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stillness-in-green · 1 year

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Some targeted follow-up on 383, courtesy of a disgruntled Mina Stan

(Or, Why the chapter post for 384 is late.)

Ooo-kay, @randomvongenerico, I’ll dance this time because you’re just barely on the right side of “politely asking questions” for someone who, judging by their own page, is probably pretty new here. But please know that I came very close to hitting the block button the moment I saw, “Why do you even care about heroes? Aren’t you a villain stan?” at the very top of a notification chain of twenty-seven comments on my chapter post. The next time you have as much to say about someone’s post, I strongly urge you to just reblog it and add your thoughts rather than indignantly spamming the comment section and then sending a bunch of the same stuff word-for-word via ask when you don’t get a reply in less than 48 hours. Some of us do have lives and commitments outside of Tumblr.

That said, as with last time I got a detailed reply that seemed to genuinely want to hear my reasoning but also edged over into belligerent/condescending territory, I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for being somewhat blunt at times. Digs like, “Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?” have not earned you the most patient reply I’ve ever put down in writing.

I’ll take your questions and points roughly in order you sent them, though I may omit points I have nothing much to say about, or rearrange them. Anyone who wants to see rvg’s full set of replies in the original order and context is invited to check the comments here, at least until such time as I deem it less of a headache to hit that block button after all.

For everyone else, for the purposes of gauging your interest, this post contains discussion of the following topics:

Mina as she's affected by BNHA's tendency to shortchange the interiority and development of its women. I hit this one from a few different angles.

How the series treats physical damage and how that impacts what I call out as problematic or don't (e.g. why Shinsou's brainwashing got compared to a war crime but Mina's acid did not).

The Sludge Villain, why he shouldn't have been involved in the second war at all, and how his return fails to address the flaws in Hero Society he was originally used to establish.

The circumstances of Midnight's death and the impact of the narrative's ongoing refusal to allow people panel time to grieve for her.

Saving villains, who that maxim applies to, what it means for the heroes' responsibilities, and what it means when they fail to live up to said responsibilities. Specifically addresses Hose Face and Gigantomachia.

Replying to wild presumptions re: which characters I should or should not care about, as well what situations I ought or ought not overthink.

A fair number of intersections between the above topics and other less substantial diversions, including a retraction on my part for a mistake I made in the chapter post that rvg brought to my attention.

Hit the jump.

I think the “pure psychological scarring” thing is just referencing Mina’s trauma from her first encounter with Machia. It’s just there to remind the readers about Mina’s trauma, since it’s been a while since the last time it was brought up. Shonen does this sort of exposition all the time. I wouldn’t think too deeply on it. Like, I mean, it’s technically not an incorrect statement. Mina was mentally and emotionally scarred by Gigantomachia. Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?

It’s true that the specific line about Machia embodying psychological scarring overlays Mina in a way that’s doubtlessly intended to remind the reader of her trauma. However, if that’s the only function Horikoshi intended the line to serve, he’d have done much better to put it in a text box, delivered to the reader via omniscient narrator. Instead, Mount Lady is the one delivering it, and she is explicitly thinking about Machia in relation to “ordinary people,” flashing back to the scene of carnage left in Machia’s wake, as countless civilians scream and cry for help. She’s not even slightly thinking about Mina in that moment, for all that the same sentiment applies.

When I criticize Mount Lady’s mode of thinking, therefore, my point is not that people are wrong to have trauma,[1] but that it is wrong to dehumanize the source of that trauma. Machia has feelings and thoughts just like any other human—treating him like a symbol of pain rather than a human being, something to be stamped out like a disease or a curse, is the same sentiment as Gran Torino blaming All Might’s pain and the smearing of Nana’s memory on Shigaraki’s very existence. As with Shigaraki, there are reasons that Machia turned out the way he did, and talking like he’s some kind of free-roaming trauma elemental obfuscates the chain of failures and wrongdoings that produced him to begin with.

Incidentally, I wrote a twenty-thousand-word essay on the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front, so I promise you are not going to get anywhere with advising me not to overthink this manga. If Horikoshi didn’t want his readers to take his societal issues seriously, he shouldn’t have presented them as the root cause of so many problems; if you didn’t want to read a detailed meta dive tackling the chapter’s philosophical shortcomings, you probably should have abandoned ship somewhere around the time I started waxing verbose about the ethics authors sign up to engage with when they make the decision to put their protagonists in skintight catsuits and call them Heroes.

