#flaming sidekickers

The Flaming Sidekickers are the more than 30 sidekicks that work for Endeavor in Endeavor agency.

While they are introduced pretty early on, they will have to wait quite a long time to be named, and we will be introduced only to 3 of them.

In the early parts of the story we see glimpses of them but there do not seem to be an intention to develop them... until they get some attention in the Endeavor Agency arc.

Due to this I decided it could be interesting to look at the moments in which the Flaming Sidekickers appear in the manga.

On another note - what is your opinion on Enji’s sidekicks?

Listen, the reaction to Aoyama being traitor was so annoying to me from so many angles. Kid had no choice, take issue with his idiot parents putting him in that situation!

Endeavor's sidekicks are interested and I kinda wish they got explored a bit more, especially post Touya reveal because each of them are very different from Endeavor in personality (seemingly kind and in heroics for more altruistic reasons).

so does/did Onima ever try to get Burnin or Kido to box with him? and then they’re r either not in to it or really good at it?

(This is a bad ask I know. . . .)

also my Burnin hobbies?

I mean they train together at the Agency, so that’s their gym as well lmao

(sorry if I bothered you!)

I haven’t! But here you go!

Onima and Kido give me Naruto ninja vibes, so I gave Kido Kakashi’s mole haha.

Kido headcanons:

-Sake connoisseur, but appreciates all alcohols (responsibly)

-‘Kido’ as a surname can mean tree/wooden/castle door, so I consider him a ‘castle guard’ type of guy. He’s the Dad Friend/Cool Uncle of the Flaming Sidekickers, he’ll watch your drink at a party, he’s the designated driver, he’s the one that helps newbie sidekicks settle at the Agency.

-Was a solo Pro-Hero for a couple years before he had a team up with Endeavor. They worked together on a mission and it went really well. Kido applied to be his sidekick after they talked about it, as he believes he’d be a more efficient hero following Endeavor’s lead.

-Since he has no fire resistance at all, he has worked extra hard to train his Traject to work on heat and air.

Onima Headcanons

-We don’t know his Quirk, but we know it’s NOT fire based but that he does have fire resistance. I also don’t know what ‘Onima’ means (オニマー) but google (peak research, I know) says it can mean ‘ogre demon/fearsome demon’ in some context (which would explain the horned headband). My Quirk headcanon for Onima, then, is “Thick Skin”, his skin is incredibly durable and he can take a lot of damage (like being burned to a crisp by Dabi, boy how did you survive that?).

-Joined the Flaming Sidekickers straight out of hero school. I headcanon he joined the Agency the same year as Kido, and the guy looked out for him for a while since Onima was a newbie hero.

-Him and Burnin’ are the youngest sidekicks, and so have a tight bro-sis relationship. They go to karaoke together a lot.

-Is a massive lightweight, often looked after by Burnin’ or Kido.

-Does boxing on his days off.

-He has so many dad jokes.

Shouto: Oh that’s cute. You’re doing what All for One told you, and he doesn’t even pay you.

Dabi: Wait.

Shouto: I’m getting a car as soon as I turn eighteen. What are you getting on your birthday? A rusty knife?

Dabi: I…

Shouto: I am a user on Dad’s debit account. The card is right here in my pocket. It’s fireproof. I could go all out at the mall after I’m done beating your ass. You’re dressed in rags.

Burnin: Actually, we all have benefits at the Endeavor agency. What do you have? The “I’ll possess your body” guarantee?

Jailbreakers: Wait a minute, you guys are getting paid? What the fuck?!

Kido: We have a union too. Do you villains have a union??

Nomu: We’re not even getting fed!

Dabi: Holy shit, guys! We’ve been made! 😨

Onima: Yeah! Seize the means of destruction!

Judging by Shouto’s conspicuous absence in Koda’s flashback, it’s looking like not.  My cynical read is that Shouto is too popular with the fanbase (the portion of it that partakes in popularity polls, anyway) and so Hori and/or his editor don’t want to call attention to it.  Possibly we’re meant to assume that Shouto has matured and made friends with enough heteromorphs that he wouldn’t do it again, but I wish very much that Sero and Shouto had been there for Shouji’s backstory dump.  I think Sero has as much to apologize to Shouji for as Mineta, and Shouto could at least have had a flashback to that time with Tsuragamae and looked uncomfortable.

That said, I care more about seeing it openly acknowledged than meticulously explained.  Much as some people didn’t want Endeavor to get a Sad Backstory to explain why he’s Like That, I don’t need Horikoshi to explain why Shouto uses the kind of language that he does; I would just like Shouto to be confronted with the fact that it’s an issue.  Because I think “background radiation of their society’s widespread dehumanization of heteromorphs” is a perfectly adequate explanation, I do agree that handwaving it as Because Endeavor would be pretty lazy.

Regarding this post.

I had to go dig up some alternate translations to see what you meant by the last line there, and fair enough that they sound much more ambivalent about Endeavor there than in the Viz. Still, though, even with the insults thrown Endeavor’s way, Kido says he’s there following Endeavor’s orders because he chooses to be, while Burnin’s got that whole thing on Endeavor’s accomplishments/getting the job done, and they just feel so unnecessary to me.

Dabi doesn’t care about why you’re here, Kido; he definitely doesn’t care about Endeavor’s glowing hero track record, Burnin’. Why not just say they’re there to support Shouto and leave it at that? Or say that, as heroes, they can’t just let a murderous arsonist run loose no matter how tragic his backstory is? There’s no need to pad out their dialogue with this defensiveness about why they’re still doing Endeavor’s work, unless it’s just that: defensiveness.

Their personal reasons for not walking away after finding out about Endeavor’s abuse are personal; they wouldn’t owe those reasons to Dabi even if he asked. Even if you read his line calling them Endeavor’s aides/merry helpers to be a personal dig at their moral fiber for shrugging off Dabi’s accusations, I would say it’s kind of unprofessional to feel the need to rise to the bait.

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Going back over the material for the ask above, I notice that the way Dabi refers to the Sidekickers kind of feels like he’s noting them as the three of Endeavor’s sidekicks, not just any three random people who work at the agency. I really do kind of wonder if Flaming Horse Man was just kind of included on a whim but never materialized into anything in particular. It would fit his absence since, though it’d be a shame. Here’s hoping he crops back up somewhere before the end!

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I don’t generally devote enough brainspace to the pros to give this one a really detailed breakdown, but Best Jeanist is probably a fairly good model.

Whatever his feelings on it, the fact of the matter is that Dabi is still out there willfully endangering peoples’ lives, and the heroes don’t have the numbers or resources to be stripping the Number 1 Hero of his license at the present time. They’re also not the police or the justice system; strictly speaking, it’s not their job to do anything about Endeavor if he’s not actively in the process of hurting someone with his quirk. Also x2, no one is going to get any answers about how Dabi survived and became what he did while he’s still at large;* any closure on that matter is going to require getting him in custody.

This is all, of course, exactly the kind of reasoning that allows “distortions” like the League to form to begin with—villains are putting others at risk so we have no time to try to reason with them; we have to think about the greater good; our only job is dealing with villains—but there’s a reason it’s not going to be the Old Guard to change the system. Really, the professional front sounds good on paper, but taken to its logical extremes, it’s kind of where the HPSC wound up: no flaws or weaknesses are allowed to show, because The People Need To Believe In The System.

(* Spoilers for Chapter 350, but at least until they just go ask Ujiko about it, apparently. Think of all the time that could have been saved if someone had just done that at the start. What, is Tsukauchi the only police officer that has had the novel thought of questioning detainees?)