#so i'm just posting this now to get it out before 357 officially drops

[stillness-in-green]

Chapter 356 Thoughts

Written before the 357 leaks and largely left as-is, give or take a snarky footnote. Presented this week in order of events.

•     Oh my god, Jirou is such a badass.  Just think about the kind of guts it takes to be like, "Okay, I'm a thousand feet(1) up in the air and can't fly under my own power, but whatever, my bandmate has a black abyss fist with that supervillain's name on it.  Catch you guys on the flip side!"

•     This fight continues to be pretty fun, as far as fights that I'm not terribly invested in go.  Jirou dropping her jacket over Dark Shadow, and Tokoyami using his cape to wrap up his arm, are exactly the sort of doing-a-lot-with-what-little-we've-got measures that I'd like to see more of from this series, making the heroes play smart with the resources they have on hand rather than constantly leaning on super tech bought by private millionaires or convenient pre-planned reinforcements from other heroes despite the alleged depletion of hero numbers.

•     I do not like All For One reassuring the audience that his problems were Definitely Not because a girl was allowed to be effective and directly contribute to taking down an arc boss, but blahblah somethingsomething Quirk Rebellion. 

          On the one hand, if I were to be generous, it's easy to see AFO flailing to make excuses for why the Demon King just took a major L to some random teenage girl, and it's even pretty funny in that light.  On the other hand, we directly see the quirk rebellion from inside AFO's skull, which makes it looks like his description is accurate to reality.  And like, look, Shounen Manga Power Level Bros have the same mentality AFO does, and will take any excuse they can get to downplay the contributions of side characters, especially side characters who are girls.  I don't like the manga going out of its way to hand those people justifications.

          Why not just let Jirou (and Tokoyami as well) have this?  Like, consider AFO's extrasensory quirks, just the ones we know about: vibration-sense, infrared, maybe the empathy, and Search. 

It hardly needs to be said how a violently loud wall of sound would fuck with a vibration quirk.  Sound is literally vibration in the air!  Jirou's is so loud it has physical impact!  Of course AFO can't detect shit with a vibration quirk in the wake of that!      

Infrared would pick up Jirou and Tokoyami just fine, but how about Dark Shadow?  What's his working temperature?  Crucially, is it meaningfully different than the temperature of thin air?  And, if Dark Shadow is difficult to pick up with infrared because he has neither body heat nor any particular lack of body heat, then how much would Tokoyami's heat signature be masked by being wrapped up in Dark Shadow's essence?      

Does the empathy come with a sense of directionality—can AFO move through the world detecting emotions around him?  Or does he have to pick a target and focus on them in particular?  Does he have to be talking to them?  It would be so easy, and accomplish what the story needs of it, for the empathy quirk to be something he has to be interacting with a person to use, without imparting any sense of directionality.                 Indeed, if the empathy quirk is meant to be the source of his lie-detecting capability, the rather strong suggestion is that he does need to be directly interacting with a situation to use it effectively: he didn't pick up on Aoyama and Deku's little performance being a total sham because they aimed it all at each other instead of him!  He likewise missed Aoyama's parents' deceit because that deceit was technically coming with Shinsou, whose presence AFO was unaware of.  The fact that it needs that targeting aspect suggests to me that an ambient sense of emotions around him is not part of the quirk.      

Search is another that pings the location of someone, but from what we've seen of it from Shigaraki's perspective, it doesn't give the user a visualization of their target's form or moment to moment updates on their actions.  It's purely a mental blip and a list of weaknesses.  The Tokoyami blip could be coming closer very quickly, and AFO could make the logical assumption about what's coming, but Search wouldn't give him a dodgeable visual.

So like…  Vibration-sense and infrared would have been all the help in the world against All Might at Kamino.  Against a girl who fills the air with vibrations and a boy whose super-power is a literal shadow, with no indication one way or the other about its body heat?  Not so much!  AFO even told the guards at Kamino that he has these powers, so the heroes could well have put Jirou and Tokyami there on that exact reasoning!

But no, can't make it look like two side characters synergizing well against known weaknesses would have been effective.  Gotta make up some stuff about quirk rebellion, and then can't even have that rebellion being led by the face in there that the audience knows.(2)

•     Nice to have the explicit confirmation that killing AFO was the plan here.  I'm gonna go ahead and assume that's the plan with Shigaraki and the flying coffin, too.  I'm so curious about whether we're going to get any call back to All Might declaring at Kamino that trying to kill AFO was a mistake he didn't plan to repeat.  Did that come up in the planning?  Did Hawks have to talk him around to, "No, it was totally the right move; we'll do it again only it'll work this time"?(3)  How does that connect to Ending calling out Endeavor as a hero who kills, the thing heroes are never supposed to do? 

