#hero/villain ish

[writereleaserepeat]

This was clearly meant to be a bit of a hero/villain prompt, but I made it hero/ex-villain dynamics because that’s where I felt inspiration dragging me. It also ended up way longer than I meant, oops. Slightly pathetic but still defiant ex-villain whumpee, hero caretaker who isn’t exactly sadistic, but he’s absolutely cold and a bit unsympathetic. 

CW for strong language, blood mention, violence mention, abuse mention, nudity, implied past non-con, whumper/whumpee dynamics, medical whump, forced medicating, PTSD, sadistic-ish caretaker. 

~2800 Words

Whumpee blinked open his eyes, low light piercing his skull like daggers, his vision still blurry. A thick fog clouded his mind, and his confusion was so dense it brought on a sharp wave of nausea. His tongue was dry as sandpaper in his mouth, still bitter with the taste of blood, and he could hear the sound of his own ragged breathing. 

For a moment, all he could feel was disappointment that he wasn’t dead yet. 

The nausea spiked again. This time Whumpee heaved, his head spinning as he rolled over onto his side, but nothing more than a thin stream of acid burned his lips as it dripped to the floor. Tears pricked at his eyes, but no, he wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not until he figured out what had happened and where he was. 

His vision began to clear with every blink, and although the pounding in his head was more fierce than ever, his wits slowly started to return. The familiar weight of a metal collar still sat heavy on his neck, and a tight cuff around his left wrist shackled him to a wall. His body laid limp against a cement floor. Whumpee could feel the cool stone leeching any last bits of warmth from his already battered body, and his bones were still palpable through his pale, bruised skin. 

It was a cell, he knew that much. He’d been in places like this before. He’d suffered, and he’d bled, and he’d almost died, in places like this before. But this cell was new to him. There were no familiar bloodstains underfoot, the copper never having quite washed out. There were no chips in the cinder block walls where he had raked his fingernails down to bloodied nubs. The light overhead was a soft yellow, not the blinding white that had made it so impossible to sleep for those many months of agony. 

And then there was the door. A door, not rusted bars, no taunting glimpse at the hallway to freedom that would never come. This door was towering, solid steel painted white, obviously barred and bolted from the outside. There was a translucent window at eye-level, but Whumpee hadn’t yet found the energy to stand. Wherever he was now - a new prison, purgatory, or hell - it didn’t really matter. The restraints and the collar around his neck told him all he needed to know. 

He didn’t even have the chance to survey the rest of his wounds, both the old and the new, before the groaning sound of a lock snapped his attention back to the door. 

Whumpee grit his teeth and tried to sit up, and he finally pushed his back to the wall to hold himself up. He wasn’t going to take whatever tormet laid ahead without a fight. Even that small motion made him pant from the effort, and it was all he could do to breathe through his nose so as not to give away his weakness. Not that it mattered - Whumpee knew he looked more like a corpse than a human being at this point. There would be no illusions of strength. 

Despite his usually steely demeanor, Whumpee felt his eyes widen when a broad silhouette filled the doorframe, his gaze falling on the muscular arms that bulged beneath a sharp jawline. Whumpee recognized Caretaker immediately as he strode into the cell and his face was fully revealed beneath the lights. The man looked down at Whumpee with a frown before he scoffed. 

“Well, they told me you looked like shit. I didn’t think they meant it.” 

Whumpee bit his tongue as tears threatened to pool again. No. He couldn’t be here with Caretaker. Not like this, not now, not at his utter mercy. With Whumpee so helpless, and with the history behind them, being Caretaker’s prisoner was all but a death sentence. 

But there was no anger in Caretaker’s face. Instead, there was a glint of something that Whumpee might have called sadness if he hadn’t known better. 

“Alright. I don’t think you need me to tell you this, but you’re in our custody now.” Caretaker’s shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I don’t really like using the word ‘prisoner,’ but it’s the most appropriate for your current situation. Do you remember how you got here?” 

Whumpee hesitated, but then shook his throbbing head. He couldn’t remember anything for… well, he didn’t know how long. The last thing he could piece together was transient images of his previous cell, fleeting sounds of his chains dragging against the floor as he waited for his tormentor to return. Those days had all bled together. As for how he got here, to this place where Caretaker stared down at him, he had nothing. 

Another sigh escaped Caretaker’s lips, the sound laden with disappointment. 

“You went through hell to get here, including some pretty serious head trauma, so I guess that makes sense. And now that you’re finally conscious, it’s time to start getting you fixed up a bit.” 

Caretaker stepped into the cell, and Whumpee recoiled in spite of himself. The rough grit of the cinder blocks bit into his scarred back and he pushed into them, expending every ounce of his strength to put more distance between himself and Caretaker, and Whumpee felt his eyes burning with pain and fury. 

There was nowhere to run, of course. Even if Whumpee had been strong enough to do so, his left leg was still crooked from where it had been broken, and the ache of broken fingers would have made it all but impossible to manipulate a door handle, much less a lock. So instead, when Caretaker knelt down just inches away, Whumpee let a soft growl rise in his throat. 

“Hey,” Caretaker said with an easygoing chuckle, “I don’t want to hear that kind of attitude. You’re not really in a position to bargain. We’re going to get you feeling better, whether you like it or not.” 

With that threatening assurance hanging in the air, Caretaker reached forward and grabbed Whumpee’s chin in his massive hand. Whumpee tried to jerk back out of his grasp, but the grip was firm. 

Much to Whumpee’s horror, a hot tear rolled down his cheek and landed between Caretaker’s fingers. 

Caretaker made a disapproving click of his tongue, smiling softening as he peered into Whumpee’s wet eyes. Whumpee tried to find some purchase against the cement floors, anything to hold on to or to leverage himself away from Caretaker’s touch, but his mangled digits gave him no opportunity to do so. 

“Mmm, yup, looks like you’ve got a nasty concussion,” Caretaker said, although it sounded more like he was talking to himself than Whumpee. “Let’s see what other damage we’re dealing with here.” Another weak growl, this one sounding more like a whimper, came from Whumpee’s throat as Caretaker’s other hand began its intrusive journey across Whumpee’s skin. 

Those calloused fingers first probed Whumpee’s neck, tugging at the collar, then snaking beneath it. Caretaker didn’t seem to care when a garbled plea of protest escaped alongside another one of Whumpee’s tears. Next they drifted over Whumpee’s protruding collarbone, the healed fractures of his ribs, the bruised flesh of his abdomen. The touch was gentle one minute, then rough the next, but Whumpee tried to keep himself together. 

That facade fell apart when the touch drifted down Whumpee’s abdomen, then to his hips, then lower and- 

Whumpee hadn’t meant to scream. It wasn’t the rare dignified defiance he allowed himself, no, this was a howl of pure desperation. He just- he couldn’t bear that, not again, not with Caretaker. He’d hardly survived it at Whumper’s hands. This could well be his final undoing. 

“Hey, shhh,” Caretaker soothed as he withdrew his hands. “Relax, Whumpee. You need to relax.” 

Relax? Whumpee wanted to cry out. With the rough fingers off  his body he pushed even further into the wall, as though it would shield him from Caretaker’s unending probe. If Whumpee hadn’t been worried about bone splintering out from beneath his battered skin, he would have at least tried to strike back. Even if it would have been no use, at least he would have done something to protect himself. 

“Listen.” Caretaker’s voice was both firm and gentle, an almost clinical coolness to it. “I need to see what’s wrong so we know what treatment you need. I promise I’ll be quick, okay? I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Another moment passed, and Whumpee realized his body was shaking, tremors wracking his frail frame. In this brief silence, Caretaker bit down on his lip. 

“I’m not like Whumper,” the large man said after a pause. “I’m only going to do what’s necessary to make sure you’re not hiding any injuries from us. But I need you to cooperate so it’s easier on both of us.” 

Caretaker’s hand went up towards Whumpee’s collar. Those steadfast fingers gripped the thick iron ring at the front, ensuring that Whumpee couldn’t pull away. Whumpee swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the metal. 

“Close your eyes,” Caretaker demanded. “And count to thirty. It’ll all be over then, alright? Go on, close your eyes.” 

Whumpee hated to close his eyes. It always meant that he was vulnerable to pain that he couldn’t see coming, that Whumper had an opportunity to strike him by surprise. Caretaker, of course, hadn’t been asking. It was a command. 

So Whumpee closed his eyes. Maybe this meant it would be over sooner rather than later. One… two… three…

The counting did little to distract from that cold, unwelcome touch. It was gentle, though, and it was fleeting, just like Caretaker had promised. And even though Whumpee only associated such an intimate touch with the onset of unimaginable pain, by the time he reached thirty, Caretaker had indeed retreated and released his grip on Whumpee’s collar. No blinding agony had followed. 

Whumpee opened his eyes to Caretaker’s shallow smile. 

“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” 

Neither made a sound as Caretaker finished his inspection. Caretaker made a few grunts of discontent as we went over each of Whumpee’s broken digits, and finally over the swollen skin of Whumpee’s broken leg. And at long last, Whumpee’s body was his own again, slumped against the wall and free from another’s hands. 

Caretaker rocked back on his heels as he hunted through the pockets of his pants. 

“We’ve got some serious work to do on you,” Caretaker said as he fished out a capped syringe and short vial of clear liquid. “Now that I can get a report to our medical team, they’re going to come in here and fix what they can. If something needs surgery, we’ll take care of that too, which is why we haven’t given you anything to eat or drink yet. You’re going to get some food and water before you know it.” 

As he spoke, Caretaker had uncapped the syringe, and had begun to pull liquid from the vial. Whumpee couldn’t pull his eyes away from it, the substance and the needle glinting in the soft light, both an unspoken threat. Caretaker continued, apparently unaware of Whumpee’s mounting terror. 

“This is ketamine,” he said with a gesture to the vial. “I promise, that’s it. If you don’t already know, ketamine is a great pain reliever and fast-acting sedative. I imagine you’re in quite a bit of pain. I also imagine you’ll give anyone else who comes in here a hard time. It’s why I insisted on being the first one to see you, you know. It’s also why the medical team insisted that you be sedated while they do their work.”

It could have been any number of things in that vial, Whumpee knew, including a litany of substances meant to cause him unbearable agony. And yet Caretaker hadn’t given Whumpee any reason to doubt that claim.  If anything, Caretaker had made one thing clear: at the moment, trying to resist was useless. Whatever pain he was destined for, Whumpee had to surrender to it, and wait for an opportunity to escape at another time. 

“You’re not going to fight me this time, are you?” Caretaker asked as he carefully adjusted his grip on the syringe and held out a hand for Whumpee’s arm. 

Whumpee shook his head. It would do no good to fight now, in this condition. Whatever Caretaker and the rest would do to Whumpee when he was unconscious, well, at least it would be better than suffering it awake. Maybe, blissfully, Whumpee would never wake up. 

So he offered his arm out to Caretaker, unable to look the man in the eyes. This time Whumpee looked down at the floor, not so much as wincing as the needle slid beneath the soft flesh of his inner forearm, aware only of how frail he was in Caretaker’s grip. 

“There you go,” Caretaker said as he pulled the syringe away and capped it. “You’re doing so well. Just relax, and you’re going to feel it in a few seconds. I’m here, alright? I’ve got you” 

Warmth cradled Whumpee’s body as he surrendered to the wave of artificial sleep that swept over him. The pain didn’t quite fade, but Whumpee no longer cared about it. He didn’t care about anything. He fell back into Caretaker’s arms, and the last thing he felt before tumbling into unconsciousness was his head resting in Caretaker’s lap. 

When Whumpee woke, he was still in that same cell, his left wrist still shackled to the wall on a long chain. But the restraint was instead wrapped around a thick black splint. It wrapped around each of his broken fingers, extended up over his wrist, and came to a stop just below his elbow. Three fingers on his right hand were also in splints, tightly bound together and secured at his wrist. 

As the effects of the drug faded, Whumpee saw that his leg had received similar treatment. A solid cast wrapped from his hip down to his foot. It was the straightest Whumpee had seen his leg in weeks, and although the pain still radiated from the break’s epicenter, it was a relief nonetheless. 

Bandages were taped over old and new wounds, the smell of gauze and isopropyl alcohol still hanging in the air. There were spots where the tape itched, and for a moment Whumpee was delighted, solely for the fact that he felt a sensation other than pain. 

Most surprising of all was just how warm Whumpee felt. As he struggled to sit up from where he was laying, he realized that he was on a thin mattress. It was a simple affair, just a layer of padding between himself and the floor, but it was draped in a few thick blankets. Light undergarments shielded the rest of Whumpee’s body beneath the covers. Air kissed Whumpee’s naked throat for the first time in recent memory. It was all Whumpee could do not to cry - the collar was gone. 

As he soaked in this facade of dignity, this sliver of relief, Whumpee looked over to a plate on the floor beside the mattress. Warm food still steamed on a paper plate, and a few bottles of water sat open beside it. And on a small notecard, a message was scrawled- 

“Enjoy. Love, Caretaker.” 

"You're our prisoner, now. You've also just been through hell. So, you're going to get fixed up, whether you like it or not."

[villainousauthor]

"I'm tired." Hero speaks in a rough voice, exhausted. "I'm so tired." They repeat like a mantra, a lifeline. One look in their eyes shows that their weariness goes beyond just today's battle.

Villain steps closer, gaze raking up and down Hero's beaten form.

"So stop. Quit this fight and run home, tail tucked between your legs." Villain's tone is amused but not quite judgemental. "I'm sure your higher-ups will understand. Tell them another tale of how brutal I am, how merciless, and beg for their forgiveness like a dog."

Shaking their head, Hero lets out a choked protest. "I'm tired." They speak in a more desperate voice, more insistent. "I'm tired of begging and apologizing. I'm tired of fighting for people who don't care if I live or die."

Hero's eyes have a hungry fire in them now, a look of selfish desire along with the agony. Stepping closer to them, Villain smirks devilishly and offers them a hand.

"So join me."

[dilatorywriting]

Valentine's Day Special: Let Them Fight

GN!Reader x Malleus Draconia vs. Azul Ashengrotto vs. Vil Schoenheit Word Count: 5.3k

Summary: Who knew that in a world of magic, and mayhem, and outright villainy, that it'd be something as stupid as Valentine's Day that would push these idiots over the edge. Or, Malleus, Azul, and Vil go to war over some chocolates

A/N: This MC/Plot takes place in the Heroes vs Villains universe -- specifically Post-Staff's route, rather than any of our other lovely idiot husbands.

There was always some sort of strange overlap of customs from your world to this one. Halloween seemed to have survived more or less intact (even if it was a bit more, uh, extreme than the subtle evening of giving out treats and dressing as ghosts that you remembered). Winter Holidays were still very much a Thing, even if all other connotations had been stripped from them. Moreover, it was like someone had taken your familiar Earthen calendar and just sort of… mirrored it. Distorted it a bit. Just a lil’ bit more chaos than would have been socially acceptable back home.

