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bnhaobservation · 2 years

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Ramblings about BNHA chap 378

So now we are at 378…

…and I’ve mixed feelings for it.

Why?

Because it has plenty of things that are good… but also feels like… rushed and well, considering Horikoshi was hoping to end BNHA with the end of the past year, I can understand he feels like rushing it but still…

Also… the whole scene is broken more than once to switch back and forth to various groups. So, for simplicity sake I’ll actually jump and forth as well to connect all the pieces so that we’ll follow the fate of a character and than of another in a more ordered manner instead than jump back and forth.

So we start with…

THE ‘FIGHT’ BETWEEN LA BRAVA AND SKEPTIC

This fight should have been planned long ago because, back in chap 230, Skeptic has rejected Re-Destro’s accusations of having failed with Jin and has stated proudly he only failed once in his life, and that one with Jin wasn’t failure (yeah, sure he wasn’t, and AFO is just a harmless old guy) and now it turn out his failure was being unable to stop La Brava when, just for practice, she wormed her way into Feel Good Inc.’s server to replace their ads with images of cats. And, to add insult to injury, she informs Skeptic of her having been the one behind it.

So, you see, this was planned long ago, it’s not something that Horikoshi thought last minute.

But how the whole thing goes?

Skeptic is evidently still traumatized by it and by the huge financial hit they took back then and… and his battle with La Brava is… well, nonexistent as he immediately concedes defeat realizing she’s taking over every single one of his systems and take care to inform her he won’t let her take control of U.A. or the evacuation system as well that he’s fleeing so it doesn’t matter if she figured out where he is.

Flash forward into the chapter a bit and it turns out that actually La Brava has already gave away Skeptic’s location and there were conveniently a group of heroes nearby so Skeptic won’t even manage to escape. For him it’s a complete failure.

Meanwhile U.A. altitude is continuing to drop. Due to Skeptic? No, apparently the system got wrecked due to that last impact so La Brava should code a brand new program for it to keep working and keep U.A. in the air only there’s not enough time for her to do that.

So, okay, first break here.

This was a planned fight and I’m so glad La Brava is back and I don’t really like Skeptic and it’s an interesting idea to have a hacker fight a hacker to save the day but their whole fight is… meh.

Basically, as soon as La Brava showed up, she won the battle and, despite what Skeptic says, the reason why U.A. is dropping isn’t that he controls its system but that the system got wrecked by the last impact.

There’s no real battle, there even was a confrontation as Skeptic had no idea La Brava was there until she was and won. And while this brings over the idea that La Brava is oh so good as a hacker… well, it would have been good if it had more air to breathe.

So, great to have a confrontation with La Brava and Skeptic and La Brava being his only failure but… for me it needed more time. It needed Skeptic to try to fight and lose instead than basically concede he has lost the fight immediately. But maybe it’s just me.

Anyway back to the story.

THE POLICE

Back to where La Brava is, a nameless policeman with glasses, after hearing from La Brava she doesn’t have enough time to create a brand new program, complains that they shouldn’t have let their final defense line to Villains.

Tsukauchi hears him yelling such things and quietly says a crime is a crime and they can’t erase the past but it’s not always a lost cause. And when he says so he thinks to Aoyama.

And we go back to why this part is Very Good and why instead… it’s not.

It’s very good because it conveys how society is so prejudiced against Villains they would attack them even when it’s, to put it simply, plainly stupid.

I mean, La Brava wasn’t chosen to be there because she was a Villain but due to her impressive hacking abilities. If they picked her up, it wasn’t to be nice with a Villain, it was because they didn’t have a better person for the job… because if they had they should have just used it.

So if she can’t be fast enough to write the code, no one could have done it, regardless of them being Villains or not. Implying her inability to do it is just due to her being a Villain is stupid. She can’t because there’s no time. The nameless policeman is doing it solely because he’s prejudiced.

