#as if destro actually was that impressive to begin with?

[pocketramblr]

white hair, hm? How about DFO Geten?

AfO disowns his son when he learns what a dumb cult he joined and that out of literally anyone, he picked ReDestro to be his sugar daddy

[dereksmcgrath]

I had said before that the number 108 can be unlucky. It wasn’t unlucky at all for My Hero Academia: Vigilantes. But 108 is kind of unlucky for this episode: not only are we focusing on the Villains, but we just aren’t giving their story the structure and emotional weight it deserves.

(I either opened with those remarks or just made a bunch of corny jokes about how “Meta Liberation Army” can be abbreviated as MLA--and I’m saving those jokes for a future review.)

“My Villain Academia,” My Hero Academia Episode 108 (Season 5, Episode 20)

An adaptation of Chapters 220, 221, 222, 223, and 224 of the manga, by Kohei Horikoshi, translated by Caleb Cook with lettering by John Hunt and available from Viz.

My Hero Academia is available to stream on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

Spoilers up to My Hero Academia Chapter 325.

When I teach literature, I refer to the plot as a problem: it is something that the protagonist is trying to solve. This problem can take various forms, but it is often as an antagonist that the protagonist confronts. When this episode has the Doctor refer to a “villain” as someone “who turns nonsense into action,” that’s kind of the point: the villain is here to get the plot rolling. Without them, you don’t have a hero, you don’t have a story.

It has been long accepted by a lot of fans and scholars that superheroes tend to uphold the status quo. I think the first time I gained awareness of this popular argument--although likely not the first time I encountered it--was Dr. Horrible’s mangled remark that “the status is not quo.” More recently, however, I have been reading academic books on superheroes, and not only does that argument persist--that superheroes represent law, order, and upholding traditional norms even in the face of new evidence or out of sheer obliviousness to the need for systemic change--but the argument has become that, if a superhero story does not have the heroes doing something to effect systemic change, then it’s not a good story. I may be misunderstanding that argument, but if I don’t, then it’s not an argument I can stand behind.

The argument is that superhero stories tend to reduce complex issues to having avatars for each side of the issue--the good guy and the bad guy--get into a fight, where we are focused on the spectacle rather than on seeing actual people engaging in the actual work needed to address problems not on the individual level--again, one good guy physically fighting one bad guy--but on a larger scope.

I am oversimplifying this argument, as even those same scholars will point out that, initially, of course there were superhero stories that had the protagonist taking the fight against the system. Superman is one of the ones named most frequently, whether in his initial comic book premiere doing what police and media would not to face down a corrupt senator (a sign of things to come in his later fights with Luthor and in Justice League Unlimited) or fighting the Klan (in the meta sense, fighting their analogue on the radio show and, more recently, literally in the comics). It kind of makes Superman look like one influence on the Peerless Thief in My Hero Academia, but we’ll get to him far later in these episodic reviews.

Even with that exception of Superman, it’s not hard for me to agree with the argument that heroes prop up the status quo. That has been the plot point for My Hero Academia and why this war against the villains has been incoming: a system that depended on just All Might, now depending on a wife-beating abusive father like Endeavor with his crimes not popularly known, has a level of corruption that cannot stand up with just one man’s shining example of honest goodness and integrity to be the Symbol of Peace. It was why I appreciated the manga eventually showing that, yes, there was an entire network of assassins within the Hero Public Safety Commission to keep All Might’s hands clean--and, in retrospect, while Lady Nagant was our first named example, given what Hawks ends up doing to Twice, deadly force may be frowned upon by law in MHA but has to have been something Hawks was told he had legal authority to do. (Also, as I will never stop pointing out, Endeavor unintentionally and unknowingly killed another Pro Hero in Vigilantes, and we’re just supposed to pretend that was fine.)

But going back to this academic argument, about how superhero stories tend to stick to one-on-one battles and don’t let the heroes effect systematic change, I’m ambivalent. There have been a range of superhero or superhero-adjacent stories that have the protagonist making on-page, on-screen, obvious work to not just get into fisticuffs with the bad guy. I already pointed out Superman’s first appearance and his fight against the Klan. I can also identify other examples, some hamfisted like Captain Planet, others more nuanced like Korra reaching out to Kuvira in The Legend of Korra. While the scholarship I read bristles at the idea of reducing these fights to just avatars for good and evil, I shrug and say that kind of comes with the territory of a superhero story. I hate justifying tropes: it’s like saying “this fanservice is acceptable because that’s part of the genre”--which leads to its own set of problems, especially when I hear fools defending sexualized fanservice that is just not needed for the story and is abusive by gender and representation. Heck, The Brave and the Bold animated series had Equinox and Batman battle as giants representing the avatars of chaos and order--which is confusing enough, with Equinox having a vaguely yin-yang motif that debunks any clean separation between chaos and order. And yet, here I am, arguing that this kind of fanservice of a hero and a villain beating each other up is to be expected: you have a debate about ideals of what a hero should do when you see Iron Man and Captain America each representing a side in a fight, whether the poorly handled comic book Civil War or the better film version, and even then, that film also lets the individual personalities get in the way of saying anything meaningful about government oversight and individual agency, ideas better handled in that other Captain America film, The Winter Soldier, and even then that film also gets stuck in just being about Steve and Bucky’s relationship.

All of this is me saying that, when you add a superhero to the fight, you’re going to feel disappointed that almost nothing systematically changes in its setting, not only because, as I’m hinting, these are stories about individuals fighting each other and not stories about the individual against society or nature, but also because a superhero can only change so much of their world for the better before that world no longer looks like our own or a new societal problem has to emerge to create the problem that is the plot itself for wherever the story goes next. Once a hero makes the setting into a utopia, either a new problem emerges to show the fiction of that story and that a dystopia is always married to a utopia, or the utopia is revealed to be hollow (Shigaraki’s word of the day) and fake. My Hero Academia already showed the utopia of a world where people get to live with their Quirks is fake, not only by (largely necessary) regulation of those Quirks but also, as we’ll see more with Spinner, Compress, Toga, Gigantomachia, and others, looking different, or being socially aware, or having disabilities, or being the “wrong” size, excluded you from that society.

What I’m trying to say is that, once you add superheroes into a story to fix the problem, you can’t show what systematic change looks like. How do you write a story where it makes sense that no hero came to save Tenko Shimura from becoming Tomura Shigaraki? What’s a story like My Hero Academia supposed to do to show the problems with a society, if you have superheroes who can fix those problems by beating up the bad guys?

Solution: You have the bad guys beat each other up.

In this corner, the League of Villains, people who were made outcasts because they did not fit in--which reveals the flaws of a society that is not accepting people who may not be able to change their past or their bodily conditions.

And in this corner, the Meta Liberation Army--which reveals how society breeds people in business, media, and politics who abuse laws and societal norms to elevate themselves and create a social Darwinist nightmare.

Granted, these are some foolish schmucks for starting up this fight in public, but I’ll address how the MLA just doesn’t work in a later episode review.

But for now, let the fight begin. No matter who wins, at least we see how society at large allowed these Villains to emerge--and we can either see All For One’s dictatorial forces get wrecked, or see Re-Destro’s fascistic oafs get wrecked.

Unfortunately, no matter who wins, the Pro Heroes are going to lose, too.

I am overly impressed with myself for realizing all of this. And I say “overly” not only because this is arrogant of me but also because I’m pretty sure just about every other person following this series already came to this conclusion: if you want to show actual systematic change, you have to show what the villains are up to, because they are the ones showing the holes in our society that need to be fixed. Either a villain exploits those holes to cause damage to people, or the villain is themselves representative of unfairness in the system and, by breaking the law to save themselves and others, are unfairly maligned as villains.

That being said, I’m not a big fan of the “[Insert villain’s name here] was right” arguments. Yes, Magneto is justified in his goals and ethics, and the debate is the means he takes to them, so his existence is to show why the X-Men are screwing up and need to be more radical. Yes, Killmonger is right that Wakanda’s isolationism is reckless and allows for travesties to persist, but his choices are largely out of individual desire for vengeance, so he’s an example that T’Challa can follow. Taken too far, though, and you get people who preach anti-establishment notions without having an alternative or are just trying to sound edgy rather than actually pointing to the actual problem: it’s someone who celebrates the Joker without recognizing that, no, you don’t want to be that asshole, or who celebrate villain-turned-hero Vegeta just because he looks cool and without appreciating what steps he took to change and what fall he experienced before he got to the point of being a villain.

In all these cases, if done poorly, you have the same tired trend of a villain existing only so long so that the hero changes for the better. It’s as tiresome as I unfortunately sometimes feel reading post after post celebrating how complex and sympathetic the League of Villains’ members can be when, still, a lot of them are just assholes using empty excuses to defend atrocious behavior (primarily, just All for One) or, for the most part, are people put into desperate situations (Shigaraki, Toga, Spinner, Dabi, Twice) who are doing the best they can (Twice, Spinner) even if their actions are not defensible (Toga) or also out of line (Shigaraki) due to their own refusal to seek the legitimate help they need to work through their issues (Dabi).

It’s hard to read posts online calling the League members sympathetic when we have not had a chance in the anime to know their full story. And as with the slow revelation that this setting is not really as welcoming of people of all shapes and sizes as initially hinted, so too do the villains’ backstories show that they were justified in some actions they took, except for those that led to deaths. Too bad none of that really pops up in a meaningful way in this episode that would rather tease out Shigaraki’s back story, keep dangling the obvious answer to who Dabi really is, and short-sells what should be a meaningful friendship between Twice and Giran but is just dropped as fast as Shigaraki takes off Twice’s mask. Jeez, Shigaraki, that is a dick move to Twice…

But I’m already on Page 4 of this rant, so let’s get to the episode already.

Pulling back the curtain yet again, these reviews tend to follow a pattern. Since I first wrote about the MHA anime, my process would be to first re-read the chapters, then watch the episode in Japanese, then watch the episode in English, so as to retrace my steps in how I first encountered most of these stories, as well as to see any patterns in the production process moving from manga to anime to localization. But with this episode, that practice was made nearly impossible given how prevalent the hostility towards this episode, this arc, and this season have been, especially when a friend shared numerous reactions from other viewers about this episode. Seriously, for all the whining I just did the previous four pages, you could read this person or this person who are much better at explaining why the introduction of Re-Destro to the anime sucks, for more than one reason.

So, I had a different approach: I already had the flaws to this episode shared with me by other viewers, then I listened to the English dub, then I re-read the chapters, then I watched the Japanese dub with English subtitles.

And, boy, am I grateful I took that approach, because this episode is a ton of talking--too much talking. For an anime adaptation that cut so much of Spinner’s Leonardo from Ninja Turtles narration, I’m shocked that they kept the boring parts of his narration and cut the only good parts, including the very opening that had a lot more action and gave us a reason to sympathize with these Villains.

I know I’m a snob regarding animation; I have expressed before how, despite my love for animated works, I tend to appreciate them more for what they do with storytelling rather than the spectacle of the visuals. I really dislike works where the value of the work is in the animation alone: I am here to see a story unfold, and if there is no narrative, no plot, no beginning-middle-and-end, then what I’m encountering is a museum piece, not a work of cinema. (Feel free to bash me for that hot take: I’m still railing against Patty Jenkins’s ridiculous argument from this week.)

And as with most forms of karmic punishment I experience, I pay the price: if I rail long enough about works that are only all about the animation and not the story, then my punishment is an episode where all we get is a lot of story and not much in the way of animation. Yet I can’t even say we got a story here, so much as back story, exposition, needless narration--it’s Blade Runner only bad. As much as I have loved how this anime’s storyboards stick so close to the manga panels, the pan over the League listening to Shigaraki’s vague back story felt like the least interesting way to handle this scene, especially when it excises so much of Spinner coming around from questioning Shigaraki to sympathizing with him. Who would have imagined cutting so much of Spinner’s initial narration and the opening from Chapter 220 would screw up how to adapt Shigaraki’s back story from Chapter 222.

The anime cuts how this arc begins in the manga: Chapter 220 starts with Spinner facing off against an extremist group that hates him for his reptilian appearance--a moment that would have garnered more sympathy from the audience for these Villains than this episode is exhorting. We needed a scene to get behind these villains and agree with them, before we are shocked to hear Shigaraki say what we have long expected, that he just wants to destroy everything and make everyone as miserable as he has felt, to wake us up that, no, you may sympathize with these outcasts (to use Twice’s one-word self-description), but you shouldn’t agree with Shigaraki’s goals. (I know Shigaraki relents somewhat when asked by Toga, but it’s hard to backtrack from “destroy it all” to “destroy it all but not the stuff my friends like.” How on Earth is Shigaraki going to destroy Izuku when Spinner somewhat admires the guy and Toga...well, yeah, best left unsaid.)

While watching this episode, I also was reviewing other topics about anime and manga I’m going to go into more detail about later this month, and one topic of discussion is the assumption that anime and manga, by their visual style and story tropes, especially shojo and shonen, tend to be about big expressions--emotional outpours in words, movements, facial expressions, and actions to more easily communicate what is happening, regardless of context.

I hate to keep repeating “ambivalent” in my reviews (another academic word I need to expunge from my lexicon for a bit), but I’m ambivalent about that argument, that anime and manga, especially shojo and shonen, are better at communicating. If your character is unreadable, that likely has an intentional reason: we don’t get much of a read on the Doctor in this episode, not helped by his mustache and glasses, but we also don’t get a read on what Shigaraki is up to.

This episode only heightens my regard, not just about anime, manga, shojo, or shonen, but in animation and comics at large, that not everything is readable in what a character is planning.

On the one hand, I do agree that visual works tend to make ideas easier to comprehend for some people who can engage with such visual works. As someone who teaches English literature and writing in a United States setting, I use comics in my teaching to cross language and cultural barriers, especially for students for whom English is not their primary language or who are the first in their family raised in the United States. And this teaching approach also helps in reverse: I include manga and anime in my teaching to show how not all details cross language and cultural barriers in a one-to-one correspondence, hence the challenges of translation and localization, and how all of us struggle to make ourselves understood within our own primary language to someone else who is fluent in that language, let alone trying to translate into another language or to present ourselves in a different set of cultural norms.

On the other hand, anime and manga are not a fixed genre. Yes, I agree that the images tend to emphasize big eyes, big expressions, and big motions--but that’s like saying all animation is Looney Tunes, or all animation is Disney, or is Dragon Ball, and so on. Likewise, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, shonen is more than just one type of storytelling, and the same goes for shojo. This arc of My Hero Academia is placing focus, after admittedly far too long, on the Villains as the protagonists--and their behavior pokes holes in the idea that things are obvious, when the Villains are themselves such liars, so crafty, have their own hidden agendas, are keeping secrets from each other. It’s as if their behavior is a commentary on this plot and how BONES is adapting it: the Villains are keeping secrets, so this plot is going to keep its secrets for just who Re-Destro and the Meta Liberation Army are, what their personalities are like, and what Shigaraki and the Doctor have in mind for getting what he wants. We’re even kept in the dark as to Shigaraki’s full back story; we’re in the same position he is, knowing just little bits and able to make assumptions from a handful of visual cues and memories, without fully knowing who the hell Tenko is. Add to that Spinner’s struggles to narrate all of this and to get into Toga’s mind and Shigaraki’s mind, as well as Dabi’s own secrets and agenda with Hawks, and we have a story that blows up the notion that anime and manga are easier for reading a character’s mindset: no, they are not always easier, not when the creators deliberately mislead the audience or keep them in the dark for a surprise.

By keeping so much of the audience in the dark, so that we become aware of how deceitful villains can be, and we are put into Shigaraki’s place of not knowing where he came from. This should be a set of brilliant choices by BONES to adapt this arc in this manner. But the problem is, no, almost none of this gets anywhere close to brilliant. It’s not brilliant--it’s frustrating, because we already know what is going to happen. You can just pull up the manga at low cost with a Viz account and read all of this in the order it was originally presented and get the answers ahead of time. And if you’ve been reading the manga all along, you already know how this arc ends, and you know stuff from the next set of arcs so that you do know already what Shigaraki’s back story is, what Dabi was really up to, who survives, who dies. You even learn more about Compress’s back story--stuff that really should have been hinted at much earlier in the manga, and could have been hinted in this adaptation but as of this episode has not.

Maybe that is why the anime removes Re-Destro murdering his assistant: it’s such an odd moment that it is challenging for me to get a read on Re-Destro, as he alternates in the manga between being very friendly and devoted to his comrades but also violent and heartless.

It may be obvious that I didn’t like much of this episode. I think when I stopped taking this episode seriously was when I heard the voices. Like I said, I tend to start with the Japanese dub first before getting to the English dub. And I have nothing at all against English dubs: I would not be listening to them as much as I have, often first before I ever hear the Japanese, and I would not be a fan of so many English-speaking actors in dubs if I had any animosity to the craft, their work, and the benefit they provide for creating a larger audience for these stories. And nothing against Larry Brantley and Sonny Strait, but some of this casting feels off. I wasn’t able to take this episode seriously as soon as I heard the voice distortion that was used for Re-Destro’s phone call: that took me out of the story. If I had the chance for localization, I would really need Twice or someone to call out how freaking ridiculous that Mickey Mouse voice sounded. You have freaking Sonny Strait here: use the Krillin voice, use the Chibi Ragnarok voice, use the Usopp voice--use something, really go bizarre here, it’s just a voice distortion device! And as I said, nothing against Strait, but when I hear Re-Destro when I read the manga, that’s not the voice I have in mind. For right now, HIroaki Hirata in the Japanese dub is closer to that smoothness I expected for this character. But I have no doubt Strait will do excellent as Re-Destro’s empowered form: think Strait’s role in The Intruder II from Toonami. It’s just that Re-Destro in the English dub is lacking that odd refinement I was expecting.

