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stillness-in-green · 1 year

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Chapter Thoughts: 371 — Together With Shouji

H’okay, getting back into the swing of this (very glad the series is on break for a week so I can maybe catch up a skosh. Shall we?

(jfc you guys this post is so excessive)

On Those Who Plan:

Right off the bat: One of the things that has gotten more and more and more irksome to me as the series has gone along—starting circa the Lady Nagant resolution and getting ever more prominent since—is this bizarre thing the manga does where villains are required to produce fuckin' itemized checklists and budget breakdowns of their plans for the future in order to be recognized as legitimate while heroes, faced with the discontent and rage of those failed by their society, get off with these moon-eyed daydreams and shallow what-about-isms.

Consider:

Shigaraki is challenged by Stain, Overhaul, Spinner, Gigantomachia, Ujiko, and Re-Destro. They want different things out of him, but the general thrust is that he needs to prove he can be the kind of villain that can be, if not like All For One exactly, at least as comprehensively threatening in his own way. Thought-out ideology, concrete goals, power to enact his will; he can’t just keep tooling along, doing what he’s doing, if he wants to get where he’s going. He’s by far the most prominent character who’s made to confront this, but he’s not alone.

Stain is called upon by a furious Iida to defend his choice of targets.

Overhaul is grilled by Nighteye for the details of his plans and by Mirio for the nature of his ideals.

Spinner is derided first by Trumpet for being a shut-in neet with nothing to contribute to the world and, here in this chapter, yelled at by Shouji about how his current actions aren’t suited to the fulfillment of his goals (as Shouji understands them).

And yet:

Deku is another character who’s semi-frequently challenged about his goals and ideals, but the answers he’s allowed to get away with are far simpler.

He resolves Kouta’s resentment towards heroes by saving the kid personally, despite the fact that this resoundingly fails to address Kouta’s (and later Shigaraki’s) complaint about how heroes prioritize strangers over their own loved ones.

When the OFA tribunal in his mind asks about his intentions toward Shigaraki, he just says he wants to try to save him, with zero ideas of how exactly he’s going to do that.

When Lady Nagant accuses him of being an innocent naif who has no idea how the world works, he somehow changes her heart by—being an innocent naif. Because certainly only a total lamb would think vague talk about “bringing back the light” is in any way an appropriate rejoinder to a bombshell about covert government assassins killing guilty and innocent alike in cold blood.

It’s all over the place with the heroes, too. Endeavor defuses a crowd of journalists out for blood by just saying his, “Watch me,” catchphrase. Hawks shrugs off his own extrajudicial murder and various other unsavory deeds with the blasé quip that he’s optimistic to a fault. Just recently, we watched Mirio respond to a presentation of cold hard facts with the magic thinking that heroes just Believing in the impossible will change reality, without at all addressing what becomes of those failed by reality up to this point.

All Might is challenged twice about the failures of his Pillar ideal, early on by Deku, uneasy after the mall encounter, and later by his own sense of his failures and inadequacies. The first time, he basically shrugs it off by saying that it isn’t a perfect method, but he does his best; somehow this is enough to get Deku to drop the question. His later self-interrogation is resolved by Stain popping up to lambast him about how the Number One Hero All Might was great and perfect, actually, because he tried hard and inspired others to follow in his footsteps—as if people walking his path will do anything other than arrive at the same destination he did!

And like! This should be reversed, I feel! If you want to be comprehensive about your destruction, sure, a plan would help, but it is actually much easier to destroy than it is to heal and build. Thus, it’s the heroes who ought to be talking about a defined and enumerated action plan, because if they really want to improve their society such that it stops producing all these villains, those concrete steps are necessary.

Yet the only action plans the heroes ever actually develop are ones to take down villains, and thus we have Shouji and his big response to generations of violence against heteromorphs: Just be cool and it will eventually go away.

I’ll get to Shouji’s response later on, but I want to break down some other factors first, because the garbage fire that is the (still developing, in fairness) resolution to this entire plotline consists of several interconnected pieces of flaming refuse issues.

As a final note, though, on this whole pattern whereby villains are expected to produce Receipts while heroes get by on Thoughts and Prayers, I’d like to say that it is highest-cut Grade-A bullshit that when a villain finally has both the presence of mind and the opportunity to demand real answers from a hero, he gets knocked off a goddamn roof to shut him up, and we’re apparently expected to think that’s fine and cool and not at all a damning sign that Horikoshi and his heroes don’t actually have any real answers to offer the victims of their society.

(More) On The Crowd:

This was present last week but becomes much more egregious this week. Why do these people need Spinner to answer for them? They know what the plan is; why does some school kid showing up and asking about the plan mean they have to turn around and wait for Spinner’s answer like they’re watching some kind of rhetorical tennis match? Do they have no ideals of their own?

Horikoshi has always written his civilians as deeply impressionable, easy to sway with the right fired-up sentence, but it’s never been as damaging as it is here, when a group of people who, assuming they’re in about the same boat as Shouji and Scarecrow and Spinner all are, have been facing discrimination, whose children have been threatened or maimed. Yet we’re to believe they don’t have any strong beliefs of their own on this matter? That they didn’t spend the nights leading up to this talking to each other, searching their own hearts, for whether it’s worth it to follow someone their society’s been calling a Villain for the last year, a member of the group that’s directly responsible for the current state of collapse?

