Appearance

[burnitblack]

Appearance

Dabi is a fairly tall, pale young Japanese man of a slim, somewhat lanky build, described to be in his early twenties. While he’s in fair health and good shape, life as a villain on the streets has left him with a wiry tonnage in musculature instead of a well-trained or athletic physique. He can knock an average man down, but in his own words, is pretty weak physically due to his premature birth.

Naturally, he has white hair with a few red streaks at its crown that spikes upward around his head in the usual unruly anime style, with choppy bangs hanging low over his eyes, which are thin and heavily lidded, but hold sharp and piercing turquoise irises. Before the reveal of his true identity, Dabi dyed his hair black to hide his identity, and when he was younger, his hair was completely red, until the events in his life and the use of his Quirk began to turn it white (the latter wasn’t really explained, so go figure). His hair’s been through an adventure. Assumedly he dyes his eyebrows and eyelashes black as well, for completion’s sake.

Scars  

Dabi’s most striking feature is undoubtedly the discolored burn scars (or skin grafts?) covering much of his body’s real estate. Due to his physical constitution (cold resistant) not fitting with his Quirk (fire emission), he regularly burns himself when he overuses his flames. During his childhood, a fateful accident occurred where he lost control of his Quirk, was engulfted in his flames, and "burned to death" on a mountain, which was the event that gave him most of his scars. These uneven patches of gnarled, wrinkled, purple skin cover close to 80% of his body, and are bad enough he’s lost all feeling in his skin in the areas. He attaches his damaged flesh to the rest of his healthy skin via multiple crude surgical staples or hoop piercings along the demarcation line (it’s inconsistent, sometimes they’re drawn like staples bent into a curve, and sometimes they look like he replaced them with hoops).

His scars are most prominently seen on his face and neck, where it practically bifurcates his lower face from his upper at the jaw line, giving him a semblance of a Glasgow smile. After his "death", it was said all that was found of him was a small piece of his jaw, so this clear-cut split (compared to the rest of his burns) might be due to some reconstructive surgery. Nothing’s been said so far.

As for the rest of his head, his ears are completely burnt, he doesn’t have earlobes (whether natural or because they burned off is unknown), and he has large burn patches under his eyes. These give him an eternally-tired look and cause his face to appear rather skull-like at a distance. His tear ducts are so burned, he can’t cry anymore; any attempts to do so cause blood to leak from under the edges of his eye scars.

The rest of his body’s burns are more random in nature, with his neck being completely covered all the way down to his collarbones. Both of his arms are affected, scarred from the base of his hands, up his wrists, and all the way up to his bicep on his right arm, but completely consuming his entire left arm and shoulder before flowing into the burns on his neck. His left collarbone is covered but the burn perimeter slants up above his right, as his right shoulder remains clear of burn damage for now. Another large swath of burn territory wraps around his torso, arching up into his lower chest and covering his upper stomach and diaphragm, before swallowing his mid-to-lower back.

It’s not been shown exactly where the burns extend on his legs in canon, but as least his ankles and knees have been seen to be completely burned, and it’s most generally accepted that his burn scars terminate around his mid-to-upper thighs, while the scarring appear to extend at least below his ankle joints and some support they cover his heel and end halfway down his foot at his insteps.

Since Dabi’s scars are reoccurring—as he only got the lion’s share from the one incident and he burns himself more if he overuses his Quirk—they continue to change as he gives himself new ones. His scars also spread, like fire slowly consuming paper. Take his hands for example: they started in his first appearance at the rim of his wrists, but over time spread to the bottom of his palms and a third of the way up the back of his hands. It’s only a matter of time before the guy runs out of skin at this point.

Clothes  

Clothing wise, Dabi looks like a punk specter, ditching the proper and formal clothes the rest of his family wear and instead went dumpster diving behind Hot Topic in the alleys and stole from wherever to scrounge up his new digs. Generally, he settles on a combination of loose shirts, long short-sleeve coats, slack-like pants, and boots.

In canon, his look consists of a large darkish blue coat with a high collar and two large metal cuffs at the end of each elbow-length sleeve, and a white stitch design on each of his shoulders, with the coat’s calf-length hem slashed into several tails and stitched together like a weird spider web. His shirts are usually loose light-colored tees, with the collars either deep-scooped or V-necked, likely as a mixture of comfort due to his burns and to show the scars off as an intimidation tactic or a "screw you" flaunt. His pants run similar to dark-colored slacks or cargo pants, somewhat baggy and occasionally decorated with stitches, all held up by a silver belt with the extra slack left callously untucked a leather satchel attached at the back. While he originally wore black dress shoes in his first appearance, he quickly replaced them with sturdy black boots ending at his upper shins.

For material, his clothes outside his shirts appear to be made of leather or a durable denim-like quality, decorated with the same stitch and staple theme he’s got going on, as well as rips and tears that could be seen as either deliberate or that’s what you get for dragging shit out of the trash. In addition to the metal fasteners holding his skin together, Dabi also has several silver cartilage piercings in both ears, and a triple nostril piercing on the right side of his nose. After joining the League of Villains, his coat added thick metal bands at the edge of the shortened sleeves, which are sometimes theorized to be underground illegal support items to help him regulate his heat a bit, though they’re nowhere near as effective as the tech the hero society has available.