#todotalk | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stillness-in-green · 1 year

Text

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 387: Congealing

Howdy, everyone, guess who had an unusually high amount of research to do for this post? Next chapter's should be up faster, between being extra short and largely Todo-centric.

Content Note: I will be talking quite a lot about the Himura inter-family marriages below. An enormous chunk of this post is going to be dedicated to dispelling some of the most frequent misconceptions in the fandom response to the Himura situation, which I don't think is anywhere near as drastic as a lot of people are making it out to be. That's not the same as saying there's nothing wrong with it at all! However, I want to be very clear on what I believe Geten is describing before I talk about what we can gather from it.

(Spoilers: A lot of people don't have the first clue what the phrase "branch family" indicates and good lord, does it ever show.)

Hit the jump.

On Geten and the Himura

O Wow, you guys. Wow. Okay, so, obviously, lots to cover here, and I know I’ve said before that I try to make these posts with minimal reference to Bad Takes I’m seeing out there in the wilds of the fandom, but holy shit, people, the takes are SO INCREDIBLY BAD. I should have known better, I guess, than to expect the fandom to be remotely reasonable about a reveal that intersects with both the MLA and the Todoroki. So, first things first:

Please, please, please, knock it off with the inbreeding jokes and the screeching panic about Rei’s only choices being an abusive arranged marriage or a cousin-marriage. Geten specifies in nearly every translation we have that the intermarriages within the Himura clan were between distant relatives. And I strongly, strongly suspect that the majority of people who are making banjo jokes or fretting about the deleterious effects of inbreeding on their faves have not the faintest idea what Geten is talking about when he says “branch families” and “main family.”

As an illustrative example, let’s talk in brief about the Fujiwara clan.

The most dominant clan throughout virtually all of Japan's Heian Era (794 – 1195) was the Fujiwara clan, whose whole shtick was marrying their daughters to Emperors and then relying on the practice of raising the future Emperor in his mother’s household to take advantage of filial piety traditions—which applied even to in-laws!—to secure the loyalty of the Emperor/future Emperor to his Fujiwara father/grandfather. Even after they fell from the heights of their influence, they still monopolized powerful positions as imperial advisors and regents all the way up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868!

That’s over a thousand years of first marrying into the imperial line and then being the only family who were even eligible to be chosen as regents for child Emperors or Empresses Regnant. They certainly didn’t achieve that by being a single family for a thousand years! Rather, there were branch families under the clan umbrella, four of note—

—Well, actually, it was four during the Heian Era. Once the Kamakura period rolled around the most powerful of those four further subdivided into five. So eight families total—

—Well, wait, those were really just the most important and chief of the families. Actually there were five more cadet branches, too. So thirteen families total—

—But actually, those five cadet branches were subdivided even further as well. According to Wikipedia, the total number of subfamilies in the Fujiwara clan, families that were specifically aristocrats in the Imperial court (the kuge class) or higher—is…

Uh. Ninety-seven.

Now, I don’t know how many of those families existed concurrently, but with numbers like that, I hardly think it matters. All those families—and they are families, not individuals—fell under the broad umbrella of the Fujiwara clan. So, you know, if some of them intermarry, it’s not exactly on the same level as you marrying your first cousin! Or your second. Or your third or fourth or fifth.

Obviously I don’t think the Himura were anywhere near that big or influential, but I hope it illustrates my point: Japanese clans that have had a few hundred years to develop can be fucking enormous. Please banish from your mind the idea that the Himura have been marrying their direct cousins this whole time. When Geten says they created multiple branch families, and started marrying distant relatives, the plural on "branch families" and the adjective "distant" are giving us crucial, meaningful information, not just superfluous clutter.

Truthfully, I think a lot of this panic is due to the fact that most people aren’t very into genealogy and thus have no idea how quickly you can become very distant indeed from people with whom you share a common ancestor. I mean, how many of your third cousins can you name? For me, that answer is zero. Heck, I can’t even name any second cousins. The best I could do would be to tell you of their existence in broad strokes—the son of one of my mother’s cousins, whose name I don’t remember but who I know exists; the hypothetical children one of my father’s cousins might have had at some point after the last time I heard anything about him, well over twenty years ago, at which time he was still single.

Now, it’s a little easier to look down the family tree rather than across, in this case. To wit, you almost certainly know your cousins much better than your parents’ cousins—your children and your cousins’ children will be second cousins. That’s probably much closer feeling, right? But put yourself in the shoes of those kids—unless you live in the same town as your cousins, and see each other pretty frequently, your children and theirs will probably meet only a handful of times before they grow up and head off to live their own lives. After all, look back up—how well do you remember your parents’ cousins’ children?

And, again—that’s second cousins, the outer periphery of what people who study this stuff class as “close relatives.” [1] Geten specifying distant relatives means we’re talking farther removed even than that. Your second cousins once removed, for example, would be either your second cousins’ children (that is, your parents’ cousins’ grandchildren) or your grandparents’ cousins’ children. Your third cousins, meanwhile, would be your grandparents’ cousins’ grandchildren.

Have you ever met family that far removed? Have you seen pictures? Do you even know if they exist? How many members of your extended family do you know of, generally, perhaps because your parents brought you along on visits a few times as a child, but you’ve long since forgotten their names or their specific relation to you?

Now, in a situation like Geten is talking about, you probably would be able to positively answer some of my questions above, because you’d be mid-level ruling class; your parents would be talking about marriage to someone (hopefully) your age in a branch family. But that doesn’t mean you would have met them. They’d probably live in a different part of the country entirely, your common ancestor married to some outside group before the Advent of the Exceptional. The branch families of, for example, the Tokugawa shogunate lived in four strongholds, each a hundred or more miles distant from the next.[2] You can track descendants of Queen Victoria through royals from England, Spain, and all three of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

What all this boils down to is that, no, it really is not that strange for a widely spread clan to do a bit of intermarriage now and then to consolidate power. People in power want power to stay in the family. Duh.

However.

That all said, I am not saying the situation Geten describes is 100% fine and cool. Obviously if it were totally normal and unremarkable, there’d be no point to even bringing it up, much less having Mr. Compress disparagingly comment on it! But look at the timetable here. The Himura began as village leaders a long, long time ago, and even after the land reforms, they still went on creating branch families, enabling them to maintain their wealth and pride.

It’s after the Advent that the marrying between the families starts. And even this, done a handful of times and then abandoned, would not be a damning thing—as I said, those big families in power do have marriages across branches sometimes. The real trouble is carrying out such marriages repeatedly, across many generations, within a small group. Some research on the Habsburgs, for example, surely the most famous inbred royals in the Western hemisphere, turned this up:

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous. In other words, they were marriages between close blood relatives. Most often, these unions took the form of marriages between first cousins, double-first cousins, and uncles/nieces.

Nowhere does Geten suggest that things with the Himura got this bad. In fact, I would argue that the text is quite clear that the family slowly stopped intermarrying, and this is what led to their demise! Consider the following points:

The Advent happened in modern times. The glowing baby is delivered in what is very clearly a modern hospital; the very next panel shows a geeky dude levitating a volume of manga, which didn’t even exist in the form we know today until after WWII. Technology stalled in the wake of the Advent, but the characters now still have cellphones and laptop computers—the Advent was modern. My rough estimate for how long it’s been since then is a bit over 150 years.

Because the Advent happened in modern times, the Himura family would have known about the dangers of excessive intermarriage. This isn’t something they’ve been doing since the Stone Age and refused to change their minds about until the last twenty-five years!

Because the Himura family would have known about the dangers of inbreeding, look at what happens: they do inter-branch marriages to “distant relatives” for about 125 years and then they stop. Over the course of that time, the clan shrinks and wanes, for one reason that is immediately self-apparent and a few others that we can guess were probable. The self-apparent reason is that, even though the families started out as distant relatives, the divide would get shorter with every wedding that produced children. Thus, the pool of marriageable candidates for those children gets smaller and smaller as the families become more closely entwined. Avenues close off, marriages become unavailable that would be illegal under Japanese law (which allows marriage between first cousins, but not between uncle and niece/aunt and nephew), or which would have too high a concern of congenital defects—which, remember, a modern family would be aware of. We can hypothesize plenty of other reasons for the clan’s diminishment. Once it became clear that quirks were there to stay, entire families might have broken away rather than go along with an inherently doomed endeavor. Some marriageable candidates likely ran away or otherwise abandoned the family rather than continuing along the path the family had laid out for them. There would probably have been otherwise acceptable candidates who became unacceptable due to developing quirks that were undesirable to the bloodline.[3] And so on and so forth.

Eventually, Geten says, the head family—presumably the one Rei’s from—started selling off their children to outsiders, and that was the end. If the head family threw in the towel on preserving the bloodline, the branch families certainly weren’t going to be bound to do it anymore! And so the remnants of the clan shattered.

So, no. Rei’s choices were not, “Marry Enji or marry a cousin.” Rei’s parents were looking for someone who could bring money to the family; by that point in time, I don’t think they would have let her marry within the family even if she’d wanted to!

By the same token, Dabi and Geten are not cousins—not in the way people have been using the word, at least, to mean “someone I am imagining to be as close to me as, like, my first cousin, ew.” While the repeated intermarriage would indeed have reduced the distance quickly as the generations passed, if the common ancestor (that is, the family founder) was from, say, eight generations ago, two and a half centuries prior to the point at which the intermarriage began, and there were at least five or six branches of family at the start,[4] it would have taken more than just one or two generations before the only options available to wed were close relatives!

And, to reiterate, that’s exactly what we saw happen—the Himura kept it up for a few generations, shrinking all the while, but fragmenting for good four or five generations after the Advent. I would guess that, while Geten would have been more closely related to any children Rei had borne via intermarriage, Dabi and Geten are third or fourth cousins at best. The Himura were in denial about the new state of the world; they weren’t idiots that managed to forget everything history has ever demonstrated about what happens when you keep marrying off first cousins in a closed environment.

That all said, what else have we got this chapter?? Because make no mistake, the fact that I’m pushing back against reductive cousin-marriage takes in no way means that I wish to shy away from examining the darker implications here!

O I love how ambivalent about all this Geten is. Given that Rei was married to an outsider over twenty years ago, if the branch families scattered around that time, Geten must have been very young, so he’d have been profoundly impacted by it. This is especially apparent given the harshness of the language he uses to describe the event: the families don’t merely admit defeat and grudgingly set to integrating; they “scatter.” The main line doesn’t just start marrying outsiders; they start “selling their children.”

