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Before we begin I want to warn while abuse is a deeply personal matter, this is a story with fictional characters. We are doing literary criticism here which means we're only talking about events that happened in the text of the story itself.

This is an analysis on how these two stories TELL their abuse narrative, characters, themes, etc, and what works in one show tht doesn't work in the others. This is just about storytelling real life does not apply here.

Anyway, My Hero Academia and The Venture Bros seem like the weirdest shows to compare but they are actually pretty similiar. They are both action shows with heroes and villains that fight each other, that take inspiration from comics and also Genre Fiction as a whole.

What My Hero Academia is to Spiderman and Dragonball Z, Venture Bros is to Tom Swift Novels, the Hardy Boys, and old Hann-Barbera Cartoons. However, thy also use the genre they are riffing off of to tell stories with more personal themes revolving around family and abuse.

In a fun twist the basic premise of both shows is that the main characters exist in a society that's overflowing with superheroes, supervillains and are growing up in this weird chaotic comic book world.

1. Meet the Venture Brothers

If you've heard of the Venture Bros then you've probably heard of the premise that it's an adult parody of Johnny Quest. Johnny Quest for those of you who have a life and therefore haven't seen every old Hanna-Barbera Cartoon like I have is a show where eleven year old Johnny Quest travels around the world with his super scientist father Dr. Benton C. Quest and their bodyguard Race Bannon, going on adventures in Jungle Ruins or fighting villains. The Venture Bros is an animated adult comedy meant to poke holes in that premise.

In the Venture Bros the main character Dr. Thaddeus Venture is an emotionally abusive and heavily neglectful father who constantly exposes his sons to danger in his trips around the world. Their bodyguard Brock Samson is a hyper violent man who basically matches a thirteen year old's idea of masculinity is. The titular Venture Bros, Hank and Dean Venture are incredibly sheltered children who are understandably traumatized from the fact that people in costumes are constantly trying to kill them.

So the basic premise of the show lies in it's dark deconstruction of shows like Hardy Boys, Johnny Quest, these Tom Swift-esque stories where young boys go on adventures by showing the real dangers that children would be exposed to in that kind of life.

Between Johnny Quest, the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift, what is up with these pie-eyed youths chasing pirates and international diamond thieves and stuff like that? They would get their throats cut the minute that stumbled upon a hideout. And that would be the gag. - ART AND MAKING OF THE VENTURE BROS.

The show does explore the impact the dangers they were exposed to all throughout their childhood has on Hank and Dean, but despite the title of the show they are not the main characters. The protagonist is Doctor Thaddeus Venture who is unfortunately another victim of the Boy Adventuring Lifestyle.

Dr. Venture: "Who was, for 43 years, the only son of Dr. Jonas Venture? Who, from the ages of 3 to 17 accompanied him on hundreds of adventures the chilling memories of which rouse him from sleep in a cold sweat to this day?"

Thaddeus used to travel around the world with his father the super scientist Dr. Jonas Venture who was a far more succesful super scientist and hero. He was the star of the "Rusty Venture Show" a cartoon made of his childhood spent traveling around with his father.

A father who continually neglected and gaslit him throughout his childhood to the point of not allowing him to go to therapy, and acting as his therapist instead to tell him there was nothing wrong with his childhood and he's ungrateful. It's literally a scene in the show that Jonas Venture played therapist for his son to tell him to stop complaining.

Rusty: "So I don't know. Sometimes I wish I could just be a normal kid and go out and play with kids my own age and stuff. THe only people I get to hang out with are grown ups. The only place I get to leave the compound is to go someplace creepy, like the bermuda triangle, and then I get kidnapped, by grown ups. And I'm not even sure I want to be a super scientist when I grow up anyway, but I feel all this pressure because of my fa-It feels weird telling you this stuff." Jonas: "Remember Rusty, in here I'm your doctor not your father. Now let's get back to it shall we. You were telling me how you're ungrateful for all the opportunities your father's given you and you blame me for all your problems."

Rusty because of his terrible childhood was never able to be as good of a super-scientist his father was and remains a failure late into life. On top of that he's a washed up child star, who basically peaked when he was nine years old and never formed an identity outside of being the star of the Rusty Venture show. He drags his kids all around the world on crazy super science adventures because that's what he knows.

The central premise of the Venture Bros is that Rusty is basically stuck, both in his father's shadow, and in his days of child stardom and cannot meaningfully grow past either of those things despite the fact he is now a single father trying to raise two sons. The central theme is about the complicated nature of family, and how abuse cycles through three generations of this family. As Rusty is both the victim and the perpetrator of the abuse it makes sense he is the main character the story centers around because he's at the center of that cycle too.

It is a study of one family in particular to show the complexity of family. The themes can be summarized in one line said towards the end of the show:

"Just a watch. VMT Venture. Tells the time in two time zones. That fourth hand there? Little date window? Those are called complications. Complications make a watch special. More complications the more value. Read the engraving Jonas put on the back there. Elige Tua. It's Latin for Choose your family. Blood doesn't make a family, love does. Choose your family and remember that complications make it special."

In other words it's a seven season long show on how family is complciated, but it uses it's genre of super heroes and super villains and adventuring to tell that deeply personal story.

2. Keeping up with the Todorokis

My Hero Academia is about a lot of things, but the central premise is that in a society where power and strength of the quirk you were born with can determine a lot about your life, one boy without a quirk sets out to prove that anyone can be a hero. If Complciations make it special is the central theme of Venture Bros, then the central theme of My Hero Academia is two sentences. "All People are not created equal" and "Anyone can become someone's hero" both said at different points in the story. The story itself is about Deku's attempts to overcome the first statement, that he was not born equal but he deserves to be a hero as much as anyone else because he reflects what heros should be, a good, selfless person who will risk anything to save others.

The story isn't just about Deku though. The world and it's characters turns out to be much larger than that simple premise. We're not even going to talk about Deku in this post, but rather the Tritagonist Todoroki Shoto. Introduced in the first tournament arc of the series Todrooki is a foil to Deku someone who is born with an extremely powerful quirk, but who's been groomed from childhood to be a hero.

Shoto's father Enji Todoroki is All Might's ultimate rival, he was unable to surpass him in life always second place. In the world of MHA not only are there tons and tons of heroes, but they're highly commercialized and ranked by popularity and achievements and Enji has been number two his entire life. Unable to overcome his rival he decided to force his dream of number one hero on his son. He purchased a wife with an ice quirk for an arranged marriage with the purpose of having a child with a hybrid fire and ice quirk that would be more powerful than Enji himself. He had four children, and ignored the other three to train Shoto up as a hero, ignoring what Shoto wanted, training him until he puked, and then beating his wife when she tried to intervene and protect Shoto. Which culminated in the mental breakdown of his wife who threw boiling hot water on Shoto in a moment of weakness and was institutionalized for years after the fact.

That's a lot and I didn't even cover all of it. After this reveal of Shoto's backstory, Enji seems like he's only going to be a one note abuser to give Shoto a tragic backstory to angst over. However, later on in the show Enji is given what he wants and finally becomes the number one hero only to realize how empty his lifelong dream has been. He feels remorseful for the family he destroyed in pursuit of that dream and goes back trying to make ammends. After this point, Enji basically becomes the second most important character of the "Todoroki Family" story, a story about both the family's attempts to move on from the abuse and Enji to atone for his abuse of his wife and children. A lot of focus is put on Enji's remorse and atonement to the point where some accuse him of stealing the spotlight from his victims.

While the Todorokis are a sideplot in MHA, whereas the Ventures are the main focus of Venture Bros these two plots have a lot in common. They are basically families who are not allowed to have normal lives because the patriarch of the family is a costumed hero. The hero is also someone who is generally well-respected and is considered extremely succesful in their chosen career, but are terrible to their family members. They are a hero to the world and a villain to their own family. Both are analyzing this one specific case where a man has chosen to be a hero over being a father over and over and over again and the damage it's done to the people around them.

If there is a central premise to the Todoroki Family outside of MHA's analysis of what exactly makes a hero, it's this:

Todoroki Shoto: "As a hero this endeavor guy is pretty darn amazing. But it's just like Nasu said. I'm not ready to forgive you... for abusing mom. So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?"

The challenge is if Endeavor can choose his family over being a hero, and if Shoto can find a way to reconcile with his family as a whole and find some sort of normalcy with them. They are the two main characters of this plotline, Shoto wants to reconcile with this past and grow into his own person outside of his family whereas Enji wants to atone for the damage done to his family.

It is a pretty solid premise for a story and as I've said above I actually have no problem with an Endeavor like abuser being one of the main characters of this plotline.

You can even see some parallels in Venture Bros, as Rusty's main struggle is to try to be a father to his twin sons and help them grow up while at the same time struggling in this dangerous worlds of heroes and villains and super science. Rusty is a super scientist constantly getting chased around by guys in costumes, but he's also a normal father trying to raise two sons into adulhood with basically no idea what he's doing because his father didn't allow him to have a normal childhood either.

With both of these there's this comic booky setting where the dad going out and fighting costumed villains, but he's also expected to be a dad and raise a family which mixes the fantasy comic book stuff, with the more realistic themes of familial abuse.

However, as I said above in Rusty's case it's pretty uncontroversial that he is the main character of his story, whereas Enji starts fights within the fandom very time he appears onscreen.

Why is this exactly?

It's not because it's offensive to have an abuser be the main character, but rather how these characters are written in both of these stories, and how well they fit into those stories. As I said Rusty is naturally the main character of his story because he's the central link in the chain of abuse, but should Enji be the main character of the Todorokis? Does he fit as well as Rusty?

