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aesariwritessometimes · 3 years

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BNHA 314, Lady Nagant and war crimes, the take of history nerd.

This text will contain a discussion of war crimes, human experimentation, and genocide. Please, if you find such topics uncomfortable and upsetting, don't read.

When I was twelve years old, I visited what remains of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complexes in Oświecim, Poland. I heard about the utter torture people of various nations had to go through. I walked through the cells in which people were starved. I saw names long gone written upon the thousand of thousands of luggage left behind. I saw shoes, belonging to men, women, and children alike. I saw where those alive slept, the pits in which you wouldn't hold a dog, much less a human. I saw the walls against which people were slaughtered.

I looked at what remains of the endless list of names of people who died to the Third Reich's death machine.

Arbeit macht frei, says the slogan atop of the gates, Work sets you free.

Our guide told us the nazis used to smile and add, Durch Krematorium Nummer drei. Through the Crematorium Number three.

The Auschwitz Museum is not all of the testimony of the pain the people suffered under Nazi Germany, but it's the symbol. I can talk much more about it, about the horror of living in Nazi-occupied Poland, about the terror the Jews come through, about the evil residing in the hearts of men but I can never describe it all. You can't really describe the horror of those times.

During the Nuremberg Trial, the war criminals responsible for it all, one after another, claimed they did it all because they were told to.

This argument didn't hold.

In 1942 Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, was ordered to execute the war prisoners in Africa. Supposedly, he burned Hitler's orders. Nothing happened to him. He was never punished by the nazi regime for disobeying their leader.

Most of the war criminals on the Nuremberg Trial were sentenced to death. Society decided that the excuse of being ordered to do something meant nothing.

The year is 2021. The leaks of the BNHA 314 chapter are out. I feel... complicated.

I did it because I was ordered to.

It could mean nothing. Just coincidence, right?

But.

The name of the character who said it is mocking me. Lady Nagant is badass; she is the female villain character I was waiting for. She is powerful, she is interesting, she has such potential.

But.

Her name.

People pointed it up already. Rifle Mosin-Nagant, one most famously used by both Simo Häyhä, the White Death, and Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Lady Death. It seems so badass and cool at the first glance but I always felt somewhat iffy about it. She is named after a weapon, and yes, a weapon is not responsible for committing the crimes, it's always the people.

But for me, this weapon screams the Soviet Union and they didn't use it only in wars. Soviets committed unspeakable crimes, the ones for which they were never punished. They slaughtered people, they starved people, they committed genocide. Soviet Regime was not better than the nazis.

Deportations. Massacres. Gulags. All of it is not as widely discussed but I always felt there was a good, macabre example of how cruel they could be.

There is a book in Polish I read for my literature classes, The Another World by Gustaw Herling-Grudzieński. It talks about the author's memories of living in a Soviet gulag, in starvation and cold, working in inhuman conditions. What heinous crime did he commit to ending up on the end of the world?

You see, Mr. Herling-Grudzieński was wearing the army's boots. And yeah, his name sounded somewhat German. That's all. Only those boots and last name for years of painful labor, starvation, and death.

Am reaching with all of it? Probably. But emotions are not logical. It feels wrong for me to call a character after a weapon that committed genocide but maybe it's just me. After all, I know I'm biased, I was listening to all those things since I was a little girl.

I just don't like the connotation of Lady Nagant's name and those words. Even more, because we see people threatening her while something like that never happened in reality. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her? Are we supposed to forgive her and Hawks?

And that, for me goes further: Are we supposed to forgive war criminals now because of orders? Is that what he is trying to say? What is your manga about now, Mr. Horikoshi?

Because I can't. I will not. Too many people suffered because of them. Too many people died.

My thinking does sound like reaching and overinterpretation, but then, I remember the last straw of it all, something I really can't forgive because of how malicious it felt.

When Ujiko's real name was revealed as Maruta Shiga in reference to the human experimentation on the Chinese civilian population by Imperial Division 731, I didn't understand what exactly it means. I don't speak Japanese. But then, oh, god, I learned.

Japanese war crimes, compared to those committed by nazis, are controversial topics. Most of them were swept under the rug by the politics of that time. I wish I could not judge those people for the choices they made. I wish I could say I'm not utterly disgusted by how the perpetrators of those crimes were never truly punished. I can't. Like said, I'm very biased about the subject, I feel strongly about all of it.

I'm not Chinese, though, I can't even imagine how they feel about all of it.

I never learned about what the Japanese did in school, I had to uncover the depravity of Imperial Japan myself. Is it wrong? Absolutely yes. Does the educational system suck? Yes. The thing is, people just try and try to keep those heinous crimes under this stupid rug and I'm ashamed of that, I'm ashamed of myself, and most of all, I'm ashamed of what Horikoshi did as a human being.

I learned that the only country in which nazi is treated as a hero in China. Why? Because even he was so disgusted by what the Japanese did. Because he actually tried to protect the Chinese people.

A nazi.

What does it say?

What did the Imperial Division 731 did, though? Human experimentation, as I mentioned earlier. They infected people with viruses, they tested flamethrowers and weapons on them, they poisoned people, they vivisected humans. They were not better than their western allies, nazis which people are so afraid to speak of.

What happened to them? They exchanged their freedom and lives for the results of their experiments. They were never punished.

I'm going to be cruel: Horikoshi and all of the Jump deserved the backlash they got, their apologies mean nothing. How the hell they let it through in the first place? How the fuck all those editors, all of the staff, saw it and nobody cared? Nobody thought oh, that's a bad idea, let's change it? If they didn't know, it doesn't help either! It only confirms the stereotype of Japanese people not knowing and not caring about the crimes they committed.

Hot take: In some way, calling him that is just as bad as if he was named after Mengele.

All of the people who suffered under the Japanese regime deserved better than being a footnote, a simple reference in Japanese manga of all things. Those were the people we are talking about, for fuck's sake, people who went through hell and never saw justice.

That's... my take on all of it.

All of my words are pretty emotional but the subject is very emotional; it's hard not to feel in such a way when you know what happened. The sheer lack of respect BNHA holds toward the people who suffered through those awful things is astounding.

I always had problems with BNHA, okay? I disagreed about a lot of things Horikoshi did, but I always kept quiet, not wanting to speak up because there were some things I loved.

But it makes me so angry, how the author does things like that. If they did it one time, it could be an accident. Two times would be dangerous. But three? Three creates a habit.

Please, stop that, Mr. Horikoshi.

Your manga is about heroes and their corrupted society. It's action shounen, not a dark story about the war which still haunts people. It's not about our rotten world and making all of those references is disrespectful toward the victims. Stop playing with history like that.

TLDR; Soviets bad. Nazis bad. Imperial Japan bad. Hori, stop this pls, and let me see Dabi already.

#bnha spoilers #bnha 314 #bnha critical #world war two #potentially triggering

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