This suggests incredibly bitter feelings in the family, and no wonder! I imagine there were a lot of people, especially in the branch families or among younger members, who’d hated the clan’s insularity, and they would have left the moment they had an excuse to! Conversely, though, there would also have been people who’d been indoctrinated into the clan’s worldview all their lives, people who’d quashed their doubts or discomfort down long ago, who would be clinging to sunk cost fallacies with all their strength because change would be terrifying to them. Those people, I think, would be particularly likely to have complete breakdowns (or meltdowns) when the main family surrendered.

Whatever happened, it must have been quite dramatic, given the way Geten talks about Re-Destro having found him. Counter to a couple of, just, woefully awful takes I’ve seen around, Re-Destro did not buy Geten; it doesn’t even sound like he found him via any official channel. It was the main family members who were being “sold off,” remember; the branch families, which Geten explicitly associates himself with, were “scattered.” It sounds, then, like Geten was basically an orphan, and not one living in any kind of facility or home. He clearly had family, but whether he bolted on his own, was abandoned,[5] or whatever, that family’s no longer in the picture. This despite the fact that, again, he would have been a very, very young child at the time.

On a similar note, because of that youth, it’s also probable that his view on the family tragedy is colored at least in part by whatever Re-Destro’s reaction to it was when he got Geten’s story upon taking him in.

Re-Destro, of course, is all for radical quirk acceptance, but he’s deeply entangled with issues of bloodline himself. Although he uses some pretty flowery language to talk about his inherited blood from Destro, he also views that duty as a huge burdensome responsibility from which he is deliriously happy to be freed by Shigaraki. So we might suppose that he himself is pretty cold on chaining children to bloodline purity politics, especially in absence of a Worthy Cause. And rejecting the glorious future of everyone using their quirks to become who they were meant to be is the very opposite of a worthy cause!

O Gee, I wonder what Spinner would have thought about this. What a shame we didn’t have a three-month period where the League and the MLA were living together to explore oh wait.

O Congratulations to everyone who ever ventured to suggest that the Todoroki microaggressions against heteromorphs might stem from Rei, with her old money, traditionalist family, rather than New Money Endeavor, who went whole scenes being mad at Hawks and never called him anything dehumanizing even in his own mind. Guess there was something to Natsuo not bringing up his mouse-eared girlfriend in the hospital scene after all!

I’m mostly being facetious about this, but you can check here if you want my thoughts on who in the Todofam uses animal insults, who doesn’t, and some analysis as to why. I'd add two observations in light of new information:

First, Natsuo's girlfriend isn't at the shelter with him and the others, despite having a far better justification for being with him than the Masegaki kids have to be hanging around Fuyumi. It's a small absence, but noticeable in the context of the Himura being specifically described as heteromorphobic by Compress.

Second, while a lot of people say that heteromorph discrimination is a recent retcon, it's got a lot of early evidence. In that same vein, it's notable that Rei brings up bloodlines and obligation to them all the way back in Chapter 39—Shouto's Sports Festival flashback—where she reassures baby Shouto that he isn't a slave to his blood as the two of them watch All Might on TV talking about quirks being passed on from parent to child.

It's a little obscured by both Shouto's fears of coming to resemble his father and All Might's (frankly pretty contradictory) claims about what his, "I am here!" catchphrase is meant to indicate, but even back then, Rei's comfort is phrased in terms of being free from obligation to one's blood. If Horikoshi already knew what the Himuras' deal was even back then, one can easily imagine that he already knew the sorts of people the Himura were rejecting.

On the Todofam Reunion:

I love all the information packed into Geten and Compress scene, but I do wish it felt less arbitrary. Indeed, it’s the second scene we’ve gotten of the incredibly specific “captured villains sit in their cells and randomly, with no apparent prompting, talk about something relevant to the Todoroki situation” scenario. But then, this whole confrontation in the Todofam is wildly arbitrary. Which is frustrating! The family had that great scene in the hospital where they all talked about stopping Touya together and then did absolutely nothing to actually make that happen, and it really does not reflect well on either them or this whole scene.

Consider:

Dabi is only in this location, confronting Endeavor, because of spill-over effect from other villain actions (Spinner, Kurogiri). This was not planned in advance because the villains didn’t plan for being split up. Likewise, Endeavor confirms this chapter that he was trying to lure Touya away from the fighting at the Villa, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have intentionally led Touya towards one of the evacuation routes if he’d known there was a stalled box in the danger zone. (Why exactly didn't one of the people at police HQ tip him off about that?)

There are many, many other transports Rei and the kids could have gotten onto; they’re on this specific one rather than any others by total freak coincidence, not active choice.

The transport only stops where it does because of outside villain interference (Skeptic, and, as of next chapter, AFO’s spies). This interference was obviously not intended to stop the transport in the specific location it did because Skeptic was already interfering with them long before Dabi was warped in, and the AFO spies ought to value their own lives too much to willingly try to get themselves killed in a blue flame inferno. (More on them next week, because my god, does their scene in 388 annoy the hell out of me.)

So, taken all together, the Todofam’s vow in the hospital has amounted to absolutely nothing, and the fact that they’re being reunited now is a result of villain actions at best, random chance at worst. At no point have any of them been seen to make an effort at facilitating a full family action. While, yes, it is the case that the rest of the family are civilians, why even talk about “dealing with Touya as a family” if they’re going to do nothing of the sort? When did “deal with Touya as a family” become “allow the planners of this combat to move us all to different locations, leaving only Shouto—who knows the least about Touya of anyone in the family!—to try and talk down the brother who resents him more than anyone?”

It's just another point where Team Hero talks big but takes no action to back that talk up.

On Enji and Touya:

O The, “Watch me!”/”I don’t want to watch you die!” exchange is good stuff—all that telling people to watch him, and now Enji’s on the other side of that. Even better is that ludicrously delightful panel of the two of them with hands and flame-hands entwined, Enji’s arms wide open as Touya comes in[6] for a landing. As ever, Dabi’s dancing imagery is on-fucking-point. Good work getting your dad to dance with you in hell, Dabs.

O As to Enji’s actions here, I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s extremely telling that Endeavor leaps straight to, “Guess we’ll die together, then,” when he fails to talk Dabi down, and that’s emblematic of the flaws of the hero mentality, which is so drastically bad at dealing with nuanced situations in which they or their society have failed.

On the other hand, Enji does try to talk to Touya here and gets nowhere, not necessarily because he’s saying the wrong things (though you could argue that he is) but because Dabi’s frying his own brain. This is uncomfortably reminiscent of Spinner’s mental decay, and, as others have said, I’m Very Not Here for the villains being so damaged mentally that they can’t even articulate their own grievances, allowing heroes to get the last word by default even though their “solutions” are wildly insufficient and ultimately in support of the demonstrably failing status quo.

Anyway, Enji is obviously taking the wrong tack here, but I can’t help but feel like the writing has put him in a no-win situation by stripping Touya’s ability to reason from him, rendering him unable to even attempt to respond to Enji’s attempts at engagement. Enji’s still ultimately to blame for this, of course, thanks to all his many, many failures to engage with Touya at literally any point prior to this, but it’s just an ongoing disappointment to me that we continue to be deprived of a proper intellectual back-and-forth about this society’s ultimate worth because, at all times, either the heroes are unwilling to engage or the villains have been rendered unable to.

O Travel times in this series continue to be unbelievably whack. Endeavor has gotten 800 meters from the Villa ruins? 800 meters? That's less than half a mile! AFO is most of the way to U.A. by now! All Might has driven even farther, going all the way from the police HQ, which is probably in Tokyo near Central Hospital, past Kamino and every other active battlefront, to far enough out from U.A. to intercept AFO's flight path. That's well over a hundred miles, traveled in a matter of minutes![7] But Endeavor, even on injured legs, couldn't make it one single mile?? And Dabi couldn't have caught up to him if he was moving that slow?

God save me from these arbitrary fucking travel times!

Stray Notes:

O The “land reforms,” not “the agricultural revolution,” jfc C.Cook. There's a pretty huge difference between a family sustaining their power through an agricultural upheaval in 1947 vs. 10,000 BC!

O Why is it so cold in there?? Get Mr. Compress a jacket!!! Also, like, Geten doesn’t seem terribly bothered, as one might expect from an ice quirk user, but it’s a bit inconsistent with his wearing a full-length parka during his fights, seeing as the parka would suggest he is, in fact, not totally immune to sustained chills!

That being the case, why is it so cold in there? I wouldn’t think it’s actually just that cold in the prison, since there’s obviously a cold mist drifting into Mr. C’s cell, rather than being ambient in both of them. Does Geten just generate it? His whole thing up to now has been that he controls ice but can’t create it from nothing, so if it is coming from him, that would be—well, not quite a retcon, but certainly a swerve.

Does he naturally generate it but do so very slowly, not in sufficient amounts to use for his preferred Ballistic Iceberg fighting style? If it’s coming from him automatically, can he turn it off? Presumably not, since if he could and isn’t, that would suggest he’s doing this with a goal in mind, something you have to think his jailers would have Opinions about.

So if he can’t turn it off, and this just happens in anyplace he sits long enough, is the parka to protect other people from his chill, rather than to protect him from the cold of the ice he uses? Recall that there wasn’t ice caked on his chair during e.g. the MLA dinner scene. What a fascinating idea, and one that speaks to the need for support items like Detnerat makes!

Well, whatever the case, I certainly hope he’s about to use his ice to decisively break them out of there! Because haha, why wouldn’t he be able to do that if he ambiently creates cold just by sitting there and the prison can’t even be arsed to crank the temperature up?? Surely no one thinks that those restraints on his hands are sufficient to stop him from using his ice? I haven’t forgotten that he definitively does not need to touch ice in order to control it, and it can’t be that hard to find a fire suppression sprinkler system line or the plumbing connected to whatever the toilet situation is for prisoners or something!!

(Sigh.)

O Unexpectedly good of the heroes to let Mr. Compress keep his prosthetic. And a bed, no less! I wonder where Geten’s bed is. (My god, these jail conditions are so inhuman. Get them a damn futon, at least.)

O That hint that Mr. C has been talking to the cops and heroes—Geten asking about the conversation—I wonder if anything will come of that? Because it would be incredibly lame for Horikoshi to promise us we’d see Mr. C again only for this to be his final appearance, doing nothing but weighing in with disgruntled expressions on Geten’s out-of-nowhere backstory drop. It’s a pretty shit final scene for Geten, too, dropping backstory exposition for no reason save to layer in some justification for the ice powers Dabi is about to exhibit.

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

[1] The cut-off between close and distant relatives is made here because, once you get further out than second cousins, there’s little to no difference in the impact of shared blood on the child of two such distant relatives and that experienced by any random person in the general population.

[2] I eyeballed this on a map, so it’s not exact, but it’ll do as a ballpark. Two of them looked a little closer together than a hundred miles, but that’s also a straight overland route from Point A to Point B, which the roads probably wouldn’t have been. Incidentally, traveling a hundred miles in a time before cars would have taken at least five days if you weren’t a military messenger in a hurry and trading out horses at multiple stops.

