Anonymous asked: can you talk about eris quirk and overhauls i heard that there quirk is simular in an aspect, someone talked about in a recent video that eris quirk is a symbol for return to innocence and restoration like with eri arc she returns to a normal childhood with kai being corruption how he want to resemble socaity without quirk you talked about his quirks in your post

linkspooky:

Hello my name is spooky, and I spend the entire time reading a series called “My Hero Academia” thinking and talking about the villains.

Their quirks are similar but I’m going to spin it from a different angle if you don’t mind. Eri and Chisaki are foils, from their background, to their quirks, these are pointed out several times to us by the story and it’s one of the main reasons why Chisaki takes such a personal investment in abusing her.

Now, none of this is going to excuse what Chisaki did of course, but in order to explain their connection I have to go further into Chisaki’s mentality. A lot of it is told more subtly in the background of the arc.

So, a lot of what Chisaki is working from here is a case of projection.

Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributingthem to others.



A lot of people noticed that Chisaki has a definite grudge against quirks, and he seeks to cure them but unless you analyze his character a lot of what he says sounds like crazy villain rambling, like he’s saying terrible things to Eri because he’s an abusive and mean person, but there’s a deeper layer to it than that. Chisaki is not a symbol of corruption, he’s a person with severe flaws to the way he thinks and who is psychologically warped.

So, at the beginning of Chisaki’s character he’s shown to be a severe germophobe.

He wears gloves at all times except when using his quirk and he’s forced to take them off, he wears a plague docctors mask which wee said to superstitiously keep sickness away in medieval times, he constantly complains how dusty the air might be. When Compress attacks him, he cares more about being touched then the fact that he was attacked.

His obsession with keeping everything sterile goes beyond germophobia, it’s basically pathological at this point, considering he lashes out in violence, and is clearly breaking into a cold sweat over the idea of being touched, now this could also just be a villain trait. Chisaki is obsessed with cleanliness because he wants to cleanse people of their quirks and he views quirks as a disease, but it goes a layer beyond that, because as the manga shows us these behavior patterns of Chisaki did not arise until the boss got sick. As the first thing Chisaki is shown doing is checking the Yakuza boss who raised him who is on life support and apologizing to him for the noise he’s going to make defending this place.

However, we’re shown in a flashbak that Chisaki while the boss was healthy shows none of the strange ticks with cleanliness that he’s shown post the boss getting sick. He’s not wearing gloves, and he’s wearing a normal half mask probably just to disguise his face while doing crimes rather than a plague mask which is symbolically associated with avoiding sickness.

Then, it’s important to remember what’s been mentioned about Chisaki’s relationship to the rest of the precepts earlier. He seems really respectful of the old man Yakuza boss, but at the same time the others discuss how if the boss wasn’t in a coma currently then nobody would really listen to Chisaki’s extremism. Even in the flashback where we see them alive and talking together before Chisaki acquired his obsession with being clean, the boss is lecturing him for taking things too far.



There’s also what Chisaki’s henchmen who fought against Kirishima and Gum says, that even though Chisaki is insanely powerful and has one of the strongest quirks in the series to date, he leaves almost all of his fighting to his henchmen. His way of running things requires that they follow him absolutely as disposable pawns.

And then the implication keeps piling on. From Chrono, Chisaki’s closest and oldest companion (subordinate?) (friend?) (subordifriend?).

Then finally we get the implication. The underlings listen to the boss, not Chisaki. The boss then tells Chisaki that he doesn’t belong in the yakuza anymore, the place that took him in, and the place he wants to repay a debt to and then Chisaki snaps and then the implication is clear as he moves his hand and then tells the boss to sit and watch and it fades to black. The reason the Yakuza boss is in a coma is because Chisaki put him in one using his quirk. Then, told the rest of the gang that the boss was sick and he needed to take control. Yet, all of this is because he believes genuinely that he can’t repay the boss unless he takes himself to those extremes.

Chisaki seems stable but he has a very delicate and contradictory mindset, and his obsession with cleanliness is a symptom of it. We’re shown his progression in flash backs. Chisaki is known as an extreme gangster who picks fighs, but the obsession with cleanliness is not there until he is given Eri. Then, realizing her quirk he begins to experiment on her.

As he pushes the horrible experiments further, then his obsession with cleanliness and being sterile develops, which makes sense not only because in order to push human experimentation requires a sterile environment, but also the horrible acts with Chisaki is committing.

Chisaki is not an inhuman monster or an unfeeling sociopath. His actions however are monstrous not him, however there is a person behind those actions who has to justify those actions to himself. Not only is Chisaki fiercely loyal and affectionate of the boss, even after putting him in a coma to use him to his own means. He goes as far as to visit his hospital room and apologize for all the noise he’s going to make, and it’s memories of the boss’s kindness that motivate him when he’s pushed to the absolute extreme.