          Is there a chance that killing AFO was not in the plan, and this is just Hawks being Hawks, a hero who Very Definitely Does Kill, figuring he'll deal with the consequences later?  Not like anyone's going to complain too much about a villain being dead—they didn't about Twice, after all. It is notable that Hawks is the first one to break out the K-word in this particular encounter—previously, the wording had been the more ambiguous "downfall" and "taking down." On the other hand, centering the plan around taking out AFO's life support mask always rather strongly implied a plan focused on killing AFO, a conversation that took place between Hawks and Best Jeanist, with All Might not shown to be present.

•     The fire and quirk cannibalism thing is effectively unsettling, but like…  If that was an option all along, why in god's name was it a big plot point that ShigAFO couldn't just destroy New Order, but had to physically dump it on some rando?  Sure, New Order is a strong quirk, and would have gone down fighting, but she/it would have been up against the original quirk vestige of All For One, backed by Shigaraki's powerfully destructive hatred.  So why wasn't that viable?  I know that, strictly speaking, we saw AFO still hoping to dump it on Sir I Can't Believe This Guy Got A Name And Random Civilian Lady Didn't, so we know he wanted to preserve it if possible, but still, in Chapter 333, he explicitly says, "I can only steal quirks or bestow them.  I can't just dispose of one!"  So what exactly is he doing by metaphysically devouring them?

          Furthermore, if he can get rid of them this way, isn't that kind of, uh, counterproductive?  Sure, it stops them rebelling against him, freeing him up to move again, but wouldn't that deprive him of their use?  So he's down to just his four remaining normal senses?  Which is an extremely dangerous place to be in when you're floating in a three-dimensional space surrounded by enemies trying to do you harm?  Especially when those enemies can specifically make your hearing unreliable, too, because like hell would anyone hear Hawks or Tokoyami coming through the racket Jirou is capable of making.

          Maybe the idea is that, if AFO devours the vestiges of his extrasensory quirks, it will leave him with just the quirks themselves, with no lingering consciousness attached to defy him?  But if that was an option, then why didn't he ever do that to deal with his vestige-caused nightmares?  I guess if we find out in the next chapter of this fight that he did do that to deal with his nightmares, just as soon as Ujiko told him what he was dealing with…  And that would set up something I would very much like to see, which is Shigaraki decaying the AFO vestige and leaving just the power itself, with only Shigaraki in control of it.  Still, though, Vestige!AFO was very present-tense when he talked about his nightmare problem back in 287, so I doubt that's the intended takeaway here.

          Seriously no idea what him biting the head off a vestige lady Charlotte the Dessert Witch-style is supposed to represent.

•     Hawks protecting Tokoyami and Jirou is good stuff.  Great hero instinct, and the narrative can just let it stand for itself, rather than making a big thing out of it.

•     One wonders exactly how much use that mask is going to be, not only in six hundred pieces, but also full of Rivet Claw divots dimpled all across the inside.  Not exactly a hermetic seal for AFO's delicate old man lungs, y'know?

•     Endeavor's arm (and of course it's his Victory arm—leave no good parallel undrawn, eh, Hori?) getting pierced through is excellent gore of the sort that I remain incredibly curious about how the anime is going to handle.  The war arc is loaded with it; are we just going to get Dramatic Silhouettes every time?  Like with Magne, and Shigaraki dusting that crowd in Deika?  At a certain point, it really just feels like they ought to suck it up and change the timeslot.(4)

•     Love the heavy shadows under Young Enji's eyes on that big panel before the page turn.  Distaste, disdain, maybe just a touch of displeased surprise.  What a fantastically subtle expression for Enji's self-loathing.

          Also, the degree to which he looks like Natsuo is just gutting.  One wonders how Natsuo is ever going to look in the mirror when he hits, like, 35.

•     Finally, to the big reveal of the chapter, WOWIE ZOWIE IT WAS HIS DAD NOT JUST SOME DAD.

          Firstly, yes, I do think Caleb got right what the fan translators missed.  I ran it by my sis-in-law translator friend, and her opinion was to agree with Caleb based on the wording Young Enji uses.  Basically, Japanese has different ways to refer to one's own father as opposed to someone else's father or just fathers in general.  While Young Enji doesn't directly use a possessive like "my" or "your" (ore no or omae no), the word he uses for "father" there is chichi.  It's a term for father that is very strictly neutral; contrary to expectation, this doesn't mean that it's a depersonalized word for fathers in general, but rather that it's practically only ever used to talk about one's own father. 