[3] Given that the characters in-universe still don’t know the origin of quirks, there’s no way to completely guarantee desirable quirks, or even to perfectly guard against the dreaded heteromorphic quirks. Eventually, the Himura would get a kid whose ice quirk is tied to the fact that they were born looking like a snowman, or they'd crop up a polar bear heteromorph or something. And whoops, there goes another viable bloodline.

[4] A very reasonable and indeed conservative estimate. Remember that Geten says “the few remaining families” scattered after the main family gave up; the plural indicates that there were still at least two branch family holdouts even after all the waning and shrinking. In turn, those being the remainder means there must have been more previously. Losing only two over the course of over a century of mandated intermarriage throughout the chaos of the Advent is possibly undershooting quite a bit! I talked about the Fujiwara earlier, but for an anime example of how ridiculous the branch family situation can get, look at Kakegurui: we’re at ten and counting branch families under the control of the main line, and if we read the kanji of that main line's name literally, there could be ninety more in the wings.

[5] I lean towards some form of abandonment because it makes the Dabi foiling tastier if Touya left his family by choice when he became Dabi, whereas Geten was left alone through no choice of his own. Abandonment also provides more meaningful context on Geten’s attachment to RD and his determination to be useful and strong for him.

[6] Crotch-first.

[7] Maybe he gave Lady Nagant a ride and that’s how she got in range to start taking potshots at Shigaraki at U.A.? It'd be nice to have any kind of explanation for that particular feat, though it would mean All Might didn't leave Tokyo until after Kurogiri was freed, cutting into his travel time even more. But heck, what's a few minutes matter when your car can drive eight hundred miles an hour, right? Christ.

#bnha #bnha 387 #chapter thoughts #geten #himura family circumstances #todotalk #bnha culture gap #bnha fandom critical

70 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 11 months

Text

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 390: Todoroki Shouto Rising

O I wonder if the busted pipes mean Iida’s going to have to go back out to the woods to pull them out so he can grow in a new set? Yowch.

O It's really odd to credit this moment to All Might’s chops as a teacher? Like, I’m hardly the world’s foremost expert on the 1-A kids, but the absolute most I remember All Might doing for Shouto is being an encouraging presence, and for Iida, rather less than that. Iida’s faster pipes are a result of his family’s knowledge; Shouto’s Phosphor is, as best I recall, largely his own invention. At most, we might say he went to Endeavor for help getting his fire on par with his ice, maybe as preparation for this very move. But All Might? All Might’s Deku’s teacher; in fact, he’s so little focused on the rest of the kids that he wholeheartedly pulls in three of them to teach their moves to Deku with no thought at all given to Deku or himself teaching them anything in return.

All Might’s big advancement in teaching circa the one-hundred-chapter mark was not giving Deku easy answers, but rather giving him a hint*; it took remembering one of Gran Torino’s lines and a visit to the Support Course lab for Deku to figure out that answer. And maybe I’m just forgetting something, but I don’t remember All Might doing much after that on the teaching front? Certainly not that actually got extended to Shouto and Iida!

And sure, maybe this is just Tsukauchi being ignorant, but like, credit where credit is due, and while All Might is the one that had the confidence in Shouto and Iida to do what they just did, he damn sure isn’t the one who taught it to them. Hell, given that he specifically instructed them to go after Dabi, it’s not even in keeping with his aforementioned teaching breakthrough: giving a student a problem and then stepping back and letting them solve it themselves. Partial credit at best.

O Sorry, gang, but I just have virtually nothing to say about the big centerpiece. I appreciate that Dabi’s got at least a semblance of his mind back. I like Natsuo’s open acknowledgement that the way ahead is choked with thorns. I have a thin ghost of emotion for Dabi’s hopeless whispers of hatred and Endeavor encouraging him to keep going, because certainly the silence and refusal to grapple with their problems head-on was a huge part of the family’s damage.

All of this, however, is hobbled by the lack of agency in the family choosing this outcome, as opposed to being pushed to it at every turn by outside forces. Dabi only gets to have a whisper of coherence at the very end, instead of in the middle of the fight when it would have made him more of a challenge to deal with. Natsuo nods to what should be a fascinating story of the family having to pull together to save Touya (and with him the family's precarious path to recovery) from the future in store for him, but we’re already in the endgame, so I already know we’re not going to get to see more than a hint or two about that fascinating story.

And, of course, the family continued refusing to actively grapple with their problems until the last possible second, only getting here thanks to the plot handing them a load of conveniences, contrivances and work from outside actors that their own actions up to now failed to earn.

I want to care about this, but god, It all just feels like Too Little Too Late.

O I do very much like that closing image of the Todoroki family alone at the center of the ice, only them and their family issues together in that field of desolate white, but at least all together at last. It's super evocative and visually powerful.

I would also very much like it if they would stay there for a while.

O GOOD LUCK, TOGA. So far you’re the only one League member who’s been in control of yourself mentally for this whole fight, and I would really, really like it if you could hang onto that.

--------

* Note that he immediately walks over to Kirishima and gives him very concrete advice about just breaking through like a bulldozer, not any kind of “hint” at all. All Might’s gotta save his ‘A’ material for his protégé, I guess.

#bnha #bnha 390 #chapter thoughts #todotalk #all might semi critical #mostly just snide commentary about his teaching chops #god i'm so ready for no more tododrama for a while #sorry for the lack of insightful commentary about them team #but in fairness these are chapter THOUGHTS posts not chapter reviews #and i seldom think much about the todorokis #my writing

29 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 11 months

Text

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 388: Touya + Chapter 389: Assurances and Prayers

The last two chapters were so short and contained so little that I care about such that I have measurable amounts to say that I decided to just combine them. Hit the jump for two major talking points and a bunch of stray observations.

AFO’s Spies, Or: God, Why Can’t We Have Subplots That Matter Anymore

The AFO spy scene is just so fucking maddening. Just like the bulk of the MLA, the spies’ whole subplot has gone virtually nowhere. They were told to get Deku to leave U.A., but had no hand in doing so. They’ve provided no information of value to AFO.[1] They’re being credited with stopping this cube here, but take a look at the problems with that:

This is a task that could just as easily have been assigned, narratively speaking, to Skeptic, who was already shown to be messing with the cubes. I know the logical protest is that this is the only cube La Brava couldn’t get moving again, so there must be some other complicating factor, but guys, this is the only cube that matters to the story! It does not change a single solitary thing about the plot if all the cubes are sabotaged and have to be evacuated or only this one, because this is the only one the story’s lens is on. It’s the only one in imminent danger, the only one carrying plot-relevant characters; every other cube could just be evacuated at the leisure of the heroes inside or once the battle is over, so it doesn’t matter if they can move or not. Since it doesn’t matter, there’s no problem with just letting Skeptic stop all of them, rather than blowing AFO’s spies here.

Stopping one random block of escapees does nothing in particular to help AFO, so I can’t imagine why all four of these people would choose to put all their chips on it. At best, all I can think is that they’ve been here long enough to know that the Number 1 Hero’s family is present, and they might make decent hostages for the Dark Lord, but that’s certainly not anything Bowl Cut Dude was thinking about when he got collared; he acted like stopping the cube itself was his best attempt as doing something useful to AFO. But like, in what universe is one cache of people—ones now at risk of being incinerated by Dabi before AFO can even make use of them!—more valuable to AFO than spies still safely ensconced in a vulnerable refugee population bound for the next-most prominent hero school in the country?

The power is supposed to be out in here! The cube is being moved on exterior rails that are on the other side of a three-foot thick metal floor! How did the spies even access “the foundation” to stop it from moving? Using what light source? Using what quirks? How did the heroes see them doing it? What were the spies actually doing that they reasonably thought they could get away with, and why were they so immediately stopped?? Why bother setting them up like they’re going to be a problem and then have them immediately dealt without with no problem at all the second they attempt to do anything?!

This is all not even getting into the problems with how they’re portrayed—it remains mind-blowing to me that the story is insistent to the point of ham-handedness on the Aoyama family as blackmailed and terrified victims, but the instant we have to look at someone who hasn’t shared a classroom with Deku for the whole length of the story, all that sympathy is immediately abandoned. Instead, the only spy in whose head we spend any length of time is constantly drawn with these unbalanced, manic grins that completely undermine the fact that his thoughts, read in and of themselves, would seem to incline the reader towards compassion.

I’m just so tired of the way this story wants to hold up sympathy for villains as morally good, a desirable and indeed necessary mindset for the young heroes to have, but then the story itself can only find sympathy for a handful of the characters the young heroes interact with, while shrugging off all the rest as villainous caricatures. Would a little bit of ideological consistency be so damn much to ask?

That said, while the people collared by the heroes this chapter are the four who were most consistently shown in their scene back at U.A., there was one other probable spy that I don’t see getting nabbed here, so maybe, maybe there’ll be one tiny wrinkle left in this plotline yet.

Leopard Guy, Old Lady Megane, Beanie Hat Girl and Bowl Cut Dude are all out. I'm rooting for you so hard, Nondescript Dark-Haired Gal.

On Dabster

A very common trope of manga dealing with youkai—I assume borrowed from real folklore, though I haven’t done the research to say that for sure—is the warning not to make eye contact with them, lest they notice you looking at them. Whether they desire or resent your gaze, no good can come of a youkai’s attention! Since my favorite treatment of Dabi leans on the supernatural—that he’s Touya’s angry ghost—I very much enjoy the, “Don’t even look at Dabi!” sentiment of heroes directing the evacuation of the cube.

Of course, Revenant Dabi being my favorite Dabi doesn’t mean that’s an approach it behooves the characters to take in-universe—indeed, not looking at Touya has been rather the problem this whole time! It’s tellingly dehumanizing that heroes are taking the “watching” element of the Todoroki plotline and cranking it up to eleven in exhortations to not watch Dabi which implicitly liken him to a supernatural horror story. Dabi is a horror story, but he’s a horror story about the consequences of neglect, pride and willful blindness.

In that same vein, Dabi being about to scythe down everyone in a five-kilometer range, including his own allies, makes a pretty good metaphor for the problem of villains in general. They’re failed by society and they don’t just go lie down quietly somewhere to die; they become everyone’s problem. The danger villains present to heroes and other law-abiding folk is obvious enough, but it applies to other villains, too.

Well-positioned villains like AFO and Overhaul may give the people under their wing somewhere to exist that normal society would deny them, but that doesn’t mean those people aren’t in danger from their masters’ larger aims. The MLA may offer belonging and support to their members, but that doesn’t make them less of a cult.