Tsukauchi acknowledging that yes, crimes are crimes and the past can’t be changed but trusting Villains isn’t always a lost cause, lays down the basis for finding a way to deal with Villains that isn’t just beating them and then jailing them. It’s basically the war’s very first verbal step to set up a plot in which Shigaraki (and possibly Himiko and Touya) are viewed not like lost causes but as something that could actually change page (well, actually Gori did so when he dealt with Gentle in chap 183 but it’s not bad to get a reminder right at this point of the story). I’ll flash forward a bit and say that Tsukauchi will continue saying important things like “No matter how far they’ve fallen, each villain is still a human being. It’s on us to recognize that about them. We absolutely have to” and “Deep within each of their hearts we’ll find their starting point- their origin.”

So yeah, the story is really using Tsukauchi to bring forward the idea that Villains aren’t just horrible, hopeless creatures as the jailers of Tartarus implied in chap 297.

Now, to be clear, the one of the jailers in chap 297 was a horrible mindsetting, they made clear they wouldn’t have minded if Gigantomachia was just killed as they didn’t see him as a human nor they saw as humans the prisoners they guarded and they have plenty of accusations of human rights violations.

And when we see how the prisoners are handled in Tartarus… well some are kept in a state that would make Arkham Asylum looks like a holiday resort.

So, back to this chapter, it’s good we finally have someone acknowledge this about the Villains. That they are human and that they aren’t hopeless. This is very good, as finally we’re going somewhere in this direction.

What’s not so good?

For start a recurring problem of BNHA, which is that the dark side of hero society is often unrepresented. The nameless policeman with glasses, who represents the people in the police who thinks Villains are hopeless is ONE mob character. He voices the prejudices of society but it’s no one we can hold as ‘representation’, especially against the majority of named and known characters who are actually good.

Tsuragamae was willing to bend rules so as not to get in troubles Midoriya, Shouto and Iida, we’ve heard what Tsukauchi says and I’ve already mentioned how Gori was overall nice with Gentle Criminal.

This ends up making it seem as if people who would react like nameless policeman with glasses are less of a problem because they hardly appear in the story, since they end up being represented by one background character.

And this isn’t the sole circumstance in which this happens.

We’ve learnt there are heroes who’re all but… however the near totality of heroes or heroes in training we see are good people who genuinely want to do good.

Slidin Go is negligible and his crime was basically to be aligned with the Meta Liberation Army and feeling himself overly important, nothing as dark as the people Nagant mentioned but we never had to deal with nor saw.

Nagant is represented as manipulated by the Hero Commission and ultimately rebelling to it, so again, she represents someone who was good, got manipulated but is still good deep inside and, if you allow me to jumpo forward again, in this chapter, will show she’s back with the good guys.

We don’t see Hawks doing something wrong beyond killing Twice, there’s the implication he too might have murdered like Lady Nagant but we have no info about it and the story paints him as a genuinely good person who actually wanted to save Jin even though he ended up deciding on killing him under the belief this would save more lives.

Endeavor is a terrible father but a very good hero and the story places him on a path of atonement/redemption, him having acknowledged his mistakes so, although many fans still hadn’t forgiven him… well, the story doesn’t want to paint him as someone we should hate.

Well, this leaves us without a hero who’s a terrible person and who’s okay with being terrible and is a problem the protagonists have to deal with.

We can say the dark side is represented by the Hero Commission… but the hero commission is soon disposed, actually it’s disposed before we’ll learn of its dark side, so we’re left with nothing.

The president of the hero commission who turned Nagant into a killer and would have killed her off if she resigned, was killed off before the story started, and madam president was represented as a tamer version of him (she didn’t want to kill Nagant and stuck her into Tartarus) and she’s also killed off rather quickly.

And the same goes for those who’re discriminatory toward Heteromorphs, the creature rejection clan being killed off pretty quickly. Yeah, the kids made some rude comments toward Shouji, but it’s mostly waved away with the kids being ignorant about how it was cruel to say such things to him (because city people don’t know about the plight of Heteromorphs) and them apologizing. And yeah, there were the guys who rejected the giant lady, but that can also be washed away with people being in panic due to the situation and, anyway, again, they were unnamed guys.

Someone gave Shouji’s scars, but all this is reduced into a quick flashback.

