#plf advisors

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

#bnha #bnha meta #bnha worldbuilding #heteromorph discrimination plot #octolad #plf advisors #my writing #preview for Vigilantes: #Kamayan is a crank and that distracts everyone #from realizing that Kamayan is also right

[itsnothingofinterest]

My Big Dumb PLF Advisor Theory for the War Arc

Alright, I said I’d do it, so here’s my entirely self-indulgent rambling on what I think would be interesting theory post on what I think the unaccounted PLF Advisors, especially the first ranked Advisors we’ve barely seen anything of, will do this arc. Since a few of them have been rising to brief prominence this arc, but strangely only the 2nd ranks. So the League’s top henchmen of established designs must get to do something too right?

Namely, tying into my theory of a My Hero part 2 fuelled by how, among other reasons, this is a really anticlimactic final battle[1]; I think a big play on the Advisors’ part will be a coordinated move to salvage the villains’ operation from AFO’s incompetence and help the League escape this unwinnable conflict & live to be saved another, more dramatic day.

In other words, it’s a revamped prison break-out theory.

The time? Right after the war, since Geten mentions he & Compress have nothing to do until then and I decided to read that in as conspiratorial a way as possible: that they have something planned to do after the battles ends.

With the in mind, what would this salvage operation look like:

Well as said, though many Advisors are unaccounted for in this war, the stars of this theory are the 1st ranked Advisors. Of whom; 1 is imprisoned, 1 was seen with Spinner for a panel before Spider-guy took focus, and the other 5 have not been seen as I’m aware.

Additionally, targets they might be interesting to hit are:

The apparent police station seeming to house the PLF higher ups, assuming Garaki really is in the same place as Compress & Geten.

Whatever location is housing the other ~115,000 PLF soldiers. (If they also have the 10,000 jailbreakers to round us out at a nice even eighth of a million, that'd be great.)

Gunga & UA are both interesting cases in that, the PLF effort definitely needs people here picked up, yet it's very possible those people could do it themselves. Maybe that could be Machia's big roll in proceedings. And of course Shigaraki’s Warp can still come into play.

Need to pick up Spinner, Spider-guy, and maybe any unconvinced heteromorphic protesters from Central (probably bug woman's job).

Skeptic could use a rescue.

And if they wanted to pick up the villains from Kamino, the aquarium, & the stadium, that'd be fine, but there’s not a lot of villains there and we don’t really care about any of them anyways[2]. So, y'know...

That’s the rough priority order anyway; amounting to 7~9 targets if they wanted to be thorough, although there are a few that could get skipped. But is thorough even an option? Unless electric guy can break out of wherever he’s being held himself, aren’t there more targets here than Advisors left active? Well there’s also a ton of unaccounted for 3rd ranks and more 2nd ranks, but I have another idea.

You see: I prank’d ya! I’m also incorporating yet another wild theory of mine that accounts for that. I also think there’s even more unaccounted for, secret Advisors. 

After all, we’ve only got Advisors for 7 of the 9 Lieutenants of the Liberation Front. That’s pretty weird right? Why don’t RD & Trumpet have advisors? They’ve got the same position and roughly as much seniority & experience as Skeptic. Well, I propose they do have advisors, their existence was simply kept from Hawks. A classic big-shonen-villain-group trope I’m sure you’re all familiar with.

But if so, you may wonder, why would they be hidden? Well I’ve got a theory on that too; it’s because they’re the heroes Geten mentioned Compress talking too and getting information from. We know the MLA has hero members, so if a few didn’t go to any meetings for Hawks to spot them at, perhaps their duties keeping them away or perhaps as a back-up plan a la Machia; they might still be active and able to talk with jailed Lieutenants & hit as many locations of interest as they like[3].

It also means an established villain like Compress or Redestro could be behind the operation. And as much as I think an Advisor masterminding this plot would be cool, it could border on “coming out of nowhere” for an unestablished villain to pull this off, so that alternative might be for the best.

So yeah, basic rundown of the salvage operation is pretty simple after all that set-up. I kind of figure the #1 Advisors would all get their own thing to do where they can, make a name for themselves;

As said, Spinner’s bug woman Advisor could rescue him, she is right there after all,

Maybe Skeptic’s could bail him out.

Twice’s Advisor Sanctum (1 of like 3~4 names we’ve got so far so I really hope he’ll get something) could rescue the grunts,

If we do get secret advisors then they might free Geten & Compress,

and Compress’ lightning guy could help from the inside of wherever he’s jailed,

Etc, etc. the details aren’t the biggest thing in the world and they’re hard to pin down anyway with so many skipable targets.

Oh but actually now that I think of it after talking about it above, it’d be really cool if Machia picked up Toga & Dabi after however their final talks with Uraraka & the Todofam go. Assuming his injury in 385 didn’t kill him; it’d be a nice epic roll for him in this arc.

And yeah, that’s the basic idea all laid out at once. Is it hopeful & optimistic given the villain writing we’ve been getting? Maybe. But it also answers a few nagging questions in the background like what Compess heard from the heroes. And besides, I like being hopeful & optimistic with the villains.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[1] I don’t want to repeat myself to much but for goodness sake, the heroes basically won back in 343. You could argue AFO had a chance to win alone until 378/379 when he lost control of Tomura, but that’s gone now. AFO would barley have a chance of winning even if he could a) get OFA, b) get it into Tomura, and c) regain control over Tomura; none of which he seems able to do. Everyone else has been on the backfoot since AFO warped them all into a trap. The war is lost. It’s why I changed my theory to have any break-out occur after the war instead of during. The PLF can do naught but escape; like Kamino or Jaku.

[2] Besides Moonfish, they have to pick up Moonfish.

[3] Man I went into a lot of detail to propose that the villains have the skilled man-power to rescue villain forces that probably aren’t worth rescuing. The aquarium, stadium, & Kamino might barely break 100 villains between them tbh. Whelp, guess that’s just what a self-indulgent theory post is like. It’s where the fun comes from.

#bnha #paranormal liberation front #PLF #plf advisors #mr. compress #geten #redestro #rikiya yotsubashi #bnha trumpet #koku hanabata #spinner #shigaraki tomura #gigantomachia #bnha skeptic #dabi #toga himiko #moonfish #league of villains #my stupid long term predictions #In other news this is my 35000th post; isn't that fun.

[salvagesmha]

MHA Villain Speculation - The Curious Case of Trumpet

Now for another reason why I made this seperate blog: to post my just weird, gut feeling-ish theories concerning the Villains and their roles in the MHA series! No real evidence, just me speculating based upon how they were handled in the series.

And for our first entry we have everyone's...well, someone's favorite politician Villain! Representing the Meta Liberation Army it's Koku Hanabata AKA Trumpet...

And what I think of his weird treatment and what the 'original plan' in my eyes was supposed to be.

So I'll put it out there right off the bat: I do not think that Trumpet was supposed to live past the MVA Arc.

Now, that is a pretty big thing to claim and don't blame people for being skeptical. After all Trumpet's faction, the Hearts and Minds Party, is a major aspect of the PLF if they were to win, being the driving force to steer education, and thus the future more towards what the organization wants after Shigaraki destroys everything. It's even brought up again after his arrest and how the party was dismantled...

Yet, with that in mind, I can't help but feel this is something akin to a band-aid meant to involve someone who wasn't supposed to last as long as he did.

So why do I feel this way. Well, from the get go, MVA ends with a bit of an awkward note when it came to the MLA executive side. No matter how you slice it, the fact that Hori planned only for Curious to die out of the named five is just very weird in hindsight. After all, if the plan was for the MLA to join the LOV, then why not have her stick around as well? Why just kill one? It's just an odd detail, I'm sure everyone else would think so as well.

Well, what if she wasn't supposed to be alone? Given how much of a forefront he played in the Revival Celebration, from spurning the MLA soldiers to attack and even welcoming the League when they come to Deika City with Curious, (especially in the image above), I feel as though he was supposed to die in the event as well. If I were to be specific, I think the initial plan was for Spinner to prove Trumpet's view of him and his 'weak Quirk' wrong by using the strengths of his Quirk to get close enough to kill Trumpet. In turn, Spinner is able to lighten Shigaraki's load since Trumpet's death removes the effects of his Quirk to the soldiers of the MLA and makes them fall even easier for Twice's Sad Man Parade to handle.

But something happened. I think, ultimately, the plotline had to be scrapped as Hori went into Shigaraki's ordeal with Re-Destro. Perhaps it was to preserve the pace or maybe its because there may have been pressure from editors or the like to hurry the arc up, whatever the reason was, the fight was scrapped and Trumpet was spared as a result.

