One Bad Day - League of Villains

can you explain the meaning of all it takes is one bad day meaning my hero academia? I saw it used with twice but i thought that it might appy to some of the villians we saw in the manga.



In the most recent arc “My Villain Academia” the story flipped to the villain’s side rather than the heroes and we saw the world through their eyes. In that same arc, Hori made several allusions to The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, a comic that explores a darker take on the relationship between batman and the joker and one potential take on the Joker’s Character. It just like My Villain Academia is a story told mainly through the villain’s eyes rather than the hero’s, and it’s all about the narrative a villain tells himself.

What was Hori’s purpose in referencing the killing joke? Did he take inspiration from the story? Is he just a nerd making a comic book reference? Did he believes the themes espoused in the Killing Joke to be true? Let’s take a look under the cut.

1. The Killing Joke

The most logical place to start is with the material Horikoshi is referencing himself. I read the Killing Joke several years ago, and reread it for the purpose of this meta. The funny thing about the killing joke (har har) as it’s one of those stories that gets misinterpreted a lot by fans.

It’s actually a pet peeve of mine when people blame the original work itself, like saying it’s Fight Club’s fault that people misread it. The common misreading of the text is that Joker is right, that he’s actually this really deep person that sees through the lies of society. Even when the entire point of the story is that Joker is wrong, the characters even say this out loud as direct dialogue. This story is the exact opposite of subtle, it’s very in your face with it’s themes, almost too loud.

People confuse the Joker’s own personal narrative, that he sees through these things and is therefore deeper and more aware than anybody else, with the framing of the story that frames Joker as petty and shallow. But, you could have Joker wear a t-shirt that says “I am wrong and a hypocrite” the entire work and people would still misread it.

The point of this preamble being, I don’t think Hori misinterpreted the killing Joke. I do not think his reading of the story is so shallow he referenced it because the joker is a cool villain who says cool things. I hope that will show as I continue, that there is a lot of thought put into these connections. Even if it’s not a direct adaptation of the themes of the killing work the two separate works make for a really interesting comparison.

Joker says many things about the world., but the killing Joke isn’t about the world at all, nor does Joker really care about the world. The Killing Joke is not a comment on society, it’s a character study, primarily about the relationship between Batman and the Joker. It starts and ends with the titular killing joke.

See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum, and one night, one night they decide they don’t like living in the asylum anymore. They decide they’re going to escape. So, like, they get up on the roof and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town stretching away in the moonlight, stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem but his friend, his friend daredn’t make the leap, y’see. Y’see he’s afraid of falling. So then the first guy has an idea. He says “Hey, I have my flashlight with me. I’ll shine it across the gape between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me.” But the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says. He says “wh-what do you think I am, crazy? You’d turn it off when I was halfway across.”

The Joker’s joke, which is an analogy of how hopeless it is for one insane man to try saving another insane man. It’s so sadly relevant, Batman can’t help but join the Monster in bitter laughter. The entire story is a character study of the foiling between Batman and the Joker, and how both of their actions, becoming a hero, becoming a villain, is a response to meaningless tragedy in their lives. Yet, even if Batman recognizes that they’re both victims in a way he can’t save joker, because it’s impossible for one insane man to save another.



That is the main theme, of the Killing Joke. In a way it’s a failure of empathy, because batman’s methods won’t save the joker, punching him in the face won’t fix him. That is also what I believe Horikoshi disagrees with.

The main conflict of the Killing Joke is that the Joker is trying to make a point. That he’s not that different from everybody else, that anyobdy when exposed to the meaningless tragedy of the world would go insane. That it’s the right response and everybody else, clinging to to society, and it’s made up rules are the ones who are really man.

It’s basically what is called moral nihilism.



Moral nihilism is the meta-ethical view that ethical claims are generall false. It holds that there are no objective moral facts, or true propositions - that nothing is morally good, bad, right, wrong, because there are no moral truths.

Basically, because morals are made up ideas by human beings therefore morals cannot exist. The thing is while it insists there is no value to the things we believe are proper and right about the world, it’s not Nihilism or not in the nietzschian sense of the word.

See, the thing is Joker is right that all of these institutions are meaningless, that they’re not as set in stone as humans would like to pretend they are, that the earth under your feet could fall out under you at any time.

But that realization is not necessarily something that leads to evil, or even madness. Like, nihilism is very subversive of power structures. People use the idea of meaning, they use ideas, they use the way the world currently is as unfair as it is to insist that the world has always been that way, to keep in power. Therefore, rejecting what you are told by existing power structures and finding their words meaningless and thinking critically instead is something that could lead into something better. The formation of new ideas inevitably involves the rejection of old ones as meaningless.

