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hamliet · 3 years

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Hello! I love reading your bnha meta, and I've found your stuff on Hawks particularly interesting. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the role Tokoyami might play in his arc? I was talking with my brother about Hawks' arc being a tragedy, and he said that he wasn't convinced because he's sure Tokoyami is going to have something to say about it. I personally think it would be weird for him not to be involved somehow, given the prominence he had with Hawks in the last arc.

Good question! Again, I’m bad with specific plot points, but I’ll give this a shot.

So on the one hand, Tokoyami is cool but he is not a very important character. He does not really have an arc to speak of. It is a little late in the game to give Tokoyami an arc, and without an arc, it’s kinda odd to have him play a prominent role. Plus, if he saves Hawks, there’s not an arc there: Tokoyami saved Hawks already, and thinks he’s a good person, so unlike Ochaco-Himiko, Shouto-Touya, and Deku-Shigaraki, Tokoyami saving Hawks doesn’t challenge Tokoyami to grow in any way. So, this runs the risk of feeling a bit cheap.

However, one way I could see this working though (and am gonna hope for it) is that Hawks might be inspired to repent from attempting to go after Dabi (which I do think he’s going to do) in part by Tokoyami. For example, if Tokoyami reveals that his quirk went out of control back in the Forest Training Arc to the point where Dark Shadow hurt Tokoyami’s friends, Hawks could draw a parallel to Touya and his quirk.

I also do think that even if Hawks’s arc is fundamentally tragic, it’ll be redemptively tragic, not nihilistically or cynically so! So Tokoyami playing a redemptive symbolic role for Hawks isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive with tragedy. I also think Hawks will be a hero in the end, even if he dies and has a tragic spiral (the latter pretty likely, the former who knows, I think so but I’m again a character survival pessimist). Meaning, regardless of whether he lives or dies, even if he has a very tragic fall and tries to kill Dabi and ends up hurting Enji instead, I think his final moment in the manga--final moment living or dying--will be heroic. Hence why I’m currently expecting redemptive death but am fine with being wrong.

I guess because--though this isn’t directly part of your ask--there seem to be so misconceptions about what I mean by tragedy, I’ll drag out Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” again:

Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale always reveals what has been called his tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the character, is really nothing--and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker’s brightest opinions of the human animal.

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity, or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man.

(I don’t necessarily agree tragedy is more optimistic than comedies nor that they are inherently better stories, but I do agree with the sentiment that the best tragedies, the ones that actually leave an impression and last through centuries if not millennia--like Icarus, Romeo and Juliet, etc--are tragic because they did not have to be that way. It’s not life sucks and then you die. It’s chances to grow that make it tragic, it’s circumstances that are cruel but that can change (like how, despite the fact that they died and should not have had to, Romeo and Juliet’s love saves Verona). Good tragedy redeems even the darkest of times through glimmers of hope. Even King Lear, one of the bleakest tragedies I can think of, ends with the “good” side winning the war, so there’s hope of a new beginning.

Even if Hawks doesn’t survive his tragedy, we see through others that he could have. (Again because I think I’ll get an ask if I don’t clarify: the reason I am pessimistic for Hawks but not for the Villain Trio is not because Hawks somehow is worse or deserves tragedy, but because the narrative set up is different, see other posts for details about what I mean by that). But even if his tragedy takes him, I think he will die a hero and specifically in an act of redemption after a low fall.

#ask hamliet #hawks #takami keigo #bnha theory #mha theory #bnha 299 #tokoyami #Anonymous

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