On Rei's Situation (and Who's Responsible for It)
This is a reply to an anonymous ask I got in response to this post. I'm screenshotting it because my answer got long enough that I want to be able to give this post a title and I've never noticed a way to do that when using the built-in site tools for answering asks.
Please be advised that this reply discusses the following topics: Rei as not cleanly, palatably separable from her family values, the Himura intermarriages, conservative views on divorce and domestic abuse in Japan, forced marriages as a form of human trafficking, and references to the various forms of abuse perpetrated by Endeavor.
Yeah, Rei is a criminally underserved character in the story, not least, I’m sure, because actually exploring her perspective in any depth would make Enji look far worse than he already does – and that’s no small feat! By all means, just because I think Rei plausibly had, if not Perfect Free Agency, then at least more agency than a lot of people in the English-speaking fandom give her credit for (and would accordingly like them to talk about her situation in less grossly sensationalized ways), this does not this absolve Enji in any way!
There are some places in their history that are, by implication, far darker than Horikoshi was ever going to depict on the page, I imagine both because his editors would never have let him even if he wanted to[1] and because, again, actually examining the damage Enji did to Rei in detail would make it so much harder to ask the reader to root for him. And these days I am quite skeptical of Horikoshi’s willingness to write genuinely challenging material of that nature.
1: And you can posit about a sexist editorial environment wanting to avoid damaging Endeavor’s popularity, but there's also the simple fact that Weekly Shonen Jump is not rated in such a way that it can allow a direct depiction of e.g. marital rape.
That said, I’m also firmly of the opinion that, taking Rei and her family situation in the context we’re given, a more in-depth exploration would make a lot of the Western fanbase – especially the parts of it on Tumblr – screamingly uncomfortable anyway!
I went on rather a ramble here, so hit the jump to find a longer breakdown about Rei’s situation as I read it. Apologies if it's kind of here there and everywhere; I'd been considering reorganizing it for a more streamlined or responsive-to-the-ask's-priorities reply, but everytime I tried to edit it, it just got longer on me. I have thus decided to call it a day and Just Press Post.
So, Rei is from an old family, a hyper-traditional, deeply conservative family obsessed with maintaining their purity, bigoted against heteromorphs and longing for their days of wealth and influence. Rei is not going to be magically immune to the attitudes and expectations she would have been raised with, and frankly, I think she’s a much more interesting character the more of that baggage you allow to inform her decisions – the more decisions, in fact, that you allow her the agency to make at all.
I saw it said in a number of places, back when Chapter 387 came out, that Rei’s choices were to “marry Enji or marry a cousin,” and I’ve always thought that missed the mark of what Geten revealed in that chapter (not least because a lot of people were imagining the available pool of cousins to be much smaller and more closely related than I was). Rei’s choice would not have been Enji or a cousin because, given how far the family’s fortunes had fallen, they were explicitly trying to secure a good marriage for her outside the family. As I said in the afore-linked post, she couldn’t have married a cousin even if she’d wanted to.
(Note here that when I say “cousin” here, I'm using it as a shorthand to refer to not merely direct cousins but also second or third or even further out cousins, or cousins some number of steps removed. See the above post for more discussion about what that actually means in practice for the Himura clan as described by Geten.)
If I may here plunge right into some screaming discomfort, then, what if she did want to marry a cousin? What if she and everyone of her generation in a multi-family clan was raised with the expectation that they would be marrying someone within the family because that’s what the clan had been doing ever since the advent of quirks? What kind of unspoken charge would that understanding bring to, say, large family gatherings?
What if Rei spent the first, say, sixteen years of her life quietly evaluating everyone she thought might be a prospect to figure out which one she’d like the best? What if she’d managed to strike up a promising relationship with a young man from one of the branch families, someone she thought might make her happy, only for the decision to come down from on high that the family was breaking with its long tradition and would, at least for the current generation, be seeking marriages with outsiders to prop up the family fortunes?
What if she was disappointed by that? Would there have been others of her generation who felt betrayed by it, afraid of what outsiders would be like, afraid of what their children might be like as products of mixed blood? How much of their opinions would she have been absorbing; how much of their opinions did she share? Heck, if you wanted to be particularly brazen about it, you could even tie this back to Horikoshi's description of Prototype!Shouto in Ultra Archive, which includes a mention that Prouto's mother had a boyfriend before she was “chosen” by Enji, though obviously that element of lost love factoring into Rei's mental decline is nowhere to be seen in the canon version.
