My Hero Academia – Season 7 Episode 8 Recap & Review

Two Flashfires

Episode 8 of My Hero Academia Season 7 follows the fall of Endeavour’s eldest son, Toya, and his transition into the pyromaniacal villain Dabi. We get a brief snapshot of Toya’s history, his growing obsession with his quirk to gain his father’s approval, and how he lashed out at his mother and an infant Shoto when Endeavour’s attention diverted from Toya to Shoto, who was born with a much more powerful quirk.

We see Toya working on his quirk and inviting his father to show his progress, but when Endeavour doesn’t appear, Toya mentally breaks down, loses control of his flames, and almost burns to death. He’s saved by Kyudai Garaki, also known as Doctor, under All for One’s plan.

Toya wakes up after three years and is informed that he had to be stitched up with regenerative tissues and cannot use his power as before. Grief-stricken, he rejects joining All for One’s team and goes back home, only to discover that his family has moved on and his father’s obsession with training Shoto remains intact. This becomes the breaking point and leads to the birth of Dabi.

The Doctor, under imprisonment, relays how Dabi’s body was supposed to be alive for only a month, and he was surprised when Dabi joined the villains years later, still alive and held together by his resentment towards his father and the other heroes.

Dabi explains to Shoto that he trained his fire and became stronger thanks to his pain insensitivity after his accidental self-immolation, with only one purpose: to take revenge. “My dulled senses removed my limits,” he adds.

As Dabi condenses more and more of his heat while narrating his story, Todoroki realizes that he was expecting to die from the beginning. The moment he finishes his monologue, the real battle begins. Dabi becomes hotter and hotter and finally unleashes his fire.

In another attack, he shoots right at Todoroki, forcing him to crash into a nearby building. This is when Dabi realizes that the heat in one of his palms is neutralizing.

Todoroki finally reveals the move he created himself. “I took the essence of Flashfire and manifest my right and left sides at the same time with my heart at the center. The hot and cold blood circulate through my body and bring equilibrium to both sides,” he explains to Midoriya in a flashback sequence. This new move is purely him.

Saying this, he counterattacks Dabi with a new technique, ‘Great Glacial Aegir,’ leading to a huge explosion which ultimately freezes everything on the opposite side and even Dabi.

The Episode Review

In this episode, we not only encounter Dabi’s past and the reasoning behind his maniacal hatred towards his father and the heroes, but also see Todoroki as almost a mirror image. While both brothers have accepted their existence as the outcome of a quirk marriage, their forms of acceptance are polar opposites, with one destructive and the other constructive. Even Dabi comments, “Even though we’re brothers sharing the same blood, we ended up so different!”

At the same time, we finally see Todoroki finding himself through his unique technique, Phosphor. This move requires Todoroki to use both his right and left sides at once in harmony throughout his body.

Through Phosphor, he literally and figuratively accepts himself as the half-and-half child, where he once rejected his flames altogether out of the hatred he had for his father. “I’m doing this so I can accept the reason I was born into that family. Midoriya, it’s my power,” he tells Deku, smiling.