#have the majority of their mass produced merchandise made through basically slave labor in foreign countries because thanks capitalism?

[marginal-notes]

Would you mind sharing your thoughts about mha’s world building? I never put much thought into it positive or negative. Where do you think there was wasted potential? I am curious

OH BOY, OKAY. BUCKLE UP. This isn’t really a cohesive essay covering all my thoughts, just some bigger points immediately coming to mind.

First things first, some context.

I have yet to run into any other fandom that lives off its own fanon the same way as the MHA fandom does. It’s not even like how the HP fandom did it, where they completely threw out the burning dredges of canon they didn’t like. Reading MHA fanfiction, there’s a lot of broadly accepted fanon that still gets treated like it could be canon. Idk, it’s weird and fascinating.

As you’ve probably figured out from my ramblings here and the random details I like stuffing into my writing, I care a lot about how fictional narratives can convey and explore societal institutions and conventions. Form should drive function, and everything should have consequences.

I am absolutely aware that MHA’s a mainstream shonen primarily functioning off the rule of cool, and thus isn’t supposed to operate at the level I keep trying to bully it onto.

Anyways, short story of my love/hate relationship with this series boils down to: it keeps bringing up tiny details that implies that SOMEONE on that writing/editing team is trying to make this series deeper than an almost dried out puddle, and then abandoning all thought for more of the same old “who can punch hardest” boring shonen tropes.

Also, I’m an American reading this without the full Japanese cultural context.

Here’s the long story.

Inherently, My Hero Academia is telling a story of a society reaching its breaking point under the strain of its social politics, through the lens of a highly influential and powerful industry associated with law enforcement. From the beginning, the series introduces the concept of a social hierarchy constructed on the basis of having a quirk and its raw talent. It’s a story of blind veneration and a country still not fully ready to accept a world of superpowers.

And to me, it’s extremely important to understand that for all that professional heroes are technically public servants, professional heroics is first and foremost an industry.

~~~

Okay, let’s just start with quirks themselves.

To this day, I’m still a much bigger fan of the spinoff manga than the main manga itself. I like the cast better, I love their interactions with each other, the plot makes sense, and it still has spent more actual panels discussing the impact of trying to accommodate quirks in universe than the main series has. Sure, Hori put in tidbits into the end of chapter extras, but that’s it.

Vigilantes actually takes the time to discuss how people with non-humanoid quirk mutations can run into difficulty finding affordable housing and the inadequate government assistance on that front. This piece of worldbuilding actually has consequences on characters and as the plot progresses, the consequences actually have influence on locations that appear as settings.

The main manga just doesn’t have this level of thought.

How do highways and mass transportation handle very large individuals and very small individuals? What changes to building codes and architecture has there been? What changes had to come to product design to accommodate different quirks? How do you as a society deal with individuals whose biology aren’t close to the old quirkless standard? What happened to food production and distribution? How well are government agencies addressing concerns brought up among the citizens due to their quirks? What impact has quirks had on the medical system?

(Minor pet peeve, and this is more directed towards fanon. I personally hate healing quirks, from a logistical and ethical standpoint. Canon proves that repeated use and high stress causes quirks to evolve and change over time. If you’re medical personnel and you’re using your quirk on your job, that quirk’s going to change its effects and abilities over time. Hello? Do you have any idea what the short- and long-term side effects of your quirk fully are? How did you figure out its full benefits and drawbacks? Are you taking a risk with each new patient that something completely unexpected could occur? Do you know how annoying it is when you can’t replicate or standardize procedures in a field like medicine where you need to carefully evaluate safety through scientific investigations? Do you know what using healing quirks sound like to me? Dangerous human experimentation, on both the patient and the doctor. AAAAUGH.)

I really want to know the political history behind the rise of quirks. What rate did it spread across the world and through generations? How did the politics around quirk rights shift over time? When did society stop using language like “meta-humans” or “quirked individuals” and started assuming having a quirk should be the default for describing humans? When did quirks first appear in the Imperial family? What shifts happened in rhetoric across the political spectrum over time in relation to quirks? How did that influence legislation and law enforcement? How does that influence employment statistics and population demographics? How did what was considered “desirable” change with each generation and decade? What influence did quirks have on the international scene? What really happened during the period of chaos and violence in the earlier quirk years? What pressured the system to finally hitting its boiling point? What were all the influences that finally calmed that period down?

Hori, for the love of god, shut up about daddy issues and fuck you for turning AFO into a stupid, boring cartoon villain.

~~~

If you’re going to introduce a corrupt government institution that has no problems abusing its power to order assassinations and partake in child trafficking, go all in. And I don’t mean go all in the way the “HPSC Bashing” tag on AO3 tends to. I mean stop treating the HPSC like some kind of singular monolith that didn’t derive its power through its connections and influence.

If you have corruption in the HPSC, that means you have corruption in the Ministry of Justice. You have influence and competition with the police force. You have relationships with the courts and the judges ruling cases. You have the ears of politicians in the National Diet writing laws on criminal justice and prison infrastructure. You have sway through your own regulations and oversight on heroes and their agencies. You can steer the industry towards addressing one kind of crime over the other by dangling the secret ranking algorithm over the heroes’ heads.

You can create a society where the shiny surface covers over the reality of letting violent offenders go on light sentences, if they’re prosecuted at all, so you can have enough repeat offenders to feed and inflate the apprehension and arrest performance metrics of heroes. You can create a society where powerful businesses can lobby with their money to influence patrol routes. You can create a society where the insular press clubs dutifully spread your party message across the country. You can actively craft a society that forces large portions of your population into crimes of desperation in order to feed the gaping maw of an oversaturated hero industry.