If that's the case, then it goes a way to explain the oddity concerning his placement in the PLF. Namely, the fact that he doesn't get to be a Commander of a Regiment (which is bizarre when you consider that Twice was the sole Commander of the Black Regiment, even though Trumpet easily could have been a Co-commander of it). Re-Destro made sense since he was the leader of the MLA as a whole up until Shigaraki, so he's pretty much the Vice Commander of the entirety of the organization as a whole.

But Trumpet? He just gets nothing, and while you can argue It's because he's a working politician, keep in mind Skeptic was a Commander while also being an executive of Feels Good Inc. He could certainly have been both, and likely be a good fit for Brown or Black. It's odd, but if you consider he wasn't supposed to live past MVA, then it starts making sense. He was supposed to be dead, so Hori didn't really have a set Regiment to give him, and by the time the First War came around, he opted not to really bother with it.

And on the First War? If you consider he was supposed to be dead at this point, than his involvement makes his role in it star to click...or rather. Lack of it. He doesn't do anything. Geten, Re-Destro and, especially, Skeptic had major roles to play in the War and Trumpet easily could have had a part in leading the army about or boosting them with his Quirk. Turning 16K people into a very dangerous force to contend with the Heroes! Yet-

He's taking out off-screen without affecting a thing. But why? Well, another reason I think Trumpet was supposed to be bite it in MVA, beyond giving Spinner his moment, has to do with Incite.

It's one of those Quirks that would fall into 'One-Shot Villain' tier on the latter of how tricky it is to write around. Think of Mustard. His Gas, while it worked for the Training Camp arc, would have been a nightmare to use in later arcs if he were to stick around given how effective it is as neutralizing enemies, require someone to be there with gas masks, and he can't really work with his allies since he could knock them out too - as much as I love Mustard, its very understandable why he couldn't stick around.

Trumpet also fits the bill since his Incite can very easily stack the favor in the Villains without much effort. With one speech, those thousands of soldiers can be buffed to prove an even more dangerous threat to the Heroes by being so caught in a frenzy they refuse to go down, and if worked in conjunction with Gigantomachia, I could see them even pushing back the Heroes to have even more escape!! Add that to having powerhouses like Geten and RD around, the aforementioned Giganto, Advisors (in theory), and the League (especially Shigaraki) fighting and the cards become too stacked for the Heroes to win. But if Trumpet were dead? The canon story becomes a lot more smooth as the soldiers have no one really giving them that boost to be as dangerous as they would be in MLA, and makes most of their capture make a lot more sense.

But, since he was left alive? Well, Hori's answer to that awkward fact, seemed to be just 'pretend he's dead' and just stick him in a panel for later, and be done with him. Which...was an option XD

On the matter of the Hearts and Minds Party, I also argue that the PLF could still use it even without Trumpet being around. He can just be a martyr for them to promote Liberation even more, which makes sense since Trumpet did that with Curious himself. Heck, a cool thing I think could have worked out is for both Trumpet and Curious to have successors in the MLA since their spots are vacant. For example,

Chrome and Diva, for lack of names (Hori please give these guys names), could have been selected to take up the mantle left behind by their predecessors, having been part of their party/Shoowaysha, respectively. That being said, given the PLF reshuffling, at the current moment, they were stuck as just #1 Advisors to the Commanders until a proper time to name them could be met. Give a bit of depth to them.

But that, seemingly (they haven't shown up yet after all), isn't the case! What we are left with is just Trumpet being the most 'there' Villain in the PLF until he's beat which pretty much has him at the bottom of the heap of MLA effect on the story. Yes, even Curious beats him in my eyes since her vestige/ghost still haunts Toga even in the Second War. At best, Trumpet got a passing mention of his own party being dissolved...which is even worse since now since its just confirming it can't be used any more XD

Now, do I wish Trumpet was dead in story? Not really, I wished all five of the MLA executives not only lived, but got some sort of story to head into the Second War - instead of just Skeptic (even though he is the GOAT~). There's a lot you can do with politician villains in stories, so seeing him pretty much reduced to the side was disappointing. But that's life, maybe he can appear in the jail that's holding Compress and Geten? But that's just hope on my end!

Though anything is better for Trumpet than essentially being a Walking Dead determinant character~ 'Yeah, this guy lived....but aside from some minor dialogue doesn't do much and is fated to be gone anyway'. Poor guy!

#koku hanabata #mha trumpet #meta liberation army #paranormal liberation front #salvage speculation #league of villains #redestro #geten #mha curious #mha skeptic #my villain academia #plf advisors

[plf-advisor-stan]

Hoseface vs Mina

Commission by Sonchapoo on Twitter

#mha #paranormal liberation front #my hero acedamia #league of villains #mina ashido #plf advisors

[tired-teacher-blog]

I was wondering the other day--what exactly did Hawks do while he was under cover? For that matter what did any of the other liberation army members do? We know that Hawk's joined the army in order to bring back information to the Hero's, but what was he doing when he wasn't doing that? He spent time with Dabi, acted all buddy buddy with Twice, but what else did he do to prove he was on the villians side? From what we see, we see the small fry members just kind of stand around in groups talking about their loyalty to ReDestro and about how heroes suck. Ok, then what? Do they all just live together in this giant mansion and fart around all day? Cuz it seemed to me like just one big social club where no one does anything.

Don't forget that Hawks did not abandon his role (job) as a hero after infiltrating the villains.

He was a spy for the commission within the meta liberation army, but his official status remained that of the #2 hero. So when he wasn't in the presence of the villains, he was fulfilling his role as a hero.

As for how he managed to gain their trust, it was fairly easy since Hawks is canonically known to be cunning, rational, intelligent and a great lier if he wants to be, allowing him the best chances to go undercover. Though as it's been shown, that despite all of the above he could not gain Dabi's trust.

Same goes for the rest of the members who do not only consist of regular citizens, but some heroes as well.

They have well established roles within the PLF, and are divided into several units. Each of them is lead by a lieutenant and specializes in a different area of combat.

Each lieutenant has three advisors who are considered to be the most capable members of each unit and -according to Hawks- are stronger than the average pro hero. These advisors are in charge of various locations throughout the country.

I hope this answers it 😁

#paranormal liberation front #meta liberation army #bnha hawks #mha hawks

[deusvervewrites]

Deika Civil War AU: So assuming that there’s still an inner council of the MLA, who is on it after the coup? Obviously Trumpet and Destro, but who else? The advisors from the PLF or some new OCs?

Probably OCs. There are very few named members of the 100,000 MLA members.

Possibly Nedzu.

#asks #deika civil war au

[codenamesazanka]

Chapter 370 Spoilers!!

A hasty translation of the speech the PLF advisor gives because I think it's real good:

Rage, people! Today is Liberation Day! Quirk counseling! Quirk education! These are a sham! We bear this knowledge with our "form"! The Six-Six Incident. The Great Purge of Jeda. The "paranormal" is a history of heteromorphy persecution! The men who took part in the slaughter summed up their motive in a single sentence: "They’re disgusting"! And now the modern world pretends to have done repentance! Those who grew up in the metropolitan crucible of diversity… Yes, they’ve been well taught! 'There is probably no such thing as discrimination!' But get out of the city! And there it is— "They’re disgusting." No light, no matter how strong, can illuminate everything! Here we are gathered because we are those upon which the light did not shine! We will illuminate ourselves! "If it weren’t for this Quirk…"! Have you ever once thought that? You're not our heroes! He (Spinner) He is the one who will lead us to the center of society!

#spoilers #bnha spoilers #Chapter 370 #bnha 370 spoilers #translation #take this with like a saltshaker of salt #edited it for flow too #chapter spoilers #370 spoilers

[ihatetaxes99]

Hey when are you gonna make more quirks for the PLF advisors I'm sorry if there's something personal going on but I just wanna know?

Ah! Yes, I do apologise, it's been a very long time. Truth be told, I've just had a lot going on that has largely taken priority. I do have ideas for at least three more of the advisors, so I'll certainly get to cleaning up some time to do the next one.

[lemongogo]

here are some bg characters i rly enjoy . for no particular reason other than they look fun and i wish we had seen more of them (or hope we will see more of, in the case of miss 2a and the plf advisors)

#lgtext #bnha #xless #majestic #the guy who toga killed idk his name #also tht lady also unnamed #and all of the plf members unnamed #raptor #random guy from unbreakable / team fat arc #miss 2a #and other plf advisor dude #and ya maybe i like the guy in row 2 column 3 bc he looks like natsuo but hes confirmed evil ig AHKAJDHLKJASHLAKSJDFHADLKFJHDS #not tht i want natsuo 2 be evil i just think its funny #bnha 296 #bnha 258 #bnha 131 #bnha 154 #bnha 182 #i think? or smth close for raptor

[greenhappyseed]

BnHA Ch.329 - Review, parallels & comparisons

The religious imagery in Ch.326 and Ch.328 wasn’t an accident. Nope, not at all. In 329, Horikoshi continues to use heavy religious language and imagery for AFO, Shigaraki, the PLF.... and Jeany refers to our newest hero ex machina as the heroes’ “salvation.” (Bless his Levi’s joke; I can't believe one of Japan's Top 3 is simping and thinking about vintage denim as the world burns.) All while AFO sits on his throne like Hades with his three-headed hellhound flanking him. And check out this great post on how the AFO quirk-stealing hand hole resembles stigmata.