On which note:

I have some questions about your logic about the morality of the methods and tactics here, if you don’t mind. So brainwashing and calling Machia mean things is crossing the line, but throwing acid at him is okay? You criticize Shinso using his Quirk on Gigantomachia, yet you don’t take any issue with Mina melting his claws(…). Why? I guess brainwashing is just too much of a villain Quirk, so it just can’t be used heroically?

Judging by one of your later comments, you did some archive-diving to find out if I’d ever talked about Mina before the Chapter 283 post. Judging by this question, that archive-diving did not include the Chapter 282 post. Please see it for a lengthy explanation about what specifically I object to in Shinsou’s use of his quirk on Machia, and a much briefer aside about what kinds of uses I’d have been completely fine with.

As to the difference between hurling acid at someone and brainwashing them to attack their own allies, while it’s certainly true that doing the former would be a horrific crime in real life,[2] that’s down as one of the places where I’m spotting the series its premise. To wit, physical attacks like Mina’s acid are only ever going to be as impactful as the plot needs them to be, and the plot has a history of being wildly erratic about that impact.[3]

You can call accuse me of having a double standard if you like—picking and choosing what I hold to realistic standards—but in essence, I view Mina melting Machia’s claws with acid as Shounen Battle Action Damage. There’s definitely a point at which it would stop being that—if she’d used it on his face instead of the tips of claws he could potentially just retract and grow in fresh—but if I were inclined to complain about every hero who uses a power that would cause ghastly mutilation if used against criminals in real life (acid, fire, concussive blasts, etc), we’d be here all week. Shinsou’s brainwashing doesn’t get that handwave because it’s fully and completely effective.

Btw, Kirishima hearing about Midoriya and the sludge Villain was already established. We have known this since we got Kirishima’s backstory in the Yakuza arc. So this didn’t come out of nowhere.

This is a 100% fair point. I very clearly remembered Kirishima shaking his funk because he saw the clip of the interview with Crimson Riot; I’d completely forgotten that the Sludge Villain attack was one of the things contributing to his funk. Having looked back over it, it still seems weird that Kirishima doesn’t show any sign of recognition in this chapter, but it’s certainly possible that that’s just a consequence of the breakneck storytelling. Regardless, consider that complaint retracted, and thanks for the refresher.

What do you mean we don’t get anything of Mina against Machia and overcoming her fears and previous failure? That’s literally what the chapter is all about. She doesn’t freeze under fear this time and instead jumps into action to save her friends and come in clutch to guarantee the win for her team. She’s the actual MVP here. The actual problem here is that the whole thing gets sped up and abbreviated. What should’ve been 3 or 4 chapters of this battlefield, gets presented and resolved in one chapter.

One of my longstanding issues with BNHA is the difference between the levels of interiority that are permitted to the male characters as opposed to the female ones—how much they’re allowed to dictate their own internal narratives via having their thoughts shown on-panel, and how much room the story affords that exploration. Following are some examples:

Mirko has no thoughts we’re permitted to access about her traumatic double limb loss. While Endeavor’s story of wrestling with his sins and trying to better himself as a person is a prominent, recurring storyline, carried out in the foreground to such an extent that some people complain it’s actually sublimating Shouto’s arc, Mount Lady grows from a money-hungry fame-chaser to a responsible and determined hero completely off-screen.[4] Tamaki and Mirio get dedicated multi-chapter solo battles peppered with emotive childhood flashbacks; Nejire gets a beauty pageant that takes up a grand total of four pages, exactly one (1) of which is dedicated to Nejire’s actual participation.

And so on and so forth. The only two gals we’re really allowed to get into the heads of in a consistent, sustained way are Toga and Uraraka, with perhaps Jirou or Momo as distant runners-up, though Jirou's interiority is mostly concentrated in the Cultural Festival arc and Momo's is virtually all rooted in her bouts with paralytic self-doubt. That's pretty pitiful compared to the number of dudes who get sustained attention paid to their internal landscape.

That issue is largely what I’m getting at when I kvetch about not being shown Mina overcoming her fears. When Kirishima first gets overwhelmed by Rappa, the reason he gets back up is given a backstory flashback that takes up almost two full chapters.[5] Those chapters are the one and only reason we have any context at all for Mina’s PTSD flashback against Machia in MVA. She’s not allowed to “tell” that trauma to the audience herself; we know about it because we got it filtered through Kirishima.

Likewise, when she comes through against Machia in 383, she just—does it. There’re no extended scenes of her wrestling with her fear, drawing on her experience to overcome it; we don’t get a flashback to her training with Bakugou or Shouto.[6] She just tells us about it in a single sentence, then gets a third of a page dedicated to a collage of old scenes. And then, again, she pulls through in a moment of crisis in such a way that her moment of awesome is in service of giving a dude an opening to solve the problem instead of doing it herself.

