Gensousei

had to draw the girls 🧎‍♀️

Obligatory statements: You are allowed to headcanon whatever you want. I am working off of canon information and my own interpretations, but my word is not law, nor do you have to follow what is canon

Canonical system | system coded | canonically dissociative | dissociative coded | could be interpreted as a system | could be interpreted as dissociative | does not meet criteria

In canon, Dabi meets the criteria for depersonalization and derealization, as well as general dissociation. We see this through his own statements, as well as his behavior during traumatic events. I think this is most notable in both his backstory (what little of it we get from his POV) and his reaction to Jin's death

Here, and throughout his reveal, Dabi is simultaneously happy and dancing while trauma dumping at a pace any therapist would find alarming. I didn't include his full monologue for obvious reasons, but even on this page he is questioning his very purpose for being alive, something he struggles with as a child and an adult. Most notably in terms of dissociation though, he doesn't seem to be connected to his feelings to any meaningful degree. He's seperated Dabi and Touya altogether, which we see said outright when he visits home after coming out of his coma

On top of the seperation from his younger self, the smiling on its own is an act of distancing himself from his feelings, whether in response to actually feeling them now or having felt them in the past. This is another pattern that is consistent with Dabi through his life, appearing both when he is actively being abused and immediately after seeing Jin, someone he thinks of as a brother, murdered in front of him

Even after the heat of the moment, Dabi still does not speak of Jin's death in the way most people might. Though he is clearly upset, enough for his eyes to be smoking and to involve the video of Jin's murder in his reveal at an attempt at justice, he doesn't seem "traditionally" upset

And though the strongest signs are through a fictional/interpretive lense, I feel it's impossible to talk about Dabi's dissocation without referencing his quirk and his tears. We've seen time and time again that Dabi's quirk is tied to his emotions. His fire is strong to begin with, but it doesn't turn blue until his emotional breaking point when he burns at Sekoto Peak. As Dabi reveals his true self to the world, his burns spread as a visual representation of his openess. His quirk finally awakens fully when he is ready to kill himself and faced with confronting his family and his trauma. Though Dabi is, for the majority of the story, a very closed-off person, we can get a read on his true feelings through things tied to his quirk

His tears are an especially strong point for his dissociation. As Touya, he is crying in almost every scene we see of him. Touya has emotional outbursts, sad and angry, and is a little bit of a crybaby (/aff). As he gets older though, Dabi says his tearducts have burned away, making him no longer capable of crying

There's also several references to him being unable to feel at all, though this is clearly not the case in reality. Due to Dabi's many physical disabilities, he would in fact feel more pain than the average person. Especially when burning previously unharmed parts of his body, he should feel something. Whether he means physically or emotionally, Dabi feels his suffering deeply, but it is buried beneath layers of dissociation

The end of his arc, while it has its own short-comings (imo), deals with this in a way that fits with the pieces we have. His quirk awakens, cooling his fire, and we see Dabi cry a real tear rather than blood for the first time

As for his potential as a system, any evidence for this is mostly tropes based. There are several panels of Dabi where he follows the very classic gimmick of having two different expressions

And, of course, the same differentiation between speech bubbles that Jin has. I found a few distinct types, some of which I'm not able to include because I'm out of images, but here's a good sampling platter

And, of course, Dabi's BNHA-villain-typical age regression during his fight with Enji. Though this is meant to be a plot device and/or theme relating to the villains needing to be understood and saved, Dabi experiences the most notable changes in personality. While Touya obviously behaves differently than Dabi, he also reads differently than the Touya we see in flashbacks. He also uses "we" pronouns during his fights in the war, but this could be refering to the League as a whole