However, the joker isn’t interested in any of that. Nothing he says is subversive of power structures at all. He doesn’t care about the injustice of the world, or the way power structures let people like him fall through the cracks. In fact, Joker recreates the same power structures he is trying so hard to subvert and laugh at.

Joker’s entire (possible?) backstory is that he was a victim of poverty that the world didn’t really care about, was utterly indifferent to, and the realization of the world’s indifference to him is what drove him mad in the end. However, the thing about the Joker is, he sucks at telling jokes. His attempted parody or satire just ends up recreating the same ideas of the society he is trying so hard to say that he’s above.

In his backstory, the Joker makes a pretty misogynist joke. While a victim of poverty himself, he looks down on women victims of poverty who sell their own bodies and try to live just like he is. Joker’s problem isn’t society itself, it’s that he’s the one being stepped on, and not the one stepping on others because he thinks it should be the other way around. A guy like him should have never ended up society’s victim, society’s punchline.

Which is why he insists that he’s normal. He’s the same as everybody else. And in a way he’s right, Joker reflects the attitudes of society, he’s sexist, he looks down at the poor, it’s implied he takes his feelings of inferiority out on his wife. He’s normal for all of those reasons, not because it would be normal to go insane.

Also, this is just a side tangent but there’s a lot of philosophy on whether normal people are good or bad which is too lengthy to get into, but whether people are born good or bad by default, normal people will carry within them the ideas society raised them in.



“You must stop your fooling around with women. You’ve gone far enough. Society won’t stand for more.”

What, I wondered, did he mean by “Society?” The plural of human beings? No longer Human, Osamu Dazai.

Society is the plural of human beings. Joker is a part of the same society, a reflection of the same society, a response to it, just like any other person is, and in that way he’s normal and not as outside of society as he believes himself to be.

The work then goes on to make the point that while this may be our society, there are also people who try to be better even in situations like these. Gordon the entire time, tells Batman it’s wrong even if Joker is a bad person who murders people, to beat him up because police brutality is wrong.

So we finally reach the scene which Hori is quoting. Joker’s speech to Batman, the grand point that he is trying to prove. That everybody is the same as he is, they just haven’t realized it yet. That anybody would have gone mad being put through what he was put through, the revelation that everything was meaningless.

However, once again Joker doesn’t actually care whether society is meaningless or not. In fact, his actions are the opposite of NIhilism. He is trying to make a point. A point, as in, the opposite of meaninglessness. He thinks there are ideas that are correct, that there’s such a thing as being right about this world.

Which is why we see is his slow breakdown amidst his own monologue. What he really wants is to prove to someone else his perspective is correct. So that he can finally feel justified in it, and maybe because batman isn’t responding he has to pause a minute and consider that he’s wrong?



What Joker fears is true meaninglessness. So everything he does isn’t reveling in meaninglessness like he supposes, it’s the opposite of it. He’s trying to create a narrative to life, he’s trying to give it themes, he wants to teach a lesson. Joker’s views are just a reflection of the society that created him. Joker thinks everybody else is wrong, but the idea that he himself might be wrong genuinely breaks him.

Which is why Batman’s line here is so important. Because I’ve heard it before. What Joker says is no different from society. He carries the same attitudes. Society isn’t just some idea floating out there, it’s made up of human beings, people like the Joker.

So, the work of the Killing Joke itself is subversive to the idea that one bad day is all it takes to turn anyone into a villain. However, at the same time the Killing Joke is not trying to make a point about society, or insanity, or victimhood and trauma or anything like that. All of those ideas present in the work, but they are basically just window dressing because the central part of the story is a character study between Joker and Batman, two people who let their entire lives be ruined by one bad day.

However, at the same time Killing Joke is heavily flawed. Just like the joker is misogynist, etc. etc, the work itself is rife with the nineties it was made in. On that front it’s much more a product of its time than ahead of its time in any signficiant way. Like, there’s the obvious fridging of Barbara Gordon, but also as I said the point they are trying to make isn’t reflective of mental illness or trauma or anything like that. The joker went mad because he was a bad person to begin with.

See the thing is I also believe that mentally ill people are perfectly capable of being bad people at the same time. There’s nuance there. No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai is an example of this. The main character isn’t a bad person because they are mentally ill. The fact that they are a victim of trauma never goes away throughout the book. Yet at the same time, you see the person just uses other people as things for them to cope with, they could care less about the feelings of others, they see no one else as an individual. The way they cope with their mental illness when they are given access to healthier alternatives, is what makes them a bad person.