The coming-through-so-a-dude-can-pull-off-the-finisher pattern is a significant problem with the general power balance in the class: the girls do support while all the heavy-hitters are boys. And doing support is fine! There are a healthy share of boys doing support, too! Kirishima’s own big moment in the Hassaikai arc is playing support so Fat Gum can get in the finishing blow, for example. The problem is not girls having support roles at all; the problem is that while there are boy support students, there are no heavy-hitter, A-list offense-oriented girl students (at least not in Class A). And actually, Mina has always been both interesting and frustrating for me in that regard because she feels like she should be a heavy hitter, but up until this exact chapter, she’s never really treated like one.

It’s never been clear to me why fire and explosions are so much more A-list material than acid, save that Mina doesn’t have Shouto or Bakugou’s intense determination to pull her up to their level from the beginning. Acid is also the kind of thing that could so, so easily have been called a villain quirk, especially in combination with Mina’s mild heteromorphic appearance. She doesn’t ever seem to attract that accusation, however, possibly because she’s so chipper—indeed, in a narrative that had more time for her, I wonder if we’d find that her chipperness is, at least in part, a defense mechanism she maintains for exactly that reason. As it is, though, her personality keeps her as a fun presence in class without ever letting her seize a larger piece of the narrative for herself. But I’ll always wonder what she would have looked like if she were hiding negativity for the same reasons Shouji hides his scars, or if she’d had Bakugou’s burning desire to be #1.

Instead, her most significant backstory moment gets relegated to a flashback intended to advance a male character, while her big moment in the story is freeing Shinsou and saving Mount Lady more or less on the backswing. Admirable in its own right, certainly, but part of a larger pattern when it comes to the roles the Class 1-A girls play on the battlefield.

(I know Machia literally has a Quirk that makes him feel no pain, so that attack did nothing to him. Which in retrospect, makes the poor handling of Mina’s spoltight worse, because it sorta makes it seem like the biggest feat and most powerful move she has ever performed in the series was inconsequential. Yes, I know she literally saves Mt. Lady by using it, but still). + The Sludge Villain being faced by a character that has had an encounter with him before like Midoriya or Bakugo would be too obvious and on the nose. Horikoshi can be pretty basic at times, but he’s not that basic. + Mina saving Shinso from the Sludge Villain isn’t the important part, the important part is her saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain.

I’m unclear on why that would be more basic than e.g. Muscular showing back up for no reason save to get clowned on by Deku, or the incredibly twee return of the woman All Might saved at Kamino, but to each their own basic bar, I suppose. On the matter of Mina’s biggest and most powerful move being arguably inconsequential, I agree completely. As I said before, it’s entirely possible that Machia could just regrow the claws—he clearly doesn’t have them in his “base” form, so it’s entirely down to an arbitrary call on Horikoshi’s part whether the damage to them would stick if he retracted them entirely and then regrew them. We haven’t gotten a good look at his right hand yet to see one way or the other, so the jury’s still out.

As to the Sludge Villain and who gets to face him, two things:

1) He didn’t have to come back at all. I can’t help but feel like the only real reason he does is that Horikoshi’s enjoying throwing in callbacks to bit characters from early chapters, rather than because there was any real groundwork laid for their return: the Sludge Villain, the baby in the cloud-pattern onesie, the star-head guy Deku talked to in the first chapter, Jin’s boss from his MVA flashback, etc. At least the returnees from USJ have a modicum of prior association with the League of Villains and thus, indirectly, AFO. The Sludge Villain doesn’t have that, and, honestly? Given his characterization in 383, I’m confused about why he joined up with AFO’s group at all.

It was a specific point of note that when AFO freed the prisoners from Tartarus, the only task he gave them was to rampage, to go wild. When Muscular shows up to bust open the prison Gentle’s in, he tells them they’re free, to do with their lives as they will. We even know from Kashi Kashiko (the guy in 334 who ShigAFO tries to unload New Order onto) that more than one person was freed and immediately headed to the boonies. Given that all the Sludge Villain wants is to sneak away from this fight without getting hurt, why wasn’t he one of those?

It’s always possible AFO called in favors for the jailbreaks, of course—the Warp quirk makes him an enormous danger to anyone he wants to have in his presence when he decides to call in a chip—but there’s been no indication of it if that is the case, I assume because the story doesn’t care about its shallower convict characters.

