Hello everyone. This will be part 1 of an unknown number of posts on Endeavor (due to WorstGen’s image limit).
-Part 2
I have often been quoted as saying that Endeavor is the best written character in the history of Shonen, and this is a quote I stand by.
Endeavor is so awesome that it makes me physically ill. Endeavor is so awesome that I recommend reading My Hero Academia solely for Endeavor. While MHA perhaps has one of the worst endings in the history of manga that were not cut short by their magazines, Endeavor stands alone as an absolute masterpiece of a character, a character who can never exist again in the genre of Shonen manga. What do you mean by that I ask?
Endeavor is a character who was universally hated by the MHA fandom in the beginning. He was initially an abusive father figure who his children hated for either neglect, physical abuse, or both, and whom his wife ends up leaving because he traumatized her so severely that she was forcibly admitted into a mental hospital. He was a true embodiment of the “villainous hero” trope both in MHA as well as in broader fiction.
By the end of MHA, Horikoshi gave Endeavor the best character redemption arc in the history of Shonen, turning him from a singularly obsessed power crazed maniac who hurt the people closest to him, into a man on a mission to repair the lives of his family, and the number 1 ranked Hero who led the world of heroes through the darkest era in the history of this world.
I sometimes think I may be the number one Endeavor fan on the entirety of planet Earth, aside from Horikoshi. The sheer balls it took for Horikoshi to redeem Endeavor in spite of his extreme unpopularity among general anime/manga fans is nothing short of legendary. Horikoshi made the active decision to lose fans over Endeavor.
There were people who would and did drop the manga if Horikoshi attempted to redeem Endeavor, and Horikoshi did it anyway.
There were people who didn’t like seeing Endeavor almost becoming the main character in this manga. Horikoshi did it anyway.
There were people who thought Endeavor was great, but that Shoto, Bakugo, and Midoriya (like the MHA main trio) would clearly surpass him in the end. Yet in the end, none of these characters attained the number one spot that Endeavor held, even in the post MHA future, the number one spot after Edeavor goes to Mirio Togata (based af) and as far as we know none of the MHA Holy Trio actually reached that position.
Horikoshi made the active decision to go against what his own fanbase wanted when it came to Endeavor, and MHA is better off for it.
But this thread isn’t about all that because honestly all this stuff deserves a far deeper look. No, today we’re going to look at how Horikoshi successfully trolled all Endeavor doubters in terms of his power level. And I should say, extreme MHA spoilers ahead, you have been warned.
I honestly wish I could have chronicled all of the Endeavor doubt over the years, it was your classic case of “I don’t like Endeavor’s character therefore he is weak” bullshit that is so prevalent among manga/anime fans.
Even among Endeavor fans, people were really scared to give Endeavor his due respect. Take this video for example:
Now, I love Zhoniin, I unironically watch his channel all the time. I also like Turtle Quirk although I don’t watch purely MHA dedicated videos too often.
That said, these two really chickened out on this video, declaring that Endeavor would convincingly lose to old All For One, a point that was obviously not correct even at the time of this video. This take aged like bread, standby for part 2 of this post lmfao.
But before I get ahead of myself, let us now chronicle some of the absolutely atrocious Endeavor downplay over the years, and how Horikoshi systematically wrote Endeavor in a way to debunk every moronic Endeavor hater in existence.
1. “Endeavor would lose to Overhaul”
This was the first case of highly prevalent annd gross Endeavor downplay.
The idea that the (at the time) second highest ranked hero in all of Japan would lose a 1v1 to a small time Yakuza thug was just hilarious, but people really believed this gross bullshit at the time.
Now Overhaul definitely wasn’t weak, he easily beat League of Villain members Magne and Mr. Compress as his first on panel showing.
Magne:
Compress:
And this was just his first showing. Later on Overhaul is doing far more insane shit with his quirk, and he gives Deku a hard fight and requires him to use OFA at 100% to win:
So I think people saw Deku being required to use OFA at 100%, and concluded that Endeavor could never push Deku that far, and therefore that Overhaul > Endeavor, right?
Now even at the time that all this happened, I was telling people that this was horrendous logic, and the beauty of hindsight is that I don’t have to even try and explain why, I can just show you what happens later. Lol
So later on Horikoshi gives us probably his best villain in the form of Re-Destro, a CEO of a major corporation and secret leader of a massive underground quirk militia:
And Re-Destro does a number of very silly, very insane things in terms of his power level:
^This is his reduced power level as some of the force of this attack was reduced by Tomura
Now, it was universally agreed in the MHA fandom that Re-Destro was completely beyond Overhaul in strength and stature. Overhaul was a leader of a small Yakuza gang, Re-Destro was the CEO of a major corporation. Re-Destro was so strong that his reduced power level was obliterating multiple city blocks with each strike, he was truly a colossally strong villain that just seemed to be way stronger than Overhaul.
So Re-Destro >> Overhaul >> Endeavor, right? This is what most of the internet believed at the time.
Well, Re-Destro later gets into a fight with Edgeshot, the number 4 Hero during the time where Endeavor was the number 1 Hero.
And Edgeshot defeats him off panel. Lol
Now Edgeshot is a great hero, the problem is that Endeavor is plot-acknowledged to be by far the strongest hero of his era, at multiple points in the manga. None of the other Japanese heroes even attempted to reach the level of All Might, let alone surpass him, with the exception of Endeavor. Because Endeavor pushed himself that much harder than all the rest of them, when All Might retired, it was universally accepted by the entirety of MHA that Endeavor was the strongest hero.
