#Chapter 389 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

stillness-in-green · 2 years ago

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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.

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* 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

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