Groupthink is real, certainly, and these people have likely been pushed to a point that’s more desperate than they would normally be. But it’s like Spinner is being followed only by caricatures of himself—people who have no ideals of their own, only grudges and a longing to be filled up with words of purpose, no matter how dubious a source those words come from.

I love Spinner, obviously, and I think the whole concept of him is great, but the reason he works is that he’s modeled on the kinds of disaffected young men who get radicalized by extremists because they’re isolated and vulnerable. Portraying a throng of an oppressed minority 15K-strong the exact same way? That just leads me to a lot of extremely urgent questions about what the author thinks of movements for social change in real life, and the answers that suggest themselves are very unflattering indeed.

On Alternatives To Violence:

”You’re about to set us back thirty years,” Christ. Set who back, Shouji? What group are you including yourself in here? Because I see you standing on the side of the status quo that maimed you.

That’s something that’s extremely frustrating about the writing of all this, and it’s even worse than I’d feared it would be. Like, in so many stories that contain uprisings against oppressive systems, there’s that group that gets scolded by the main character/narrative for Going Too Far; it’s what I was always worried about with this plot, and indeed we get it here. But Mother of God, at least in those stories, the main character is also part of the uprising!

By my reckoning, those stories require four groups: the oppressive system, the clueless or disinterested majority that forms the backdrop of the status quo, and the two different parts of The Rebellion, the “good” rebels who want to protest and be as nonviolent as possible and who are angry but not vengeful—i.e. the main characters—and the “bad” rebels, who want to hurt people like they’ve been hurt, who don’t care about civilian casualties, or who might even want civilian casualties, if it turns Public Opinion the right way.

It’s bad enough that BNHA has the ominous fifth group—bad faith outsiders manipulating the movement for their own gain(1)—but much worse that, so far as I can tell, and shockingly, the story doesn’t even have the “good” rebels! There is zero mention of any sort of organized group dedicated to non-violent protest or awareness-raising. No sit-ins, no fund-raisers, no petitions, no TV spots from heteromorph heroes, nothing to indicate the existence of a middle ground between people who don’t care about the cause at all and people who care so much they’re ready to spill blood for it.

This is a consistent problem with the way the kids respond to the divide between Heroes/Hero Society and Villains: they say the villains are going too far, that violence is unforgivable, but there’s never any indication that there are movements or groups or resources that the villains could have joined or sought instead. The closest thing this universe seems to have to a figure who actively questions the status quo but does so nonviolently is Tsukauchi Makoto, Detective Tsukauchi’s Vigilantes-only younger sister.

Makoto is a miracle of the universe, to be sure, but as alternatives to villainy go, she’s woefully insufficient as a rejoinder. She’s not even overtly interested in villains—vigilantes are her area of interest. Even if she were, though, there’s no indication that she’s part of any organized advocacy. She writes papers and goes on TV spots, but she’s one person asking questions, speaking only for herself, not a public face for an organization.

Lady Nagant proved quite decisively, in both what she did for the HPSC and what she did to it, that a single person making a nuisance of themselves is not enough to force systemic change.

Shouji’s Backstory:

The emphasis on kegare gets even worse. I said last time that treating Shouji himself as a source of kegare implies that the people in his village believed that he could not ever be cleansed or purified, hence the need to either drive him away or at least keep him confined to a single, enclosed space—his home—so his pollution didn’t spread.

In this chapter, we see just how seriously the villagers took that “danger”—that if Shouji so much as touched someone, the whole town would turn out for a “blood cleansing.”

For comparison’s sake, the usual solution for mild exposure to kegare is washing your hands afterward or scattering some salt, not rousing the entire population to do—well, whatever this cleansing entailed. There’s the image we see accompanying Shouji’s line there, but I’m not 100% convinced that it’s depicting the normal ritual as opposed to the more-drastic-than-usual response to Shouji, by necessity, touching the little girl he saved from the river all over her arms, hands, head, and back. If the thrashing he was getting in that panel were the norm, presumably he would have already had his scars during the rescue; he didn’t, but he was wearing the same clothes during the rescue as he was in the panel where he was being beaten.

He describes this incident as the single good memory he has relating to his body and further mentions that his parents didn’t have arms like his. This strikes me as a concerning combination of facts. I don’t necessarily think his parents were participating in the blood-cleansing the same way everyone else was—they let him go to the biggest hero school in the country, after all, which suggests that they must not seriously believe his touch is going to taint people. Still, when you combine both aforementioned facts with his line about what happened when he touched people and his to-put-it-mildly spartan bedroom at UA, it does not exactly imply a childhood filled with warmth from his parents even if the rest of the world was out to get him.

Of course, his parents were doubtlessly having a pretty hard time, too. Living in a place like that and having a heteromorphic son out of nowhere, I imagine suspicions would have turned on them hard about what they’d done to bear a child like that.

Koda’s Flashback Framing+Quirk Awakening:

We should have seen the class scene directly, full stop. So much of the whining about heteromorph discrimination coming out of nowhere could have been avoided by us seeing this when it happened rather than crammed in as a flashback. I’ve seen some attempts to place it in the timeline based on who’s not there (most noticeably Shouto and Bakugou) and what Midoriya’s wearing, but for my part, I would have put it either during the Edgy Deku arc or in the immediate aftermath.

