As a boy, Tenko Shimura developed a power that disintegrated everything it touched — and with it he killed, without meaning to, his entire family. Hurt, terrified and covered in blood, he wandered the streets begging for help, and the heroes who should have saved him walked on by. The only one who stopped was the greatest villain in the world, who picked him up to cultivate his pain. Tomura Shigaraki did not choose evil: it was the fate of a child for whom strain, layer upon layer, left no other way out. The general strain theory explains that manufacturing.
// The theoryWhen pain turns to rage
The general strain theory (GST) of Robert Agnew (1992) renewed Merton's old theory of anomie by giving it an emotional engine. Agnew identified three major sources of strain: failing to reach the goals one pursues, the loss of something valued (a loved one, safety) and the arrival of something harmful (abuse, humiliation, violence). Those strains generate negative emotions —frustration, fear and, above all, rage—, and crime appears as one of the outlets for relieving that pressure. Agnew's key point is that it is not the strain itself that pushes toward crime, but the emotion it produces and the absence of healthy ways to manage it.
Shigaraki is the complete catalogue of Agnew's strains, stacked onto a single child. Loss: he kills his family and his home vanishes. Harmful stimuli: an abusive father before, and afterward a world that abandons him to his fate. Failure: in a society that promises heroes save everyone, no one saved him. Each layer of pain, with no one to cushion it, settled into rage — until a perverse adult, All For One, found it, named it and aimed it: he did not teach him to hate, he gave him permission and a target. Shigaraki is Agnew's strain made character: not an evil that wells up from within, but a pressure that built because no one, in time, released it.
Emotion is the bridge
Agnew's decisive contribution is to place emotion at the center. Not everyone who suffers strain commits crime —most do not—, and the difference lies in what one does with the rage: whoever has supports, resources and healthy outlets channels it; whoever has none of that discharges it. Shigaraki illustrates this in the negative: his strain found not a single cushion —no family, no hero, no attachment figure—, and it did find, instead, someone interested in feeding it. GST underlines that uncomfortable point: the society of My Hero Academia, obsessed with spectacular heroes, produced its worst villain precisely by what it did not do — by the blood-covered child everyone walked past. Crime, Agnew says, often begins in a rage no one helped to release.
Get the map of theories for free
Subscribe to the criminal archive —one case a week, no spam— and I'll send you The map of theories: the great currents of criminology on a single sheet.
// The subjectThe villain society refused to see
What makes Shigaraki such a tragic —and such a timely— villain is that his monstrosity is a mirror. My Hero Academia dares to say something its own genre usually keeps quiet: that a society which celebrates saviors can, at the same time, be made of indifference toward those who fall outside the spotlight. Shigaraki does not hate heroes out of envy for their powers; he hates them because they embody the promise that failed him — "heroes save everyone," except the child who needed it most. His iconic gesture, undoing with his hands everything he touches, is the perfect metaphor for GST: accumulated rage that only knows how to destroy because it never learned to build. And his ultimate horror is not that he is a monster, but that he can be traced back, layer by layer, to an ordinary child who could have been saved. Shigaraki was not born a villain: he was manufactured, by everyone, by a world that looked the other way.
Tomura Shigaraki
// The crackDoes explaining excuse?
GST carries two objections. The first, empirical: the vast majority of those who suffer brutal strains do not become Shigarakis, so strain explains a risk, not a destiny — and over-explaining it ignores those who, in the same circumstances, harm no one. The second, moral: understanding the origin of Shigaraki's rage does not erase his victims or return his innocence. Here the same fine line as in Joker applies: to explain is not to excuse. Agnew's theory does not ask for compassion that pardons the crime; it asks that we understand the process in order to interrupt it before it erupts. Understanding how a Shigaraki is manufactured is not justifying him — it is the only way to manufacture one fewer.
Defusing strain in time
If crime often springs from accumulated rage that found no outlet, GST's prevention is clear: reduce avoidable strains (poverty, abuse, humiliation) and, above all, give people cushions —emotional support, role models, resources to manage anger, a second chance when everything breaks. Shigaraki is the bill for having provided none: a child society walked past and a predator picked up. The uncomfortable lesson of My Hero Academia, and of Agnew, is that villains are not always defeated with more force: often they are prevented much earlier, by stopping for the blood-covered child asking for help in the street instead of walking on by. Every strain someone helps to release is a villain who may never be born.
Three key takeaways
- The general strain theory (Agnew, 1992) gives anomie an emotional engine: strains (loss, harmful stimuli, frustrated goals) generate rage, and crime is an outlet for relieving it.
- Shigaraki stacks every strain onto one child (he kills his family, an indifferent society of heroes abandons him) and his rage, cultivated by a manipulator, erupts as an urge to destroy. He is not born a villain: he is manufactured.
- The crack: most people with brutal strains do not offend (risk, not destiny), and to explain is not to excuse. The cure: reduce avoidable strains and provide cushions (support, bonds) before the rage erupts.
Sources · further reading
- Agnew, R. (1992). «Foundation for a General Strain Theory of Crime and Delinquency». Criminology, 30(1).
- Agnew, R. (2006). Pressured into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory. Oxford University Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). «Social Structure and Anomie». American Sociological Review, 3(5).
- Broidy, L. & Agnew, R. (1997). «Gender and Crime: A General Strain Theory Perspective». Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 34(3).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Tomura Shigaraki?
Tomura Shigaraki («Shigaraki») es un villano de My Hero Academia, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. As a boy, Tenko Shimura developed a power that disintegrated whatever it touched — and with it he killed, without meaning to, his entire family.
¿Por qué Tomura Shigaraki se convierte en villano?
My Hero Academia and general strain: Tomura Shigaraki is not born a villain — he is manufactured, layer by layer, by abandonment, trauma and a society of heroes that looked the other way. Agnew's theory of how accumulated pain turns into rage, and rage into destruction.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Tomura Shigaraki?
El caso de Tomura Shigaraki se analiza desde la Tensión general. Robert Agnew's general strain theory (GST) holds that crime is born of the negative emotions —above all rage— produced by accumulated strains: the loss of what one values, the arrival of what is harmful and the failure of one's goals. Tomura Shigaraki, from My Hero Academia, is its perfect illustration: a child battered by trauma after trauma —an uncontrollable power, the death of his family, the abandonment of an indifferent society of heroes— whose accumulated rage, cultivated by a manipulator, erupts as an urge to destroy everything. He is not a born villain: he is a strain that no one defused.