Still and all, whatever her opinions might have been, Rei is a daughter of the main family. She would have always understood that that position carries with it a responsibility to see to the family’s longevity, that part of her duty as a woman of the Himura clan is to marry someone who will be approved of by the family elders. Love would be nice, of course, but you can grow to love someone over time, and even if you don’t, it’s not the end of the world. And why should women’s sole happiness be romantic love anyway? Is there not other happiness, other fulfillment that can be found, even in a dispassionate marriage?
Why should she not take pride in being able to secure her family’s future? Why should she not take pride in the family and household she will eventually create?
Now, she can tell herself all that and only be so successful at believing it. Her expression at the omiai is certainly not one of anticipation, joy, or fulfillment! And I do think it’s telling that, when her youngest son is fretting about whether he’ll inevitably grow up to be like his awful father, she tells him that he doesn’t have to be bound by his blood. Not the phrasing I would expect from someone who needs to convince a five-year-old that domestic abuse is not genetically heritable but who does still believe in duty to one’s bloodline!
Of course, that scene takes place many years into a truly terrible marriage, and likely only a matter of months before she’ll be scalding that same child’s face with boiling water in a fit of reflexive terror. That is to say, because our view of Rei is so limited, we really have no way of knowing whether she always disliked the idea of a life being dictated by bloodline but submitted to it anyway, or whether she’s only come to hold that belief as a result of her dreadful and ongoing experience with Enji. With the context we have, it’s clear she told Shouto what she wished someone would have told her years ago, but what exactly the Rei of “years ago” believed herself is largely a matter of reader handcanon.
To continue on topics that the Western fanbase clearly has a different view on than I think Rei herself would, Rei’s upbringing would likely also figure into her feelings on divorce and the handling of domestic abuse. All those nominally feel-good AU scenarios where Rei GirlBosses her way through getting Enji thrown in prison for abuse? To me, those wildly miss the mark – Rei is never going to press charges against Enji, especially not in the epilogue!
I touched on this once before, in my author’s notes about the MLA AU short featuring Rei, but there have been a lot of hurdles to activists trying to get legislation passed about domestic abuse in Japan, including the views that knowledge of domestic abuse is something that should be kept in the family, or that it’s a husband’s fair and just prerogative to “discipline” his wife if she's disobeying him. It's not just decrepit and corrupt old men in the LDP that believe this: older women, or those who have more traditional views – both of which describe Rei! – are among the hardest to convince that domestic abuse warrants a police report. This is compounded by the fact that domestic abuse remains only a civil offense in Japan, so there’s only so much the police can do about it, anyway; it’s more a matter for courts than cops.
Divorce, likewise, is one of those things that messes with the sanctity of a nice clean family registry, something that will Make People Talk, and is accordingly very frowned on by those of a more traditional mindset.[2] It’s especially easy to imagine this being the case for Rei, since dissolving her marriage would raise immediate questions of what would become of whatever spillover wealth being married to the Number Two Hero brought to the Himura.
2: Japan’s divorce rate has been rising since the 60s; it still has a lower divorce rate than the U.S., but then the U.S. is itself a high-divorce outlier! Currently, Japan is about on par with a lot of Europe. Interestingly, I read some academic briefs that suggested that Japan used to be quite a high divorce rate country, but that this decreased in the Meiji Era, and particularly the years approaching World War II. The Empire of Japan as it focused on modernizing and industrializing to avoid Western colonization had many projects involving enforcing the appearance of unity and uniformity – that applied to other cultures/ethnicities living within Japan, like native Okinawans or the Ainu, as well as Japan's imperialistic aims in Korea and China, but also to the unity of Japanese citizens and families! That image of Japan has become very ingrained in the minds of those of a more traditionalist bent, to the point that many take it for granted that Japan has always been a low-divorce society and that the rising divorce rates are a disgraceful modern thing, denying or simply not knowing that the country’s low divorce rate was more a function of propoganda-driven policy than a reflection of historical reality.