So if Edgeshot can mid diff Re-Destro off panel, what does that say about Endeavor?
And this only gets worse when you realize Edgeshot is probably not even the second strongest hero, there are a number of other heroes who may be better than Edgeshot in combat overall (though like I said Edgeshot is quite good).
So literally overnight, the Re-Destro > Endeavor and Overhaul > Endeavor posting virtually vanished off of the face of the MHA fandom.
But who cares, right? Endeavor may be great but he is NOTHING compared to weakened All For One and All Might, right?
Oh, my sweet summer child.
2. Endeavor vs All Might
For a large part of this manga, people thought Prime All Might would actually like, one shot or neg diff Endeavor or something. This is because it was acknowledged in the main series that All Might was clearly stronger than Endeavor, and the gap between them was “not particularly close”.
From this description, people came to the conclusion that Endeavor was just like, a gnat or something to a Prime All Might. Now this take was already suspect given that Endeavor (with help) killed a stronger Nomu than the one who pushed weakened All Might to extreme diff.
However, this quote was also given to us toward the beginning of the manga, and Endeavor goes through a number of character development changes/character growths that in effect result in him being much “stronger” as the series progresses. He gets those “mentality” Powerups. So what does this mean?
Well, Horikoshi actually later gives us a pretty explicit fight between Endeavor or a quasi-All Might level being:
Where Shigaraki’s physical body was said to be close to All Might in power.
This would be reiterated by Endeavor later on:
So, the doctor who made Shigaraki this strong says that Shigaraki is physically “not quite as strong as All Might,” whereas in Endeavor’s eyes, Shigaraki is just straight up as strong as All Might.
Now I must stress, Endeavor is highly intelligent, and he is acknowledged at numerous points in the plot as being highly intelligent. Endeavor before the series had even began had solved more cases than every hero ever including All Might, and still to my knowledge he has solved more cases than any hero of all time. He is a hero who is constantly fighting and operating in “ultra instinct” mode, his body and quirk will operate in synchronization without him even having to consciously think about it, which frees his mind up to solve more complex tasks while his body and quirk operate automatically. He is the type of hero who can immediately identify a fighter’s strengths, weaknesses, and limitations after only brief observations, and immediately begins strategizing on how to defeat them even as his body fights them on auto-pilot.
He has specifically trained himself to be this way, and it is a literal direct plot element that Endeavor is this highly intelligent as this is what he directly teaches Bakugo, Shoto, and Midoriya, to master their abilities to such an extent that they don’t need to think about individual moment to moment combat, so that their minds can be freed up for more advanced problem solving.
Now, the Doctor who made Shigaraki’s body is law imo, if the Doctor says Shigaraki is slightly weaker than All Might then that’s pretty much the end of it, but the point I am trying to make here is that Shigaraki is physically basically as powerful as All Might, he is said by two very credible sources to at least be quite close to All Might. So let’s examine Shigaraki and Endeavor’s exchanges now in detail.
Immediately even Shigaraki’s speed is countered by Endeavor’s reactions. Endeavor then proceeds to pepper Shigaraki with flames:
Before reacting to a second Shigaraki attack. Now there’s a couple of points to be made here:
First off, this attack Shigaraki lands in the bottom left panel basically does no damage to Endeavor.
We can see that immediately after Endeavor bounces across the ground, he is back up with zero damage.
The second point to note is that Endeavor’s flames are actually doing severe damage to Shigaraki:
The issue for Endeavor becomes that Shigaraki has a regeneration quirk, something All Might does not possess. So Shigaraki will basically begin healing himself from Endeavor’s flames, but keep in mind that this is not something All Might would have access to.
The fight continues:
And Shigaraki confirms that Endeavor’s flames are actually damaging his body. Shigaraki continues to hit Endeavor:
But Endeavor never seems to be taking any big damage, and he continues to power through and attack Shigaraki:
Endeavor even manages to put Shigaraki out of commission with an attack that is not his signature attack:
Now the more astute among you will correctly realize that I am not showing the entirety of this exchange, Shigaraki was in fact fighting multiple opponents at once, but the point is to show how well Endeavor does against him on an individual level. Endeavor’s speed, the heat of his flames, and his durability are all FAR above what most MHA fans thought he would actually demonstrate against Shigaraki.
And we haven’t even gotten into Endeavor’s legendary signature move, Prominence Burn, which he later does hit Shigaraki with:
Just look how severely fucked Shigaraki was from this attack. Without the benefit of having a body engineered with multiple quirks, Prominence Burn may have killed or at minimum severely maimed him beyond repair.
Now I am not trying to argue Endeavor > Shigaraki, what I am trying to show is the difference between how MHA fans perceived Endeavor vs how strong Hori actually wrote Endeavor as being. Far from being a low diff or a one shot, Horikoshi made Endeavor strong enough that even an opponent nearly as tough as All Might was having a hard enough time against him initially, and straight up getting maimed by him later on.
Now this may seem like an awkward point to end part 1 of this post, but part 2, which I will also post to this thread, will have a fuck-ton of images and I’d rather that post be alltogether.
Let me know if you don’t give af about MHA or want to be added to the taglist or whatever.
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