Granted, it’s the same problem for me when I hear Brantley as Spinner: I am making unfair assumptions that don’t suit the goals of the creators when it comes to this character. It is sadly not as obvious in this episode as it is in the manga: this arc in the manga starts with Horikoshi invoking Laird and Eastman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by having Spinner, who is already a sword-wielding reptilian martial artist, narrating just like how Leonardo narrating at the beginning of the very first issue of TMNT. I wanted a voice for the English dub that is like Leonardo’s, a little higher pitch and more youthful, like what Brian Tochi brought in the live-action Turtles film or what Cam Clarke and Michael Sinterniklaas bring in the animated versions. I think, for the Japanese dub, Ryo Iwasaki’s performance as Spinner is very close to what I expected. But that also may seem too obvious: Spinner may be young, but giving him an older-sounding voice can belie his inexperience, youthfulness, and naivete, similar to how people make assumptions about him by his reptilian appearance. The anime is putting me into my place--I think of Spinner one way other than who he really is, so I’m no better than the people around him who have discriminated against him for his physical appearance.

Just as I have a set of assumptions that unfairly influence how I would cast Spinner, I also think Re-Destro should have sounded more refined and less graveley in the English dub. But my expectations belie that, just the Joker whom he resembles, Re-Destro puts on this cultured facade to hide that he is just another violent gangster thug, someone who would kill his own assistant. I know I cited examples above about how complex Re-Destro is, but it’s hard for me to see him as sympathetic just because he’s crying over something he did out of his own volition: he coldly killed his office assistant Miyashita, his tears and kind words don’t suddenly make this a warm and cuddly death, we don’t get to think of him as our woobie. It only makes it more irritating that BONES so far has cut not only that scene of Re-Destro killing Miyashita but also Re-Destro’s TV commercial: it would clue us in that the reason he has that gravelly voice is because, no matter how much he tries to present himself on TV, he is not that kind of a man.

But since I invoked the Joker comparison to Re-Destro, yeah, I’m disappointed we didn’t get Troy Baker as Re-Destro, as unlikely as I imagine that would be to happen, regardless of Baker’s previous work with Funimation. It does lend a bit more to conspiracy theories on my part, though, given casting director Colleen Clinkenbeard telling Twitter followers to stop expecting Mark Hamill in MHA, it’s never happening--we can’t even get Troy Baker doing his Mark Hamill Joker.

(I’m not being fair to Baker: I’m not saying his Joker is at all bad--it is not, he has been excellent as Joker, especially playing him and Batman in the Ninja Turtles crossover film, but it is obvious Baker is performing the kind of Joker that came out of Hamill, so I’m trying to say he’s doing the “Hamill Joker,” rather than the “Nicholson Joker,” the “Ledger Joker,” or the “Caesar Romero Joker”).

It’s also a challenge to sympathize with these characters when we aren’t getting what this arc should give them: a re-introduction. I hate approaching this episode in a post-James Gunn The Suicide Squad world, but seeing how much MHA owes to not The Suicide Squad of the comics but that motif in so many superhero comics, there is that missed opportunity to reacquaint the audience with who are the members of the League of Villains. So, where the hell is my freeze-frame re-introduction to each League member? There was that fan theory a long time ago that Giran was really Present Mic in disguise: imagine doing Present Mic’s introduction of characters by name, Quirk, and pithy comment, only it’s Giran in the announcer seat this time.

(Don’t even get me started on how annoying it is to have Izuku handling the post-credit preview: give that to Spinner.)

Again, maybe it is brilliant for BONES not to include some re-introduction scenes, whether narrated by Giran or happening naturally in conversation between these characters. These Villains barely know each other’s back story, so there’s no artifice where they would believably share their back stories to each other in conversation in this context. And as I said, Shigaraki does not know enough about his own past, and Dabi is hiding his real identity. But when we’re stuck with Spinner as our half-hearted narrator, who seems not to know why he and Toga are still here with Stain being gone, and when Toga is this dull in her answer about what keeps her going after Stain’s arrest, and when Spinner himself seems not to know what he’s still doing here, all of that does not communicate a reason for us to keep going with this story.

I know this arc is going to get better, storywise at least, just based on how it went in the manga. I can only hope that the animation can capture the chaos that the original manga illustrations showed. But I am trying to think what a new viewer is going to do if this is their introduction to this series. I’m not invoking the Episode 7 Rule, I’m not doing a hypothetical experiment to gauge which episodes are the best to bring a newbie into this series--I am asking, honestly, if a fan was already into this series, and was watching it one Saturday morning, and a friend or roommate or relative saw them watching, they would be utterly lost about why they should care about this. Even the explanation for why Twice is indebted to Giran is presented as such an afterthought that does disservice to a potentially emotional moment, to what is supposed to be a pretty deep friendship, as deep as it can be for a weapons trader like Giran and an outcast-turned-criminal like Twice, so that, when Twice helps rescue Giran, we feel that emotional payoff.

It is honestly shocking that, for all the throwbacks, recaps, and flashbacks we get, including how Giran’s fingers match up to previous places where the League fought, that this still leaves a new viewer in the dark. And the problem lies at the feet of MHA arriving at a fifth-season slump: the series has gone on so long that things feel lazy and making far too many assumptions on what knowledge the audience is bringing. You’re not getting a bigger audience if you keep appealing to the diehard fans and the people reading the manga. After all, why would you keep doing ridiculous recaps and flashbacks if the fans already know what happened?

But speaking of the recaps and flashbacks, that should have been how this episode redeemed itself. As I said last time, if you re-worked the order of episodes to start with the Oboro Shirakumo story, that would be more shocking. But what if this episode could have been the very first episode of the season, and following the trend of previous seasons, make it a recap episode? We already had Izuku narrating a clip show, Class 1A at the pool, a photojournalist visiting the UA Dorms--it would be so much more interesting seeing “League of Villains camping in the woods while in the background Shigaraki gets squished by a giant.” Have the Villains tell campfire stories about how they got here: it would be a great excuse to re-use the animation and save on the budget. You could fit in a few gags, as Toga starts telling a really gruesome story but gets distracted by all the blood in it, while Twice’s story bounces between sugar-sweet happy and grim-and-dark chaos, while Compress and Spinner are stuck trying to keep them focused. It’d be a hell of a lot more interesting than how BONES somehow screwed up a potentially emotional volatile moment between Izuku and Amajiki that would put into question whether Izuku is going to have to kill a Villain and just how devastated Amajiki feels after Mirio lost his Quirk.

And speaking of whether Izuku is going to have to kill a Villain: obviously, this arc is setting up how much more dangerous Shigaraki is than UA gave him credit. Back in Season 2, I hated how Nezu and UA staff referred to him as a “man-child,” given the connotations that have surrounded masculinity and being a man. I wrote that before 2016; in this post-2016 atmosphere, and the increased prevalence of toxic masculinity, I am, once again, that annoying word ambivalent. I am likewise ambivalent how well this series has shown Shigaraki to be able to form the plan he does by episode’s end. We’re only told by Spinner how much faster Shigaraki is getting and how much slower Gigantomachia has become--but the animation doesn’t show that. And we’re being told how great Shigaraki’s plan is--when it sounds ridiculous.

By cutting so much of Spinner’s narration from the manga, we also don’t get a scene where Spinner confronts Shigaraki to ask him what is his plan. Up to that point, Shigaraki has said that, with Kurogiri gone over the last month and the computers at the old League hideout destroyed, they can’t reach the Doctor. Spinner is insistent: what is the plan? Shigaraki responds that he just told them--as Gigantomachia crashes through their hideout. The other characters explain for readers like me who aren’t following: Shigaraki just said Kurogiri was gone; to contact the Doctor, Kurogiri sought Gigantomachia; Gigantomachia would sniff out where Shigaraki is and bring him to the Doctor. Brilliant--that shows more attention to Shigaraki’s planning and scheming, and now, it’s not even here in the episode to make me think this guy is that smart. (This episode also had Shigaraki reveal his plan to have Gigantomachia attack the MLA, whereas it was Spinner who predicted that was going to be Shigaraki’s plan--so, again, we’re not letting Spinner stand out as smarter than we expected, either.)

I know Shigaraki is supposed to be our chessmaster, given his association with gaming, especially when he was faking his ignorance about shogi to lower Overhaul’s guard before defeating him and stealing his Quirk-cancelling bullets. But I’m having the same problem I had when following All For One throughout this anime: it just feels like these two antagonists are getting ahead out of sheer luck and because everyone else is a fool, not because either of them are that great as villains. Give me a Xanatos, give me a Luthor, give me a Norman Osborne (not Clone Saga Osborne, a different one). Show me Shigaraki is more than a pawn for All For One and the Doctor, because I don’t feel anything here, not even when we’re supposed to feel that Shigaraki has some legitimate concern for All For One that just isn’t getting communicated to me, whether by my stubbornness or because the content is not giving the animators and actors what they deserve. Eric Vale can sell the hell out of a scene, but Shigaraki’s talk about All For One is not giving that opportunity to the actor.

My remarks this time are a lot more disorganized and doesn’t really arrive at any conclusion. I have more to say about how this arc works and doesn’t work, especially when it comes to how ridiculous the MLA comes across in underestimating the League, but we’ll get to that next time.

[stillness-in-green]

I felt like the plf war was rushed

1.Plf advisors getting hype but no payoff

2.Only miruko, Momo, and Kirishma got time to shine

3.Machia got defeated to easily

4.The war felt more like a raid

I don't know if I feel like it was rushed, per se--it's by far the longest arc in the story so far by number of chapters, and would be even if you cut off the Tartarus jailbreak and the entirety of the hospital aftermath. What it absolutely does feel like to me is unbalanced.

You note that the "war" feels more like a raid, and you're right. As a caveat, it's worth keeping in mind that "Paranormal Liberation War" as a name for the arc in question is entirely an invention of the fanbase. To the best of my knowledge, the reasoning for the name was that big action shonen series like BNHA (Naruto, Bleach, Hunter x Hunter, etc) always have a war arc, so what we were seeing in the lengthy, mass combat confrontation with the PLF had to be HeroAca's equivalent. It's not a term that's in the manga itself, however, not called as such by the characters, not referred to as such by Horikoshi or his editors, not even namedropped in chapter or volume titles. If it feels like a raid, that's probably because that's what it was intended to be.

And that's the problem, really. This arc shouldn't have been about a couple of raids; it should have been about a war.

(Below the cut: a bunch of fired-up complaining. Uses some harsh language, and talks about both injuries and deaths we did see and some we logically should have.)

From the outset, we were told that the resources Shigaraki had amassed were "on par with, or even stronger than" the resources of the hero-saturated society. Yet, we're expected to believe that a force that strong is so easily taken down by a single coordinated set of raids? Yes, the heroes had the benefit of surprise, but there's just so much that doesn't work for me.

First off, and to get this out of the way, it's ridiculous that the heroes even had the benefit of surprise. The MLA had an unknown number of hero double agents. They had people in the government; they had people in the infrastructure. This is an organization that had been living undercover completely unsuspected for multiple generations--how did the HPSC ever manage to carry out a massive, country-wide investigation on such a secretive group and coordinate multiple simultaneous, comprehensive raids without a single person finding out and alerting the higher-ups over a period of only three and a half months?

When exactly did Hawks have time to go and revive Best Jeanist--which he tells us he did personally--such that none of the bugs and micro-cameras he was covered with picked up on it, and both he and BJ could be back in the positions they needed to be in for the raid to begin?

How did Skeptic find out about the raid such that he only discovered it at the last possible second and not minutes, even hours, before it kicked off? How did hundreds of heroes (and even "hundreds" is being conservative, given the fact that they had seventeen thousand people to detain) close in on the villa without anyone from the PLF noticing, either Skeptic with his information network or mundane precautions like people on watch?

Even granting the heroes their surprise advantage--which I don't want to--if the advisors were all supposedly "stronger than the average hero," why didn't we see any of them winning? Okay, yes, Hose Face beat Midnight, but he had every possible advantage in that "fight"; I hardly count it as some big impressive defeat that shows us that the villains were holding their own.

Here's another thing: the MLA styled themselves as an army--they were demonstrably trained in troop tactics. When we saw them in Deika, even their nameless on-the-ground people were capable of coordinating with each other on the fly in response to the movements of the enemy, as we saw come up repeatedly:

Yeah, they were off-guard at first, but as soon as the advisors made the front line (which, you'll note, was immediately), that disadvantage really should have begun eroding. Certainly once Geten--Geten! The number one MLA member most willing to disregard collateral damage! And there he was being a proper leader!--got to the front and started yelling orders, we should have seen the PLF rallying, and I can't imagine any sensible justification for the tides not turning when a) Re-Destro showed up to occupy the highest-ranked hero on the field, b) a bunch of heroes peeled off to try to stop Machia only to get trampled for their efforts, and c) Trumpet got dug out.

You know who don't style themselves as an army, though? Heroes. Oh, they get some basic lessons in cooperation as students, but the extent of such lessons we see is stuff like "why it's important for heroes to have signature moves"--so that on group missions, their reputations will precede them and fellow heroes will already know their shtick. U.A. teaches the odd lesson plan that involves the kids fighting in groups, but there's a huge difference between you and 3 to 6 of your buddies fighting a similarly-sized group in a practice fight, or a handful of heroes teaming up to take down some criminal low-lives, and the mass combat scenario that was the raid. For heaven's sake, look at our closest other equivalent: the raid on the Hassaikai base. At every turn in that encounter, the heroes let themselves get split up and picked off, winnowing down their numbers. It's even explicit in the narrative that hero team-ups were, in the age of All Might, uncommon, and heroes are only just beginning to adjust to fighting in teams. The erstwhile MLA should have had the advantage there.

As to Machia's defeat, I think the big problem with it is not how it happened, per se, but the timescale involved. The plan itself was sound enough, and even with all the kids' efforts, it still took Machia reaching Shigaraki and not getting any new orders to follow to really do him in. Given what we can extrapolate about his movement speed, though, I just don't think the kids should have had time to set all those traps, especially given how much of that equipment would have had to be fabricated by Momo on the fly. I know she's gotten stronger and all, and good for her, but you're telling me that in the four months between Joint Training and the raid, she went from passing out because she created a bag of goodies and one (1) cannon to being totally fine and still able to coordinate her fellow students while cranking out 23 jars of sedative, dozens of feet of rope/cable, multiple fire-resistant coats, explosives they somehow had time to bury, and three cannons?

For fuck's sake, Jirou gave Machia's ETA as under ten seconds. Yeah, Mount Lady slowed him down, but "only a little"--how much time could she possibly have bought them, that the kids were able to to coordinate and enact everything that plan involved?

You guys, go read this post by @codenamesazanka. Machia is so fast. So unbelievably, incredibly fast. "Twice as fast as the fastest train in the world" fast. "Horikoshi clearly did not stop to think about the distances involved here" fast. Three miles in ten seconds fast. It would have been hard enough to square with the needs of the plot that the kids were sufficiently far from the villa to have the kind of time they needed to swing Momo's plan at all, but Horikoshi explicitly letting Machia get right on top of them before the kids even start just makes it completely impossible for me to credit. Machia clearly being slower aboveground than he is when burrowing does not make that much difference to my suspension of disbelief.

My other big complaint? More people should have died, for real. The PLF warriors would not have been holding back. They were ready and willing to kill anyone they came up against. The heroes did have to hold back, because heroes, as we're told over and over again, are not supposed to kill, no matter how dire the circumstances. That difference in ability to exercise force should have been yet another significant advantage for the PLF. I could write an entire list of characters that I think could have reasonably been killed during the raids. That wouldn't be to say that I think any individual, specific character on that list should have died, just that, based on the parameters as they were presented to audience, some number of them should have.

I mean, honestly. How did Horikoshi wanna show us Gang Orca's unmoving claw in the wake of Machia's passage and not have Gang Orca on the list of the dead? How did Fat Gun run right into a mass melee and still have enough fat left over afterward to survive getting trampled by a walking mountain? How did Thirteen survive not getting pulled out of the hospital basement when Shigaraki's Decay hit? How did Trumpet survive getting a staircase dropped on top of him? How did Gran Torino survive a fist through his tiny old man chest cavity?

I could go on and on, but it's not just about the deaths, either. I'm not saying that Kamui Woods necessarily should have died by swinging himself face-first into a blast of blue fire, but I am saying that he should have been out of commission for longer than three goddamn days. You bet your ass I'm saying that after telling us that Hawks' weak point is fire, making us watch him spend at a solid minute or more with his wings wholly enveloped in Dabi's 2000 degree flames, and having Dark Shadow exclaim that his back is completely burned away, Hawks should never have grown his wings back, much less so quickly that they were already visible under his shirt a single day later.

More deaths, more maiming--heck, even more retirements. I'm not saying I love that kind of thing in my fiction--I don't, actually. I think an overreliance on it is a sign of edgelordy nonsense. But the scenario that we had demanded to be treated with the kind of gravity that would have led to such an outcome. To set up a conflict like the raid and have the villains only barely be able to scrape a partial escape, to try to tell us that Shigaraki's victory in Deika granted him such a terrifyingly powerful force only to have them lose every battle they got into, to tell us this was a blow that shook Hero Society to its core, only to be so unwilling to kill or retire any heroes the audience cares about that Midnight is literally the only significant loss… It doesn't work. None of it works.

I don't have much to say on which characters did or didn't get a highlight. I think there were a few more people than you listed that got some good scenes--Tokoyami and Uraraka both got material I liked quite a bit; Dabi famously out-trended the U.S. presidential election on Twitter when he (literally) came clean, and Mr. Compress gave us some wonderfully interesting and characteristically opaque material to chew on. On the whole, though, adding more character moments would only have been dragging out the problem: the scale of the PLF's threat and the HPSC's chosen method of dealing with it are simply incompatible with the feeble "neither side truly won or lost" resolution we got.

And that's my rant on that--thanks for the ask!

[twobitmulder]

When did Storm Shadow Become a Villain?

There is a scene in GI Joe Resolute where Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are having their obligatory Ninja Battle and (Spoilers I Guess) Storm Shadow reveals that he orchestrated his uncle, The Hard Master’s, death and that he fully meant to kill Snake Eyes as well, out of jealousy and because his uncle would not teach him the final secret to killing a man in seven steps, fearing that young Storm Shadow was too volatile and violent. Towards the end of the battle Storm Shadows wrist bands come off, revealing his Arashikage tattoo on one arm and a Cobra Sigil on the other.

This version of Storm Shadow (Voiced by “every Beagle Boy on Ducktales” Eric Bauza) stands out amongst his post-2000 incarnations as an unrepentant psychopath, but still falls in line with the prominent view of Storm Shadow as a villain--one of the main villains with a special hatred for his GI Joe counterpart.

