#i still hate it less than the shitshow that went down with lady n and overhaul

[stillness-in-green]

I felt like the plf war was rushed

1.Plf advisors getting hype but no payoff

2.Only miruko, Momo, and Kirishma got time to shine

3.Machia got defeated to easily

4.The war felt more like a raid

I don't know if I feel like it was rushed, per se--it's by far the longest arc in the story so far by number of chapters, and would be even if you cut off the Tartarus jailbreak and the entirety of the hospital aftermath. What it absolutely does feel like to me is unbalanced.

You note that the "war" feels more like a raid, and you're right. As a caveat, it's worth keeping in mind that "Paranormal Liberation War" as a name for the arc in question is entirely an invention of the fanbase. To the best of my knowledge, the reasoning for the name was that big action shonen series like BNHA (Naruto, Bleach, Hunter x Hunter, etc) always have a war arc, so what we were seeing in the lengthy, mass combat confrontation with the PLF had to be HeroAca's equivalent. It's not a term that's in the manga itself, however, not called as such by the characters, not referred to as such by Horikoshi or his editors, not even namedropped in chapter or volume titles. If it feels like a raid, that's probably because that's what it was intended to be.

And that's the problem, really. This arc shouldn't have been about a couple of raids; it should have been about a war.

(Below the cut: a bunch of fired-up complaining. Uses some harsh language, and talks about both injuries and deaths we did see and some we logically should have.)

From the outset, we were told that the resources Shigaraki had amassed were "on par with, or even stronger than" the resources of the hero-saturated society. Yet, we're expected to believe that a force that strong is so easily taken down by a single coordinated set of raids? Yes, the heroes had the benefit of surprise, but there's just so much that doesn't work for me.

First off, and to get this out of the way, it's ridiculous that the heroes even had the benefit of surprise. The MLA had an unknown number of hero double agents. They had people in the government; they had people in the infrastructure. This is an organization that had been living undercover completely unsuspected for multiple generations--how did the HPSC ever manage to carry out a massive, country-wide investigation on such a secretive group and coordinate multiple simultaneous, comprehensive raids without a single person finding out and alerting the higher-ups over a period of only three and a half months?

When exactly did Hawks have time to go and revive Best Jeanist--which he tells us he did personally--such that none of the bugs and micro-cameras he was covered with picked up on it, and both he and BJ could be back in the positions they needed to be in for the raid to begin?

How did Skeptic find out about the raid such that he only discovered it at the last possible second and not minutes, even hours, before it kicked off? How did hundreds of heroes (and even "hundreds" is being conservative, given the fact that they had seventeen thousand people to detain) close in on the villa without anyone from the PLF noticing, either Skeptic with his information network or mundane precautions like people on watch?

Even granting the heroes their surprise advantage--which I don't want to--if the advisors were all supposedly "stronger than the average hero," why didn't we see any of them winning? Okay, yes, Hose Face beat Midnight, but he had every possible advantage in that "fight"; I hardly count it as some big impressive defeat that shows us that the villains were holding their own.

Here's another thing: the MLA styled themselves as an army--they were demonstrably trained in troop tactics. When we saw them in Deika, even their nameless on-the-ground people were capable of coordinating with each other on the fly in response to the movements of the enemy, as we saw come up repeatedly:

Yeah, they were off-guard at first, but as soon as the advisors made the front line (which, you'll note, was immediately), that disadvantage really should have begun eroding. Certainly once Geten--Geten! The number one MLA member most willing to disregard collateral damage! And there he was being a proper leader!--got to the front and started yelling orders, we should have seen the PLF rallying, and I can't imagine any sensible justification for the tides not turning when a) Re-Destro showed up to occupy the highest-ranked hero on the field, b) a bunch of heroes peeled off to try to stop Machia only to get trampled for their efforts, and c) Trumpet got dug out.

You know who don't style themselves as an army, though? Heroes. Oh, they get some basic lessons in cooperation as students, but the extent of such lessons we see is stuff like "why it's important for heroes to have signature moves"--so that on group missions, their reputations will precede them and fellow heroes will already know their shtick. U.A. teaches the odd lesson plan that involves the kids fighting in groups, but there's a huge difference between you and 3 to 6 of your buddies fighting a similarly-sized group in a practice fight, or a handful of heroes teaming up to take down some criminal low-lives, and the mass combat scenario that was the raid. For heaven's sake, look at our closest other equivalent: the raid on the Hassaikai base. At every turn in that encounter, the heroes let themselves get split up and picked off, winnowing down their numbers. It's even explicit in the narrative that hero team-ups were, in the age of All Might, uncommon, and heroes are only just beginning to adjust to fighting in teams. The erstwhile MLA should have had the advantage there.