So we’ve these HUGE problems that plague society and cause people to turn into Villains or make hero Villains who however keeps on being labelled as heroes but… there’s no real representation for them, they’re just an information, a quick glimpse.

Why all this is relevant?

Because in a story you need all this to be represented by characters… to be visible.

When the Villains go and attack ‘hero society’ and there’s no one who’s the face of the dark side of hero society and all we see of heroes are nice heroes it kind of undermines the point the Villains are making.

Readers get feelings for characters that see and know. But here there’s hardly someone we know and we can feel angry/disgusted about so, even if we know some things are bad… we aren’t lead to feel them on an empathic level, we aren’t helped to care.

It’s much more heart wrecking and easy to remember how Stain hurt Iida’s brother than how there were heroes who pushed civilians into becoming Villains to then hunt them down so as to collect rewards, or how Nagant was deployed to kill people who were only talking about committing criminal acts.

Because through Iida we care about his brother (and if you’ve read “My Hero Academia: Vigilantes” you care about Tensei as he’s a recurring character there) than about those guys.

So this is a problem of under representation… which is actually pretty relevant because society is actually terrible.

I mean, Tsukauchi implied Aoyama too is technically considered a Villain, Aoyama, a teen who was blackmailed by the greatest demon lord of all due to something his family did for him.

I might understand if he had tried blaming his parents, as they knew what they were getting themselves into but Aoyama? Aoyama is a victim, a scared teen who fears he has no one to turn for help.

If society wants to see him as a Villain on par of willing murderers… well, there’s something seriously wrong to society.

But no, let’s focus on how Tsukauchi says positive things about Villains. Glasses guy will likely disappear in the background soon, after all, to leave us with the impression the world is moving in the right direction because Tsukauchi, thinking to Aoyama, has finally realized that Villains are humans.

And this also kind of feel rushed because the implication is that Tsukauchi came to feel so due to Aoyama (because this is actually such a dark world where it feels normal not to consider Villains as humans), so he made a huge leap but… the thing doesn’t really transition well because we don’t really spend time on it.

It feels as if Tsukauchi has transitioned from ‘Villains are hopeless monsters’ to ‘wait, Aoyama despite being a Villain isn’t a hopeless monster because he’s helping us, so all the Villains are also humans’ which is a way too abrupt 180° turn.

And even if we assume that no, Tsukauchi was already thinking so (but in chap 340, although he said he sympathized he still held him accountable for ‘turning his back on decent society’, you know, the one who doesn’t bat an eyelash to violation of human rights in Tartarus, to Endeavor abusing his family and which the hero commission built secretly sniping away whoever would damage its image) and Aoyama merely confirmed this idea… the fact that Aoyama is considered the proof a Villain can be a human and not hopeless still makes the whole thing weak. This 180° turn needed more time to take place. Not long ago All Might himself was waving off Touya as just ‘the madman Dabi’ [Chap 335] likely not referring just to how he was willing to burn himself to reach his own goal, because a better definition for it would have been ‘suicidal’ but just to how he was willing to turn against the father who abused him and society who supported his father.

And now we see Villains as humans and not hopeless?

It’s great but really, we need to explore how this jump in view came to be, otherwise it’s just jumped out of nowhere for the sake of the story.

Whatever, maybe it’s just me.

Back to the story we return to…

MIDORIYA AND SHIGARAKI

On top of panels depicting them in a parallel way we’ve what Shigaraki said previously.

“I am your villain. I don’t care if you don’t understand. That’s what makes us heroes and villains.”

It summarizes the situation but also the problem Midoriya has to overcome. He has to break the division, the idea there are two clear cut groups, one for the heroes and one for the villains and the only way to do so is through UNDERSTANDING Shigaraki. It’s the thing Shouto failed to do with his brother, deciding he would only try to stop him, and the thing both Midoriya and Ochako failed to do with Himiko and the think Hawks failed to do with Jin, we saw that it lead them to get 0 results, actually it only worsened the situation.

The less the Villains feel understood the harder they attack.