This is the version I grew up with. GI Joe vs Cobra through Sigma 6 were the prominent Joe adaptations when I was the target demographic and all throughout Storm Shadow was a bad guy to varying degrees. 

I knew in the classic Hama stuff he eventually defected, but I was not prepared for just how much he’s a heroic character from the start. There’s no big sword dual with Snake Eyes, no Anakin and Obi Wan style “friend turned bitter enemy” dynamic. It’s made clear from jump that Tommy is undercover in Cobra and remains an honorable man in search of justice. He leaves Cobra quickly and is branded as a Joe in all his figures until 2000--when they started packing their characters in two-packs with one Joe and one Cobra. In all appearances, Storm Shadow is more a Joe than a Cobra. So what led to the the modern view of Storm Shadow as a bad guy, who, even when he gets his redemption, still has a mean streak and a cruel manner? How did a character in a toy driven franchise who had more toys as a hero than a villain end up as one of the franchise’s most consistent villains?

*(For simplicity’s sake, this is only going to cover film and television portrayals of the character).

*Spoilers for pretty much every GI Joe adaptation to follow.

The first portrayal of Storm Shadow as Cobra Commander’s loyal and competent hatchet man (one of the few) is not too much older than Hama’s original Marvel version. The Sunbow version of Storm Shadow (voiced by “guy you’ve heard in everything” Keone Young) remained a loyal cobra agent--with none of the Hama version’s depth. 

He had what you might call “standard cartoon Ninja honor” where he clearly had some kind of code of ethics, but was primarily an arrogant killer (as much as he could be in a cartoon) who fought primarily with Spirit and Quick Kick (voiced by wonderfully talented “guy you’ve seen in everything” Francois Chau) as Snake Eyes was largely shunted to the side in the cartoon. The echoes of Sunbow Storm Shadow can be seen in pretty much every non-comic adaptation that followed.

Skipping right over the Dic continuation of the Sunbow cartoon because Storm Shadow actually is a Joe in that, as he was in the comics and figures of the time (and because I haven’t seen it) we come to the 2000′s era.

The Spy Troops and Valor vs. Venom DTV movies had a Storm Shadow (voiced by “guy who got his blood ripped out by Magneto in X2: X-Men United” Ty Olsson) who was essentially his Sunbow self with one major change. He actually had a history with Snake Eyes, and a bitter rivalry. The details are not gone into in either film (you get a little more in the figure file cards and mini-comics of the era) but Storm Shadow accuses Snake Eyes of betraying the Arashikage. The implication being that either Storm Shadow blames Snake Eyes for some crime or another or that there was a schism in clan. 

The File cards of the time movie go from acknowledging Storm Shadow’s time as a Joe, and claiming he’s working with Cobra again for unknown reasons, to establishing their own canon that Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow were once best friends and “Sword Brothers” before Storm Shadow fell to the dark side and joined Cobra. Though Storm Shadow’s file card does end with the ominous implication that he’s got his own agenda in working with Cobra (just like his Hama incarnation) the DTV films imply that he’s a Cobra loyalist in addition to his feud with Snake Eyes.

Spy Troops and Valor vs. Venom lead in a semi-canonical way to GI Joe Sigma 6 where Storm Shadow (voiced by “guy whose only other role I recognize is pulling double duty as Zeke Stane and Living Laser in the Iron Man 3 videogame” Tom Wayland) more or less continues the previous two iterations’ version of Storm Shadow. He once again accuses Snake Eyes of some great betrayal that broke their friendship. The GI Joe website at the time includes the detail that Storm Shadow was infiltrating Cobra when he was brainwashed into becoming a loyal Cobra agent. It’s another concession, like his 2001 file card, to Hama’s heroic double agent, while still portraying him in line with Sunbow’s villainous henchman. 

GI Joe Resolute comes next, where we see a departure from any pretense of Storm Shadow being a good guy. Resolute, in many ways, comes off as a gritty direct continuation of the Sunbow series, and it takes Sunbow’s villainous Storm Shadow and strips him of even the token bits of honor and humanity he had. It also, as near as I can tell, begins the trend of Storm Shadow outright resenting Snake Eyes, rather than being his one time friend.

As an irrelevant aside, I have my problems with Resolute but I do love everyone’s character designs and Eric Bauza does a fantastic job as one fourth of the cast. His Sean Connery impression for Destro is particularly inspired.

This brings us to the big ones. GI Joe: RIse of Cobra and GI Joe: Retaliation where Storm Shadow is brought to the big screen by Lee Byung-Hun (who I don’t have a snarky/informative aside for because shamefully despite how prolific he is I’ve only seen him in these movies and The Magnificent 7 remake) and as a child by Brandon Soo Hoo (he’s also been in a lot of stuff, but I particularly liked his turn as Beast Boy in the animated New 52 DC movies).

Lee’s Storm Shadow in the first film falls in line with his portrayals up to this point, probably skewing most closely towards Sunbow. He has a code of ethics (he doesn’t kill women apparently) but he’s still a bad guy and he seems to quite like it. Lee brings a charm to the character that had not really existed up until that point. He also spends a lot of time maskless (and it’s hard to blame the production team for that one, he’s a very handsome dude) which was a shock for anyone who grew up with the 2001 era storm shadow where the thought of him without a mask was so insane that it was relegated to a mail in figure (As a kid I seriously thought he had some Mandalorian style code of not removing it)

His origin in this version takes bits of Hama and bits of Resolute (or Resolute took from this, Resolute came out first but this might have been in development). It is, as far as I can tell, the first version to have Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes train together as children and it portrays Storm Shadow, even as a child, as an arrogant and jealous person.

Now, at least in my opinion, it’s fairly obvious that the first movie fully intended Storm Shadow to be a baddie, full stop. There’s a little wiggle room given that we never see him stab The Hard Master in the flashback (the Hard Master in this version is Storm Shadow’s father rather than his uncle) but the way he taunts Snake Eyes about it during their final confrontation makes a pretty compelling case for his having committed patricide.

The sequel would bring back elements of the Hama backstory. Zartan killed The Hard Master and Storm Shadow had to infiltrate Cobra to discover that. Given Cobra Commander and Storm Shadow are of roughly the same age (Storm Shadow being a bit older I think) and this event occurred when they were both children it’s unclear on who’s orders Zartan did this but we do know it was done to turn the already volatile young man into the perfect angry ninja assassin (given this canon is pretty much over we’ll probably never know for sure, but my guess based on the IDW movie universe comics is that Zartan either did it at the behest of the Red Ninja Clan or just to have a tiny assassin of his own, probably the former since they seem to regard each other as unpleasant colleagues who sometimes work together).

What I particularly like about this version is that, because the first movie portrayed him as this charmingly sadistic Bond Villain henchman, even after he switches sides in the sequel he’s still kind of a belligerent dick. It’s a fun piece of characterization that even once he’s cleared his name, avenged his father, and made his peace with his family, it doesn’t change the fundamental fact that he’s not a very nice person.

This is something that would persist into the next (and for the moment last, but more on that later) onscreen version of Storm Shadow.

GI Joe Renegades (the best GI Joe Cartoon, fight me) saw Storm Shadow (voiced by “holy crap this guy originated the role of Saw Gerrera in Clone Wars” Andrew Kishino) as the leader of the Arashikage Clan (explicitly a crime syndicate, harkening back to implications in Hama’s version) who operates independent of Cobra except very briefly and only to fulfill his own ends (again bringing him closer to Hama’s version than any of his predecessors). Falling in line with the implications of the movie and Resolute, he and Snake Eyes were uneasy classmates more than friends and trained together as teenagers. An attempt to kill Snake Eyes went awry and resulted in the death of the Hard Master (who again, seemed to favor Snake Eyes over his own nephew). Storm Shadow believes Snake Eyes to have killed The Hard Master(somehow failing to connect the dots given his own murder plan failed the same night Snake Eyes allegedly murdered his uncle--or hell he’s probably just in denial until the truth slaps him in the face). 

Also, irrelevant aside number 2, in contrast with Resolute I really don’t like this character design. Renegades had pretty good character design all around, neatly bringing together various versions in a way that felt coherent but I don’t like the little tufts of hair sticking out of the mask or the way it kinda hangs in front of his mouth. Is he hiding his face or not? It seems like he’s not so much wearing a mask as a bandana and an oversized turtleneck.

This version neatly ties together the “Snake Eyes betrayed us” of the early 2000′s, the “arrogant unfavorite” of the mid 2000s and the “out for justice assassin” of Hama’s run. He is, again, an arrogant prick from the start, but his genuine shame and resolve to abandon his quest for vengeance and his extremely short partnership with Cobra make his eventual redemption (or the start of what you assume would have been a longer redemption arc had the series continued) more believable than the live action movies--if a mite less fun.

And that’s where it ends, at least until the much delayed Snake Eyes live action movie is finally released, where Storm Shadow is set to be played by “guy from the best episode of American Gods Season 2″ Andrew Koji. I quite like the look of the cast of this movie, and I’m excited to see what Koji brings to the role. Will Storm Shadow be arrogant, murderous, honorable, charming, brooding, misunderstood, cruel, vengeful...some impossible combination of all of the above? We’ll have to wait and see.

*Including the various alternate comic book versions probably would have painted a more complete picture, but I’ve only read Hama’s run and the IDW reboot (where Storm Shadow is kind of a non-entity), besides this was more about tracing Storm Shadow through the adaptations I watched as a kid.

*None of the adaptations seem to go with Hama’s original detail that Storm Shadow and Jinx were from Northern California. On the one hand I see why you transplant them to Japan with the rest of their family (it’s a globetrotting element and makes the cast more cosmopolitan) but I always liked the idea of that they were children of immigrants.

*Adaptations have been touch and go about casting Japanese actors in the role but I was impressed to find out that Sunbow cast Japanese Americans as both Storm Shadow and Jinx, making them probably the most faithful casting in relation to their original backstories.

*Apologies for my complete inability to get screenshots of roughly the same size or resolution.

[alexthegamingboy]

Toonami Weekly Recap 9/18/2021

Fena: Pirate Princess EP#05 - The Burning Sea: Abel describes to Fena that the portrait of her mother was made by him and is lacking some colors to make it complete. As the Bonito II surfaces, the crew all decide to chase after Yukimaru and rescue Fena with him. Meanwhile, the Rumble Rose begins its attack run on the Blue Giant. Abel decides to test the "Wellington Cannon" that was supposed to be used during a siege on them, blowing up the entire pirate ship and its crew in one shot. Fena suffers from shellshock, the burning wreckage and the British sailors reminding her of the attack on her father's ship ten years ago which the British Royal Army was also involved in. As the Captain of the Blue Giant demands she be thrown in the brig, Fena cries out for Yukimaru who arrives in time to start attacking the sailors, but he is shot twice by Abel's tri-barrel gun. Yukimaru recognizes Abel from the attack on Franz's ship as he collapses from his wounds. Suddenly, the rest of the Goblin Knights arrive and manage to escape the Blue Giant with Fena and Yukimaru, but both are unconscious as the group retreats to the Bonito II.

Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon EP#12 - Night of the New Moon and the Black-haired Towa: Konton tasks Nikosen, a sage-turned-apparition demon, of annihilating the Half-Demon Princesses and attaining their Rainbow Pearls. At the village, Towa and Setsuna accepts the mission of slaying Nikosen from Kohaku while Moroha helps local villagers in destroying the demon for his bounty. Towa and Setsuna come to join her but are attacked by Nikosen who demands the rainbow pearls they possess. Towa attempts to join her twin sister and cousin in battle, but her light blue energy blade does not form, which concerns her and puzzles Setsuna, as she can hear her heartbeat louder than she should. Moroha tries to use her Kurikaramaru but is unable to slice through Nikosen. In retaliation, Nikosen sends forth a stream of poison that affects and weakens Towa. Setsuna gives her a poison-shielding mask and tells Moroha to take care of Towa while she fights the demon. As Moroha helps an unconscious Towa across a bridge, she notices the change in Towa's hair color and length but is blocked by Nikosen's torso. In midair on Kiara, Setsuna attacks an illusion of Nioksen's head which is undo by the assistance of Hisui and his fellow Demon-Slayers. Finding shelter in a cave, Moroha is surprised that she smells the sent of human on Towa and learns from Myoga that Towa's predicament is because of the new moon which is different for every half-demon, with the exception of the late Naraku who was capable of choosing a night of his own free will. Towa is concerned that Setsuna has experienced the exact same transformation and wants to go find her. With Myoga's aid, Moroha infuses her spiritual powers into sutras to erect a blue sacred barrier to protect Towa. As Setsuna retains her full abilities, Moroha deduces that because her memories were taken from her by the Dream Butterfly, the laws of the new moon no longer apply to her. Taking advantage of this fact, Setsuna manages to hold off Nikosen who hopes to eat her and gain strength from her. Fortunately, daybreak comes and restores Towa's dog-demon abilities, ending in her using her charged sword to wipe him out completely. Having witnessed the whole battle in fire he created, Konton states how good a show it was and smiles in satisfaction, now aware of their weakness.

My Hero Academia Season 5 (My Villain Academia: Paranormal Liberation War Arc) EP#108 (20): My Villain Academia: Two months earlier, Gigantomachia appears before the League of Villains, declaring Shigaraki unworthy of being All For One’s successor. During the attack, the League is teleported to the lab of Doctor Ujiko, All For One’s assistant. The doctor intends to help Shigaraki in his goal of destroying everything that irritates him, but before Shigaraki can be granted power, he must defeat Gigantomachia. The League returns to Machia, while Dr. Ujiko asks Dabi to help him test out a High-End Nomu. A month and a half later, the League of Villains have made no progress in defeating Machia, but Shigaraki's strength and skill has been increasing. Intending to talk to the Giran, Twice is alarmed to find out that the League's Broker has been captured and tortured by Re-Destro, leader of the Meta Liberation Army. Re-Destro invites the League of Villains to Deika City to face an ultimatum. Shigaraki accepts, smiling at the prospect of Machia crushing his challenger’s forces.

Food Wars: The Fourth Plate (Promotion Exams Arc) EP#66 (05) - You're Done For, Fool: The judges find that Megumi hid an apple confiture in the center of her dorayaki. Despite this, the judges vote 2-1 in favor of Momo, citing that the bitter taste of the confiture overpowered the apple butter. However, Momo acknowledges Megumi's skill and potential. Meanwhile, Takumi decides to cook a pizza with shigureni beef. However, when Takumi puts his pizza in the oven, Eizan reveals his dish is a roast beef with cream sauce incorporating artichokes. He points out the cynarine in the artichokes will cause the judges' taste buds to react more violently to sweet flavors, which will ruin the taste of Takumi's pizza, as shigureni is naturally sweet. After the judges taste Eizan's roast beef, Takumi presents his pizza, which is separated into two halves; one side is purely cheese, and the other has shigureni. Takumi reveals that he predicted Eizan would try to neutralize the taste of his shigureni, so he adjusted his sauce to be more bitter to compensate. The cheese half of the pizza is made of a mix of four cheeses—mozzarella, parmigiano, gorgonzola, and ricotta—which further complements the taste of the shigureni. Impressed with Takumi's ability to make three different dishes complement each other, the judges unanimously declare Takumi the winner.

Black Clover: The Spade Kingdom and the Dark Triad Arc EP#166 - Captain: Yami Sukehiro: Megicula takes over Vanica’s body, shatters the eternal prison and captures Secre. Loropechika is overcome with fear when she realises Megicula has also cursed Undine, and her proximity to Megicula activates her own curse, crippling her with pain. Vanica decides to kill her but Noelle manages to fight back and stab Vanica through the chest. Vanica at first is able to withstand the attack and strike Noelle down but is actually injured from Noelle’s attack. Vanica is impressed and asks Noelle’s name, Noelle replying she is a Clover royal and a Black Bull. Yami and Dante continue their battle, with Dante explaining if they manage to open the tree of Qliphoth he will have access to all Lucifero’s powers, though he is unsure if the same applies to Asta who uses anti-magic. Yami is crushed under a giant boulder but survives and, deciding he must once again surpass his limits, condenses his entire mana zone to just the tip of his sword and creates Death Thrust, which obliterates Dante’s entire torso. Dante’s own Body Magic, boosted by Lucifero’s power, regenerates him in seconds and he reveals makes him incapable of dying. Asta struggles to stand, but to his surprise, Yami announces he cannot win without Asta’s help, and Asta finds the strength to stand beside Yami and they battle Dante together, as equals.

Slightly Damned Page 1025: https://www.sdamned.com/comic/1025

[mazusu]

Oh, I see what you mean by Dabi acting like Joker woof. I was wondering why he was acting so dramatic doing this psycho crazy boi impression woof. Especially when small statements he made that revealed his beliefs genuinely already made him insane woof. Its clear how Endeavor destroyed his faith in heros and prolly humanity, but his reveal to his dad was so tryhard that I was laughing at him woof.

Hello again, dear! Hmm, I don’t think he was acting dramatic, I think the scene was genuine. I mean, it was not his own beliefs that made him like that, it was his father. Instead of saying his beliefs made him insane, I’d say being insane provided what he actually was longing for, and that’s being destroing Endeavor’s life. He was the first son, he didn’t have anybody in the beginning, he was alone.

And that’s why it reminded me a lot of Joker. I’m not saying that Dabi is exactly the Joker, but their character construction, at least for me, is really similar. Both of them were abused and tossed aside since childhood. The quote “the past never forgets” also represents both very well, for example when Joker killed Randall but spares Gary since he was the only one that was nice to him in the past. All their actions are based on things that already happened, being the future just a resolution for those things. And that’s why the way Touya revealed himself was so perfect for him and the dancing was to express how much joy he was having from it, he planned it for so long and it’s finally happening. 

When he actually saw the world outside the Todoroki’s cage, he was already broken. Stain’s idea was the the missing piece for a traumatized kid: kill those false and hypocritical heroes. And that being said, what’s right or wrong? Just because “heroes” have that title, they can do as they please? Imagine for a child being casted as a failure since he was born and moreover from a person who has the title that everybody glorifies, a hero. 