2) Another reason you might consider critiquing this as a meaningful victory for Mina is that her defeat of the Sludge Villain has literally nothing to do with who she is as a character and the work she’s done. She defeats the Sludge Villain because she just so happens to have a liquid-based quirk that can effectively be used to harm him. She only used the souped-up damage quotient to get through Machia; presumably, a much less corrosive version would have been perfectly sufficient against the liquid-based Sludge Villain.

And that’s particularly annoying because one of the key points the Sludge Villain was originally used to establish was the way that heroes just stood around not even trying to fight him because they didn’t have the right quirks, and why that was a failing of the current system. So when he returns—at the climax of the series! Almost four hundred chapters later!—it would seem the perfect time to explore how the heroes have improved. We should watch them determine that they have to fight him even though they don’t have the ideal quirks for it. We should see them use ingenuity and their surroundings to come up with a work-around, assuming we don’t see them apply the Save Villains maxim to convince him to back off.

But we don’t get any of that. Instead, Team Hero just so happens to have Mina on hand, who just so happens to have the right quirk. It’s a damn waste, is what it is. Not only does the Sludge Villain have no personal relevance to Mina whatsoever, only twice-displaced relevance via Kirishima, she doesn’t even get to defeat him via determination or wits, skill or training—she could have sneezed on him and won. I can’t imagine finding that rewarding for a character you really like.

Finally, I disagree that the important part of this scene is Mina saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain rather than her defeat of the Sludge Villain in and of itself. She doesn’t save Kirishima from the Sludge Villain; Kirishima is in no danger from the Sludge Villain. He’s Class A’s premier defensive tank character! The only way Sludgey could pose the slightest threat to him is by trying to hijack his body, but Sludgey already has a body he seems perfectly satisfied with and is trying to use to escape. The worst he can do is smack Kirishima around a bit, which, again, is going to be wildly ineffective. He could possibly also attempt using Shinsou’s quirk, but Kirishima is entirely aware of Brainwashing’s operating conditions—note that he doesn’t say a single word to Shinsou the moment he becomes aware Shinsou’s compromised.

Mina saves Shinsou from the Sludge Villain, not Kirishima.

On regards on her developing her new technique due to training with Bakugo and Todoroki, I don’t see the problem. All of the students learn from other adults and eachother, as well as inspire one another. The only problem I have with the Bakugo and Todoroki thing is that we never got to see those interactions. There’s so much stuff we should’ve gotten to see from class 1-A during the aftermath of the first war and we never got.

You are welcome to not see it as a problem. I would probably see it as much less of one if the story cared enough about Mina to actually show us any scenes of her fretting about her strength, wanting to improve herself, and psyching herself up to whatever degree she might have needed to in order to approach Bakugou about private training.

Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be a full scene—BNHA gets plenty of mileage out of 1–4 panels of characters interacting in ways that aren’t immediately explained and then dropping the explanation thirty chapters later. Shinsou’s training with Aizawa was like that, for example. Why not make the time for Mina? Other than, as you bring up, the unseemly abbreviation of the aftermath of the first war. The story at that stage has zero time for any of the students other than Deku—Mina’s hardly the only character whose arc suffers because we don’t get to see her reactions to such a sea change in the society she’s lived in all her life, or the trauma of what she experienced the day of the raid. I’m not going to refrain from critiquing the writing just because it’s not any given character’s fault that their arc is missing huge chunks that are being papered over with flashbacks and retroactive explanations for the scenes we didn’t get.

To be fair about the Midnight thing, no one really had any actual established connection to her. With Momo, Midnight just was her hype woman like two times, and then she entrusted her with the plan to sedate Machia. With Mineta it’s kinda hard to take it seriously because their one meaningful interaction is full of the usual pervy jokes that are synonym to Mineta. I guess Horikoshi tied Mina to the plotline of Midnight’s murder because Mina is a more emotional character, so there’s more he can do with that (and then he barely did anything, but what little he did, did show some great shots from her).

All of the things you cite are things that give both Momo and Mineta more established connections to Midnight, which is exactly why I brought them up as people who should have been involved in the confrontation with her killer. I also brought up that those connections are themselves fairly thin and that Midnight doesn’t really have any strong connections with any of the students. This is in large part why I continue to believe that Midnight being the most emotionally significant hero death during the war[7] is pure cowardice on Horikoshi’s part. Mina getting the final say on that death is just the latest way the story is writing off dealing with it.