So when you made a sly little joke about stocking up on discount chocolates after the Valentine’s Day rush and no one laughed—not even a little chortle, or an irritable eyeroll—you initially thought it was maybe to do with the irrationality of Sam’s Shop ever having a sale to begin with. You had not assumed that, you know, there was no Valentine’s Day at all.

“It’s an important holiday, then? Where you’re from?” Azul mused, busy scribbling endless, chicken scratch, notes in the margins of some form that was probably very important.

“I mean, not really,” you frowned, tossing your Mostro-Branded apron onto its hook. “Maybe. Yes? I don’t really know, actually.”

He hummed and moved to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Well, whatever it is, I’m always looking for new events to host at the Lounge. What exactly is it?”

“It’s a sort of special day for couples. Romance. Lovey-dovey nonsense,” you shrugged, and watched Azul’s finger slip off the slick metal frame of his glasses and nearly take his eye out. You waved off his obvious disgust with a dramatic sigh (I mean, why else would he be so stiff and red?). “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s ridiculous.”

“I—I never said that!” he spluttered, and then paused to cough into his fist and clear his throat. “It just—I just wasn’t expecting something like that to…”

“Exist?”

He grinned, wry. His cheeks were still a bit too pink. “Precisely.”

“You would have loved my world,” you said. “Very capitalistic. Lots of cash-grab holidays like that.”

Azul laughed.

“I’m sure I would be fond of any place you came from.” He paused, and his expression puckered up a bit miserably—like he really hadn’t intended to express such a sentiment aloud. But he managed to smooth the sharp line of his frown back into that usual, smarmy, smirk of his easily enough. “But either way! Tell me more!” he grinned, reaching forward to grab a stack of blank paper and a fresh pen. “I’d love to hear all about it.”

.

.

The next day you were supposed to help the Drama Club start building some stage scenery for their newest play. It was proper grunt work, which was perhaps the only sort of work you were actually qualified for. And Vil always made sure that there were plenty of disgustingly healthy but still quite tasty snacks available for the help to munch on. The food spread alone would have been worth the trip, but on top of that, Vil had made you promise. Practically a blood oath, binding you and your meager free time to the shitty supply closet in the corner of the Auditorium. And as sour as he could be sometimes, you really could never say no to him when he always looked so heart meltingly fond whenever you did agree to while away the hours at his side. That lovely face and even lovelier smile of his were fucking lethal. A war crime, surely, to use it against someone as plain and susceptible to bribery as you were.

But today you were now an idiot on a mission—an idiot determined to spread the joy of a trashy holiday that really probably shouldn’t exist in the first place, let alone in a world where people worshipped storybook villains as veritable deities. And you’d already bought all the molds, and the trays, and you really didn’t have a lot of spare pocket money to begin with, so letting this investment go to waste would not only be a shame, but a terrible business investment.

“What do you mean you’re not coming,” Vil sneered, glaring down his perfectly straight nose at you.

“I really am sorry,” you said, mostly genuine. “But I have something I need to do this afternoon.”

“You’ve made other plans?” he frowned, something a little too unsettled to fit with his usual regality twisting across his expression.

“I have to get ready for Valentine’s Day,” you explained, and his brow tugged down further. Though that earlier twinge of panic seemed to have vanished at least. You pointedly shook your grocery bag full of goodies. “I’m going to make chocolates for everyone.”

“Chocolates?” Vil echoed, confused.

You nodded. “It’s a tradition back home. You give stuff like candy and flowers to the people you care about. Normally it’s a holiday for couples, or whatever. But. Well…”

The ‘I Am Fully Aware That I’m Single as a Pringle, Please Just Let Me Have This One Thing’ was left unsaid, but it hung in the air around your head like a very persistent storm cloud nonetheless. Vil, magnanimously, seemed perfectly happy to ignore the Woe Is Me implications spewing from your mouth. Instead, he leaned forward until he was dipping precariously close into your personal space. His amethyst eyes had lit with blatant interest at your ramblings, and he hummed low in his throat.

“Is that so?” he mused, gaze lidded and warm. “That sounds… intriguing.”

You nodded past the heady scent of his cologne fogging your head. What was it with attractive people, huh? It was so unfair. You don’t get to look and smell good. Pick a lane. Save some dignity for the rest of us.

“So, I promise I’ll help another day. I just have a feeling making chocolates is going to wind up being a lot harder than I think it will.”

Because that’s how it always went in your stupid slice-of-life shows. The poor, harried, protagonist thinking they’re doing a good deed—painstakingly constructing their own, special, homemade goodies for all their important people. Making them with love. And then having it all blow up in their face like a goddamn, cocoa flavored, nuke. Nope. Not you, motherfucker. Your chocolates were going to be divine. You were going to take every, tropey, precaution in the book. And that of course included allotting yourself ample time to make mistakes your masterpiece.

“Of course,” Vil grinned. “How could I possibly begrudge you for wanting to spend your time on something so heartfelt?”

“Thank you,” you blurted, relived. Because at least he got it. Azul had been so ridiculously insistent that you should prepare all your Valentine’s Day wishes as a team. Which was not the point. He’d spent hours last night trying to wheedle his way into your plans—with endless platitudes about ‘business partners always being there for each other,’ and ‘how would he know if he was celebrating to your standards if he wasn’t given a model to work off of first?’ Utter bullshit. He’d probably just wanted free labor.

“Tomorrow, then?” Vil beamed and you nodded.

“Tomorrow,” you confirmed.

“Well, then,” he hummed. “I better get to work as well. I suppose the scenery can wait.”

You nodded in farewell and began the trek back to Ramshackle and its marginally functional kitchens. You hadn’t realized Vil was taking on any new projects, but if it was enough to have him putting off the Club’s activities as well then it must have been pretty important. Maybe he’d get you tickets to it whenever he finished—whatever it was. If there were tickets? How did any of the things he did actually work? Hell if you knew.

.

.

Making chocolates was, in fact, a laughably easy endeavor. And you found yourself cursing every goddamn Shoujo Bullshit Manga under the sun for leading you to think otherwise. The hardest part of the entire thing was fighting off Grim and his wandering paws.

You made up some basic truffles which were, again, stupidly simple. Just some messily chopped chocolate, cream, and a little splash of vanilla to make it Special. Once those were shaped into messy blobs, you dipped them into some more melted chocolate and bam. That was it. That was literally it. You felt like a genius—sitting there mushing up balls of cocoa like high-end playdough.

By 6PM, you had all your little darlings tucked into the refrigerator to harden, all the gauzy, red, boxes lined up on your counter and ready to be filled, and Grim had been placated with an offering of all your dirty mixing bowls. The tiny, demonic, beast was passed out at the dingy kitchen table—one of said bowls wedged onto his head like an astronaut’s helmet. Hopefully it was just a food coma and not, like, an actual coma-coma. Real cats couldn’t eat chocolate, but Grim never really seemed real at all. So hopefully he’d be fine.

You wiped down your cooking space once, twice. Paced up and down the narrow hallway until you were wearing away the already threadbare rugs, and spent way too long just standing in front of the fridge—staring in on your chocolates like a psychotic kidnapper scoping out their next victims.

Eventually you realized that you maybe needed to do something with your evening that wasn’t just creeping on your confections, and set out into the frosty, night, air for a stroll.

Which is, of course, where you ran into your familiar, horned, friend—staring up into the starry sky in a wistful manner that darkened his pale complexion into something nearly ominous. He always looked a bit like that, like something unearthly and detached from the rest of the world.

“Tsunotarou!” you chirped happily, and that adrift-at-sea expression of his melted right off his face.

“Child of Man,” he greeted, inclining his head politely. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this evening.” His brow furrowed, almost confused. “Is it not too cold for you?”

Your breath was, in fact, fogging in front of your face. And you couldn’t really feel your toes anymore. But the electric anticipation of tomorrow was keeping you warm enough. Even if only in spirit.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” you waved him off. And then, because you couldn’t help yourself, you leaned forward on your tippytoes and blurted out, “Happy Almost Valentine’s Day!”

“Valentine’s Day?” Malleus repeated back at you, looking like you’d just handed him an unsolvable differential equation.

“It’s a holiday from back home,” you explained for the umpteenth time that day. “And normally I’m not too fussed about it, but this year I’m really excited to give everyone their chocolates!” You grinned. “And you too, of course. I have to make sure I give them to all my important people.”

The furrow between his brows vanished, but the blatant, gaping, confusion remained. He looked like you’d nearly startled him into an early grave.

“I am one of your most important people?” he asked, slow as a tortoise making its way up an incline.

You nodded cheerfully, still bellied by your earlier culinary successes and excellent mood. “Of course you are! We’re friends, aren’t we? And besides. Valentine’s Day is for showing people how much you care about them.”

“What an interesting concept,” he mused, bringing a finger up to tap at his chin. “To think your world had such a heartfelt tradition—it’s quite a lovely surprise.”

You laughed. “If you think the chocolates are special, you should see what some couples do for each other. Rooms full of flowers, fancy date nights—I’m just managing the bare minimum.”

“Couples?” he echoed, and you felt the first teeny, hot, thread of chagrin work its way past your enthusiasm.

“Well, normally Valentine’s Day focuses on, like, romantic things,” you said, averting your gaze just in time to miss the tension lance through his shoulders. “But it can be for all sorts of affection!” you hastily added.

“Is that so…” the Prince hummed. He lifted his pensive gaze once more and stared you down with that weighted intensity that you’d only just recently learned how not to buckle beneath. “And you wish to celebrate this day. With me?”

“…you don’t mind, do you?” you asked, hesitant.

“Of course not, Child of Man,” he beamed, his lips curling up into a smile that put all his too-sharp teeth on display. “But you’ll have to excuse me now, I’m afraid. It seems I have some preparations to undertake this evening.”

“Oh,” you blinked. “Alright. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Yes,” Malleus said. “You will.”

.

.

It was officially Valentine’s Day, and you were ready to begin your mission of forcing your sweets onto every, single, one of your reluctant friends. Let them be pissy and tsundere. You weren’t afraid to weep and proclaim your undying, shounen-talk-no-jutsu, levels of friendship. Okay. Maybe you were a little. But these grouchy bastards had very easily become your grouchy bastards, and so help you God, they would suffer under your affection and they would like it.

There were plenty of small boxes—all nice, neat, corners with little bows perched on top. But you had also prepared a singular, larger, tray. It was cleaner cut than the rest, with bold, contrasting, colors and a simple elegance. You stared it down with a strange sort of disquiet brewing in your gut. Maybe you were being presumptuous. Goodness knows you’d more than dealt with the searing, emotionally destructive, consequences of that before. But all the same…

You squared your shoulders and spent a moment convincing yourself that your spine was quite sturdy—a proper, titanium, support system—and then popped the Big Box into the bag with the others.

Your first stop was Heartslabyul, and you burst through the ornate, crimson, doors like a manic home invader.

“I come bearing gifts,” you proclaimed, merrily doling out the boxes to your favorite idiot duo. You set three more aside, with little labels for Riddle, Trey, and Cater respectively. Normally you wouldn’t trust a dorm full of teenage boys not to devour any scrap of unattended food in sight, but Riddle had long since struck the fear of God into these poor lads. So you figured it’d be safe.

Deuce’s face lit up and he accepted the chocolate with near starry-eyed enthusiasm.

“Are these your holiday presents? Like the Santa Claus?” he asked, looking very much like a bouncy golden retriever preparing itself for congratulatory head pats.

You leaned forward with an indulgent huff to give him his pats. “No. But close enough.”

You pawned off three boxes on Ruggie when he tried to duck past you in the hallway—one for him, one for Leona, and one extra as payment for making him do your dirty work of playing delivery boy to Mister Grump in the first place. You slipped Jack his on the way into Trein’s morning lecture, and managed to press a box into Jamil’s hands before he slunk off to the library. Kalim cheered so loudly when you handed him one that your ears started to ring.

And then trouble arrived in the form of two, slippery, eels draping themselves across your shoulders. Normally the destructive duo seemed to act on their own prerogative, but on this fortuitous morning their Lord and Master was surprisingly not too far behind.

“Shrimpy!~” Floyd trilled, dragging you into a one-armed hug that was really more of a slightly-less-aggressive headlock than anything else. “Azul says you came up with this stupid holiday! And he made us work all day yesterdayto put together stuff for the Lounge! It’s not fair!”

Your legs shook under the weight of the new tumor that had made its home on your back.

“Now, Floyd,” Jade chirped. All finely manicured cruelty. “If you’re to blame anyone for going overboard with this entire situation, you ought to lay the fault on our fearless leader.” His bi-colored eyes flashed, amused. “Isn’t that right, Azul?”

Said ‘fearless leader’ looked like he was sucking on a lemon. He glared bitterly at his subordinate, seeming to share an entire, silent, argument with him, before turning back on you with a heavy sigh and the barest hint of angry flush in his cheeks.

“Prefect,” he grinned past his obvious discomfort, all sparkling, white, teeth. “I have to thank you for sharing so much information about this ‘Valentine’s Day’ of yours. It’s such a unique event, and it seems like our preparations at the Lounge are already being received incredibly well.”

“That’s good,” you nodded, trying and failing to shrug the Leech off your shoulders. “I’m glad I could help.”

Azul hummed under his breath, his eyes darting away for a moment. His glasses reflected the muted light of the hall in an odd way—making it difficult to read his expression. He cleared his throat and when he looked back up at you, the tips of his ears had gone pink.

“You’re more than welcome to come by, of course,” he beamed, suave as could be.

“I mean,” you blinked. “I would hope so. I work there.”

Floyd let out a bark of laughter and Jade snickered into his glove. The pleasant pink tinting Azul’s skin was heating to a near sunburned red. He looked down and coughed into his fist.

“Yes…” he mumbled. “I—I’m aware. But what I meant is… What I meant—” He frowned. It was a tight, pouty, little thing that scrunched up his entire face. That mottled red had spread to the bridge of his nose.

“I do believe what Azul is trying to say,” Jade stepped in, clearly taking some sort of pity on his tongue-tied friend. Or perhaps pity was the wrong word for it, seeing how smug he looked, “is that he would like to invite you to the event personally. As an honored guest, not an employee.”

“Oh,” you blinked, startled. Then hesitated, cautious on instinct. There was always some sort of catch to the Octomer’s kindness. “I don’t know if I could afford whatever fancy thing you’ve thrown together.”

“You wouldn’t be paying for it,” Azul assured you, some of that sickly flush having finally started to recede from his cheeks. You hoped he was feeling alright. “You’ve contributed more than enough for the day. It would be on the house.”

Jade loudly cleared his throat and Azul huffed, eyes sliding away yet again.

“I would be paying,” he finally mumbled. And then, even quieter, “As I believe is the custom.”

Just as you were about to thank him for his startling bought of generosity (and also ask after his health, because between the weird, pink, tinge to his skin and the aforementioned generosity, clearly somethingwas out of sorts with him), you noticed a sneaky hand working its way into your bag of goodies, and you immediately were on the defensive.

“Hey!” you snapped, spinning out of Floyd’s stranglehold. “You only get one!”