As Touya said, he knows that he killed innocent people, but as he also said, it was Endeavor’s flames. You see, he still is trapped. His “freedom” will just happen when he destroys Endeavor’s life in one way or another.

That’s why I really liked the scene. He was genuinely happy. He’s finally accomplishing what he really wanted. And as the Joker said “they think that we’ll just sit there and take it like good little boys, that we won’t werewolf and go wild.” But you know, Touya did go wild and he’s proud of himself. 

OMG I WROTE A LOT, I’m sorry it’s just that I really enjoyed it haha

[alifeincoffeespoons]

part ix of the avatar au: the red spirit

part i | part ii | part iii | part iv | part v | part vi | part vii | part viii

Lily’s sick, and saying that James is panicked would be an understatement.

He barely knows how it happened. One day she was fine, and then they walked ten miles during a thunderstorm, and then she was sick.

Okay, it actually does make sense, if you look at it that way.

“Cute,” she giggles, poking his cheek, and James gulps. If she’s calling him cute, something is definitely wrong. “Handsome.”

Okay, yep, she’s delirious. 

He paces around the cave they’re staying in. Lily’s wearing her warmest cloak and is tucked into her sleeping bag, a blanket on top as well, but she still seems to be shivering, and her forehead is burning. He needs food and medicine, more than anything else. 

Wormtail bounces up to him, and he pats the flying lemur on his head. “Wormy, do you think you could get some food for us? Something cold, preferably, to help Lily.” He tries to gesture with his hands, and Wormy nods—well, as best as a flying lemur can nod, anyway. James grins. “Good Wormy.”

He spends the next hour worrying over Lily, pressing a cold compress soaked with water to her forehead. He can’t risk taking her to a doctor in town, especially now that the Fire Nation definitely knows what he and Lily look like. They’d just as likely be arrested as helped. 

It doesn’t get any better when Wormtail finally returns. Instead of food, he’s brought back what looks to be an expensive wristwatch. It’ll be helpful when they can sell it, but right now, it’s about as useful as a rock.

Actually, even a rock would probably be more useful. 

Then, suddenly, it comes to him. He recognizes the mountain in the distance—at the last town they docked in, one old woman had told him about a healer who lived in the green mountains. That mountain looks pretty green to him. 

“I’ll come back soon, Lily,” he whispers. Lily mumbles incoherently, turning over in her sleep, and James smiles at her softly. “Don’t worry.”

He bounds out of the cave, running as fast as he can. If he conjures up a dust cyclone to bring him to the top of the mountain faster, well, no one saw him, right? It’ll be fine.

Finally, he reaches the top of the mountain, panting. He rushes inside the building to find an old woman with long white hair, walking slowly as she waters plants.

“Hi,” he breaths. “My friend is super sick—like, really, really sick—and I need medicine for her. I think she has a fever, and she’s coughing too. Do you have any—”

“Shh,” the woman whispers. “Let yourself connect with the elements, and all will be revealed.”

“Okay, I’m the Avatar. I’m the most connected with the elements. Anyway! Do you have any advice for my sick friend? Please?”

“Frogs,” the woman says sagely. “She will suck on frozen wood frogs, for only then can she be well. You may find them in the swamp at the base of this mountain. But take care that the frogs don’t thaw, because then they’ll be useless. Useless!”

James looks at the woman dubiously. She smiles. Her mouth definitely has too many teeth. “Okay?” And then, studying her face, “Oh man, you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.”

The woman just smiles back, and James groans. The problem is, he doesn’t actually have any other ideas besides having Lily suck on frozen frogs, as unpleasant and frankly disturbing as that idea is. “Right. Frozen frogs it is.”

He grumbles as he wades through the swamp, which is definitely unsanitary and probably the spawn point for multiple infectious diseases. Finally, he sees a frog, and he traps it in a circle of earth quickly, smiling. He tucks the frog into his pocket. For good measure, he scoops another one up too, and breathes a sigh of relief at his good fortune. Now, he can go back to Lily, and she’ll be fine, and—

And he’s been pinned to a tree by archers. Wonderful.

Surprisingly, being hung from chains on all fours isn’t as uncomfortable as it could be. It would almost be kind of fun, if he wasn’t in a life-and-death situation and being held captive by Admiral Malfoy. Again. He really needs to get better at evasion tactics. Briefly, he wonders if there’s a way he could just turn invisible. That would solve a good 50% of his problems. 

And now Malfoy’s monologuing. Again.

“You see, Avatar—”

“Okay, like I’ve told you five times already, my name is James.”

“You see, Avatar, you seem to be under the impression that I’m here to kill you. No, no.” Here, Malfoy laughs, and James wonders why his life is just so uniquely terrible. “No, Avatar, I’m going to keep you alive. If you die, things will only get even more complicated. I can’t afford to let the Avatar cycle continue, after all. No, I’ll bring you to the brink of death, so much that you wish you could be dead, but you’ll be alive. Always alive, at the end.”

“Wow, you’re so very kind,” James simpers. 

Malfoy sneers at him. “No one is coming to help you, Avatar. No one can penetrate the walls of this fortress. Not even your little waterbender girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend!” Wait, why did he say that? He’d love for Lily to be his girlfriend. “I mean—”

Malfoy laughs cruelly again. He strides out of the room, shutting the door behind him harshly.

James looks around the dimly lit room. There’s no earth to be found, but there is air. If he could just get out of these cuffs, maybe he would have a chance. And then he feels the frogs start to wriggle in the pocket of his robes, and he groans again. Just wonderful.

He struggles against the cuffs again, wincing as they bruise his skin. Then, suddenly, he hears a commotion from outside the room, and he cranes his neck to hear.

It’s unmistakably a fight—he can hear the clashing of swords and the shouts of soldiers. Maybe Malfoy’s army has finally mutinied. He’d deserve it. 

Then, he hears the turning of the lock to the door, and he swallows hard. He prays that it’s not Malfoy again. 

Slowly, the door opens, revealing a figure wearing a red mask that looks almost like a lion, the mouth open in a roar. It’s kind of terrifying, to be honest. And that’s not even to mention the two swords the figure is holding, sharp and deadly. 

He stifles a gasp when the figure brings down the swords, but instead of feeling pain rush throughout his body, he falls to the ground as his restraints are cut. 

“Who are you? And thank you—” James starts, but the figure shushes him, beckoning James to the door. James follows the figure as they quietly creep through the doorway, though he can’t help but protest when the now-thawed frogs bounce out of his pocket. “Hey, guys, come on! Lily needs to suck on you guys to get healthy, you know.”

“Shut up,” the figure hisses in a low voice. “Do you want to be recaptured?”

Mutely, James shakes his head. Something about the figure’s clear distaste for this situation is vaguely familiar, but he doesn’t have much time to worry about that as they creep out of the fortress through the ground and begin to climb up the tall wall surrounding it with a rope. 

And then the alarm sounds, blaring, terrifyingly loud, and alerting every single soldier in the vicinity of the wall to their presence. He feels them falling before he even sees the guard who severed the rope. 

“FIND THE AVATAR!” he hears Malfoy bellow, and inwardly, he sighs, because that just had to happen now too, didn’t it.

The ensuing battle can be described as nothing short of chaotic. He manages to throw back a good amount of Fire Nation soldiers, and the masked figure shields him from the soldiers when he can. They make a good team, James realizes, this random red-masked guy and him. He wonders what Lily would think if he brought back the figure in the morning—hey Lily, I made a new friend! I don’t know what his name is, but he saved me from a lifetime of torture at the hands of Malfoy, so he seems to be pretty all right. 

They manage to almost scale the wall for a second time, this time with bamboo letters, but unfortunately, once again, a soldier manages to stop them. This time, James realizes, they’re completely surrounded by firebenders, and he gulps. And there’s no earth around him at all, of course. Even the ground is metal. 

“Stop!” he hears Malfoy call. “Do not harm the Avatar. I want him alive, do you hear me?” And then he feels the two swords at his throat.

Okay, maybe he shouldn’t bring this new friend back to Lily.

Slowly, with the swords still at his throat—vaguely familiar situations again—he and the masked figure back away. They’re almost at the gates—finally!—when the masked figure crumples to the ground. There’s no time to dwell on that, though—he can hear the firebenders running behind him and Malfoy’s increasingly deranged shouts, so the moment they’re finally clear of the gates, him dragging the masked figure behind him, James sends up an enormous wall of earth. That’ll take them a while to get past, hopefully. 

He pulls the masked figure up and onto his back as he runs, as far away from the fortress as possible. Finally, panting, he stops in a forest, tugging both himself and the figure up into a tree.

“Er—hi,” James starts awkwardly. “I’m going to remove your mask now, if that’s okay, just to, you know, check for internal injuries and all that. Wait, that doesn’t make sense. Facial injuries, I meant—if it’s okay with you, of course.”

The masked figure gives no reply. Oh, right, he’s unconscious. 

He’ll take that as a yes, then. Slowly, James peels back the mask from the figure. He doesn’t even have time to stifle the gasp.

It’s Prince Sirius. Again.

“Why do you keep saving me?” James asks softly. Prince Sirius, of course, gives no reply. “Well, thank you for doing it, even if I don’t know why you’re doing it. I didn’t get the chance to tell you thank you last time you saved us—because you were saving us, weren’t you—so thank you for that too. You really got me and Lily out of a tight spot there.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” Prince Sirius snaps, suddenly conscious. “I just don’t want Malfoy and my fucking bastard of a father to destroy the world.”

James shrugs. “Well, you still saved me.”

“And I don’t want to have to do it again,” Prince Sirius replies. “How do you manage to keep getting captured? Malfoy doesn’t even have two brain cells to rub together. It shouldn’t be that hard to avoid him.”

“No invisibility cloak,” James quips, and Prince Sirius looks at him with contempt.

“Try to not die, okay? It really shouldn’t be that hard,” Prince Sirius says. He slides down the trunk of the tree, wincing when he lands.

“Do you need a hand back to—uh, wherever you came from?” James asks. “I don’t think you should be walking on that.”

“No,” Prince Sirius says curtly. James watches as he limps out of his sight, disappearing into the trees. He sighs. As far as he can tell, Prince Sirius is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle wrapped up in an impenetrable hedge maze. 

Three more hours later, he’s finally back at the cave, having managed to somehow find two more frozen frogs in the swamp. He gives them to Lily to suck on, and she hums appreciatively in her sleep.

An hour later, she wakes, sputtering. “James, what the fuck is this?”

“Frozen frogs,” he says cheerfully. “Did they help?”

“Why did you think—you know what, I don’t even know if I want to know,” she says, sighing. “I think I’ve been traumatized.”

“But you’re better!”

“Sure.”

part x

[makeste]

so i’m guessing mr mouse killer, dr child killer and grape pervert are the three characters you hate then

actually, no! well yes for Re-Destro, but not the other two, surprisingly. with Ujiko, even though he’s obviously a terrible, horrible person (possibly the worst person in the entire series; I think he even gives AFO a run for his money) and I hate his guts, as a character he plays a really important role as AFO’s Guy In The Chair and as the architect of all these evil sciencey plot things like the Noumus and the like. and crucially (for me, anyway), Horikoshi makes no attempt whatsoever to try and portray him as likable or sympathetic in any way. he’s an unrepentant creep through and through, which is honestly kind of a relief. I can despise him without feeling any sort of guilt or conflict. so in that respect I think he’s a very satisfying villain character, and I can appreciate that he does a good job of fulfilling his designated role in the series, which is to be Very, Very Evil.

with Mineta, I don’t really hate him so much as I hate Horikoshi’s handling of him. it’s very annoying and frustrating that we’re still dealing with comically perverted tropey characters in 2020, and that it isn’t seen as anything serious, and that people will defend it and be all “oh lighten up” and insist that it’s no big deal. even if Mineta always gets hit with some kind of immediate and deserved retaliation for his attempted gropes and such, it’s still very telling of the culture that it’s portrayed as a nuisance or an unavoidable occupational hazard, rather than sexual fucking harassment. I feel like we ought to be long past the point of this being something to joke about, but yet here we are.

anyway that turned into a rant, but having said all that, I guess it’s kind of weird but I have a tendency to try and separate this phenomenon from Mineta’s actual character nowadays. like, rather than “Mineta did something perverted”, I perceive it more as “Horikoshi wrote Mineta doing something perverted again.” he is a victim of the author treating him as a vessel to pour all of his dumb horny energy into, rather than treating him as an actual character. I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t hate Mineta because I’m constantly wishing that we would get to see him portrayed as an actual character with a personality beyond just “I really like boobs.” he has an interesting quirk, and the potential is/was there to have him be a character who at first just wanted to become a hero for superficial reasons like money and fame, but over the course of the series gradually grows as a person and becomes someone who genuinely wants to help others. that’s the kind of character I think he could be if Horikoshi wasn’t constantly beating the “guess what, Mineta’s still a perv!! so funny!!” horse, which was in fact dead on arrival and never funny to begin with. anyway so I’m not sure if any of that makes sense but oh well.

so now getting back to the original topic of “characters I dislike”, the other two besides Re-Destro are Overhaul, and Stain. and there are a lot of reasons I dislike them, but I guess probably the biggest one is that in both of their cases, they’re characters who are treated within the story as being super charismatic to the point of inspiring fanatical devotion in a ton of people, and I guess I just don’t really see that at all, myself. like, for Stain, everyone in-canon kept going on about how even if they didn’t agree with his ideas, they all found him super intimidating and compelling. and I kind of got the impression that we the readers were supposed to have this impression of him too, except that I just didn’t. at all, lmao. to me he just came off as very annoying and hypocritical and child-murdery. I felt like it was a total swing and miss as far as the attempt to build him up into a character where we could see where he was coming from and empathize with his ideals even if we didn’t agree with his methods.

basically I dislike him because to me he fails at hitting the marks for either “likable as a character/person”, or “admirable as far as being well-written and serving an important function in the story.” he does serve an important function in the story, mind you, but that’s part of the problem -- that someone who serves as this huge catalyst and is in a way responsible for the creation of the LoV reads to me as such a hollow and disappointing shell of a character, and we’re basically just forced to accept that he’s the type of person capable of attracting this huge cult following. however, pretty much all of this is totally subjective and YMMV and that’s fine! like if you happen to be a big Stain fan or whatever THAT IS FINE lol, this is all just my own dumb opinion.

and with Overhaul it’s pretty similar to Stain I guess. except that with him, you also couple in the fact that almost right from the start we already know that he is torturing a little girl (and I mean like literal torture?!), and has absolutely no problem with that. and the thing is, as soon as that’s revealed, there is basically no coming back from that. this is never going to be a sympathetic character. this is never going to be someone the audience is ever going to look at and be like “okay, but otherwise he’s actually a really nice guy” or even “this sad thing in his past makes me feel sorry for him.” because bro. he is torturing a little girl. and manipulating her and gaslighting her into thinking she deserves it, and keeping her locked in a cell in the basement, and only interacting with her when it’s time to torture her some more. THIS ISN’T A NICE GUY. THIS GUY IS SUPER DUPER EVIL AND BAD.

which would be absolutely fine if, like Ujiko, he was treated as someone we were supposed to find repulsive! but then Horikoshi for some reason started giving us all these flashbacks showing his various lackeys being “saved” by him and them being all “he was the only person who gave my life any meaning even though he clearly treats me like garbage” for whatever reason (I mean, ??? this is still inexplicable to me). and then later on giving us these childhood flashbacks of him trying to explain that in his mind what he was doing made sense, and he had convinced himself it was all for his boss’s sake, and so in a strange and deeply fucked up way it was out of love for him, and so forth. and that just did not gel with me at all. like, I can respect the attempt to try and make him a more fleshed-out character, but at the same time, you showed him torturing a little girl. do you think we’re really going to feel sorry for him?? or that (in the case of the flashback where he was implied to have put his boss into a coma) we really needed to see yet more examples of how terrible of a person he was? anyway so to me his flashbacks felt like just more dragging-out in an already-dragged-out arc, and more or less fell flat in terms of expanding his character. like, yes, he’s a sociopath, we already got that. we figured it out. we’re good.

again though, it’s subjective! others may have found him a more compelling character, and have been more receptive to Horikoshi’s attempt to give him a backstory and provide more context for his actions! and that’s fine. but for me, it was just a big No all around, and I can’t say I was particularly sorry about his ultimate fate at the end of the arc. definitely ranks among my top ten limb amputations in a series which is surprisingly rife with them. anyways! so thus concludes my unnecessarily long post about my disliked BnHA characters. I’m just glad the series is good enough that there are only three, haha.

[darthravage]

Who is the most useless Sith?

When you want to gain influence in a society which is like those of the Sith you should be very good in your job. At least most of the time. Some Sith only seem to have survived and even recieved a title by pure luck. I seven Sith in which last is the case (at least in my oppinion). The sequence of the Sith isn’t a rating.

Darth Caedus whos birthname is Jason Skywalker is the oldest son of Han Solo and Leia Organa and was trained to become a Jedi. He was strong in the force even though it was obvious that he wasn’t as strong as Luke Skywalker. He tried to live like the Codex of the Jedi wanted it what you can also can recognize that his brother Anakin Solo died and Jason dind’t want revenge in murders without any sence. That changed when he got captured and tortured by a Sith and had additionaly time to think about his brother and feel the sadness about his dead. Moreover, he had a vision that he is going to kill Luke Skywalker and hoped to escaped this destiny by becoming a Sith. (I don’t know what he thougt about the Sith that he regards joning them as a good opportunity to don’t kill a famous Jedi). As a Sith he was more commanded and manipulated by others than following his own aims. Except killing Mara Jade Skywalker, Lukes wife he didn’t cause much damage. And he didn’t even defeat her in a fair fight so she was ditraced and poisoned by him. Eventuelly, he was nothing but psychologically unstable.

Darth Zhorrid was the daughter and only apprentice of Darth Jadus. When he died she was the lawful hair to his place in the Dark Council what she recieved after a view diskussions within the Dark Council. The reasons for that were that she was very yung and not much of her deeds were known since Darth Jadus kept them as a secret. Unfortunately Darth Zhorrid didn’t know the secrets of her father and wasn’t able to gain respect from the other members of the Dark Council. Some of her actions caused that she was hurted by the other members physikally.  In the end she wasn’t able to do her job accurate what you can see when even the Minister of Intelligence was able to manage that she dosn’t has to do that much with the agents and he was hirachically under the Sith. Her little influence also caused that the Star Cabal was able to abolish Imperial Inteligence and Darth Marr could use Lana Beniko as a Minister for her job without getting trouble. (The alternative is that she get killed by Cipher Nine what is emberassing either.)