The scene though is interrupted again to show UA is still falling and about to crash, as well as filled with Twice’s clones when… someone appears. The scene is technically interrupted to show Skeptic being captured as I anticipated previously and, when we come back to it we discover said someone is…

GENTLE CRIMINAL

So Gentle Criminal is back, of course, and he’s here to save the day.

A flashback, which took place a month and a half ago, starts showing Muscolar freeing the prisoners in Mikuzu Prison, telling them that their lives were their own so they can live as they see fit. You might remember that when AFO began to free convicts we learnt that 7 prisons came under attack but prisoners didn’t manage to escape only from a prison… and this thanks to Gentle who, feeling regret for having walked down the wrong path, manages to stop them all.

As a thank you for this they allowed him to see again La Brava.

Now… it’s great that they had Gentle have his great moment but… he magically did it all on his own when previously he didn’t seem that stronger and, what’s more, he’s the only one Villain who actually try to stop the others. In a chapter that tries to bring forward the idea that Villains can change… the fact that only one prisoner stood up to stop the others, make it looks as if it’s exceedingly rare since the other Villains are all depicted as wanting to escape and do violent acts.

It would have worked much better if other prisoners were to join Gentle in his fight, proving Gentle isn’t the exception, that there’s more people like him.

Never mentioning Gentle wasn’t really a violent criminal or something like that, acting for the pleasure to hurt others, same as La Brava, same as Aoyama, so it seems to carry the message that the Villains who aren’t hopeless are the ones who committed minor, non violent crimes.

Muscolar, for example, is never shown having a good reason to be a Villain and doesn’t regret murdering people.

And if we go to Nagant, who did murder people, well, society would probably excuse her the way they did with Hawks murdering people, as those murders were for the better of society so… we really needed more to carry on the intended message.

But it’s easier and faster to focus just on Gentle and having solely him here so…

Anyway, back to present Gentle uses his power to make things elastic to turn air elastic and therefore catch the falling U.A. reminding us what was what lead him to become who he was, he wanted to become a hero and tried to save someone who’d fallen, but since he failed his life ended up ruined.

He was expelled from school, his parents grew desperate, he was targeted of bullying and chased away by his own family until he came to believe his dreams were dead and gave up on them, deciding to become a Villain. It wasn’t this great Villain origin story, but the core of it was he actually wanted to be a hero, and this time (likely combining his quirk with La Brava’s) he gets to save tons of people from falling and THIS IS GREAT.

Gentle wonders if Midoriya too is fighting for the happiness of other people, and Midoriya is touched by how Gentle came to his help.

So we’ve reached…

THE ENDING OF THE CHAPTER OR LADY NAGANT IS BACK!!!!!!!!!!!

In fact the chapter ends with Shigaraki trying to use his quirk but Lady Nagant, with one of her bullets, basically rips his hand away (and all the while we have the previously mentioned scene of Tsukauchi saying “No matter how far they’ve fallen, each villain is still a human being. It’s on us to recognize that about them. We absolutely have to” and “Deep within each of their hearts we’ll find their starting point- their origin.”).

And by the way, it’s great to see Lady Nagant as well, I LOVE HER!, she’s all bandaged so she’s probably not well but it’s great to see her only it feels weird she had been quiet up until the story required her to act. I mean, what about saving Katsuki previously? But, who cares, I’m glad she’s back.

However… even though Lady Nagant ultimately agreed to help Midoriya by giving him info about AFO, she didn’t seem so into it she would stand up against AFO (and Shigaraki), so again, her deciding to be there feels rushed. And yes, maybe next chapter will devote a page or two about why she came there but still…

So, overall, there’s A LOT OF GREAT THINGS IN THIS CHAPTER but… I think they could have benefitted of being developed in more time.

But I guess we can’t have all and I’m glad to see that the story seems to be turning toward a point in which people will consider understanding Shigaraki as a way to deal with the conflict and save him instead than just beating him harder as a way to stop him or force him to comply.

I only wish the story had spent more time setting up the stage for how the characters acted here than how it tossed them here abruptly. But whatever, maybe that’s just me.

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