“Then I want the really big one!” he demanded, making grabby motions at it.

“No!” you squeaked, and clutched it protectively to your chest. The trio looked at you with varying degrees of surprise and you cleared your throat awkwardly. “This one—This one is special.”

“Oh?” Jade cooed, eyes flickering back towards Azul, who seemed determined to look absolutely anywhere else. “Is it now?”

“Awww,” Floyd whined. “That’s no fair! Who’s it for, anyways?!”

You gripped the box tighter and now it was your turn to stiffly avert your eyes down to the ugly carpet. “It’s not—I’m not—” you cleared your throat and forced the jitter from your voice. “I’m not ready to give it to him yet.”

The silence that followed was absolutely the worst thing you’d experienced in a long, long, time. Overblots and all. You could practically hear your blood pounding in your ears. You were just about to turn and beat a hasty retreat when a familiar, snappish, voice called your name from the other side of the corridor.

“There you are, potato,” Vil huffed, coming to stand at your side and bodily inserting himself between you and your tormentors. He met Azul’s petulant sneer with a frankly terrifying one of his own. “What are you doing here? I thought we agreed you’d be eating lunch with me today.”

You remembered no such thing, but if it got you out of this verbal minefield of a conversation, you were more than willing to take the claim at face value.

“Apologies,” Azul cut in with all his usual, mafioso, flair. “But the Prefect will be taking their afternoon meal at the Mostro Lounge today.”

“Is that so?” Vil hummed, sounding positively venomous.

“Unless you think you can make an offer good enough to sway them otherwise,” Azul chirped, equally as unpleasant.

Vil laughed—cold and sharp as crystal. It was the most elegant display of blatant irritation you’d ever seen.

“Of course you’d only consider this entire situation on a transactional basis,” he drawled, entirely unimpressed. Azul flinched and his expression screwed up into something near petulant. “I would expect no less. Are you planning to lock them into a contact too, hmm? Sign away everything in formal, sterile, terms?” Vil crossed his arms, and you were reminded sharply once more how very, very lucky you were to not be on his bad side (even if you hadn’t realized before all this that Azul apparently was on said bad side. You had no idea they disliked each other so terribly). “I really hadn’t expected you to have a single, romantic, bone in your body, and yet somehow I’m still disappointed to be proved so entirely correct.”

Azul looked ready to explode, and even though Jade and Floyd and melted back into the shadows at the start of this entire encounter, the pair of them were starting to look a bit murderous too—like sharks lazily circling the dark, ocean, depths.  

“Don’t you think you deserve better?” Vil asserted, turning back to face you with a soft cant of the head. You blinked back in shock.

“Uh,” you gaped, absolutely fucking lost.

And then, like a beacon of unrivaled, black-drenched, hope, you spotted Malleus making his way down the hallway. He was flanked by his trio of housemates-cum-pseudo-bodyguards. Normally you tried to leave him alone when his rabid, green-haired, guard dog was yipping at his heels, and on top of that, the idea of using your classmates’ ingrained fear of the Fae Prince to your own advantage upset your rather staunch sensibilities. But this was an emergency.

“Tsunotarou!” you called, and it absolutely sounded like the cry for help it was.

He perked up immediately and you watched him nearly crash to a standstill. And then his sharp, neon, gaze locked on the dueling Housewardens circling you like a pair of snapping wolves, and his merry expression shuttered into something positively glacial. Which was—Fuck. I mean. Come on. What the fuck was going on today—

“Child of Man,” he droned, crossing the short distance with all the grace of the near-mythical, arcane, master that he was. His posture was more collected and regal than you’d ever seen it, and he loomed all the taller for it.

Azul and Vil had gone tense at your side, one certainly more so than other. The Octomer looked incredibly unsettled at Malleus’s sudden arrival, but Vil just looked angrier. It was the sort of unpleasantness that bloomed whenever someone challenged him or his competencies over and over—inevitably pushing the normally composed beauty into an indignant rage.

“Happy Day of Valentine’s,” Malleus continued, slotting himself firmly into the veritable territory dispute going down. “Are you quite alright?”

No, you wanted to wail. No! I’m so confused! I have no idea what’s going on! I just wanted to give my friends chocolates!

But you never managed to get those words or any others past your lips, because Sebek Zigvolt shot to his master’s side with all the speed of the lightning for which he was so named, and immediately began to scream.

“HOW DARE YOU INTERRUPT THE YOUNG MASTER’S AFTERNOON ROUTINE!” he shrieked at the top of his very impressive lungs.

You weren’t sure if he was howling at you (very likely) or just anyone who wasn’t Malleus, but Jade took the opportunity to slink forward from the shadows with a sharp tut-tut.

“Perhaps none of you deserve the Prefect’s special attentions,” he piped in, sounding very much like someone intentionally throwing a cannister of gasoline onto an already roaring fire. “Or any chocolates at all—let alone the ones set aside for someone special.”

At this, silence once more rang through the corridor and you wanted to throttle that stupid eel.

“There is a special box?” Malleus asked first, brow shooting up as his expression tugged with… something.

“I—I mean, I made all of yours special!” you defended, holding the wrapped treasure tightly to your chest. “But… I guess. Yes. There’s one that’s a little bigger than the others.”

At this, all three Housewardens exchanged pointed looks.

Jade smiled serenely once more, and then continued his absolute massacre upon your person.

“Yes, indeed,” he nodded. “And our dearest Prefect only just mentioned that—hmm. How did you word it? Ah. That’s right. ‘I’m not ready to give it to him yet.’”

The trio tensed. All looking absolutely ready to pounce. At—at what, you had no idea.

“Perhaps,” the wretch mused, “it would be best for you all to temper your rage until the victor is decided, hmm?” He paused to tap at his chin for a moment, and then his lips split into a mean, jagged, grin. “Afterwards? Well, I suppose that whole cheery sentiment about ‘love and war’ still holds true.”

You gulped, feeling startlingly like Jade had just tried to serve you up on a silver platter.

But when neither Azul, Vil, or Malleus made any further moves to murder each other… well. As sacrificial as it all felt, at least it must have worked.

The rest of the day passed in a tense sort of fugue. You certainly hadn’t expected your attempts at bringing some holiday cheer to Night Raven to go so… Uh…

But either way, you managed to survive through the rest of the afternoon, and before you knew it, all that remained of all your tireless efforts and good will was the Special Box. The big one. The one that you’d put together with extra care and hopes for better things. You glared down at it for a moment, feeling sweat starting to bead over your palms. But you couldn’t chicken out now. Not after you’d come so far! Everyone was acting so strange, and it was all so weird. And as much as that unfamiliarity had your teeth on edge and your hackles raised, you didn’t want to regret not giving out the last of your well-made sweets.

Well, here goes nothing, you frowned. You took a deep breath, willed yourself to be brave, and smiled your biggest smile.

“Here,” you beamed, more than a little shy and still a bit horrified by whatever pissing match had been going down earlier in the day, and finally offered the grandest of your chocolate boxes to the man standing opposite you.

Divus Crewel accepted your offering daintily, plucking at the crisp, sharp, wrapping with his crimson gloves. He arched one of his thin brows at you and you fought the nervous heat rising in your cheeks.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” you blurted. “I know it’s not a thing here, but I thought it’d be nice.”

The second eyebrow joined the first—practically jumping all the way up into his fringe.

“I appreciate the gesture. Though from what I understand of all the garish advertising I’ve seen for Mostro Lounge’s new event, I assumed this was a holiday for romantic overtures,” he intoned, wry.

You spluttered and waved your hands furiously. “I mean! Normally! Yes! But also…” You trailed off, fighting the urge to fidget. “If you don’t have a—a, well, someone, then Valentine’s is just a nice excuse to give something to people you care about.” You averted your gaze and lost the battle to twist your fingers into your jacket sleeves. “My family used to give me chocolates every year. So. I thought I could… Well…” you trailed off on a grumble, embarrassed.

Crewel sighed and popped the lid off the box. He plucked two truffles from their casing—keeping one for himself and handing you the other.

“Well, then. A very happy Valentine’s to you, Prefect,” he droned and popped the chocolate into his mouth with a thoughtful hum.

You lit up like a Christmas tree and happily gobbled up your own treat. So distracted were you by the one-two-punch combo of the delicious sugar and even sweeter taste of your Professor’s approval that you almost entirely missed the pointed glare he shot over your shoulder.

“I appreciate your regard,” he said, loud. Sharp. And like he wasn’t talking to you at all. “And while I’m certain that if you do pick a ‘someone’ for yourself to celebrate with in the following years, they’ll have to work very hard to be worthy of such a gift, hmm?” His lip curled unpleasantly, in direct contrast to the indulgent warmth that had been tugging at his expression only a moment before. “I could hardly allow you to waste such a thoughtful gesture on someone unworthy.”

The Octavinelle Housewarden had the decency to look at least a little panicked—his face going pale and gaunt from where he was shrinking into his high collar. There was a frantic look about him, like he was trying to weigh the cost-benefit ratio of going up against his professor in his head, and realizing that he was stupidly, willfully, walking right into a lose-lose situation. And that, sadly—miserably—he was going to keep doing just that. The other two, however, looked entirely undeterred. Schoenheit curled his lip right back at him, more than ready to duke it out here and now, and Crewel fought the urge to remind the blonde that he was the adult in this situation, thank you very much. The adult who could very well revoke the Warden’s access to his Alchemy Labs as it suited him. The very alchemy labs that he knew Vil had been using to concoct all kinds of new, personalized, gifts for you. Draconia simply looked on with that unnervingly ancient, green, leer of his. Like he was staring down a particularly fascinating game. The Fae Prince was the most unsettling of the trio, if only because that while Crewel was more than confident enough in his abilities to subdue his other wayward students, fighting off an Immortal, All Powerful, Dragon was going to require at least a little bit of prep work.

Divus Crewel sighed, and it rattled all the way out from the marrow of his bones.

“Come, then,” he rumbled, directing you to follow him back into his office. “It’s not chocolates, but I probably have some of those ridiculous cookies of yours lying around somewhere.” Which he did. Boxes upon boxes of them. Tucked away special for whenever you came to visit. Not that he’d ever willingly admit that, even under the pain of death.

Your eyes went wide and warm as you positively beamed.

It was rotten work, certainly. He shot one, last, warning glare down the hall at the trio of infatuated interlopers as he firmly shut his office door behind you and your absolute oblivious idiocy. He’d do it. Of course he would. But, Christ alive. He was going to need a stronger drink.

[heronoegg]

them cause i've never colored them properly enough

[prettyboytortureclub]

Technically this is a continuation of this but you can read it on its own too!

Hero knew something was wrong the second they reached the prison. Guards avoided eye contact, giving one word answers when spoken to. One even ignored them entirely, face drenched with sweat. They sped up, practically running down the stairs as they reached the outer wall separating the high security cells from the rest of the prison.

“Uh, (miss/sir/mx), you’re supposed to be accompanied by an officer on any visits.” The man who stood watch over the entrance mumbled. Hero shot him an icy glare.

“I need to see them. Now.”

“I am sorry for the inconvenience, but I really can’t let you in unaccompanied. That would violate-“ Hero grabbed his collar, shoving him against the wall. “-protocol.”

“Open the door.”

“Gladly!”

Hero stormed through the building, up the uneven winding steps he knew too well, down corridor after corridor of cells until he came across the high security section. Racing up the remaining stairs, hero flung open the cell door.

Villain was leaning against the wall, hand clutching at the growing patch of blood seeping through their thin shirt. Their face was battered and bruised and they looked severely malnourished. Their eyes drifted towards Hero and they plastered a half hearted grin on their face.

“Hero, you seem excited to see me.”

“Who did this.”

“Wow someone’s-“

“Villain, who did this!” Hero yelled.

Villain went quiet. Their smile dropped and they glanced off into the distance.

“Well, if I tell you then it’ll only get worse once you leave.”

Hero felt rage bubbling up inside of them, but now wasn’t the time. They sat down on the floor beside Villain, brushed the criminals hair out of their face with their hand.

“It’s alright I won’t force you to tell me.” The crime fighter paused, looking to see if anyone was outside the door. “I can’t leave you here again. We’re getting you out of here today.”

Villains widened their eyes. “Hero, you are not putting your life on the line for me. I am a criminal. I deserve to be here.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.” Hero pulled out their first aid kit, extensive after years of injury on the job, so that they could bandage up villains bleeding arms. “Villain, please. I can’t just keep letting this happen, you’ll die!”

“They’ll know it was you. You know what the leagues like, you’d be lucky if they didn’t have you killed for this. You’ll never be able to work as a hero again!”

Hero sighed. “I don’t want to be a hero, not if it means hurting you.”

[the-broken-pen]

“You’re drunk,” the villain said, voice tinted with surprise.

The hero hiccuped.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No—wait, why are you here?”

The villain laughed.

“Someone told me a party was going on, and that I should crash it. I didn’t expect it to be yours.”

The hero blinked back a sudden onslaught of tears.

“Not really mine any more. So if you had any reservations about crashing…”

The villain arched a brow, and sat down on the slightly damp grass across from the hero.

“Are you saying you want me to crash your party?”

“Not my party.”

The villain tugged out a piece of grass.

“Why isn’t it your party anymore.”

“It just isn’t,” the hero said around a sob.

The villain studied them, too observant, too seeing.

“Does this have anything to do with you being drunk?”

The hero hiccuped again. “No.”

The villain hummed.

“I thought you had a problem with alcohol. Because of your—“

The hero stuck their hand out, pressing a finger to the villain’s lips.

“Can we not?”

The villain had the audacity to smile.

“Stop smiling.”

The villain obliged.

“Did you…did you want to get drunk?”

The hero didn’t answer, and the villain stiffened. Their eye caught on the empty solo cup, abandoned on the grass beside them.

“Please—and I mean this in every sense of the word—tell me that those ‘friends’ of yours did not spike your drink.”

The hero shrugged, noncommittally.

“They just wanted me to relax. Have fun. It isn’t their fault.”

When they looked up again, the villain was seething.

“They drugged you.”

“That sounds so bad—“

“Did you give consent?” The villain’s face was carved from stone.

“I—they wanted me to relax.”

“That’s a no.” The villain grabbed the hero’s chin. “If it isn’t an enthusiastic yes, it’s a no.”

The hero moved their head from the villain’s hand.

“It’s fine.”

“It isn’t.”

The hero looked back at the villain. The villain sighed.

“You’re even more stubborn when you’re drunk.”

Ridiculously, the hero smiled.

A moment later, the villain held out their hand.

“Come on. Let’s go get you some better friends—these ones are trash.”

The hero blinked uncertainly. They shot a glance back at the house, humming with music, and laughter, and light. The hero doubted their friends—their ex friends—had even noticed they were gone.

They took the villain’s hand.

“As long as they aren’t douchebags.”

The villain laughed. God, they had a nice laugh, and led the hero away, down the street, and kept holding their hand the whole time.

The only friend the hero ended up making that night was the villain.

And in the end, they were the only friend that mattered.