Midnight gets no funeral. Aizawa, one of her closest friends, immediately shuts down Mic when he tries to bring her up in the hospital, and neither of them ever bring her up again—for heaven’s sake, Mic doesn’t even think about her in Chapter 372 when bringing up what Aizawa has lost! And when someone finally does want to actually talk openly about Midnight’s death, who is it? Not Momo, who Midnight trusted and praised, or Mineta, an openly admitted fan of Midnight, one perv to another. It’s—Mina, who liked her classes, who is emotional about the death because she’s a good person who’d be emotional about the death of anyone in her social circle, not because Midnight was in any way special to her. For heaven’s sake, she registers her first opinion ever on Midnight the chapter after the deathblow is struck.

And then, to top it all off, there’s that tossed-off, perfunctory line about vengeance, which no one Mina is facing that chapter even brought up, and which she herself immediately shuts down. So not only do I not feel any impact from Mina rejecting revenge because she’s never been shown struggling with a desire for it, but it just feels like another case of Midnight being brought up only to get immediately dropped again. To wit:

Aizawa, who won’t or can’t think about her, chooses instead to focus on his students. Mic brings her up the once and then drops the subject at Aizawa’s request, apparently never to think about her again, despite being given an excellent opening to do so in his confrontation with Kurogiri. And Mina makes three, bringing up how much she liked Midnight Midnight’s classes only in the context of how stewing on the desire for revenge is bad.

And so the narrative just moves on. And it sucks, and Midnight deserved better, even if only in her memory.

…Also, just for the record, Mineta is an incredibly emotional character. He cries as much Deku does! He openly, habitually worries about classmates when he knows they’re in danger somewhere he can’t reach; he worries about Midnight during the war. Yes, he’s a primarily a joke character (and the jokes are outmoded and sexist), but so what if his scene with Midnight is full of the pervy jokes that define him as a character? Midnight is also a perv! She was contributing a perfectly adequate amount of pervy jokes to that scene all on her own! Indeed, that was part of the humor of it—Mineta the lech running afoul of Midnight’s theatrical sadism and being incredibly in love with it even as he runs around screaming about how he’s ever supposed to beat her.

Mineta has been a much-improved character from the war onward so I, for one, would not have any problems at all with taking him seriously if he were allowed to seriously mourn.

In regards to the Mina and vengeance part. Remember again that Mina is a very emotional character. Also remember that when she heard about Shoji’s backstory, she angrily stated that the kind of people who hurt Shoji “should be removed from existence” (I think you said Mina was 100% right in saying that, if I’m not mistaken). So while yes, Mina is a very cheerful, kind and friendly girl, we know the war and her inability to help deeply affected her. The problem is that we never got to explore that or see her go through it. Her inner struggle got resolved off screen in the background before her shinning moment.

You know, I thought about bringing up the Shouji bit in the post. I didn’t end up doing it because that moment doesn’t break the pattern I otherwise described: “Mina doesn’t hold onto anger; she doesn’t brood; she’s extremely well-adjusted in that she cries when she needs to, to get it out of her system, and then she bounces back.”

That all still applies! Indeed, as I said in the post you reference, her comment in Koda’s flashback is clearly presented as hyperbole. She says it in the heat of the moment and no one even blinks because they understand that she’s not seriously suggesting that e.g. all bigots should be murdered in their beds. No one takes her aside afterward to have a gentle talk with her about appropriate levels of bloodthirst or tentatively ask her if there’s anything she needs to get off her chest. After she says it, Shouji gently acknowledges that she might be right[8] and then moves the conversation along; within the next few exchanges, she’s joined the group encouraging Shouji about making new, happier memories for him going forward.

I’m sure the war and her inability to help did deeply affect her. Those things affected everyone. But we didn’t get to see it, so I’m simply not going to accept the story insisting on how noble she is for eschewing the vengeance she was never shown to be contemplating to begin with.[9] You’re welcome to fill in those blanks yourself; god knows I have characters myself in this series for whom I’m willing to make those reaches. But then, my blank-filled characters are mostly in prison right now rather than active in the plot and trying to do emotional heavy-lifting for which the author has woefully ill-equipped them.

Regarding Midnight’s killer. I just didn’t like that part in general. Idk about you, but I don’t like that Horikoshi wrote Mina trying to find common ground with the guy who went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat to him. Like, couldn’t you have just let Mina kick his ass? Like, I know the story is setting up the kids reaching out a hand to “save” the villains. But seriously? If there’s one villain who should get his ass kicked, it’s that guy.