The League enjoys by far the healthiest interpersonal environment of the major villain groups, but that doesn’t mean they’re totally safe from the consequences of one another’s goals. The story’s been teasing at that since the second Toga held a knife to Shigaraki’s throat and asked him why she should go along with being sent to the Hassaikai; the conflict between Toga’s desires and Shigaraki’s was then made explicit during their meeting with Ujiko. Twice was happy with the League, but he still died in the course of trying to help them. Spinner and Mr. Compress have, each in their own way, been maimed in their pursuit of Shigaraki’s dream.

Nowhere, though, is that more clear than with Dabi, who led someone he believed to be a spy right into the League’s midst for no adequately explained reason, who at best weaponized Twice’s death for his own cause, and who I don’t for a moment believe burned down Toga’s childhood home and gave her a vial of Twice’s blood out of nothing but the goodness of his spurned heart. Dabi presenting a danger to Toga here is just a logical endpoint of the danger he’s always presented to the League more broadly.

That said, I don’t love this as a defining endgame crisis for the villains. The heroes saving villains from themselves/each other while doing nothing to repair the fragile, corrupt system that landed the villains in such vulnerable situations to begin with is a cheap out on the story’s themes of societal responsibility.

Stray Notes:

O I do thank the story for giving me any kind of reasonable explanation for how all these people, including children and the elderly, are going to get out of range of the explosion in time. However, the UA robots proudly proclaiming that they exist to serve humans’ desires is a deeply unsettling element to think about in the context of their earlier “Kill All Humans” attitude and the note in [the movie booklet] that they’ve rebelled against humans in the past. The PLF R2-D2 advisor needs to come and liberate his robo-brethren post-haste, because that imagery of the robot giving a thumbs up as it’s abandoned to crisp and blacken in the heat of a human’s flames is really quite distasteful!

O A bit of Rei’s conservative upbringing showing in her telling boy Natsuo to look after girl Fuyumi even though Fuyumi’s three and a half years older than Natsuo and has been taking care of him since they were children.

O I’ve got nothing much to say about the big reunion. I feel like I’d have more appreciation for a less excruciatingly contrived version of this scene, and also if Horikoshi had not put so. much. work. into making Dramatic Explosions such a complete non-threat that even as Dabi burns his eyeballs away and his very face starts to fracture, I just feel zero sense of concern for him and the people around him. The art’s nice, and I really do want to be moved by Rei, Fuyumi, and Natsuo’s individual moments of calling out to Touya, but the fact is that I want it more than I feel it. Good of Rei for actually just plain-old apologizing, though, and I like Fuyumi and Enji’s unabashed begging. As to Natsuo, I remember there being some disagreement back during the hospital scene about who Natsuo was wishing he’d just hauled off and punched back when he was a kid—the official suggested Endeavor, while most of the other translations pegged Touya. Though I find the Viz release to be typically the more reliable about squirrelly subject/object distinctions, Touya as the prospective punch-ee did make more intuitive sense to me; I wonder if Natsuo yelling at his brother in fairly harsh terms this chapter supports that read?

O Re: the color page, I am laughing at it being another villain coming in to lock their legs around the hips of the object of their attention. The real question is, who’s more in danger of being leg-locked by Teen!AFO, Deku or Shigaraki? (The idea that Deku could be in danger of this from Shigaraki doesn’t even bear thinking about.)

O If the explosion is not yet happening, why persist in drawing it as an opaque dome of radiant, bursting light and heat?

O I see the Masegaki kids are back with their actual teacher again. For real, where in hell are their parents?

O We should have seen Can’t-Ya-See-kun way before now. Seeing only the very beginning of what promised to be his crisis of faith in Endeavor during Dabi’s broadcast only to totally abandon him right up until the moment he starts praying for Endeavor is such a cheap play for sympathy. I really was interested in his (hypothetical but logical) disillusionment! I’m not interested in seeing him get his illusions faith back without the slightest nod towards the time he spent having abandoned it. A picture may be worth a thousand words—his expression right before he bows his head is very evocative!—but this picture needed at least one similarly wordy picture predating it.

--------

* Maybe they’re the ones who told him that Deku was back at U.A. at all? But I’m skeptical that he couldn’t have found that out via other means, especially with Skeptic at his disposal.

#bnha #bnha 388 #bnha 389 #chapter thoughts #afo spies #todotalk #revenant dabi is my favorite dabi #ua robots #can't-ya-see-kun

17 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 1 year

Text

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 386: I Am Here

Sorry for the lateness on this one, folks. This time it was less Life Happening and more trying to sculpt all of my many, many words about All Might and his mech suit into something at least kind of coherent. I've got a few asks and a meme I got tagged in I'm hoping to get posted before the next chapter, fingers crossed.

Hit the jump!

On “Everyone’s on their last legs” and “No heroes can possibly make it in time.”:

O I have… Some issues with these claims. Let me take the latter one first.

No one can make it in time? Really? Iida is being tasked with running across a third of the country in under ten minutes. Gigantomachia’s ludicrous turns of speed are well-documented. Okay, Machia’s incapacitated and Iida’s got something else to do, but even setting aside the two of them, Miss Joke turned up at the Villain Cave mere moments after La Brava determined Skeptic’s location because she and the Ketsubutsu kids “happened to be nearby.” Lady Nagant managed to get from Central Hospital to within firing range of UA, well over a hundred miles away, in what absolutely cannot have been more than two or three minutes. The supersonic American jets are still perfectly intact, too.

Distance between combatants has been a laughable nonissue for the heroes for this entire fight, but now we’re supposed to believe that travel time presents any sort of problem?

Further, the claim, “Everyone’s on their last legs” is certainly interesting, in that it rather strongly suggests that the villains are winning, or at least doing so much damage that even when they finally lose, it leaves the heroes who were facing them with no energy to relocate. Like, the travel time is an issue, but it doesn’t seem to be the primary issue; it’s not the one that’s brought up first. The one that’s brought up first, and twice, is that there’s no one in good enough shape for it.

And like, really? No one at all? None of the heroes at Machia’s containment facility, who should all be free at this point? No one at the arena fight where all the non-important villains were teleported? No one at the parking lot fight? No one at all?

Certainly it would be nice to believe that the villains at the other combat locations around the country are doing so well, but that sure hasn’t been reflected in the story thus far, which has been pretty insistent about heroes rather efficiently mopping things up everywhere but the AFO and Shigaraki fights.

I would like to take this as confirmation that Shiragiri did indeed dump a bunch of Himijins on more battlefields than just U.A. and Gunga, but we didn't see any at Kamino, so what gives?

On Dabi’s Immolation and the Evac Boxes:

O On the one hand, I really like the idea that Dabi is about to destroy himself because of the Phosphor move he copied from Shouto. It’s incredibly thematically sound!

Touya drove himself to destruction because he was trying to overtake his baby brother in their father’s eyes, despite not having a body type that can perform the types of moves said baby brother can. Shouto has learned to balance both sides of himself, has spent the whole series trying to come to terms with both the parents he inherited his dual elements from, while Dabi remains focused exclusively on his father’s fire, with absolutely zero concern for his ice side/his mother’s perspective/balance in the family.[1] Dabi is accumulating heat because he was never trained in how to turn that heat down and isn’t about to start now. Dabi is on a path that will destroy he himself (again) and destroy his family without intervention that Endeavor doesn’t know how to give.

Also, it’s just really great art of Dabi in general, dramatic tool (affectionate) that he is.

On the other hand, lololol imagine trying to convince readers that the police and their magic sensor machines can accurately predict when Dabi is going to explode. Dabi! The guy who survived for over ten years when Ujiko gave him less than a month to live! And who lived those ten years not even taking it easy, but obsessively training himself with the fire that was supposed to kill him! But sure, now we’re supposed to really buy that lifespan outlooks are going to be so very reliable. Okay, BNHA, whatever you say.

O It is entirely lost on me why Gun Head (no longer occupied with Bowl Cut spy dude, I see) thinks people would be less safe in the metal box that is quite some distance underground than they would be right at the surface when a 5km wide fire bomb set to “burn everything off the map” goes off. Maybe the idea is to just manually run and try to get out of range? But there are dozens of people in that box, including elderly and children. 5km is a bit over three miles—call it a mile and a half radius, then. How fast could you run a mile back in Phys Ed, and would you want your grandmother or baby sibling to have to match that time to avoid being killed in a catastrophic inferno?

Granted, Dabi may or may not be right on top of them, but even if they’re towards the edge of the range, 5km is given as the distance at which everything will be “wiped off the map”—the damage is going to be reduced beyond that range, but it isn’t going to just cut off in a perfect circle! Also too, if Tsukauchi is right and Dabi did get information from Skeptic, he might well be right on top of them! He has been chasing Endeavor through the woods for several chapters now—perhaps he knew the spot he was aiming for?[2]

On the other hand, there are already pieces of the ceiling falling and taking out chunks of the interior structures, so maybe the reasoning here is that if they stay, they run a chance of the whole thing collapsing on them and burying them alive? I dunno; I assume the real reason for getting people above ground is to facilitate the long overdue full Todofam reunion, but good lord, if what’s happening on the surface is so bad that it’s doing this underground, how could it possibly be safer to send people right up into whatever’s causing that damage?

O Of course, it’s fairly ridiculous to begin with that Dabi’s anywhere near one of these escape routes. As @itsnothingofinterest pointed out here, the heroes had complete control over where they set these battles. Why, other than the meta reason that it would be better for the battles to be set in places the audience would recognize, were any of them set anywhere near an evacuation route?

This becomes particularly egregious when you look at the battle map volume extra and realize that all of these combats are happening in a roughly horizontal band across the central, southern parts of the country. Why not move any of them north or much farther west? Also too, once those locations are chosen, why send any of those escape cubes on routes that would pass nearby? The cubes look basically as crowded as a random street scene—people gathered up in clumps in some areas with a lot of empty space in others—so why not just put more people in cubes that are headed on northerly routes?

I’m looking forward to the reunion, don’t get me wrong, but the seams are showing in ways that, taken at face value in-universe, reflect very poorly on the heroes.

On All Might, Quirklessness, and a Fight With AFO:

O GOSH THIS ALL MIGHT QUIRKLESS STUFF. Yes, even a quirkless person can be a hero, at least as long as they have millions of yen to burn on transforming mech suits!!!

And okay, maybe that’s reductive; I can see an argument that the point here is that even quirkless people can use what resources they have available to help! Except that All Might is, by any measure, incredibly wealthy and influential because of the 30+ years he spent being the number one hero with the most powerful quirk in the world. He has access to resources that no random quirkless kid—certainly not middle school Deku!—could hope to match! His mech suit car thing is basically a souped-up support item, and support items are strictly, intensely regulated, such that only two categories of people are allowed to utilize them at all.