3. Who's your Daddy?

So as stated above Enji and Rusty simultaneously exist in worlds where there are heroes and villains in costumes running around and yet they are also normal people who are expected to have jobs, provie for their families and raise their kids. They both exist in what is basically the marvel universe, though in the case of Venture Bros it's the Marvel Universe fused with old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Because it's such a highly fantastical world some of the things both Enji and Rusty do are things that have no real life parallels. For example Rusty once created a machine using the soul of a dead orphan as a power supply. You can't do that in real life so I'm not going to use that as an example in talking about his parenting.

They're both high fantasy stories that depict things that would never happen in real life like costumed battles between heroes and villains but at the same time, they are drawing on real life parallels of parental abuse I'm going to be talking about those to tell what kind of neglectful parent each is.

Rusty raised Hank and Dean Venture as a single parent with the assistance of their body guard Brock Samson. They live on the Venture Compound and only leave when Rusty needs to take a trip around the world. Obviously, there's not many real life examples of parents taking their kids into egypt to fight mummies.

However, Rusty's main flaw as a parent is how much he shelters his children not allowing them to live their own lives or make their own choices. They are homeschooled until they are eighteen and almost never allowed to leave their home unsupervised. They are raised in special "learning beds" instead which educate them in their sleep which doesn't really have a real life parallel but he could be compared to a helicopter parent that feels the need to micromanage every aspect of their child's lives, sheltering them so much they're unprepared for the real world.

Rusty is a weird combination of controlling and neglectful, because while he doesn't let either of his children live normal lives or go to public school and they barely get to interact with kids their own age, he constantly exposes them to danger. He is often disinterested in his kid's lives and puts most of the burden of protecting them and raising them on his bodyguard Brock, while he chases after whatever super-science project is occupying him at the moment. Despite the fact he controls every aspect of their lives he doesn't seem to want to put the actual time and attention into raising his kids that they require. He's neglectful to dangerous extents too considering there are actual villains constantly targeting him and his family

Also, he lets them die a lot.

Hank and Dean have died several times over, only to be replaced by clones that Rusty grew in a lab with all the same memories. Once again there's no real life parallel to this, but it's interesting in the context of the show itself. Rusty isn't just putting his sons into situations that could get them killed by taking them on his journeys with them, he has gotten them killed several times over. Then he just clones them and keeps going. That in itself should make Rusty irredeemable but the show presents it in a more ambiguous light.

Dean: "You're telling me I'm a clone, that I'm not even Dean, that I'm some stupid science experiment." Ben: "No, no, no. You're Dean. There's no other Dean, you're it, flesh and blood. Look I was conceived in the back seat of a packard, you were conceived in a tank. So what?" Dean: "So I have no mommy? No nothing!?" Ben: "Dean, you have it all wrong. You have a mommy, and your dad is your dad. They made you by getting drunk and forgetting to wear a condem like everybody else, and your dad loved you so much that when you got a boo-boo, he kissed it and made it all better and made it go away." Dean: "You brought me back to life." Ben: "Yeah okay, well you and your brother had some pretty big boo boos. Have a kid one day, Dean. Hold it's lifeless body in your arms, and then tell me how wrong it is. Jonas, me, and yes your dad, saw it as nothing more than a fucking band-aid for a really big boo boo."

In the story itself it brings up the argument that if any parent was holding their dying child in their arms and they had a chance to see that kid with all the same memories and the exact same body that they'd be tempted to take it. That in the logic of the show this is practically the same thing as using magic to revive someone from the dead, just with super science instead. At the same time it's still terrible because Rusty let his sons die on multiple occasions and then just kept replacing them with clones because he had that safety net he didn't change his neglectful behavior.

Super-science aside, it is kind of a metaphor for Rusty as a parent as a whole for the first three seasons of the show, he's very controlling of them even to the point of playing god to bring them back from the dead when they die nd won't let them grow up into their own people. Hank and Dean have been cloned so many times that despite being nineteen years old they still believe they're sixteen. At the same time he's not interested in bonding or raising his children and so he just keeps on neglecting them to the point where they're continually exposed to danger.

It's also probably relevant to mention that Rusty himself is a clone and died and was replaced multiple times much like his sons, and the technology for cloning Hank and Dean was invented by his father Jonas.

However, after season 3 the cloning lab gets destroyed, and the body guard Brock leaves the family. There are no more extra Deans and Hanks running around so if one of them dies this time it's permanent. With the safety net removed Rusty actually starts taking a more active role in both of his child's lives. This is basically a mirror to Endeavor's moment of realization after getting number one hero that his entire family has grown up without him and they all resent him.

Season four onwards Hank and Dean develop into their own people outside of Rusty. He responds to them in different ways but he's actually parenting them this time instead of shoving them away like annoyances. Hank becomes rebellious and fights back against Rusty for a long time after Brock leaves because he no longer has a role model and Rusty's response is to always get strict and punish him hard for the strongest disobedience.

Whereas when Dean rebels not only does Rusty tolerate it, he also spends a lot more time in Dean's life trying to push him into the direction of being a super-scientist like him, supporting his efforts to go to college, while basically ignoring Hank. It's a running gag in the show that Dean is obviously Rusty's favorite, but even when playing favorites Rusty by this point in the show has reasons for why he's making those parenting choices.

Rusty: "Dean believes in this crap! He should have been Rusty Venture, Boy adventurer. Hank got this life thrown at him. And he fights against it. Just like I did."

Rusty playing favorites comes from an attempt to overcorrect for both children. He rejects Hank because he believes Hank doesn't want to be a boy adventure and therefore is trying to push him away from a lifestyle he doesn't want for his own sake. Whereas, he believes that Dean embraces the super scientist lifestyle and he tries to mentor Dean into another scientist like hismelf therefore he gives Dean most of his attention because he thinks Dean needs that guidance from him.

Of course, Rusty is totally wrong about his sons. If anything Hank is the one who wants to be an adventurer whereas nervous and anxious Dean just wants a normal life and to be his own person outside of his father and is family but the way Rusty misunderstands his sons is pretty understandable. Parents don't always understand their children. He's not actively malicious, he's just misguided in what he thinks is best for each of his sons. He's not really even playing favorites in this case he's choosing to parent his sons differently based on what's best for each of them, it's just in this case father doesn't know best.

Rusty isn't a stagnant character, but also there's no big redemption arc for him the way there is Endeavor. Rusty has no point where he faces the screen and narrates about how he has to atone for the sins of his family. He just sort of stumbles along as the same dysfunctional mess, but over the course of seven seasons he gets bonding moment with his sons and we see him acting more and more like a parent, like Rusty himself grows up from eternally clinging to his childhood stardom while letting his sons grow up into adulthood. The fact that Rusty doesn't really have a "redemption arc" also means that the narrative isn't really trying to spin his actions anyway. It's just showing you Rusty as he is, and with all the bad things he does he's still capable of loving his sons.

The question isn't really "Is Rusty redeemable?" but "When is Rusty gonna grow up?"

Then there's Endeavor (everyone starts booing) who is simultaneously a much better, and far worse person than Rusty.

Enji is honestly more comparable to Jonas, an incredibly succesful hero who built a career and an empire in heroics and fame and then tried to force his son into that same lifestyle. A person who is beloved by the public and has skeletons in their closet in regards to their own family. He's the exploration of that same idea a supposedly great man with skeletons in his closet. Enji technically has saved thousands of people (such as Hawks one of the other main heroes) with his actions as a hero, but then he went home to beat his wife.

Enji is at least a better hero than Rusty, because Rusty is an incompetent mad scientist who does stuff like accidentally mutate college interns and build death rays.

However, as a parent strip away his status as a hero and Enji is little more than a show parent, pushing his children into a life they don't want in an attempt to live vicariously through them. Once again, resembling Jonas more than he really does Rusty.

As stated above Enji gave up on his ambition to be the number one hero and so he decided to create a son with the right quirk to surpass All Might. He then pressured a woman into an arranged marriage, basically purchasing her from her parents and conceived four children with her only the last of which he actually raised. He also forced the last one to basically train nonstop since childhood and controlled every aspect of his life forcing him to follow in his footsteps while neglecting the other three.

Chapters 301-302 the wrong way to put out a fire, detail the slow descent of the Todoroki Household from Enji entering an arranged marriage with bad intention to create an ideal child to be heir to his legacy, into a full on child abuser. Enji is written like a normal person falling into a cycle of abuse, he never intended to hurt his children at first. In fact he's shown positively bonding with his first born son who seems eager to learn to use his fire based quirk. He even mentions multiple times that he was alright at the time with the idea of Toya being the one to succeed him and he even gave up on the idea of breeding a genetically perfect child.

Enji only had kids to carry on his legacy, and only bonded with Toya because Toya was eager to participate in the training and become his heir. However, to give Enji some backstory it's quite clear the death of Enji's own father at a young age left him with no idea on how a father should act.

At a young age Enji witnessed his father attempt to save an innocent girl only to end up a burnt up corpse, and probably at that point conflated strength with being a good father. If his father had been strong enough he would have survived and continued to be a father to young Enji. At that point it's almost understandable that Enji thinks in his mind that earning his keep as the patriarch of the family, and being a powerful hero who will come home alive is the same thing as being a good father because his own absent father failed him simply because he wasn't strong enough to defeat a villain.

So Enji conflates toxically masculine ideals of strength and heroism with being a good father, all the while not actually showing up to parent his kids. Strength = Good. Weakness = Bad. When Toya seemed like he could live up to Enji's expectations and be strong as a successor everything seemed fine.

However, Toya turned out to be disabled at which point everything in the household began to decline. After learning Toya could not use his quirk without burning himself, Enji tossed Toya aside and left raising him entirely up to Rei and then pressured her to have more children until one with his ideal quirk would be born.

Toya did not like his father ignoring him and began acting out for his attention. The response of everyone in the household was to politely tell Toya to shut up, because Enji wielded all the money and authority in the household and no one could stand up to him. When Toya's acting up gottoo out of hand, Enji would even hit Rei instead of just personally dealing with his son.