This is another clue that you definitely haven’t poked around my backlog in any depth. No. Just no. Trying to save the villains means trying to save all the villains. No exceptions. Anything less means the heroes are just picking and choosing based on personal bias. That means this guy and the rest of the PLF. It means the Tartarus escapees. It even means All For One himself, if anyone can manage it. The heroes are not arbiters of justice. It is not their job to play favorites based on who they’ve seen crying and who they haven’t; it is their job—or so Deku and the general direction of the narrative would have us believe—to save people in crisis.

Should it be their jobs to do all the emotional labor and hand-holding that’s required to talk down someone whose crisis has led them to endanger others? Maybe, maybe not, but the story has been exceptionally clear that they’re the only ones in a position to do it; God knows their justice system isn’t. But given that the climax of the series is revolving around saving villains, if that isn’t the heroes’ responsibility, then whose responsibility is it, and why aren’t we reading the story about them?

I’m sure some people would point that, in-universe, saving people is only half of a hero's job description, and the other half is defeating villains. That’s true enough in the world as it now stands. However, Deku—in what’s clearly meant to be a big inspiring moment—tells the OFA tribunal in Chapter 305 that One For All is a power meant for saving, not killing, and that he learned this from All Might. In 326, in a scene that I have some issues with but that is also obviously meant to be taken sincerely, Stain alludes to the influence of All Might on the next generation, to the embers he left behind being nurtured by the ones who don’t give up.

Thus, if All Might is meant to be the ideal because of his tireless efforts at saving people, and Class 1-A—key members of whom are moving towards saving villains—are being modelled as the collective successors of All Might, it only makes sense to assume that, yes, the series wants us to accept that villains are people who also need to be saved. That means all of them, not just the ones who look easy. What kind of successors will the kids be, if they can’t go even farther than All Might did? If they just turn their backs on anyone who they don’t have the exact right quirk inspiring monologue to save, aren’t we basically just back where we started?

Incidentally, let’s talk about this characterization of Hose Face, which allegedly makes him a villain who doesn’t need to be saved, but just needs his ass kicked: he “went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat(…).”

Twice was too weak to defend himself from Hawks when Hawks tried to put a feather sword through his forehead. He posed no active threat to Hawks when Hawks stabbed him in the back. Shigaraki floating in tube stasis posed no active threat to anyone, certainly not Mirko or Mic, both of whom did their level best to kill him by destroying the tube and all its systems that were keeping Shigaraki alive. The PLF had their guard completely down the day of the raids, which certainly didn’t stop Cementoss from ripping the building in half with no warning—how many people do you think might have been in rooms five or six stories up when the floor ripped out from under them and sent them plummeting 50+ feet towards the shattered concrete and broken wood below?

They’re villains, sure. They were going to hurt a lot of people, sure. But aren’t heroes supposed to be better than villains?

Further, I have to contest your assertion that Midnight even was “severely wounded” or “posed no active threat.” Yes, she’d taken a few hunks of concrete to the face and fallen through the canopy, which would severely injure any normally fragile human, but again, this is BNHA, where physical damage is only as severe as the plot demands.[10] Midnight went from splayed on the ground to starting to push herself back up in a single panel, had gotten to her hands and knees two panels later, and was just getting a foot on the ground, preparing to push herself back upright, when Hose Face hit her from behind two pages later.

I can remember being unsure how that fight would go back when the chapter dropped, because, just as the scene cut away, Midnight managed to whip her head around and shoot that fierce glare at the oncoming enemy. Midnight had an AOE attack that was extra effective against dudes, and all of the people coming at her that we could see were men. It was entirely plausible to me at the time that she would win, that she just stopped answering her comm line because she had to focus on the fight.

All in all, she had recently immobilized dozens of people on Hose Face’s side and was clearly still a threat. What would you expect him to do, detour the whole group the long way around just so no one would hurt her? Let Machia get even farther ahead of them by standing back and waiting for her to finish getting up so they could have an honorable fight? Come on; she was part of an army of heroes who'd just attacked their base. Of course he didn’t stand back and hand her the opening to knock them all out with sleeping gas. And no, he didn’t go out of his way to kill her—he and his group were following Machia and just happened to run across Midnight in the path Machia had taken.

Cripes, you make it sound like he spotted her unconscious on the ground eighty feet away in another clearing and decided to run over and cut her throat before rejoining the group. No. Remember, he’s a member of the MLA, the only group in the series that explicitly styles themselves as an army. His attack on Midnight should be read as a soldier fighting an enemy soldier—it’s quick, it’s brutal, it’s merciless. Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s at war. Both letting a hero go because she was injured (but not so injured that she wasn’t trying to get up again) or wasting time going out of his way to murder someone who’s already dealt with (because he gets his jollies from murder) would have been acting counter to the mission.

