Jin Bubaigawara, whom the world will come to know as Twice, is one of the villains hardest to hate in My Hero Academia. His quirk duplicates anything he touches —including himself—, and that almost magical ability became his curse: an accident pitted him against an army of copies of himself, unable to decide which was the original. The doubt split him apart inside. Isolated, paranoid, with no one to vouch for him, Jin was exactly the kind of person that conventional society leaves out of the game. And then the League of Villains appeared, and gave him what no job, no institution and no street had given him: a name, a place and a loyalty. For the delinquent subculture, that story is no mystery, but a familiar mechanism —that of someone who, denied status through the legitimate path, finds it in a group that inverts the rules of the world that rejected him—.
// The theoryCohen: the status sought through another door
In Delinquent Boys (1955), the sociologist Albert Cohen observed that excluded boys are measured against a yardstick they can hardly meet. From that repeated failure is born status frustration: the humiliation of losing at a rigged game. The way out that Cohen describes is as audacious as it is understandable: those who fail band together and flip the scoreboard. They create a subculture where exactly the opposite of what the respectable world rewards is what counts, and where they can finally win respect and belonging. Crime, on this reading, is not so much about money as about recognition. Twice fits the mold with painful precision: Jin seeks neither power nor loot; he seeks someone to confirm that he exists, that he matters, that he belongs. Society answered him with loneliness and suspicion. The League answered him with a seat at the table. Cohen would understand it at once —what moves Jin is not greed, but the need for a place where his name means something—.
Belonging as a need, not a whim
The enduring finding of the delinquent subculture is that people need respect and belonging, and when the legitimate ways to obtain them close, the deviant group offers them. Twice is the perfect illustration of that thesis. His tragedy does not begin with a crime, but with a void: the broken identity, the isolation, the paranoia that kept him from trusting anyone. The League does not seduce him with money or ideology; it seduces him with something far more basic —they treat him as one of their own—. That is the heart of the theory: the subculture does not recruit monsters, it recruits the excluded, and it gives them the functional family that the conventional order denied them. That is why Cohen insists on reading it as a collective solution to a shared problem, not as individual evil. Defiance and loyalty to the group grant status precisely because they scandalize whoever left you out; and for someone as alone as Jin, that status is worth more than safety, more than the law, more than life.
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 who dies for his own, not for killing
What is revealing about Twice is what he gives up in order to belong. His defining trait is not violence, but loyalty: he is the comrade who holds the group together, the one who worries about the others, the one who weeps for those who fall. In Cohen's subculture, that bond is exactly what the theory predicts —the prestige and the affection the group hands out when the outside world offered only rejection—. His reaction formation is visible: the man whom no one protected becomes the one who protects everyone; the one betrayed by his own mind makes trust in his own his supreme value. And the ending confirms it starkly: when the League is in danger, Jin finally overcomes his identity trauma not to save himself, but to save his chosen family, and dies doing so. It is not the arc of a sadist, but that of someone who found a place to belong late and defended it to the end. Therein lies the power —and the danger— of the subculture: it turns the most human need, that of being accepted, into the glue of a group that does harm.
Twice
// The crackTo explain the bond is not to excuse the harm
The crack with Twice is tempting precisely because he is so easy to love. Explaining why Jin ended up in the League —the trauma, the isolation, the society that made no room for him— runs the risk of sliding toward an alibi: «he had no choice», «he was only looking for family». But the delinquent subculture does not excuse. Cohen explains the pull of the group, he does not erase the harm that group causes. The League of Villains is not a solidarity club: it is an organization that wounds, terrifies and kills, and Twice takes part in that violence with his quirk. To understand that his bond arises from a legitimate need —to belong, to be respected— does not make the means or the victims legitimate. The theory, in fact, serves the opposite of an alibi: by pointing out that belonging is a real need, it forces us to ask why conventional society left it so neglected that a criminal group could meet it first. That is a responsibility running in two directions, not an absolution.
There is a second, subtler crack, about the limits of applying to Twice a theory conceived for real youth gangs. The classic subculture described neighborhood groups and class frustration; Jin is an adult broken by a supernatural accident, and his story is personal before it is structural. Forcing the mold can make us see status where there is, above all, tragedy: that of a man whose identity crisis left him so alone that any outstretched hand would have sufficed. The honest reading holds both things at once —Twice is responsible for what he did with the League, and his drift is also the portrait of a need for belonging that no one legitimate cared to satisfy—. Remembrance, here, is not to excuse the villain, but for those his group harmed, and to recall that acceptance should not be a luxury offered only by the worst.
Offering belonging before the subculture does
Twice matters because he teaches that loyalty and affection are not alien to crime, but sometimes its engine. The delinquent subculture says it with modern data: the programs that truly reduce the activity of violent groups are not only the policing ones, but those that compete with them by offering the same things through legitimate channels —mentors, employment, a place to matter—. Because belonging is a need, not a whim to be repressed. Jin's story is the perfect warning: a man whom a little acceptance in time might have saved, and whom the void pushed into the arms of the first group that called him «one of us». The lesson is not to sentimentalize the villain, but to recognize the void before a subculture fills it —to reach out to the isolated, the broken, the one society measures against an impossible yardstick— so that the family they find need not be the League.
Three key takeaways
- Twice (Jin Bubaigawara) embodies Cohen's delinquent subculture: a man denied status, marked by trauma, isolation and an identity crisis, who finds respect and belonging in the League of Villains —the group that inverts the rules of the world that rejected him—.
- He does not offend out of malice: his central trait is loyalty. The subculture gives him the functional family that conventional society denied him, and for it he comes to overcome his trauma and to die. Belonging is a need, not a whim.
- To explain is not to excuse. Understanding why Jin fell into the League does not legitimize the harm that group causes; it also points to the responsibility of a society that left belonging so neglected that a criminal group met it first.
Sources · further reading
- Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. Free Press.
- Cloward, R. A. & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and Opportunity. Free Press.
- Thrasher, F. M. (1927). The Gang. University of Chicago Press.
- Vigil, J. D. (2002). A Rainbow of Gangs: Street Cultures in the Mega-City. University of Texas Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Twice?
Twice («Jin Bubaigawara») es un villano de My Hero Academia, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. An accident split him in two and the doubt almost erased him: who am I, the original or the copy?
¿Por qué Twice (Jin Bubaigawara) se convierte en villano?
Twice and the delinquent subculture (Cohen): a man denied status by conventional society who finds respect and belonging only where it was refused to him. He does not offend out of malice, but out of loyalty to his own.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Twice?
El caso de Twice se analiza desde la Subcultura delincuente. The delinquent subculture (Albert Cohen, Delinquent Boys) explains that young people excluded from status by conventional society form groups where they DO gain recognition and belonging, inverting the dominant values. Twice (Jin Bubaigawara), from My Hero Academia, embodies that mechanism: marked by isolation, paranoia and an identity crisis after a trauma, he finally finds acceptance, loyalty and "family" in the League of Villains. He does not offend out of cruelty: the subculture gives him what society denied him. It explains the bond, it does not excuse it.