At the same time Shoto was finally born and being given his perfect heir after four attempts, Enji eagerly began training him. When Shoto did not want to be trained the same way that Toya did, Enji stepped up to threats of physical violence and long grueling training sessions to force him to learn. All the while Toya continued to mentally spiral.

One day after his flames turned blue Toya asked his father to meet with him on Sekoto Peak. However that day Enji didn't show up, and Toya lost control of his flames starting a massive forest fire that killed him. Enji's neglect of his own son literally got him killed and afterwards rather than changing anything about the way he parented his kids, he just pushed Shoto even harder.

So on paper Rusty looks like a far worse parent, because he got his kids killed multiple times and replaced them with clones. Enji only let one son die. That sure was a ridiculous pair of sentences to type.

As a parent though Rusty is far less malicious. He neglects his kids similiarly to Enji at first, but when the safety net is removed and he can't keep cloning them anymore he actually does start taking a personal interest in their lives. Maybe it's too little too late because it's the 14th version of Hank and Dean but he does hear the wake up call and change his ways as a parent.

Enji always doubles down on ignoring his sons in favor of heroics when given the chance to be a father.

Even post redemptoin arc Enji behaves in the same way. There is no point in the story so far where Enji actively chooses to help or be a parent to one of his sons, when he can choose to be a part of a big important battle instead. Let me break out the list:

In the Pro Hero Arc Shoto sets the challenge for Enji to show what he can be like as a father rather than a hero.

In the internship arc Enji trains Shoto up as a hero but not a father. When he brings the family home to dinner they're attacked by a villain and Enji stands and watches as his son Natsuo gets kidnapped y a villain because he felt like it would be too awkward if he saved Natsuo because then Natsuo might feel inclined to forgive him.

In the War Arc aftewards Toya is revealed to be alive the entire time, and when given the chance to see his dead son come back to life, Enji not only does nothing but he sits and watches as his oldest son tries to kill his youngest without trying to talk to or appeal to Toya.

After the war arc, Enji doesn't bother looking for Toya and goes back to his job as a hero hunting down AFO. He also makes a promise to Shoto that they'll search for Toya together, only to break that promise multiple times.

In the second war arc, when Enji is given a chance to face Toya face to face, he instead sends his other son Shoto to fight him, while Enji fights against the big bad instead as the number one hero.

When Toya is literally dying and about to burn himself alive in front of him, Enji who has chosen to run away from Toya too many times by this point picks the murder suicide option and chooses to try dying with his son in a heroic sacrifice.

Every single chance he is given to act like a father, he acts like a hero instead. Enji Todoroki never steps out of the role of the hero Endeavor. While we are given several moments of his redemption, his remorse for his actions, his internal struggle with how he can possibly atone, and even moments where he realizes the error of his ways and apologizes for them we never see him actually act like a parent.

Which is I think a fundamental difference in Rusty and Enji in how they're written. Rusty is a heavily flawd parent, but he's still a parent.

He does favor Dean over Hank, but that favoritism takes the form of him giving Hank more chores when Hank acts out, but when it's time for Dean to rebel giving him space and letting him have his own separate room in the attic. It's Rusty letting Dean have access to the family checkbook so he'll have spending money at college, but cutting Hank off from the checkbook because they agreed if Hank didn't want to go to college he needed to find a job to support himself.

Rusty is parenting these children. He's parenting them very badly, but he's still their parent. Enji wanted to be a parent to begin with he wanted a kid he could coach into becoming a hero stronger than All Might. Then twenty years later he realized he has three children he's never even raised and the one he did raise resents him.

I'm not saying that Enji is irredeemable, just that Rusty is a heavily flawed parent but Enji hasn't been a parent in these kid's lives whatsoever. He's more like their abusive gymnastics coach trying to push them towards the olympics.

If you ignore the fantastic circumstances, the heroes, the villains, the clones, the mad scientists, then you're left with how they treat their kids. Rusty has absolutely no idea what he's doing because of his own childhood raised by a man far worse than him, so even when he has good intentions he screws up. Enji doesn't have good intentions for his kid, he had those kids to surpass All Might. He controls everything in his household. He isolates Shoto from his siblings all so he'll have complete control over his heir. Rusty has no idea what he's doing, Enji knows exactly what he's doing, he's intentionally doing all of these things to raise an obedient heir. As opposed to Rusty who exposes his kids to the dangerous boy adventuring lifestyle because that's exactly how he grew up and he doesn't know any better.

Enji for most of his life didn't want kids, he wanted heirs. He even purchased a woman so his heirs would turn out with the right genetics, and tossed aside the ones that were disabled or born with the wrong quirk.

Rusty made the decision to become a parent on his own. In the last twist in the series it's revealed Dean and Hank had no mother. They were conceived in a test tube, raised in an artificial womb by Rusty himself. He is both their father and their mother. Kids were a deliberate decision on his part. He wanted to have a family, probably because his own childhood was so deprived of any familial love.

Dean: Okay, so who is our mom? Rusty: Seriously, Dean haven't we had enough family history for one day? I don't even know who my mom is. All you need to know is that the person who gave birth to you. I promise they do.

Remember as stated above the central thesis statement of Venture Bros is "Elige Tua - Choose your family". Rusty chose to bring those kids into the world because he wanted to be a father, it's an active choice his character makes.

Whereas the central statement of Endeavor's arc is "So, heroics aside. What sort of dad are you going to be? That's what I want to find out?" but we never witness Enji doing anything outside of being a hero. Enji chose to have a family so he could have a son that was a better hero than he was. Then, later on when he's come to realize how he's neglected his family for twenty years he's challenged to choose his family. Toya as a character presents this challenge to him, because he's Enji's son, but he's also a villain who's killed innocent people. If he's acting as a hero he has to put a stop to Toya, but as a father his dead son has returned to him.

We never see Enji make that choice to be Toya's father over a hero. Which is why in story he comes off as a worse father than someone like Rusty, because he never actually acts like a parent or makes an attempt to emotionally bond with his children. Rusty will sit Hank and Dean down and tell them stories from his childhood. He'll find common ground with his sons to bond over because they've both been subjected to the boy adventurer lifestyle.

Rusty: Dean what are you doing? Dean: Hyperventilating into my knees. That smell a little like spit up... because I spit up a little. Rusty: Dean, you just baby burped onto a speed suit. Not a super scientist alive that hasn't coughed a little acid onto his speed suit. Dean: Really? Rusty: Why do you think these things are like 95 percent polyester? You can clean off fear-vomit with a wet nap. Dean: I thought you were used to this. Rusty: Dean I remember when the action man would wake me up with a gun pointed at my head. He'd just hold it there and pull the trigger. I'd hear the click really loud because it was right against my forehead. Dean: So it echoed. Rusty: Right, it sounded like he snapped one of my teeth out. Click! Then he'd go, "Not day Rusty. Not Today." Dean: Golly, and you took it because you had to? Rusty: No Dean, I took it because I was Rusty Venture. Boy adventurer. I didn't ask for this life, Dean, but it's mine. Sure, I fall down in the Speed Suit but I get up and Wet-Nap my puke off.

We never get any moments like this with Endeavor and his kids.

He only goes so far as apologizing for his past abuse, he never choses to be a father instead of being a hero. Some people might argue about whether Enji's apology is "enough" or "sincere" or whatever, but that's kind of missing the point.

Whether Enji is "redeemed" for his past actions or not is kind of an irrelevant, because the question was "What sort of dad are you going to be?"

The narrative challenged him to learn to act like a father to his family, and he never did. He stayed in the role of hero from beginning to end, so we can only ask if he's redeemed as a hero now. You could make an argument he is in that sense, because he's less selfish, he's remorseful, and he's now fighting for better reasons to protect others instead of just to be the strongest.

They're both awful people but at the end of the day Rusty is a father, and Enji is not.

Stories are kind of like essays your english teacher used to force you to read. You need to make a thesis statement in the story itself, and then have evidence to support that thesis statement. The theme of Venture Bros is choose your family, and family is complicated, and in support of that theme we have Rusty's decision to bring kids into the world and then bonding with both sons over how complciated being a "venture" is.

The actions Enji takes in his story don't line up with his thesis statement. The Todoroki Family subplot is supposed to be about how one family was messed up because Enji only chose to have a family to further his career as a hero, and choosing his career again and again made things worse. The thesis statement was that Enji needed to choose to be a dad, but then he never actually does that in the story proper.

So Enji as a character seems like he doesn't fit in with his narrative. Which is what I said at the very beginning about Rusty and why he works as a main character. Rusty is the center, because he's had this horrible life inflicted on him by his father, and he's in the process of raising his sons but he still has a chance to choose to be better.

Enji could also work as the center of his story, he has a chance to choose his family over his work as a hero, but he's ultimately not the one who does that, it's Shoto. Which yes Shoto is the "main" main character of the Todoroki plotline, but by the end Enji's gotten as much screentime as his son. If the plot was going to focus on Shoto and his choices to begin with then he should have been the central point. You spent a lot of in story time asking this question with Enji on whether or not he's going to be able to choose to be a father over a hero, only to not answer it in a satisfying way.

This again has nothing to do with Enji the person and whether I think he's likable or not, because Enji's a fictional character. He's an idea. If writing is communication, then a writer is trying to communciate some idea with every character in their novel. We're asking what is the author trying to say with Enji, and do they do a good job of getting that message across?

4. What's the Big Idea?

So the above section was mainly about the personal arcs of each characters: How do both of them fail at fatherhood and do they learn to be better fathers over the course of their narratives?

However, these characters are part of a much bigger world. How a character interacts with both the world around them, and the extended cast of characters is another way a story relates it's theme.

Venture Bros and My Hero Academia both exist in comic book worlds. There are people running around in costumes calling themselves heroes and villains and fighting each other on the streets.