The Edgy Deku arc needed to be more fleshed out anyway, but among its more egregious proposals was that the 1-A kids would be allowed—or, indeed, would even want to—putter placidly around helping the school or training when there’s a whole country out there seeing shortages of heroes and massive upticks in crime, violence, and general Villainy. We’re meant to believe that the HPSC(2) would send students to the front lines of mass combat but wouldn’t send them out on patrols or to accompany their assorted mentors? Come on. With heteromorphobia on the rise due to the chaos (more on that in a bit), that arc would have been a good time to directly face the students with it.

Show something happening to a group Shouji was with, scattered in amidst other things, have Koda or someone see some of his scars behind a halfway damaged mask, tie in the Civilian Lady’s arrival somehow, and it’s not hard to imagine getting to a scenario in which Shouji finally decides to tell his classmates about why he wears a mask all the time.

As it is, I’m left wondering what prompted this confession. Shouji is normally such a stoic; he doesn’t talk about this stuff unless asked and the class never showed any inclination to do so. So what changed? Did someone finally ask, and he decided he only wanted to have this talk once, so he rounded everyone up? That’s clearly not the case, since at least three classmates are missing. Did it just come up out of the blue one evening, so he just talked about it to whoever was already there? If so, when? What made that day different from every other day he spent not talking about it?

With little in the way of concrete cues, it just reads like Horikoshi suddenly needed Koda to know about this, so a flashback gets hastily scrubbed in with next to no connective tissue, leaving it feeling massively unearned. That’s because Shouji and Koda have no relationship prior to this point.

Zero. Zilch. I mean, maybe there are some minor exchanges buried in the class material, but I went and checked the wiki, and the two of them are universally on different teams, under different mentors, or on different battlefields for literally every arc in the manga. They’re even on different teams in the Culture Festival arc! For fuck’s sake, there’s nothing. The closest thing they have to real bonding material is anime-original material, and even that’s not for the main anime; it’s for the third movie!

Nothing! My god!

That relationship being missing further impacts Kota’s quirk awakening. When Toga has a quirk awakening, it’s connected to her feelings for Deku and Ochaco, which have been established for ages. When Jin breaks his mental block, it’s because of his affection for Toga. When Bakugou’s body moves without thinking, it’s for the sake of his childhood friend and Best Rival. Even the mention of Geten’s backstory quirk awakening builds on one of the few things that was established about him at the time it was brought up: his close relationship with Re-Destro.

Koda? Koda did not earn this. It is patent contrivance, yet another example of the story flubbing these big emotional moments because the connection between the kids is generic, blandly fond with little specific to draw on, and thus not up to carrying the dramatic feelings the story asks of it.(3)

That said, there is one potential alternate explanation for Koda’s awakening here, though it too is pretty bad in its own way. It’s tied to Koda’s mom, though, so it’ll be a topic for next time.

Mineta’s Apology:

Mineta’s apology is a good note, but a curiously incomplete one. It confirms that calling someone an animal is the kind of thing that should be apologized for, and it’s nice to see Mineta capable of such self-reflection.(4) I can’t quite get fully behind it, though, because… Mineta isn’t the only one who called Shouji an octopus? He’s not even the one who brought it up first—that was Sero, visible in the flashback panel but conspicuously absent from the class scene. Even more conspicuously absent are Shouto and Bakugou. Shouto is, of course, one of the two Todorokis we’ve seen using heteromorphic microaggressions, in his case doing so straight to the face of the chief of police when the man made him angry. Bakugou doesn’t get brought up in the conversations on this topic anywhere near as much, I assume because he’s equally abrasive to everyone, so it doesn’t stand out for him the way it does Shouto. Still, because Bakugou performatively refuses to use peoples’ names, he’s always reaching for the easiest possible descriptor of whoever he’s addressing, meaning he uses this style of microaggression constantly. Bakugou has never, to the best of my recollection, directly addressed Shouji in this fashion, and certainly Shouto hasn’t, so they wouldn’t have anything to apologize for in this scene. Still, I know Horikoshi is capable of portraying that sort of introspection; look no further than Bakugou’s reaction—muted, but given panel time nonetheless—to Endeavor’s conversation with Natsuo after the confrontation with Ending. Horikoshi is very good at that kind of slow-burn characterization, but only when he chooses to prioritize it. So, Bakugou and Shouto’s absence here feels like it almost has to be intentional, but I can’t imagine what Hori could be saving that plot beat for. My cynical response is that he or his editor didn’t want to imply that two of the three jewels of the BNHA Popularity Polls might be *leans in and whispers* heteromorphobic. I’d more seriously consider that angle if Sero weren’t absent also, but seriously, of the four of them, Mineta feels like the one who has the least to apologize for. As a reminder, here’s that panel with the text included:

Mineta is barely even addressing Shouji; it almost looks more like free association perviness! Sero is the one who directly drops animal names on him, so it really ought to have been Sero apologizing in this chapter. Having it be only Mineta and his cartoon tears turns into a comic beat what ought to be a serious acknowledgment of a real, if minor, offense.