Lord Paladius, a is a carismatic person who was able to get a own Cult on Nar Shaddaa. Oficially he was there because of Sith artifacts but he didn’t seem to work that much and live in gluttony. That impression gets enforced when you look at his body proportions. Another problem of him is that he is very selfsuficiant. You can watch this when you finally get to meet him and it comes out that he can seperate you from the force what will kill you. But he only mocks and frightens you until he says that he will fight against you even though his fighting skills aren’t that good. (That also approves the theorie I’ve made bevore since he hasn’t had that much training on Nar Shadaa). Finally, you can ask if he is loyal, easy to scare, dump or just lazy. Bevore you met him fist he had time to prepare himself for the meeting and only had to look up what caused the earth quaque which you officaly only did by using the force. When he found the broken hydraulik lines, what shouldn’t be that difficult, he could show it to the others and reduce your influence as much as your credibility what will cost you a lot of followers. After the fight you can decide to leave the cult to him but he will rule in your name. Sincce you dind’t care for the Cult after Nar Shaddaa (until Moff Pyron comes) he has lot of time to prepare his revenge but he didn’t do anything like that and only tried to get higher income by taking part in trading with technique. Now: Is he loyal? - Possibile but it won’t fit for a Sith. Is he scared of you? - Possibile either but he could use his anxiaty to fight me with more strengh since strong emotions give strengh to a Sith. So the most likely option is that he is basically lazy and dosn’t care who is leading the Cult officially as long as he has direct influence and a convenient life.

Darth Millennial has a name which sounds very powerfull and he actually has some skills which are pretty cool what makes it sad that he didn’t use his opportunities. When Darth Millennial was trained to become a Sith he developed doubts in some parts of the Sith philosopie, especially, the Rule of Two since he thougt it was better if the stronger one rules. Since the doubts increased he run away at what he was almost killed and founded a new religion on Dromumd Kaas which was told “Prophets of the Dark Side”. The name had the reasond that Darth Millennial was able to see the future and claimed himself as the chosen one. Over the years the “Prophets of the Dark Side”, which only existed secretly,  were able to attract many force users in the whole galaxy. Even after Darth Millennial died at a high age on Dromund Kaas. That was it. The man who had the philosophie that the strong Sith should rule the galaxy died without trying to spread his religion by fighting or fought against the Sith anyway.

Darth Gravid was a Sith who doubted in the Dark Side of the Force itself. But he didn’t wan’t to become a Jedi either and so he mixed up the teachings of the Jedi and Sith by adding things like altroism and emphatie to it what actually is against the nature of the Sith. Since that wasn’t enough Darth Gravid became increasingly mad and destroyed Holocrons and artifacts untill he was killed by his apprentice for this reason. She even managed to kill him after he tortured her in fighting instead of basically killing her (what would fit to his philosophie but obviously he isn’t taking it this serious regarding himself). The actions he did throwed back the Sith Empire about centuries and he didn’t save it at all what was the reason for his actions. (However you want to save something by destroing importatnt thinks of its history)

Thana Vesh is the apprentice of Darth Gravus and your rival on Taris. She is regarded as a good Sith who managed the tests on Korriban in record time. But she can only use her full potential when she is angry what you have to cause like Darth Gravus did it in asking you for help. Another problem is that Thanna wants to be regarded as the best what causes that she works inefficent by letting a mission least longer for getting extra kills. Of course it’s good to kill an adittional number of your enimies but not if the whole war leasts longer because of one person. Another problem regarding her is that she is very directly for example when she tell Darth Gravus that she is going to kill him. It’s normal that an apprentice wants to kill his master and Darth Gravus may know that but it’s a difference if somebody has something in the back of his mind or if he has it at a curtain thread. But you can say about her that she is fulfilling the mission in the end so it’s fine I think.

I think Darth Nox is the most suprising person to name in this text since he/she is the only one who survives the forcewalk more than one time and of course you play him/her what causes that of course all the quests are succesfull. Moreover I think that Darth Nox seems to be quit strong in PVP (but I’m not really experienced in this). Eventually you can say that you bind a Dashade, a feard assassin, at a very low level. But I name him/her anyway because he/she is only trying and survives by a mixture of luck and help of other persons. You can see this right in the beginning when Darth Zash sends you in the Temple of the Dark side to get the artefact of Tulak Hord which belongs to the gost of Kallig only because she had a dream which predicts that you maybe are able to calm down the ghost. She also admits that she isn’t sure if you are the right person for that. So instead of informing him-/herself how she could be able to save him-/herself from Lord Kalligs anger Darth Nox went to the temple without having any clue what to do when Zash is wrong and it was luck that Kallig is an ancester of Darth Nox. When Darth Zash calls you to the Temple of the Dark Side again you are informed that her intentions won’t be good for you. Instead of going in her chambers for a short time (while she is in the Temple) and inform yourself about her plans you run to the point where you are supposed to meet her having no idea about the ritual she wants to do (and it’s obvious that she don’t want to give you the strengh of Tulak Hord. The Sith don’t trust each other especially not theyr apprentice so why should she give her apprentice more power than she has herself). If Khem Val wouldn’t save you by change you died there. The same problem appears when you get to meet Darth Thanaton. Andronikus Revel warns you to don’t trust him as Zash does. Again you don’t inform yourself about the dangers in the tomb and would’t survive it without the help of Lord Kallig. When you learn the Forcewalk you get informed that it is a bridge between life and death so you should think that it should have some unwanted side effects, especially when you know that even some artefacts make people crazy and Sith aren’t altruistic and there isn’t an obvious reason to teach it to you. But you don’t consider that as a posibility. Moreover the whole story didn’t work if your crew, especially Darth Zash who betraied you once, would do all the reserches for you. Another problem which I have regarding the strengh of the Sith inquisitor is that you haven’t the strengh to defeat Thanaton on your own and need a lot of ghosts to do that. If anybody else had this strengh he or she would defat Thanaton either since it is not that hart to do this with the strengh of many people.

[miscellanasaurus]

MHA 235

Again sorry for the late updates and to anyone who follows me because of my random and often spontaneous Vrains reviews i am working on my review but at the same time life seems to be getting in the way so sorry about that but never mind that onto the yugioh vrains review.

We open up with Re-destro clarifying how shigaraki decayed his attack in the3 official translation  which should appease the padantic ass hats over on reddit as well telling us how re-destro`s been perfecting this technique since his childhood days which is something i hope horikoshi delve`s into wheather or not his family indoctrinated the beliefs of the MLA into Re-destro in much the same way AFO indoctrinated shigaraki or if he choose these beliefs of his own volition and his family disaproved or hell maybe they supported the beliefs too in short i want some backstory on RE-destro...also small detail but those heart palpatations shown in the second panel “Badump” “Badump” is most likely the downside to his stress based quirk and considering stress is one of the major causes of heart attacks i wouldnt be suprised if Re-Destro died or was significantly weakened because of this.

We also get a beutifull worded panal from horikoshi that really shows the extent of shigaraki`s drive for destruction also i love the pure malice in the face i and how its completly different from any of his other expressions and in this case the lack of detail really adds to the tension.

This panal also has me worried as from the beginning i was under the impression that this villain arc would develop shigaraki`s goal into his own ideology but considering that this was the prime oppurtunity i`m starting to have my doubts and though it wont bother me if shigaraki`s goal remains as pure chaotic destruction i have to wonder how that will effect the story as a whole all i know is that there has to be a skybeam if superhero movies have taught me anything its that theres always got to be a gigantic skybeam.

howvever again the official translation has it as “all i can do is destroy” making this even more tragic for shigaraki and i really just wanna give hima hug while he goes down this unhealthy self destructive path

 We flashback to shigaraki`s past and as many people seem to have theorized it Shigaraki did indeed want to be a hero when he was a child also its hard not to notice the resemblance to little deku horikoshi`s kinda laying it on a bit thick but it doesnt matter that much to me

what i also like is that horikoshi doesnt portray it as black and white you can understand the complexitie behind his father and how in his own way he`s trying to protect him by cutting his dreams of being a hero short, does that make what he did right? of course not its still borderline abuse, though not physical that comes later. as well as being selfish and narrow minded but i can still appreciate the complexitie behind the father also noticibly Tenko`s absent from any scenes that portray his family in a less ..well there`s no other word for it, dickish fashion .

There`s something heartbreaking about shigaraki being compared to all might especially considering how much he detestes him also this is the second time its mentioned tenko didnt have a quirk yet now if they went to test him or not thats unknown however i have mixed feelings about the idea of afo giving shigaraki the quirk asi`m not particularly fond of backstorys of people being forced into villlainy by manipulating the chessboard in such a fashion so far its tolerable as it seems tomura was going to grow into a vilain without AFO`s guidence though thats not the theme of him as a character, and its afo who simply gave him the ability to become a powerfull villain though no matter what direction horioshi takes the story in i`m sure he has a plan for how his story will progress.

*Small note its nice how as a child shigaraki took the people no one wanted and played with thim rather similier to the Leugue 

We also get the full details behind the office scene from chapter 227 and i`l raise my hands and say i did kinda blunder by suggesting that Hanna did actually want to become a house wife that was a mixture of weird scans and no energy. the idea of a hero sibling team with little tenko is adorable and i kinda wish we knew what the shimura quirk is it`l either be revealed in this arc by flashback or ,hopefully not, shigaraki gaining said quirk that or we have to wait for deku to unlock it.

Honestly these few panals are heartbreaking and though i enjoy the creative narrative that reminds me of earlier 80`s comics the way this scene plays out is utterly gripping this is the first time child abuse has been directly shown in this manga neither immplied or kept just out of frame its direct and raw.

Its heartbreaking to watch tenko endure this whilst everyone else looks on helplessly and it certainly adds some more nuance to deku and shigaraki`s little mall encounter and how his family is honestly a reflection of both hero sociaty as people just look on not bothering to do anything and is a genuine sociatal problem in japan as a whole if you want to considere this political commentary you can though i doubt horikoshis making this manga for that one purpose and its unlikely thats his purogative .

Honestly despite only being prominent in one chapter i already enjoy shigaraki`s dad as a character the conflict of emotions as no matter how you look at it nana chose her career over her child at whilst that might be for the better good, whole lot of it it did to, you can still understand the resentment he holds for her in a sense he`s Kota without a deku unable to let go of his resentment for being left behind

he even admits what he did was wrong and i feel this sums up shigaraki`s life  best the fact taht it wasnt a tragedy from beginning to end much like Dabi`s presumably is it started off bleak and then escalated to a full on nightmare as we end on this disturbing panal of shigaraki anjd his poor corgi  

all in all i enjoyed this chapter though to be honest i`d of preferred it if shigaraki could recall his backstory from the start of the seriese and have it leading up to this moment with a bunch of flashbacks scattered throughout as it adds such a complexity to him as a character but other wise i enjoyed it 

[thequietmanno1]

MHA Final Boss theorising

About whether or not Tomura is gonna get AFO’s quirk, or multiple quirks as a means of fighting Deku at full power- I admit I’m flip-flopping on which of the two of them should end up being the opponent for Deku’s final battle. At First, I was all for Tomura, mainly because that’s the way the narrative has been going for the two of them since the beginning, each of them gaining a better understanding of what it means to be the top hero/villain in their society, overcoming their personal flaws and becoming more mature and powerful, losing their mentors in the same fight, gaining access to new powers/resources as a result of the actions of their predecessors, and each becoming the leader of a rising group of new heroes/villains (though it’s more like co-leader in Deku’s case) - it’s actually been mainly due to your arguments that I’ve started to think that Maybe AFO will keep his power and end up the final boss after all. 

Basically, so far as I can see, Deku and Tomura are ultimately supposed to end up in the same position to the other, just on opposite sides- they’ve grown at a steady pace in different ways that inform both their paths in life and have come to an understanding that they have to make their own place at the top separate from their master/idol- they’ve even both got mangled and permanently scarred hands now, once Tomura’s heals up (I’ve seen statements that say it’s a well-made prosthetic that’s supposed to replace his hand, but looking at it closely, there seems to be stitching showed under the wrapping where it connects to his hand, and in close-up’s it looks like a glove, so it think it’s supposed to be a cast-like medical wrapping that’s supposed to force his severed hand back together against his bleeding stump until the nerves reattach and to keep bloodflow moving into the severed fingers until they heal- you mentioned that Re-Destro ‘plucked’ them off like a flower petal, so it looks like it was a clean cut, all things considered, though I am surprised that his fingers survived his wave of decay afterwards- Toruma’s decay tends to be a bit pedantic about what it does and does not affect at times doesn’t it? 

What with it somehow not decaying his remaining face hand despite that being close to ground zero- point is, once his digits are reattached, his left hand will be as mangled as Deku’s right hand is, which is probably symbolic what with the connotations of things on the left side belonging to the devil)- and to me, the final step in that process would be Tomura getting either AFO’s quirk as a rite of passage and to justify the power boost he’d need to take Deku down towards the end of the series. 

One of the things that impressed me the most upon AFO’s introduction and subsequent curb stomping of everyone that didn’t have the initials AM was how he somehow managed to twist the narrative mid-battle to make All Might the Attacking Villain and himself the Rescuing mentor saving his protégé in a suicidal defensive attack- like, I’d seen everything he’d just done to the heroes and best Jeanist, I knew he’d killed hundreds of people in that attack alone, I knew he was the one that Crippled All Might and was responsible for generations of evil deeds, but when he gave Tomura words of comfort and encouragement, and then turned back to throw himself at All Might, explicitly to sacrifice himself for his pupil (a sacrificial act I’m pretty sure NO villain or ever overlord has ever done before, or at least not explicitly to allow another person to inherit their position and power as Overlord) I couldn’t help but admire that act- like I knew he was Evil, but for that brief moment he was almost like a hero, and I was surprised at how he’d warped my perception of himself even with that knowledge (props to Horikoshi for pulling that off)

 hen he reveled that he intended to allow Tomura to possess Multiple Quirks, presumably through his own Quirk being passed on, and then he revealed to All Might that he’d deliberately pulled a Luke Skywalker on him and subverted his master’s heroic legacy to the cause of overthrowing the oppressive Hero society (and it is oppressive- that’s a fact. In order for something like peaceful society to exist, everyone’s superpowers must be controlled and suppressed lest they cause chaos and destruction all around them, so even good natured guys are frowned upon using their quirks even for mundane purposes in public) basically weaponing the traditional Heroic narrative against the heroes themselves, just like the self-aware comic-book reading villain he is. 

It was like he said to himself “you know what? Screw all of you, if I’m going down, I’ll go down on my own terms- I’ll go down making Obi Wan and Yoda look like goddamn chumps by raising my own pupil more efficiently than they ever did!”. All of that said to me that he planned for Tomura to continue his goals in his own way, to become the best villain successor to AFO that he could possibly be before gifting him his powers so as to grant him the ability to shape the world however he wished. And here’s the thing about Tomura getting multiple powers- I kinda felt it was necessary for him, not only to mark him as Deku’s counterpart, but also to have the power necessary to overcome Deku once he’s trained up in a few years’ time (I’m pretty sure the series will continue to justify the ‘Academia’ title by sticking with Deku throughout the full 3 years he’s studying/training at UA, so the narrative will probably last about that long). 

AFO and All Might’s clash was all about one power trained and honed to the absolute limit vs many powers working together to overwhelm him through sheer might. I felt that that was indicative of their positions in the narrative, as two people who have come to occupy a similar position through completely opposing means as a foil to each other. Right now, it’s looking like Tomura and Deku’s clash will be a reversal of this, what with Tomura having his Uber-decay ability and Deku having Multiple powers, but honestly, as Strong as Tomura is right now, I just don’t see the His decay power having the same overwhelming force as AFO did in Kamino. I’ve always felt that for Evil to pose a threat to good, it must possess strength on equal grounds than Good so it may be overcome- it must be able to match and dominate Good’s strengths head on, rather than aiming for Good’s weak spots to end the fight in a ‘sneaky’ way. AFO deliberately fought All Might to weaken his powers first, but he did so by hitting him hard enough that he had no choice but to expend his power through a clash of brute force- once AFO underestimated the very last blow he went down in one hit, but he was strong enough to withstand at least 2 other punches beforehand. 

Tomura may be capable of Destroying a city even worse than AFO did to Kamino, but I feel that was because AFO wasn’t focused on destroying the city, but rather threatening to destroy the city to force All might to weaken himself- if he’d wanted to he probably could have turned his quirk combo into a massive city-levelling explosion, but he was focused only on dealing with All Might, and such random destruction doesn’t really seem like his preferred method of doing things- he always has a logical, pragmatic reason to act, so he wouldn’t destroy the city like that of his target was only one man, it’d have been too…messy and unorganised a way to take him down. 

Hell, in the All Might:Rising sequence we see a younger AFO blow up an entire uninhabited island with what looks like the flick of a wrist because he had no logical reasons not to hold back in finishing Nana off- sure that may have been at full health, but it’s been repeatedly hinted that his Full Power at peak strength Practically made him a god, to the point that once All Might took him down, they both got crippled to the point that neither’s power levels would be capable of preventing any opposition in the plot going forward, and even in that state, it still came down to leaving All Might to deal with AFO alone, because nobody else could.

To succeed his master, Tomura must be capable of a level of power where nothing can stop him, save somebody on his level aka Deku, leaving the two of them to fight alone because nobody else can interfere in such a high-level fight (though personally I think that if such a fight did happen, Bakugou would still interfere because screw sitting on the side-lines against the final boss, and then the rest of 1A would join in because they’ve got to stick together as a team and they can’t let Bakugou commit suicide like that). 