This has been building up for a while, with Shigaraki in a literal “no man’s land” — he was reborn and “transcended” humanity, a miracle awakening, and we are told he is on a “crusade” to destroy. But he isn’t AFO; he doesn’t want to be an eternal demon lord. Shigaraki is unsure not just of WHO he is — as All Might was — but WHAT he is. Is he human? A god? A demon? Savior or destroyer...or both? Even Shigaraki’s clothes look confused. He has his old (red, I assume) sneakers back, but he’s also wearing what appears to be a suit and a tattered cape, iconic pieces from the stages of his awakening. (This is where I feel compelled to remind everyone that we’ve seen All Might talk about how justice is always born from evil.....)

We also see that the PLF is using Shigaraki and the LOV, with AFO’s encouragement. For example, the PLF holds up Toga as divine light and hope (a mirror of Ochako as the light of hope calling out to persuade citizens), claiming Toga’s tragedy continues because society won’t let her use her quirk freely. And yet, Toga wouldn’t say that her life was a tragedy. She DID use her quirk freely; that WAS her normal, and it’s what got her branded a villain. Toga's tragedy wasn’t an inability to use her quirk; it was other people not accepting her “freakish” quirk and not teaching her a positive way to use her quirk, because she wants friends and a place to belong. I suspect that Toga will not agree with the PLF’s philosophy.

Likewise, the PLF isn’t seeing Shigaraki as their leader, or the one directing their will or conviction. To them, Shigaraki is merely the destroyer so the PLF can “sow the seeds” of the future...specifically, the future where individuals are free to use their quirks. Who else associated Shigaraki with a seed of conviction that needed to grow? STAIN. But unlike the PLF, Stain would not pass judgment on Shigaraki until that seed blossomed. Stain wanted to see Shigaraki’s own conviction grow.

The interesting thing here is why AFO is getting involved with the PLF at all. He doesn’t care about politics. There is an argument he agrees with the PLF, and that explains why he forced a quirk on his "feeble" brother. But that doesn't feel right. We know AFO links quirks with personality, but that doesn't fully explain it either.

It's more compelling to think about how AFO cares about power and manipulation of the masses. In the PLF's ideal world, where strong quirks are what determines a person's worth, AFO is effectively a god and a kingmaker. He can give a strong quirk to the weak for the right price. He can take a strong quirk from someone who doesn't do his bidding. We also know the things AFO is afraid of tend to be collective -- heart, spirit, love. And we learned from Nighteye that a strong collective will can bend fate.

The PLF advisors say, “the cinders of liberation yearn to burn bright.” Hm, cinders sounds a lot like embers…a spark that can be cultivated into a roaring blaze. This is the ideological end battle for the citizens’ hearts — should society burn fiercely in service to others, as Stain says to All Might? Or promote individual liberation above all?

The battle of collectivism vs individualism has always lurked in BnHA, and I’m glad to see it come to the forefront. (It's extra fun in a chapter featuring a “big time maverick from the West” aka a symbol of individualism — the maverick — hailing from a country known for its individualism). Star & Stripe is such an individual, running off on her own to Japan without government approval, that Hawks jokingly wonders if the powers that be will "throw the book" at her when "this" lil apocalypse is over. Hawks also calls her "reassuring," so clearly she's putting Japan's Top 3 at ease, but when she runs into Shigaraki, she sure ain't smiling.

Her taunting line to Shigaraki also hints at the collective vs individual conflict, but in the sense of free will, which AFO loves to twist. I mean, he gave Nagant free will with his "contract" (as opposed to an order). But it does raise the question for Shigaraki -- is any part of him independent of AFO? Is Shigaraki an individual or a collective?

And now we come to Spinner. Spinner is, unlike the rest of the LOV, still of sound mind and body. He was a follower of Stain, a believer in true heroes, and a supporter of Shigaraki destroying the hero society status quo. But Spinner is NOT an AFO lackey. I suspect he stood bodyguard for Shigaraki, not AFO, and AFO’s ego made an incorrect assumption. Does Spinner, as a symbol of heteromorph discrimination who has “led a difficult life,” wish to help the PLF quirk supremacists plant their seeds? Is that really how Spinner will “do justice to his name”? I think this art is a big clue, because the left half sure looks like Stain. And if Stain thinks that even feeble and mortal souls can be heroes...if Stain believes in the collective, well……

#bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #mha #my hero academia #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha 329 #mha 329 #afo #all for one #shigaraki tomura #tomura shigaraki #spinner #shuichi iguchi #toga himiko #himiko toga #stain #hero killer stain #star and stripe #stars and stripes #mha hawks #best jeanist #bnha meta #mha meta

[class1akids]

It seems from the last chapter another one of the vol 32 promo sketches' context has been answered ( https://twitter.com/Color_Division/status/1447776112415846404?s=19 ). I had initially thought that the sketches were a mix of stuff that happens soon after vol 32 and things that will happen in endgame but with so many of them happening now maybe the Shouto-rage moment is rapidly approaching? I can't imagine any other situation outside of the next Touya encounter where he pushes past his limits, but at the same time it would be strange to me if Touya is just dealt with so quickly and then gets what - taken into police custody? Joins to help in the final fight against the remains of the PLF? (The latter seems pretty ooc for him, to bother with that since I can only imagine him being at best a neutral party who may chip in to save those he cares about from dying) for us to then focus on Shigaraki and Izuku (and perhaps Ochaco and Toga?) I would have thought before it may be used to have Shigaraki's location leaked by Touya, but given the already tiny window left and Shigaraki already attacking Stars and Stripes...I don't know.

Oh you are psychic; I was just thinking about how another thing is done from the teasers (which were also supposed to be Vol 32, showing how much Hori underestimated how long it will take to wrap everything up). We got Dark Deku, Nagant, Uraraka, Bakugou, the PLA advisors, Iida leading Deku home, international heroes (though I don't think that particular hero - could be someone from Star's past).

The things we are still missing are Hatsume and Rage Shouto. Deku's gear is unusable (Iida's is broken too, but I think he'll get Tensei's stuff), so obviously the plot will have to switch back to UA after the Star/Shiggy confrontation to give Deku his final suit before the endgame fight.

Which leaves us with Shouto - which I think is either part of the closing moments of this arc or is the transition into the endgame battle.

I've been trying to think of what he's expression looks like, and to me, it definitely feels like anger/rage/pain mix.

I don't think Touya necessarily has to be there for him to break his limits, though. His first time was facing Deku, the second time it was Tetsu.

With Shouto, his past trauma is always bubbling pretty close to the surface, so it can come out in any kind of emotional situation.

It definitely feels like the story is building towards his next "the person I want to be" moment.

The narrative also pretty much neglected all the emotional stuff Shouto has been dealing with since the war - the Dabi reveal, being tainted with both Endeavor's and Touya's sins, his family being dragged in the media, the anti-hero movement honing in on Endeavor and by extension his family, Shouto himself personally causing unease for others, wanting to go after his brother, etc.

It seems like that he's been focused to get Deku back for now, so he supressed everything else. I honestly still think it would be cathartic to give him a moment where it all hits him (a la DvK2 Bakugou), because it is a lot... and let him cry or have a meltdown or a rage moment.

It could be still tied to Dabi threatening something or someone he wants to protect (be it his family, his friends or the civilians - I'm still waiting for the kindergarten kids making a cameo, because why make that panel if you won't deliver on it).

Shouto so far never smashed a limit during a big battle - it was usually before. He unlocked his fire in Sport Festival -> became important during the Stain fight. He unlocked Flash Fire in JTA -> became a life saver in the war.

Both Bakugou and Deku got an upgrade during/post-war, something Shouto hasn't had yet. So I wouldn't be surprised if now Shouto got another upgrade before going into the endgame battle (maybe in a situation where there is an attack on UA or he's helping out in Shiketsu or something). The ability being some kind of extreme only he's capable of - according to the teaser. And then whatever ability he unlocks will be used in the final battle facing Touya.

By the way, I'm totally expecting Touya to switch sides in the endgame and help out at the very end of the fight and get a Touya-Shouto combo. I agree that he's not going to be suddenly the altruistic type, but Shouto will have to reach him, together with the family, and when that happens, I think Touya will remember his love for them and he will want to protect them too.