While yes that is also a part of the Joker’s character, he’s always been double sided as a bully, as someone who is looking for an excuse to exploit others not really to make any kind of point. Which is why the ideas of mental illness and victimhood and whether society is at fault for creating people like this by the act of letting people fall through the cracks isn’t really suited to a character like the joker. This is something Alan Moore himself admits.

I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. “Alan Moore”

There are a lot of ideas about society brought up in the Killing Joke, but none of them are substantial, and none of them really matter because the work itself is not trying to develop them.

However, the ideas themselves are still good which is why I like to think Hori’s work in My Hero Academia, his insistence that one bad day is what created people like Shigaraki, Twice, and Redestro is not a misinterpretation of Alan Moore’s message but in fact an interesting response.

2. Shigaraki’s Bad Day

There are a lot of connections between Shigaraki, the character and the Joker for instance, it’s pointed out right a way in the same sense as the Joker is throughout the entire Killing Joke comic, that he does not really mean what he says and he isn’t actually trying to prove any kind of point through his actions.

However, Horikoshi’s writing and humanization of Shigaraki is really different and takes a different direction than the Joker. Here let’s talk about good victim bad victim again.

The reason good victim bad victim is bad, because it basically tries to strip away victimhood of characters in order to render them in black and white ways. It gives the implication that reacting certain ways to trauma makes you a bad person. The feelings of the victim are entirely stripped away and they’re stopped from being seen as a human being, because other people want to fit them into a simpler black and white narrative.



Nuance is the best way to approach these scenes. So, let’s look at this scene with what we now know. Shigaraki is a victim of abuse. Not only that but he became a punching bag for his father, directly because All Might’s Master abandoned his father to raise All Might Instead. He was raised in domestic violence, and then adopted by a violent person and molded into becoming more violent raised with no stability, no home and constantly exposed to danger that would threaten his life.

So, yes Shigaraki’s words might be nonsense but the feelings behind them are still real. This is what All Might’s Mistake is, he could not care any less about the feelings that the person he is fighting has, and he just sees them as someone to punch in the face. This is also something that bites him later when he realizes that Shigaraki actually was someone he was connected to.

Of course All Might is trying to save a bunch of kids, does he really have time to listen to the feelings of somebody threatening to kill kids? Who knows. That’s the thing about reality, it is mesy and indefinite, there are more important questions to ask then whether victims are good or bad. You could also say at the same time that All Might is completely oblivious to the feelings of victims of abuse. That he still fails to see what kind of person Endeavor is, and insists he has good things to teach people, because Endeavor is a part of the same sytem that heroes is.

Anyway, the point of that tangent was to establish a good aspect of Hori’s writing, characters are people first. Shigaraki is a victim first before the question of whether he is a good person or a bad person is even asked.

Shigaraki is also, someone like the joker thinks he seees above society because he sees it from an outsider’s perspective. He views other people as clinging onto meaningless ideals and unable to see or think for themselves, because they’re too concerned with the illusion of safety.

Shigaraki also shares the same relationship with Deku that the joker does with Batman. Even though they do not know or understand each other, the two of them are set up as mortal enemies and keep fighting each other because their masters pushed them into this fight. Deku even denounces Shigaraki the same way that Batman does the Joker.

Shigaraki and the joker both experience a moment where they snap. Almost as if their entire lives have been defined by one bad day, where a lot of it amounted to coincidence. Joker loses his whole family in one day and falls in the chemical tank, Tenko’s quirk activates after a particularly bad day of abuse in his abusive household and his family is caught up in an accident, and then when his father attacks him he tries to defend himself.

Here is the primary difference though. With Joker there’s the idea written that Joker was like that all along, that he wanted to hurt people and take out his shitty life on others, and that his madness just revealed feelings that were already there. This mostly works in the case of the joker because he’s a bully, a bad person, that’s who he’s always been.

But, Shigaraki is 1) five years old, and 2) we see the kind of person Shigaraki is before trauma.



He’s a kid who is in fact, victimized by the patriarchical ideas of society. Unlike the joker who believed he deserved more, not only was Tenko literally just a kid trying to be himself and follow his own dream who was abused by patriarchical authority figure in his own house, but Tenko even as a victim still cared about the feelings of other people, fellow people who were being excluded like him and he went out of his way to look out for them.

There are absolutely no hints that Tenko was simply a bad person all along, and that he was looking for the excuse to simply act on his impulses to hurt other people and destroy things. In fact this idea itself appears in story as a narrative that All for One feeds him in order to manipulate. The Joker’s ideas appear in the story, but the one that uses them, the one that’s just a bully taking advantage of weaker people is All for One, not Shigaraki.

