BIRD

Beautiful…

‼️ MANGA SPOILERS ‼️

It was difficult to tell in the manga, but I think the way this scene was animated makes it very clear that the bleeding is a substitute for tears; if Dabi was physically capable of crying, he would have been crying here by the sea. 

He’d just come face to face with and spoken to his father for the first time in ten years, and all his father could say to him was “you’re the one who murdered Snatch!” Endeavor could so easily recognize the villain responsible for a minor hero’s death, but he couldn’t recognize his own son. What Dabi had just learned was that even after dying, even after returning from the dead, and even after becoming a notorious criminal, he still couldn’t get his father to see him. 

From chapters 301-302, we can tell that Touya’s tears were heavily linked with his desire to be seen and despair at being ignored.

Here he is suspecting that even Natsuo won’t look at him:

Here he is crying while training to impress his father:

Assuming his tear ducts burned away at Sekoto Hill, here he is having his last proper cry—

—while waiting for his father who will never show up. 

Touya died without ever managing to get his father to look at him, and I think buried deep in Dabi’s subconscious there is still the desperate desire to be acknowledged by his father somehow.

Dabi doesn’t give a damn about Snatch, but he spent hours either consciously or subconsciously trying to recall who he was until he finally remembered. Why did he think about Snatch so hard? Because Endeavor brought him up, and if Endeavor remembered Snatch before remembering his own son, this Snatch person must be pretty important, right? Wrong. Snatch was just a small time, rank-less hero who’s last words were

“You ever stop and think about the families who gotta live with that loss?”

Recalling Snatch’s last words was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back and made Dabi start bleeding because, given how much Touya cared about his father’s attention, there’s no way Dabi hadn’t wondered about his father’s reaction to his death. A part of Dabi probably thought the death and everything after was worth it if it set him up as someone his father would finally look at. A part of him probably hoped his father would recognize him when he approached in Fukuoka.

What Dabi learned from his encounter with Hawks and Endeavor, an encounter in which his father remembered Snatch of all people but couldn’t remember Touya, is that the victims Snatch talked about—the ones with “families who gotta live with that loss”—Touya is not one of them. His father couldn’t be bothered to look at him when he was alive and he still can’t be bothered after he’s dead. 

It was the harshest reminder of a pain that Touya was all too familiar with, the pain of being ignored when he wished he could have been seen. Dabi is Touya, and his physical response to the emotions is as reflexive as when he was a child—he got worked up and started crying.