An Average Woman:

(Reintroducing the unnamed heteromorph gal with an ass shot that Shouji is explicitly not standing in the line of sight for—stay classy, Hori.) She’s a particularly awkward person to bring up now because her experience blatantly disproves something Shouji says in this very chapter—that, to heteromorphs raised in cities, discrimination like he experienced is the sort of thing they only read about in textbooks, not something they have to live. But it turns out, even heteromorphs in cities are only ever there on sufferance. As soon as things get too chaotic or unstable, the violence comes back, even for them. That’s muddled somewhat because she was not specifically targeted because she’s a heteromorph, but rather because people thought she was a villain. As I said before, though, there’s considerable Venn diagram overlap between those two reactions. To wit, people thought she looked like a villain because of her heteromorphic appearance. Shouji himself also brings up, in the very same flashback, the “Heroes who look like Villains” rankings, the only occupant of which we know is Gang Orca—another heteromorph. Note that the ranking isn’t called Heroes Who Act Like Villains or even Villainous Heroes; it’s about appearance, about how those heroes look. And Gang Orca looks like a killer whale. For some people, even the appearance of heteromorphy is enough to quantify a person as villainous, and for this society, villains are—to use Kamui Woods’ words from the very first chapter—pure evil.

That all covered, let me finally turn back to Shouji and what he’s modeling for the reader.

Shouji’s Rationalizations:

I earlier described his response as, “Be cool and it will eventually go away,” and, in total fairness, that response is his own personal decision. The words overlaying the return to the current action are, I think, the end of Koda’s memories of what Shouji said in the flashback, not Shouji’s current thoughts, and certainly not something he’s saying to the crowd. So at least there’s that.

However. Shouji’s words cannot and should not be presumed to be sufficient on the societal level. He’s allowed to have whatever response suits him to his own trauma and to react as he feels best to oppression that has and will continue to directly affect him, but if the story is trying to tell us that his is a tactic that will succeed if only everyone practices it is just—so blatantly ahistorical that it beggars belief.

Firstly, and to get this out of the way because it’s more easily addressed, the plain fact is that not everyone has a quirk suited to heroism, much less the temperament for it. Pushing people into jobs they can’t perform well and might not even be interested in is not the answer.

Furthermore, it should not be the responsibility of heteromorphs to go out and put their lives on the line just to get people to accept them! They were not put on Earth to serve the non-heteromorphic(5) majority in hopes of being allowed to right to exist unmolested!

Secondly, and far more damningly, Shouji’s own words disprove this idea's efficacy. There are a whole fleet of reasons for this.

Shouji says that he’ll act, “Just as those who came before,” have acted, but the actions of those who came before him clearly did not save him when he was a kid, so what does he think his actions will do for children now and in the future?

He says he’ll be a cool hero that will provide a good example and, ideally, change hearts, but that plan clashes with the way heroism is compensated in the setting. Under the current system, heroes get paid according to their ranking, and the factors that determine that ranking are all slanted toward heroes active in big cities. Obviously, Incident Resolution is going to be higher in a place with more villain activity, but it’s the same deal with Societal Contribution and Public Approval. Heroes aren’t going to score as high for aiding society if they’re only contributing to tiny backwaters as opposed to national campaigns. Likewise, if only people in a small backwater have ever even heard of a small-town hero, and half of that population hates said hero because they’re a heteromorph, then their approval score is going to be dismal.

We're told that low-ranked heroes don't make much money,(6) and, taken together with the fact that heroes are allowed to do side work, the strong implication is that plenty of heroes don’t even make enough money to do it full-time. Any heteromorph who wants to do that (and especially one whose stated goal is to be "the coolest hero the world has ever seen") has to go to the city to do it, which means not being active in the rural areas that would most benefit from that kind of visibility.

And if heteromorphic heroes are only on TV? Well, just look at Hawks’ backstory: heroes who are only there on TV make no difference to his day-to-day life. It takes active intervention to make a difference. If a kid doesn’t have that, well, it’s an easy enough thing to change the channel.

The most galling thing, to my mind, about Shouji’s belief here is the disparity in results between him saving a child and virtually every other instance we see a child saved in this whole story.(7) When Deku saved Kouta, it changed Kouta’s mind about heroes. When Deku and Mirio kept struggling to save Eri, it moved her to reach back out to them. When Endeavor arrested the thief Takami, it changed the entire course of young Keigo’s life. Capes are there to wrap up little girls in pain, we’re told; heroes give their all for the next generation, some say.

Yet when Shouji saved that little girl from the river, did it change anyone’s heart? Perhaps it’s a memory the little girl will keep close as she grows into someone with less hateful views than those around her, but equally possible is that she’ll internalize it as a shameful incident that was a result of her carelessness. Whichever is the case, it sure as hell didn’t move her own parents to intervene, nor Shouji’s to step in to save him. It didn’t change the hearts of the village; it didn’t stop him from being beaten and scarred by adult men with sharp tools wielded in ignorance and hatred.

How much cooler would he have had to be, to change those people's minds? How much suffering is the story asking children to bear in the hopes that their stoic endurance will lead bigots to change?

That’s what really gets me about Shouji’s story. Yes, bigots in real life will change their minds sometimes, often because they came to know or were in some way helped or saved by a member of a group they previously hated. Shouji’s actions should have changed minds! And if his flashback-in-a-flashback suggested that anyone had changed their minds because of the way he risked his life to save that girl, then, while I would still have issues with his story being applied as a societal maxim, I would at least concede that Shouji’s belief in the transformative power of endurance and self-sacrifice is warranted by his own lived experience.

But that is not what the story showed us. All we see is that he himself came to believe he could be a hero, not that his heroism will save a single soul that’s out of his immediate reach.

@codenamesazanka said it best here: Shouji’s belief is not inspiring. It’s a tragedy.

