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#how does this story want to lay out BJ explaining IN DETAIL how they plan to kill Shigaraki up here
stillness-in-green · 2 years
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Brand's being anti-capitalist is actually kinda funny since he's one of the few Advisers that's in a business suit XD
It’s exceptionally funny for a guy who used to work under (and I say this with only the greatest of affections) a bunch of upper management types and a politician. But you’d better believe I was obsessively taking notes about it anyway!
The Japanese word there translates somewhat more literally as "mammonist"—what Viz uses—or, if you don’t want to put a Bible-derived term in the mouth of a Japanese character, just “money-worshipper.” And that is extra funny to me because it was not even twenty-five chapters ago that we were told about Nedzu’s “deep pockets” such that he could afford to pay for the upgrades to U.A.’s security systems,(1) so it’s not like Brand’s even wrong.
I mean, obviously we’re meant to see Brand as wrong about his summation of the heroes’ motives, but with this most recent chapter especially, I am once again left shaking my head that, on one side of this fight, we have the wealthy, handsome, popular, elite, well-educated, powerful heroes who had ample time to lay battle plans, painstakingly plot out where all their people would be, and allocate all the resources they could possibly need to build “a coffin in the sky”…
Meanwhile, on the other side, we have the guy who has spent most of the last month writhing on the ground in a cave, probably eating canned food when he could eat at all, fighting against his own power, barely able to communicate, and promptly separated from all of his friends and allies so the heroes could immediately seal off his quirk(s) and start bouncing him off of electrified walls as a warm-up before they have Deku and company beat him into a thin paste.
Fuckin’ hell, when you phrase it like that, the heroes sound like Yu-Gi-Oh! villains. This is Seto Kaiba level excess. This is Marvel villain Arcade killing people in a place literally named Murderworld. Yet somehow, it’s the heroes I’m supposed to be rooting for? Horikoshi, you can’t possibly be serious, can you?
Yes, yes, Shigaraki is a murderous terrorist, a big threat, blah blah blah. But look, this is a damn shonen story. It matters who the underdog is, and right now, the underdog is Shigaraki Tomura.
Tangent onto my fave aside, I would love to see more villains continue to call out heroes for all of the resources they endlessly dole out on beating up villains without ever even contemplating dropping some of those resources on trying de-escalation tactics now and again. And as to Brand and his business suit, I suppose he can still wear a sharp suit for work and have exceptionally strong opinions on where one’s money ought to be going. Presumably making obscene buckets of money is fine as long as it’s being used to fund as worthy a cause as Liberation!
I hope we get some more good stuff out of him; I’m going to be extremely annoyed if he gets taken down by Crust’s dad or whatever. I’d initially been strongly hoping he was a clone—now that Toga has Twice’s blood on hand, if she were running this like a power gamer, then technically any, even every villain on the field right now could be a clone! I’m not really expecting that to be the case at this point, though I’d be thrilled if it were, but I was high-key annoyed that Brand was on the cliffhanger page of 341 with the Sludge Villain and the heteromorph uprising, suggesting he’d be with them, only to have him get ‘ported in by AFO maybe, what, a day or two later at best? Sigh.
In any case, I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for him and the rest. Thanks for the ask, @shockersalvage!
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1: “Way more than a few hundred million yen!” said Kaminari, a number that roughs to $1.75 million. And that’s before even getting into the specialized battlefields and upgrades we’re just now finding out about!
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