As to Machia's defeat, I think the big problem with it is not how it happened, per se, but the timescale involved. The plan itself was sound enough, and even with all the kids' efforts, it still took Machia reaching Shigaraki and not getting any new orders to follow to really do him in. Given what we can extrapolate about his movement speed, though, I just don't think the kids should have had time to set all those traps, especially given how much of that equipment would have had to be fabricated by Momo on the fly. I know she's gotten stronger and all, and good for her, but you're telling me that in the four months between Joint Training and the raid, she went from passing out because she created a bag of goodies and one (1) cannon to being totally fine and still able to coordinate her fellow students while cranking out 23 jars of sedative, dozens of feet of rope/cable, multiple fire-resistant coats, explosives they somehow had time to bury, and three cannons?

For fuck's sake, Jirou gave Machia's ETA as under ten seconds. Yeah, Mount Lady slowed him down, but "only a little"--how much time could she possibly have bought them, that the kids were able to to coordinate and enact everything that plan involved?

You guys, go read this post by @codenamesazanka. Machia is so fast. So unbelievably, incredibly fast. "Twice as fast as the fastest train in the world" fast. "Horikoshi clearly did not stop to think about the distances involved here" fast. Three miles in ten seconds fast. It would have been hard enough to square with the needs of the plot that the kids were sufficiently far from the villa to have the kind of time they needed to swing Momo's plan at all, but Horikoshi explicitly letting Machia get right on top of them before the kids even start just makes it completely impossible for me to credit. Machia clearly being slower aboveground than he is when burrowing does not make that much difference to my suspension of disbelief.

My other big complaint? More people should have died, for real. The PLF warriors would not have been holding back. They were ready and willing to kill anyone they came up against. The heroes did have to hold back, because heroes, as we're told over and over again, are not supposed to kill, no matter how dire the circumstances. That difference in ability to exercise force should have been yet another significant advantage for the PLF. I could write an entire list of characters that I think could have reasonably been killed during the raids. That wouldn't be to say that I think any individual, specific character on that list should have died, just that, based on the parameters as they were presented to audience, some number of them should have.

I mean, honestly. How did Horikoshi wanna show us Gang Orca's unmoving claw in the wake of Machia's passage and not have Gang Orca on the list of the dead? How did Fat Gun run right into a mass melee and still have enough fat left over afterward to survive getting trampled by a walking mountain? How did Thirteen survive not getting pulled out of the hospital basement when Shigaraki's Decay hit? How did Trumpet survive getting a staircase dropped on top of him? How did Gran Torino survive a fist through his tiny old man chest cavity?

I could go on and on, but it's not just about the deaths, either. I'm not saying that Kamui Woods necessarily should have died by swinging himself face-first into a blast of blue fire, but I am saying that he should have been out of commission for longer than three goddamn days. You bet your ass I'm saying that after telling us that Hawks' weak point is fire, making us watch him spend at a solid minute or more with his wings wholly enveloped in Dabi's 2000 degree flames, and having Dark Shadow exclaim that his back is completely burned away, Hawks should never have grown his wings back, much less so quickly that they were already visible under his shirt a single day later.

More deaths, more maiming--heck, even more retirements. I'm not saying I love that kind of thing in my fiction--I don't, actually. I think an overreliance on it is a sign of edgelordy nonsense. But the scenario that we had demanded to be treated with the kind of gravity that would have led to such an outcome. To set up a conflict like the raid and have the villains only barely be able to scrape a partial escape, to try to tell us that Shigaraki's victory in Deika granted him such a terrifyingly powerful force only to have them lose every battle they got into, to tell us this was a blow that shook Hero Society to its core, only to be so unwilling to kill or retire any heroes the audience cares about that Midnight is literally the only significant loss… It doesn't work. None of it works.

I don't have much to say on which characters did or didn't get a highlight. I think there were a few more people than you listed that got some good scenes--Tokoyami and Uraraka both got material I liked quite a bit; Dabi famously out-trended the U.S. presidential election on Twitter when he (literally) came clean, and Mr. Compress gave us some wonderfully interesting and characteristically opaque material to chew on. On the whole, though, adding more character moments would only have been dragging out the problem: the scale of the PLF's threat and the HPSC's chosen method of dealing with it are simply incompatible with the feeble "neither side truly won or lost" resolution we got.