In My Hero Academia heroes are basically professional athletes who sell sports drinks and pose for ads and compete for rankings on a big board, and heroics for the most part has been reduced to a day job for people with particularly powerful quirks. Heroism is an entire industry that's for profit, and run by the shadowy hero council who has far more power over their society than they let onto. You could compare Endeavor being the top hero to him being an incredibly succesful and wealthy salaryman in real life japanese society. Though he'd probably be like a CEO or something.

Ironically, the worldbuilding of Venture Bros is pretty similiar. In Venture Bros. the villains are all unionized. There is a super villain trade union. It's a secret organization known as the guild of calamitous intent, which makes villainy into a bureaucracy.

All villains in the world have to register with the guild. If you're a part of the guild you receive the protection that the guild offers, as long as you follow the guilds rules and regulations. There's lots of small rules, like you can't torture someone who's having a medical issue, and if you're fighting a good guy and they have a doctor's appointment you have to let them go.

They even rank heroes and villains by their threat levels called "EMA LEVELS (equally matched aggression) and then assign you a hero who's about your equal so you won't get killed by someone way stronger than you. The guild basically decides who you're allowed to fight as a villain and picks a hero for you. The act of being someone's arch villain is called "arching" you show up to harass them once a week like a saturday morning cartoon villain, fight them, then do it again next week. You're not allowed to kill your hero and you're supposed to follow specific rules. The tradeoff is the heroes won't kill you either, because you have guild protection.

The Monarch: I don't know, just keep it cat and mouse not cat and missile. JJ:: So it's a game? We fake fight? That's ridiculous. The Monarch: No, it's like fencing, it's about the art of the fight. JJ: Well, I'm about to deliver my killing stroke. Then what? Dr. Girlfriend: Then the guild steps up their game. You throw a rock, they throw a knife. You throw a knife, they come to your house when you're sleeping and murder your family. The Monarch: Look Dr. Venture you call the guild and you get the damn rulebook, I'll be waiting.

The justification for why the guild exists is that in world if you didn't give the villains a system with a bunch of rules, then you'd have a bunch of crazy people in costumes running around causing havoc.

Brock: You wanna what? Shoot him? And all his men and his wife? You could steal his cattle, too. Maybe burn his village down? JJ: It's an antiquated system. I mean my father did this fake arch enemy nonsense in the sxities. Maybe my brother is good with this namby pamby guy in a costume chases you around nonsense, but I'm not. Brock: Hey no disrespect Jonas, but it isn't so easy. These guys like their system. It's what they do. You take that away and you're looking at a bunch of pissed off nut bags with ray guns, and giant -- i don't know, a giant octopus / tank with laser eyes.

The villains and the OSI (who are like the GI JOE) of this world have signed a very long and detailed treaty that keeps both sides in a cold world stalemate and lets them fight every week like how the good guys and bad guys fight in saturday morning cartoons while keeping a status quo.

In MHA heroics is a commodity. It's commercialized and sold to the public. Heroes are like professional athletes selling you sports drinks, it's a spectacle to the public, and it's even intentionally made to be that way by the Hero Commission who use heroes as a bright shining light to distract the public while they do shady things like assassinate anti-government protestors from behind the scenes. The entire of hero society in MHA is built on the spectacle of heroes.

In Venture Bros heroes and villains are a spectacle too. It's just a job to them. Heroes and villains both show up to work, get in their costumes, fight each other and then go home. In Season 6 of Venture Bros, a parody of the Avengers is actively charging people to provide their services as heroes in the city of New York and you have to sign up for a protection plan if you want to get saved. Then the local mob boss takes a cut of the protection money they're charging.

In both settings the ideas of heroes exist, comic books exist, but the heroes themselves are incredibly mundane, they're just people showing up to jobs and making money for the most part. The only difference really is that in MHA the villains are societal rejects and trauma victims, whereas in Venture Bros they've unionized. In Venture Bros the villains and heroes basically fake fight under strict rules. Even in MHA though the villains need to exist in order to give the heroes someone to fight in front of the public. "Villain" is an actual legal term for a certain kind of quirk crimminal with more than three stirkes who gets sent to a super max prison if they're caught.

Both of these works are making comic book heroes and villains seem a lot more mundane by deconstructing them with this layer of realism. By making the roles of "hero" and "villain" seem much more mundane, and therefore more human, it also asks us to look at the characters who call themselves heroes and villains as human beings.

The Venture Bros like many richer takes on superhero stories really likes to play with the concept of identity. It's the idea that Good and Evil, Heroes and Villains, are just roles we play. They're not something fundamental or innate they're constructed by the world around us. In the show the main villainous organization the GCI is really just a bureaucracy of larpers sustaining their violent rolelplaying through organized crime. Rich and powerful lunatics who built the world around a game they wanted to play. There's really nothing of substance keeping Rusty on the "Good Guy" side. The good guys are also a mix and match. Shield, GI JOE, FBI. Another exmaple of people who never grew up. Only these people are running things, playing out their childhood power fantasies. They're barely less insane and blood thirsty than the bad guys. So what's even the point of being a good guy in the first place? That's the world Rusty is caught between...[x]

MHA and Venture Bros are both works that feature societies that divide people into two distinct categories "hero" and "villain" and then go on to show that these two categories are not as black and white as they would like us to believe.

Venture Bros features Brock Samson, a character who is ostensibly on the side of the good guys who is also the most trigger happy character in the show, who probably has the highest body count of nameless henchman who we see him gleefully kill onscreen over and over again. There are members of the OSI who are just as trigger happy as the guild so what's the difference between them besides what they've decided to personally identify as? On one side you have the larpers who are roleplaying villainy, and on the other you have people who think that they're in GI JOE.

In My Hero Academia you have the slightly less funny version of heroes who are essentially state sponsored peace keepers who suppress anyone who disrupts the status quo with violence, and villains who are rejected from that status quo who eventually turn into violent terrorists. While yes heroes have the responsibility of protecting innocent civilians, most of what heroes do is fight villains, in fact heroes with quirks suited to rescuing people aren't nearly than ones with flashy violent quirks like Endeavor. You have two sides and one calls themselves villains and the others heroes, but they both use extreme violence as a way to accomplish their goals.

Rusty and Enji are two characters who are caught between these two categories which seem distinct and seperate but really blur together and become the same.

Enji is basically the first deconstruction of heroes in MHA. He's a hero who's not interested in saving people, or giving the public ease, but instead wants to be the strongest and does everything out of a selfish pursuit for that goal. He's simultaneously the hero with the single most resolved cases in history, who's constantly praised as being extremely good and efficient at his job, but at the same time he's always number two to All Might because he's not "super" enough of a super hero. In a manga where Deku's natural desire to save others make him a candidate to bea hero even without a quirk, we have a character who's a hero for purely selfish reasons. One that only cares about having the strongest quirk because being the best is all that matters to Enji.

In many ways the way Enji treats his family is more like a villain than a hero. AFO himself comments at one point he wasn't able to manipulate Toya, because his father did too good of a job manipulating him already. In fact you can draw a parallel between his actions of manipulating and grooming Shoto to be his heir, to the main villain of the series AFO treating Shigaraki Tomura the same way.

However, this is a good thing. By making Enji a hard to swallow character who's simultaneously done heroic things, and yet done awful things we can't easily label him as hero or villain and it makes us think about who he is as a person instead.

There's an entire episode dedicated to a villain Mentor named Dr. Henry Killinger, showing up and basically mentoring Rusty Venture when he's at a low point. He gives Rusty money, workers, gets his business up and running again and at the very end reveals that he's setting Rusty up to be a villain to arch his brother as a hero. Rusty is tempted with the idea that he'd make a much more succesful villain than he ever would be a hero (because as a hero he's kind of just a loser who can never measure up to his dad or brother) but he still chooses to be a hero at the end of the story because he doesn't want to fight his brother. At which point his mentor, all his hired men, all just walk off and he loses all the money he would have gained and he goes back to being a mediocre super-scientist.

"Doc has the whole thing laid out for him clear as day. This role is here for you. Waiting for you to claim it. You have your nemesis. You have your means. You have the ability and the pain. You can do this and you'd be good at it. And Rusty can look at all of that, everything he's been through and say, "Yeah... but I don't wanna be evil." [x]

Rusty walks away from the chance to be a villain, but he's not exactly a hero either. He runs illegal cloning farms, he brings people back from the dead and sells them to the us military, he builds disintegration rays, he does lots of unethical scientific stuff and he's not even remotely the hero his father was considered to be. He also usually doesn't go out of his way to save people unless you cajole him into it.

Because he doesn't fit well into the category of hero or villain, the show instead asks you to evaluate who Rusty is as a person. He's one of the few characters in the show that's capable of stepping out of those categories.

"That's the great thing about him. Sometimes being disillusioned just means you can see through the whole thing. Sure the whole super science villain game feels stupid. It's not going anywhere. No one's accomplishing anything. It's all violence and roleplay. But at the end of the day it's still real. And it still means something to us. Choosing to be a villain means choosing to be a bad guy. It means relinquishing the premise that you could ever do better, ever actually help anyone. And that's not who Rusty is. He's a scum-bag, but he's a grown up. Even in a show with brilliant characters, old pros, and actual supermen, Rusty is the adult. And adults don't put on rubber masks and terrorize people for fun because that would be fucking silly." - [x]

Rusty spent his entire childhood being terrorized by guys in costumes, he's so used to the hero and villain shenanigans that it's placed him in the role of cynical straight man. He's the one normal person among the crazy people who like to dress up in costumes and fight each other. What makes him the sane man is because he doesn't fit into either role of hero or villain.

Rusty is just too incompetent to ever be like his father. Jonas Venture is a scumbag like Rusty, but he's also a well-respected scientist and a world wide hero. Everyone in the scientific community thinks that Rusty is a joke, and his friends just barely put up with him. The world remembers him as a child star, he basically peaked when he was nine years old and it's downhill from there.

