@auem:
I understand what kind of storyline you would prefer. You want Tomura to be a self conscious villain,who despite knowing that his situations were fully manipulated by somebody, would prefer to take up the mantle( and even expand it further) of the same person who did that.
Yup, you got it perfectly.
To do that Horikoshi needs to put him through a far more 'adverse' and complicated situations where he can come up with new reasons rather than one which motivates and corrupted him till now i.e there were nobody to save him in his need. But knowing his predicaments were intentionally devised would take away his present reason. It would be heck of a challenge to write in that line.The redemption prospect will also become increasingly difficult.
I think you're making the process sound too complex. All he has to do is give the League of Villains more of a spotlight than he has thus far, moving away from how they're mainly in the shadows in most arcs they appear for a more prominent reading perspective. Like giving Shigaraki a short arc similar to the hero license makeup exam or the High-End arc that focuses on Shigaraki building his own bonds with his team and form his own perspectives/morals as a "villain". Dig deeper into his head as to how he views All for One and his future. We could have gotten seeds like this in the Yakuza arc if it bothered to focus more on the partnership between the League of Villains and the Cleansers, although that arc was already a bit bloated and convoluted as is. The League felt very tangential and almost unnecessary in that arc outside of roping in the girls to the final fight and the stealing the Quirk nullifying bullets.
I don't even think that knowing what All for One did to him has to take his away his current motivation. All for One might have orchestrated a lot of terrible things in Shigaraki's life, but he can still find some ways to effectively criticize hero society for not intervening. We don't know enough details about Shigaraki's past to know whether or not his reasons are justified. He can hate both All for One AND heroes, or have nuanced mixed feelings on both and aims for being somewhere in the middle ethically.
Such a route still opens up plenty of redemption opportunities too.
Another way(though not as good as yours perspective)would be Tomura learning his true past in the end , try to amend some of his mistakes and in the consequence AFO takes over his body and finally we have Deku ( the final OFA) vs. AFO for one last time. All traces of AFO will be erased and Deku will save Tomura.
That almost sounds like a version of Naruto where Orochimaru possesses Sasuke for the final fight. It could work. Definitely not my preferred route since Shigaraki, while becoming a more impressively dynamic character, will still be forced into a victimized role to propel All for One. But it's technically possible.
Also i find nothing 'arrogant' in the younger brother in such incomplete picture. Rather the bits we have seen, i find pretentious arrogance in AFO who think just because he can save people's life, everybody should be loyal to his cause.
The part I find arrogant about the younger brother is him chastising All for One for switching people's Quirk genes and saying that All for One created two more servants. All for One is obviously evil in the grand scheme of what we know. But in the chapter itself, incomplete picture or not, it is completely within those people's rights to choose whether they should keep their Quirks in the same way that a deaf person can choose to wear hearing aids or get surgery to hear again. And it is also completely within their right to follow All for One of their own free will. He practically saved their livelihoods and fulfilled their dreams, it makes sense for these people to be willing to do favors for All for One before finding out what those favors might be.
The problem that comes into play is when those followers are willing to destroy any people to reject One for All, but that's their own fault. All for One did not tell them to do anything. I can only criticize All for One for not condemning that act of violence, not moderating his followers better, and maybe take advantage of already knowing his followers will destroy any "problematic" people without giving the go ahead to avoid culpability.
If the younger brother wanted to make accurate criticisms, he should have cited actual methods or bad things that All for One did to forcibly dominate or harm other people. But he doesn't. He only whines "don't let him change your Quirks!" and "you just made two new servants…". Which only makes sense if he's the type of person to hold an arrogant high horse that people should accept what they're born like even if it throughly inconveniences their lives and ostracizes them, even though they have a foolproof way to satisfyingly change themselves. To be honest, I actually hope that's the route Horikoshi is getting because that would make the younger brother a more grey fascinating character who might be biased in his own right than someone we should agree with all of the time.
I would only call All for One pretentiously arrogant if he forced people to join his cause. But as far as we know, he didn't. Those minions joined out of gratitude. The only thing I would call pretentiously arrogant regarding him is gleefully appreciating his minions destroying his critics on their own assumptions without even being ordered.
But as we get to learn more, I can totally see All for One becoming a hypocrite and end up still manipulating/extorting people join him and directly destroy other lives to get his way. Although I would much prefer seeing All for One stick with his morals here to look like a more interesting morally grey antagonist that somewhat cares about helping people, and having his crimes be a lore more subtle and less overt than the usual megalomaniacal dictator villain.
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