[chaotic-orphan]

Febuwhump: Day Twenty-Six

“Help them” — #febuwhump prompt calendar

Almost over!! Eeek!! I need to get all the prompts done! And my assignments are coming due but what is more important honestly?!

*~*~*~*~*

Hero brought Villain to supervillain cradled in their arms, paler than milk. It made everything look worse somehow… the dark circles around their eyes looked more like bruises now, deep purple and sore reds. Henchmen narrowed their eyes when they opened the door to see Hero standing there, covered in blood and an unconscious Villain cradled in their arms like a baby.

“I need to see Supervillain,” said Hero thickly. Henchmen raised their brows, clearly unimpressed. Hero stepped in, desperation driving them. “Please… I wouldn’t be here if there was any other way. You know Villain, henchmen please.”

Henchmen’s eyes flicked from Villain to Hero before setting their mouth in a thin line and stepping back into the house, opening the door wider.

“Thank you,” Hero breathed.

“I’m not doing this for you.”

“I know, thank you anyway. I’m grateful.”

Henchmen guided Hero to the stairs down to Supervillain’s workshop that took up the entire basement, renovated to suit Supervillain’s needs. Hero thanked Henchmen again before descending to the sounds of the door shutting behind them.

“Henchmen, if this is about tea again, I told you I’m fi—” Supervillain grumbled coming to see the intruder on the stairs. He paused, continuing to wipe his fingers in a cloth. Supervillain’s eyes took in Hero, the state of them, then focused on Villain in Hero’s arms.

Supervillain’s gaze when it returned to Hero’s eyes was heavier, weighted by their shared history. Supervillain turned away and said: “I’m closed for the day, little Hero.”

“Please.” The word was blubbered out of Hero’s lips before they could reign it in, the desperation, the despair, the panic. It caused Supervillain to pause again.

“Help them,” Hero whispered, sniffing, tears streaming down their cheeks Hero wished wouldn’t shed in front of the deadliest Villain in the entire city. “Please.”

“I told you,” said Supervillain, looking at Hero over their shoulder. “That if you walked out the door Villain was your problem. I told Villain that too. I didn’t walk, Hero. You did.”

“I’ll beg,” Hero told them taking another step down the stairs. “I’ll stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll give up being a Hero, I’ll stay here with you and we can start again.”

Supervillain scoffed, casting their gaze to the ceiling instead of anywhere else. “You’d give up your freedom for that mongrel?”

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation. No hitch in Hero’s voice, no doubt.

Hero watched Supervillain’s back stiffen at the immediacy of Hero’s reply, and the guilt overwhelmed them but it was the truth. The one truth Hero would live and die by, sacrifice their freedom for. If it meant Villain lived.

Supervillain started walking again, their voice quieter as they said: “you can set them down on this table here. Then leave. I don’t need you lurking over me while I work.”

“But��” Hero protested as they set Villain on the table. The rest of their protest died on their tongue when Supervillain cut them with a glare.

“Just upstairs, you don’t have to leave. You can shower, tend to your wounds yourself.”

Hero nodded and sniffed, “oh—okay.”

Hero pressed a kiss to Villain’s forehead before they sniffed and turned to leave. Supervillain spoke and it halted Hero in their stride.

“This will cost you dearly, Hero,” they said, voice grave. Hero nodded and said: “I know.”

That’s all they said, that was all there was to say. Hero walked back up the stairs to the main house. Henchmen was waiting beside the door, arms crossed over their chest, head reclining against the wall. Hero thought Henchmen would be surprised to see Hero without Villain, but Henchmen just scoffed, shaking their head.

“They never could say no to you,” they told Hero. Their eyes were burning with scorn when they fixed on Hero’s face. “What did you do? Sell your soul? You know they won’t do that for nothing.”

“I know,” said Hero softly, too tired to fight anymore. “I’m— I’m going to lie down.”

Henchmen pushed off the wall, haughty. “Do whatever you want, Hero. It’s what you always do anyways.”

[sseniita]

hello op, I adore the villain you've created in the medical malpractice piece. their energy, their quips, their motivations, their dynamic with the hero. it's brilliant and perfect and please, please do write more about them. "firework" now has permanently changed my mind. maybe a continuation or maybe another one-shot if you're interested? it's great stuff

omg thank u sm,, i was proud of it! and ofc! i didn't have a story laid out for them but im always happy to revisit my works (maybe even w/ suggestions wink wink nudge nudge) !! sorry for the late update, i may be silent but trust, i am lurking

medical malpractice: healing boredom

The villain hadn't expected for this to go on for this long, but the little hero was resilient. If the villain didn't know any better, he'd think the hero was getting as much as a kick out of this as he was. His thoughts took over his mind, only snapping out of it when he heard the squeak from the hero and the flinch away from his healing hands.

"Ouch." Hero cradled their newly healed fingers to their chest.

"Oh, so sorry, firework. I was distracted." The hero returned their hand and the villain got to work on their thumb. Maybe snapping each of their fingers last night was overkill they thought- he shouldn't be giving himself this much work. Each heal was a meticulous and fragile process; it took more power than messing with a frontal lobe or blocking an artery. The villain cursed silently as he moved to the hero's other hand.

"I didn't know you could do that." The villain hummed in confusion, asking for elaboration with a raised eyebrow. "Hurt."

The hero was smarter than the villain thought, but apparently also vulnerable to charm. They dismissed things when disguised as a joke or flirtatious comment. Which explains why the villain now spent their Tuesday and Thursday afternoons playing footsies with the Hero under oval tables at meetings. He had had many close calls.

"Mmm. Everyone can hurt someone, Hero." He responded, focused on the hero's untrimmed cuticles.

"Yes, but I didn't think you could do it physically, with your powers."

"Well, healing involves pain, does it not?"

"You don't make it hurt."

"Ah, you've never been healed by someone as talented as me is all."

The hero chuckled. "So it's a skill thing?"

"Of course. A bad nurse would draw blood during a vaccination," He smiled up at the hero, healing the hero's pinky without breaking eye contact. "but you wouldn't feel a thing with a practiced nurse"

The hero's eyes widened at the realization their pinky had been healed. They wiggled each finger that only an hour earlier had turned purple and gone limp.

"Oh, you are good. Thank you, Nurse." They said, impressed, batting their eyelashes and smiling at their fully functioning fingers. The villain stared at the clock, ticking towards 9 PM and letting him know it had taken almost an hour to heal the hero's fingers. Never breaking fingers again, he thought.

"You're all set. Anything else you needed from me?" The hero leaned back against their arms on the examination table, leisurely displaying themselves in their ripped suit with half lidded eyes. They crossed their legs and tilted their head to the side.

What are you playing at, Firework?

"Well, I don't know. I hate that our little meetings run so short."

"They're very frequent." The villain shrugged.

The hero rubbed over the tissue on the examination table, making an infuriating crackling noise. They continued at it while speaking. "I have a kink in my neck."

"I'm a doctor, not a masseuse, Firework." The villain said, turning his back toward the hero, distracting himself from the noise of Hero's fidgeting by organizing paperwork and folders at his desk.

The hero had been at this game the past few visits. Coming up with excuses and making up stories about them and the villain that he knew didn't happen. Last week the hero had said the villain threw them against a brick wall and broke their arm. The villain had certainly not done that.

He was starting to get annoyed at how peculiar the hero actually was. They blabbered non-stop while he took x-rays, they became very sweaty very fast, and they had acquired a staring problem when he inspected them. He assumed the fighting had finally gotten to them. It always does.

"Well, could you maybe at least look at it?" The villain sighed, mourning the fun he had had the past months. Was the joy of fighting the hero really worth the effort of healing them over and over again?

He turned to the hero, a red and sweaty mess, and moved his hands up their neck, getting close to inspect under their hair, to know exactly where to press. If they were lucky, they'd hit pressure point and the hero would drop dead.

The hero wouldn't stay still, squirming under him and leaning their head back. Their hand reached for his elbow and a light tug had made an effort to make them face each other. Noses just inches away from each other. The villain was about to ask what was wrong before he noticed the hero's glance to his lips.

Oh.

The villain was pleasantly surprised at the hero's delusion about their relationship, but that was neither here nor there. He smiled softly at the hero, taking complete control and kissing them even softer on the lips. He liked being a few steps ahead of them. The villain knew the hero had no self control and so was prepared when they grabbed onto the lapel of his lab coat and pushed him on top of them, deepening the kiss as they went.

The hero was very different in this state. Grasping onto the villain to save their life, throwing the stethoscope around his neck to the floor. Hero was in bliss, and the villain decided to keep going along. After the villain's coat was on the floor but before the hero could reach for the villain's belt, the pair was distracted by a knock on the frosted door.

"Shoot." The hero hissed, finally regaining themself, sitting up and diving for the villain's coat on the floor. Sorry they mouthed before yelling towards the door.

"Justaminute!"

"Hurry up in there!" A voice called from the other side.

The hero was red in the face as they fixed their suit, struggling with the zipper the villain had started pulling down. The villain smirked, taking the liberty of zipping it up the rest of the way, his cold hands earning a flinch from the hero. They turned back towards him, before the hero opened their mouth the villain hushed them.

"I'll come see you later, okay Firework?" Their head tilted, their eyes lustful, and their hands right at his sides, exactly where the hero didn't want them. All the hero could utter out was a pathetic Ok, biting their lip to hide their gushing smile before rushing out of the office, only mouthing a bye halfway down the hall.

The villain watched them leave. They didn't mind the 6 or so heroes awaiting treatment. They had begun to regret their choice, chalking it up to a waste of time and effort. All they had wanted from the hero was the occasional fight to get out of boring afternoons lazing around the mayor's office- that had gotten stale. But this could work too. Oh, this could definitely work too, he thought with a dreamy smile. As he gestured for his next client to come in, he knew it would be a messy healing job- he found himself a tad bit distracted.

Healing his boredom would hurt, it just wouldn't hurt him. If he played his cards right, the hero wouldn't even notice their own destruction. After all, he was a very talented doctor.

[youling-the-ghost]

Villain Deku AUs have always confused me because like...did we watch the same show?? Midoriya's heroism is so strong that it allowed him to:

inherit One For All from All Might

pass the UA exam (with the help of his new quirk)

save not one, not two, but three children from deadly villains AND inspired them in different ways

and probably more that I'm forgetting.

I'm not saying that Villain Deku is a bad idea or anything, I really like the concept! I just find it weird how some people say things like "the timeline where Deku is a villain instead of a hero is not far from the canon one" because there's not a single ounce of villain-ness in canon Midoriya's body.

Another main problem that I have with most of these AUs is how they almost always paint All Might as the bad guy: "Oh, he's the one that caused Midoriya to spiral into villainy" and "If All Might had been nicer to him, he wouldn't have turned to villainy" are both sentiments that I've commonly seen before which again, confuses me.

Most of this hinges on the whole "you can't be a hero without a quirk" thing, which honestly? It makes sense to a certain extent. Remember, All Might was quirkless too. He knows how helpless quirkless people are in the world. Midoriya can train until he's on par with UA students without a quirk, sure, but that doesn't erase the social ostracisation that all quirkless people experience. The truth is that the public severely looks down on quirkless people, and that's not something that a single passionate middle school student can fix. Sure, Toshinori could've phrased himself better, but what he was trying to say isn't false; it is very difficult, maybe even impossible for quirkless people to become Pro Heroes given the current system.

[ekat-fandom-blog]

I love Justice League Action. The very first episode has Plastic Man, Booster Gold, Plant Thing, Captain Marvel, overly British Constantine, and smug Batman.

I mean come on! Who wouldn't want to watch a series where Plastic Man dresses as Wonder Woman and then continues to wear her boots(which are high heels btw) because they're comfortable. She doesn't even blink that he's still wearing the entire outfit other than to question why he's wearing her boots!

It's great. 10/10. 100% recommend everyone watch this.

[haleigh-sloth]

Toga is a liar

Let's talk about Toga this chapter, and also Toga during MVA. Because once again her words do not align with the pictures on the page. Horikoshi has not stopped making Toga unreliable--yet.

Cannot use the official page for this one point because of Caleb's trash translation, but the point to be made here is that Toga outright admits that she has been lying to herself this whole time:

She tried to pretend everything was fine. In MVA you see what is clearly unreliable narrating. "I'm not miserable! Not me!" on top of pictures of her clearly being haunted by her past.

Curious forced her to face her demons.

However, martyrdom is not how you relay a message, so Curious ultimately lost the physical battle. But she clearly understood Toga's pain and hit the nail on the head.

Now we get to the current chapter where once again, literally nothing Toga says aligns with what is on the page.

Toga says that the LOV will create a world that is easy for her to live in, and yet, despite that being all she's wanted, she's supposedly ready to leave the world behind in order to save Ochacko. So what does this mean?

It means Toga knows the truth. She knows the world that's coming is not the world she wants. Sure, maybe it'll be a world where she can do what she wants, but it's not the world she wants. What makes this particularly obvious is how disconnected her recent memory of the League is from reality. Twice is dead. She believes Touya is dead. Tomura is out of commission as far as she's concerned (also his hand being over his face is an interesting detail I need to think more on). Toga says "that's a world I can live in", and then says "I'm going to leave this world behind, despite what I've been wanting coming soon."

Toga doesn't believe what she wants can actually happen. It's not coming, she knows it. The acceptance she had from the LOV sustained her and made it easier for her to live for the time being, but ultimately it isn't the world she wanted. Because the world Toga wants doesn't involve everyone she loves and cares about dying. It doesn't involve all of the people who accept her dying. And so far, that's all she's gotten.

Toga being ready to die shows just how little faith she has in the possibility of her living how she wants in a world she WANTS. A world where she's free, loving and living how she wants, and isn't losing people she loves.

Really, her words here indicate that now she got what she wanted, but it came too late. The presence of "IF" and “MAYBE” is a big tell of this mindset.

Even with this break through, the entire time Toga never really had faith she could live how she wanted. The LOV promised a world easy to live in--a world where she does what she wants, and watches her friends and people who accept her die. That's the world that was promised, and that's the world being delivered to her right now, which is not what she wants.

So she rejects that world and saves something important to her, and plans to die in the process because she doesn't see a world where she can really live. Hence "IF" in her words, IF she had found love sooner. The next step is the big picture showing Toga that it's ready to accept her. Which is more of an effort involving showing Gentle and La Brava, Lady Nagant, the Todorokis with Touya, Izuku with Tomura, Aizawa with Shiragiri, Shoji with Spinner (maybe lol still unclear where that’s going), etc. Just showing the effects of saving on others and that it’s possible to keep going.

[deckofaces]

Choose: Love or Heartbreak

(A Secret Santa Snippet)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Once again this year I chose to participate in Secret Santa snippet exchange! This year I coincidentally got my girlfriend @justalittletoocorrupted! I really hope you like it <333

Prompt: Villain x Hero (who is a sidekick to superhero!) and Superhero finds out Hero was dating Villain (or just fell in love with them) and kidnaps them to try and help them understand that's a bad thing and the Villain could save them!