In a way, the extremes that Chisaki does too, are all in a childish way to earn that same praise that his boss gave him as a child, because the Yakuza is his only attachment to the world, his only place of belonging, if it becomes extinct than he loses his home. However, Chisaki is extremely insecure in this attachment. The only person who took him in still used him as a tool to further the Yakuza’s means, and this becomes clear in Chisaki’s actions and the lengths he pushes himself to. He can never see himself as the Yakuza Boss’s family member, he can only ever be a tool which is why he must always be useful. Being a tool is more important than being family, which is why even though he dearly loves the Boss for taking him in and does everything for the boss’s sake and honor he can justify putting him in a coma and going directly against his wishes. Even though he’s a surrogate son to the boss, he can justify tormenting the boss’s grand daughter because he’s not really the boss’s son, just a tool for the boss to use. Therefore the boss’s own family can be a tool as well.

Yet, at the same time Chisaki wants to see himself as somebody important to that family. He cannot deny the part of himself that craves a place of belonging, and so we see his contradictory thoughts. Therefore we reach psychological projection, a perceived imperfection in himself which is suppressed and then attributed to others.

Chisaki’s obsession with cleanliness arose from the guilt from what he did to the boss, and also what he did to the boss’s granddaughter Eri, which was against his beloved boss’s wishes, and he was explicitly told so, and even told to leave the yakuza over as well. Chisaki is the unclean one, who dirtied his hands with terrible experiments, but if he projects the sickness to everybody else then he can escape the guilt that he himself feels. It’s not Chisaki’s fault, it’s not his own sickness that pushed him to do what he did to Eri, it’s everybody else’s fault, it’s the existence of quirks in the first place.

Then we reach the second point in the essay, Chisaki’s grudge against quirks and why he did what he did to Eri. Chisaki is a foil for Eri, the reason being is that Chisaki was Eri once. We see two flashbacks that give us this implication. Chisaki monologues on how quirks are a virus, and then we see him playing alone secluded in his room.

Then, the next time we see Chisaki he’s sitting entirely alone.

Not only that, but the name Chisaki was given to him by his parents is a name that he violently loathes.

It’s left to implication once again, but the implication is pretty clear. Chisaki was abandoned by his parents due to the nature of his quirk, and was probably secluded by his quirk before that point until his eventual abandonment.

This doesn’t justify anything he did in repeating his abuse on other children, but it does explain why Chisaki has such a grudge against quirks. He was taught his own quirk was monstrous and then abandoned for it. Therefore, to escape this inferiority he sees in himself, Chisaki projects it onto others. He thinks not only is his quirk the problem, but also everybody else’s quirk as well.

Then you have Eri, who like Chisaki was born with an incredibly powerful quirk that came out of nowhere. When she used that quirk on somebody else only by accident, she was quickly abandoned by her birth parents and handed off to the Yakuza instead, which is exactly what happened to Chisaki. Not only that, when she’s given off to Chisaki it’s commented how similiar their quirks are.

Then, Chisaki who himself possesses a quirk that has terrifying capability towards destruction, and one that he uses fully to constantly destroy and rebuild people looks at her quirk and goes “No, actually it’s Eri’s quirk that it’s the terrifying one.” From that moment forward, everything Chisaki says about Eri is really more about himself, he’s pojecting it onto her, all the terrible things he does with his quirk, all his self loathing for having such a power.

Chisaki refuses to see Eri as a victim, or as a human being because he refuses to see himself as one too. Everything Chisaki says about Eri’s quirk and it’s potential for destruction, or horrifying use applies to his own quirk as well.

Even what Chisaki says here to Mirio, he’s clearly resenting Mirio for being born with a quirk that led him to being heroic, whereas his quirk led his parents to abandoning him and him only being used as a tool for the mafia and for violence.

It’s the same as Shigaraki really, Shigaraki resents All Might for saving everybody else when he wasn’t saved. Chisaki resents people with quirks for being able to use them freely, when he only pushes his quirk to the most horrifying applications possible, and he was taught and socialized to hate his quirk, and to only use his quirk for violence.

Chisaki’s quirk to reassemble people can heal them. If he had went into the medical field he would have a miraculous quirk, but people only saw the destructive potential for his quirk. The same can be said for Eri’s quirk, it’s a kind and gentle quirk, but just as eveybody else did to Chisaki, Chisaki twisted it into the most horrific uses possible.

So, we have the foiling between the two. In a way Chisaki does represesnt innocence lost, but not because he’s a corrupting force of the adult world but rather Chisaki represents an Eri whose innocence was lost. Who believed all the nasty things others said about him and internalized it, until he began to victimize others. Chisaki’s goal is an innocent one, deep down all he wants to do is have a place of belonging in the Yakuza and the boss he views like a father, and be congratulated for protecting their honor like he was when he was a kid, he desires a return to that innocence in a way but it’s lost to him because as he grew up the monstrous actions he took.