fallen through the cracks after the hero system failed him. Horikoshi is painting him as someone the reader can sympathize with, much like in Tomura’s case, who was also someone who was failed by the system and left to fend for himself from a young age.  

One point that is worth mentioning here, is that no other villain so far has been shown to feel some sort of regret for what they’ve done, not even as a passing remark or afterthought. Just Dabi. 

Interestingly enough, this aligns with the fact that Dabi hadn’t even committed any crimes before joining the League, and even after joining - with the exception of leading Bakugou’s kidnapping as a member of the vanguard - he’s still pretty much the least active member of the alliance. Even when faced with the main characters, some of which are known to be on Shigaraki’s hitlist, he does his best to fight as little as possible. He had a noumu and barely used it. He attacked Aizawa, the person who was objectively the worst match-up for his quirk, told him everything the League was currently planning, and then up and left. He saw Aoyama hiding in the bushes and did nothing about it, and that led to him almost failing the entire mission as Aoyama later found his courage to fight back. 

Now, before everyone starts whining, I’m not implying that Dabi is a good guy. I’m just saying that he’s terrible at acting like a villain.

… And, incidentally, that he does have a conscience. 

Don’t get me wrong, Dabi IS a murderer. I’m not trying to invalidate this point or to make him appear as something different than he is. I’m just stating a handful of facts. Like, to name one, the fact that when he does kill, he’s motivated not by bloodthirst, but by a very twisted concept of justice. Much like Stain, he doesn’t kill without a reason. 

We were shown this with Dabi’s canonical first victims: 

“you’re all nothing but garbage”

That’s right. The first people that canonically die at Dabi’s hands are villains. Not heroes, like Stain, but lowlives. 

One might wonder (I sure have) what makes him think he has the moral upper ground here, given that he’s a villain himself. He justifies this by saying that the League doesn’t have any use for them, but that’s blatantly untrue. The attack on the USJ was led with dozen of those small-fry villains on the frontlines. Sure, they only served the purpose of staging a diversion, but it doesn’t really matter, since it worked perfectly. 

Not only that, but by killing those lowlives and subsequently making it to the news, Dabi’s essentially leaving a trail behind his every action and attracting more attention to the League, which is something they can’t really afford. After the attack on the training camp, the League was decimated. A handful of them was either arrested or died. The entire reason why their hideout was found during Bakugou’s rescue operation was because Dabi stood out when he wasn’t supposed to, leading to someone recognizing him as a villain and then reporting him. 

So, back to the point: by cremating those villains, Dabi’s not acting for the League, nor is the League anywhere on his mind at all. That was entirely his own initiative; he was acting for his own selfish reasons. 

So why, against all better judgement, did Dabi murder them? Well, it’s really not that deep. He killed them because he personally despised them. 

Much like Stain hated Tomura for being the type of villain who kills on a whim, without a purpose or a cause, Dabi hates people who commit petty crimes for no real reason than having the power to do so. 

Dabi himself showed similar doubts about the League upon first joining them, and for the same reasons. 

But he joined anyway because he’s weak as fuck and he needs the League to accomplish his goals, but that’s a meta for another day, lol

Back to my main point. 

Dabi kills for a reason and that reason is reforming society and following in Stain’s steps. Or so he says. The only time he errs from this path is when he contributes to Snatch’s death. 

[small note: Dabi wasn’t the one who dealt the lethal blow - that was Mr. Compress’ doing - but for the sake of the argument, intent to kill still counts. If he had the strength to do so, he’d have killed Snatch on his own].

That was the first time that Dabi was faced with the task of doing something that went against his morals, which, it can be argued, are the only thing keeping him from metaphorically falling apart. 

Now, I’m not quite sure if Dabi forgetting about Snatch afterwards is meant to be read as a sign that he might be more unstable than he appears, but it’s a reading that does make sense. Especially if he’s Endeavor’s child. We don’t know what exactly he’s gone through, but. I’ve talked before about how Dabi is someone that embodies a lot of contradictions. His entire vendetta against Endeavor is a plan that doesn’t actually make logical sense. From a moral perspective, a murderer is no better than an abuser, and is in no place to talk about reforming society. 

The idea that is keeping Dabi together is his warped perception of justice. As long as he’s doing what needs to be done, he’s in the right even if he’s tainting himself with crimes worse than those he’s reprimanding Endeavor for. Can you see the contradiction there? Right. But Snatch’s death does not align with “doing what needs to be done”, because Snatch was not a corrupt hero. Dabi went too far. He betrayed his own ideology, and therefore couldn’t think of himself as the one in the right anymore. That’s why, I believe, forgetting about him was his only way to detach himself from a thought that might have mixed badly with his trauma and made him forget himself. But I’m no expert in psychology, and it’s unclear if Hori even wanted us to read that much into it. 

Of course, if Dabi was literally anyone else, I would dimiss all of this as him being the unrepentant villain type who sees all of his victims as the same… But this is Dabi. 

We’ve established that he doesn’t kill for fun, and there is virtually NO REASON for Horikoshi to show us this scene: 

if Dabi’s regret wasn’t genuine. As I said, this scene doesn’t make Dabi appear more villainous, but it has the opposite effect to make the reader sympathize with him by showing his human side. If HK wanted us to perceive him as the big bad guy, he would’ve left it at Dabi and Hawks’ confrontation. He would’ve closed the chapter on a portrayal of Dabi that stressed just how whimsical and ominous he can be. 

Instead, he shows us Dabi feeling guilt, not just for Snatch himself, but also for Snatch’s family. All of this, while his seams bleed for no apparent reason, like HK is trying to imply that Dabi’s being metaphorically (and not so metaphorically) torn apart by his regrets. And, remember, this is a couple of hours later than the fight, so he can’t still be bleeding from Miruko’s kick, as he was fine during his and Hawks’ little chat)

One might wonder: why does Dabi feel bad about killing Snatch, who is a hero who literally got in the way of achieving the League’s goals, but he doesn’t feel guilty about killing other villains? 

Well, just look at that. When the policeman was thrown out of a swerving car full speed, Snatch rushed to save him. Dabi even mocks him for it, having expected such behaviour, because that’s what a true hero would do. 

Snatch was a good egg in a system made up of bad eggs. Of course Dabi feels overwhelming guilt about killing him. 

Now, if you unpack all of this stuff in light of the theory that Dabi is Todoroki Touya, everything will make even more sense. 

- Why would a kid brought up to be a hero want to kill people for fun?

- Why would a kid who wasn’t rescued by anyone want to harm someone who prioritizes the citizen’s wellbeing and rushes to their rescue without a second thought?