(I ended up doing more villain x civilian (I checked if it would be okay))

Note! As we are really close I decided to use ocs, this is an au where Dystopia from Dystopian Reflections is a civilian, via the name Cain. Vortex/Blank-Slate is @justalittletoocorrupted’s oc and it uses it/its and he/him pronouns

Tw: kidnapping, arguing, mentions of violence, swearing

“Cain Harlow.”

Cain’s head was foggy. He blinked a couple times, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion. He glanced down at his hands, silvery looking threads were slowly unwrapping from his wrists and making their way back to their creator. His eyes followed and they made their way back to a woman, a superhero more specifically. 

Looking around, the room almost appeared to be an interrogation room. He was not cuffed, but he sat in a closed room at a table across from the hero. 

Nothing was making sense, he last remembered being at the grocery store! He was just shopping! His boyfriend and him were going to have a nice dinner that night and he went to get a few things they would need.. he has no memory of leaving there and ending up with this superhero in front of him!

“…Who are you?”

“The media refers to me as the Porcelain Woman,” the superhero replied simply. 

That makes sense he supposed until suddenly the name clicked in his head and Cain realized exactly who she was. And the alias quickly seemed obvious too. Looking at her, she didn’t look like a normal person, well, because she wasn’t. Her body appeared very doll-like with long, curly black hair and perfect makeup. All exemplified by the apparent cracks across her face, just like what can happen to porcelain.

However, even though she looked like a doll, she wasn’t one. He’s heard his fair share of news stories criticizing her for being a hero. And that is the result of many considering her less than human. She is a powerful spirit inhabiting the life size doll. But the spirit, or a “Reflector,” is a reflection of a real life person, given their name. They are typically chaotic entities. …Not heroes. But he shouldn’t make assumptions about their character..

…But it explains how he got there. From what he’s heard, she has some form of mind control ability in the form of a literal puppet on strings. The doll shell she uses is apparently quite fitting. His face morphed into disgust at the thought of how he got there. 

Cain took a deep breath. “Why am I here?”

She stared at him for a few seconds before answering. Her fake, glassy, and yellow eyes were a bit unnerving. “You should know why you are here, do you not?”

Ah.

He could only be there for one reason, and if a superhero of all people is involved, he definitely knew. But he also wasn’t foolish enough to give himself away without her stating why he’s there first. “I’m afraid I do not understand why I am here. Considering I was taken out of a grocery store, pardon my confusion on the matter.”

The Porcelain Woman drummed her fingers on the table. “It was necessary at the time, it was for your safety,” she stated, brushing off his comment. “You’re here, Mr. Harlow, because of your boyfriend. Are you aware that your partner goes by the alias of Blank-Slate?”

There it is. 

“I do not see why that matters,” Cain answered, trying his hardest to keep his face schooled into a neutral expression.

She stared again, almost as if in surprise. “Your boyfriend has hurt and killed many people, have you no remorse for them, their families, or future victims? It is not a good thing for you to be dating it. Does it not hurt knowing its career and choices?” 

He let out a sigh. He knows what Vortex does is wrong, horrible even, but it has never made him feel unsafe.. rather it has made him feel so loved and cared for. Maybe it’s selfish that that is all he cared to think about in this situation but he didn’t care. And it likely makes him a horrible person too, but if it ever asked him to join it in what it does, he’s sure he’d say yes in a heartbeat..

“Blank-Slate treats me with much more love and care than anyone else ever has. What it does may not be considered right, but it has never subjected me to its lifestyle, rather it does its best to protect me from it,” Cain replied calmly, crossing his arms over his chest. 

The Porcelain Woman scoffed at his comment. “Do you really believe it loves you? It is a villain, Mr. Harlow, one that seeks to draw any sort of horrible reaction it can get out of someone. That means it will eventually revel in the heartbreak it will inevitably cause you.”

Cain shook his head. “You do not understand the nature of our relationship. You believe that to be true when in reality I am an exception to that idea.”

“No, you are failing to understand. I want to help you, this agency wants to help you. Being in that relationship is only going to bring you a lot of pain. We want to help you and stop that from happening. Loving Blank-Slate will hurt you. It is not someone you should love.” Her tone held a bit of concern, but for him it was difficult to distinguish if it was genuine or fake. 

Despite that, this situation was ridiculous, he wanted to go home! He spun a ring on his finger that Vortex gave him to try and calm himself and his anxieties. He hoped to get out of there soon, or maybe Vortex already realized he hadn't come home when he said he would…

Cain supposed he could understand some of her points, he knew it enjoys getting a reaction out of people, but that’s not how it is in regards to him. The amount of times it has seen him vulnerable and treated him with so much love and compassion and respect.. The amount of times he’s seen it so vulnerable.. if it wanted to hurt him, it would have done so many months ago. He’s never loved anyone quite like Vortex and this superhero will not sway him from that. 

“I get what you are trying to convey, but I do not want help from you or your agency. Rather, I wish you would have let me just go about my day,” he said more firmly. He was tired of being there now. He hasn’t been there very long, but being in that room quickly aggravated him. Everything just was wrong about this. 

“Mr. Harlow,” the superhero interjected, “your safety is at risk here! I am merely trying to offer you a way out of your situation but you are only showing me disrespect for my efforts!”

Cain gritted his teeth before raising his voice. Not only was this aggravating, but he was also talking to a wall. How lovely. “That is because you fail to show me respect! I do not want your efforts!! Let me spell it out, I. Do. Not. Want. Your. Help.” He sucked in a breath before trying to continue, his voice returning to a normal volume. “I’ll get ‘hurt’ in your words for all I damn care. It is not your responsibility to look after me.”

“I understand that it’s not my responsibility, but I don’t want you to be added to its list of victims! Blank-Slate-“

“Blank-Slate,” Cain snapped, “Is the love of my life whether you like it or not. Quite frankly, it has treated me far better than you have, and I have only known you for less than a day.”

“You don’t make it easy to get into contact with you,” The Porcelain Woman sneered. “Your career as a doctor makes you busy and most other times you are spotted with the villain. Bringing you here today in the way I had may have been unethical, but I had no choice. You were free and it was the only opportunity I had to get you here. If you would hear me out, you would understand it was for the better!”

“Oh so you and your band of heroes have been keeping tabs on me? You can’t, you know, send me an email or message that your heroes need to talk to me? You resorted to kidnapping me?” Cain threw his hands up in exasperation. “I’m going to repeat myself one more time, leave me alone. I am happy with my boyfriend. I do not care about your concerns about my supposed safety.”

“That was only a result of trying to keep tabs on Blank-Slate, which is actually incredibly difficult to do. We only very recently discovered you are its partner,” she retorted.

Cain has had enough of all of this. There seemed to be no convincing this woman that he feels safe and loved in his relationship. And really it should be none of her business at all! She’s entirely convinced that Vortex will just suddenly start hurting him one day just because it can. They’ve been dating for quite awhile and it hasn’t done so. 

And what’s more, he’s been able to see a side of Vortex that it doesn’t show anyone else. To others it very easily can seem cruel! But to him it has only ever been caring and affectionate and so so loving. But even when he has accidentally caught it doing its villain work, he can’t help but be a bit fascinated by it. And strangely enough, after seeing what it does and seeing it hasn’t done anything to him, it only has made him feel more safe and secure in their relationship.

Cain stood up from his chair. “I appreciate you trying to ‘warn me’ about my boyfriend, but I really do not need your assistance and I would like to get going home.” 

“Please sit, we are not done talking, Mr. Harlow. Going back to your boyfriend would be a bad idea,” the hero advised, her glassy eyes watching him stand.

“No, ma’am, I am heading home. Excuse me,” he said while trying to move past her to the door. 

“We aren’t done,” she stated, more harshly this time. Silvery threads shot from her hands towards his legs. He yelled a curse before quickly stumbling backwards, narrowly avoiding them. 

“Are you fucking delusional??” Cain cried out. “I acknowledge why you may be upset with my decision but that is unacceptable! For a hero especially! Contrary to what you think, my love for Blank-Slate will not lead to something completely horrific!”

“I’m not allowed to let you walk out so easily. I apologize that you don’t get it, but Blank-Slate is incredibly dangerous. I need you to stay awhile longer, I wasn’t even close to finishing on this matter.” 

Throughout this whole argument, the woman’s face has been just about completely neutral the entire time minus her tone, and it honestly was becoming infuriating. In the right state of mind he would realize that her being so doll-like didn’t allow for a great range of physical emotion, but in the moment it only ticked him off more. To him it only seemed like she concerned herself with breaking the two apart rather than how he felt. 

“No no! I’m done with this!” Cain argued, “You keep talking about me hearing you out but you have not been listening to me. You kidnapped me to talk to me, then you started preaching about how my boyfriend’s and I’s love is invalid, and then you refuse to let me leave!”

“Mr. Harlow—“

A knock sounded at the door. 

They both fell silent and turned to look at the sound. The Porcelain Woman answered the door, only to find another superhero he’s never seen before on the other side. 

“Mr. Harlow is needed by another hero for questioning, it is required that this continues later,” the stranger at the door said to the superhero.

“Fine, bring him back as soon as they are done.” She shot a glare over to Cain, but stepped out of the way to let him pass.

A wave of relief washed over him to finally get away from her as he stepped past her next to the stranger. He didn’t know where he was going but hopefully it would be better. If it entailed questioning, maybe not.. but here’s to hoping.

The two walked through the corridors of the unfamiliar agency. After a minute or two, the stranger spoke to him. And as soon as he did, it practically made him want to fall into its arms on the spot. 

Ensuring no one was around, the stranger shifted into a different person, returning to the form of his boyfriend. Telepathically it spoke gently to him, “Are you okay baby..? I’m going to get you out of here, just play along and act as if I’m one of the heroes.”

“I’m okay..” Cain mumbled, watching as Vortex shapeshifted back into the hero, “Thank you for finding me.”

It telepathically reassured him that it would always find him. It noticed that he never came home on time and wasn’t answering any of its messages alerting it that something was wrong.

Being fully disguised as a hero, Vortex escorted Cain safely out of the building without alarm. The pair headed home where they could have a relaxing evening like they originally had planned. 

[the-stove-is-divorced]

Time for my yearly (ish, kinda, sorta, maybe) time to ANNOUNCE THAT I FUCKING LOVE SCARLET SCARAB!! I MISS HIM SO MUCH.

Look at my son. His iconic palette swapped fit. His funky little scarab buddy. His cool ass name. He's my little fella, my good time boy, the best mf that has ever existed on the planet and that time-span was like one episode. IF SCARLET SCARAB HAS NO FANS THEN I AM FUCKING DEAD.

That is all ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡

[theshadowrealmitself]

At all times I am thinking about “person surrounded by robots who inexplicably look like them, so no one believes them when they say they’re not a robot”

Currently it’s taking the form of a person (A) stumbling into a part of the galaxy where there’s a line of robots that coincidentally look almost identical to them, and this person gets snatched up by a group who wants them to use that to go undercover against the group’s opposing enemies

Rn really focusing on one of the opposing group’s leaders (B) really liking the “robot” (even if it makes them feel skeevy for liking a robot of all things so much) and when it comes out that A is actually working with B’s enemies, B is still not aware that A is actually an actual person, instead thinking that the group must have reprogrammed A at some point, and they want them back

It’s about to be a very awkward negotiation meeting for A

[stillness-in-green]

More and More on Mina, Machia and the MLA

For my readers other than @randomvongenerico, please have this peremptory list of this very lengthy post's contents to help gauge your interest:

Some more discussion on what is or isn’t, would or wouldn’t be blameworthy about various characters’ actions (or hypothetical actions) during the war arcs.   

More discussion about Mina, chiefly about how (and why) her acid powers are handled compared to all the male characters with fire powers, and the way her plot points are poorly set up by the narrative, with the result of shortchanging her development.   

Yet More Complaining About How The Story Is Handling Heteromorphobia, this time featuring a compare and contrast on quirk-based bias as it might affect Mina, Bakugou and Tokoyami, as well as a dissection of Shouji’s contention that the only possible way to know about the violent bigotry in the rural areas of the country is to be from them.   

Some fairly extensive spitballing in response to questions about how I would have handled the scene at Machia’s prison compound if I were writing it, as well as why I have trouble conceiving of anything Hero Society could do to Hose Face for killing Midnight that would actually feel like justice.   

A little bit of basic talk about Tumblr, its functionality and some relevant slang.   

Buried at the very bottom, I stand up in front of God and everyone and explain in brief why Kaminari is a worse character than Mineta, with some particular focus on Kaminari as emblematic of the conflict between what the series tells us versus what it shows us about the legality of quirk use in careers other than heroism.

Hi again, rvg.  Because it's been forever since our last post exchange, let me say again that I appreciate the apology and want to thank you for being such a good sport about it.  Last time I had something like your initial response, that person told me straight out that they’d been condescending and antagonistic on purpose, though they regretted having done so after my reply.  I appreciated the regret, but would have preferred they take a day or two to cool off in the first place!  That’s the experience I was bringing to your comments, but I’ll keep in mind what you said about lack of experience with initiating chats and Tumblr in general.

For what it’s worth, yeah, there is a character limit on both asks and replies, so that’s the trouble you were running into there!  You might also consider using a cut next time before a really long post, though if you’re on mobile, I recall that being a difficult-if-not-impossible feature to find, and it’s not as important as it used to be ever since Tumblr’s started adding default Expand drop-downs on long posts.  That aside, welcome (belatedly) to Tumblr!  I hope you find some good people to chat fandom with; I’m always open to some back and forth about things I know well enough to talk about, though I’m, er, decidedly unprompt with replies.  And, as noted, definitely more of a villain fan, so probably not the most fun person for discussions on the kids.

That said, to your replies!  Other readers should note that, while I wrote all this roughly in response-order to rvg’s points, I reorganized everything after the fact to group together the broad topics.  I’ve tried to provide some bare minimum context for anything that would otherwise be too much of a zero-context non-sequitur, but if anyone wants to see rvg’s comments in their intended order and context, their reblog can be found here.  Otherwise, hit the jump!

  

Would You Have Held It Against ___?

But would you hold it against Mina if she had actually done more substancial damage to Machia? Let’s say, not the face, but Machia’s fingers instead of his claws. Machia still doens’t feel any pain. Would you chastise Mina for it? Even though she’s actively saving Mt Lady by doing that?

It’s hard to say for sure, since I imagine that if Mina’s acid had hit Machia’s fingers instead of his claws, we probably would just have seen them abraded and singed, like how Dabi’s fire damage was drawn on Hawks, not with chunks of skin melting off and exposing naked bone.  Physical damage in BNHA just doesn’t work like that, at least not against named characters.  If Mina were doing realistic damage, I imagine everyone else would be too, and then I’d be criticizing all of them, because, holy shit, that is not okay to do to people, any people, and especially not when you’re acting as an agent of the state.