The narrative is steadily building towards "an everyone should be saved, everyone can become a hero" type of conclusion (if the Stain chapters didn't make that clear). So I think all the three main villains at least will have key roles in the final victory.

#bnha speculation #bnha meta #todoroki shouto #todoroki touya #bnha volume 31 extras #teaser panels #c1a asks

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XIX - XXI-a, Star & Stripe to Final War-a)

Okay, so, I had intended to make one last post to cover through the hospital attack, but as my work week kept me very busy, the write-up on the hospital stuff itself is not finished yet. However, when I checked the word count on the S&S arc up through the end of what I had on the hospital--somewhat shorthanded notes on the first two chapters that would need considerable fleshing out, and bupkis on the second two chapters--I found it was already at seven thousand words, far over the four to five thousand mark I've been aiming for per post in this series. So, this week's somewhat shorter post covers from where we left off up through Chapter 369, the last chapter before the hospital material starts. Hit the jump!

The Star and Stripe Arc (Chapters 329-334)

Chapter 329: 

AFO explicitly pins the blame for Spinner’s difficult life on his being a heteromorph and notes that many in the shadows empathize with his cause, leading to an explanation for the Spinner fanboys from 318: Spinner is becoming the face of a movement!     

Much of this stirring up of heteromorphs around the country is being done by the remnants of the PLF, particularly Spinner’s PLF advisors, who have been putting up posters about Spinner being the voice of discontented and mistreated heteromorphs, posters that also suggest a coming reckoning in grand language steeped in cult mentality: gather soon, liberation, fruition, neutrality is a sin.      (And not just Spinner!  The line about neutrality being a sin is from a set of posters about the tragedy of Toga Himiko, picking back up the tack Curious had wanted to take in using Toga’s story to realize Liberation.[1] It’s unclear whether Spinner’s advisors are also putting up the Togaganda or whether that’s being handled by some of the other remnants we’ll see later.)      The beauty of this is that once heteromorphs are stirred up enough, they’ll be gathering comrades and spreading the word of their own volition, even to those with no contact with the PLF.  Of course, the people ultimately behind this are Skeptic and AFO, neither of them heteromorphs, and both with transparent ulterior motivations, though Skeptic at least is still holding to Re-Destro’s ideology of Liberation and likely does view the subsequent mob activity as helpful to heteromorphs themselves, as opposed to the mere means to his own end of becoming the Demon King AFO has in mind.      [1] And which Skeptic had once scoffed at, feeling Toga a poorly suited choice for that sort of mythologizing.  I wonder if he’s just gotten more desperate or if he’s acceded that Toga’s just fine for bringing about Liberation provided that it’s Liberation à la Shigaraki Tomura?     

But how about Spinner himself?  Well, he looks unconvinced, to say the least.  More on this later, when he gets more context on what the reader is already seeing.     

Chapter 333: 

There’s one lone heteromorph outside of Agpar in Star’s crew.  He’s not a very extreme one—tall but not inhumanly so, with a snouty facial structure and long, upward-pointing ears—but he is still the only heteromorph I’ve yet seen in the default masses of a uniformed group of military-types.  Like, BNHA’s masses of riot squad type cops are all baseline, the guards at Tartarus were all baseline, the probably-JSDF guys in the movie are baseline, and so forth.  These folks are often wearing helmets, of course, so there might be some minor divergences scattered amongst them, but there’s only so much divergence that a helmet and full-coverage uniform will hide!  Odd skin tones, yes, unusual eyes, sure, but not protruding facial features or anything other than very small horns, and divergent body plans are right out.     

The U.A. Traitor Arc (Chapters 335-342)

Chapter 335: 

All Might very conspicuously omits Spinner from the list of threats facing the hero side.  In the moment, it reads like All Might doesn’t view Spinner as a threat.  And sure, why would one random, weak-quirked lizard guy constitute a threat worth mentioning, right?  Later on, we’ll find out that the heroes were trying to keep Kurogiri’s location on the down-low, so this omission may simply be an effort to avoid having to discuss the target of the mob that’s brewing by not bringing up the mob to begin with.     

While I assume that’s Horikoshi’s reasoning for this scene playing the way it does, I do think there are some questions raised by later chapters that imply that heroes are underestimating the situation quite severely.  To wit, it’s already known that the obfuscation has failed and an attack on the hospital is coming—even someone as removed from villain goings-on as the Ordinary Woman had heard about it, news which she relayed to Shouji.  I can’t believe that Hawks and company wouldn’t have intel to match that, if only via also learning of the attack from Josei-san.          If the heroes already know the hospital assault is coming, though, why on earth is it so under-defended?  They can’t possibly be running the risk that an attack set to be led by a member of the League of Villains (as they might presume to be the case thanks to all the posters everywhere!) would choose to target the hospital at random, or that it’s just some kind of generic protest that won’t be trying to breach the walls—surely they must know the mob is coming for Kurogiri?  But then why such paltry numbers of defenders?       I can only assume that the heroes badly, badly underestimated how deep heteromorphic anger and pain ran, and thus equally badly underestimated how many people would show up for the attack.  All Might, being part of that central group of planners, is also one of the people being proven deeply ignorant about, and dismissive of, both the suffering endured and the danger presented by the heteromorphs he knows are coming.     

Shouji immediately picks up on the omission and indirectly challenges it when he says, “It’s safe to assume the list goes on,” which All Might deflects with, “Yes.  They will likely amass more allies,” still not talking about who those allies are going to be.  May I say, then, that if there’s any extent to which All Might doesn’t want to talk about this because he doesn’t want to field questions about why a mob of civilian heteromorphs might choose to ally themselves with the League of Villains, it doesn’t reflect particularly well on him.     

Chapter 341: 

Skeptic gives us the line that ties together every single crowd scene demographic we’ve seen over the course of the entire manga:

My vindication, let me show you it.

There are a few subtly different ways you could read this, so I checked with my translator sis-in-law about her take on it.  She said that what Skeptic’s implying here in the Japanese is that, taken as a whole, a telling proportion of criminals designated as “Villains” are heteromorphs.  That is, by inference, heteromorphs are overrepresented in Villain-level criminality.      So why might that be?  Well, look back at everything I’ve said through this whole essay to date: o Discrimination runs rampant in this society, from minor microaggressions perpetrated by otherwise heroic characters all the way up through dedicated, violent hate groups.  Those facing discrimination may have reduced opportunity, thereby pushing them into harder choices, which may make criminality more difficult to avoid.      o Heteromorphs make up a larger proportion of the population in seedy, rougher areas, suggesting they’re probably lower income, proportionally, than non-heteromorphs.  Lower income means the necessity of facing harder choices, as above.      o The very nature of heteromorphism leading to the laws being applied to them more strictly—for example, if a heteromorph gets into a fist fight with an emitter, the heteromorph’s very body being a part of their quirk may make it more likely for them to be charged as Villains for illegal quirk use than the emitter.  (Think of something like Mandalay not thinking of Spinner as having used his quirk during the training camp, but him being categorized as a villain regardless.)          o Bias against heteromorphs leading to the laws being applied to them more strictly.  If the person in charge of deciding how prosecutors are going to handle an accusation against you, and they just reflexively don’t like the look of your face, or are even openly heteromorphobic, of course you’re more likely to get treated like a Villain than someone a baseline prosecutor more readily sees the humanity in.  This problem in particular will self-perpetuate—more heteromorphs being prosecuted as villains means more cops begin to perceive them as inherently more prone to villainy.      Skeptic doesn’t say outright that criminals who are designated as Villains are more frequently heteromorphs compared to baseline types who committed equivalent crimes, but it sure is easy to read as an implication!  After all, why else would he need to specify “Villain-designated criminals” as opposed to simply one or the other?  If all he meant is that heteromorphs make up a larger demographic percentage of criminals and/or of Villains than they do a demographic percentage in the general population, he could just say that.  It would still imply that there’s some unjust reason for that, but “villain-designated criminals” means that he’s suggesting that the numbers are out-of-whack specifically at that intersection, the place where “criminal” gets modified to “Villain.”     

He goes on to say, “No matter how hard heroes and the government have tried to illuminate our society, the light can’t reach every dark corner.  Plenty of heteromorphs hold deep grudges against the so-called heroes,” referencing ideas of light and illumination that will come up again in the hospital attack.      Most literally, we could say this refers to rural discrimination, far away from the advanced, “integrated” cities, and the way heroes cluster around those urban areas because that’s where the money and fame are at.  But I think it can cover my points above, as well—think back to the purse snatcher from the first chapter, who got run down by a whole passel of heroes and then paraded around in front of cameras in a muzzle, like an animal, for—stealing a purse.  Called “pure evil” by Kamui Woods for—blocking traffic?  Gosh, I wonder if that guy might hold a grudge against heroes?     