Stray Notes:

I’d intended to talk more in this post about forgiveness in a collective society, picking up that thread from last time. That topic didn’t end up quite fitting any of my major subheaders, though, so I'll boil it down here: I don’t care how collectivist your society is, there is a limit to noble forgiveness and the “go along to get along” mentality when the problem being discussed is CHILDREN BEING OPENLY BEATEN IN THE STREETS. Mina’s reaction is completely correct. Note, however, that when she says the world would be better off without such people, it’s treated as hyperbole. It gets no response and is moved on from without further discussion. Meanwhile, when people want to act on the sentiment that their oppression and abuse have to end, by violent force if necessary, they’re portrayed as villains, extremists, and gullible pawns whose anger is allowing them to be manipulated.

I asked last week about how cognizant of Spinner’s mental state Scarecrow is; this chapter continues to be somewhat unclear, rather just showing Scarecrow getting frustrated with Spinner’s laggard presence. This is itself somewhat frustrating because Scarecrow’s return post-Jakku was him talking to…no one in particular other than Spinner’s other PLF advisors about how Spinner was the real next face of the movement. It certainly seemed like he believed it then! And even prior to that, he had three solid months to talk to and get to know Spinner during the post-MVA timeskip. It’s one thing to see Skeptic talk about shaping the League to fit the purpose the MLA/PLF needs them to fill; he’s been singing that song since we saw him targeting Twice. But Spinner’s advisors don’t need to be hitting that same note of callousness and manipulation, nor does it really fit what we know/what we’ve seen for them to do so.

No jokes from me in the “Ha ha Shigaraki named the League after that game he liked” vein. The League’s name in Japanese is viran rengou; the game’s Japanese name is just its English name written in katakana. I know people are just having fun with it, but personally, when I see people willfully rejecting explanations about the original language and context just so they can hold onto their English-dependent first impression, my overwhelming thought is, “This is why Americans have a bad reputation on the internet.” The Shigaraki flashback is very good, though. As others have said, it’s very telling that the Shigaraki Spinner flashes back to is not Shigaraki standing weary but triumphant in that crater he left in Deika, but the Shigaraki who bonded with Spinner over video games. Look, Hori, I just need them to be friends tomodachi-style. I need this vision of Shigaraki to be important to how Deku eventually approaches him—not as the crying victim inner child, not as the implacable end result of AFO’s careful and precise efforts, but this version right here: not an innocent, but not some storybook evil or empty construct, either.

Scarecrow finally uses “heteromorph” himself! So I guess he’s not specifically dodging it, nor does he have a preferred term to use in its place.

I don’t want to sound too snide about it, but man alive, does all the ballyhooing from Certain Portions of the fandom about the discrimination faced by quirkless people like poor sweet Izuku really fall flat in the face of kegare, blood-cleansing, organized hate groups, etc. Like, not to be all Oppression Olympics, who-would-beat-who-in-a-suffering-contest here, but talk about a problem the fandom has wildly overinflated based on one character’s experience versus a problem the fandom doesn’t even want to acknowledge as having been present in the work before it exploded!

--FOOTNOTES--

1: I say “ominous” because it uncomfortably echoes rhetoric you see from real-life bigots pushing conspiracy theories about who’s “really” behind social justice movements. As an American, my main point of reference is the white replacement conspiracy theory, but I’m given to understand that movements for burakumin equality in Japan have attracted this kind of rumor-mongering about nefarious masterminds as well.

2: Yes, I know they were in disarray after Prez Pearls was killed. No, I don’t buy that as an excuse to wipe them off the table entirely. They’re a damned government office; when she got taken out, either the National Public Safety Commission or the Prime Minister would have selected her replacement.

3: See also: the paucity of connections that half the class has to draw on for the vs. Deku fight, like Sato and his candy apples; also, virtually all of the indignant flashbacks to Aoyama’s traitor-reveal emotional distress.

4: Maybe someday he’ll even get there re: his behavior towards the opposite gender.

5: Homomorphic?

6: Vigilantes, Chapter 77. I feel like this comes up explicitly in the main series somewhere, but for the life of me, I can't recall where, and I'm not putting this post off for another night while I dig for it. I'll edit as needed if I track it down, but if not, well, it would be just like Vigilantes to be more willing to chase Horikoshi's worldbuilding down to its logical conclusions than Hori himself is.

7: The exception is, of course, one Shimura Tenko.

#bnha #bnha 371 #chapter thoughts #so many thoughts #octolad #bnha minoru #the bird whisperer #bnha civilians #heteromorph discrimination plot #bnha critical #will next time's post be shorter? god I hope so

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stillness-in-green · 1 year

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Chapter Thoughts: 372 — Naked

Dropping this right in the wake of leaks, so let's just go ahead and put this jump here, shall we? (Note: I have seen the leaks, but am opting not to update the post below and its continued kvetching about the story’s messaging via Shouji. There’ll be time for that next week.)

How Shouji and Koda Got Here:

I have a few notes on this, all about the first page.

O A faint “off” panel from a while back is explained! I wrote before about this panel in Chapter 335, and how I thought it foreshadowed Shouji’s involvement in the heteromorph plot and a confrontation with Spinner. I thought at the time that Shouji was just noting that All Might had conspicuously failed to mention the League’s resident heteromorph and was subtly calling it out.