Jonas gets away with it because he perfectly fit what society's idea of a hyper masculine strong hero was, and no one questioned it or how he treated his son, whereas because balding, impotent, pathetic Rusty falls so short of toxic masculinity's standards he doesn't get the same respect or leeway that Jonas did. Jonas Venture continually got away with murder, and Rusty can't get away with anything. He's a pill-popping, middle aged man who ran his father's business empire into the ground who continually gets laughed out of any scientific conference he tries to attend.

He can't be a hero. He can't be his father. He can't reach the impossible idea of toxic masculinity his father represented. The only way in which he's better than his father is that he's a much better father to both of his sons. His greatest triumphs as a character come from him just being a better person than his father, and a better father in his son's lives something his father for all of his great accomplishments wasn't capable of because he didn't really care about anyone but himself. Jonas Venture is someone who perfectly fit society's standards of masculinity, but he wasn't a person outside of that.

"Jonas Sr realized this too, but to him, it was a joke. To him it meant being above everyone. Rusty can't be above everyone so he has to meet them at eye level. Part of the bitterness of growing up is realizing that we're all just chidlren who got old. No one knows what they're doing and when you come to terms with that you can look down on people or give them the respect everyone deserves. How you treat children says a lot about how you treat people which in turn says a lot about you." [x]

Now returning to Endeavor we run into the same problem that we did earlier. This whole post is comparing Rusty and Endeavor because they are the protagonists, but Endeavor is far more like Jonas. He's someone who sees through the hero system and only cares about climbing to the top out of his own self interest.

Enji even sort of looks like Jonas.

They're both extremely bulky men who are at their peak levels of physical fitness, they're what you think of when you think strong, masculine man. Meanwhile Rusty is a balding, unattractive and out of shape middle aged man.

In story onas is still widley beloved by the public and is constantly praised, while no one but Rusty is aware of his faults, but there'a a reason for that. Jonas is someone who is basically allowed to do anything he wants, because he fits perfectly into the box of what society considers masculinity to be. Jonas is also someone who literally uses his position as a hero to manipulate people into getting what he wants and glorify himself.

Jonas can casually destroy people's lives, all while still believing he's the good guy because in his world being good guy is just a role to play and he plays it well. One of the best three episodes of the series is the Morphic Trilogy, the opening to season 7 where some of Jonas's past crimes are revealed.

In the past he tricked a married man into making a sex tape with him, and then when that man Don Carraldo aka the Blue Morpho turned out to regret that, he used the tape to constantly blackmail him into doing his dirty work. Killing people in secret while Jonas Venture remained Squeaky clean. After years of being forced to act as a mercenary for Jonas, the Blue Morpho died in a plane crash. Jonas then revived his best friend as a cyborg. He got bored of his new cyborg within a few months and reassigned him to babysit his son Rusty. THe cyborg glitched and started to strangle Rusty and then he snaps his friends neck, and throws the cyborg away in the garbage.

Jonas can use his power and influence to just completely destroy a man's life because he has the power to do so. Because everyone around him enables him and no one is going to stop him. Because this is how people in power act when they're given too much power. Because might does not make right.

He's the gold standard. He's the ideal. Who would question him?

Enji occupies a similiar position in the story, where he fits the role of a hero so well that even when his family abuse is revealed to the public basically every character and their mom is tripping over themselves to defend him.

Jonas is constantly praised in story years after his death and every bad thing he's done is swept under the rug, but that's because number one Jonas was a manipulative monster, and number two it shows the ideals that Jonas is supposed to represent, the ideal of masculinity, is actually false and toxic. When people bend over backwards to defend Endeavor what does it say exactly? Because we're supposed to believe that Enji's a genuinely remorseful person on his way to redemption who knows he's done wrong things in the past and is willing to work for redemption even if people don't forgive him. We're not supposed to think Enji is a manipulative monster intentionally bending people around his finger like Jonas was.

There are some ways Enji is like Jonas, especially in his backstory. He did use his money and influence to buy a woman. Rei was definitely not going to get the option of divorcing him if she actually wanted to leave, something that's hard enough to obtain in japanese society without a rich husband who has the purse strings.

However, in the present time we don't see Enji doing the kind of manipulation that Jonas does, because really he doesn't have to. Hawks does it for him. There is a character in the narrative named Takami Keigo who is a little boy that Enji indirectly saved as a child by putting his father in prison. Because of this he is obsessed with making Endeavor live up to the hero he imagined him to be when he was young, and does everything he can to prop Enji up behind the scenes and make him look like that hero to the public.

Hawks is a whole other can of worms, but in effect what this means is there is someone manipulating public opinion in favor of Endeavor so he'll be able to shine in spite of the numerous skeletons in his closet, it's just not Endeavor himself. Hawks also takes away a lot of the active decisions on Endeavor's part. When Endeavor chooses to ignore Toya in the latter part of the story, it's not Endeavor's choice, he's just following Hawks plan.

The result is that Endeavor comes off as less of a Jonas, after all he's not manipulating people on purpose, that's Hawks doing it for him... he's no longer the seflish egotist manipulating both his family and the public opinion for his own personal gain... but if he's not Jonas then who is he in the story?

The entire point of this post is to compare Enji to Rusty, but Enji's far too succesful to be Rusty. Rusty is a failure in basically everything he set out to do in life. He's the butt of the series jokes. He's the victim in as many ways as he's the perpetrator. He had a lot of money and then wasted it all. None of his inventions are succesful. The scientific community thinks he's a joke, or they don't even know who he is. Women won't even go near him. Even his friends barely tolerate him. No one ever defends him. At no point in the story does someone stop and say "Hey, Hank I know your dad's an asshole but he's really good at science so that makes it okay."

Rusty's such a failure at being a hero that he's forced to be a person. He compeltely fails at the toxic masculinity ideal he's striving for, and shows us how empty it is. He's as equally narcissticic and toxic as his father, he treats women like objects for sex ad comfort like his father does, he just doesn't get away with it. There's nothing to glorify about Rusty because he's just an out of shape bald guy. You can't point to some heroic feat of his that justifies his toxic behavior because he doesn't have any.

The story however can't stop singing Enji's praises for what a good hero he is. He's never forced to step out of the role of hero and be a person like Rusty is, and because of that the message of his character becomes confused.

Are we supposed to think he's a manipulative narcissist like Jonas is? Are we supposed to think he's an incredibly flawed individual trying to figure out how to be a father late into his kid's lives like Rusty?

Rusty has a clear role in his story, and Enji's role is unclear and messy. I know what the writers are trying to say with Rusty, because the writers crafted him with a clear vision in mind.

Everyone praises Jonas to death and no one can see him for the terrible purpose he is, because that's the point. Venture Bros is about failure. It's about the death of the space age. It's about how much the boomer generation sucked.

From the Radiant is the Baboon Heart Commentary. Question: Did Jonas only keep Rusty around for the press and his cloning tech or did he actually care about him? Answer: . The show has a villain called the monarch, but if you watch all the show the villain is Jonas Venture Sr. He is a bad dad. What you need to realize is that in this kind of baby boomers gen x millenials kind of thing we are of the generation that had bad parents. For the good and the bad of it. The good was we were all left alone by our parents, and we had a freedom in our thought that I don't think the millennials have. Because we made the millennials, and we were like You know what Our parents suck and we're gonna be great parents." And they helicoptered them and they gave playdates. [...] I did hate the boomers, they were awful fathers they were terrible people they did horrible things to our world, and at the time they were celebrated as good people. They were a bunch of hippies and they failed and they did everything wrong that they wanted to fix [...]. You and I are lost people we observed our generation. We are fully aware of it. We observed our parents generation. My actual father was a classic distant father, very bright had a lot of work to do, but I observed that generation and the way that toxic masculinity was set in stone. Just branded onto their tombstone. Toxic masculinity. Our generation grew up wanting to be adults, childhood was something that was not examined. When people were growing up we wanted to be grown ups, we wanted to wear suits, it was something you guys don't have. It was a very different way to grow up. So we wanted to be like this generation that immediately we looked at and went oh my god they're monsters. So Jonas Venture Sr. is a monster.

Jonas is a commentary on how much the boomer generation is glorified, and how much they suck if you look at them critically at all. It's written by authors who were observing basically three different generations of parenting, the way boomers parented, the ways Gen-Xers did in response to that and now the way millenials act as they reach adutlhood. Rusty can't escape Jonas' shadow because Toxic Masculinity is set in stone.

The role of Jonas in the story is to serve as an antagonist to Rusty and be the cause of Rusty's struggles, and also his impetus to change bacause Rusty doesn't want to be like his father. Rusty and Jonas both exist as characters to show the author's observations on parenting through the generations, and yeah it's a very american idea of parenting and family but it's you know... a cartoon made in america.

What is Endeavor's role of the story? If he's a criticism of toxic masculinity he's not criticisized enough, because the story spends just as much time glorifying him for his heroic traits as they do criticizing him. There's no scenes like this for Rusty to show off how cool he is, or how determined. The story wants you to believe that there's something redeeming in the fact that Enji is always struggling to be the greatest, even though his obsession with being number one is what caused him to abuse his family in the first place

It's crticizing and praising Enji's obsession with power in the same breath, because My Hero Academia can't fully deconstruct toxic masculinity the way that Venture Bros can. It would never treat Endeavor the way it treats Rusty, constantly humiliating him or making him the butt of jokes. It would never make Enji out to be weak or pathetic the way Rusty is.

The central concept of Endeavor is struggle. Endeavor means to try hard to achieve something and Enji means effort. His entire character is based around the concept of struggle. His central struggle is that he's a normal guy trying to compete with a superhero like all might, and everything he does he struggles with even if that struggle is pointless.