This is just run of the mill politics and dealmaking, folks. You don’t need to turn towards torture and more cartoonishly evil entities to create conflict. Freaking – god, I hate whump. (EDIT: it occurred to me after posting that this is a great place for me to wax poetic about how much I LOVE, ADORE, APPRECIATE “may death never stop you” by slex on AO3 for addressing some of my points in a witty and engaging way. Superb writing.)

Of course, MHA also doesn’t go into goddamn ANY OF THIS even in the background as flavoring that can color the plot in interesting ways. Hori, it’s not enough to just have Aizawa point out that his students are being drafted as child soldiers, and then move on. HELLO? HELLO?

~~~

MHA, I swear, is your technology more advanced or not? You can’t just throw in “Detnerat makes support tech and now it’s moving to hero gear” and then bail. And the way it’s portrayed? As making all this custom gear? Tailored to each customers’ quirk? MAKES NO SENSE FOR A LARGE CORPORATION? How did you scale that?? How are your logistical supply chains not a profit killing mess? What on earth is your manufacturing and fabrication process like? How inefficient are your operations that no one freaks out or notices your prototypes being intentionally leaked to the black market? How did you even make those connections, you’re a bunch of –

Using the excuse that they’re the arc’s villains is such lazy worldbuilding. Sure it’s in-line with the series LITERALLY going “UA’s Sports Festival has replaced the Olympics in importance” (w h a t, no, bullshit, get back here, STOP MOVING ON, HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE), but still it’s frustrating and it’s lazy.

Smartphones and vehicles?? Still look the same?? Even though chapter one implies it’s been around a couple centuries since roughly modern times?? Are holographs cheap tricks or not?? If they are, why aren’t they more widespread? Why are there still plenty of normal monitors and TVs? If they’re not, then why is UA able to jam them into their acceptance letters and it’s able to be some kind of bonus item among Kirishima’s merch?

I swear there was no thought put into tech beyond pure rule of cool. Which creates completely arbitrary hijinks and aesthetics without a lot of internal consistency, for something that really should be extremely important in universe across society, not just with heroes.

Like at least ATLA’s consistent and there’s logic going on with its tech. They’ve pulled off some things that also raise a ton of question marks with me (again, putting all that fire right next to the airship fleets is a recipe for disaster), but there’s at least an internal logic. Take Sokka’s submarines for example. The thought behind their design makes sense in a world with waterbending.

MHA’s just like, “And now UA’s a flying fortress.” WHAT??

(Disclaimer: Like how I don’t consider material outside the original shows canon for ATLA, I don’t really treat the movies as canon to MHA either. If people try bringing up I-Island at me, they’re just going to get a different giant but WHY rant.)

~~~

Uuuugh, the Todoroki family situation.

This response is already clocking in over two thousand words, so I’ll save my giant rant about Hori’s and Japan’s stand on abusers for another day. Suffice it to say, I’m extremely cynical about the various redemption arcs and why they occur the ways they do. I believe the driving force behind those arcs is highly motivated by real world profits and massaging the series’ messaging to conform to an easy to digest black and white mentality.

But, it always makes me. so frustrated. how fic proves again and again how the Todoroki plot can be an excellent lens into the trappings and failings of elite pro hero society. It can be a really engaging lens into the corrupting influence of power and the dangers of blind hero worship. It can discuss people’s choices when the system fails them and their different decisions on how to take matters into their own hand. It can show the dangerous and corrosive effects vigilantism has on a society (ugh, more personal beef from me against some fandom tropes, ANYWAYS) through some of vigilantism’s more extreme manifestations.

The implications and consequences involved here are pure Navi bait. And Hori and his team just.

The things going on right now in canon always, guaranteed, makes me so angry.

~~~

Also, as a final insult to injury, Hori’s self-insert is basically Mineta, whose main character trait is being a repeatedly aggressive sexual harasser. Dude.

~~~

Idk if you really got anything out of this, I’ve been obsessively thinking about different parts and facets of the MHA universe for over a year now. My thoughts are just all over the place.

I still haven’t gone into the whole AFO situation from an organized crime perspective. Nor have I addressed the full impact of the ranking system on the hero industry as a whole, when you split heroes into a pyramid of the top elites, mid-tier, and bottom-tier groupings. Nor have I gone into all the wild potential and shenanigans of an elite, exclusive, and wealthy place like UA (that’s a whole fic in progress right now). Or about what kinds of social insecurities and concerns craft the look and feel of each generation of heroes.

There is just so much that can be explored in MHA, and since it’s a mainstream shonen, all it cares about is punching people real hard.

#the blah blahs #navi stirring up shit #MORE THINGS I DIDN'T TALK ABOUT #how does forensic evidence work here?? #why does the CRC's attitudes seem to have no greater impact on the plot and world as a whole? #wouldn't it be ironic and hilarious if heroes #defenders of the innocent and protectors of the public #have the majority of their mass produced merchandise made through basically slave labor in foreign countries because thanks capitalism? #why aren't more people talking about money laundering #what's the attitude on criminal rehabilitation really like in bnha canon? #like shut up about protecting your favs in fic #is the hero industry really going to allow effective community support and rehabilitation to happen? #on an individual level they all have SO LITTLE incentive to actually support rehabilitation? #that's their KPIs on the line folks that's their salaries #WHYYYY is this world so cool with the human rights abuse going on left and right #just look at tartarus MASSIVE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE RIGHT THERE FOLKS #it will never stop being hilarious to me how frequently this fandom forgets that quirk canceling technology DOESN'T EXIST #IT'S NOT CANON #the closest thing to quirk canceling technology in canon is overkill via physical restraints #where using your quirk will actively harm you #this is just all my beef with canon lmao #we haven't even covered my shit stirring urges in regards to popular fandom tropes