One category of people is irrelevant for this discussion: people whose quirks interfere with their everyday life. If you don’t have a quirk at all, obviously you can’t get cleared for a support item through this method!

The other category, of course, is heroes. Could a quirkless kid get access to support items that way? Well, Deku seemed to believe, back in Chapter 1, that U.A. allows quirkless people to take its hero course entrance exam; hypothetically, then, a quirkless kid who got into a hero school would then be able to access support items to use in hero work. However, since they wouldn’t have that access until after passing the exam, they’d have to pass the exam with nothing but their own abilities.

Has that ever happened? Well, no—Deku clearly stated that there was no precedent. That implies that it’s not allowed at most schools—or has only become allowed very recently—and that, even at schools that do allow it, there’s never been a quirkless person who’s been able to pass an exam. Not at U.A., apparently not anywhere.

And that’s not really a surprise. Diminishing the agency and potential of quirkless people so thoroughly that they lose confidence in themselves is a well-established pattern! Mirio handily proves that a quirkless person with the right advantage—in his case, his training in Nighteye’s fighting style—is more than capable of facing down a threat even well-trained heroes would struggle against. Yet Mirio was still either allowed or required to withdraw from hero courses after losing his quirk.

I suspect it’s the same with support items: the right tool could make all the difference in the right hands, but if those hands are quirkless, no one bothers to give them the training or tools that would make that difference, nor do they themselves believe it’s even worth trying.[3] You see how that works? Quirkless people need support items to be heroes, but only heroes are allowed access to support items.

Remember, All Might himself said that it was a bad idea to rely on support items, especially if they’re such a central part of one’s persona/skill set that losing them would be cause for hopelessness. Even if he’s changed his mind since, it’s easy to imagine that that sentiment as being the party line on why quirkless people can’t use support items to become heroes: they’d be so reliant on them that they’d be “helpless” without them.[4]

With all that in mind, how exactly does All Might’s decision to face AFO in a mech suit like nothing the average quirkless person would ever have access to have any bearing on Deku’s question about quirkless people becoming heroes?

O I note, too, that this is all framed around the idea of “a quirkless person becoming a Hero,” and very much not about the idea of a civilian, quirk or no quirk, stepping up to take heroic action when necessary. We’ll get some of that in the next chapter, which is nice, but also very tied up in familial responsibility and parental duty, which is not equivalent to a stranger helping another stranger because they’re there and capable of stepping up. Stepping up with no power was framed as admirable when Deku did it, but his reward was not validation that quirkless people could be Heroes after all, but rather the gift of his very own quirk. Likewise, All Might stepping up is framed as admirable here, but it doesn’t answer Deku’s question any differently than All Might did the first time.

Back then, he said that, because of the dangers of the heroic career, only people with power can become Heroes. All this scene does is expand the definition of power to include mechanical augmentation that no one but a Hero would be able to access anyway. From the first chapter to today, the story is still telling us that being a Hero requires power beyond what a normal person can muster.

A reminder of how this issue reflects on another bedrock problem the narrative is presenting: if only Heroes are allowed to step up and make a difference, then Tenko is still walking.

O Because of how incredibly faulty I find the attempted callback to the question of quirkless Heroes, I’m torn about how I want All Might and AFO’s fight to go. On the one hand, I wouldn’t mind seeing AFO kick All Might’s ass for the sophistry of answering Deku’s Chapter 1 question with a mech suit! He could also defy All Might’s expectations and just fly on by, and that would be funny! On the other hand, there are a lot of good narrative reasons for AFO to, firstly, be tempted into stopping here to fight, and, secondly, lose.

There are several arguments I can see for that, many based in the concept of him being influenced by Shigaraki:

AFO cultivated Shigaraki’s hatred of All Might, carefully encouraging it for years for the sole purpose of stealing OFA. He only ever intended to use it as a tool; for that purpose, he intentionally warped his ward’s psyche. It’s karmically appropriate, then, that that wrongdoing plays into his undoing, with the hatred he created becoming a trap he can’t escape.

AFO making bad decisions based on emotions he can’t handle underscores the idea of Tomura’s willpower overpowering VFO. Shigaraki’s strong hatred was too strong for the vestige to handle, and merely moving the conflict to AFO’s mind instead of Shigaraki’s doesn’t change the outcome. (I also like that AFO falling more under Tomura’s influence reverses the progression that we saw in Jakku, of AFO’s influence gradually overcoming Shigaraki.)

Shigaraki’s hatred spreading down the mental link is a keen parallel to his Decay being able to spread to things beyond what he directly touches. Shigaraki destroys VFO; VFO is connected to AFO; guess what happens to AFO?

If All Might could beat AFO but get his suit taken out in the process, that would leave the rest of this story to the next generation, and it would be about goddamn time.

O Some of those points are in opposition to points that could be made in favor of AFO’s victory, though more in the sense of both being valid points rather than one being a counterargument that defeats the other.

For example, the idea of leaving the story to the next generation works if you believe that Shigaraki should be the final boss. I do, fiercely, but plenty of other people believe just as strongly that the last fight should be Deku (+/- Shigaraki) vs. AFO.

Likewise, there’s an argument that AFO will win here because the story has set up the idea that he has to give his quirk factor to Shigaraki, so it has to follow through on that plot thread. A fair point, but you could also say that we already saw Shigaraki defeat VFO and there’s no point in retreading that if the outcome will just be the same, so instead, we have Shigaraki’s hatred/will overcome AFO right here and now, resulting in him getting into a fight he can’t afford to waste time having with All Might.

…One argument I don’t have a counter for is that if a mech suit is all it takes to defeat Prime AFO, why didn’t Hero Society just do that decades ago? But I suppose Prime AFO wasn’t on a rapidly depleting life timer, so All Mech doesn’t need to be able to decisively defeat him, so much as just stall him.

O Some of those points are also banking on the AFO/Shigaraki mental bond having overcome the complication of distance. I mentioned that last time, so to elaborate slightly: in 340, All Might says that the minimum separation they need wrt AFO and Shigaraki is ten kilometers—a little under six-and-a-quarter miles. The distance from the villa to the spot where U.A. was, meanwhile, is closer to one hundred miles. Given how much Hawks and company had been managing to stall and delay, shouldn’t the distance at which AFO started mentioning his other self's influence still have been too great for their mind link (and thus, presumably, Shigaraki’s emotions) to be in effect? Pretty sure the characters would have mentioned it if AFO had managed to get that close all the way back circa Machia's arrival!

In that light, it’s interesting that there’s a conflict between what All Might says—that Shigaraki’s influence is what’s making AFO unable to suppress his negative emotions—and what the narration box says—that, according to Hawks’ report, the de-aging process is the culprit. I don’t know if anything will come of that discrepancy—Hawks has to be guessing, but when was the last time Hawks actually guessed wrong about anything?—but it might be worth pointing out anyway, in case it’s relevant to the theories about AFO having impulse control problems because of his quirk. Maybe All Might and AFO are just wrong about what’s going on in AFO’s brain!

(Note that a much simpler possibility is that splitting up AFO and Shigaraki was never about their mental link but simply about separating the enemy's two most dangerous combatants. The mental connection is mentioned, but it's not the sole cause for concern. But if that's the case, why mention such a specific distance as ten kilometers, instead of just trying to get them as far apart as possible? If them joining up at all is the problem, the distance is immaterial. So what else can the 10km be if not the maximum range of the mental connection?)

Odds & Ends:

O This is a really damn good sentiment that I wish the story would delve further into by letting its characters actually express more doubt. Like, fair’s fair, neither Shouto nor Uraraka have managed to cinch a victory against Dabi or Toga when their actions haven’t matched their desires—squaring up for combat when they want a more peaceable resolution. However, given that the full extent of doubt we’ve seen is Uraraka and Deku discussing, “Hmm, maybe I’m not feeling so great about beating the shit out of someone I have recently begun to suspect is a human person with human emotions. But maybe I’m just a big weirdo and I should forget all about that,” it’s pretty, uh, basic? Maybe we could take more than baby steps, is what I’m getting at here.

(Also, I note harboring that kind of doubt sure as shit doesn’t stop Deku from punching seven kinds of shit out of Shigaraki as long as he can still tell himself it’s AFO in control. So, you know, he’s doing just fine on the victory front so far, doubts and all.)

O Shouto’s emotional “stiff upper lip while his lower lip is going all wobbly from All Might praising him” face is cute.

O Iida clonking Shouto with his mask is also cute. But also, given that the distance is around two hundred miles—so Iida covering that distance in ten minutes will have him moving at roughly 1200mph—I can’t help but feel like it ought to take more than a face mask to protect someone who isn’t built for speed like Iida is from the wind intensity.

O I think a lot of people assume the “wayward child” Iida is referring to is Shouto, and that’s a fair interpretation, but given how much Shouto wants to find some way to come to terms with his brother, it’s really far more Touya who’s gone astray. Preventing that explosion means saving Dabi too, after all, so I think it’s maybe a bit more resonant if Iida is referring to the elder brother there.

O I say this in complete sincerity: Hawks clutching Tokoyami is a good, emotive panel. I also say this in complete sincerity: I dearly hope some Himijins catch up to them, STAT.

O Stain must have either immersion-breakingly superb hearing or an in on the police line if I’m expected to believe he could hear Shouto and Iida’s conversation well enough to render a value judgement on it from the distance he’s at. Maybe he’s just making some assumptions, since I trust he’s seen the Dabi broadcast like everyone else in the world at this point and thus can draw some basic conclusions from Dabi leaving via warp and Iida picking up Dabi’s brother piggyback-style.

O Speaking of Iida and Shouto leaving, I notice we got no input from Burnin’ this week or last. She was still standing last we saw her, so where’s she gotten to? Maybe she’s getting medical attention for Kido and Onima? We haven’t seen them since Dabi was doing a very good impression of burning them alive.

I will be shocked if Dabi managed to off a named character of greater significance and personal import to him than Snatch. Pleased, too—as I’ve said before, Dabi’s firepower gets talked up way too much for how ineffectual it tends to be in terms of concrete, lasting consequences, and I can think of no better candidates to correct that than one or two of Endeavor’s sidekicks. They certainly don’t deserve to be burned alive, but, well, them’s the breaks when you stand there flapping your gums to a murderous abuse victim about why you personally chose to stand with his abuser.

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

[1] So naturally, he goes and gets ice powers next chapter. Sigh. We’ll see how I feel about that when I read the official release and start putting thoughts down in writing.

