Tomura Shigaraki deserved SO MUCH BETTER
Iâm so angry about how the villains were handled in the ending of MHA that I donât even know where to start. It feels like Horikoshi spent years building these characters up, giving them backstories dripping with tragedy, setting up these complex moral gray areas, and then in the final act he just dropped them. Dropped all of them. Like their entire narrative weight suddenly didnât matter.
Tomura Shigaraki. This is a character who had one of the strongest villain arcs in shĹnen in YEARS. A child groomed, tortured emotionally, denied stability, denied guidance, denied love - turned into a weapon by his "mentor", twisted and gaslit until he couldnât tell if he even had thoughts of his own anymore. We saw him struggle with identity, with autonomy, with his dreams. He deserved liberation. He deserved a future, or at the very least, a conclusion that honored everything he had endured. Instead, what did we get? A rushed âyouâre saved now, time to dieâ send-off. Hori built him for years, only to reduce him to a stepping stone for Dekuâs character development. Itâs infuriating.
And the worst part is that the story pretended to care. It pretended his breakthrough mattered. It pretended his pain was important. It dangled hope - the possibility of choice, of change, of liberation - and then ripped it away because god forbid the protagonistâs idealism actually be tested in a meaningful way. The message unintentionally becomes: your suffering matters until it clashes with the protagonistâs idealism.
It just hurts. Because the villains were the emotional spine of the story. They were the mirror the heroes needed to confront. They were the commentary on societyâs failings. And yet they were treated like disposable chess pieces in the end.
The ending feels like itâs trying desperately to deliver a clean moral message in a world that Horikoshi himself spent years establishing as morally messy. You canât write characters whose entire existence is proof of systemic failure and then handwave their fates to keep the hero shiny and untarnished. You canât call it "saving" when you donât let them live long enough to actually experience being saved. You canât spend hundreds of chapters showing how broken the system is, how it creates people like Shigaraki, Dabi or Toga, and then decide in the finale that actually, the system was fine all along and the villains just needed to conveniently die to prove it.
And itâs not that we wanted all the villains to survive or be redeemed neatly. We wanted endings that respected their narratives. That felt consistent with the emotional investment the story demanded.
It feels like Shigaraki, Dabi, Toga, the entire League - all of them - were punished for their own authorâs exhaustion. And thatâs heartbreaking. Because they deserved better. They earned better. They werenât just "bad guys." They were survivors of systems that failed them. And yet Hori gave them rushed resolutions, moral shortcuts, and farewells that felt like he wanted to be done with the history yet, no matter the cost. It just feels like Horikoshi was exhausted and the villains paid the price for his burnout.
No amount of pretty animation or hype moments can cover the fact that Hori threw away his own most powerful narratives threads And honestly? I donât think that sting is ever going to fade.
Forgive me if anything in this rant feels inconsistent, Iâm writing it while still completely overwhelmed after the latest ep. MHA became an incredibly important story to me over the past few years, something I poured my heart into, and right now I just feel devastated