However, in the actual narrative itself he doesn't struggle. He definitely doesn't struggle the way Rusty does. Rusty's a lazy, incompetent, and entitled man sitting on a pile of money he didn't earn who thinks he's entitled to more who fails at all he sets out to achieve. He is constantly getting his butt kicked by the narrative for being a flawed person. Rusty never gets what he wants, and even when he does get what he wants like when his brother leaves him a billion dollar corporation in his will, he bankrupts that company in two seasons. Struggle means that the world isn't going to give you what you want and you keep fighting anyway.

Endeavor's never subjected to nearly the same amount of narrative punishment that Rusty is. He's still well-respected. People defend him. His family talks to him. He's still rich. He fights in all the major battles of the series and gets victories. No one's disgusted when they hear that he's a wife beater. We are told that he struggles, that the central concept of his character is struggle but we're never shown him facing any difficulties at all that aren't fighting villains. As I've said above several times, Enji's never really forced to step out of the role as hero because he's not a failure the way Rusty is.

My Hero Academia hits some of the same notes. It's criticizing japanese hegemonic masculinity, specifically that of salaryman masculinity and the way men in japan completely put their careers over their families. Read about it here in this convenient power point presentation. Enji is essentially an incredibly succcesful salaryman who has completely disappeared from his kid's lives in order to earn money and success and believes that he's still entitled to be a father because he's performed adequately in his role as earner and head of the household.

Enji is pretty obviously inspired by Japan's idea of patriarchy. He is the head of his household, and entitled to the respect of everyone inside it despite the fact he never actually shows up as a father or even tries to parent his kids because of the ideals of filial piety.

The story does show how giving too much power to the patriarch of a household can cause a house to fall apart, because people given too much power tend to wield it poorly. It shows that traditional family roles aren't all they're cracked up to be. Enji is assigned the role of father but he doesn't live up to it. The very rigid and traditional Todoroki Household crumbles because basically everyone fails to live up to their roles. The father isn't present. The mother isn't a good caretaker. The first born is defective. The youngest is given all the responsibility of the first born. No one is able to live up to those roles because maybe those rigid set in stone roles shouldn't exist in the first place.

Once again though, that's all in the backstory. Enji has a developing story from his first appearance to his last showdown with Toya, but he never steps out of his role as being a hero and because of that the ideas surrounding his character don't develop into anything.

You can have ideas in a story, but they're not always executed well. Enji is obviously a commentary on fathers in japan, and hegemonic masuclinity as a whole. However, what the author is trying to say is unclear becuse Enji's role in this story is unclear.

Rusty is never going to be as sucessful as his father. He's always going to be mediocre, always going to be a failure, and even if he's sympathetic he's still a scum bag. However, Rusty has one thing his father doesn't have which are his two sons who he made a deliberate decision to get closer to. Unlike a serial user of people Jonas, Rusty has the ability to actually love and care for people and he chooses to make those connections.

Endeavor never chooses. Either circumstances or Hawks choose for him. He didn't choose to go to Toya's side, but that's alright because the rest of the Todorokis and Shoto showed up to freeze Dabi in time before he self destructed so there was no consequence for that bad choice. In the end he still manages to save Toya and the rest of his family despite the fact he never actually tried to. He was too busy being the hero and fighting the big bad.

Which is why Enji doesn't work as a character compared to Rusty. He doesn't fail. He's supposed to be a flawed protagonist struggling against himself, but he never really loses. He's too much like Jonas and not enough like Rusty.

    Front-End Dating

Let’s look at the beginning of the timeline first, as it’s the one that involves somewhat more guesswork.  There are a few reference points in looking at the timeframe for the glowing baby, if you’re willing to get unbelievably anal about worldbuilding details Horikoshi may or may not have even thought about.  I am absolutely willing to be that person, so when I first started ironing this all out, there were two hard dates I went looking for right off the bat: the invention of the taser, and the first Japanese publication of Marvel comics.

Point 1: Tasers

The existence of tasers is mentioned in a stray comment during Deku’s dream flashback to All For One and Yoichi: the quirkless man who gains a spike quirk from AFO is mentioned as carrying one for self-defense.  Tasers were invented in 1993, ergo, that scene must have taken place sometime after 1993.

It’s possible—even probable—that the scene could take place significantly after 1993, for two reasons.  First, we don’t know how long it took quirks and the chaos they brought with them to become widespread.  If it took decades for the world to realize what it was dealing with, the taser could have existed for years before the scene in question.  There’s also the matter of the technological crash brought on by quirks.  If said crash took place over an extended period of time during which tasers were still in development, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have been completed until sometime after 1993, taking even longer to reach civilian/black market availability.

Could the advent of quirks have sped up the development of the taser, answering the suddenly widespread demand for a self-defense/less lethal police weapon?  I could see it, but it would be a departure from what we’re told about other technological developments in that period.  it’s also worth noting that the very first taser available for sale, circa 1976, used gunpowder as its propellant, leading to it being classified as a firearm.  It’s therefore unlikely that Japan, with its extremely stringent gun laws, would have had much access to it at all that far back.  The 1993 date refers to the modern, non-firearm electric taser.  1976 is an interesting date, though, as I’ll discuss in the next section.

The taser gives us a starting point.  Assuming that its development wasn’t an aberration in a time of collapsing norms, the OFA scene post-dating it must be likewise post-1993.    

Point 2:  Japanese Publication of Marvel Characters

If you look at the narration about the origin of quirks in Chapter 1, you find a handful of silhouettes, fictional characters who represent the “fantasy” that became “reality.”  Since the narration is delivered by Midoriya, not an omniscient narrator, we can assume that those media properties did exist in-universe and, further, that all of them were viewed as fantastical prior to the advent of quirks.  Therefore, even the newest of those characters must have first publication dates that predate the Advent.

Of the lot of them, the Marvel characters are the newest.(1)  Spider-Man’s first appearance was in 1962; Wolverine’s (if the figure with the sideburns and claws is intended to be Wolverine) in 1974.  Marvel comics were even being localized and published in Japan by the early 70s, which would have begun familiarizing at least some people with those particular “fantasy” characters by that time.  Ergo, quirks must not have come about before the mid-1970s.

Knowing that also helps shore up the taser point by keeping the historical timeline on track up at least through its initial 1976 creation.    

Heretofore Unnumbered Point 3: The Technology Crash

My last consideration when I was originally running the numbers was the developmental crash brought about by the Advent.  Specifically, the world of My Hero Academia generally reflects a modern-ish Japan, so I default to wanting modern technology—and modern social reforms—to still feel modern to the characters.  Thus, the point at which society stopped developing needed to predate the full flush of the Digital Revolution, which really began to hit its stride in the mid-to-late-80s.  It could perhaps be the case that some developments were brand new and subsequently lost along the way, or simply never reached their full potential due to the spreading chaos of mysterious superpowers, but modern digital technology needed to not exist in any widespread form prior to the bottom falling out.

That’s my working window for the start: The glowing baby should be born no earlier than the late 1970s, the world should be recognizing the danger and starting to turn its attention towards the new problem by the late 1980s, slowing the development of other technology, but with total collapse not yet having come about by the early 1990s.

That’s the front end.  Before I get to the back end, let’s look at the middle: How long after the glowing baby’s birth was All For One’s?    

Bridging the Gap

The Shigaraki Brothers & Captain Hero

All For One provides an immediately accessible reference point for the timeline at large.  He’s over a century old, so quirks must be so as well.  However, we can assume that he isn’t past or closing in on two centuries, else that’s how Gran Torino, in talking about him, would have described him.  Whatever AFO’s age is, it needs to be something that’s in keeping with that estimation.

One thing to emphasize here is that we don’t know how long it took quirks to become a widespread, fully acknowledged issue.  If they started appearing all over the world in large numbers within a matter of months, that makes my calculations different than if it took years for enough quirks to surface in enough countries for them to become the subject of widespread panic.

Another thing that’s unclear is whether the brothers are themselves in the first generation—and therefore that they grew up watching the world spiral out of control—or whether quirks had already existed for quite some time before they were born, and they never knew anything but that widespread chaos.

One thing that gives us a lens on those issues is Yoichi’s beloved Captain Hero comic.  While the Captain could be from any number of periods in which that image of an American-style superhero exists, the Demon Lord is a bit more specific.

Particularly in Japanese media, that fantasy Demon Lord (Ma-oh/Maou) archetype was basically invented wholecloth by Dragon Quest, especially Dragon Quest III and its villain Zoma.  DQ3 came out in 1988 and had manga tie-ins in print that same year, therefore we can assume that comics inspired by this type of villain have to post-date 1988.

The Captain Hero comics are also another example of a piece of media described by a character (AFO) as “fantasy” that is now being reflected in “reality.”  Because of that fantasy/reality proviso, we can further assume that heroes as a job class didn’t exist at the time of the manga’s publication—which would make sense, since AFO in the dream flashback highlighted that the world was totally without order, whereas heroes being codified were a sign of the chaos beginning to settle somewhat, so obviously they wouldn’t have existed at the time of the flashback.

This gives us a somewhat limited window.  If the comics can’t predate 1988, but I still want to stick to my guns on the, “Panic about quirks superceded the nascent Digital Revolution,” qualifier, it pretty much dictates that the world was in full-tilt collapse by the end of the 90s.  This also lets me scrape by on my taser window of 1993.

In any case, seeing as Captain Hero depicts a pre-quirk vision of popular J-fantasy, to say the least, the comic’s fairly retro by the time the brothers are talking about it as adults.  I might even go so far as to say that they probably weren’t new-new when the brothers were reading them as kids.  They have the feel of something old, like maybe a collection the brothers’ father owned, or that they bought on the cheap somewhere just to have some meager entertainment in their lives.