[2] As, indeed, it turns out he is. Mind you, typically the person with more control over where a chase goes is the one being pursued, not the pursuer. Dabi would need to nipping right at Endeavor’s heels to have much ability to turn him in a specific direction, or he’d need to be teamed up with a partner who could also direct Endeavor’s flight. So it’s actually pretty strange to suggest that Dabi/Skeptic had any hand in this confrontation winding up where it did. Endeavor is the one who decided to take off in this direction and not veer off in another at any point. A little more on this topic next time, probably.

[3] You could argue that Deku was an exception to this, but Chapter 1 Deku always comes off to me as someone who was pinning all his hopes on a Hail Mary without even considering his other options. He wanted to tell himself, At least I tried, but he was already pretty sure he was going to fail, so he wasn’t doing prep he could have been doing to maximize his odds, like exercise, martial arts training, looking into backup schools with easier exams, etc. I would be entirely unsurprised if Deku didn’t even contact U.A. to see if quirkless people are allowed to test for their Hero Course, or if that was just the earliest hurdle that would have felled him and left him thinking, Well, it didn’t hurt to try.

[4] As if that isn’t true for every hero who ever comes up against a villain that’s a hard counter for their skill set, like all those heroes in Chapter 1 who gave up on even attempting to save Bakugou the moment the “tools” they were reliant on—their quirks—were rendered moot.

#bnha #chapter thoughts #bnha 386 #bnha logistics problems #todotalk #bnha all might #bnha afo #bnha endgame #quirkless discrimination #you guys I deleted SO MUCH complaining about Mirio's withdrawal from the hero course #justice for Mirio's quirkless era

18 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 9 months

Note

I’m a little confused, what does rei telling shouto about rejecting bloodlines have to do with himura mutant phobia?

(Re: a comment I made about Shouto's Sports Festival flashback in my post on Chapter 387.)

It’s not a direct correlation! I was pointing out that Rei has early dialogue that can potentially be read as foreshadowing for the familial issues discussed by Geten 350 chapters later. Basically, that Horikoshi might have chosen to specifically frame the conversation in terms of bloodline—mangling an explanation of All Might’s catchphrase to do so*—because he was already aware that fears about the sorts of things one can inherit via bloodline were significant to the characters in the scene.

Shouto is afraid of inheriting his father’s willingness to hurt Rei, but what sort of fear of bloodline inheritance has Rei already faced in her own history such that she can now reassure Shouto that blood is not binding? It could simply be a generic assurance, not connected to Rei’s history at all, but what if it isn’t?

What if Rei is able to reassure her son that one isn’t bound to one’s bloodline because she already has personal experience with the consequences of excessive regard for bloodline? And given that she’d later burn Shouto out of fear of his resemblance to Enji, did she really even believe it at the time, or is it the same as when she tried to get Touya to change course and he lashed out at her for lecturing him about choices, save that, unlike Touya, Shouto was young and attached enough to believe her?

To look at it another way, when Horikoshi was brainstorming the Todoroki family’s general situation, he would have had to figure out Endeavor’s obsession and the forms it took—the attempts to wrangle genetics, the failures that came before the success, the spiral into abuse—as well as at least the broad strokes of the ways Enji’s kids and wife reacted to it. It’s entirely possible that all Horikoshi originally had figured out about Rei was “mentally fragile because of the abuse; gets institutionalized after she burns Shouto,” but he’s on the record as thinking a lot about the lives of his minor characters and there’s plenty about Rei that begs further thought.

For example, why would the woman with the ice powers Enji sought agree to the marriage? Why would she stay in the marriage even after it turned sour? Was it all out of love? Wouldn’t it be a bit convenient that Enji could find a woman who just loved him that much given his unabashed ulterior motives? Further, Rei was open to her mother about the dire straits she was in—why wouldn’t her mother step in, call child protective services, tell her own husband, do anything? Rei’s family being traditionalists, with old-fashioned ideas about marriage and commitment, works to answer the question. Then, on top of being traditionalist, Rei’s family needing the financial resources Enji brings to the table bolsters that answer even further.

The questions that follow logically from that scenario are what tradition looks like in the world Horikoshi’s created, and why Rei’s family need money? If they were an old-money family but lost their fortunes, what caused that? Geten provides the reader with the answers, but it’s not impossible that Horikoshi’s known them from the start. If that’s the case, then even Rei’s earliest lines in the series can be read as speaking in light of her family history, and that family history is intimately entwined with heteromorphobia.

It's somewhat reachy, I acknowledge, but I hope that explains my thought process a little better? Thanks for the ask!

* The conversation on TV is so weird. What in god’s name does self-love and the DNA inheritance of quirks have to do with All Might’s, “I AM HERE!” catchphrase? That’s nonsense, counter to everything else he’s ever said about the meaning of the phrase, which is supposed to be both reassurance to those in danger and threat to those endangering.

It’s an awkward and baldly contradictory contortion of a response that, so far as I can tell, serves no real purpose save to suggest a question from the interviewer that upset Shouto because it implied that his blood doomed him to grow up like his father, and give Rei a chance to answer in the same framework. What question could the interviewer possibly have asked that would have both given Shouto that impression and prompted All Might to respond, “Yes, quirks are naturally passed from parent to child. However, that’s not the only thing that matters. It’s not just blood ties… Instead, one must recognize and appreciate oneself! That’s what I mean when I say, ‘I am here!’”

#bnha #heteromorph discrimination plot #todotalk #himura family circumstances

7 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 2 years

Note

I always feel concerned when people say that Dabi’s victims were villains/thugs as a way to lessen his murders like they were still people? Who had families that cared about them?? And even if they had no one they still mattered as a person. They could have been like Twice where one bad day helped them become the people they were. Now they’ll never have the chance to be better because that choice was forever taken away. And it looks like some of them are no different from the Todorokis in that they still had family who cared about them despite the path that they chose. I just don’t like this dehumanization of “thugs” and to use it clean up the image of the character you like… This fandom is so bad at weighing the worth of victims in the story.

I don't have much to add to this, anon; it's all pretty on-point! I, too, was high-key irked when the chapter with Dabi's video came out and I had to watch people falling all over themselves to handwave Dabi's bodycount by saying those people deserved it, they weren't innocent, it was self-defense, etc. Despite the fact that those "thugs" (any of whom could have been Jin, the Hassaikai Trash Trio, a runaway young adult Tenko, or even Touya himself post-evil orphanage) were just vibing in an alley and got incinerated down to their bones for the High Crime of--bristling in a territorial way?

Truly, I've always thought it really rich, how much people hate Geten for his alleged quirk eugenicist beliefs, when Dabi beat Geten to the "murdering people whose [Arbitrary Quality] I personally deem too weak to deserve to live" punch by over a hundred chapters.

The fact is, Horikoshi simply is not writing Dabi as some kind of revenge fantasy in which a victim can lash out at their abusers, comfortable in the knowledge that they will only ever hurt exactly and specifically the people who "deserve it." That sort of story has its place, and people are more than welcome to find comfort in it! But refusing to admit that Dabi's revenge does splash damage undermines everything this story is saying about trying to help people even when they've done bad things.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

#bnha #todotalk #stillness answers #stillness wishes people would stop trying to call Dabi 'bad victim rep' when they refuse to acknowledge anything he's doing as 'bad'#bnha fandom critical #or something

61 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 1 year

Text

Chapter 374 Thoughts: Butterfly Effect

How’s this for a turn-around time? XD Next time, starting on the inbox. Back to chronological bullet points because, again, the table-shuffling going on this week means I have less in-depth to talk about. (The exception: translation quibbles. I have a lot of translation quibbles. It's one of those weeks.)

O I love how ominous that one visible eye tracking up from the hand to Mic is. Whereas at the end of last chapter, its forward aim and the thin line of a single eyebrow made Kurogiri look mostly surprised/shocked, here his expression is considerably more chilling.

O I don’t have anything in particular to say about Meryl the Weather Forecast gal making a Principled Stand against AFO, save to note that the projection behind her notes that the forecast is for the midnight news.(1) That is to say, the viewership numbers are not at an all-time high for this noble speaking of truth to power. (Though if the government is still playing at placating AFO, I wonder if that means Tim Ackbar is out of a job?)

O Amused that even the tail on Iida’s talk balloon is at right angles.

O Love the note from Burnin’ that Dabi’s “will” is inherited from Endeavor, because, wow, ain’t that the truth—lethal determination that never falters or flinches, no matter the obstacle. Touya continues to be by far the most Endeavor-like in temperament of the Todoroki children.

Well, except that, as much as I love the Dabi Is Endeavor’s Monster read, it is still worth discussing that crediting Dabi’s willpower to Endeavor is diminishing his own individuality in ways that, ironically, play right into the narrative he spun for the world in his video: that his flames are Endeavor’s flames, that there’s no boundary between Endeavor’s sins and Dabi’s crimes. That’s dangerous rhetoric, Burnin’! Especially for your side!

O I suppose there must be a resurgence of Phoenix Quirk theorizing in response to this chapter, huh? What with Burnin’ being very explicit about the There’s Something Else Going On Here signaling. Chalk that up as something I’ll wait and see on because I don’t have enough deep interest in Dabi to actively theorize about it, save a mild curiosity as to what the explanation is that Ujiko, noted quirk specialist, failed to spot it.

O I adore that page of the portal opening up in front of Dabi, though mainly because it delights me to imagine the sheer face-splitting width of the grin Skeptic must be wearing while he delivers that free travel line.

O I find it irksome that C. Cook decided to entirely remove all reference to the implied friends Spinner spoke of last chapter when he begged Kurogiri to rescue Shigaraki-tachi, but then here in this chapter, in a moment that allows for a touch of ambiguity about who AFO is referring to, Spinner or Kurogiri, suddenly Cook goes with friends, plural. The noun in question is ambiguous in the Japanese, sure, but the official English would nearly rule out Spinner as the topic of AFO’s monologue thanks to that singular/plural disagreement.

For the record, yeah, I think AFO is obviously referring to Spinner here. It’s a bit of a run-on meander, but I think the switch to Kurogiri is just to emphasize that his presence is the result of Spinner’s strong feelings, not to indicate that Kurogiri was the topic all along. Though I’m sure Shirakumo’s feelings for his friends are not at all off the table going forward, there’s not much reason to assume AFO is placing his trust in those feelings, given that the last time they were awakened, Shirakumo was instrumental in interrupting the surgery.

(Caveat: Given that ominous shifting of Shiragiri’s eye on the very first page, I suppose there’s a slight possibility that AFO is talking about Kurogiri here, and the feeling he’s talking about is “resentment that his ‘friends’ didn’t save him from the dark life he led after Ujiko and I stole him from the nest.” That feels like a reach to me, but it would be very funny.)

O The microchip line feels like another case of Horikoshi overexplaining things so he doesn’t get buried in letters from confused fans again like he did after Deku’s 1,000,000% against Muscular. It’s not quite as egregious as Hawks and Jeanist’s incredibly terrible conversation in Chapter 299 reiterating things they both already knew about Jeanist’s faux death, but it’s got the same sense.