And that's my rant on that--thanks for the ask!

#and yet #i still hate it less than the shitshow that went down with lady n and overhaul #inkbuckets #paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #bnha #stillness has salt #stillness answers

[imastrangeone98]

Lost and Found - Chapter 5: Et Misericordia

(A/N: hello I’m back. to my non-existent readers, this is gonna be a little filler that will lead to some more horrible shit)

(also wow Dante is probably super ooc here... I’m so sorry)

(and have this song too)

https://youtu.be/Ym4sH9VaHbU

[Four Months Later]

It wasn’t until he woke up curled around her that he began to think he was getting a little too attached.

He knew for certain that he fell asleep on his chair while she napped on the sofa, only to wake up hours later pressed next to her, chest to back, on a couch that was too small for them.

What made things worse was the fact that the blanket had slipped a bit from her neck while she slept, exposing the skin underneath. And for some reason, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t seem to look away. His demonic instincts screamed at him to sink his teeth into it and claim, claim, claim.

What the hell’s wrong with me?

With difficulty, he tried to force himself to think about something else- what pizza to order, or magazines to read- but his thoughts kept getting fried the moment he caught a whiff of her sweet, delicate lotus scent.

He should move. He should really move.

But she began to readjust herself to snuggle further into his chest. His arms remained locked around her waist.

...Shit.

He knew that he wasn’t going to follow through on the idea, so he closed his eyes to try and fall back to sleep, but he kept getting distracted.

Faith.

An interesting person, to say the least. She was one of those people where you could learn everything about them in one day, yet learn nothing about who they are at the same time.

He knew she often went out during the day, usually to chat with the homeless and feed the stray animals that wandered the back alleyways of the city. He knew that she would sneak out every night, always checking first to drape a blanket over him and see if he was asleep (he wasn’t), to take a stroll on the beach and stare up at the sky and stars. He knew that she hardly ate, no matter what type of food it was, and she never used the room he offered her, instead preferring to sleep on the couch, curled up in a little ball. And he knew that she loved music- on stormy days when the pounding rain made it impossible to leave the office, she would hum to herself and rock back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around her skinny frame while listening intently to the jukebox.

He also noticed the way she would shiver uncontrollably at seemingly random moments. He saw the way that she would flinch at loud noises (he learned to be careful of his volume the hard way). He noticed the way she would sometimes sit by herself in the bathroom for hours at a time, huddled into the bathtub and staring at nothing. On those days, he’d sit right outside and just talk- about his business, the weather, his favorite type of pizza, what fashion exploit Lady had planned for them- until she’d open the door and let him sit on the toilet seat as she listened to him speak.

She gave no explanation. If asked, she would simply clam up and hide under the blankets, refusing to come out.

He hated that he couldn’t help her, but he learned to accept the fact that she wouldn’t talk until she was ready.

But that still didn’t help his imagination.

What if she was being hunted? he thought before he could stop himself. What if she had...

A chill ran down his spine.

What if she had been abused?

If that idea was true, then it would explain a lot about her skittish behavior. It would also explain the boiling rage that simmered in his gut with every second that he thought about that possibility.

Faith began to shiver.

Crap.

While he could easily guess that Faith was a natural at reading peoples’ emotions, he hadn’t fully processed how much she seemed to react to them.

Whenever he or Lady were upset in any way, she’d often hide in the bathroom until one of them (usually Lady) would have to persuade her to come out. If either one of them felt some form of peace (or any positive emotion in general), she’d wrap her arms around their waist and bury her face in the crook of their shoulder blades, as if she was trying to absorb their energy.

Maybe she was.

He relaxed into the soft leather of the couch, and let his thoughts dissipate. And she stopped shivering, leaning further back into him.

Now wasn’t the time to ask questions. And as drowsiness began to seep back into his body, he let his forehead rest against the back of her neck and breathed in her smell.

Right before he closed his eyes, he remembered feeling like he could breathe in her scent forever.

[...]

His body processed the fact that she wasn’t there faster than his mind did.

He felt cold, despite his natural body heat and the blanket that was carefully draped over him; the space next to him was empty. Muted lamplight seeped through the windows, illuminating his now-dark office.