Where does all that leave us, then?  I would probably call the Captain Hero comics something that came out in the late 80s/early 90s, some publisher’s attempt to capitalize on Dragon Quest’s popularity and those American superhero comics that had been floating around the edges of the zeitgeist for a decade or so.  They were probably published right in that nebulous period when the glowing baby had been born, and there was growing unease with the mysterious powers popping up around the world, but since there wasn’t yet a mass panic, entertainment companies were still trafficking in a lot of their usual fare; elsewhere, the taser reached mass market readiness.

Then, the bottom dropped out.  Media pivoted to be about what meta-abilities were and what they meant; old-fashioned things like Hero vs. Demon Lord comics plummeted in popularity and wound up in bargain bins(2) or put into storage.  In this fashion, some of them eventually find their way into Yoichi’s hands.  If he or his big brother actually bought them, they’re probably no more than a few years old—say maybe 3-5, which would put Yoichi reading them in the mid-to-late 90s.  If they’re something of Yoichi’s parents’, and AFO and Yoichi were born quite some time after the glowing baby, that could make the comics older, anywhere from a decade (if Dad was still around collecting when the brothers were very young) to closer to 30 or 40 years, if Dad bought them in his own childhood and just held onto them).

For myself, I prefer a read that the collapse was pretty fresh when the brothers were growing up, and some math further down the line in this analysis has led me to the conclusion that AFO and Yoichi were pretty early in the history of quirks, meaning that the collapse had to be pretty rapid in order for both of those things to be true.(3)  That being the case, let’s go with the more conservative read and say those comics were less than a decade old when the brothers picked them up.  That, then, leads to the next part of this analysis: How old are the brothers?    

Back-End Dating

I’d peg AFO as being in his early 30s during the flashback, and Yoichi in his late 20s; I assume that at that point, both of them were still appearing as their natural age,(4) which gives us AFO as 30-something during the events of dream sequence when he forces the quirk on his younger brother—the genesis of One For All.    

One For All’s Age

I’m going to jump around somewhat here, broadly working backwards, but circling around as necessary and tallying as I go.

Bearer 9, Deku

Easy-peasy.  Deku has carried OFA for a year and change—he received it in late February and the manga is currently in late spring/early summer of the following year.

Running tally for age of OFA: 1 year.    

Bearer 8, All Might

All Might has carried OFA for 40-ish years—possibly a few more, but not so many that Yoichi, talking about this in Chapter 304, would be better suited to say, “For over 40 years, Yagi maintained his grip on One For All,” instead of simply, “For 40 years, (...).”  All Might’s in his mid-to-late 50s now; he was still in school when he got it from Nana.  He was possibly in middle school when they first met, judging by his uniform, but presumably he wouldn't have been able to go to UA without it, so he must have had it by the time he started there at 15.  He was clearly seeing himself in Deku, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he was exactly 14 when he met Nana, and 15 when he got OFA just in time for entrance exams.

Running tally for age of OFA: 41 years.    

Bearer 7, Nana

Nana carried it for at least a few years, but we've never been explicitly told which she got first, OFA or her husband and kid.  You can make a good guess if you do the math, though, so here's some math+guessing:

The mothers in the series whose ages we know (the mothers of Deku, Bakugou, Tsuyu and Jirou) all had their first child in their early-to-mid-20s.(5)  Let's assume Nana was the same and put her at, say, 24 when Kotarou was born.  He then died at 32 (having turned so only recently), meaning that, had she survived, she would have been around 56 at the time of his death.  Tacking on the time since the Shimura Massacre using Shigaraki's age, that would put Nana at 72 today.    

All Might, again, got the quirk ~40 years ago; if he was echoing his own experience in the way he raised Deku, he would have been 15 at the time.  That would have made Nana 32—and Kotarou 8—at the time she gave Toshinori OFA.  She was killed when he was 18, his senior year.

Kotarou looks noticeably younger than 8 when we see him as a kid being given up.  He looks much closer to Tenko's ago, or his obvious parallel Kouta's, those ages being 5 and 6 respectively.  So I think we can assume Nana gave up Kotarou at least a few years before giving Toshinori OFA, which would certainly explain her surety, in the letter, that the fight would be the death of her.  If Kotarou was, say, 6, that’d make Nana 30 at the time she gave him up.    

We don't have any further idea how long Nana was carrying OFA herself before the transfer, only that it was less time than Shinomori, and not long enough to start taking a heavy toll on her(6) despite her being several iterations down the line from him.  I would guess it was fewer than 10 years, as 10 would put her at only 22 when receiving it, and I would tend to think that she wouldn't have had a kid if she'd known the full extent of what she was dealing with—she obviously saw the state En was in when he passed it on, after all.    

So, let's assume she'd already been a hero, trained and licensed, and already married with a young son when she came across En and didn't realize the extent of what she was getting herself into.  Some time between Kotarou's birth and turning let's-call-it-6, she takes the quirk, gets the world’s worst wake-up call when her husband is killed, and gives Kotarou up to the state.

Let's say it takes a year or two to realize the full extent of excrement you've stepped in with AFO.  Two years with a mysterious new quirk she got off a dying stranger before the mess led her to give up her son (at 30) would put her at getting the quirk at 28, when Kotarou was 4ish.  If she gave Toshinori the quirk around 32, that means she would have carried OFA around 4 years.

Running tally for age of OFA: 45 years.    

Bearers 6+5, En and Banjou (Take One)

En and Banjo are big question marks.  We have no idea how long they each carried OFA, other than, again, "for less time than Shinomori."  So to start narrowing down a timeframe for them, let me look to something else: heroism in general.

We know that Banjo, two bearers previously to Nana, was a professional hero—Lariat.  Heroism, then, must have existed in his era.    

We don't know specifically how long Pro Heroes have been established in Japan, but we can make at least one educated guess: Harima Oji was active when, quote, "the present system was just beginning to settle into place."  Thus, heroism has been around for the generations following him, as well as some years prior to his own vantage point.  That factoid gives us four generations (his child, grandchild, great-grandchild, and finally his great-great-grandchild, Sako Atsuhiro) plus however many of Harima’s own years heroes have existed for.  

A generation is usually considered around 25 years, which tracks with the known parental ages in the series.  So if the stretch of time between Harima's child's birth to Sako's birth can be estimated to 75 years, plus Mr. Compress's age of 32, that means it's been at least 108 years since Harima's child was born.  We don't know when said child was born relative to his criminal activity—maybe Harima had already become a father by the time he was thieving; maybe the family came later.  Let's just round it to 110 years that we can say with relative confidence included heroes in them.    

Heroes have existed for at least/around 110 years.  Our estimate of OFA's lifespan, meanwhile, currently stands at 45 years.  As noted earlier, it seems pretty apparent that heroes did not exist at the time One For All was first created; AFO’s climb to the top happened in those early chaotic years before the legislation of heroism.  So that leaves us at least 65 years we need to fill between Nana getting OFA and the very first licensed hero, and then an uncertain number of years between that first licensing and OFA’s creation.

Keep that 65-year figure in mind; we’ll be using it going forward.  For now, let's put a pin in En and Banjo and move on.    

Bearer 4, Shinomori

Shinomori is easy.  He carried OFA for 18 years, and says his own times were awful—he must, then, have been much closer to those chaotic years (which would track with Shinomori’s direct successor Banjo saying that the Japan Deku’s sojourning in post-Jakku reminds him of his own time).  18 years off our remaining 65 leaves us with 47 years OFA must have existed such that it at least parallels (and ideally predates) the Hero Institution.

Running tally for age of OFA: 63 years.    

Bearers 2+1, [?] and Yoichi

Skipping Bearer 3, another big mystery, for a moment, if AFO would rather his brother be dead than free, and if AFO wanted to both take back that power and take some really horrible revenge for stealing his brother away, I'd be shocked if Yoichi and Strawberry Bakugou made it as much as a decade between them.  Let's call it a decade for ease of rounding, though, and add 10 years to our tally.

Running tally for age of OFA:  73 years.    

This brings us down to the three bearers we have the least information on: #3, Banjo and En.  We still have 37 years to account for to get us in the ballpark of that Year 1 of Heroism, and more would, again, be welcome, as I assume the first hero didn’t get sworn in on the very eve of OFA’s creation.  (It might be thematic, but it runs you square into Destro and the original MLA, and evidence I’ll go over later would put them later in the timeline.)

Moving on, let’s take a brief aside to consider the vestiges’ appearances.  It might seem likely that none of the early bearers carried OFA for very long, given that they all look the same in the OFA mindscape as they do in the scene where 2nd and 3rd kick down the vault door hiding Yoichi, suggesting they died without having the chance to get significantly, obviously older than they were in that moment.

On the other hand, we don’t know enough about quirk metaphysics to say that the appearance of the vestiges would match their living appearances.  Given that we know there's a certain amount of connection between All Might and his vestige, it could be that the vestiges mirror their living selves' appearances until the end.  We can't really call Vestige Might definitive, though, because he's the only one that isn't a quirk vestige, but rather just an impression of All Might's (literal) personality.

Perhaps, then, the others’ appearances are imprinted when they're first incorporated into One For All and then they just stick that way?  Or is it more about their self-image, the age they tend to think of themselves as being?  Or is it the age that marked the most important part of their lives with OFA?  The lines beneath Nana’s eyes kind of come and go, but they’ve never been consistent enough that I’d call them a definitive sign that the vestiges’ appearances are fluid.

Deku’s fluctuating appearance—both how much he’s covered in mist and even his age, as shown when he talks about how he wants to save the little boy he felt inside Tomura’s rage—would seem to point towards a fluid manifestation, but Deku also can’t be considered definitive because he, like All Might, is both still alive and not appearing in the mindscape via his quirk, because he doesn’t natively have one.

So comparing the bearers’ appearances in flashbacks versus their mindscape selves is a dead-end.  What else do we have?    