But hypothetically, no, I think I would be more lenient even if she did do concrete and permanent damage to Machia’s hands, and it’s because she’d be doing it to save Mount Lady.  Shinsou could have taken control of Machia and then just had him lie still while whoever was in charge of this facility redrugged him,[1] and that would have been fine by me—disappointing, sure, but only because Machia’s interesting and I’d like to get more on him than we do, not because I’d be critiquing Shinsou’s actions.

It’s specifically Shinsou and the rest choosing to weaponize Machia against AFO that I object to.  Mina harming Machia would be taking that action herself, to protect someone that’s right in front of her, risking no one’s life but her own in doing so.  Shinsou throwing Machia up against AFO—which he’d made the decision to do before hearing Machia’s angry grumbling—is risking Machia’s life, without Machia’s consent.  And it’s not even for the sake of saving anyone, at least not anyone that’s right there in that moment—AFO is fleeing.

Sure, he still presents a huge threat to lots of people, but given that we’d just seen proof that AFO did not know about Shinsou’s power,[2] they could also have used Machia to, for example, rapidly transport the heroes to some place they could set up a second ambush to trick AFO into responding to Shinsou.  I mean, good god, AFO’s the chattiest villain in the comic; Hawks lured him into at least two extended conversations even after he’d resolved that he needed to leave.  He’s a Demon Lord and thus categorically incapable of shutting up.  And that would have been that, really.  Take control and let the clock run out; end of problem.

It would have been anticlimactic as hell, so obviously that was never going to happen, but there’s no reason the heroes couldn’t try for it, you know?  Instead of the bone-headed decision to just hand AFO his most loyal soldier on a silver platter on the thin chances that they could either prevent the brainwashing from being broken at all or that Machia’s upset would translate to both the capability and willingness to attack his master.

I’ve observed this problem in a few different areas, that Horikoshi sometimes writes the heroes, particularly Hawks, as not taking actions or drawing conclusions that, from their perspective, should seem sensible, well-reasoned, and with solid chances of success; instead, they simply disregard possibilities they should logically be considering but which the reader knows are dead ends, or they benefit from things they could not have known at the time they acted.  That hurts immersion because it gives the heroes victories, both tactical and moral, that they simply haven’t earned.  Shinsou’s control of Machia is a particularly egregious example.

  

Speaking of Monoma. Since we were talking about the morality of Shinso’s Quirk. Would you say Monoma using his Quirk to copy a villain’s Quirk and use it on him and his allies, would also qualify as something that should be criticized? I’m curious.

Nah, I don’t think so.  Taking an opponent’s weapon and using it to subdue him is a perfectly valid tactic, especially since Monoma’s method doesn’t actually deprive his opponent of their weapon, just replicates it for his own use.  It really all does boil down to Shinsou’s method forcing people to fight and hurt their own allies.  Mina causing Machia physical harm, Monoma using a villain’s own weapon against them, even the heroes’ surprise attack: none of those are remotely on the same “holy shit that is a literal war crime” level as what the heroes planned in advance to have Shinsou do to Machia, and what he willingly agreed to do well before he found out that Machia was not as opposed as the heroes thought.

  

I mean, I get what you’re getting at. I’m just wondering. If the heroes hadn’t launched a suprise attack, and had left the villains do the first move and come to them, would you then be criticizing them for being irresponsible and incompetent instead? Sorry for going on a tangent, it’s just something I’ve noticed when it comes to readers criticizing the heroes. It’s either people complaining that the heroes are too ruthless, or that they’re too nice, naive or not pragmatic enough.

(This is in response to some discussion of the heroes' actions in the first war arc's raid on the villa+hospital lab, not the second war's divide and conquer plan.)

I actually don’t really have a huge problem with the surprise attack in principle—I might criticize Cementoss ripping the building in half when there could well have been people on those upper floors, but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine what else the heroes could generally have done to deal with the numbers they were dealing with.  I mean, it’s basically just a scaled-up version of the attack on the Hassaikai base, and I don’t have any moral quibbles with the way the heroes and police handled that.

Rather, my problem with the raid is that I thought the heroes were too effective given the way their forces and those of the PLF had been set up.  It’s not the tactic itself that’s the problem (though individual acts of worse violence within the attack, like Hawks killing Twice or the attempts to outright murder Shigaraki in the tube, are still an issue), it’s the finality, the totality, of how effective the attack was.

To be brief about it (because I’ve talked about this at length elsewhere), I don’t think the heroes should have known where all the PLF bases were, I don’t think they should have been as effective in disordered mass combat as the PLF, I think the advisors should have put up a better fight in all cases, and I think there should have been enough members of the PLF in significant positions of influence or power that the HPSC couldn’t uncover them all, leading to complications when those members realized their organization was under attack.

As it is, the heroes handily win every fight they have with the sole exception of Gigantomachia and Shigaraki.  The PLF is neatly swept off the table save for a few “remnants,” with no attention given to the practical difficulties of detaining tens of thousands of combatants with no motivation to let themselves be quietly arrested, much less how the justice system is going to handle trying and sentencing them all.  That has repercussions going forward, as well: heroes clearing the board of all the (named) PLF members save Skeptic leaves the bulk of villain forces in the subsequent arcs to be prison escapees, and man, if the PLF’s moral nuance has been squandered, the depiction of the prison escapees is even worse.

The raid is, of course, only the first of two big surprise attacks the heroes manage.  I have significantly more issues with the second one, but most of that boils down to the fact that the divide and conquer/Tempt and Trap plan feels crueler, meaner, and much more openly aimed at extrajudicial murder.  And like, that would all be fine and in-character for Hero Society in general and Hawks, the main planner, specifically, but with Deku, Shouto and Uraraka all starting to think Save Villains thoughts, and fresh off the traitor reveal, the kids should never have been as collectively okay with the second war’s tactics as the story has presented them as being.  To echo an older complaint, good god, what universe is Horikoshi living in that he thinks the people that converted a place of learning into an arena they call a “coffin in the sky” are the heroes?

  

I was under the impression Midnight was off to the side from where the MLA minions were passing by, and the Skull Mask guy took a detour to kill her.

I’m not sure from this if you’re explaining how you read Hose Face’s attack on Midnight at the time, or if you’re maintaining that that’s an accurate read, so just to clarify, here are the panels in question:

As you can see, the PLF guys’ path through the woods has them coming in from directly behind Midnight.  Hose Face calls out that he’ll take care of her once they get close enough for the reader to make out who they are, at which point he gets out in front of Scarecrow and hits Midnight from the same direction as their initial approach: directly behind.  He most certainly doesn’t take a detour of any kind, but rather chooses the action that is going to get his group through the obstacle with the least amount of time and effort possible—entirely his prerogative as the highest-ranked member of the Guerilla Warfare regiment on-scene.

  

But if we classify this entire conflict as a war, wouldn’t that mean that both sides are free to use whatever tacticts and methods they feel like as long as it’s not a war crime?

If we classify it as war is irrelevant if the side aligned with the current ruling authority hasn’t done so themselves.  I imagine the Japanese government is in no hurry to validate the terrorists on an international stage by acknowledging that they’re numerous and dangerous enough to declare actual, formal war against!  Calling it a war drags in a whole pile of wartime conventions Japan has signed numerous treaties about; it grants the opposing side some legitimacy as a cohesive, organized force that will need to be negotiated with down the line.  As long as you’re calling it a police action, you don’t have to negotiate shit until you get to the plea deals!  Team Hero never declared war here, so yeah, I still expect them to carry out their plans and actions accordingly.

Also, in the thematic/meta sense, I expect the heroes to either conduct themselves as heroes—admirable, upright, heroic—or face the narrative consequences when they fail to live up to that ideal.  The hyper-encapsulated version of this conundrum is the recurring idea that attacking Shigaraki never actually prevents Shigaraki from coming back worse and more dangerous next time; the heroes are never going to achieve a different result by attacking him again but harder this time, and that’s why Deku is set up to finally try something different.[3]  I would just like it if what’s true on the micro-level could even be attempted on the macro-level.  Or, in other words, if the narrative is going to tell us that saving villains is the correct path, it can’t only demonstrate that for the villains with known-to-the-heroes sympathetic backstories.

  

General Mina Points

Regarding your analysis about Mina’s acid being underpowered because it’s harder/less believable to downplay the effects of acid than fire/explosions/etc. in Shounen Damage Logic, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I don’t see anything wrong with just showing the Nebulous Abrasion Damage that’s the ubiquitous, default mode of illustrating nonspecific injury in this comic for Mina’s acid the same way we get it for the boys.

I can see your argument, but like, just for example, when Endeavor first encounters a Noumu, he bathes it in fire under the assumption that it’s a normal villain and then says he’s surprised it’s still up because he’s never seen anyone stay conscious after that attack.  Bathing someone in flames in real life is not a “knock them out” kind of attack; it’s a “severe burn ward for months” kind of attack.  If Endeavor’s been throwing that around at random criminals for thirty years, we are plainly very far away from realistic damage, and I’d be perfectly satisfied with treating Mina’s acid the same way.

If I had to take a guess as to why Horikoshi’s so staunchly avoided letting Mina cut loose—other than regressive gender politics—I’d say it’s that acid simply feels nastier or more morally dubious than fire.  Fire has positive as well as negative connotations; acid’s a lot more, shall we say, unilateral in the collective imagination, especially given what’s going to turn up if you run a web search for “acid attacks.”

To look at it in JRPG logic (and I don’t care if AFO’s admiration stems from a comic; that comic was clearly playing with Dragon Quest tropes), acid is pretty much the same thing as poison, and poison effects are chiefly the realm of enemy characters.  It smacks of underhandedness or cowardice in anything more cognizant than roving toxic plants or venomous beasts.  Certainly you see the occasional party member specialized for status effects who can inflict poison damage on enemies, but I can’t readily think of a main character that does.[4]

Perhaps, then, because readers are somewhat conditioned to think of acid as particularly dangerous and nasty compared to fire, and because there’s a limit to how morally dubious Horikoshi is willing to (consciously) write the students, especially the girls, Mina’s sharply limited in how she’s allowed to use her acid.

That said, I got a very hearty laugh from, “Just look at Dabi.  He can’t even kill himself with fire,” so thank you very much for that.

  

It’s as if Horikoshi only ever figures out what to do with Mina retroactively instead of in the moment (e.g. there were no interactions between Kirishima and Mina until AFTER Kirishima’s backstory, we never got any hint that would connect Mina’s and Midnight’s characters until AFTER Midnight died, when Mina speaks about not giving in to vengeance she references SHOJI’S WORDS which happened in HIS FLASHBACK, and then this whole chapter is technically a flashback too when you think about it).

That’s a big oof, all right.  I know about the Midnight non-connection and the issue of Mina’s anti-vengeance words having first been delivered by Shouji and relayed to the audience by Koda (it being his flashback, rather than Shouji’s), but I didn’t know there was no indication of Kiri-Mina connection until after his flashback.  Wowzers.

  

But also, in one of my comments I had left a link to a post analizing Kirishima’s and Mina’s characters and their dynamic. I don’t know if you checked it out or not, but it was a pretty interesting read. If you did read it, let me know your thoughts on it.

Apologies for not responding to that; I hadn't clicked it because I just wasn't terribly interested in the topic. Having checked it now, I can say that I'm unlikely to read it because I've encountered this person's meta before and, even at a glance, found it to be flawed for reasons I am not comfortable gabbing about in a public space. I'm sure they make some valid points, but I will have to respectfully bow out of reading and commenting on it here.

  

But what about Mina telling Kirishima that “now they’re even” though?

(This is re: my contention that Mina saves Shinsou, not Kirishima, from the Sludge Villain, and that Kirishima was never in any danger from the Sludge Villain.)

I mean, she can say it, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe that she/Horikoshi are accurately portraying the stakes involved.

  

Just for the record, you’re not saying that Mina not giving in to revenge isn’t noble in and of itself. What she does is indeed good.  You’re saying it doesn’t have any emotional weight because Mina has always been a morally good character, so you never thought she would ever give in to revenge in the first place. Correct?

Correct!  As I’ve said, Mina has perfectly healthy emotional regulation: when she experiences negative emotions like anger, guilt, or grief, she doesn’t dwell on them; she vents them to friends and finds healthy ways to channel them into bettering herself and the world and people around her.  She’s got a great head on her shoulders!  But all of that means that her giving into anger about Midnight’s death was never a remotely convincing threat to me.  Of course she wouldn’t; there’s never been a moment that foreshadowed that she was in the slightest danger of harboring that kind of obsessive, vindictive grudge.

That being the case, it feels unfair of Horikoshi to pin a big dramatic monologue on a desire for revenge which Mina was never shown to possess to any greater degree than any of her classmates.  She’s one of the last hero-aligned characters I’d have guessed if you’d asked me who was going to get a beat like that in the endgame.

(To anticipate the obvious question, Aizawa would have been my first guess; he’s even been written for it properly in the way he and Mic have responded to Shigaraki—clearly holding a grudge for something that would have happened to their classmate when Shigaraki was all of six years old.  Conversely, while plenty of the 1-A kids could have believably carried a “struggling with vengefulness” plot if they’d been written with it from earlier on, I don’t think there’s a single one of them who feels like a good match for it in their current incarnations.  Iida’s moved on from his Stain days too smoothly to buy it from him, Bakugou’s only real obsession is Deku, and Deku already had a whole arc of being obsessively negative and driven by dark desires to find and deal with a villain.  If any student was going to show up to the fight with bloody-minded revenge on the brain, it should have been Shishikura.)

  

But What About the Heteromorphobia, Tho’?

(Warning: Incoming off-topic harping about Shouji and the inane resolution of the hospital attack.)

I have even seen someone make a post on Reddit arguing that Shinso being discriminated for his Quirk makes no sense because it’s not villanous, and that it makes more sense for characters like Bakugo, Mina and Tokoyami to be discriminated because they have more villanous looking Quirks. I don’t really agree with everything that guy said. But he did bring up a good point. How come Mina doesn’t get side eyes from people due to her Quirk like Shinso does?

I will have to disagree with Reddit User That Guy that Shinsou’s quirk should be viewed as less villainous than Bakugou’s.  It sounds like he was conflating heteromorphobia with the bias against villains/"villainous" quirks, and while there is overlap, they’re still distinct categories.  Shinsou’s quirk inherently subordinates one’s physical body, allowing him to force his targets to act against their will, or potentially take the fall for things they didn’t willingly do.  Of course people are nervous about it or think it’s more villainous than heroic!

Conversely, the Number 2 Hero has been attacking criminals with fire for decades now, so I think the BNHA general public is more than ready to accept a hero whose quirk lets him fire off explosions.  The commonly accepted idea in the fandom is that “flashy and offensive quirks” are the ones most valued in heroes.  I think that’s a bit oversimplified—Crust was the Number 6 Hero and his quirk was neither—but it’s certainly true that purely elemental quirks (fire, lightning, wind, earth-shaping), no matter how damage-dealing they are, don’t tend to get treated as villainous in nature.  The real “villainous quirks” in the series tend to be the ones that are more creepy, dark, invasive, or impure.  Even Dabi’s fire is that ethereal blue, like spirit fires, instead of everyday orange-red!