Sidebar: On the topic of the financial fallout of a divorce, Japan has no alimony and only poorly enforced child support payments. Fewer than 50% of divorced households have any formal agreement in place about child support, just under 25% of single parents actually receive any payments at all, and far fewer even than that receive the amount of money agreed upon. Meanwhile, Japan stipulates that the spouses both have a responsibility to make sure the other can maintain a stable living situation while the divorce is being finalized, which usually means the more well-off spouse makes temporary support payments while the other gets settled into whatever their new independence is going to look like. Afterwards, a single lump sum payment is made as the assets accumulated during the marriage are divided – by mutual agreement if possible, by court deliberation if not. And that’s it. So not only would Rei likely return to her family home, minimizing the necessity of e.g. payments to help her get moved into an apartment or something, but she might well do so with up to four children in tow and no realistic expectation that the spurned Todoroki Enji would pay to support them beyond a one-time court-defined splitting-the-assets payment. No matter how big that payment was – and it would be larger than an even split, to account for her limited resources as a spouse who didn’t work during the marriage, any emotional damages she might try to claim, and whatever number of kids she’d have to support – I can’t imagine it would make up for bringing multiple new mouths to feed back to a family that was already falling onto rough times financially. Of course, the child custody thing isn’t a given. Endeavor would surely fight like hell in court for custody of Shouto, which might or might not require him to take custody of the other kids as well.[3] Women usually get custody of children in Japan, even more universally than in the U.S., but given Endeavor’s social status, I could easily see him being a rare exception, give or take any messy abuse allegations that came out in the divorce proceedings. That said, by the time we get that far out into the weeds of hypotheticals, we might as well suppose Endeavor would have a red-feathered “accident” happen to him before the HPSC let the whole country find out that their No. 2 Hero was a domestic abuser and spousal rapist.
3: Japan doesn’t legally recognize joint custody arrangements; whichever parent gets custody gets sole custody, and any arrangements for the child/children to see the other parent are solely at their discretion. Now, I don’t know if that means parents can divvy up (as it were) multiple children or whether a parent who wants custody must take all the kids or get none of them. But it does mean that if Endeavor won custody of Shouto and any of the rest, he’d be under no legal obligation to let Rei see them ever again. And vice versa, of course – if you think Touya was nasty to Rei in the series, just imagine what he’d be like if she tried to move him across the country and cut off contact with Enji entirely!
In light of all that, Rei would have to have been pushed to incredibly dire straits to even consider seeking a divorce. And, in fairness, we can see that she was! Just before burning Shouto, she was on the phone with her mother, finally having broken down and called after holding out for ages; that she was finally willing to reach out suggests she was getting desperate enough – both for her own sake and that of the children – that she would have been willing to take drastic (from her perspective) measures.
Post-series, though? All the talk of living separately came from Enji, not Rei,[5] and even that evaporates after the reveal that Touya is not so dead after all. Maybe it’s a desire to circle the family wagons in the wake of the great public shaming that is Dabi’s video; maybe she sees the penitent Enji in a new light and wants to try again, imagining the kind of man he could be[6]; maybe she rationalizes that, given that Enji has clearly reformed and the kids are almost all grown, she doesn’t really have the grounds to want a divorce anymore, the past being the past. Heck, maybe she’s just weighing the fact that her abusive-but-now-humbled husband institutionalized her for ten fucking years and her family apparently did absolutely nothing in that time to free or exonerate her (including the very woman she was literally speaking to on the phone when she had her nervous breakdown!), so she might as well take her chances with the humbled husband!
5: And even Enji doesn’t bring up the idea of divorce, likely because he knows perfectly well that her family – and a healthy portion of the public! – would give her hell for it. I don’t think he’d fight it if she asked for one, and he’d continue providing financial support either way, but he wouldn’t suggest it himself save perhaps to ask, very tentatively, if it’s something she herself wants.
6: That would be a screamingly ill-considered plot beat, but it’s Horikoshi we’re talking about here; he probably thinks Rei would have been totally fine if she’d just had someone to pat her on the back and tell her everything was going to be okay. If only she'd called her mother – what do we think, maybe ten minutes? – earlier, then maybe all this could have been avoided!
Whichever the case, I think there’s functionally zero chance that Rei post-series is going to ask for a divorce or even push Enji to carry through those plans he had for building a new house for her while he stays behind at his own.
Maybe in a different story, Fuyumi would be the Modern Woman that could push her mother to have some self-respect and not be so mired in the expectations of her upbringing, but Fuyumi’s own most prominent character trait is her longing for a family reconciliation. Probably nothing’s going to come from her quarter, either, then, especially when the person most unhappy with the status quo is neither her father nor her mother, but Natsuo, who certainly has the right to his opinion, but not to a say.