I’m not going to tell you he was morally correct—he’s a villain, a cultist, an unabashed quirk supremacist, someone who would have been on the front lines of any terrorist attacks the PLF were planning by virtue of the regiment he was associated with—but just in terms of tactics, he didn’t do anything the heroes haven’t done or sought to do repeatedly over the course of both war arcs. If you feel it’s okay for them to cross those lines but not him because they’re heroes who want to help people while he’s a villain who wants to hurt people, then it’s his allegiance that’s the real problem, not his tactics.

(And, just to be clear, the reason I’m okay with him killing Midnight but not Hawks killing Twice is because of their respective allegiances. Hose Face is a villain. I don’t hold him to a hero’s moral code because he never claimed it to begin with, so he’s not being a massive hypocrite by not adhering to it.)

Any comment on the Mina and Kirishima interaction? What are your thoughts on the “you’ve always been my hero” line?

If I had a comment on it, you can generally assume it would have been in my chapter post. I don’t have much interest in the lens on Mina that, because it frames her as Kirishima’s hero, means we see her heroism almost entirely through his eyes. Again: he gets the two chapter flashback lovingly detailing his personal history, doubts, and motivations; she gets to be a figure inside his flashback rather than ever being able to frame her own. Ochaco may not ever get two chapters dedicated to her backstory, but at least what flashbacks she does get come to us filtered through her. Though, I will say that I find Ochaco’s romance plot largely tiresome, so I do hugely appreciate about Mina and Kirishima that they legitimately are just friends and I don’t have to watch Mina’s arc get devoured by blushing and fumbling crush behavior.

Since you asked, I can think of a scenario in which Kirishima telling Mina that she’s always been his hero would have worked much better, at least for me. It’d fit right into all the post-war material we didn’t get because the story was so laser-focused on Deku.

Start by showing the readers Mina approaching Shouto and Bakugou about training with them. Don’t have them ask why (because Bakugou wouldn’t care why and Shouto would just take the request at face value, especially if she explained that they both have techniques she thinks she could benefit from learning; Shouto would understand that), but have Kirishima notice or otherwise find out about it, and have him bring it up to her later on.

Then, because Kirishima and Mina are friends and should be able to have these conversations with each other, especially in the particularly vulnerable states they’d be in after the war, have Mina actually confide in Kirishima that she’s feeling shitty about freezing up when facing Machia.

Have him remind her of the time he did the same, and expand on what she already knows. I checked back over his Hassaikai arc flashback, and I notice that, while he apologized to the other two girls that were there for freezing up and being unable to help, and while he tells Mina later that he’s saying goodbye to his old pathetic self, he never actually tells her that he admired her courage (unless it’s in some other scene of theirs I’m forgetting about, which is entirely possible; feel free to give me a cite if so). The closest they get to openly acknowledging the way Mina inspired him is her observing that his new styled hair spikes resemble her horns. Have him say it out loud to her after the war, then, when she’s in an emotionally raw place and needs to hear it.

Thus, when he calls her his hero again after the Sludge Villain encounter (if we must indeed keep the Sludge Villain encounter), it becomes a reiteration and callback to that bonding moment, and implicitly him congratulating her on overcoming her fear—like he always knew she would, because she’s his hero.

Why do you care about Mina, btw? You’re a villain stan, correct? So why do you care about Mina’s moment to shine being handled poorly and not receiving the proper care and attention it deserved, if you don’t mind me asking?

Good lord, rvg, just because I’m a villain stan doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to care about bad writing affecting the heroes. If the heroes’ writing were better, it would improve everyone’s treatment, including the villains! If the students’ writing were better, I might actually care about the kids more than I do! If the girls’ writing were better, I would have infinitely less to complain about re: the disparity in how fleshed out they are compared to their male counterparts!

Anyway, I like plenty of heroes. I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A[11] and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari. I love Monoma and Tamaki. On the pro side, I adore Nighteye, am a thoroughly unapologetic Best Jeanist appreciator, and want to watch way more of Rock Lock mouthing off at more people higher ranked than him. I think Haimawari Koichi is everything Horikoshi desperately wants Deku to be and is failing to write him as being. There are plenty of others I at least think are good company when they’re around (Fat Gum and the Wild Wild Pussycats, for example), and some I would be happy to embrace if the series could stop being so incredibly indecisive about how it wants us to read them (Hawks and All Might are big offenders here).