Shigaraki is deliberately raised not to have empathy for others, to only act on his own impulsive feelings to destroy, to be impulsive, to act to hurt whoever he wants, whenever he wants.

Now, I don’t know if there are truly good or evil people in this world. Good and evil might not even be real, but, at the same time jerks are real, and they’re out there in the world being jerks. For the sake of simplicity let’s just define a jerk as somebody who does not care about the feelings of other people in the least, especially when it comes secondary to their own feelings. Shigaraki does not fit that criteria.



Shigaraki listens to the people around him, he treats them with care. Even though Shigaraki suffered one bad day, and then several bad days after that, the part of Shigaraki that All for One tried so hard to destroy where he actually wants to reach out and connect to others and stand up for them is still there.

So, in a way Horikoshi is using Shigaraki for a much more empathic take of one bad day, which sort of validates both sides of the argument. Yes, someone’s entire life can be ruined by one day and they can fall through the cracks that easily and the society that was supposed to take care of them won’t. It’s a stance that acknowledges that villains are made, and trauma exists and will always affect people whether they are good or bad people.

However, at the same time that does not necessarily mean the person you are will be gone forever. One bad day cannot destroy you. The Joker’s view is pessimistic because he believes there’s no hope for someone like him, that both he and batman are completely broken and will have their lifes defined by their one bad day their entire life. Whereas, not only are the good parts fo Shigaraki still in there, but he also is someone slowly recovering from his trauma when placed in a much healthier environment. The Shigaraki at the beginning of the manga, and the Shigaraki we know now are different, because Shigaraki does not want to be stuck in one bad day his whole life, he’s trying desperately to become his own person outside of his trauma.

In the end, one bad day can in fact ruin your entire life. Which is why the message of the Killing Joke ends up coming off as a little ableist, by saying that if you were a good person you would not have let it ruin you. It’s kind of like saying that Dabi is a bad person because he chose to be a villain in response to Endeavor’s abuse, even though Shouto was abused and chose to become a hero. Like, that’s a pointless argument to make, and holds Dabi accountable for his own abuse instead of holding Endeavor accountable for the people he abused.

Shigaraki isn’t the joker, because Shigaraki is a lot more human than the joker as a character.

2. Twice’s Bad Day

The other fundamental difference between the Joker and The League of VIllains is that the Joker really is not trying to make any kind of anti-establishment point, nor does he really care about the society around him, whereas the League of Villains definitely does care. The Killing Joke isn’t actually about society, but My Hero Academia, the central conflict of the story is about the society the story takes place in, a society that basically manufactures it’s own villains.

Twice, just like the joker, and just like Shigaraki is someone who is driven insane by one bad day. Specifically because society as a whole neglected him and let him fall through the cracks. He’s also like the joker, someone who while at the same time as being insane, genuinely is able to observe the world around him from an outsider’s viewpoint and pick up on things. He tends to be more aware than the other characters, even while babbling like he’s just comedic relief.

However, Twice’s views are also in direct contrast with the Joker’s. Twice himself believes that it’s fine that normal people are able to enjoy their normal everyday lives, and that people exist in this society who have no problem fitting in at all.

Whereas, the joker loathes normal people and anyobdy else who can fit into society in a way that he cannot. He dismisses them all as idiots and laughs at them. That’s because, as a character Twice is far more self aware, unlike the Joker who is in denial of his want for people to understand him that’s exactly what Twice wants and admits to wanting. He knows his views are outside of normal society, so instead of trying to prove that he’s right, Twice seeks out people who are like him.

He also knows that society will not try to save or sympathize with a person like his. The thing is the things Twice is saying aren’t grandiose claims to the true meaning of the world or seeing through everything, instead they’re much more grounded observations that are true because My Hero Academia is trying to prove a society that has failed people like Twice.

Twice’s story even mirrors the joker in several ways. He is basically the same, a guy down on his luck, dealing with poverty who eventually resorts to crime when all of his other options fall through.

Let us count the actual societal injustices that are present in Twice’s Backstory. Twice obeyed the law, and the person he hit did not. However, because the person he hit was a rich person and Twice was not, Twice was the one who was punished instead. Almost as if laws that supposedly protect everybody favor rich people and people with power already.

The foster system left Twice alone when his parents died from a villain attack.

Not only is Jin given a permanent record which affects all of his future employment because society treats felons like they are not people, but rather a lower class, but he also was fired from his job because someone abused the power they had in society to carry out a personal grudge against Twice. That person got away scott free and Twice lost his entire livelihood.