Bakugou’s quirk is much closer to the “pure elemental” category than anything very villainous and, indeed, when he got kidnapped from the training camp and that one journalist was suggesting that he might have turned to villainy already, he based that suggestion on Bakugou’s behavior, his conduct during the Sports Festival.  Nothing was said about his quirk at all, but rather his recent public demonstrations of violence and “mental instability.”  That’s perfectly consistent, I think, with the biases we see elsewhere.[5]

Tokoyami has the potential to get hit by both the villainous quirk bias and the heteromorphobia, but I think Japan seeing ravens as emblematic of wisdom rather than death and rot would mean his bird head is less ill-seen there than it would be in the West.  I don’t think it would take much more than the proverbial One Bad Day to get him to a very bad place indeed, though—there’s a reason Mr. Compress judged him a good potential recruit!  Tokoyami was rescued before it became an issue, but if he hadn’t been, I’m sure we would have seen the same journalist mentioned above making similar statements about Tokoyami and his dark quirk/mien.

Mina’s an interesting case study in not experiencing a lot of the same sorts of discrimination others in similar situations do.  She has three distinct heteromorphic traits—her skin, her eyes, her horns—as well as having a potentially extremely deadly quirk which, as I discussed above, could easily attract judgmental side-eye because of the cultural view of acid.  So why doesn’t she seem to face discrimination?

As I said in the post you’re replying to—and as you mentioned is a common headcanon—I think a lot of it boils down to her relentlessly chipper attitude.  If she had, for example, Mustard’s personality, or Muscular’s drive to violence, would people be quicker to say that her Acid is a “villain quirk”?  If she glared more, would people be more creeped out by her eyes?  It’s possible, I think, that we would actually see her facing some of this if we spent more time with her, but the narrative doesn’t make that time, at least not anywhere Kirishima can see it.

  

Well, if I had to guess, I’m sure you would say that would make her a more interesting character. You might get to be interested in her character, which then would probably mean you would be even more upset and disappointed with this chapter.

Ahaha, very fair.  Honestly, Class A would have benefited tremendously from more kids with bite to them.  A Mina whose competitiveness had some real fervor to it, or a Mina who had some heaviness in her backstory she was faking her way through dealing with, would have been a good contribution to that.

  

It really sucks that Horikoshi had to justify Shoji being the only one to experience prejudice by clarifying that heteromorph discrimination is only still prevalent in small villages. I feel like it robbed characters like Tsuyu, Mina, Tokoyami and Koda of being part of an actual narrative and get more depth and development.

Before I talk about this, let me clarify something: Shouji’s line about what his classmates know about heteromorphic discrimination is an example of very crucial nuance being wildly different between translations.

The fan scanlation suggested that Tokoyami and Koda, who grew up in cities, must feel like such violent heteromorphobia resembles something out of a textbook, with the implication that the textbook in question is a history book.  They’re presumed to think that blood-cleansing rituals and children with scars like Shouji are artifacts of a terrible past, not a modern-day concern.

The official Via release suggested that Tokoyami and Koda could know that stuff like this still happens in rural areas because they might have read about it in textbooks.  They’re presumed to know that such rituals and scarred children do exist as modern concerns, but only out in the boonies.

Those are completely different propositions!  Which one was accurate was far beyond my capability to judge, but the official translation did feel a little off to me, so, as I usually do in such situations, I brought it to my trusty Translator Sis.  For possibly the first time ever,[6] she told me that Viz had this one wrong—that Shouji’s implication, to her eye, was indeed that T&K would think such violence was limited to the past, not that it was limited to rural areas.

That established, I was actually talking about that line from Shouji with a friend the other day!  I was aggravated that the writing would portray city-born heteromorphs as so oblivious to the problems facing them in other parts of the country when that seems so counter to my (American) perception of the ways members of threatened groups communicate danger to one another.

My friend reminded me that silence is a much more common Japanese way of addressing (or attempting to address) minority discrimination: trying to make a problem go away by starving it of conversational oxygen, treating oppression like an infection that needs to be quarantined until it dies out on its own.  In that light, it’s entirely possible that Tokoyami and Koda might not know this stuff because no one around them thinks it would be helpful to tell them if it’s not a problem they’re directly dealing with.  A lot of people propose the same approach to burakumin issues in real life, for example.

Also, technically Shouji doesn’t say that Koda and Tokoyami don’t experience heteromorphobia at all, just that the idea of fear and hatred that extreme, that violent, must seem like something out of a textbook, rather than something that happens here and now in certain parts of the country.  Also too, Tokoyami and Koda are teenagers; I can forgive them not having much understanding of life outside their own circle of experience.

That all said, it still feels more than a little telling that Horikoshi thinks everyone in Shouji’s whole class, including and especially all the other heteromorphs, could never have heard in their entire lives about acts of bigotry-driven violence against heteromorphs being carried out in the here and now.

While it’s true that silence is a widely accepted way to address these sorts of issues in Japan, they’re hardly universal!  Activist groups are out there trying to raise awareness, trying to get their issues on the floor of the Diet in hopes of getting laws passed about them.  There’s not some kind of media blackout on talking about it, and, indeed, I’ve read any number of articles from Japanese publications online covering such topics.

In BNHA, however, silence does seem to be universal.[7]

No one but Shouji is from a remote enough place that they knew about violent heteromorphobia.  No one recognized it as a thing that e.g. disadvantages heteromorphic heroes in the public approval ratings.  No one tripped over a magazine article about it and got curious enough to look the topic up online.  No one’s heroic mentors or family members have talked to them about it (particularly egregious with Koda, given the fairly strong implication that his own mother suffered it).  No one had a patch of morbid interests (Tokoyami) that led them to dabble in reading about real-life horror stories of human hatred, or an interest in how their society came to be that might have led them to reading about the CRC and realizing it still exists in the modern day.

They attend a hero school, and yet Shouji seems to be the only one with an inkling that there are heteromorphs out there who need, and have been needing, heroes.

That’s all a lot to ask of the reader, but what really pushes it past plausibility to me is what happened with the Ordinary Woman.  How close to the surface must violent heteromorphobia be even in the cities if the current state of Japan brings it all right back into the open in a matter of weeks?  That none of the students other than Shouji have ever even imagined that heteromorphs can still be victimized in this way represents an over-the-top ignorance that I have to read as either a bleak condemnation of the shallow focuses of heroes or reflective of Horikoshi’s own beliefs about discrimination and the understanding of it possessed by those who aren’t immediately threatened by it.

Whichever is the case, and with Spinner’s higher brain functions out of commission, it leaves Shouji carrying the whole plot on his back and he just can’t do it, both because the audience hasn’t had enough time with him to buy it and because the answers the series uses him as a vehicle to deliver are facile, victim-blaming nonsense.

...And here’s where I admit that even if the hospital attack had climaxed with a whole bunch of heteromorphs from Class A and B and the Pro Hero ranks acknowledging the mob’s feelings while pleading with them to not give into hatred and to stand down, I would still have issues if the resolution didn’t involve concrete suggestions and promises about how the heroes would address the mob’s grievances going forward.  Which canon very much did not, and just adding more voices to Shouji’s wouldn’t have changed that.  But my whole rant about that can be found in the relevant chapter posts, so I’ll not repeat it further here.

  

How Would I Have Done It Instead?

Let’s be real here for a second. Even if Mina had been the one to stop Machia. How would she even do that? I remember back when people were talking about when Mina would get her moment to shine, and that it would involve Machia again, I had serious doubts about that idea ever becoming true because I couldn’t think of a single thing she could do against him. I thought for sure Mina’s moment was going to be relegated to fighting Midnight’s killer, since that seemed more within her capabilities. In the end her shinning moment did indeed involve Machia, and no one really had a confrontation with Midnight’s killer. I actually want to hear your thoughts, if you happen have a thing in mind that you think Mina could’ve done to be the one to stop Machia. I’d love to hear it.+ Btw, since you brought it up, in what way could she have defeated the Sludge villain that would’ve been witty, or skillful? If you don’t have any ideas you don’t need to answer. It’s not that important. I’m just curious of the posibility.

Okay, so, this is the part that hung me up for the longest, because there are a few wildly different possible answers here.

The real truth is, if I had been writing this whole shebang from the start, this confrontation would never have happened this way at all.  Just off the top of my head, I think there’s no compelling reason AFO couldn’t have sent Toga into the hospital to activate and retrieve Kurogiri weeks ago, and with Kurogiri back in play, getting Machia would obviously have gone differently.  I would also never have disposed of the MLA as comprehensively as Horikoshi did; I would have had at least one or two instances where an MLA member who didn’t get uncovered by the HPSC in time was in a position to shift the balance in the villains’ favor—maybe one would have been with the police somewhere.

Barring a top-to-bottom rewrite of the whole arc, however? Well, I'd still say that, feeling as strongly as I do about how morally dubious this whole second war has been, even if I were telling this scene with the same components, I probably wouldn’t be writing towards a hero success because I don’t think the heroes have earned it.  The baby steps the kids have taken towards Saving Villains don’t go far enough for me to want to see the villains defeated here.  The biggest changes there would have been twofold:

1) Shinsou’s voice changer play shouldn’t have worked on Machia.

Machia has a sense of smell so incredibly acute that, if I were trying to logically explain how it worked, I’d make it a psychic ability that just happened to manifest as scent-based.  We’re talking about a guy who could track down Shigaraki after a teleport of over 270 miles, who could smell AFO’s vestige stirring from almost fifty miles away.  There’s absolutely no reason he should think for even a second that AFO is standing right outside his prison.

Now, we do know replications of AFO’s voice has an effect on Machia—we saw as much as the beginning of MVA!  But I would contend that back then, he didn’t have a big loud response to the recording, just curled up around his radio and started loudly purring.  In the scene with Shinsou, he actually responds as though he thinks AFO is there, but again, I don’t buy that Machia should have fallen for that, especially since he was woken by Hose Face’s device emulating AFO’s voice, which would have given his unbelievably keen senses enough time to register that it’s only the voice, not the man, that he's hearing.

But, with Machia up and not immediately prey to Shinsou’s ploy, the other big change I’d make with him becomes apparent.  The series has proved willing and eager to shitcan everything Shigaraki gained in MVA, but not me.  Shigaraki won Machia’s loyalty at the end of MVA, and if Machia’s cranky with AFO for leaving him behind again,[8] that doesn’t mean he couldn’t still have loyalty to AFO’s successor.

Given that his loyalty to Shigs is predicated on his loyalty to AFO, it might seem logical that AFO squandering the latter would free Machia of obligation to the former.  That’s a fair take.  But if it were me, I’d capitalize on Machia’s keen senses and what he was present for in MVA—Shigaraki saying that his followers should do whatever they want.  Hell, if the endgame likes flashbacks so much, let’s have a flashback of Shigaraki and Machia actually talking in ways that would let Machia distinguish Shigaraki and AFO.

In other words, I think Machia’s loyalty should supersede his anger.  If he gets free, his first reaction should be to go to Shigaraki, not to focus on his anger.  That way, it’s not a hero win rewarding their gross sky coffin tactics, but AFO doesn’t get quite what he wanted out of it, either.  This would be one part of focusing the narrative back on Shigaraki and his allies, rather than ruining Shigaraki’s hard work by letting AFO take over and piss it all away.

Incidentally, I will concede that, just because Machia shouldn’t have responded like a dupe to Shinsou mimicking AFO’s voice, that doesn’t mean Machia might not have responded at all—he could have rebuked Shinsou for trying to emulate Master, and that would have worked for Shinsou’s purposes just as well!  So to avoid that, I would add one more element to a flashback showcasing Shigaraki and Machia’s relationship post-Deika: have Shigaraki showing Machia a picture of Shinsou and warning him to be on the lookout for this kid, and to not respond to anything he says.

Horikoshi loves to tie back plot beats to pre-established elements, and one such element is, as I footnoted earlier, that AFO and Shigaraki watched the U.A. Sports Festival together, so they should both know good and well who Shinsou is and what he can do.  Knowing Shinsou’s SF-era capabilities doesn’t predict the voice changer, of course, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, if the heroes are pushed to a point of desperation and they have access to a brainwasher, even a non-licensed one, they will try to use that brainwasher on whoever they think is their highest priority target.  Quite frankly, all of the higher-ups and key players should have known about Shinsou.

2) The kids shouldn’t have been tipped off that they were facing Midnight’s killer, or it should have come up in a different context.

Nothing interesting comes of the way the canon deploys it, thanks to Mina’s vengeful feelings having no grounding in the story, and the blunt way it’s brought up serves only to make Hose Face easy for the reader to write off.  As I said in the chapter post where he brought up “that U.A. teacher,” there’s no real reason for him to be focusing on Midnight specifically unless he has a personal reason to think she’s emblematic of the things about Hero Society he hates, or unless he was tuned in enough to U.A. personalities (knew who was teaching there, watched the Sports Festival to get a handle on its students, etc.) to realize that he was facing students he could potentially rattle by bringing up their teacher’s death.

The latter would offer a less awful read on Hose Face’s personality: He’s not bringing up the death out of pure sadism, but as a psychological tactic.  The former would give him some real characterization and motives while also giving the kids something to argue against, rather than the easiest possible reaction of, “Hay did u kno Might Makes Right iz bad?”

Alternatively, if Hose Face has nothing personal against Midnight at all, and doesn’t have an encyclopedic memory of hero wannabe high schoolers, he has no reason to specifically mention Midnight.  Even if the narrative must see her death “answered” in some fashion, it still doesn’t follow that the kids must get emotional closure for someone they lost to the undeclared war they were drafted into.  The audience can take some solace in perceived karma, but lacking a naturalistic way for Mina and the rest to connect those dots, the kids should just have to deal with him as they would any other opponent they come up against, because, surprise surprise, when you’re fighting in a war, you’re not guaranteed to see and know who’s on the opposite side of the gun that just shot down your best friend.

As another alternative, if we go with the idea that Mina was struggling with dark desires for revenge, maybe she should have brought it up!  Not as an accusation—again, she has no way of knowing she’s facing Midnight’s killer without him saying it—but just out of generalized fury with her opponents as a group, the same way Aizawa and Gran Torino hold the pain of their loved ones against Shigaraki when Shigaraki is not the one responsible for causing that pain.[9]  Maybe a more openly vengeful Mina could just freely state that her aim is to take down the PLF to avenge Midnight, only for the enemy in front of her to answer, “Midnight?  You mean that woman I killed in the woods on the day of Liberation?  Here’s your chance, then, girl.”  (Or whatever.)

Of course, Shonen Jump is not in the habit of validating heroes craving revenge, so Mina in that scenario would fail because rage would make her sloppy, same as with Deku, Iida, and so on.

So, in a scenario where Machia is up and not falling prey to Shinsou, but rather prioritizing getting to New Master Shigaraki, and the PLF is likewise loyal to Shigaraki and not AFO, I’d just let it work, because I’d be slanting this whole combat towards an overall heroic loss.  Give Mina a face to obsess over until next time but also let Kirishima get a good eyeful of it so he at least knows there’s a serious problem with his best friend and one of his hero inspirations.

