#BNHA 429

[is-bakugou-alive-yet]

Clean scan of the 10th anniversary color page

[eleiwitch]

He raised those kids, he's such a proud dad

[aashi-heartfilia]

They have each other's reflection in their eyes!!!!

THIS IS INSANE!!! THIS IS DEFINITELY MY YURI ACADEMIA AND YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE!!!!

[aizawazs]

BNHA 429 SPOILERS!

beautiful yet sad way to say goodbye.

-

[solitairedeere]

i was never as optimistic about the ending of bnha as some villain stans were, but i never thought it'd end so badly it left me wondering why horikoshi ever bothered to humanize the villains or make them complex characters at all.

like-- i expected that at least 1-2 of the 3 villains who were heavily foreshadowed and outlined by the narrative as people to be saved would be, you know, actually saved. i didn't think that was a high bar. i've been let down before in fandoms where everyone was certain a character would live and then they didn't, so i tried to keep my hopes low. AND YET.

what happened to tomura was upsetting, but i wasn't that shocked after how disinterested the manga has seemed to be in him for like, the past 100 or so chapters. a bit surprised, because you'd think if anyone would succeed in the 'saving' mission it would be the MC, but whatever. dabi, well, they've spent a lot of time showing the way his quirk destroys his body even before this arc, so that also sucked but at least it didn't feel completely out of left field.

........but they're not even letting toga live???

i just-- what have we even been doing here? when zero out of the 3 characters that were marked out for saving were actually saved, you have to acknowledge that something has gone seriously fucking wrong with the storytelling. not even just from the perspective of a villain fan but from the perspective of someone who likes stories to be thematically consistent or satisfying in any way.

you can set up an expectation of these characters being saved and then subvert that and turn it into a tragedy- if done well that could even be worthwhile and interesting. but you can't turn it into a tragedy and then just... keep trucking along with the happy ending messaging and act like anything in the manga has been resolved and that the characters have somehow successfully completed their heroic origin stories.

like, maybe i shouldn't have expected this much from a shounen- at the end of the day it is still a shounen so i didn't expect to feel that it truly satisfactorily wrapped up all the themes it brought up around societal ills. but i expected it to at least resolve those things in a shounen-y way where they punch the problems and help these specific people and then you can feel good assuming that the state of things will continue to improve in the post-canon world of the manga.

instead we got... uh, none of that. the story refused to answer a single one of the larger questions it's been outlining for the past 400+ chapters. in the end, it was all flash and no substance, which again could've been fine, if it weren't for the way the story seemed to spend significant chunks of time trying to delude you into thinking it had substance.

truly makes me wonder what horikoshi thought he was doing the entire time. can it really all be blamed on burnout? the most that can be said for this ending is that it is, well, an ending. fuck dude, it is that.

and that's just... such a sad way to end a project that took up 10 years of your life.

[shadowed-dancer]

Just to be clear, no matter what I say about the MHA finale, know that above all else I'm very grateful to Horikoshi for making this world and this story. It may have ended in a way I consider bad, but it brought me a lot of joy for many years in a time I needed it. And it's also a massive accomplishment to have written a story that lasted 10 years

[epickiya722]

Eri getting into the music is something so special when you remember the first time she smiles is because of the music concert Class A held... EVERYONE SAY THANK YOU, KYOKA JIRO!!

[embers-of-the-league]

They don't get it. They really still just don't get it.

It's not about saving children, it's about saving people, regardless of who they are... (or that's how it should be at least)

It really feels like they both still feel that you can only save the crying children, not the villain adults - not the people who grew up, dried their tears and started pushing back towards the world that has made them suffer

Sure, they need to save the children, but as heroes they were gonna do that anyway. The real change would be if they started looking at the adult and teenage villains as people capable of being saved too

But apparently that's too much to ask for with this story..

[xspidershex]

If only had I realized sooner

[frankencanon]

He's smiling... 💚

[valzhangism]

[is-bakugou-alive-yet]

BNHA's final cover in Shonen Jump

[eleiwitch]

LOOK AT THEM MY BABIES OH OH

[aashi-heartfilia]

They're GIRLFRIENDS MA LORD!!!

[redphlox]

"If I'd known her when we were children, would things have been different??”

That's a really sweet sentiment, Ochako, but it doesn't fix the systemic issues that contributed to Toga turning to villainy: quirk discrimination and hierarchies, being ostracized by society, her family not accepting her, etc. You can't love someone out of their societal issues. You have to change how society treats "bad" victims.

[sammy-the-dead-dumpster]

I mean, listen.

This death wouldn't hurt so much if it weren't for:

-Toga committing suicide -Toga committing suicide in an exceedingly preventable way -Toga committing suicide because she felt like she wasn't meant for this society and like she had no other options, which nobody disavowed, not even Uraraka directly -So many other characters with way worse odds surviving (like Bakugou, Nagant, Edgeshot?? Dabi???) -Seriously, why did she have to die? Let her be comatose, at least?? -Hawks being all like, 'Yeah, I shouldn't have killed Twice, the villains shouldn't have to die' -Hawks being nearby at the time, right? And of the same damn blood type? -Anyone willing to help nearby, actually -Didn't they put her on the helicopter? You're telling me that Dabi survived the stretcher ride, but not Toga? -It being. so preventable. not like Dabi's path toward destruction, or Shigaraki turning his body into a vessel for a greater evil. she was just a girl who was helping someone she'd hurt. and didn't need to give up all her blood to do it. -She didn't need to give up all her blood to do it. (Bakugou survived worse. Uraraka would've been fine.) -Her being seventeen -Her death feeling so meaningless, as the theming could have been accomplished by Shigaraki's death alone, except as a conduit for Izuku and Ochako to hold hands together. Which stings. My film professor would be completely unsurprised. -Bury Your Gays -Bury Your Unconventional Love Interests (thanks, film professor!) -the frustrating positive tone of some parts of the epilogue, with no real address of the character's failures and emotional struggles -Not even Uraraka gets to monologue about what this means for her future? Izuku's just slapping an emotional bandage on this? Really? -What even is Izuku's characterization right now? -Is Shoto really the only one who more or less Saved, in addition to Winning?