Tomura’s decay wave destroyed the city, but it’s got several weaknesses- chief among them is that it can only affect object over ranged distances through the ground. If someone can fly and attack at the same time, like say Hawks and Endevour, or even Snipe with a sniper rifle, then Tomura’s wide open for counter-attack from above or at a distance outside his range. Secondly, it seemed like Tomura needs to keep still and constantly releasing a decay ‘output’ from his hands to keep the wave active and spreading-it stopped once his hand was too damaged to release anymore decay or he may have kept decaying his way into the earth’s core, so Tomura can’t move to defend himself and keep the attack up at the same time, meaning if he’s interrupted the damage can be minimised relatively easily- plus it’s possible that he needs some time to ‘charge’ or get in the right mind-set to release the Uber-decay so it’s not something he can do just by dropping his hands to the ground in a second. Thirdly, judging by the blackened and bruised looks of his right arm and the decay markings on his neck and face, Tomura can’t release that level of decay without feeling some blowback from his quirk- it looks like pushing his decay that far started to erode his own natural defences against his decay, so he runs the risk of causing permanent damage or Limb loss if he Freaken Dekus his arms like that again going ‘Plus Chaos’.

When AFO fought All Might there was nothing any hero could do against him to stop or defend against his attacks save letting All Might cancel them out through force, but whilst Tomura’s Quirk is currently more powerful in an overall destructive capacity, he’s more limited in options than AFO was. No matter what the heroes threw at Him AFO has a quirk or a combination ready to counter them, with only All Might’s generations-built brute strength being able to hurt him. If the formula is reversed with Deku and Tomura, Tomura’s destructive ability just isn’t forceful enough to overwhelm and beat Deku close range- he needs something that can allow him to make an opening or bypass his defences so his decay can affect him, but as I’ve mentioned before I think Black Whip will provide Deku with a natural defence against Tomura’s decay (there’s got to be a reason that it’s the first of the new powers Deku discovered, whereas Tomura’s own Powerup in the subsequent arc was basically his Decay pushed to 11), not to mention we haven’t seen how Decay does against energy force-fields, so there’s also ways it could be shut out through technology, plus long-range attacks are kinda Tomura’s weakness right now.

Tomura would be forced to rely on luck or cheap shots to take Deku down if he fought using just his quirk, whereas Deku has a lot of goddamn options down the line- he’s got 7 different fighting styles through his quirks, and by combining 2 of them at once he can potentially have 49 different ways of fighting back, never mind if he combines 3,4,5 quirks at once- Tomura’s decay simply isn’t forceful enough to confront Deku in terms of their powers alone, and ultimately I think a fight between them will be determined by the powers they wield and the strength of their wills (let’s admit it, if they both go crazy on each other, their bodies are gonna be so busted the end of the fight will be ‘dragging myself towards you with my chin levels of damaged).

I’ve seen theories that Tomura will uses the Pliff’s access to cutting edge technology to compensate for his weaknesses in a fight, and whilst I think that could work for the moment, ultimately, the final showdown will be reliant upon his own strength to beat Deku. Like, just as we saw when he fought Re-Destro, if you tear Tomura down, beat him physically and psychologically, if you reduce him to a barely standing raggedy teen hardly conscious of what’s happening, he still has his quirk to fight back with, to enforce on the world his will and refusal to lose. A quirk’s personality Powers aspect could be seen as the quirk itself being an extension of the soul, of Tomura’s entire being, and I foresee a clash between him and Deku being as much a clash of their wills as symbolised by their quirks-using technology wouldn’t allow Tomura to reach the same level of power that his master had, and that Deku will eventually reach. 

Hell, the only technology AFO used to fight with was his Breathing mask, and that was more a sign of weakness, and how far he’d fallen from the unstoppable force he used to be, barely able to even breathe properly on a battlefield without a technological crutch. So to sum up, the way the narrative is heading and has been hinting at from the beginning has been building Tomura up As Deku’s destined final opponent and equal, and to be his match in combat, due to the sheer power that Deku will have through his 7 quirks, Tomura needs something else down the line that gives him an advantage against Deku beyond his Touch of Thanos- some force or power that overwhelms everyone else and puts Deku on the back foot.

 Granted, part of my desire to see Tomura with Multiple powers is an excuse to see him and Deku Man-of-Steeling the crap out of each other all across a city, but you’ve presented several convincing points about AFO as a character and Tomura’s latest changes in personality and leadership in the latest arc- at this point , so long as he’s not actually fighting against Deku and the Hero Society yet he and the core league members really are main Shonen Protagonists of the story, just flipped round to the opposite side. 

Hell, the Overhaul arc splitting the narrative between both heroes and villains trying to take Overhaul down in their own ways was basically like getting to see two different paths in a moral choice video game getting played out simultaneously, with the villains going Renegade (for Life) and the heroes Picking Paragon (til Death-sorry Nighteye) and the outcome of the fight with the MLA was definitely a Renegade option, what with the blood, maiming and copious violence on display. With this change in Shiragaki’s character into becoming more of a viewpoint character, rather than an obstacle Deku eventually has to Overcome as Part of AFO’s revenge gambit against All Might, I’m starting to see the possibility of there actually being something of a team-up between them if the narrative undergoes a twist and AFO emerges as the true final boss. 

Basically, It depends on what form AFO’s in when he and Deku have their destined clash, since there’s really only going to be one single, final and decisive fight between those two when they finally meet face to face- no long-term antagonistic relationship between them, just one deciding deathmatch. If AFO’s still in his weakened form, then his wounds and implied handicap upon his powers will be the main factor that let’s Deku hold his own, give or take some backup from the supporting cast, since he’s unable to fight nearly as well as he could have, but if he manages to recover his youth and vitality through Eri or some other means, then it’ll have to be a team-up between both villain and heroic protagonists to take him down, since he’s simply too powerful to be stopped otherwise, and Deku won’t have been given enough time to be capable of using his powers to the maximum limit like All Might could. 

I mean, the only other way I could see Deku fighting in that situation would be for Something like Eri unlocking the power of her left horn and ‘forwarding’ Deku’s body(and maybe the rest of 1A as well) into his physical prime, gifting him a body that can make full use of all his powers without the physical constraints that’s currently capping his output (and giving us viewers a future glimpse of the number 1 hero he’s supposed to become), but with Deku not having had the time to train and master his new body’s abilities, forcing him to struggle to master his capabilities mid-fight. 

Honestly, before I read some of your posts about AFO I would have bet money that he’d step aside and let Tomura takeover, but your posts about his character have got me thinking that maybe he will try and find a way to reclaim his former throne, rather than retiring with grace like he’s indirectly claiming to do so up to this point. Btw, just a thought that hung around after the closing chapter, but I found it quite suspicious that the one hand that survived Re-Destro’s fight was AFO’s handy-spare mystery hand that hung around on the back of Tomura’s head- given the flashback revealed the origin of every hand except that one Horikoshi clearly has something important planned for it- if there is something nefarious about the hands beyond their emotional connection to Tenko and his traumatic past, perhaps the hand we should have been looking out for wasn’t the one that was most prominently displayed on his face, and which he kept focusing on, but the one at the back of his head, hidden away from sight and in close contact with his brain? 

Or, if the identify of its owner is the important part… Could it be Nana’s hand? 

We never actually saw her body get disintegrated after AFO killed her, so enough of her corpse could have remained behind for AFO to salvage afterwards for whatever purpose he wanted to- to study it for clues on how OFA worked, given its unique DNA transfer method? To keep it as a trophy for his victory over his brother’s chosen successors, along with the remains of the other previous wielders preserved in a room somewhere? To use her body for spare parts to be used in Ujiko’s Nomu research? (we don’t know when that started, or how long it’s been going on for) or just to potentially use it as a way to piss off All Might even more when they inevitably met again? 

Whatever the case, AFO made a point of calling the hand a ‘spare’, and Nana’s the only family member who could potentially provide an extra hand after Tenko Broke Kotaro’s, and I can totally see him getting a laugh out of the ‘Family Reunion’. “Here you go, me laddo, one extra hand free of charge, just to complete the set! Hrm? Where’d I get it from? Well… ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies, eh?”

EDIT: yeah this was supposed to be released earlier, before the more recent chapter 246 clarified some things about Tomura’s status going forward, but since i was sticking to the long separate asks positing method this got delayed for a while, but i’m still interested in some of the points i had here and how they’ll get proven/disproven going forward 

@makeste

[sparda3g]

My Hero Academia Chapter 232 Review

It appears the climax is on the horizon. Actually, the magazine spilled the bean on the news, so the ending is near. But the arc must showcase the power of the main boss that is Redestro, now with Twice closing in to save his precious friend, Giran. Can Twice win? Well, this is hype time, so no, he won’t. But this chapter offered more than demonstration with the clarification on the Meta Liberation Army’s purpose and the big boss fight is fast approaching.

One thing I should comment about Twice. Despite the last chapter more or less wasted on the reactions on his doubles going extreme, he does bring some energy to this arc with plentiful dialogues of non-sense, but in a good way. I dare to say he’s carrying this arc as much as Jim Carrey in Sonic the Hedgehog movie. Granted, it’s not out, but first impression wise, it would seem to be. Moving on.

Twice explains even further about his multiply goes faster when the original does the creation. Good to know, I suppose. It makes up for his clones to be represented by the League, including Shigaraki the Leader. Again, Twice does make it lively with his interactions and absurd lines. Yeah, it kills panel spaces, but in this case, it’s amusing. It’s not going to be easy, because now it’s the time for Redestro to show off his real power.

At first, Twice clone tried to save Giran, but got smacked away to oblivion. It’s a good thing it was a clone, or else, it would have been a bloody mess. The second time they tried, they did it with Compress and Dabi, only now we get to see Redestro’s quirk. Actually, I can’t say as it wasn’t announced, but we could assume it’s gigantic. His arm grows large and smack all of them away. Well gee, I wonder who he will face as well. It’s not like the League has a giant to show up one day. Okay, I’ll be nice; I’ll wait and see, because it’s not established what his quirk is. I wonder why his sleeve remains intact though. But hey, at least it will be flashy with taijutsu combat and gigantic size battle.

I find the reunion a bit charming since it’s with Twice and Giran. Poor guy has to realize that his best friend’s fingers are really cut off. Redestro now find Twice unacceptable to their cause; now willing to kill him. Well, that hardly went anywhere. I know Twice will stay with the League no matter what, but it could have enlightened better. Anyway, Shigaraki Clone is around to fight the main boss, but not without a backstory to boot.

In midst of fighting, Redestro suddenly talks about a mother that gave birth to a baby with meta ability. Despite a random segue timing to exploit a backstory, though I guess talking about a dream was a heads-up, I thought it was good.  You don’t see any vision of the backstory aside from a woman and a baby, so you could only draw the images in your head. Long story short, it was a dark time with people hating on meta abilities, so they took it on them, with words that echoed, “This is just a quirk of my child.” She was killed and the baby was abused with no freedom. It changed when they established the system for the use of quirk due to the rise of heroism. The problem is, it’s still not balance as it only restrict to those without permission, hence heroes under law.

The twist behind the story is, Destro was that child that was abused by the hateful society. It’s kind of odd because in hindsight, why not have him as the main villain here rather than his son, who was once hidden until now. Like the Doctor said, who knew he had one; certainly until the plot demands it. Basically, the son is carrying the torch and keep the world reminded of the legacy. Who said a child isn’t born evil? His agenda is to incite rebellion against the state; to pursue true freedom. It makes sense to me, based on his introduction. Yes, it is dirty work, but whatever it takes. There’s just one problem: this should have been an arc with a hero.

This concept of rebelling against the system could have been pretty interesting, but what good it will do if it’s with another villain? It doesn’t help that this Shigaraki is a clone; not like he will give a crap about it. This is like revealing the big secret in Attack on Titan to someone who knows already; why should that be effective? If it was a hero, or Deku to be exact, this could have challenge the foundation of free will and use of quirk. I mean Deku did a heroic stuff back in chapter 1, no license and such, so it could have worked. What’s there to carry forward if it’s a villain versus a villain? I understand why Redestro is taking on the League, but perhaps it would have been better if it was a three-way battle. Maybe the idea is to eliminate Redestro before the next arc, which would be disappointing for an interesting concept to be wasted like this.

The other problem or maybe the reason for this arc to flow this way, is that the backstory isn’t really demanding a deep insight on the system and morale. I know it dropped a mention on the government, but I doubt Kohei is going to go deep into it. Unlike in Naruto with Itachi’s big reveal or Pain’s motivation, it’s simply just a guy who carried the family’s legacy of righteous moral on freedom, but society remains unfair and cruel, so they respond with violence. Maybe due to lack of depth world building, this arc was designed as a one-off thing for the Army; care more on the League’s development. If so, that’s pretty disappointing. I still have my fingers crossed to be wrong, but I got a feeling I’m being optimistic.

The cliffhanger is intriguing, though I can see the arc concluding very soon. The real Shigaraki decays the tower, though why the guys weren’t affected, and bring it down to the ground. That’s a nice shortcut to reach to your main boss. I do like the last page with the two leaders in their most detailed artwork yet. I doubt the main fight begins or at least fully focus on them; we have other battles to worry about for now.

Overall, I enjoyed this chapter. It’s not clear on what Redestro’s quirk is; we can only assume it’s gigantic based. The backstory was good, which means the end is near. I may have problems with the idea that seems more appropriate to have heroes involved, but I’ll enjoy the ride and think over the execution when it ends. At least the artwork has been pretty solid. My Villain Academia is entering the climax with the two leaders meeting face-to-face. I don’t think we will skip other battles, but we can expect more words exchange. Will the legacy carry on, or fall and decay to oblivion?

[bnha-l0ver]

Narration #10

***DISCLAIMER: This is just going to serve as a compilation of the narration that has been done in the story so far (Chapter 1-216). Keep in mind, the story is pretty long now, so I’ll keep adding on. In other words, it’s a work in progress. Either way, enjoy!!!***

• [Gran Torino and Tsukauchi fight with Kurogiri]

> “In a certain mountain range, while Deku and co. were fighting...”

> “[Gran Torino] We were able to pinpoint your location. If we can just capture you, the most troublesome member of the League, the rest will surely follow.”

> “[Kurogiri] There have been rumors that a “ruffian” has been appearing here as of late...It seems I was standing out a tad too much, but I had no choice. I have some business with that ruffian you see.”

> “[AFO to Kurogiri] If by chance, something were to happen to me in the near future, you’ll be the only one left who can protect Tomura...You can rely on him.”

> “He [the ruffian] is one of AFO’s faithful servants, Giganto-machia.”

• [The following day of the infiltration and Nighteye’s death]

> “Senpai took a temporary leave of absence from school. And for us, we returned to school...”

> “When we returned, they had us go through a bunch of inquiries and processes. But we were eventually able to make it back to the dorms that night. Uraraka and the others had also been occupied in Ryukyu’s office.”

> “A few days later. Before we knew it, September came to a close and October began. The last vestiges of summer faded away and the temperature difference became more drastic. Our intern group, accompanied by All Might and Aizawa-senpai went to Nighteye’s funeral.”

> “At the end of the conversation between the school and the hero office, the internship was postponed for the time being. Nighteye’s office was taken over by his sidekick, Centipede, while awaiting Toogata-senpai’s return.”

> “And Eri-chan, finally regained consciousness though her psychological state is still unstable. Since it’s still unclear whether she might lose control again, Aizawa-sensei told me we weren’t allowed to have a face-to-face. Moreover, Eri-chan’s Quirk was found to originate from the horn on her forehead. That horn seemed to shrink along with her fever. Now, it has shrunk to just about the size of a lump.”

> “And as for me, ever since that day...something strange has been happening.”

• [Aoyama shoves a piece of cheese in Midoriya’s mouth xD]

> “Something strange, yes.”

> “His behavior left a strong impact, but, Aoyama-kun was a man whom I could never read. Until he finally started to reveal his true nature.”

(N/ To be completely honest...I don’t think anyone can read or even know what Aoyama will do/is capable of xD)

> “I haven’t really talked with Aoyama-kun before. He’s not the type of person who actively gets involved with people. He gives off the impression...of a free spirit who speaks what he wants, when he wants. But, his behavior at the training camp and at the provisional license exam (Iida-kun said, overflowing with emotion)...is certainly that of a hero’s. What does that guy want with me...?”

> “Is there some kind of situation...? If that’s the case...maybe it’s something he can’t have with the rest of the class, and doesn’t want to risk making a big fuss about.”

> “Since then, Aoyama-kun and I became good friends.”

• [It’s finally been announced that the cultural festival will be taking place in a month, so all the students better prepare. Briefly introduced to Gentle and La Brava]

> “All Might.”

> “Brave.”

> “Crimison Riot.”

> “Between the Age of Vigilantes and the present day, individuals known as “heroes” have shined brightly in our history.”

> “The ruler of the legends, All for One, the leader of the “Special Abilities Liberation Army,” Destro, and the uncanny thief, Oji Harima. Likewise, others known as “villains” have also carved their names into history.”

• [Class 1-A has decided what to do for the festival. They are practicing hard every day, and during the middle of practice, Eri and Mirio drop by]

> “Today is Saturday.”

> “Yup! In other words, it’s our day off!! Kacchan and his group’s temporary license course is also on break this week...”

> “This afternoon, each team is in the midst of practice!”

• [After walking around with Mirio and Eri, Midoriya returns to the dorms to find out he has been “fired”]

> “This was the way practice and meetings were held after class. Until the actual event, I couldn’t find any free time. Hence, my training was—...”

(N/ In case anyone forgot, Midoriya being “fired” just meant he wouldn’t be dancing the whole set with the group. Instead he would be dancing part of the routine, and then help out the staging team. On top of that, he went to training at 6AM)

• [Introduced more in depth to Gentle and La Brava. Some backstory as to how they met is provided, along with details of their plan to infiltrate U.A.]

> “At last, tomorrow is the cultural festival! The real deal! And all that’s left is—a good night’s rest...before the cultural festival begins at 9 o’clock in the morning.”

> “And then...on the day of the cultural festival.”

• [Hatsume comes during Midoriya’s training to deliver the support item he asked for. With that break, Midoriya, having hours until the festival begins, takes the chance to leave to buy a new rope and other supplies. As he is running back to U.A., he meets Gentle and La Brava]

> “Please...Please stop this!”

> “Don’t you lay a hand on U.A.!”