Spinner articulates what he was almost certainly feeling back when AFO was first talking him up in 329: that he’s average dude, not some messiah, that he’s only here for Shigaraki, not to serve a great cause.  Still, Skeptic says, the common people are waiting for him; he’ll be the one to pull a trigger Re-Destro no longer can.  The very perception that he’s someone average, Just Another Heteromorph Like Us That Got Tired Of It, is what makes him such an inspiring figure.     

Chapter 342: 

All the students in the little montage bidding farewell to people at U.A. are those whose parents we’ve met, all also there in the scene, with one conspicuous exception: Shouji is talking to the Ordinary Woman, who is most certainly not any relative of his.  I grow more annoyed by her lack of a name by the chapter.     

This chapter features one of the manga’s starkest examples of the dehumanization of villains: Uraraka’s dialogue about how it had never even crossed her mind to consider Toga Himiko’s circumstances and beliefs.  Toga is, of course, a seventeen-year-old girl, only a year and a half older than Uraraka herself, and one who first went on the run at fifteen.  They’re so close in age, even met over the summer, yet Uraraka only realized—truly understood—that Toga was “a person too” when she saw Toga crying.      Further, when confronted when this realization, Uraraka’s instinct is to try to quash it, to assume that even thinking this way makes her some kind of villain-apologist freak, so she has to banish those thoughts by going out and staring at scenes of immensely traumatic destruction to remind herself of what Toga had a hand in and thereby banish her human compassion.      This is not framed as being about heteromorphs, but just last chapter, it was laid out for the reader in black and white that heteromorphs make up an outsized proportion of “Villain-designated criminals.”  Thus, in turn, they’re proportionally more likely than any other group to be subject to the dehumanization faced by villains, and here we see just how extreme that social conditioning is even in a nice, empathetic, thoughtful girl like Uraraka.     

The Final War Arc (Chapters 343-369, for now)

Chapter 345: 

Geten’s #3, a heteromorph right on the border between resembling an animal and just being weird-shaped (if anything, he looks more like a heteromorph based on a Pokémon), calls the heroes Mammonists, a term referring to followers of Mammon, a personification of wealth/lust for wealth.[2]  Professional Heroism as HeroAca’s Japan practices it is an inherently capitalistic endeavor.  It’s wildly commercialized, rewards competition before cooperation, and dehumanizes the human assets that keep it going, hero and villain alike.  Calling heroes Mammonists, therefore, echoes Stain’s accusations, and recalls Mount Lady’s grin way back in the first chapter when she stole the “kill” from Kamui Woods, all in the interest of fame, benefits, and government pay.      [2] In the Japanese, haikin shugisha, literally “money-worshipper”; jisho even gives Mammonist as a direct translation.      I want to reiterate a few points I’ve talked about before, as well as add a few new considerations, to get at what I think is telling about not!Greninja’s Mammonist accusation as it relates to heteromorphobia:     o Mount Lady’s bonus chapter established that more rural areas see less heroism.  This impacts heteromorphs like Shouji and Spinner both because there’s no one around who’s both willing and able to save them from the abuses they suffer[3] and because there are no heteromorphic heroes around to serve as role models.      o Tomura’s Chapter 237 flashback established that rougher areas are slower to see hero agencies established in them—the men shortly to be murdered by Tenko complain about a bunch of new hero agencies being built in the area lately.  That’s over a decade prior to canon, sure, but many long years more since the establishment of professional heroism!      o I’ve demonstrated that higher concentrations of heteromorphs in an area can serve as a visual shorthand for it being a poorer, rougher place to live.      o A hero’s ranking depends on incident resolution, public approval, and social contribution—all things that disadvantage those who work in rural areas.      o Two characters in Class 1-A were admitted as “recommendation” students, i.e. those who can take smaller-group versions of the exams, as well as getting the benefit of an interview portion.  Those two characters are Momo and Shouto—both baseline, both powerful, both wealthy.  Does U.A. offer scholarships?  Any financial aid for underprivileged students?  Any programs to seek out promising youth who may not have the connections to get recommendations?  Who knows!  But, we sure do have a telling window on who gets small-batch exam privileges.[4]      [3] Of course, if you take Vigilantes as canon, there’s no guarantee heroes would have helped them anyway—the people attacking them were doing so with pitchforks and pesticides, after all, not quirks.  That firmly puts those attacks in the category of “not a hero’s job.”  But let’s give Heroes enough benefit of the doubt to assume that even a pretty materialistic one would probably not have stood by while a crowd of adults attacked a ten-year-old with farming tools unless they themselves had already been raised to such violent heteromorphobia—which, if they’re content to be working in such rural areas, odds are they were.      [4]    This particular argument is, I admit, much weaker when you factor in Juzo, Tokage and Inasa, but if Horikoshi didn’t want to make some unfortunate implications about who benefits from the recommendation program, he shouldn’t have made 100% of the recommendation students in the Main Character Class baseline, powerful and wealthy.     

Taken all together, it’s easy to understand why someone might accuse Heroes—especially Heroes who bust out the kind of exorbitantly expensive, last-minute constructs the heroes have just busted out—of being money-obsessed.  Successful heroes live and die on commercialism, on public recognition, on their “brand,” and that structure keeps the money flowing—from the government to heroes, from civilians into the Hero industry, from heroes to the vast array of production companies supporting them on all fronts.  The whole industry is a prayer wheel that turns on money.      Now, Geten’s #3 is a pretty flashy dresser himself—those pinstripes!—so whenceforth this “Mammonist” accusation?  Well, I would point out that he is a heteromorph, and reiterate the story’s frequent utilization of heteromorphs to visually communicate lower income brackets.  Perhaps he himself has experience with poverty, even if he’s clearly doing better for himself these days.  If so, then it’s very likely that the beef that drives his embrace of Liberation ideology is that the Hero System first criminalizes public quirk use for non-heroes and then monetarily disincentivizes getting help where it’s truly needed, all while pouring money into Heroics elsewhere like a busted oil tanker spewing crude into the Gulf.     

Chapter 349: 

Spinner is visually suspended between the desire to change the world he lives in and the desire to destroy “the warped imbalances (…) that we all just came to accept.”  He embodies both—he’s someone who once resigned himself to his warped lot in life, who came to the League because he wanted so desperately to change, because he wanted to believe that change could be brought about by only a single man, and who fell in love with the promise of destruction.  Hero Society never promised him either, so he came to the only people who could.     

Chapter 353:

This chapter places Spinner firmly at Central Hospital, here to retrieve Kurogiri.  The group he’s leading is entirely composed of heteromorphs, including two of his three PLF advisors; this, combined with the set-up about heteromorphs looking to him and Mezo “I want to feature him in the story” Shouji’s conspicuous presence, hints at what’s about to go down at this location.     

Chapter 355: 

AFO’s got a snappish “fowl duo” thought about Hawks and Tokoyami—just “two birds” in the Japanese, but still dismissal of them as animals.     

Of the ones we can see, AFO has exactly one vestige with tiny little horns; every other one attacking him is baseline in their general appearance and build.  Not exactly beating my heteromorphobic accusations there, big guy.     

Chapter 358: 

ShigAFO brings up appearance and form in his monologue about how the post-Advent world is a world beyond hope of a status quo, full of disparities that lead to a lack of understanding, and thence to fear and rejection.  It touches on similar themes as Nedzu’s speech back in 323, but with an ultimately fatalistic bent.     

Bakugou relates this all to Deku—their past relationship, as well as Deku being brought back to U.A.—but, as we will see, the arc’s got some heavier hitting stuff in mind for talking about disparities giving rise to fear and rejection.     

Chapter 363: 

Mirko’s gets another self-referential animal quip that only exists in Caleb Cook’s colorful localization.  The line rendered as, “If only I’d been one hop faster!” only references being one step faster in Japanese.

----------

Next time, I will finally actually cover the hospital! Hopefully it will be in a week, but it's only half-written and is, I suspect, going to require a lot more editing to strike the right balance on discussing what I think is relevant and simply complaining about how egregiously bad it is as a resolution to this whole aspect of the worldbuilding. Followers who read my posts on those chapters will likely find my bitching familiar, but this is piece is bound for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be able to stand on its own without too much reference to other posts.

In any case, it should be up in one or two weeks, depending on how busy work keeps me.

On the topic of work, and with a number of new followers around, this is probably a good time for me to point out again that I'm in a pretty tight financial situation, so if you've been enjoying this series of posts and are of a mind to throw a few bucks my way, I do have a ko-fi you can use to do so!

Thanks for reading, all!