She must be at the beach, he thought as he stretched his arms. I’m bored... might as well take a look, right?

Quickly grabbing his jacket, he strolled out of the building and began his long walk towards the ocean...

...only to find that she wasn’t there.

He jogged up and down the sand at least six times while repeatedly calling her name.

Nothing but the ocean waves replied.

Inexplicable panic began to grow, and he tried to force it down to no avail. So he headed into the city, resolving to call Lady if he couldn’t find her there.

Dante wandered the city for at least half an hour. She wasn’t at any of her usual spots. He asked some of the homeless people he saw if they had seen her- none of them did.

“Actually,” someone noted, “she sometimes goes to the church when she’s thinkin’ ‘bout somethin’.”

“Which church?” Dante asked, already anxious to check on her.

“Uh, St. Charles, I think, over on the hill. I hear they have choir practice every Saturday night.”

With a quick thank-you and some spare pocket money, he sprinted down the street towards the church on the hill.

The pressure in his stomach diminished the second her familiar lotus scent hit his nose.

She was here. No doubt about it.

Choir practice every Saturday night.

Was this where she’d been every Saturday? Why didn’t she tell him? Also, why did he care so much that she didn’t tell him? He had no right to infringe on her privacy, and hell- he hardly knew anything about her to have any say on what she did with her personal time.

But one thought lingered in the back of his mind, and he hated it, but once it was in his head, it was impossible to ignore.

The idea of her leaving him behind was unbearable to him.

Shut up, brain, he thought as he pushed open the door. I’ll deal with you later.

He spotted her the second he stepped into the chamber. Faith sat on the bench closest to the corner of the wall, and the back of her head blended in with the shadows, but that gentle aura was unmistakable.

She didn’t react much when he sat next to her, golden eyes fixed intently on the session in front of her. He somehow knew that she wouldn’t respond to him until it was over, so he made himself comfortable and watched with her as the chorus practiced their final piece.

Et misericordia eius...

Et misericordia eius...

Et progenies, in progenies...

Timentibus eum.

Dante hadn’t realized how relaxed he’d become over the course of the song. His mind felt clearer, and his body was less tense than it usually was. He could understand why Faith would come here so often.

“This is my thinking place,” she finally murmured, long after the choir had disbanded for the night. “I come here from time to time and just... listen to everything. I guess it’s... therapeutic?”

He nodded. “Makes sense. It’s a nice song.”

“Yeah. It is.”

They were silent for a while after that, but he didn’t mind. It was comfortable.

Faith shifted. She rubbed her hands over her arms, her gold eyes deep in thought.

Under the shadow of the dimmed church lights, she looked tired.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Let’s go home. You look exhausted.”

Faith shook her head. “I’m going to think a little more. You go ahead and get some sleep. I’ll be back before you wake up.”

“Faith...”

She let out a light sigh and gazed at the hanging cross on the front wall for a bit. “Do you know what that song means?”

“Uh... something about church?”

The tiniest of smiles flickered on her lips; he stared too long at them. “You’re not wrong. ‘And His mercy is on them that fear Him from generation to generation.’”

“...Is this about you being a nephilim?”

“Yes.” Her voice weakened, but she said, “Nephilims aren’t meant to be born. We’re mistakes, created by angels who succumbed to their unholy desires.”

“Uh, but weren’t there a ton of them in the olden days?”

“Supposedly. But God allegedly saw how unclean and sinful they had become, and He wiped them out, using their essence to create a new world. This world we walk on now... it was made from the bones of my kind.”

Dante didn’t like where this conversation was going. He didn’t want to have it. He just wanted to kill demons, eat pizza, annoy Lady, and listen to jukebox music with Faith. Philosophy and religion were never his specialties.

“Something bad is going to happen, Dante. And whatever it is, I doubt that it’s coming to show mercy.”

The temperature dropped. The chapel, once comforting, now felt hostile. Air seemed to leave his lungs.

They needed to leave. Now.

“Faith... Let’s just go home, okay? Maybe- maybe we can talk more about this tomorrow.”

She said nothing in return. Her gold eyes looked black and empty in the darkness.

And Dante was once again struck with the knowledge that he didn’t know anything about her at all.

———————————————————————

A/N: hmm what a shitshow. Also would anyone consider this blasphemous or sacrilegious?

Edit: read chapter 6! :D

#devil may cry 3 #dmc dante #dmc lady #dmc oc #lost and found #dante x oc