Now, reading between the lines, we get the real explanation: Shouji had already spoken with the heteromorph giantess and found out about the group of heteromorphs planning the attack on the hospital. What he was reacting to in 335 wasn’t the omission of Spinner, but rather the omission of the hospital raid from All Might’s list of what the heroes were up against. Totally still foreshadowing for the heteromorph plotline, though!

(This does make the timing weird, given that we wouldn’t see Spinner sending out the call to action for another five chapters. One does not plan an assault mob fifteen thousand-strong in less than a week, so the groundwork for this would presumably have been going on already, but it is perhaps a touch strange to frame Spinner “pulling the trigger” with a group that very much is not the group he’ll be leading later on, and even stranger to picture that group when talking about early word of the hospital raid.)

O I assume the “troubling things” the giant gal mentioned was her comment that she’d been turned away by numerous shelters because of her heteromorph status, but it still would have been nice to see a reaction from Shouji about that line in the moment. As we can see from the 335 panel, Horikoshi is perfectly capable of putting in little beats like that to come back to later! Shouji’s only appearance in 325, though, was him being offered an umbrella by some other heteromorph—he wasn’t even looking at the giant gal in a way that suggests he was concerned about what she’d said moments before!

(Also, back on this current chapter, rather than the polite Shouji calling her “that large woman,” now would have been a fine time to GIVE HER A DAMN NAME, HORIKOSHI. Especially since All Might following up with, “Oh right, the big lady!” would have been perfectly adequate context for the previously unmentioned name.)

O This feels like a strange matching choice, in ways that I wonder if will prove to be intentional. Like, the two most notable characters in this shot are Katana Advisor from the PLF and the Sludge Villain. Both heteromorphs, to be sure, but neither of them are in the group of heteromorphs going after the hospital? Katana Advisor was in the group of people AFO teleported in to start the battle; he got shoved through a Monoma-giri portal and hasn’t been seen since. The Sludge Villain, meanwhile, is with the group attacking Gigantomachia’s location, which is what the above panel, from 341, suggested to begin with, since the group was clearly converging on the ruins of Jakku, where we’d later learn Machia was being kept restrained in the same place he fell.

If anything, the context of the hospital raid makes this plot beat even weirder in retrospect.

O As I said last week, this sudden Shouji/Koda bond is incredibly strained-feeling. Like, okay, one of the things I’ve long thought about with regard to the student relationships—an observation I originally came to via watching the patterns in what people were shipping—is that, just because some students were together for some early story event or another did not mean that togetherness would translate into a long-term, developed bond. For example, the Tokoyami/Tsuyu ship seemed popular for a while because they were paired up for their finals, but that relationship never got any particular follow-through; compare that to something like the sustained time made for e.g. Kaminari and Jirou.

Students often just got mix-and-matched, especially in the early going, sometimes as a way to establish relationships that would be important going forward, but also sometimes just because that’s the nature of the school setting. Here in the endgame, though, in almost every field of battle, we see the relationships that were built up paying off, while the characters that never really got that foundation are placed somewhere they can nominally contribute without being forced to carry unearned dramatic weight.

Izuku and Kacchan go without saying, of course. Iida and Shouto have been frequently seen together since the Stain arc. Tsuyu and Ochaco have been the two always dealing with Toga, ever since the training camp. Mina and Kirishima are middle school friends, giving them (iirc) the second-most long-term relationship of any of the students other than Deku and Bakugou. Even Jirou and Tokoyami were in the band together, while Aoyama is facing down a specter of AFO’s dark influence, and I’d bet that fight is where the yet-unseen Hagakure will prove to be, building on her and Aoyama’s extremely modest connections surrounding the traitor reveal and their paired combo attack.

Who does that leave? Momo and Kaminari are at UA, with Momo in particular feeling very egregiously sidelined for a student of her ongoing rate of panel time. Mineta is with Kirishima and Mina, and while he doesn’t have much going on with Kirishima, there has been a low-key thread of Mina pepping up Mineta when he’s down (the culture festival when he’s bummed about guitar; the raid when he’s worrying about Midnight). Mineta also faced Machia during the raid and expressed aforementioned fears for Midnight, which makes it fitting to have him defending Machia’s location and seen to face Midnight’s killer.

Sato, Ojiro and Sero, who have neither strong relationships with villains nor with students who do, are tossed off to some stadium at which we haven’t seen a single identifiable villain. They don’t feel unjustly sidelined like Momo and Kaminari because they were never such major characters to begin with. Nor do they feel unduly heavily focused on because the story isn’t trying to use their relationships (or lack thereof) to carry major plot points.

Shouji and Koda, however, feel unduly focused on. To have this opening beat of Koda saying, “If Shouji’s going, then so am I,” needs to have some kind of relationship behind it that was established farther back than a single chapter. There was none, so it just rings hollow.

Shouji feels equally unfitting as a match-up with Spinner because their connection is entirely a matter of shared oppression, not actual encounters, and even the shared oppression connection is flimsy because Spinner has engaged with that oppression, while Shouji’s experience with it was, prior to last month, entirely relegated to character profile pages, not something he ever opened up about.

I wish I could credit this as being really stirring. I mean, Shouji (apparently) became a hero specifically because he wanted to promote a cool, respectable image of heteromorphs, so of course he can’t walk away from a group of heteromorphs pushed to an extreme like this! However, it seems to me that this boils down to yet another instance of the series insisting that only heroes with government licenses and/or teenagers with main character privileges are allowed to step up, while everyone else, no matter what provocation or crisis they’re faced with, is wrong and possibly villainous if they try to do so.