That aaaaall said, I do want to come back to the accusation of Rei's situation as human trafficking, because it's easy for me to imagine someone showing up in my inbox or replies waving citations to prove that it is too. So on that note, if you look up “human trafficking” on Wikipedia, it will tell you that one of the things that can be considered human trafficking is forced marriage. While concerns of trafficking via this vector typically rotate more around e.g. transnational forced marriage for the purposes of coerced labor or sexual slavery, forced marriage itself (on its own Wikipedia page) is defined as any marriage in which both parties did not choose to enter the marriage with free and full consent.
Arranged marriages, which I contend Rei and Enji's to be, are not considered synonymous, as the prospective spouses are still considered capable of giving consent to allow family members or professional matchmakers to assist in finding suitable candidates; this holds true so long as both parties still ultimately have the ability to accept or decline the candidates offered. As I noted in the Dabi Sexism post, forced marriage is very much illegal in Japan!
However, Wikipedia notes that forced marriage exists on a spectrum, as what constitutes “force” can range from kidnapping and threats of physical violence to more subtle psychological pressure or emotional abuse inflicted by family members, and that latter clause is where we must ultimately land in talking about Rei’s ability to freely consent.
Her view is clearly that she was able to choose freely enough – “Yes, my options were limited, but I made my choice, and I walked that path of my own accord.” I'm unwilling to dismiss her own self-perception out of hand, especially since she never says anything to contradict it in the hospital scene with the family or at any point after, by which time she's portrayed as having been galvanized by Touya's return as regaining all her old strength and then some.
And she did, I must point out, have strength before, at least if we believe Enji's first impression of her as being ice-like: prone to “melting away” at a touch, but nonetheless strong. That doesn't suggest to me a wilting, meek flower who hates everything about her situation and is only going along with it because she sees herself as powerless to resist her terrible, awful, no good very bad family! Quite the contrary, I would say (albeit somewhat self-servingly!) that that characterization lines up quite well with my conception of Rei as a woman who knows and accepts her role in life and who's been looking for a way to fulfill it in a way that she herself finds satisfactory, but who also has her share of concerns about intimacy (emotional and otherwise) with an Outsider.
That said, I’d be reluctant to say that she had 100% unhindered agency in the matter, either, given the expectations she would have been raised with and the pressures she had to have been expecting to clamp down harder and harder the longer she resisted those expectations.
Did she have to marry Enji? No, I think she could have gotten away with rejecting his proposal if he’d really rubbed her the wrong way, frightened her, or she just couldn’t stand to look at his awkward glowering. But the family would have brought her another prospect in due time. And another, and another, until something reached a breaking point. I don’t think they could ever have truly made her marry in the sense of someone holding her in place while someone else forced her hand through the motion of pressing her personal seal to the marriage license. However, they could very easily have disowned her and thrown her out of the house. Obviously, no one would want things to come to that – frankly, she’s much too valuable an asset to the family to let things come to that! – but there’s such a lot of emotional pressure that could be exerted before reaching that point, too.
Rei would have known all of this. And, again, if you don’t assume that she’s just Magically Immune to the thought patterns and values imprinted in her by her own upbringing, then she likely wanted to help her family, people she presumably loved quite dearly! So in that situation, I think what she would have been looking for was simply a candidate she found appealing enough. It wouldn’t have to be love at first sight, the man wouldn’t have to be perfect,but just enough – kind enough, caring enough, understanding enough – that she could trust her future and, with any luck, her heart to him. Become the ice that melts into a touch rather than away from it.
If she decided, based on her own judgement and experience in however many meetings they had before the arrangement was finalized, that Enji could be that man, and if she still felt sufficiently free and safe to refuse even in the face of some degree of familial disapproval, then I don’t think we can call it a forced marriage. But there are, of course, a lot of Ifs in there – as my anon asker notes, we never get enough insight into the details of Rei’s family situation to gauge how burdened she was or wasn’t, or felt or didn’t feel, by the expectations of the Himura family. There’s room there, ample room, to consider that it could have been a truly forced marriage, and could therefore be considered a form of human trafficking – but if that is the case, the blame would not be on Enji, who presumably just went to a professional matchmaker hoping they could find him someone suitable and willing, but on the Himura.
And but so, to circle back to my original post, all I’m asking for is some intellectual honesty. When the people who call it human trafficking use that term, they aren’t talking about a difficult, fraught situation in which Rei’s parents, laden with their own damaging history of tradition and family expectation, pressured her to accept the proposal of a man she didn’t know, and she accepted because she valued her family's needs over or as an aspect of her own happiness. The people who use that term are not using it to talk about the Himura at all!