Bearer 5, Banjo (Take Two)

I might guess that since All For One seems to have largely lost track of the bearers during Shinomori's time—seeing as he died of "old age," rather than at AFO's hand—it's possible that Banjo had a very good run before AFO caught up to him.  OFA was weaker back then, so the effect it had on Banjo's power levels might not have been so noticeable in a sea of heroes that it jumped out right away, especially with Yoichi's "voice" still being ill-formed.  Banjo's also by far the oldest looking of the lot, give or take Shinomori's difficult-to-measure signs of age.  That being the case, let's give Banjo 15 years—fewer than Shinomori, but long enough to take a good chunk out of our remaining span.

Running tally for age of OFA: 88 years.    

Bearers 6+3, En and [?] (Take Two+A Tweak to Nana’s Numbers)

That takes us down to 22 years to split between En and Mr. Fa Jin to get us to the bare minimum point where heroism would be brand new circa OFA's creation.  It's pretty much a toss-up, how one imagines that going.  My last point of evidence to consider, then, is Banjo’s statement that AFO tried to steal OFA from both him and En, and it didn't work.  They clearly survived to pass on the power, however, and not to anyone under AFO's direct control.  So, is it possible that, by this point, AFO was coming to understand that he couldn't just neatly steal OFA?  That he needed to adjust factors somehow?

That being the case, while I expect he would have tried to keep Banjo and En around (the better to have them available to test out new methods on!), he might not have been in full search-and-destroy mode, because he didn't have a solution yet, so it didn’t really hurt him to let OFA's bearers run about for a while, meaning En could have had a pretty good stretch of time with the power.  Heck, that might even have had an effect on the amount of time Nana had as well!  I estimated two years between getting the power and realizing the extent of her danger, but if AFO was in full cat-playing-with-its-food mode by then, it might well have been longer.

On the other hand, if AFO lost track of Fa Jin-san such that he was able to pass OFA to Shinomori without being detected, it would seem he slipped AFO's net as well, so he could also have had a pretty solid run.

Twenty-two years left, but En—if his appearance is even remotely relevant—is the clear youngest outside of Izuku, and I don’t see him and Banjou having a senpai/kohai relationship if En was a literal child at the time.  So to avoid having to hang too much time on him, let's wick a year or two back to Nana, reflecting that perhaps AFO’s danger was not quite so immediately apparent as I first supposed, and make her OFA run 6 years instead of 4.

Running tally for age of OFA: 90 years.    

That gives us 20 years remaining between En and 3rd that we know need to exist to get them back to even Harima Oji's time.

Let’s go ahead and assume that En was at least 18 when he got the power from Banjou—while we can imagine situations outside of official, professional relationships, Banjou was a hero, and En called him senpai, so the Occam’s Razor explanation is that En was also a licensed hero when they were forming that relationship.  If En was a licensed hero, he’d need to be old enough to be issued that license.  Even if he didn’t go to a hero school—that many years in the past, did hero schools even exist?—I have to think he’d need to be at least 18.  And we see how old he looked at the time of his death: exactly the same way he does in the mindscape.  I’d guess he’s around the same age as e.g. the twenty-somethings in the League, so at best I’d call him 25 at the time of his death, giving him a maximum possible run of 7 years.

That leaves Fa Jin-san 13 years with OFA to meet my scaffolded-out-into-thin-air bare minimum.

Running tally for age of OFA: 110 years.    

So, OFA has to be at least 110 years old to even get the point of its creation back to Harima Oji, and that’s reachable while staying within the bounds of what we know.  I personally still think it’s still a bit on the short side, however.  Again, the OFA dream very much gave the impression that AFO was running around attracting the masses in the full-tilt chaos years, not the ones where the Hero System had already been adopted and was beginning to settle.  So let's bump it back 10 more years—before Harima, and anywhere between that same 10 years to only a few years prior to Destro and the original Meta Liberation Army, depending on how contemporaneous Harima and Destro were.  We can scratch those 10 years together from, for example, stretches of months (like Deku’s three months on top of his base year) that the above analysis is too broad-strokes to cover, as well as granting an extra year or two here and there to bearers whose numbers we can only guess at.

FINAL TALLY FOR AGE OF ONE FOR ALL: 120 years.    

Shigaraki Yoichi and AFO’s Ages (Interim Answer)

Recall that I estimated Yoichi at the time of the dream as being in his late 20s.  Tack that onto our age of OFA, and we get just a bit shy of 150 years from the time of Yoichi's birth to Izuku entering UA.  This would make AFO a few years over 150—over 100, but not so close to 200 that you’d expect Gran Torino to say that instead.    

Putting It Together

I estimated the Captain Hero comics as being from late 80s/early 90s and supposed that they were less than a decade old when Yoichi and AFO first picked them up.  Chapter 333 gives us a quick flashback from AFO to Yoichi reading them; Yoichi in that panel looks less than 10 years old himself.  So let’s ballpark the comic and Yoichi as being around the same age and put their publication and Yoichi’s birth in 1990.  Adding on the previous ballpark of “a bit shy of 150 years” to get from Yoichi’s birth to today, that puts us at “a bit shy of 2140”—or of 2141 for the manga’s current events!

Now we can use Tiger’s age+birthday to settle on a final number.  Tiger’s birthday is, as stated, February 29th—he’s already had his birthday for the year and is currently 32.  If 2141 were exactly correct, that’d put him being born in 2109—not a leap year.  Luckily, the estimation is “a bit shy of 2141,” so let’s bump that birth year back by one to have him being born in the nearest leap year of 2108.  32 years later, he and we find ourselves in…

|| The current year is 2140, with Deku’s first year at UA being 2139. ||    

Going back to the beginning, then, to try and backdate the glowing baby, my suppositions are as follows: 

 •   AFO and Yoichi are from relatively early in the Advent period, within the group of people deemed the first generation.      •   “A generation” can be ballparked to 25 years.      •   Yoichi was born in 1990.  Being of the same generation as the glowing baby means his birth needs to be within 25 years of the baby’s birth.  25 years back from Yoichi’s birth would put us in 1965, which is much too early, so it must be a narrower window.        o We also know All For One is younger than the growing baby, if possibly by very little.  If AFO is 3-5 years older than Yoichi (again, early 30s versus late 20s in the flashback dream), that’d put him being born sometime in 1985 to 1987.        o I don’t want to push the baby’s birth any further than 1985—the collapse being rapid means I need to keep it as close as I can to my taser datum in 1993—but let’s aim for a middle way and call AFO 4 years older than Yoichi, born in 1986.  That puts us with a final analysis of…

|| The glowing baby was born in 1985.  Quirks are 155 years old. ||    

Checking My Math With Doc Ujiko

If AFO is currently 154, then even assuming Ujiko’s Life Force quirk had a retroactive effect, AFO should look in his mid-70s, which he clearly doesn’t.  However, I’ve long figured that AFO had to have been running on a life-extension quirk of some kind even before he met Ujiko.  Even just working with what’s explicit in the manga, he looked more or less the same when he fought All Might as he did when he fought Nana 40 years prior, and more or less the same as that when he created One For All far longer prior still!  A simple “2 years lived=1 year aged quirk” wouldn’t explain that continuity of appearance, and AFO certainly doesn’t seem to suffer from Ujiko’s reduced vitality.

Also, Ujiko is, per Mic, over 120 (thus presumably under 130).  He presented his Paranormal Singularity Theory to the world 70 years ago, during a time when the world was “struggling to end the turmoil and reclaim peace.”  Assuming my numbers are right, 70 years ago would put AFO at 84 years old.  One For All would have been created 50 years prior.  This makes AFO around 30 years older than Ujiko.(7)    

A (New) Finalized Rough Timeline

Note: Years are estimated, favoring five-year increments for ease of calculation.  Most events could be tweaked earlier or later by a year or two.  It does not include the One For All bearers; recall that I wedged in an extra decade to their time, to be distributed in chunks of months or more generous year allotments than my first pass.  Not having specifically divvied out those years, they’re not represented below.

1985:  The glowing baby is born

1986:  The child who will become All For One is born.

1990:  Shigaraki Yoichi is born.

~2015:  The child who will later call himself Garaki Kyudai is born.

2020: One For All is created.

~2032:  Harima Oji’s child is born.

2070:  Soon-to-Be-Garaki Kyudai presents his Paranormal Singularity Theory.

~~~generations pass~~~

2139:  Midoriya Izuku receives One For All; begins first year at UA.

2140:  Manga current events.

...Et voilà!

P.S. If the Hawks line turns out to be in the main canon, I will cry. And then I will do my best to adjust this accordingly.

-------------------------------

1:  Of the ones I could identify, at least.  Others include Superman, Ultra Man, Devilman, Kikkaider, etc.

2:  Entertainingly enough, this would offer a parallel between Yoichi clinging to his reduced-price comics and young Takami Keigo with his clearance-bin Endeavor plush.  Sometimes, it’s not what a thing is, it’s what the thing represents that makes all the difference.

3:  Specifically, I’d initially wanted AFO and Yoichi to be at least in the second full generation, with the collapse happening gradually over the course of the first generation and accelerating into full meltdown as the second generation began to appear.  I would later roughly define a generation as being 25 years, however, and a 25-year gap between the glowing baby and AFO proved to be flatly irreconcilable with the math that came out of backdating One For All and the history of professional heroism.

4:  Since Yoichi was never under the effects of an anti-aging quirk, if AFO already had one back then and Yoichi didn’t, Yoichi would have appeared to be the elder of the two.  That Yoichi still looked younger suggests that, if there was an anti-aging quirk on the table at that time, it was still very new.  More likely, though, AFO simply hadn’t found one yet.

5: In order: 26, 22, 26, and 21.

6:  At worst, she looks to have just started developing lines beneath her eyes, visible in some of the scenes of her towards the very end of her life and not present in her younger days.