I realize this is a hyper-divided fandom—we might as well start asking all those manufacturers who made the team affiliation T-shirts for the Twilight or MCU fandoms to make us some Team Hero and Team Villain shirts—but I promise you it’s possible to like characters from both sides of the divide. You don’t have to lock yourself into one position or another.

Frankly, I think most of these characters deserve a final arc better than the one they’re in. I’m just louder about it for the villains because they’re the ones who are going to be left to suffer or be forgotten if the actual ending isn’t up to snuff, whereas I fully expect the heroes to get a lavish epilogue chapter that crams cameos and last second answers into every nook and cranny of the panel layout.

All that said, rvg, I'm not sure you'll see this at all, as I don't seem able to tag you, which I'm unsure if means you blocked me at some point after spamming my comments and also my ask box or just that tumblr is being tumblr. If you do, feel free to respond if you like, though I'd prefer a reblog and less vibrating indignation if you do. I hope I've made it clear that I really and truly have nothing against your pink blorbo. Indeed, so far as I can tell, we both think her scene was pretty poorly handled; you're just more willing to do the mental legwork on fleshing out her characterization than I am.

Which is fine, but maybe ratchet back on lashing out at people who don't make it a priority to read depth the author is not providing onto characters that aren't their blorbos. Cheers!

------------------ FOOTNOTES ------------------

[1] And way to be, like, super unnecessarily confrontational with those words you put in my mouth, by the way.

[2] And, yes, also a war crime—even more of one, actually. Forcing captured enemy soldiers to fight their own is only officially a war crime in international conflicts, but Japan is a signatory to an amendment to the Rome Statute that classifies the use of chemical agents in armed conflicts as a war crime in internal disputes as well as international ones. Give or take whether the clashes between heroes and villains meet the criteria of “protracted armed conflict between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups” anyway.

I’m inclined to say the use of licensed and regulated abilities like quirks makes the combatants “armed,” but as much research as I’m willing to give this footnote doesn’t immediately clarify how long hostilities need to drag out to count as “protracted.” Certainly the presence of the PLF makes the villain side an “organized armed group,” though.

[3] Dabi’s blue fire is my go-to example: it reduces back-alley thugs to twisted blackened husks but barely even singes Hawks’s forearms; it melts carbon fiber cables but leaves his outfit completely unscathed. Given that Horikoshi can’t even keep Dabi’s damage output consistent with itself across all of his appearances, I damn sure don’t expect consistent damage output between characters.

[4] Sure, Endeavor’s connected to one of the lead students while Mount Lady is not, but that’s all on the writing. There’s no reason that Mount Lady couldn’t have been connected to a student via a meaningful internship or a past acquaintanceship save that Horikoshi chose not to write her such a connection.

[5] That come, I might note, after he already has gotten back up. Perhaps Horikoshi had been doing this “spoiling the outcome before we see the process” thing for longer than I thought…

[6] Recall that the story managed to make time for a flashback of Deku getting training from Ochaco, Tsuyu and Sero as a lead-in to the conversation between Bakugou and All Might about the latter hiding something.

[7] Or, more cynically, the only one, given how tertiary the characters start becoming immediately after her.

[8] And for what it’s worth, when I said that she was right, I was saying that the world would, in fact, be a better place without bigotry. Obviously the answer is not, “Kill all bigots in their beds,” but I wish the group had talked more about what Mina said because it would have been a more frank, more honest discussion about how to fight bigotry than the provided answer of, “Put a bag over your head and hope it goes away on its own if you and everyone like you just act with inhuman levels of patience and calm at all times for the next hundred years.”

[9] Give or take her dramatically shaded angry face in Chapter 338—a face she is making along with the entire rest of her class sans Aoyama, so, again, really not impressing upon me that Mina particularly is a character struggling to avoid losing herself to revenge.

[10] So, you know, all those people who fell from upper floors of the Villa were probably also fine. But it’s one or the other, isn’t it? Either that kind of fall is enough to severely injure people so Cementoss knowingly enacted an opening gambit that stood a high chance of maiming or killing an unknown number of people, or people in BNHA would walk it off with nothing worse than a few abrasions, in which case Midnight was in no significant danger.

[11] In seating order, I like: Aoyama, Tsuyu, Iida, Uraraka, Ojiro, Tokoyami, and, from the war arc on, Mineta.

#bnha #bnha 383 #class talk #pink alien on parade #sludge villain #bnha midnight #(deserved better)#bnha critical #bnha damage physics #stillness talks more #randomvongenerico #spent four days working on this so I need a tiny break #but I'll get the next chapter post up ASAP

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