          This is because the Japanese culture expects one to be respectful towards others, so using such a neutral term, with no honorifics or formality, to talk about another person's father could be seen as rude; you should be respectful and use more polite language!  So Young Enji using it there is, contextually, talking about his/Endeavor's own father.

          That said, I quite like this reveal. I don't think it unduly softens Endeavor up, but rather provides a grounding for his obsession with strength and all the places that obsession led him. It makes him a fascinating case study alongside the likes of Izumi Kota and Shimura Kotarou in terms of the unaddressed grief and resentment at their parent(s) for considering them less important than a total stranger. Left alone, these emotions metastasize into maladaptive behaviors every time! Seriously, do the children of dead heroes ever get any kind of counseling at all?

          This then feeds in interesting ways into his relationship with his own family. If Enji's got this buried trauma about family dying because they aren't strong enough to cut it during hero work, no wonder he completely shorts out on dealing with Touya! No wonder, too, that if Touya can't be the strong hero Enji wanted, he doesn't think Touya should be a hero at all, not even a kind of middle-of-the-road one. Middle-of-the-road heroes just get themselves killed on the job.

          This analysis is, of course, banking on the assumption that Enji's father was a hero, and not just a bystander that got brave. We don't actually know that for sure, based on the available evidence. But it does explain his various issues better, I think, so I'll be sticking to it until we hear otherwise.

          Circling back to the counseling Enji clearly never got, I don't suspect we're going to get any more on that moment going forward; we got what mattered most out of it, after all. Still, as someone with an axe to grind about Hero Society, I wish we had just a bit more context. Like, how did Young Enji come to be at the edge of that crowd/crime scene? How long did he spend standing there in the rain with no umbrella, staring in horror at his father being packed onto a stretcher, two policemen standing in front of him and not apparently trying to usher him somewhere more private? Dedicated Hero Society bashers need to know.

•     I was just a touch irked when the leaks dropped that none of the flashback panels of the family included Fuyumi, but with the context of a coherent translation, it's perhaps interesting that Fuyumi is not included in the toll of Things That Exposed Our Weakness.  On the other hand, Rei wasn't in any of those panels, and my god, what Rei exposed in Enji…

•     I was also very irked in the leaks that Endeavor cites Deku as a hero he'll never be like, because, my god, can we please take a break on the unwarranted Deku Hype. But with the context of the rest of Endeavor and Enji's exchange, I'm actually pretty much fine with it. To borrow the language of the Bakugou/Deku rivalry, the two Enjis aren't talking about heroism in "saving" sense; they're talking about it in the "winning" sense. Endeavor's got nothing to say here about Deku's morality; this is purely about power—and, moreover, about the same power, since Endeavor now knows about One For All. So of course he brings up Deku when talking about "superhumans."

         "The enemy is weakness," is such a knotty, thorny sentiment.  Because this is a shonen manga, and a Shonen Jump battle manga at that, then weakness of character gets so tangled up with weakness in battle, while strength gets conflated with victory, with superhumans, and it's hard to know how much of this is meant to be A Positive Thing for anyone to aspire to (fulfilling one's duty even in the face of weakness), versus A Positive Thing for Enji (striving against his inner ugliness), versus just kind of a negative thing overall (continuing to conflate strength with solo pillars; an inability to ever quit even in the face of "a job well done").

          I suspect there's some values dissonance going on between me and the manga, but it would be nice if some of that values dissonance was also between Enji and the manga.  On the other hand, if it is intentional, one can't help but feel like you can't win a fight against AFO on values dissonance—and we're spending a lot of time on this if AFO's going to take the victory because Enji's heart still isn't in the right place.  I dunno.  I'll be curious to see how it continues developing.(5)

•     In the continuing adventures of Dabi Sure Is His Father's Son Alright, I enjoy the parallel between Enji's self-loathing telling him that cursing his weakness is the only thing that's kept him alive this long with Dabi's whole thing about the weak body he was born into, the way it caused his father to reject his very existence, and (phoenix quirk theories aside) his own "curse" that's kept him going all this time.

----FOOTNOTES---

1:  Only convert your hyperbole to metric 'cause you're Japanese.

2:  See my point last chapter about Ragdoll.

3:  Spoilers for Chapter 357: It doesn't.

4:  That point should, of course, have been, "Right before My Villain Academia."

5: More on this next time, particularly tying to the idea of how wise it is to try and kill AFO.

#bnha #bnha 356 #chapter thoughts #todotalk #bnha all for one #jirou kyouka #quirk metaphysics #my writing #sorry if this is a bit of a wall #my week got a bit crazy there and is not letting up just yet #so i'm just posting this now to get it out before 357 officially drops