Twice retaliates and he turns to crime in order to survive, and yes there were better ways that Twice could have responded, but the only reason that Twice was put into the situation in the first place was several abuses of power in society directed towards him. People like to insist over and over again that victims should always just remain good people forever, without lashing out, or hurting others in order to survive but then not say how they are supposed to survive in those situations.

Twice however, takes full responsibility for his actions and realizes that his lashing out, his decision to live selfishly and steal and try to live the good life abusing his quirk was not what he wanted at all. His actions result directly in his bad day.

However, Twice too is given an option to recover. All it takes is one bad day, and anyone can become a villain is not the Joker trying to point in the context of My Hero Academia, it’s a statement of empathy. That Twice, Shigaraki are not alone in their trauma. That they are both able to find each other, and start to see themselves as human when they realize they were people driven to be this way and not bad people who were always this way. In Horikoshi’s writing it becomes a much more humanizing statement.

The sense of understanding that Joker is depserately trying to find in batman by proving a point, by forcing him to see the world this way, Twice and Shigaraki find in each other.

The Joker’s descent into madness is sign that he is permanently broken, whereas when Twice imitates that same pose and expression it’s used in a moment of healing for him. It’s him realizing broken as he is, he’s still here, he survived his one bad day.

As a final note, while portraying this humanizing message Horikoshi also manages to succesfully illsutrate the original point of the killing joke as well. It’s almost like having multiple examples of mental illness present in your stories, you can better explore the more negative reactions to mental ilness as well without coming off as ablist.

The commentary that Joker is a part of the society he thinks himself better in, that he repeats what he’s trying to subvert, that he entirely fails at sattire is something that is repeated in Rikiya.

Rikiya and Joker are both capable of observing the society around them. They know the society around them is wrong. RIkiya’s ideals as Re-Destro that people should not be judged by their quirks and that quirk society as a whole tends to restrict people entirely based on their quirks, something that they are born with and cannot control, and that society should be trying to adapt to people and change rather than just putting certain people down for the benefit of the people who can fit in better.

However, both the joker and Rikiya are shown explicity not really to have attachment to the other people around them, or see them as people. They are jerks. Rikiya sees people as dispoable sacrifices to his great goal of reforming society.

Rikiya however speaks of how evil society’s prejudgices is, and then he goes and repeats them. He looks down on the league of villains for being poor and disabled when he himself is a wealthy businessman. He suggests that Shigaraki is uneducated as an insult to put him in his place.

His followers who espouse how people should not be judged by their meta abilities, judge the league as worthless and unworthy people because of their quirks.

Destro says not to judge people by their quirks, and then goes and immediately insists that Shigaraki can only be a bad person who wants to destroy people, because he happened to be born that way.

Re-Destro claims to be anti-establishment, but not only does Rikiya thrive in this exact kind of society (he’s a wealthy businessman he’s on the top of society, punching down at people who fell through cracks and were living as genuinely homeless going day to day for survival), but even if he were succesful at destroying the current society his ideals would just recreate the same unbalanced society just with him at the top.

Rikiya would create a society where people are still discriminated on based by their quirks, he would create a society where people with stronger, flashier, quirks are able to have more freedom in life, and find more success and people with weaker quirks cannot amount to anything. How is that any different from the society he’s a part of?

Rikiya is a part of the society he is trying to destroy. Yet, even he is still a victim in a way, he was raised in a cult to think that way and told that he had to believe these things because of who his father was, and he’s constantly at conflict with himself because of it.

Rikiya, Shigaraki, and Twice in addition to other members of the League of Villains who fell through the cracks, all of these characters read as responses to different aspects of the jokers character and different ideas he presented in The Killing Joke. Rather than just a reference though, it is an intelligent response, that Horikoshi clearly made these ideas his own and shows off his priorities in wanting us as the audience to forget that these characters we call villains are human first.

In the end the Killing Joke and My Villain Academia play with the same ideas to come to different conclusions. The Killing Joke ends with the idea that an insane person cannot save another insane person. Batman cannot save the joker. The joker is not someone who can be saved, and at the realization of that batman starts to strangle him and gives into his worst instincts to commit police brutality.

My Hero Academia uses those same ideas to tell a story where insane people can save other insane people. Unlike Batman and the Joker, I genuinely believe that Horikoshi is writing towards a conclusion where Shigaraki is someone who can be saved by Deku, not someone he is meant to continually fight with until one of them dies or the other.

In the end they are two different stories one of them illsutrates a failure of empathy and the other illustrates how empathy among insane people brought them together.