My Hero Academia: Dabi's Back Story Explained In Anime; Deets Inside

Dabi is one of the My Hero Academia villains with an extremely sad and traumatizing backstory. However, that does not make the character any less of a villain even though fans empathize with him.

Published on Jun 19, 2024  |  06:00 PM IST |  255.6K
Dabi's backstory in My Hero Academia
Dabi in My Hero Academia anime (PC: Crunchyroll, Toho Animation, Studio BONES, Kohei Horikoshi)

This article contains spoilers from My Hero Academia anime and manga

After the main story ended with the heroes defeating TomurAFO, the My Hero Academia manga started its epilogue chapters. Mangaka Kohei Horikoshi focuses on several small side plots and characters to give them all a happy ending and show us how life is going for everyone after the devastating war. One character that everyone is interested in seeing again is Toya Todoroki aka Dabi. 

In the latest chapter 425 of the manga, we saw Endeavor aka Enji Todoroki finally going to meet Dabi after the final war. Fans have been waiting for this as Dabi did have an extremely traumatic childhood because of Endeavor, which was the reason he turned into a villain. However, it does not excuse the fact that he was a devastatingly powerful villain who used his powers for destruction. 

Dabi’s backstory is one of the saddest in MHA


My Hero Academia is a manga that has several flawed characters who have had pretty traumatic lives, and Dabi is definitely one of them. Born as Toya Todoroki, he is the eldest child of Enji Todoroki aka Endeavor who wanted to train his kids to become stronger than All Might because he never could. Although Toya did not have his mother’s ice powers along with Enji’s flame power as the latter had hoped, Toya’s flames were even stronger than Endeavor’s, which made him happy.

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Endeavor put Toya through extreme training but his flames were so powerful that his body started to take damage, forcing Enji to stop training. However, wanting to make his father happy, Toya continued to train alone. When Shoto was born with both fire and ice powers, Endeavor pushed Toya aside, which made him even more determined. In the end, one day the forest Toya was training in caught on fire and nothing but his jawbone was found, making his family think that he had died. 

However, it turned out that Dr. Garaki, who saved him and replaced his jaw, told Toya that his family did not bother looking for him. This made Toya so angry with his whole family, especially his father that he turned into the terrifying villain called Dabi and joined the Paranormal Liberation Front. His main goal in life became to make Endeavor suffer just as he had made Toya suffer all his life. 

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Dabi’s character is deeply flawed


Dabi’s character became an antithesis of Shoto as even though they grew up in a similarly traumatic environment, they grew up to become different individuals. At first, it was Shoto’s goal to never use his fire power as he considered it to be Endeavor’s power and wanted to become a hero without it. Dabi on the other hand abused his flame power to make his father suffer for what he had done. 

Due to his traumatic experience, a lot of people feel pity for Dabi even though he is a villain. However, his character has a lot of flaws, including the fact that he hates his little brother Shoto. Even though nothing that Toya suffered was Shoto’s fault, the older seemed to blame his birth and power for Endeavor’s entire focus shifting on him and started to resent him. As children, he never helped Shoto train even when his younger brother was suffering. During their fight, he also tried to kill Shoto. However, in the end, we saw that Toya unlocked his ice power which stayed latent in him for all these years. Even though he was defeated and put in jail, he kept cursing Endeavor who kept asking for his forgiveness. 

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Even though a lot of fans thought that Endeavor might have died in the final fight, we found out that that is not the case. In the latest chapter, his upcoming meeting with Dabi was teased. Moreover, Shoto also said something was to happen ‘today’ when Midoriya asked him about attending Ayoyama’s graduation party. This has led fans to believe that the entire Todoroki family, but especially Endeavor and Shoto might go to meet Dabi where he is imprisoned. Even though we do not know how the Todoroki family subplot will conclude in the manga, fans are hoping to see some reconciliation between the father and his two sons, which could be the first step towards them healing their trauma together.

ALSO READ: My Hero Academia Enters Dabi's Origin Storyline; All You Need To Know About It

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About The Author

Gargi has a Masters degree in English Literature from The University of Calcutta. She has been a content writer

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