#bnha #bnha meta #bnha worldbuilding #heteromorph discrimination plot #iguchi shuuichi #bnha spinner #plf advisors #my writing

[itsnothingofinterest]

it just hit me, since Spinner's 3rd Advisor/Blocky wasn't with the others and we know the police station is close to Central Hospital, what if the reason for that is because Blocky was tasked with freeing Garaki with a smaller squad, whilst the main forces free Kurogiri (and thus be too distracted to realize another location is being attacked)? After all, while AFO would prioritize Gigantomachia and Kurogiri, it would make sense he'd also want his 'bestie(?)' to be free during that as well (AFO:....oh and I suppose any other villains who would be good servants/meat shields).

He wasn’t?

Huh, he wasn’t.

Hmm. Y’know, I suppose I''ve kind of been ignoring the 3rd ranks in my theories. My main theory with the advisors was that any big moment for them was going to focus mainly on the 1st Advisors, to follow up those few 2nd Advisors' brief times in the spotlight. I think I've talked about the idea with you before; it'd be some coordinated move to salvage the PLF's operations from AFO's utter incompetence.

I guess I just assumed the 3rd advisors won’t do anything since I’m arbitrarily expecting them to be the least capable, and the second ranks weren’t impressing us. But I suppose there’s no real reason they couldn’t do something. I mean even if my arbitrary expectations of the abilities were right (and they may not), they’d at least be up for some smaller jobs like body guarding Skeptic or, as you suggest, recusing Garaki.

Though that said, I could also understand why AFO just wouldn’t bother so much with rescuing Garaki they way he did Kurogiri & Machia. He’s not useful in this war. Kurogiri & Machia could and did join the fight (though never to AFO’s favor. Lol.), heck Kurogiri altered the course of the war and helped free Tomura. But what’s Garaki the bioengineer gonna do, make a Nomu? Add in that he's probably not quite as undefended as you're suggesting, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a reason to break him out in the middle of the war unless the police station he’s in really is the same holding facility that Compress & the PLF higher ups are in.

(As an aside, where’s the rest of the army? There’s no way one police station has 110,000+ villains in it. Are they kept at a separate location? Would a proper jailbreak need to hit wherever they’re at too? ‘Cause as much as I want the return of Compress, Geten, & RD, it’s not like they’d have any more of an impact on the war than Dabi; and Dabi is distracting 3 heroes by accidentally endangering some civilians. So if a jailbreak were to mean anything to the literal army the heroes have, it’d have to break out the whole villain army too.)

(As an aside to my aside, I should make a proper theory post going over what a coordinated move by the Advisors might look like; everywhere they’d hit & stuff like that.)

#ask & reply #bnha #kyudai garaki #spinner #gigantomachia #kurogiri #bnha skeptic #mr. compress #geten #redestro #dabi #paranormal liberation front #PLF #all for one #my stupid long term predictions

[tigerdovefan34-realone]

An Unexpected Declaration

Story Introduction for an Idea I have. Note, I do not endorse teenage pregnancy, Teen Sex, etc, etc. Toga and Izuku in this are villains, meaning they are acting against the law no matter what they do and this is what I think Himiko would reasonably want/do given my understanding of her. Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to the fic.

“I want a baby.”

That was the one statement that made Izuku Midoriya choke in surprise  on his milkshake mid sip. Hacking out coughs, he pounded his fist into his chest to clear his windpipe. Once clear, he looked at his surroundings. Dabi, Mustard, Spinner, and Compress were playing their game of Uno while little Kota and Eri watched, Twice was off somewhere, likely chatting with Hawks, and after a look around, he remembered that Tomura was upgrading for All for One. With his surrounding clear, he looked to his newly declared wife, formerly Toga Himiko, now Midoriya Himiko, staring at him expectantly as she sipped from her glass of blood that Izuku had painstakingly drained herself for.

It had been a few months (It was currently Early February) since the battle with the massive Meta Liberation Army where he, Mustard, and Toga almost lost their lives if Jin hadn't intervened when they did. Thankfully, their quirks awakened while they were engaging in combat, with Mustard’s Gas now inducing Fear and Horrific Hallucinations in his victims upon being inhaled, essentially crippling an enemy and allowing him to quickly put a bullet in their skull while incapaciated (fortunately, the Doctor had been able to immunize the League and its Warriors and allies to the gas, though Hawks was kept out of the immunization due to there not being enough), Toga could now copy the Quirks when disguised as someone she really loved and respected, as long as she had a decent understanding of their Quirk, and Izuku’s three Quirks, Air Arms, Regenerate, and Insight, had allowed awakened. The first formerly meant he could only grab certain things as well as launch himself in different directions and throw them, but now he could increase pressure and essentially crush someone into goop with air, the second one being him with the ability to regenerate old wounds before new wounds after thirty minutes now having him being able to heal in half that time with all wounds over his body as well as any lost limbs but with the cost of a massive amount of energy being lost, which he’d need rest to recover. Finally, Insight initially allowed him to view a Person’s Quirk and their intentions during a fight, but now it allowed him to view specific memories of someone, anyone at all, and any plans they have, regardless of being in combat or not.

And it just so happened that thanks to Insight, he knew exactly what the Heroes were planning thanks to a little birdy being his little lab rat for it.

Now, the former League of Villains stood as Seven of the Eleven Lieutenants of the newly declared Paranormal Liberation Front led by Shigaraki Tomura consisting of 116,000 warriors and the natural disaster Gigantomachia. Dabi and the Ice user from the Meta Liberation Army, Geten, commanded the Violet Regiment, specialized in Guerilla Warfare. Twice commanded the Black Regiment, specialized in Tactics, Himiko and the MLA’s Hacker Skeptic commanded the Carmine Regiment tasked with Intelligence with the traitorous Hero Slidin Go as an advisor, Spinner and Compress commanded the Brown Regiment tasked with Support, and finally Mustard was given command of the Yellow Regiment tasked with Biological and Psychological Warfare. There was also that bitch Curious who he let his hime have fun with for a time, she now served as an advisor to Himiko and was very willing to listen to what her boss had to say after what had happened between them, something Izuku likely never wanted to know. Izuku was given the greatest honor of all though.

He was given the position of overarching Second-in-Command and Master of Strategy, which meant Shigaraki trusted him with laying the groundwork for the coming war and how to deploy each regiment effectively and where they’d be best suited. Essentially, this made him enemy #1 on the Hero’s capture/kill list, likely along with Twice and Mustard, simply due to how dangerous the three were. Mustard knew this but Twice...He really did love Jin, but sometimes he was too trusting for his own good. Then there was the young seven year olds Kota and Eri, which Himiko, Mustard, and Izuku had effectively adopted as their younger siblings. Both of them were given advisory roles to Izuku, Himiko, and Mustard but it was more to allow them to learn how to lead and what to do for when they grow up more than anything else.

But on to the current moment, he looked at his wife of two weeks, completely flabbergasted at what he heard from her mouth. “W-w-what?” Maybe he heard her wrong? Maybe she said something else and he misinterpreted what she said? He hadn’t been getting much sleep since he started planning the PLF’s strategies for the upcoming war, so much so that now Himiko was complaining about in bed and their once fiery nights turned into warm, comforting snuggle sessions, which, thankfully, his blood-crazed wife didn’t mind. Mustard snickered behind him.

“You heard your wife, buddy. She wants to have your spawn.” He joked as Dabi hit him with a Plus Four. “God Damnit!” He cursed, drawing four cards, now having six instead of just two. “And I was so close too.” He pouted and Izuku gave a small smirk at how cute the former middle schooler was acting. Initially, the two of them and Himiko didn’t see eye to eye much, what with Izuku being focused on the mission, Himiko being all over the place and constantly looking for blood, and Mustard being distrusting of people and overly aggressive. However, with time and patience, the three became the closest of the League and with Eri and Kota formed the League’s Next Generation as coined by Compress, given the five of them were younger than the other five. Now, Mustard was his best friend and a good person to talk to when Izuku needed it and vice versa.

It was nice.

“Is it really that surprising, Izu-kun?” Himiko spoke up, her golden eyes staring directly into Izuku’s emerald ones. She was really beautiful in her current apparel, a fancy shirt with a fluffy skirt and her hair not in their trademark buns. Not to mention the view her skirt gave when Izuku looked down. “I mean, I’ve been your wife for what? Two months? Three?”

“It’s been two weeks, Himi-san.” He clarified. Dabi simply scoffed as it approached his turn.

“Not in my books, it hasn’t.” He began as he looked at the two, turning away from the simple card game. “With you two constantly sucking each other’s faces and being together in bed since the whole drama with the Yakuza, I’d say that’s when you two actually got hitched, even though you recently made it official or whatever.” He stated in his common, matter-of-fact tone Izuku had grown used to. “Uno.” He stated nonchalantly as he placed his second to last card down. A glance in his direction and Izuku saw it was a red five.

