Gigantomachia is, literally, a mountain moved by someone else's will. In My Hero Academia, this colossal bodyguard of All For One can cross an entire country on foot, crushing cities in his path, without being driven by resentment, greed or the pleasure of destruction. He is driven by one thing alone: his master's order. When someone blocks his advance toward him, he razes whatever stands in the way; when he believes a stranger is not worthy of carrying his lord's will, he treats him as an obstacle to be demolished. His strength is apocalyptic, but his moral conscience is outsourced: he has handed it over entirely to another. For the theory of moral disengagement —and for Milgram's classic study on obedience that inspires it— Gigantomachia is no enigma but a manual: a portrait of how a subject capable of immense harm can feel himself innocent because he believes he is only following orders.
// The theoryThe switch that turns off conscience: "I was only following orders"
The psychologist Albert Bandura described moral disengagement as the set of mechanisms by which ordinary people manage to do harm without feeling guilt: they do not reverse their values, they selectively deactivate them, case by case. One of those eight switches is the most relevant here: the displacement of responsibility. The subject attributes his acts to a legitimate authority —"I was only obeying"— and thereby stops considering himself the true author of the harm. Responsibility travels upward, toward whoever gives the order, and the executor experiences himself as a mere instrument. It was Stanley Milgram, in his famous experiments of the 1960s, who demonstrated in chilling fashion that ordinary people would administer potentially lethal shocks to a stranger simply because a researcher in a lab coat asked them to. Milgram called it the agentic state: the moment when we stop feeling like agents of our own acts and see ourselves as another's executing arm. Gigantomachia lives permanently in that state. He does not deliberate, he does not weigh, he does not ask himself whether what he razes deserved to be razed. He only checks who gives the orders, and obeys.
Loyalty as a moral alibi
What makes Gigantomachia so unsettling is not his size but his calm. There is no personal ferocity in his devastation: there is fidelity. He has turned his loyalty to All For One into the sole criterion of what is right —what his master wants is the good, and nothing else counts—. That total transfer of moral judgment to another person is the most complete form of the displacement of responsibility: it is not that he represses guilt, it is that he has stopped believing himself the author of anything. The harm is signed by his lord; he only lends the arms. Moral disengagement teaches that this is precisely the most dangerous mechanism, because it requires neither hatred nor cruelty —only an authority to believe in and the willingness to switch off one's own conscience—. The loyal fanatic can cause more destruction than the sadist, because the sadist at least knows he is enjoying himself; the loyal one is convinced that he serves. And whoever serves does not ask whom he destroys.
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// The subjectA titanic force with morality outsourced
Gigantomachia's biography is that of a devotion cultivated over decades. Raised under the shadow of All For One, he has organized his entire existence around a single hierarchy: his master at the top, and below him, those he authorizes to inherit his will. That is why, when the young Shigaraki is designated successor, Gigantomachia does not obey him immediately: first he puts him to the test, because his loyalty is not to just any person, but to the legitimate authority he recognizes. That nuance is pure Milgram: obedience does not yield to brute force, but to whoever the subject perceives as invested with the right to command. Once Shigaraki passes the test, the mountain sets in motion again, and his strength couples to the new link in the chain of command without friction. Gigantomachia thus demonstrates what moral disengagement warns of: the instrument does not think about the concrete victims —the cities he treads on, the people left beneath him— because his attention is fixed on the order, not on its consequences. Moral distance is not created by physical remoteness, but by the certainty of fulfilling a higher duty.
Gigantomachia
// The crackObedience explains the harm, but does not forgive it
Here is the limit, and it is the heart of everything. Moral disengagement and Milgram's experiments explain how a human being —or a fictional titan— comes to commit atrocities while feeling innocent. But explaining the mechanism does not turn it into an excuse. Milgram himself insisted on this: discovering that most people obey does not mean obedience is innocent, but that individual responsibility remains demandable even when the context pushes us to delegate it. "I was only following orders" was rejected as a defense at Nuremberg for a reason: the capacity to say no never disappears entirely. Gigantomachia chooses, at every step, to keep advancing; his loyalty is a sustained decision, not a fate. Reducing him to "a tool without guilt" would be to fall into the very trap the theory denounces: accepting the executor's alibi as if it were a verdict.
The opposite crack is just as dangerous: thinking that Gigantomachia is a mere beast without will, a natural disaster rather than a subject. That would erase precisely what makes him criminologically interesting —that there is a judgment inside him, one he has decided to silence—. The honest reading holds both things: the structure of obedience and devotion explains the why of his devastation, and at the same time does not absolve him of it. To explain is not to exculpate. The memory that matters is not that of the faithful servant who felt at peace while he destroyed, but that of the razed cities and the people who were left beneath his steps, turned into "collateral damage" of a loyalty that never wanted to look them in the face.
Obedience is not an exemption
Gigantomachia matters because he embodies the most uncomfortable warning of twentieth-century criminology: great harms are caused not only by monsters, but also by the obedient. Milgram proved it in a laboratory and history confirmed it in entire bureaucracies devoted to extermination. The mechanism repeats itself wherever someone agrees to switch off their moral judgment in exchange for the comfort of belonging, serving and not having to decide. That is why the lesson is not to fear titans, but to distrust the reflex we all carry within —that of ceding conscience to an authority and feeling clean because "we are only complying"—. A decent society does not defend itself solely by defeating the executors once they are already razing; it defends itself by cultivating the capacity to disobey in time, to look again at the concrete victim before taking the step. Moral responsibility cannot be outsourced: however many orders he receives, whoever crushes the city is still the one who crushes it.
Three key takeaways
- Gigantomachia embodies the displacement of responsibility from moral disengagement (Bandura) and Milgram's obedience to authority: he destroys without guilt because he has transferred all his moral judgment to his master.
- His loyalty is not to force, but to the authority he recognizes as legitimate —that is why he tests Shigaraki before obeying him—. Devotion is his alibi: he believes he serves, and whoever serves does not look at his victims.
- To explain is not to exculpate. Obedience explains how one reaches the harm, but never forgives it: the capacity to say no does not disappear. The memory is for the razed cities, not for the servant who felt innocent.
Sources · further reading
- Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.
- Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review.
- Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann en Jerusalén: un estudio sobre la banalidad del mal. Viking Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Gigantomachia?
Gigantomachia es un villano de My Hero Academia, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He razed entire cities without hating anyone.
¿Por qué Gigantomachia se convierte en villano?
Gigantomachia and moral disengagement: how absolute loyalty to a master becomes the switch that turns off conscience. "I was only following orders" made flesh and muscle.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Gigantomachia?
El caso de Gigantomachia se analiza desde la Desconexión moral. Moral disengagement (Bandura) explains how ordinary people commit atrocities without feeling guilty, switching off their conscience through mechanisms such as the displacement of responsibility —"I was only following orders"—, the same phenomenon Milgram documented in his experiments on obedience. Gigantomachia, the colossal bodyguard of All For One in My Hero Academia, embodies that mechanism in its purest form: a titanic force that devastates everything his master points to, not out of his own conviction but out of a devotion that has transferred every ounce of moral judgment to another's will. Loyalty as the perfect alibi.