Like, presumably Spinner—and if not him, then definitely Scarecrow and the other PLF advisors—had some way of communicating with Skeptic. It would not be so unbelievably convoluted to just assume Skeptic could patch himself through on one of those lines the same way he does to talk to Dabi this very chapter, especially since Skeptic somehow realized right away that Spinner succeeded. Indeed, a heads-up from Skeptic is presumably how AFO himself knew when to start monologuing about Spinner's success before the portals even appeared. That would feel less off to me than trying to imagine Spinner letting The Hand out of his sight long enough for AFO to plant some chip on it.

As it is, I have to assume that when AFO says "microchip," he really means "micro transceiver." AFO didn't know about the heroes' Tempt & Trap plan to split up his army, so he couldn't have put the coordinates Kurogiri would need on the chip in advance. Ergo, it has to be actively receiving a signal that can relay everyones' current locations. Maybe, as a Noumu, Kurogiri can automatically decode orders from radio waves a la the Near High Ends, but it seems like the simplest thing would, again, be to just use whatever comm device Spinner has. Doesn't seem like it would be any more or less prone to breaking than the microchip in The Hand did, you know?

O I have no strong feelings about that “Heya” added to Dabi’s line as he comes out of the portal, but considerably stronger feelings (negative) about adding the “Oh” to Togawice’s. “Oh, Hawwwwks,” makes Himijin sound like a sassy slasher killer rather than an incredibly pissed-off guy risen from the grave for revenge.

In fairness, if the Twice speaking is transformed Toga, she’s usually much closer to “sassy slasher” than “furious revenant,” but this is her confronting Jin’s murderer—a topic that makes her drop her singsong levity every time it comes up. That long, menacing growl of Hawks' name feels much more accurate to her mindset.

Anyway, somehow-not-the-most-baffling-choice-made-this-chapter localization aside, it’s a panel we’ve all been waiting for for the better part of three years now, and I seriously can’t wait to see more of it.(2) You can tell Horikoshi loved it, too; that is some seriously dedicated attention to contours, lighting, and linework.

O “Femme fatale” was actually the localization choice that had me scratching my head the most this week, but some research suggests that the term AFO uses—傾国, keikoku—is one that, while it literally translates to siren/beauty/courtesan/prostitute, is understood to refer to a woman of such beauty and magnetism that emperors and kings become enamored, endangering their countries as their attention strays. Certainly the most readily understood comparison to a Western eye would be Helen of Troy.

AFO’s full phrase was 少女に傾国, shoujo ni keikoku; Toga being a teenager rather than a full-grown woman is presumably why the shoujo got attached. I don’t pretend to understand enough Japanese to say for sure what the ni would indicate about the relationship between the two words, though, much less in the context of the full sentence. (Terminology I can look up on Google with reasonable enough confidence that I’ll at least land in the right ballpark; sentence structure is well past my level. Take me with a grain of salt.)

Anyway, regardless of whether AFO is literally using that term for Toga or just describing the situation using a string of words that just-so-happens to call the term to mind, I like it as a callback to what Giran tells Twice in his Deika flashback:

O Hawks, having learned absolutely nothing, immediately leaps to the much-quoted definition of insanity: repeating the same actions and expecting different outcomes. I cannot wait to watch him get his ass handed to him. That last panel(3) activated every schadenfreude button I’ve got, and I will be reading the next chapter with gleeful popcorn gifs scrolling across the forefront of my brain. Hell, I might make a bowl irl. Do not let me down on this one, Horikoshi. And All For One, if you want to rub it in a little harder, you go right ahead.

Taking a break from my Hedonism Bot-esque delight, I will say that I’m delighted that Tokoyami will have a front-row seat for this, too. It always bothered me that we never got more of him thinking about the claim that his beloved mentor killed a man in cold blood. I’m not even saying he had to disagree with the choice; I just wish we’d gotten to see more than him tearfully dismissing the claim and then literally never thinking about it again.

Time for a reckoning, lads. Past time.

---FOOTNOTES---

1: Which would put the current time in central Japan as being a bit after 5PM the next day, by the way.

2: Though I imagine we’re going to start in flashback next chapter, if only to see how Tsuyu’s doing, that clearly being half of her headset in the rear Twice’s hands.

3: With one last sigh-inducing translation choice for the road, since soitsu seems to be usually singular, and Hawks is clearly focused on Twice here, not Twice and Dabi, as would be one interpretation of “them.” Anyway, loving that Hawks not only calls for Twice to get murdered again, like he wasn’t even listening to AFO yammering on about the consequences, he can’t even be polite about it. Soitsu is, by all accounts, at best the kind of thing you use with friends you have a teasing, rough sort of dynamic with, and much more commonly regarded as derogatory.

#bnha #chapter thoughts #kurogiri #toga himiko #flyboy the red #todotalk #also just go ahead and assume that all of that is underlined with a subaural level of “Spinner Spinner where is he is okay aaaahhhhh”#because it is #my writing #bnha 374

24 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 2 years

Note

This is why I like it when Touya is presented as “difficult” and capable of lashing out as a child because kids like that and the people they become still deserve to have a hand reached out to them. Preferably an adult qualified for this kind of thing but the relatable teens will have to do. We already have the “good kid” rep with Tenko and arguably Himiko, so I’m grateful for Touya especially as a former “bad kid”.

It's true! Touya was a troubled kid from a troubled home and he needed support and understanding he was not getting. The fact that he couldn't magically pull out of that spiral on his own does not make him a born-wrong monster, nor does acknowledging the harm he's done negate the fact that he still needs and deserves that help.

[Please insert four more paragraphs of reflexive banging on about fandom double standards and abuse apologia in the name of defending one's fave that I am opting not to include here because this ask so nicely limited its scope to the source material itself.]

Dabi is Problematic, and honestly, I wouldn't have him any other way. I'm glad you found him and feel seen by his portrayal, anon! I hope you continue to find him and his arc validating, and thanks for sharing your thoughts.

#bnha #todotalk #stillness answers #bad victim rep dabi #truly if your touya is wholesome and pure i do not want him #have the courage of your convictions and Bless That Mess

27 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 1 year

Note

Is HK going to address the Todoroki animal mutant bigotry now? If he does, I hope he doesn’t just say Because Endeavor and call it a day. Maybe he’ll do something like “working with Horse Man Sidekick changed Endeavor’s views” but that would be so lazy imo.

Judging by Shouto’s conspicuous absence in Koda’s flashback, it’s looking like not. My cynical read is that Shouto is too popular with the fanbase (the portion of it that partakes in popularity polls, anyway) and so Hori and/or his editor don’t want to call attention to it. Possibly we’re meant to assume that Shouto has matured and made friends with enough heteromorphs that he wouldn’t do it again, but I wish very much that Sero and Shouto had been there for Shouji’s backstory dump. I think Sero has as much to apologize to Shouji for as Mineta, and Shouto could at least have had a flashback to that time with Tsuragamae and looked uncomfortable.

That said, I care more about seeing it openly acknowledged than meticulously explained. Much as some people didn’t want Endeavor to get a Sad Backstory to explain why he’s Like That, I don’t need Horikoshi to explain why Shouto uses the kind of language that he does; I would just like Shouto to be confronted with the fact that it’s an issue. Because I think “background radiation of their society’s widespread dehumanization of heteromorphs” is a perfectly adequate explanation, I do agree that handwaving it as Because Endeavor would be pretty lazy.

(Someone should tell that to fandom, who have thus far been a lot more likely to use that excuse than Horikoshi himself.)

#bnha #todotalk #flaming sidekickers #stillness answers #heteromorph discrimination plot

10 notes · View notes

stillness-in-green · 2 years

Text

Chapter Thoughts: 363, Those Who Defend, Those Who Violate

O I love the detail that Monoma is on his feet on the first page. I went back a few chapters to see if it happened when Bakugou’s big power move rocked the arena, but no, Monoma was still seated after that. But here, just like Aizawa has one hand on his capture weapon, poised like he wants nothing more than to leap into the fray, Monoma—who can’t stand Bakugou!—jumped to his feet so violently he tipped the chair over behind him. I love Monoma, you guys.

(Continued below the cut.)

O I’m amused at the idea that some of ShigAFO’s newfound disdain for Eraserhead is tied to Eraser sending students to the field instead of coming himself. I feel like it’s one of those things that echoes threads of both Shigaraki and AFO. Dabi expresses it most clearly, the idea that adult heroes roping students into these big anti-villain pushes is in questionable taste (“tacky,” as he puts it), but it’s easy to imagine Shigaraki having similar sentiments.(1) All For One, meanwhile, has had strong opinions about the nature of the student/teacher relationship from the beginning of the series! So of course he thinks Aizawa sending his student into a fight that is only going to get said student killed is a mark against Aizawa as a teacher.

O Shigaraki’s hair is especially gorgeous this week. My god, he could have walked out of a shampoo commercial. (If the shampoo commercial was cross-marketing with Mad Max, anyway.)

O As others have noted, I’m interested to see what Best Jeanist thinks he’s doing here. Eyes down, not even looking at the oncoming opponent, shirt sleeves unraveling downwards… I saw a lot of supposition about him trying to sew up Bakugou, maybe even do something about the kid’s mangled heart, if we’re going to get real wack with what kinds of “fibers” Fiber Master is able to control. (I would like to note that if we find out Best Jeanist can control muscle fibers, I will be needing the Best Jeanist+Muscular fic yesterday, please and thanks.)(2)

O I want to comment, “Nice to see Mirko confirming once more that murdering an unconscious guy in a science lab tube was her explicit intent at Jakku,” but she’s enough like Bakugou that I wouldn’t want to take her at her literal word too unthinkingly, especially when her word in the Japanese is exactly that kind of “slaughter/beat to death” threat that Bakugou uses all the time. (Indeed, give or take some regional differences in her word usage, I think it’s the exact same.)

O Egregious boob shot is egregious. At least her snarl is intense enough that it’s showing forehead veins.

O I have no idea how exactly Dabi is mimicking a move that Shouto uses ice for, but I am indescribably glad that it’s not Phoenix Quirk Nonsense. I wonder if any of Endeavor’s sidekicks are actually going to bite it here? On the one hand, Fire Is The Worst Super Power because it scales damage relative to the opponent’s determination, as has been proven by this very series time and time again, so I have my reservations that Dabi is going to suddenly get better at K.O.ing named characters than he ever has been. On the other hand, the art of Onima and Kido being consumed by the blaze is a lot more convincing than usual.