If you want the full story, let me know and I’ll continue to work on it. If you want to make art of it, just hit me up with a private DM and I’ll allow it and even feature your art. Hope you enjoyed my crappy writing. Have fun.

#my hero academia #izutoga #toga himiko #midoriya izuku #Izuku Midoriya #Villain!Deku AU #paranormal liberation front #dabi #mustard mha

[randomguywithwords]

As The Dust Settles: Chapter 14 (Geten X Dabi Slowburn)

Chapter 14: A Lonely Road

AO3 Link: Here

Previous Chapters: 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

–––––––

Dabi pulled the hood over his head as Geten and him crossed the runway. Someone was waiting for them at the hangar, their silhouette visible against the bright lamps. 

“That’s probably one of Skeptic’s men,” Geten whispered to him. Dabi nodded.

As they neared, the stranger stood at attention in a blue-collar attire. “Apocrypha, Dabi,” He greeted, bowing. “Skeptic has informed me you need a vehicle for transport. A motorcycle, was it?”

“Yeah,” Dabi replied. “Only thing I can drive.’

The Liberation soldier nodded. “We’ve managed to procure a couple for you. Take as many as you want, and good luck on your assignment. I will update Skeptic accordingly.” 

Gesturing to the row of motorcycles inside the hangar, he bowed once more and left for the air control tower nearby. 

“Crazy how spread out you guys are, how have we not noticed you all?” Dabi shook his head in astonishment as the two of them walked over to the bikes. 

“We’ve hidden ourselves well. And stop calling us like we’re not you,” Geten said. 

“Mmhmm…” Dabi murmured distractedly, scanning his choices. He pointed at a dark blue motorcycle. “That one.”  

“Why that one?” She sounded genuinely curious. “Don’t tell me it’s –”

“Yep, it looks the coolest. Let’s go.” Dabi grinned, beginning to enjoy this mission as he leapt onto his new ride. 

Sighing, Geten got on behind him. “You know we’re on a time limit right? The group will move again in a few hours. This better be fast.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine. Sheesh.”

Geten grumbled. “I could just use my ice. We’d save at least ten minutes.”

“And show everyone? You’re not in Deika City, girl. You get questioned or arrested for using your quirk in public.” Dabi tossed her a helmet, joking, “Safety first.”

She knocked it aside with a snort. “I know, it’s not like I’ve never left the city before.” 

“Oh yeah?” Dabi said as he revved the engine. “2 dollars says you only left the city...less than 5 times.” 

He couldn’t see her expression since he was facing forward, but she didn’t reply for a second. “I’m not taking that. Shut up.” 

Chuckling, Dabi started to move. “Might wanna hold on. Don’t worry, I won’t burn you.”

He heard more grumbling. “I should have learnt to drive.” But she put her arms around his waist. They felt chilly. Were they always cold? 

Then they were off, entering the main road. The ride would be roughly half an hour. And Dabi was surprised by how much he enjoyed it. It was silent besides the engine sounds. The roads were mostly empty, and the cool night air made his coat flap in the wind. 

He basked in the feeling. It had been a long time since he could cruise on an empty road in the countryside. He was hoping this mission was Shigaraki cooking up some bullshit for Geten, because he could tell there was something definitely up with this entire assignment. Whatever it was, Geten was taciturn about it. 

Alternatively, the assignment was real and he could spend a night (or hopefully three) away from Deika City and the monotony burning some folks. Win-win. 

Geten was quiet behind him, the only semblance of her presence being her two arms firmly latched onto his stomach, not too tightly – Thank god, but he noticed how whenever he accelerated, she gripped it a bit tighter. 

Just like me and Sensei… 

The memories pulled him into the past as he rode. Dabi remembered him teaching a young Touya how to ride a motorcycle when he was...14? It wasn’t easy at first, but he had to learn to get around. They didn’t have the convenience that Kurogiri or Ujiko provided. The villain street life was hard, but he chose to step into it. He had little regrets. 

He remembered sitting behind where Geten was, holding on tightly to Dabi as they cruised through empty towns and abandoned industrial estates on their jobs. His mentor didn’t mind then, so...he wouldn’t mind now. 

And speaking of empty towns, the road turned onto one, with the two of them riding through a small, two-lane town, one not meant to house people, but to serve as a pass-through. 

His eyes flickered towards a store on his left whose lights were on. A convenience store. And… 

Wait, is that…?

Dabi screeched to a halt and hopped off the bike.

“Why’d you stop? What – oh.” Geten saw what he was looking at as she disembarked too, taking off her helmet.

It was a body. Beaten up bad, with twisted limbs and fist marks on his shredded clothing. It was propped up against the side of the building, an oddly peaceful final resting place. There was a smear of blood that stretched from the road all the way to the side of the convenience store. 

Dabi squatted down and inspected it. Couldn’t have been more than three days, since no fluids have been expunged. Doesn’t smell too bad, so decay hasn’t been long, or it has yet to start. Organs are probably decomposing now, though. 

Damn, can’t believe I actually remembered Sensei’s lesson. 

“Hold on, that’s one of us. He’s an advisor for Black Regiment.” Geten said.

“Seriously?” 

“His quirk gives him incredible speed. And…” She looked at the road. Dabi followed her gaze. It was more blood. On the road. 

“He was running from there, not too long ago, since he still looks...fine.” Dabi looked at the road they were heading. 

“You don’t think it’s our assignment?” Geten wondered.

Guess this assignment isn’t Shigaraki’s bullshit after all. 

“Thump.” He heard movement. His head flicked upwards. Instinctively, he unleashed a stream of fire.

“BANG!”

Geten gave a surprised yelp, clutching her arm, but to her credit, her other arm was instantly thrust out in retaliation, but nothing happened. “Wait, what?” She gasped. 

Shit, it’s not...is it? Whatever, think later. 

Dabi unleashed a torrent of fire at the rooftops, where silhouettes shifted around. He counted five.

Dabi grabbed Geten by her uninjured hand and dragged her into the store. It would serve as cover. 

“Are you alright?” Dabi turned to look at Geten, who was looking at her arm. 

“Yeah, it’s not a bullet. It’s some dart.” She held up a small capsule with a needle at the end. “But I can’t…” Her voice trailed off as she tried again. Nothing. 

“Fuck.” Dabi growled. “Never mind. Stay hidden.”

“What are you –” 

Rushing out of the store, he swept his right arm upwards to summon a wave of flame that disintegrated the incoming volley of bullets that any idiot could predict. Igniting his left hand, he counterattacked with a fire blast, which got some of them. He heard two screams. 

Amateurs. 

With a growl, he leapt out of the way, just as some snaking tendrils shot towards where he was. Using your quirks now, eh?

He fired off another plume. The attackers ducked. 

Dabi knew he couldn’t scorch the buildings too much or it might be noticeable. The law didn’t know about the PLF, but they knew about the League. Leave too many of his burn marks, and it’ll screw him over. 

Guess I’ll try this new move. Having only practiced it thrice this morning – Felt so long ago, he thought, he prayed it would work. 

Keeping his left hand summoning a continuous stream of fire to cover him, he drew his right fist back and concentrated. Your fingers. Just the fingers. 

His left arm began to singe from the effort. It stung like a bitch. He gritted his teeth.

Now or never. Fuck you Endeavour, for making me learn something. 

He thrust his open palm forward and withdrew his left simultaneously. From his fingertips, tendrils of fire as thin as rope shot forward them like burning lassos, weaving through the air in a snake-like fashion. But he didn’t need accuracy, just the width. 

With concentrated power, they managed to cover his whole field of view in terms of range. Just as the men left their cover, The tendrils seared into their flesh, and with screams filling the silence, they dropped down from the roof, slamming into the ground with sickening cracks. Three cracks. 

Shit, if they’re not alive...Three stories, they might still make it. So there’s three on the ground, and probably two on the roof, assuming no funny business with any quirks…

Raising his voice, he said, “You guys have ten seconds to come down the ladder before I burn all your friends to ashes.” Then his gaze lowered to see Geten standing in front of the convenience store, waiting. He gave her a ‘wait a while’ gesture.

Five seconds passed before the two of them climbed down the ladder, all while begging, “Please don’t shoot!”. Dabi grinned. They looked hilariously pathetic.

When they reached the ground, they knelt down with their hands in the air. Dabi approached them while giving the ‘all ok’ to Geten. 

“If you two move,” Dabi said, “I’ll burn you alive.” 

The survivors quaked as Dabi bent down and picked up one of their guns. Colt revolver, .45, definitely modified.

Having done it a thousand times, he disassembled the gun with fluid motions without much thought. It was one of Dabi’s first lessons to him. Picking up one of the bullets gingerly, he inspected it and saw that it was identical to the bullet that had struck Geten. He dropped it to the ground and crushed it with his foot. 