• [In an attempt to stop their plan, Midoriya fights with Gentle, leaving him with 15 minutes before the start of the festival. La Brava narrates as she watches, reminiscing the past]

> “[La Brava] His [Gentle] hopes have been dashed...!!”

> “Gentle...!!!”

> “In the first year of junior high, right after summer break...I was made fun of by the person who I just built up the courage to write a love letter to.”

> “After that, I became someone who couldn’t believe in anything. I had no purpose, and would simply whittle away my days in front of my computer. I kept wondering if I should just say goodbye to this life...”

> “That was when we met. The light that is you...”

> “Gentle Criminal...you accepted me without any hesitation.”

> “Gentle!! My Gentle!”

(N/ Before I mentioned I’d use pink for the parent’s narration only, and purple who be for villains. However, Gentle and La Brava are not hardcore villains like the League of Villains, so I decided to make them pink instead....Such tough decisions -~-‘’)

• [Their fight has concluded, with Midoriya the victor. In a last attempt to save La Brava, Gentle makes Midoriya fly away and surrenders to Hound Dog and Ectoplasm. Thanks to this, the festival is able to continue]

> “What Gentle Criminal wanted to do...I somehow understand now.”

> “Gentle Criminal, you were a tough opponent. “Born out of the despair of hero dropouts.” I finally understand why our fight was so tough. Because I, too, was probably the same.”

> “Beacuse Gentle and I held similar sentiments. He fough for La Brava’s sake. And I...I fought...to see your smile.”

[aion-rsa]

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 15 Review: One Thing at a Time

https://ift.tt/3hBBAw1

This My Hero Academia review contains spoilers.

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 15

“In…case…of failure…more…manpower.”

My Hero Academia makes the heroes of its universe its priority, but right from the anime’s earliest moments it’s also been fascinated with the natural conflict and resentment that exists between the heroes and the villains that threaten society. The League of Villains and other malevolent organizations have always lurked in the shadows, so whenever these enemies are absent for a lengthy span of time there’s probable cause to worry that an attack is right around the corner. 

The second half of My Hero Academia season 5 appears to be heavily interested in what the villains have been up to while Midoriya and friends mature into more confident humanitarians. “One Thing at a Time” continues to build the foundation for a showdown of epic proportions. Both factions remain isolated and largely oblivious to the full scope of what they’re caught up in, yet tension mounts over which side will be the most prepared.

“One Thing at a Time” revolves around strategy and preparation, which leaves the heroes feeling like they’re in a healthy position to face the unknown. At the same time, there’s such little attention given to the villains that it’s impossible to tell who is truly in the “lead.” The uncertainty that hangs over top heroes like Hawks and Endeavor is actually exciting. They believe that they have a winning plan, but part of the purpose of “One Thing at a Time” is to manipulate the audience’s perception and emphasize just how little everybody knows. 

Much like the title of the episode indicates, this is a delicate matter that needs to be carefully approached, lest everything fall apart. The heroes still have a lot to learn, but by the time that this installment ends it at least feels like they’re a little more prepared for the ensuing chaos.

Some of the most exciting material to come out of this episode involves Hawks undercover work with the villains. Each episode blurs the lines a little more as Hawks puts himself in this vulnerable position, all of which helps establish him as one of the season’s biggest MVPs. It’s rare for a character in My Hero Academia to experience such a glow up this quickly, but everything that Hawks does feels like a homerun at this point. He plans to locate all of the heroes that the Meta Liberation Army has already been able to influence through Destro’s text and hopefully get through to them. 

The presence of this incendiary Meta Liberation Army literature carries tremendous weight and it’s chilling to see My Hero Academia create parallels with Nazi propaganda and Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an inspirational manifesto for evil. It’s leading to the creation of some very layered villains that the heroes may have a harder time to eliminate. 

“One Thing at a Time” repeatedly speaks to Hawks’ utility on this mission, but it also slowly creates anxiety and begins to frame Hawks like a walking target that could become an unexpected casualty at any moment. It’s a smart way to handle this material after the audience learns what side Hawks is really on and the scope of his mission. Hawks isn’t afraid to lean on Tokoyomi for some extra help since birds of a feather need to flock together. Hawks perpetually proves that he’s highly competent, but it’s appreciated that My Hero Academia shows that he still needs some kind of reinforcements to keep tabs on such a large swath of hero students.

Hawks must be subtle in this arena, but Endeavor finally picks up on his code and begins to move into action over what all of this means. Endeavor deduces that the impromptu reinstatement of the hero agency work studies is actually to better prepare the heroes for the attack that’s about to come, yet in a way that doesn’t tip their hat or frighten hundreds of impressionable heroes-in-the-making. It’s a form of insurance in case Hawks and the other Pro Heroes fail to get the job done.

”One Thing at a Time” is a very exposition heavy installment and the majority of it is spent with characters lost in panic over what they will do in the future, rather than acting in the moment. This still produces compelling material since the stakes are so high and it genuinely feels like a change of the guard is on its way after some serious loss occurs. Midoriya and company still have a lot to learn, but they’ve become progressively impressive to the point that sometimes their moments of naiveté ring false. 

It’d make for a fascinating change of pace if the Hero Association faces real tragedy and has no course of retaliation other than to embrace the next generation of heroes, who have hopefully experienced enough trials by fire to pick up the slack. This also reinforces the tough love approach that Endeavor continues to spit at Midoriya and Bakugo, as if he knows that it will leave them better prepared for the lawless society that might be in-the-making.

Read more

TV

My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 14 Review: Off to Endeavor’s Agency!

By Daniel Kurland

TV

My Hero Academia’s Deku and Bakugo on Season 5, Class 1-B, and Dark Betrayals

By Daniel Kurland

Endeavor is more hands-on with his approach on how to handle this growing problem. He hammers in how rescue, evacuation, and fighting are the three core tenets to heroics, which he tries to reinforce in his new pupils through “parallel processing” where these three maneuvers coalesce into one priority. Izuku, Katsuki, and Shoto are tasked to synthesize these skills and apprehend a villain before Endeavor can, which is a fun challenge, but plays out in a fairly predictable manner. 

Endeavor succeeds, but his new 1-A protégés study his moves and learn how to apply them to their own Quirks in comparable ways that make them better fighters. It remains highly fulfilling to have this trio of characters work together as a unit and it feels like the perfect warm up for what’s to come in the upcoming My Hero Academia movie. An awkward romance also needs to immediately bloom between Bakugo and Pro Hero, Burnin.

The second half of “One Thing at a Time” feels slightly regressive due to how it spends a considerable amount of time getting Endeavor caught up to speed on Deku and Katsuki’s accomplishments and Quirk specifics, all of which the audience already knows by heart. There’s still some fun to be had with this refresher, like Deku’s endless ramble about his Quirk and the precise analytical details behind it all. It’s a perfect character moment. Midoriya’s Quirk may technically be One For All, and now Black Whip, but it often feels like “Nerdy Ramble” is the hero’s true special power.

No one prompts Shoto to go through the same level of introspection as Midoriya and Bakugo, but it’s helpful to get a little more context for his recent actions. Shoto hasn’t fully forgiven Endeavor for his past and even though he’s comfortably able to train under him, it’s also made clear that Shoto is taking advantage of his father to some extent by learning lessons from him. He compartmentalizes this progress so that it’s not mistaken for genuine kindness or understanding. 

Shoto’s time with his father at his hero agency is merely a means to an end as he works to improve his skills, arguably to become more like All Might, not Endeavor. It’s likely that Shoto’s icy resolve will slowly thaw through the Flashfire of Endeavor’s affection. This should amount to rewarding material for Shoto, regardless of the direction that his emotions pull him.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“One Thing at a Time” is a satisfying My Hero Academia installment that emphasizes personal growth and teamwork during a time where it’s never been more important. The steps that the anime is taking forward may currently feel miniscule, but they should mean more once the villains’ side of this story gets properly explored. The endless optimism that heroes trade in helps Midoriya, Bakugo, and Shoto find their footing at Endeavor’s Agency, but it’s going to take a lot more parallel processing to take on an army of entitled villains.

The post My Hero Academia Season 5 Episode 15 Review: One Thing at a Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3yGFXLO

[geek-patient-zero]

Part 1, Chapter 6

Or: Phantomas of Notre Dame

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Death Trilogy Volume 1

Paris—March 12, 1994

The official smile of Paris is the sneer. The rich sneer at the middle class. The middle class sneer at the poor. And they all sneer at the hordes of tourists who flood their city each year.

I’ve actually remembered these lines since I first read them as a kid. I don’t know why, beyond it being Baby’s First French Stereotype Joke, but I did. I forgot what book they were from though, so when I reread Blood War and found them again, it was a nice surprise.

Their mockery, according to the guidebooks, is part of the charm of Paris. The city, with it’s great restaurants, fabulous museums, superb monuments, and long history, breeds contempt for the lesser achievements surrounding it. The average Parisian citizen considers himself far superior to anyone from outside the city.

It’s only Paris being singled out here, but still, I want to apologize to any French readers. It isn’t going to get much better for you guys in this book. But hey, at least your capital city isn’t a gang warzone.

That attitude explains, at least in theory, the joy the natives get from telling tales of the Phantom of the Paris Opera.

Not only are Parisians assholes, but they bug you into reading their Phantom of the Opera fanfics.

There’s some cliffnotes about the story (written by Gaston Leroux, demented genius living under the Paris Opera, hideously scarred, etc.), then we learn the titular Phantom is the French equivalent of Australia’s drop bears: a made up monster they tell gullible American tourists about to fuck with them.

Parisians loved to elaborate on the fantasy for gullible tourists, saying how, though he had reportedly been destroyed, the body of Eric, the Phantom, had never been found. And that every year, a few unwary tourists to the Opera House disappeared without a trace.

It was typical malicious Parisian humor. Often, the story was accompanied with a breathless attempt to sell bootleg souvenirs such as an authentic map of the catacombs or a page from the score of the Phantom’s infamous lost opera.

Or those little Mickey Mouse paper dolls that supposedly dance to music but are just attached to a motor by an invisible string. My ma fell for that one.

I don’t know if Parisians in real life actually do this, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I hear the Louvre used to give The Da Vinci Code themed tours. This sounds more fun than that, and less soul-crushing.

I admit that I’ve never read The Phantom of the Opera. I saw the play on an elementary school field trip to Broadway, but I barely remember it. I know the book begins with an intro where Leroux claims it’s a true story, but I figured it’s a true story the way The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a true story. I looked it up anyway, just so I don’t look like an uncultured moron if I dismissed it and was wrong. Turns out, the story was inspired by a real incident at the Paris Opera where a chandelier counterweight (not the chandelier itself) fell down and killed someone. There was a crackpot theory at the time that the accident was actually an assassination attempt. That’s something I didn’t know. Guess I owe Weinberg one for getting me to learn something.

Back to the story. Parisians like to use the Phantom to fuck with tourists, but there are other stories they don’t tell them. Stories that poor shopkeepers tell each other behind closed doors like the superstitious European peasant stereotypes they pretend they aren’t. Stories that were handed down from generation to generation about unexplained disappearances plaguing the Île de la Cité (aka the place where the Notre Dame cathedral is).

Common to every narrative was the same name. A title that when said aloud could cause the most elegant Parisian to blanch in terror.

What, Quasimodo’s some kind of French cryptid too? I know the original book character wasn’t as nice as the Disney version, and he’d be an obvious candidate for a Nosferatu (or a Ravnos if you wanna be a dick) but he was hardly-

Phantomas.

Oh. Alright, yeah, different literary character, but I can go along with it.

Officially, the French Sûreté (cops, pigs, po-po, babylon) dismiss such rumors as the insane ramblings of demented poets living on the West Bank. No mention is made of a file, five inches thick, hidden deep in the files of police headquarters. Contained in it are hundreds of reports, dating back a hundred and fifty years to the time of Chief Inspector Vidocq, detailing the circumstances surrounding hundreds of disappearances in the vicinity of the famous cathedral of Notre Dame.

I bet at least one report blames Quasimodo.

One actual report is a six page article, never made public, by a historical commission about the hundreds of myths and legends surrounding the church, all connected by a ghostly figure seen in the Cathedral at night. I’ll give you one guess at what it actually is.

Though he is called by a dozen different names in the tales, he is always described as incredibly ugly. And a drinker of human blood.

Yep. A goddamn mage.

In turn-of-the-century France, the vampire’s name had gained such notoriety that a series of mystery thrillers featuring an arch-fiend called Fantomas became best-sellers. None of the stories explained the origin of the mastermind. Or why he preyed on the citizens of Paris. They were works of fiction, not fact.

In case old French pulp isn’t your thing, Fantomas, spelled with an F, was a character created in 1911 by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. He’s a master criminal like Arsène Lupin, except instead of a gentleman thief he was a sadistic murderer and Grade-A pure evil bastard. There’s nothing supernatural about Fantomas. He’s just a regular human who’s really good at murder, framing innocent people for said murder, and getting away with it. Apparently, thanks to the 1960′s film trilogy, he’s usually remembered in French pop culture wearing a blue mask that covers his entire head.

You can see how that guy would inspire a Nosferatu character. Also Destro from G.I. Joe.

But as just explained, in this setting it’s the other way around. And despite being portrayed as what the French call “a homicidal piece of shit”, the “real-life” Phantomas is a big fan of the stories.

The subject of these various novels, reports, and studies found them all vastly amusing. He had enjoyed the Fantomas novels immensely and had even sent the author several anonymous letters suggesting future ideas for plots. To his intense disappointment, none of his ideas had ever been used. Once or twice he had mentally debated visiting the novelist to plead his case. But Phantomas suspected his physical appearance might do his cause more harm than good.

That... is goddamn fucking adorable. He’s just been introduced and I already hope he survives the trilogy and discovers online fanfiction.

The vampire readily acknowledged his ugliness. Standing exactly five feet tall, with skin wrinkled as a prune, eyes like raisins, and a nose the size and shape of a sweet potato, he had caused more than one drunken Parisian to swear off red wine forever. A gaping mouthful of yellow teeth and bulging red eyes propelled his face out of the realm of the bizarre into the domain of the grotesque.

Eh. Someone in this fandom would still bang him.

Wait, eyes that were both “like raisins” and “bulging”? How does that work?

Phantomas is the Nosferatu on the cover of the second book of this trilogy, if you want a visual reference.

See, he’s even still got some hair. He’s not that bad looking.

Phantomas might enjoy the fiction he inspired about a murderer, but he’s not happy about being blamed for real murders of innocent people, regarding it as “cheap slander”. The centuries of recorded disappearances were the results of more natural and obvious crimes.

While he occasionally satisfied his thirst on some poor unfortunate, Phantomas rarely killed innocents if it could be avoided. A quiet, gentle soul, all he wanted was to be left alone in his underground lair, pursuing his research.

Over the years a host of villains had used his presence on the Île de la Cité as an alibi for their murders. Their victims ended, not in his hideaway, but dumped in the Seine. Most had escaped the guillotine. However, Phantomas was less forgiving. And his justice was as sharp and final as any blade.

So other than a few accidents, the only people Phantomas “disappeared” were the criminals responsible for the rest of them.

Phantomas isn’t thinking about that dark business right now. He’s feeling great because he’s on his way to a party. The Prince of Paris, one Francois Villon, holds court once a month, and today’s such a day. Villon’s both a Toreador elder and French, so obviously he holds court in the Louvre.

Dozens of Kindred, along with several hundred of the Prince’s favorite ghouls and kine, attended the festivities. This evening the Prince entertained an important Tremere wizard visiting from Vienna. Phantomas loved such events. Though never invited, he never missed one.

There goes my heart, breaking for poor old Phantomas again...

But this time the snub isn’t a case of a Toreador being a snob to a Nosferatu. Villon just doesn’t know Phantomas exists.

The Prince was under the mistaken impression that he was the oldest, most powerful vampire in the City of Lights. He was neither. Phantomas had come to the Île de la Cité with the invading legions of Julius Caesar in 53 B.C.

I should apologize to the French again. Turns out Phantomas isn’t one of you guys. He’s a nice Italian man.

From here we’re launched into Phantomas’ pre-Phantomas backstory. In life he was Varro Dominus (Strong Ruler or Master), a young noble and soldier who worked under Caesar himself, and was in charge of recording his military campaigns. Ceasar’s legions arrived in the Île de la Cité, then called Lutetia, using it as a stepping stone across the Seine. Unfortunately for Varro, living among the easily conquered native tribesmen, pretending to be a forest god, was a fifth-generation Nosferatu named Urgahalt. The invading legions fascinated Urgahalt, what with their military strength, impressive latin names, and neat centurion helmets, and he Embraced Varro so he could introduce him into Roman society.

There’s an obvious flaw in this plan, since it’s difficult for a guy to introduce you to his culture when you’ve just made him an outcast from that culture, turning him into a shriveled prune monster with a sweet potato nose. And Varro knew it too. The Romans, or at least Varro, knew more about Kindred (or lemures, as they called vampires) than Urgahalt realized, including how to kill them. Pissed that bumping into this guy cost him his life and career, Varro staked him in the heart and turned him into a bonfire.

Convincing the legions to take him back would be a hard sell now, so Varro stayed behind on the island, pretty much never leaving during the millennia as modern Paris rose up around the guy.

He was as much a part of the city as the Eiffel Tower.

Which undersells Phantomas quite a bit since the Eiffel Tower’s only been around since 1889, but you get the point.

Turning into an ugly son of a bitch also turned Phantomas into the ultimate introvert, aside from those parties he likes attending. He stays hidden from everyone, including other vampires. Even other Nosferatu.

More than two hundred Kindred inhabited Paris and its suburbs. The Toreador Clan held control of the central city, but several other bloodlines roamed the streets, including rebel bands of Brujah, Gangrel, and Malkavians. Rumors spoke of a Sabbat pack anxious to spread dissension and revolt, with headquarters in the slums. At least a half-dozen Nosferatu lived in lairs beneath major museums and churches [sic] Yet even among the Kindred Phantomas was a legend, an unseen presence with no basis in reality. He was a phantom to the living and the undead.

Good call. If Parisians are like how the opening paragraphs describe them, I wouldn’t want to talk to them either.