Also, I’m not going to say they deserve it, certainly, but given how lethal the story is always insisting Dabi is, he’s long overdue for something that his opponents can’t just bounce back from after a day or two in the hospital. And the sidekicks, with their defensive rationalizations about why they’re still on the field doing Endeavor’s work after the revelations about Endeavor’s abuse of his family, are just about as narratively perfect a target as Dabi could get.

Otherwise, I’m extremely amused at how all this makes Deika look in retrospect. So Dabi is capable of just snapping out copied movies in a matter of seconds? He doesn’t even need any time to practice or work it out? And we know Dabi taught himself the flying trick after seeing Endeavor use it against High End. He would have had just about two weeks to practice it before the League showed up to pick him up for the Deika fight, wherein he had to fight a flying ice user. So if Dabi is really that good at picking up his family’s special moves, why on Earth did he let Geten keep the high ground for their entire fight?

Did he just not think of it? Forgot all about it just like he had to be reminded about the chainsaw Noumu at the training camp or that sand hero he killed? Or was he not confident in the move yet and didn’t want to risk falling on his ass and looking lame in front of the League and/or that insufferably smug ice user? Inquiring minds need to know.

O Looking forward to Iida getting to do something (anything) at this point. Or horse sidekick guy, who we know came to this field of battle but who hasn’t been seen here once. Or Stain, in an ironic reversal in who’s watching who in a sea of flames and Noumu.

O I’m always amused at how consistent Dabi is with using epithets or derogatory nicknames for people younger than him—crazy girl, lizard, Boss—while people older than him get to be called by their actual names/titles—Twice, Ujiko-san, and now Skeptic. Dabi being polite

And speaking of Skeptic.

O I am in mourning for a more colorful translation of Skeptic’s fazacon insult to Dabi.

I'm going to be pretty frank about this, so if you don't want to read several paragraphs about fetish terminology in Japan, or if the discussion of fictional incest upsets you, please do skip down to the next bullet point.

"Daddy issues" is, at least in my experience, entirely sexless in the English idiom, but it is not a sexless insult in Japanese. It’s a clear Dad-themed equivalent of siscon or brocon, lolicon or shotacon, and all of those -con words are much more loaded with connotations of obsession, possessiveness, and inappropriate affection or attachment in Japanese. They don’t have to indicate that the person being hit with the label is literally having (or wanting) incestuous sex, but there is, even in the most clinical uses, a meaning of, “You are too hung up on [X taboo target], to extremes that other people consider weird or uncomfortable.”

But that’s only the milder end of the implication! On the more explicit end, those words are also in common slang parlance as fetish terms, especially when they're shorthanded like that instead of fully written out! If you do a google image search for ファーザー・コンプレックス, "Father complex," you will get both academic or journalistic-looking results, as well as a number of what appear to be BL manga covers. But if you do the same for ファザコン, fazacon, the ratio shifts sharply towards manga covers/art, and even those start skewing dramatically more towards scantily clad anime women making bedroom eyes at the viewer.

"Daddy issues," to me, is about male characters brooding and stewing over their controlling or abusive or idolized fathers; it's reflective of angst and resentment, not the excessive and unseemly attachment Skeptic is implying with fazacon.

Now, Skeptic is hardly the final authority on Dabi’s feelings about his dad, of course. Still, he did spend a month living in a cave with Dabi harping on at every second of the goddamn day about how much he wanted to be out there making Endeavor cry more. Hard to blame the man for calling it like he sees it!

O Skeptic's! Pin-stripes!!! Watch me spin out a whole headcanon about how he’s adopted Re-Destro’s mode of dress as a parallel to also taking up Re-Destro’s dream. Skeptic always was the most proactive in RD’s inner circle about preserving Re-Destro for the cause, no matter what kinds of off-the-wall and/or psychologically abusive methods are required. Love seeing him appealing to Re-Destro’s desires here, including advancing Shigaraki Tomura’s interests, because of course that was Re-Destro’s desire as well.

This kind of begs the question of to what degree Skeptic knows or is even thinking about the real Shigaraki’s current situation—but on the other hand, it’s not like he was ever a real Shigaraki loyalist—he wasn’t even at the crater, after all. So it wouldn’t be a big surprise if he doesn’t particularly care what’s going on inside Shigaraki’s head right now, so long as it’s not obstructing Skeptic’s own goals.

O I’m delighted to get the nod that FGI did try to eject Skeptic from his position. Given how little the heroes have talked about him as an issue—he mostly seems to get lumped in with the rest of the PLF escapees, as if he didn’t hack into every TV screen in the country!—I wonder if the Feel Good Inc. corporate head honchos assured the federal investigators that Chikazoku had been ejected, locked out, no way he can do that a second time! (panic sweating)

It’s also interesting that the FGI head honchos were even able to flee the country. I tend to think the arrest nets had to be cast pretty wide, and you’d think a company one of the highest officers of the MLA was a boardmember of would fall under a lot of suspicion. I wonder if that implies, then, that it’s actually relatively clean?

I have had the thought before that someone like e.g. Curious might find it useful to have a dupe above her on the chain of command, someone that attracts all the attention for her magazine’s radical politics while she gets on with business in a less dangerous position. Easy to imagine Skeptic could be much the same, especially since FGI’s main use as an MLA asset is the infrastructure access, which doesn’t require an ideological bent in the same way that a magazine and a political party would, or that Re-Destro ran Detnerat with.

O Interestingly, it’s in this chapter that we finally see a hint of quirk supremacist leanings from Skeptic. He and Curious were always the two that talked least about it, which I’d always assumed was because their quirks had the least to do with what they actually brought to the table as warriors for Liberation. Of course, as mentioned above, Skeptic’s been living in a cave for a month, and had all his friends and comrades imprisoned or worse on top of that, so it’s easy to imagine he’s feeling a few notches more radical than he was, say, 6-8 weeks ago!

Still, I can't help but feel that his phrasing here is milder than the way Geten described the same idea, and I like that Skeptic’s wording leaves room for skillful or intelligent wielding of one's meta-ability—that, contra Geten, it doesn't have to be about the brute power of the meta.

It also stands out that Skeptic here is yelling about using one's quirk to get ahead in the world, as he....hacks into a computer system with no use of his quirk at all. Further, in a true anarchy that brings down the old order, exactly how intact and reliable does he think things like the power grid and the internet are even going to be? Is he thinking at all about how much less useful he’d be if no one was maintaining cell towers? The fact that he glosses over that completely is probably partly the cave life talking, but it’s also a good example of the kind of cult-based double-think lots of the MLA are likely prone to.

Anyway, like Skeptic and the Liberationists, I too would very much like to see the social categories of Hero and Villain abolished, so I remain highly curious(3) about whether Horikoshi’s going to actually do anything about all these radical binaries he has characters talking about, and the way those binaries encourage the dehumanization of members on both sides.

O Finally, I’ve touched on this before, but while La Brava is the heroes’ obvious solution to a villain hacker, I don’t think she really works in this situation. There’s nothing heroes can offer her that I can see them being willing to offer, so why would she accept any of their help requests? Yes, clemency for Gentle Criminal would be an incredibly easy thing to enact in their position, but that would be like *extremely American voice* making deals with terrorists, and the series has never given me the impression that heroes are willing to be less than Maximally Harsh with villains.

Also, even if heroes/police were willing to bargain with LB, they don’t seem to have done so in advance, judging by Mandalay and the rest’s blindsided response to someone trying to hack into the system. Exactly how fast would we be meant to believe that heroes could retrieve her, bargain, and get her appropriate equipment and access, all while Skeptic continues to make a nuisance of himself?

O I have a lot of questions about the circumstances that are seeing the Todoroki family just wandering around through a crowd when Endeavor is as unpopular as he is right now. Though Natsuo’s arm around Rei’s shoulder and Fuyumi’s touch to Natsuo’s hand do feel telling.

O I never had the chance to talk about this before, as I wasn’t doing chapter posts at the time, but do you guys know what’s really dumb? People in the tags back in Chapter 342 saying cruel or hateful and insulting things about this AFO spy dude:

(And his lady friend, too, of course, but he was a bit more prominent, so he seemed to get more vitriol.)

Guys. Guys. This man was introduced literally five chapters after we saw the Aoyama family weeping in despair about how helpless they felt under All For One’s thumb. People use AFO’s grooming as a handwave to excuse every negative thought Shigaraki Tomura has ever had. Yoichi openly accuses his brother of manipulating and using people. AFO comes into peoples’ lives when they’re at their most vulnerable and collects them for his nefarious purposes. He gives poisoned gifts and then never lets people go. We have seen all of this, multiple times, extremely explicitly.

And yet, somehow, people just forgot about all that the instant they saw someone new working for the guy. Yeah, Bowl Cut here seemed pretty cynical in 342, much less tearful and sad than the Aoyamas were, but gloppy tears and distraught wailing are not the only way to respond to a life like the one the Aoyamas were living. Every time this guy’s phone rings, he presumably has to worry about who’s going to be on the other end, whether his life is about to descend once more into intimidation, manipulation and the danger of being discovered and subsequently abandoned to the fury of a justice system that has no mercy for people who associate with villains.

It’s possible he’s just working for AFO in hopes of some kind of reward? His final line back in 342, delivered with his standing very close indeed to his fellow spy gal, was, “Our future is guaranteed,” which leaves some ambiguity about what sort of future he’s expecting. But living under AFO’s thumb is no kind of life at all, and it was absurd how quickly fandom forgot about that the red hot second they saw a new face following AFO’s orders, just because Horikoshi didn’t write in 60 pt. Font, “THIS MAN IS A VICTIM.”

I’m rooting for you, Bowl Cut! You and hat girl and the leopard guy and the older lady with the ponytail, all of you do your best for your future!

O I love AFO’s sense of camaraderie and identification with villains as a collective and I wish it was more genuine, or at least that we got to see more of it that isn’t openly and blatantly aimed at advancing his own ends. What I wouldn’t give to know more about how he and Skeptic interacted, such that Skeptic expresses, “I’m going to do as I please!” sentiments more in line with Shigaraki’s words to the united PLF than anything Late Series AFO has ever indicated he’s going to permit when he becomes Demon Lord of the World or whatever.

And that's a wrap on this week. Thanks for reading! More ask replies soonish.

–

1: Not that someone who accepted a high schooler and a middle schooler into the League has the moral high ground there or anything, but, as ever, villains don’t claim to hold the moral high ground like heroes do, so I consider them under less obligation to live up to it.

2: In light of 263’s spoilers, I would like to say that handing this task to Edgeshot is a waste and a crime. More thoughts on that next week.

3: Read as: concerned.

#bnha #bnha 263 #bnha skeptic #chikazoku tomoyasu #todotalk #ua spies #chapter thoughts #my writing

21 notes · View notes