Deku rushes in with no license and no training to help a friend, which would have further complicated rescue efforts if not for All Might’s presence, and might have gotten him killed? Wow, what amazing moral fibre! Truly worthy of inheriting the greatest power of all time!

A member of an oppressed minority takes up arms to help a group that promises to change the violent status quo? They’re being manipulated and used and need to just put their heads back down until someone deigns to come up with a solution for them. Who cares how badly they or their kids might get hurt in the meantime?

Koda's Quirk Awakening, Part Deux:

Setting aside the whole business of Koda’s mother telling him to grow up to be the kind of man who gets mad when people mock the things/people dear to him (dearness cit. Chapter 371), it strikes me as curious that she framed his horns coming in as a natural development, like they’re something he might just mature into like a kitten growing in the patterns on its coat. But him just happening to mature into his horn right at the moment he most needs would be an absurd contrivance, right? Surely this was just a quirk awakening. Dangerous, harsh conditions, high emotions, an urgent circumstantial need for greater power—it fits all the established criteria.

A quirk awakening would fit, too, with Koda’s mother saying his horns might come in some day. If it were a natural development lacking any inciting incident, wouldn’t she have just told him they would come in someday, like hers did, or at least that they probably would?

So if it is a quirk awakening, does that mean that Koda’s mother also had one? That she only described it like some natural possibility because she’s not studied enough on quirks to be familiar with what the MLA term quirk evolution/quirk awakening? That makes far more sense to me, but it does imply that the hardship she delicately phrased as mockery and “real cruelty” was very dire indeed.

Dire enough to make it even more vexing, watching Scarecrow’s fire and brimstone speeches about heteromorph oppression get shut down for the high crime of Calling Shouji Mean Words >:( >:( >:( .

On Protecting:

The yelling about protecting people drives me nuts because it’s so disingenuous not to allow any of the rioters to respond with an answer to the question Shouji poses. He challenges them to think about how their children will be scapegoated as a result of this attack, but neither he nor any of them are allowed to reply that children are already being targeted, today, right now in the present, so what difference will it make to just lay down their arms and go away/get arrested?

Spinner, of course, carries on being unable to respond, because no one is allowed to actually engage with equal rhetoric; the only one who could do so got bird-blitzed off a roof without ever actually losing the battle of words.

And Shouji thinks about Aoyama? For some reason? And I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be because Shouji is thinking about protecting Aoyama (see again: maybe if they’d ever had a single bonding scene ever) or because he’s admiring Aoyama’s will to protect. Which could work some, as Aoyama talked about wanting to pay his blessings forward, but I think “saving” is not quite the same thing as “protecting,”(1) and Aoyama’s desire to be a hero is far more about the former than the latter. It’s just a weird non-sequitur of an inclusion, and irks me in combination with something I’ll talk about in just a bit.

I wish we could get any kind of in on what Shouji really thinks of Spinner. I wish they could have had any encounters before now that would let him contextualize the change between Spinner as Shouji is seeing him and the Spinner the audience knows. Because when Shouji asks Spinner what he wants to protect, that’s a question that does have an answer, but as it is, we’ve got no way to know whether Shouji thinks Spinner has an answer he could give and Shouji wants to hear it, or whether Shouji is implying that Spinner doesn’t have anyone or anything he wants to protect, and that lack of motivation is why he his current actions are meaningless. If Shouji had even an inkling of the truth, that question would feel a lot more resonant.

Spinner’s Call:

O I don’t know how similar the language is in the Japanese, but it’s a bit fun that Spinner’s phrasing of, “The grudge never fades,” is so similar to Dabi’s, “The past never dies.” If one is looking for inspiring words to call for drastic anti-hero action, one could do a lot worse than Dabi (and Skeptic’s) immaculately scripted Todoroki Touya reveal. Spinner also spent a lot of time around Re-Destro and the rest of the MLA, presumably including his own advisors, though, so I like to think he could have picked up some of that convincingly fiery language from them, too, even if he doesn’t think of himself as a good spokesperson.

O Spinner is damn well right when he says(/said) that, if heroes win, nothing will change. And we know that’s true because Deku, Our Main Character Ladies and Gentlemen, just keeps goddamn telling people that he intends to put everything “back to normal.” No one this arc has said a single word about changing anything that desperately needs to be changed, and of all the groups that might be dissuaded by hearing such a stance, this would be the one to try it on! The one that isn’t composed entirely of villains and radical cultists! These are the people most likely to just stop and listen if you tell them that you have a plan to address their grievances.

But Shouji doesn’t tell them that. He tells them that they’ll set back progress, implicitly blaming them for whatever hate crimes heteromorphs suffer in the next thirty years; he doesn’t give them any suggestions for what they could be doing instead, or what heroes will do to respond to them; he just says they have to be the ones to stop. But why should they stop, when horror stories like blood-cleansing are the current status quo? How much worse could the Paranormal Liberation Front’s status quo really be?(2)

(That last question is important, by the way, because AFO was a shadowy urban legend until Kamino, so it’s asking a lot of these civilians, a great many of whom are implied to be rural, for them to have as good an understanding as the audience of what AFO’s new regime would be like.)

