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stillness-in-green · 3 years

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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

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charmspoint · 2 years

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New talentless Nana

Ah yesss ive been hounding the site

Am on bus atm but ill check it out when i arrive

#inkbuckets #answered #ehehe excited

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koivoid · 3 years

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FAWRFWQFAw EVEN THE SITE SHIPS ROMANTIC CHEMISTRY IC AN'T . [Also for inkbuckets, I recommend checking out Grammarly for writing.] - Nightlight Anon

this site is slowly killing me

I'm going to cry

#ask koi #nightlight anon

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ao3feed-danganronpa · 3 years

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A Soothing Chinese Zither

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3g4WIcI

by Inkbuckets

Words: 2052, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Danganronpa:Despair time

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Major Character Death

Categories: F/F

Characters: Teruko Tawaki, Hu Jing, Eden Tobisa, Nico Hakobyan, Levi Fontana, Arturo Giles, David Chiem, MonoTV

Relationships: Hu Jing/Teruko Tawaki

Additional Tags: Fluff and Angst, Touch-Starved

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3g4WIcI

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #dangan ronpa #danganronpa #dr

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stillness-in-green · 3 years

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I hate most villian in bnha are connected to the Lov in some shape or form

You think? I actually like that quite a bit. Specifically, one of the things that drew me to Shigaraki after my initial strong dislike of him was the realization that he would be paralleling Deku in his growth, and--while I freely admit that I don't read a lot of shonen--I'd never seen another series where the obvious, iconic Final Boss Villain is… A scrub working his way up from the bottom, exactly like the main character.(1) Shigaraki fighting the same battles as Deku but from the other side was what first got me really into the series, but at this point, I think it goes even deeper than that.

Here's the thing--well, actually, let me make a disclaimer first. This reply takes the stance that Shigaraki, not All For One, will be the ultimate villain of the series. We don't know yet whether that's going to be true--indeed, the current state of things suggests pretty strongly that it's going to be All For One--but until the very last page turns, I'm going to hold out hope that it's Shigaraki. @itsnothingofinterest wrote a really great post arguing the merits of Shigaraki over AFO as the Final Boss here, so I'm just going to point people to that, say I agree with every word of it, and get back to the question.

See, ultimately, I think that Deku and Shigaraki aren't really fighting each other. To be a bit flippant about it, they both live in a Society. Specifically, they live in Hero Society, and they spend the entire series learning what that means, articulating what they want to do about it, and accumulating the strength and resources to carry out those decisions. Shigaraki and Deku don't fight out of true personal animus--rather, they fight because each seeks to overcome what the other represents. Deku saving Shigaraki means truly acknowledging what Shigaraki represents about the failures of the society Deku once idolized and wanted to join; Shigaraki defeating Deku means putting the final nail in the coffin of the society that Shigaraki wants to destroy, the one that neglected and rejected him, the one that hurt the people he cares about. Both are fighting to define what Hero Society is and what--if anything--it will be going forward.

Given that, at root, they're both fighting Society, then in a tightly-written work, every challenge they come up against should relate somehow to that society. Particularly in Deku's case, since he's the main character, everything he fights should optimally be preparing him for that final confrontation with Society à la Shigaraki. Ergo, because Shigaraki is in turn heavily associated with the rest of the League of Villains, it's no surprise that a lot of Deku's preparatory confrontations are going to tie back to them somehow.

You can get crazy widespread with this, too. Obviously, the League themselves all represent different aspects of Shigaraki's grievances with Hero Society, and obviously the other villains they confront are connected to them via those confrontations, but even outside of them, you have people like Kota, Eri, and Gentle Criminal--all further steps along a spectrum of victims-to-villains that eventually leads to Shigaraki.

It isn't perfectly executed, of course. There are plot threads that seem like they've been dropped or resolved too simply. Ideally, too, you'd still want all those preparatory confrontations to feel like fleshed-out people in and of themselves, even with their ties to the League, Shigaraki, AFO, etc, a bar the series sometimes fails to clear in e.g. Lady Nagant's writing or the apparent writing-off of the MLA.

It is also entirely possible that I'm totally off-base, AFO is going to be the final boss, and Deku and friends will "save" Shigaraki in a way that satisfies him despite none of his societal issues being addressed save with a thin promise of, "We'll do better going forward," which fails to be reflected in any visible systemic changes whatsoever in the epilogue. I might even say that's distressingly plausible, and if it is the case, I'm going to be right there with you complaining about all the squandered potential of other villains that had nothing to do with what turned out to be the main plotline.

But, at least until I can't anymore, I want to have faith in everything this story's done over three hundred chapters and counting to build up the image of Hero Society as bright and adventuresome but fatally flawed in the way it metes out justice, meters autonomy, and denies the humanity of its victims unless they look and act in exactly the right way, while in the vicinity of an appropriately licensed agent of the state. And in that regard, I'm okay with the other villains having ties to the League, from them to Shigaraki, and from him to his representation of Hero Society, what it is, and what it should be.

Thanks for the ask!

----------

(1) Shigaraki isn't a total nobody, of course, but I'd contend that Deku stopped being a scrappy underdog the moment the Number One hero gave him History's Most Awesome Quirk. That gets into the theme of legacy, which I also love about the series, but isn't terribly related to the topic at hand.

#inkbuckets #stillness answers #bnha #hero society #shigaraki tomura #midoriya izuku #bnha meta

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stillness-in-green · 3 years

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My problem with the plf war is that we get little to no information on the regiment advisors

God, ain't it the truth. I mean, I have a lot of problems with the PLF War, but that was certainly a prominent one. Like, I told myself when Taser Face lightning dude got unceremoniously no-sold by a high-schooler and effortlessly one-two'd by Edgeshot and Midnight that, well, if nothing else, maybe we could assume that all those nameless advisors were there to give the heroes some vaguely significant faces to fight while the named characters with more build-up would escape to have more prominent and narratively significant fights at some later point.

But if Trumpet, Geten, and Re-Destro all get off-paneled and arrested, what exactly was the point of the advisors, then? Like, a few of them have escaped, we know, but other than the one who killed Midnight, there's no particular reason to be invested in the fights with them later. It's not like they even got portrayed as a real threat, for all that they were billed as "stronger than the average hero."

Mind, Edgeshot of the Top Ten Billboard Ranking is by no measure an "average hero," but what does that matter, when you're not going to let any of them fight and beat an "average hero"?

Also too, dramatic tension in your fight scenes aside, I continue to be irked that we got all these characters that the League had three and a half months to bond with, only for it to come to nothing. And look, three months doesn't sound like a lot, but the League themselves had only been together for two months when the Shie Hassaikai arc kicks in, Magne gets killed, Compress maimed, and this pisses off the rest of the League so much they scuttle an alliance and maim the man responsible in return.

The League isn't even together for all of those two months! Their early meetings are much more sporadic; they all split up to lay low for a while after Kamino. Three months with the people at the mansion would be much more prolonged contact! I'm forever salty that the fandom just assumes--with little canonical reason to do otherwise--that those fourteen weeks just meant nothing, that not one single League member got invested enough in the cause they were building, the people they were seeing in regular meetings, to spare them so much as a thought.

I can only hope we'll get more of them back later; given their focus on Re-Destro, I find it unbelievable in the extreme that any number of escaped advisors would just let the man stay in prison--not after having lost Destro to prison the same. (Assuming, of course, that Geten hasn't hijacked the contents of an ice machine to break them out already.)

Thanks for the ask!

#stillness-answers #inkbuckets #bnha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #meta liberation army #paranormal liberation front

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