“All right, you.” He pointed at one of the men. Psych. He opened his palm, and a blast of fire was accompanied by a guttural scream. The other covered his mouth to stifle a sob. 

When he was done, he turned to the other and asked, “Did you kill that guy?” He pointed to the body of the Liberation Front advisor that was still lying there.

“No! I swear!” He shook his head vigorously, clasping his hands together to beg for mercy. Seems truthful. 

“Who put you up to this?” 

“I – I don’t know!” He choked out.

“Oh yeah?” Dabi ignited his palm and stepped forward. He whimpered, “Please! I really don’t know! We were just paid to do it!”

“I want a name.” He placed his burning hand on the thug’s leg. The thug’s whimpers grew into raw wails.

“I – I don’t know!” 

“Try again.” Increasing the firepower, the thug began to scream.

“M – Mesa!” He managed to say through the agony. 

“Is that a street name or his actual name?” 

“That’s all he told us! I swear! That’s all! Please!” 

Could be lying. Whatever, I won’t get anymore out of them. These low-class trash don’t seem like the type. 

Dabi sighed and rubbed his face. Looking around, he was glad the town was deserted. Even the convenience store lights seemed to be the thugs’ doing. It would make cleanup way easier. 

“You might wanna cover your ears for this one,” He told Geten, standing up and gesturing for the two of them to leave the alley. The alley looked funnily similar to all the other ones he burned. Just like old times. 

Once they were on the pavement, he turned around and raised his hand. Can’t have people knowing we were here.

“NO! PLEA – AHHHHHH!” 

No point remembering them. 

––––––

Hi. Enjoy. Inserted AO3 link because again, long chapter. 

I actually wrote this and the next chapter (I thought they could be one chapter at first), then the word count hit 3k and I realised I misjudged. Anyway, I do have chapter 15′s backbone done but it hasn’t been edited yet. So expect to see it next week as usual (I’ve surprisingly managed to keep to a schedule on this story, somewhat). 

Also please, I’m not going for a “Geten is damsel in distress and de-powered” and Dabi has to be the knight in shining armour. That was not my intention whatsoever. It’s the fact that she prides herself on her admittedly powerful quirk, so taking it away for a while will be a very interesting way to see her character.

Here’s to hoping I can write that properly. It’s gonna be doubly hard because next chapter is still Dabi’s POV. So...might drink my sorrows away if I screw that up. Nah jk, but I technically am legal to drink, so ._.

I’m rambling. But yeah I felt the need to point that out because I don’t wanna offend any feminists or something. 

#bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #mha fanfic #mha fanfiction #bnha fanfiction #bnha fanfic #Dabi #bnha dabi #mha dabi #geten #mha geten #bnha geten #getenxdabi #dabixgeten #dabi x geten #geten x dabi #dabiten #ATDS

[robotlesbianjavert]

plf raid arc theory leave me alone i want to believe.

look just LOOK. things that have been emphasized so far in the plf raid arc:

the heroes are competent, powerful, and well-prepared to neutralize their enemies (thanks to hawks’ intel and their previous knowledge of the league; kaminari was definitely brought into the front lines to deal with the voltage advisor)

the lack of escape routes for the villains - john-chan is dead and crust has taken note of other routes out of the lab that will likely be taken care of, the paths out of the plf mansion have been blocked off.

the distance between the hospital raid and the mansion raid (80 km)

the heroes have completely definitely blind-sided the PLF, they are well-informed about what the PLF is capable of, and have the strength to combat it. hard-hitters* like redestro, gigantomachia, and twice’s sad man parade could turn the tide, but that’s almost too obvious, and there’s no way that the heroes won’t anticipate it. the second that hawks infiltrated the organization, the power balance tipped to the heroes. right now, we’re seeing a clean victory.

(*shigaraki waking up early and laying waste has also been suggested, but i feel like that’s really messy if shig’s still in progress, plus he’s too far away to help out at the mansion raid.)

except it’s be really weird narratively to have the plf, who have been built up as a legitimate threat with end-game potential (if not just another stepping stone for shigaraki’s individual strength), to go down so easy. the heroes are due a good loss to really up the stakes. and if the PLF/league manage to get away? despite all the planning the heroes had done, all their safeguards, all their power, the advantage of surprise, and they STILL lose? that’s going to be one of the biggest blows to society’s trust in heroes.

plus, there’s still wildcards on the PLF’s side: gigantomachia, spinner, and two of spinner’s advisors.

i’m ignoring gigantomachia right now this is spinner’s moment okay.

out of the entire league and the PLF in general, spinner’s the most unremarkable. twice (sad man’s parade), toga (her infiltration of shiketsu, and it may be hawks has learned + reported her quirk evolution), dabi (his part in the high-end attack), and compress (kidnapping MVP yo) are all known threats, and the MLA leaders are nothing to sneeze at either. 

as a league member, spinner’s biggest accomplishment is as a getaway driver. in terms of threat-level among the PLF leaders who all have useful and threatening quirks, spinner would understandably be the lowest priority. or: they’re underestimating him.

in MVA, the league gained new utility to their quirks (double, transform, decay) and an army with a huge amount of resources. the latter is proving useless against the heroes, and if the heroes are doing their jobs right then the former won’t be much use either. however, an OFT DISREGARDED development from MVA is spinner’s newfound conviction in shigaraki, specifically his desire to relieve shigaraki’s burden and to help enact his vision. he’s accepted that he’s a support figure.

i think we’ve gotten hints spinner is probably the most involved in seeing the PLF succeed. he collabs with re-destro on the Paranormal Liberation Front name, he’s deferred to in the conversation hawks eavesdrops on in chapter 245, twice notes that he’s in meetings all the time. at the same time, he’s the only lieutenant we haven’t seen during the raid so far. which could be brushed off if he’s just meant to appear if the PLF leadership manages to get together, if two of his advisors weren’t also missing from the 263 splash page.

that’s enough for me as a reasonable chill fan of spinner to insist that he’s the secret factor in turning the tides for the villains, but it doesn’t address how the villains are going to survive if the heroes have cut off their escape routes and pinned them down.

taking a step back: as of the official 264 translation, dabi is well aware that hawks ratted them out using twice, even though skeptic never found any suspicious behaviour. his immediate reaction to learning of the raid is to head towards hawks and twice, suggesting he’s aware that hawks was going to betray them, and that he’s prepared to deal with it.

while we see that the MLA leaders never prepared for this possibility and are freaking out, but outside of dabi and twice, we only see toga and compress reacting to the building shaking rather than their actually thoughts. spinner obviously is not around yet to react. there are some theories that maybe the league outside of twice were aware that hawks could betray them, and have their own backup plans in place. would help me out a lot. 

anyways that bit is just to kind of justify why i think, while waiting for hawks & co to make their move, spinner & co are prepping for a prison-breeeeaaaaaaaaaak because kurogiri yo.

at this point, releasing kurogiri would a) address the lack of escape options for the league/PLF, b) address the distance between the hospital and the mansion, c) open the possibility for backup if we needed to transport an awakened shig/some nomu to the mansion, or some soldiers to the hospital, or even other tartarus prisoners to cause general mayhem, d) offer more storyline/development for himself, aizawa, and mic, e) reunite him with shigaraki cuz it’ll be interesting to see how that dynamic is going to change with shigaraki’s own development and the shirakumo revelations.

in a scenario where the heroes are getting in some early domination and wins more or less easily, the villains need some aces if they want to maintain any narrative credibility. having spinner and kurogiri as those aces would be a shock to the heroes and a credible subversion of reader expectations, while still having enough groundwork to not come out of nowhere.

also spinner should be allowed to get a kill in. maybe that will finally garner him some fucking respect.

main nitpicks i have myself with this theory: 

i don’t know what gigantomachia is up to, if he’d be helping out the prison break, if he’s just taking a nap, maybe he’ll only take action at shigaraki’s behest, who knows

prison break would bring all for one directly back into the plot, and who knows what the fallout of that would be for shigaraki’s development.

if the league were anticipating the heroes at some point, i’m not sure why they wouldn’t give ujiko a heads up, if only for shigaraki’s sake, so that he’s better prepared, unless they didn’t want him to act in ways that tipped the heroes off. or ujiko was aware, was too busy being smug to deal with it, and now he’s just ridiculously panicky.

cmon i don’t want the league to do twice like that if they were aware that hawks was gonna do this :(

anyways this is a different theory not for this arc but for more endgame stuff. eri’s rewind is gonna be used to reverse what ujiko’s done to shigaraki. bye.

#bnha #bnha spoilers / #i'm sorry. this is long. i've been holding it in. #bnha 264 #bnha bloggin