In order to stay hidden, Phantomas lives in a huge underground lair hundreds of feet under Notre Dame, connected by a network of tunnels that stretched across Paris. He’s also a master of Obfuscate, the discipline that allows vampires, especially Nosferatu, to go around unnoticed, commonly by turning invisible. Right now, in order to get into the party, Phantomas is using the Mask of a Thousand Faces, the third-tier Obfuscate power that disguises a vampire as a random nobody human or an unimportant vampire, depending on whose looking at him. Looks like it also lets you pretend to hold an invitation and get away with it.

Shortly after midnight, he strolled past the two Assamites guarding the glass pyramid that served as entrance to the Louvre. They nodded without interest as he displayed an imaginary invitation and walked into the main hall.

That pyramid pissed a lot of older Parisians off when it was first built. Yeah, they complain about everything, but since the artsy-fartsy Toreador control the city, you’d think they would’ve prevented its construction. Unless the pyramid’s a Toreador idea, in which case no wonder everyone hated it.

(Parisians are over hating the pyramid these days, so don’t mention it unless you want them to think you’re in their city for one of those Da Vinci Code tours.)

Phantomas muttered a word of thanks to his Roman gods that Villon considered electronic monitoring devices provincial. His psychic camouflage worked flawlessly with humans and vampires. It was useless against cameras or television monitors.

The Louvre doesn’t have any security cameras? None at all?

In Phantomas’ opinion, the Prince was a pompous dandy who wouldn’t recognize true art if it hit him in the face.

Looks like Phantomas agrees with me about Toreador tastes in art.

Master of the Louvre, the finest art collection in history, Villon ignored the treasures of the past for the ephemeral pleasures of the moment.

Alright, In Villon’s defense, I think grandpa here might have some bias.

His mercurial tastes dominated the Parisian fashion scene. He surrounded himself with the most beautiful models in Paris, blood dolls who sipped on blood and dreamed of immortality. Like too many of the Kindred, Villon had never come to terms with his undeath.

I like Phantomas and all, but it’s not Villon sneaking into one of his parties, so what right does he have being judgmental?

But I think I get what Phantomas is thinking. Villon owns one of the most famous historical art museums in the world, but he only cares about celebrity shit and making beautiful but angry-looking women wear weird shit nobody else will actually wear.

The party was being held in the glass-roofed Cour Marley, but Phantomas was in no hurry to go there. Though he had visited the Louvre many times, he never skipped the opportunity to visit the galleries housing the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities. The museum housed perhaps the finest such collection in the world and, though Phantomas had the face and body of a monster, he possessed the soul of a poet.

This is the real reason he loves these parties so much, isn’t it. Grandpa just wants an excuse to visit the museum for like the billionth time.

Ten minutes he spent staring at the Venus de Milo.

Art appreciation, or the closest he gets to seeing boobs?

He walks around admiring other things, like “Winged Victory of Samothrace”, “Winged Bull”, and the statue of Queen Nefertiti.

The bust of Agrippa drew him to the Roman section. The famous general, the hero of Actium, had served Octavius, the grandnephew of his mentor, Julius Caesar. Staring at the statue made him feel old. Two thousand years separated him from his heritage.

I feel the same way whenever I meet someone born after Spongebob Squarepants first aired.

If not for a chance encounter in Gaul, his children might have fought against Mark Anthony. Or served in the Senate with Cicero.

Not if you stared at potential mothers the way you stared at the Venus de Milo and Agrippa’s bust.

He finishes his tour and finally heads to the party. If you’ve been paying attention to the plot, you know what’s about to happen.

As he drew closer to the courtyard, he frowned. There was no music. Villon’s parties always featured a loud rock band playing the latest hits. Tonight, the corridors were strangely silent.

Nirvana was supposed to play “About a Girl” but Villon kicked them out when Cobain let his turtles wander around and shit everywhere.

A tall, young man slender [sic], with blond hair and bright blue eyes, stood in front of the door leading to the Cour Marley. Dressed in a white suit with an open-necked white shirt, he nodded in greeting as Phantomas approached. It was almost as if he had been waiting for [sic] there for him.

Weinberg’s editor must’ve quit before getting to this chapter, after reading the part about Flavia’s rock hard leather-penetrating nipples. Also, ‘sup Reuben? What’ve you been doing the past two years?

Reuben doesn’t introduce himself. He just warns Phantomas not to go in. Phantomas is shocked that a human is talking to him at all. Mask of a Thousand Faces is supposed to disguise him as someone so boring not even Kindred are interested starting a conversation with him

“The Final Death waits inside,” continued the stranger, evidently not troubled by Phantomas’ concerns. “If you enter, you may never leave.”

“I am no coward,” stated the vampire simply. “After twenty centuries, I fear very little.”

Let’s see if that lasts longer than a page.

The young man smiled. “I suspected you would say that.” He stepped to the side. “Beware the Red Death, Phantomas.”

“Who are you?” asked Phantomas, startled. “How do you know my name?”

But the stranger had vanished. It was as if he had never been there.

Good old Reuben, scaring an old man, the trolling bastard.

Successfully freaked out, Phantomas opens the courtyard doors. To no one’s surprise, everyone’s dead. Even the regular non-ghoul humans.

The smell of charred and blackened human flesh assaulted his nostrils. A horrified glance around the courtyard revealed a dozen bodies of Villon’s favorites, their beautiful features burned beyond recognition. The fashion runways of Paris would be missing a number of familiar faces tomorrow. Mixed among the dead were the remains of twice as many ghouls. Nowhere was there life.

How he’s able to tell the models and ghouls apart, I don’t know.

Villon was gone. As were all other Kindred. However, dark shadows on the ground indicated to Phantomas that more than one had departed the Louvre permanently.

Can the French art and fashion worlds finally recover from the dark and untalented reign of the Toreador?

As if in answer to Phantomas’ unasked question, a gruesome figure stepped from behind the Marly Horses. Tall and lean, he wore a rotted shroud of funeral cloth held together by strips of moldering bandage [sic]. His face was

-that of a long-dead corpse, chalk-white skin, blah blah blah it’s the Red Death.

Slowly, the monster smiled.

“The meddling record keeper,” said the Red Death. He stretched out a skeletal arm. Phantomas could feel the heat thirty feet away. “Your termination will be a fitting conclusion to the celebration.”

Confronted by this horrifying fire monster who just massacred an entire party of vampires, ghouls, and humans, what does the famous Phantomas do? Something that both proves him a hypocrite and the smartest person in this goddamn book.

He hauls ass out of there.

Hundreds of years hiding beneath the streets of Paris had taught Phantomas an important lesson. When threatened, flee. Immediately. Don’t search for alternative solutions, don’t negotiate, don’t look back. Run as fast as possible until you reach safety. It was a basic survival technique that worked in the past. It served him tonight.

Phantomas ran. He burst through the doors of the Cour Marley, raced down the halls leading to the glass pyramid, and sprinted out into the night air without turning his head once to see if he was followed. Short and misshapen, he ran astonishingly fast.

Phantomas doesn’t stop running until he’s safely hundreds of feet underground in one of his tunnels. He escaped the Red Death.

He had escaped for the moment. But Phantomas felt certain he had not seen the last of the monster.

It had named him the record keeper. Somehow it knew of his great project. And the Red Death obviously disapproved.

We’ll find out more about Phantomas’ hobby the next time we catch up with him. For now, Chapter 6 ends on that mystery.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 171: Knock Them Dead With Your Sound

Previously on BnHA: Deku and Mirio visited Eri in the hospital. Eri apologized for everything they went through in order to save her, particularly Mirio who lost his powers. Mirio told her it wasn’t her fault and that everyone was just glad she was safe, and they all wanted to see her smiling face. Eri tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. Deku racked his brain for ways to cheer her up, and struck on the idea of inviting her to the cultural festival. Aizawa said he’d need to ask the principal but that it could probably be arranged. After Mirio explained the concept, Eri agreed, saying that she wanted to get to know everyone better. We then cut to the police, who were watching a live broadcast of a convenience store robbery and trying to trace its source. The robber, a gentleman thief named -- wait for it -- Gentle, took out six heroes in the blink of an eye and then left without taking any money. He said he wanted his name to be etched into history, and as he met up with his accomplice afterwards, he pondered what his next great exploit should be.

Today on BnHA: We are properly introduced to Gentle and his social media-savvy adoring fan La Brava. Gentle specializes in “chivalrous crimes” that target corruption. However his recent videos haven’t been as popular, in part because Stain and the League of Villains have been stealing his thunder. Back at U.A., word begins to spread about class A’s band performance and dance program. Bakugou overhears some grumps complaining about how cocky 1-A is and how they’re the ones who “start all the conflict.” That evening the kids meet to hash out who will be in charge of what. Jirou needs a drummer, and it turns out Bakugou plays drums, but he’s pissed at the idea of being obligated to provide stress relief for the other departments. As he puts it, “we aren’t getting smacked down by the villains because we enjoy it.” Instead he reframes the whole thing as a battle, and vows to knock U.A. dead with his sound. I mean, whatever works I guess. Meanwhile Gentle reveals to La Brava that he’s planning a new stunt which will surpass anything Stain or the League has done: he plans to invade U.A.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 198 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.)

lol

LIVING LAWLESS. all about that THUG LIFE

okay so the narrator, whom I assume is Gentle, is talking about people who have left their marks on history

you’re telling me there’s a hero out there simply known as “Brave”? I know we already had a Mr. Brave, and I can tell you right now he has left his mark on absolutely nothing. so that means there’s another guy out there named Brave, so Mr. Brave, your hero name is even lamer than I thought. WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST GO WITH SPLIT END

ooooohh!

oh my god. I want to know everything about all of these guys right the fuck now. particularly Destro. “special abilities liberation army” sounds a lot like a Magneto type “mutant rights” type of thing. there’s an era that we still don’t know much about right after quirks first started appearing on the scene, and it fascinates me and I want to know more about what it was like. because I have some fic ideas about that time period tbh. Destro, I’m definitely making a note of you

so now the narration is talking about how before the present systems were established, the lines between heroes and villains were blurred and it was an age of chaos

honestly this all sounds incredibly badass, like a superpowered wild west

and Gentle seems to agree, saying it was an age of pure freedom

this guy really feels what he’s doing, huh

the gentle, soothing, cuddly criminal. when he’s not out doing Crime, he makes ASMR roleplays in his spare time. “sleep-inducing bank robbery 🌙 (whispered/soft-spoken)”

he’s walking over to La Brava now and she says that their account got deactivated “again”, so she just finished uploading all of their videos to a new account

fucking 2010s manga though, you guys!!

and apparently that narration was from his debut video, which she was rewatching and swooning over just now

so he’s going to finish his cup of tea and then they will get on to today’s filming

oh my fucking god

you don’t understand guys. he’s really a man of the people. he’s on your side! handing out punishments to “those who do not act gentlemanly.” protecting them all from the horrors of expired pudding

oh my god you guys La Brava is the cutest ever I swear to god

how is she so cute though??

she’s frustrated because the jstore robbery video didn’t get that many views

but Gent says they’re not in it for external validation

she’s really mad though because she says it’s been 6 years since he’s been active as “the villain of the media world”

and apparently when Stain came along and went viral he stole all their views

yes but you have to admit they are super compelling though. I miss them, actually. where are they

(ETA: for real, they’ve been way too quiet recently and it’s starting to make me pretty nervous)

did you read that car chase chapter, though. “spectacle” indeed

he says his style is the opposite of that, but nonetheless it can’t be denied that they have momentum

he says all of the 10,000+ comments on their videos concern that violent behavior

are you sure some of the comments aren’t also shipping Toga and Twice. or theorizing what’s up with Tomura’s hands. or talking about how badass Compress’s new metal arm is. honestly they have a lot going for them, man

lmao

WAY TOO MANY JUMP CUTS

I also agree with the guy saying La Brava deserves more of the spotlight. she’s so great

Gent is letting loose with a hearty laugh and says he won’t be discouraged though, and that his next project will surpass even theirs

that is a tall order, sir. Tomura’s most recent act was a great service to humanity. all I’m saying is, you better not hype me up like the last new villain only to let me down, because don’t even get me started on that shitshow

so La Brava is all excited and asking what the next project is, and Gent is responding with a bunch of cryptic bullshit

so I guess we’re going to find out more about the history of heroes and when they became an established thing, huh? I’m 1000% on board with this and I may actually be even more excited for this than for the upcoming class 1-A rave, negl. good job getting this manga back on track, Horikoshi!

(ETA: I’m so thick, he’s clearly just talking about U.A. here lol)

so now we’re cutting back to U.A. and Vlad (who I almost called “Brad” again, it’s been so long) is talking to Aizawa about the cultural fest, and he’s all “so I heard class A is doing a rave huh?”

interestingly, this seems to be one of the rare occasions where Aizawa doesn’t seem to be 100% on board with their hijinks

stfu Aizawa. what’s more admirable than a fucking rave

now we’re cutting to the always adorable children of class A who are excited to plan their festival program

and some shadowy person is coming up to Bakugou and is all “did you hear?”

oh no wait they’re not talking to him, they’re talking to each other about class A right in front of him

um, whoa

y’all trying to start some shit, huh? gonna talk shit about his class when they’re trying to do something fucking nice?? like it’s their fault they keep getting attacked by fucking villains? okay then. hey on an unrelated note, go fuck yourselves

so are these guys just assholes or is this really what the rest of the school in general really thinks? because I can see why they might not exactly have a favorable impression of them, truth be told. Bakugou’s stunts at the sports festival didn’t exactly paint them in the best light. and most likely everyone has made the connection between the kidnapping and Kamino and the student dorms. and probably it’s not much of a secret who the two kids who were caught fighting on Ground Beta after hours were, either. so yeah

but it’s still a dick move to come and do this right in front of him when he’s not bothering you or anything, so fuck you still, and I will come over there and fight you if I have to, don’t think I won’t

fuck. well anyway, while I’m here grumbling and trying to take deep, calming breaths, we’re cutting back to Heights Alliance, and Iida is taking charge of a planning session

first they need to decide on the music, so Jirou is suggesting genres

she says they really should be doing EDM if the intent is to play dance music, but on the other hand everyone seems set on playing instruments. lol it would be funny though if everyone took turns DJing

so she’s asking if anyone in class plays bass or drums, and is met with a dead silence

she says she plays guitar mainly, so her drumming is only so-so. and she says that if she has to teach a beginner how to play drums then one month is not going to be enough time

OH MY GOD

I don’t fully understand what’s happening but ARE YOU IN FACT IMPLYING THAT MY SON KATSUKI KNOWS HOW TO PLAY DRUMS OH MY GOD. KATSUKI ARE YOU GOING TO BE IN A ROCK BAND!?

apparently the answer to that question is YES because class A knows all too well exactly how to manipulate him

MASTER OF PUPPETS I’M PULLING YOUR STRIIIIIINGS

lmao and JUST LIKE THAT

TOO EASY

holy shit. and it seems like he actually does know what he’s doing as well. go figure, he is good at virtually everything after all

well, this is everything I never knew I wanted. good show. excuse me for a moment, I’m gonna go play Song 2 by Blur and wonder what the season 4 OST is gonna be like

now he’s trying to walk away again lol

this is really just an open invitation for someone to come up with a convincing enough reason for him to do it without losing face

although part of me also wonders if maybe he would just rather not be in the spotlight for once. especially after overhearing those JERKFACES from the department of GENERAL JERKS earlier

oh my god Jirou

come on Kacchan don’t you want to be a good person?!

oh shit now he’s going on a tangent

he says nothing’s going to come of it

ahhhhhhhh. I see. so it’s that he’s pissed off at the other departments and doesn’t feel like they deserve class A’s niceness

ahhhh but Jirou looks crushed ;_;

Hagakure is kind of awkwardly being all, “hey, c’mon...”

but Bakugou says that what they’re doing is just “indulging the enemy”

and when exactly did it become Us vs Them though, I wonder. like, if the other classes are the enemy, that implies that your class is Not The Enemy though, yes? aww

oh shit. ohhhhh shit

oh my. and I didn’t even order any Bakugou feels. “yes, we know,” Horikoshi says, holding out the delivery bag. “these are on the house. please accept our gratitude on account of being such a loyal customer”

oh shit you guys. so what do I even do with these. should I meta about them or should I just eat them while they’re still hot

lol, but yeah. “I didn’t ask to be kidnapped. we didn’t ask to be attacked.” people acting like it’s their fault and like they’re enjoying the attention. and maybe once upon a time he did want that, but it’s one thing to fantasize about being famous for being the number one bestest coolest hero, and quite another to wind up actually in the spotlight because you’re the kid who keeps getting attacked by sludge monsters and Villain Leagues. and then people act like you brought it on yourself because you were too cocky. especially when we know that on some level he does blame himself, so it stings all the more

so why should they go out of their way to try to support people like that? it’s almost like they’re apologizing to those assholes, and fuck that

mmm. [munching] so anyway let’s see where this leads

hahaha. what

oh my god this fucking kid

lol. okay so he is on board, then, but just to make it ABSOLUTELY CLEAR, he is not out to “support” anyone, but rather he is declaring war. via drums. that’s right

well hey, however you need to frame it! at the end of the day he has agreed to help, so!

the other kids seem to be on the same page as me lol

yep. WE’LL TAKE IT

JIROUUUUU

;_____; I LOVE YOU SO MUCH JIROU

and now we’re cutting back to Gent and OH MY GOD

CAN YOU PLEASE. NOT

JESUS CHRIST. CAN THEY NOT JUST HAVE JUST ONE FUCKING THING. LET BAKUGOU DECLARE A DRUM WAR AND LET JIROU SHARE HER MUSIC WITH EVERYONE AND LET ERI HAVE A GOOD “DATE” WITH HER DOTING BIG BROTHER MIRIO AND LET THEM JUST RELAX WITHOUT ANY VILLAIN ANTICS

goddammit. I mean like, Gentle’s idea of villainy would probably be to whip out a violin and challenge them to a classical battle of the bands. but even polite villain antics are really not going to be good for U.A.’s PR at the moment. and this guy films everything he does. and just. we don’t need this sob

BONUS:

everyone this is Agoyamato Tsutsutaka and Togeike Chikuchi. that’s literally all this is. just their names. did we really need to know this lol oh well