The people who use that term are talking about Enji buying a woman as a sex slave.
That is simply not what happened, and to imply it is by using words like “human trafficking” and “breeding stock” is to wildly sensationalize Rei’s story for the purposes of advancing an ideological agenda of casting Endeavor in the most damning light possible – just like Dabi does. I said in the original post that I wasn’t going to “let him off the hook” for that, and in the sense that I think it is categorically a Morally Wrong Action for him to take, I do still think he’s “on the hook” for it. But he’s also a Villain, a deeply traumatized and wronged young man whose pain is at least in part the fault of his mother's inaction. More to the point, though, he's an antagonist in the story! I don’t begrudge him the way he co-opts his mother’s story to use for his own ends because a) it makes the story more interesting and b) the narrative isn’t trying to tell me he’s correct to do so.
His fans, I’m afraid, don’t get that same leeway when they willfully distort a woman’s story for the sole purpose of making a point about a man.
But yes, it would be a lot easier to have decent conversations about this if Horikoshi wasn't so fucking allergic to giving women internal monologue, dictation of the narrative framing in their own goddamn flashbacks, and meaningful histories separate from the men in their lives. While the visual cues of Enji and Rei's first meeting being an omiai are extremely obvious to the Japanese reader, and I don't expect Western readers to magically be able to intuit that if they've never heard of the practice before, they wouldn't have to magically intuit it if we got more context on Rei's life prior to that exact meeting – if she was, in fact, allowed to have a meaningful history separate from the men in her life.
Seriously, I love Geten and I love the information he gave us, but I'd love it a lot more if it was serving to advance the character arcs/narratives of Rei and Geten himself, rather than transparently only being brought up to justify contextualize Dabi's latent ice affinity.
One last point before I wrap this up: the flaming elephant in the room. So, I didn't talk a lot about Enji’s own perspective or responsibility throughout all this, but for the record, my read on him is that he approached all this with the full awareness that he was asking for something societally frowned on, a sullen determination to find a woman who would accept him and his proposal anyway, but also an awkward resolve to try to be as respectable and good a husband and father as he could be in light of those circumstances. His expression when he asks Rei if she likes flowers is much too open and genuine for me to think he came in already planning to be a domineering tyrant with no concern at all for the opinions/will/personality/personhood of his bride-to-be.
I don’t think he intended or wanted to be married to someone who would feel so trapped and powerless with him, but he was young and stubborn and also, to be quite frank about it, probably not actually accustomed to dealing with Old Money. His own father had been dead for years and of his mother, we have no indication. I don’t think a twenty-something Todoroki Enji would have had the first fucking clue how oppressive the expectations of an old, old family like the Himura could have been for Rei, not unless she specifically chose to tell him. And given that her telling him, “Just between you and me, I really feel like my family is forcing me into this against my will,” would make the marriage illegal, she certainly was not going to tell him that – assuming she even felt that way at all!
Now, as I suggested in the Sexist Dabi Y/N post, readers are under no obligation to like Horikoshi’s decision to portray Enji this way. They’re more than welcome to claim it’s a shitty retcon written by an abuse apologist to deflect blame from Endeavor and deny the full ugliness of his early portrayal!
Further, as I said at the outset, Enji’s initial intentions and careful handling of Rei early on in no way absolve him of seeking a quirk marriage to begin with, much less having children when what he actually wanted was a clone of himself with better temperature control, and even less any of the other wrongs he would go on to commit in his spiral into obsession and violence. Looking at his portrayal in the canon as we have it, though, and only at the attitude he had when he first set out to marry, there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’m going to accept that he intentionally and knowingly sought out a woman he could financially entrap and thereafter rape with impunity. That’s what people are saying, either directly or via implication, with the human trafficking accusation, and I just have no time for it.
To me, the young Enji was a New Money upstart with a lurking obsession fatally undermining but not therefore negating his good intentions, while the Himura were a bigoted and entitled Old Money family who viewed Enji as a useful tool for the sake of reversing their failing fortunes. And Rei, in their eyes and in her own was not more important as an individual than as part of the collective whole, the Prestigious and Long-Storied Himura Family.
It’s certainly Enji’s fault for driving Rei into a breakdown after they married, but I don’t think it’s his fault for her marrying him to begin with. That’s entirely down to her family and her choices.
Thanks for the ask!