O Spinner being sprayed in pesticides impresses me because Horikoshi keeps coming up with ways to be creatively awful to heteromorphs that effortlessly outclass what I come up with for fanfic, and yet he expects me to buy this idea that heteromorphs being cool will eventually solve these problems and it’s fine if heroes and the government continue doing exactly zilch to help the process along.

The Turn:

Having said aaaaaallllll this for three chapters running now, I think it’s very telling that the moment Spinner regurgitates a speech from a week ago, even just reheated rhetoric is enough to rile the crowd right back up again. It would be great if we could read that as a sign that Shouji and Koda’s responses are completely failing to achieve the ends they want because they offer nothing concrete—it’s like the definition of showing up to denigrate everyone else’s plans while offering none of your own. Surprise surprise, No One Liked That.

But then—after an extremely ominous transition featuring a gun—we get into the hospital scene.

(An Aside: The Gun:

Regarding the gun, my initial understanding from the leaks and such was that it was the police resorting to sidearms, but now I don’t think so? The way Officer Gori’s line of dialogue right before the page turn gets abruptly cut off/interrupted implies that this wasn’t something he was expecting. My next guess would be, “Someone on the police side gets scared and takes the wrong action that escalates situation like this into the kinds of historical turning point slaughters that get taught in schools,” but the riot squad uniform seems to feature full gloves, so whereas the shooter’s gloves are fingerless.

Mic’s gloves are right, but why would Mic pull a gun here? When have we ever even been shown him carrying one? I can’t believe he’d even be licensed to carry, not in Japan. And his lines at the end of the chapter, for all that he shows up in the hallway like a movie killer, suggests that he’s just guessing about why no one’s following Spinner, not deliberately obfuscating.

So who? My next wild thought was, “Mustard?!” but the gloves are wrong for him, too. He might have changed gloves if he got sprung from whatever facility he was in, of course, as all our returning villains have changed clothes, but also there’s no reason whatsoever for him to be present here, at least as far as plotlines he has any reason to care about personally go.

So… I dunno. We’ll see, I guess! Not least because leaks are starting literally as I write the section RIP.)

As @codenamesazanka pointed out here, Spinner did not target the line of doctors and nurses. Which makes it all the stranger that seeing those medical professionals is what snapped the crowd out of it. Like, if the targeted area wasn’t on the other side of a Red Rover line of civilians anyway, who cares if they’re all standing there? And here’s where I circle back to the Aoyama non-sequitur.

The pig-nosed guy draws to a halt when he sees the line of doctors, but what really stops him cold is some sort of flashback to Dr. Toad looking after an elderly patient. And my overwhelming thought when I saw that panel was, “So even in the flashback that’s going to stop you from progressing, you can’t see yourself in the person being cared for; you have to see yourself in the person doing the work.”

Central Hospital is staffed with Super Mario character lookalikes, but you know who one of those lookalikes is? The one who looks like Mario—that is, the one with a “human face.” So why, in heaven’s name why, could pig-nosed guy not have visualized himself or someone like him—a heteromorph—being cared for and tended to by a non-heteromorph? If the entire point is to remind an angry person who has let nuance fall by the wayside, someone whose pain has caused him to get sucked into an us-versus-them mindset, that there are good people on the other side of that divide, people who don’t hate pig-nose and his, why would the memory that brings him up short be one where a heteromorph is doing the labor while a non-heteromorph benefits?

It just makes me Real Tired, guys.

Spinner, Oh, Spinner:

The young version of Spinner running around in his socks hurts me so much. The shot of the desolate hallway behind him hurts me even more. The underlining of his empty path, the empty place it leads to, is heartbreaking. But I can’t believe that Horikoshi would let someone trying his best to be someone else’s hero fail like this, no matter how much All For One has tried to twist that desire.

Sorry, I just have nothing coherent or insightful to say about Spinner. Not until this agonizing subplot resolves one way or the other.

(In light of leaks, I mostly have a lot of screaming and crying, and will try to finally muster up some actual Spinner Thoughts next time. Beyond which we’ll see how things go after next next chapter. *biting handkerchief in anxiety*)

Stray Notes:

O I enjoy Aizawa’s extremely alarmed face when Shouji’s like, “Hey, put me on the hospital defense team.”

O The number one bit character hero I want dead: THIS Tartarus guard-looking, infinite goddamn capture tape-producing asshole:

Fucking hell. Take this guy out and the next uprising will be a breeze because the heroes will suddenly have to face their terminal shortage of restraining devices!

O “Shouji must have gotten through to them.” = Since fucking when does this manga believe that words are enough? I thought it was actions that mattered? Oh, right, since we hit the endgame. See also Mirio’s talking-the-talk bit.

---FOOTNOTES---

1: I’d probably distinguish them by saying that saving is more active but also briefer; it’s All Might turning up in the nick of time and then flying off again once the crisis is passed. Protecting is more about putting yourself between danger and those that are in danger, and then staying there no matter what. To protect someone is to be there regardless of whether or not the danger is immediate. Deku wants to “save” Shigaraki, not “protect” him. The refugees at UA need to be “protected,” not “saved.”

2: Insert quip here about how AFO is an inveterate city slicker who doesn’t even like the countryside.

#bnha #bnha 372 #octolad #the bird whisperer #iguchi shuichi #bnha spinner #heteromorph discrimination plot #chapter thoughts #my writing #stillness has salt #vague allusions to:#bnha spoilers #now including the footnotes

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