Mineta would have a chance to weigh in, too, as he's a good middle ground: he's got his own anger about Midnight, who he adored, but he's also worried about how that anger looks on Mina. Mineta always worries about his classmates, but he's shared a pretty fair amount of incidental screentime with Mina specifically over the course of the series, ranging from her sweetly offering to put a harem moment into the band performance just for him to stuff like the Clockwork Orange gag, as well as more serious stuff like Mineta being the first one to ask aloud if Midnight's dead, with Mina warmly, and with a confidence it turns out she doesn't truly feel, reassuring him that Midnight's fine.

(I've said before that Mineta should have had more to do in the confrontation with Midnight's killer, but that's not just about his fondness for her. It's also about him being the first to question if the heroes didn't just make the whole situation worse, and, if Mina really took Midnight's death so hard it had her thinking about revenge, it should also have been about Mina and Mineta's shared experience surrounding that death.)

That all said, I suspect that what you really meant is, how would I have handled this scene if I had to use all the same pieces and be writing towards a heroic victory?  So let me at least touch on that.

As far as Hose Face goes, I actually think Kirishima might have been better suited to talking to him?  Like, Mina’s been friendly with people, sure, but I don’t really buy her most pivotal, “shining moment” scene being a bunch of talk about the strength of the weak coming together.  As best I recall—though do correct me if I’m wrong—it's never been shown that Mina regularly struggles with feelings of weakness or inadequacy.  It would be perfectly natural for her to do so after flubbing against Gigantomachia, to be sure, but the series doesn’t make the time to show it, so her lines about forming packs with others does not feel like a natural evolution for her arc.

Likewise, while she’s obviously been depicted as friendly and sociable from the beginning, her lines in 383 suggest that her sociableness has, and always has had, an ulterior motive: covering for her perceived weakness.  The lack of focus on her relationships from her own perspective makes that impossible to verify or even predict, so it just feels like it comes out of thin air, grabbed almost at random by the author in his attempt to find something, anything, Mina could say that would give Hose Face even a moment's pause.

Kirishima, on the other hand, has had a focus on his relationships, places where they’ve been pivotal to his own arc and the greater plot.  (I’m sure I don’t need to harp on this to you, rvg, but I’ll go over it to lay out my perception of these things.)  His relationship with Mina—the ways he’s trying to live up to her example, as well as his desire to support her when she falters—is a profound motivator for him, something we see much more explicitly and from his own perspective than we do Mina's feelings about him.  Meanwhile, while his relationship with Bakugou isn’t given that level of psychological exploration, it’s a critical factor in Bakugou’s rescue at Kamino, and we also get that bit of Bakugou specifically giving Kirishima some advice that leads to the latter’s Unbreakable mode.[10]

So like, we do get an angle on Kirishima and his sense of his own relationships with others.  That awareness allows him to demonstrate what is, I believe, the first unabashed moment of empathy for villains that a hero demonstrates in the entire series!  Specifically, I’m talking about that low-level gang mook he comes up against during his internship with Fat Gum.  That guy does a bunch of yelling about things that speak to Kirishima—fears of weakness, desire to be stronger, a need to help his “bros”—and Kirishima tries multiple times, even after being attacked, to express his understanding and sympathy for the man.

That being the case, if anyone were going to be able to make an impression on Hose Face via appealing to his sense of camaraderie and desire for strength, it seems to me that Kirishima has the better groundwork in place to sell the moment, regardless of whether he could successfully “reach” Hose Face in the way that’s being attempted with Shigaraki/Toga/Dabi.

As to the Sludge Villain, I’d probably either not have him there at all, given how much he claims he just wants to pretend to fight for a minute before getting the hell out of there.  He very much seems like he didn’t want to be here to begin with, so I can only assume that, despite AFO claiming the jailbreakers didn’t need to do anything for him but rampage, he very much did summon a bunch of them back anyway[11] for his final dramatic attack on Deku and Hero Society.

Assuming we’re stuck dealing with him, I’d probably let the Class B kids do it.   Have Mount Lady—who was there for the Sludge Villain’s rampage using Bakugou, and therefore knows what Sludgey looks like and that he can possess people—yell for people to stay away from him.  Let there be a moment of panic and confusion, where it looks for a moment like a repeat of the mess in Chapter 1 where no one had the exact right answer to deal with him, so no one’s willing to step up.

Then, in a 1-2-3 combo move that reminds everyone why Class B is said to have advanced more quickly than Class A, and just as Sludgey lunges for someone, have Yamagi use Poltergeist to manipulate him into a steel drum barrel being held by Yui, let her shrink it down to a good tight fit before dropping it, then have Juuzo soften the ground to half-sink it, top down, then resolidify the earth, trapping Sludgey for later removal.  Ta da, a neat demonstration of the next generation outperforming the old generation when it comes to on-the-fly teamwork and decisive action even when no one individual has the perfect quirk for solving a problem.

…This, of course, is assuming there’s no good way to actually get the Sludge Villain to talk in more depth about why he didn’t want to be here from the beginning and had to be threatened into doing it at all.  It would be nice if someone could broach that topic!  Maybe a quick not-too-serious handful of lines from Mineta, who has his own history of running in terror from fights he doesn’t think he can win.  But even with some sympathy, I imagine Sludge Villain would try to run away regardless, on the (well-grounded) suspicion that heroes are going to want him to go back to prison and finish his sentence, and that’s when B-tachi could step in.

So that just leaves Machia, Mina, and Shinsou.  And honestly, rather than having to power through it, I’d rather see Mina, in particular, talk her way out of it.  This draws on two things.  First, there’s the fact that she’s one of the kids who failed her Final Exams, with her and Kaminari being unable to figure out how to utilize their strengths to get out of Nedzu’s rat maze.   I’d love to see her demonstrate that she’s grown from having no plans but to brute force her way through obstacles!  Second, there’s this sequence:

This is a bit exaggerated, obviously, but the quick demonstration of how quickly and smoothly Mina is able to approach, scold, bond with, then deescalate people in tense situations is rightly portrayed as remarkable.  But where is that facility in real confrontations with villains?  Nowhere, really, save that airless stab at remarking on common ground with Hose Face and the PLF.

I obviously don’t expect her and Machia to wind up breakdancing together when the stakes are as high as they are, but Mina would have at least a bit of an opening—her encounter with Machia in middle school wherein she lied to him about where the Springer Agency is.  I don’t for a moment think that Machia’s forgotten her smell—I doubt he forgets anyone’s, though he may or may not care about them otherwise.

For this version of the scene, I’d probably play Machia as more ambivalent—tired of being abandoned over and over again by the people he’s tried so hard to be loyal for, so not immediately inclined to run off after them, open to a bit more dialogue.  He doesn’t fall for Shinsou for the same reasons I outlined above, so Shinsou and Mina have to talk Machia into acting—or at least stop him from just rumbling off to bury himself under a mountain for the next decade or two.

I don’t know how they’d go about making that argument.  Honestly, I don’t really think there’s anything in the story for Mina or Shinsou to fall back on (by which I mean earlier panels Horikoshi’s assistants can look up and copy/paste into the storyboard to accent a dramatic speech).  Maybe they could ask him why he’s so loyal to All For One and find some commonality, either through heteromorph discrimination or bias against villains.

Maybe Machia is torn on his loyalty, betrayed by AFO one too many times to want to help him but not sure where that leaves him on supporting Shigaraki.  Hearing this, Mina brings up that AFO is threatening Shigaraki right now, but also that a friend of Mina’s is trying to stop AFO/help Shigaraki,[12] so maybe Machia could help them with that and then decide?  Machia doesn’t trust her due to the Springer Agency thing, but that same experience does lead him to believe her when she says she just wants to help people, not hurt them.

That last bit has the benefit of providing an explicit reason for why Mina uses her quirk nigh-exclusively as a watery defense barrier or to take out inanimate objects: She long ago made an active choice not to use her acid against sentient people.  This would give her some room for a little motivation-establishing flashback of her own—maybe canonize that theory about her chipperness being at least in part a front!—and provide a nice alternative to the current state of Mina’s narrative, which has spent nearly 400 chapters refusing to allow her the same free hand people like Bakugou and Kaminari take with their quirks for no established reason.

This doesn’t give Shinsou much to do, but that’s okay: his moment comes against AFO instead.

I realize that Mina's fans want her to have a big badass moment, and simply talking down a confrontation is not the kind of thing that tends to get viewed as "badass" in a shounen battle manga. Sorry about that. She can still jump around and dodge a lot while giving her pitch? Maybe she could get a big badass moment later on? I dunno; that's just what I would do, and obviously my priorities for what it would be cool for the kids to do are not the same as the broader readership's.

I'm also not sure where that leaves the confrontation with Midnight's killer; I suppose that depends on how things go between him and Kirishima in this scenario. Maybe they leave without him when he tries to protest Machia accepting the temporary alliance, or maybe he's soldier enough to take the help where he can get it and worry about later conflict later. Obviously, at any rate, this is happening in a scenario where he hasn't immediately blabbed that he killed Midnight; that can come up as a nasty surprise later on.

  

But does that mean you think Midnight’s killer should totally get away with it scott free and suffer no consequences?

Hnnnngghh that’s a tricky one because I am an unabashed MLA stan and villain supporter and therefore deeply biased about this.  Like, I don’t think soldiers should be put on trial for killing enemy soldiers, no, even high-ranking officer-types.  Obviously it’s different if they attack civilians or are otherwise breaking the codes surrounding conduct during warfare, but I do think Hose Face killing Midnight was basically a soldier killing someone he perceived as another soldier, with no undue cruelty or misconduct.

However, obviously the series itself—and the state authority the PLF is openly trying to tear down in-universe—would disagree with me!  In that context, I can’t even really call the guy “a high-ranking officer” because that would, as mentioned earlier, convey more authenticity to his position than his government wants to grant him.  As far as they’re concerned, he’s probably more like “a key figure in the recent anti-government actions carried out by the terrorist group calling themselves The Paranormal Liberation Front.”  People like that tend to get executed in prison a few years after their short, perfunctory trials.

I suppose the problem for me is that the series wants me to believe that the MLA is Very Bad and they all deserve to be Locked Up Forever, whereas I want more nuance from them than that?  Even setting aside the probable cult upbringing, I have significant trouble unabashedly blaming the PLF for their actions because the series has done nothing to convince me that less drastic avenues for change are available or even survivable for them.

This was a huge issue with the hospital attack sequence, but it applies to all sorts of the setting’s problems: Other than, “Insist that victims of oppression should focus on providing a good example to future generations,” what methods for addressing inequality does Hero Society have?  I want to know what the villains should have done, what they could have done, about systemic inequalities and repression that would have been effective against a government that employs agents like Lady Nagant and Hawks.

The picture Nagant paints is of a society waging a war against anyone who sought to change the Hero System, a war that many people who sought change never even knew they were already in.  The examples she provides of her targets are, of course, corrupt heroes and would-be terrorists, but what her HPSC President said was even farther reaching: that the purpose of her killing was to “preserve hope and faith” in heroes.

The HPSC legitimately does not seem to believe that any system other than the current one is feasible for maintaining stability, and that any attempt to shake or besmirch that system is no different than throwing the country back into the chaos of the advent of quirks.  What’s a few missing activists or tragic accidents compared to that?

Horikoshi seems desperate to have us pretend he never told us that the government his protagonists are defending actively grooms assassins to enforce the status quo, but that’s not a genie he can put back in the bottle.  I see the current events of the series as, in some form or another, basically inevitable because of Hero Society’s active, even violent resistance to change.  Midnight’s death for that cause is thus something I have tremendous difficulty thinking of as a crime that needs to be punished.

Does that mean I think Hose Face should get off scot-free?  Eeehhhhhhhhnnnngh I hate to say it this plainly, but…

Maybe it does?

The thing is, I know that Hose Face is, canonically, a quirk supremacist trying to violently overthrow the rule of law.  In real life, I have no sympathy for people trying to institute fascism, regardless of whether they’re using legal mechanisms or armed force.  But in the fictional world of BNHA, I have nothing but disdain for the way the MLA has been turned into a caricature of themselves in this final arc.  In that sense, my dissatisfaction with Hose Face’s treatment is really based on the ideal version of him and all the rest of the MLA I have in my head—the MLA that’s allowed to have nuance behind their extremism, the one overflowing with members motivated by their lived experience with the flaws in Hero Society, with a generous helping of radicalization from the fact that they’re a cult as much as they are an army.

BNHA has scrapped all that potential and left us with nothing but naked quirk supremacy to fill the void.  In an endgame that’s trying so, so hard to sell the readers on Saving Villains, that’s just poison to the story’s themes, and my villain stanning comes directly from that issue: demanding consistent treatment for the characters whose tragic backstories we haven’t been permitted to see.

Hose Face is clearly a bad person—heck, I was headcanoning him as a hard-edged, ruthless killer even when all we had to go on was him killing Midnight, long before he showed up to espouse open quirk supremacy and gloat about killing a schoolteacher, so it’s not like I ever thought he was a super nice dude or anything!  But I guess I just have trouble with the idea that the current system deserves to be the one to decide his fate, when it has, to all appearances, gone to extreme lengths to stamp out any perceived threats to itself, to the point that the narrative itself is now openly delegitimizing everyone who might otherwise offer cogent critique.

It would be different if we had never seen the dark side of the status quo and the villains really were all just shallow, two-dimensional monsters.  It would be different if the narrative had shown us legal, nonviolent and effective avenues for protest and change.[13]  It would be different if Hose Face had killed some rando uninvolved civilian.

As it is, though, Midnight was a combatant for a terrible, terrible status quo.  She might not have been using lethal means herself, but she was defending a demonstrably lethal, openly acknowledged as repressive, system.  I just can’t find it in myself to demand justice for the fact that she died for it.

But with all that being said, I also don’t think Midnight is a bad person.  She never knew about the government assassins, after all; she’s a member of the system she grew up in, the same way the kids are.  She presumably never saw the extent of the system’s flaws because she was never victimized by them.  At the end of the day, she still deserved to be properly mourned and remembered and it is a crock and a crime that we never got to see her funeral.

If anything, I think Midnight’s funeral would have been an excellent setting for a scene where the protagonists start asking questions about how things came to this, what went wrong and where, that their teacher had to die.  What is it about Hero Society that’s led to tens of thousands of dissidents, and why haven’t they ever heard of this discontent before now That would have given us considerably better set-up for a nuanced PLF, an opening to talk about Shouji’s experience of heteromorphobia, foreshadowing for Lady Nagant, and, to bring this back on-topic, the opportunity to really show Mina struggling with everything that happened as set-up for her later confrontation with Midnight’s killer.

  

Tumblr, How Does That Work?

Honestly I was expecting some sort of notification about your answers if and when you replied to me. Is that not a thing?

Making my reply a fresh post, or just posting replies in the comments section of the post you originally commented on, would not have notified you without me specifically tagging you, which at the time Tumblr wasn’t letting me do.  This problem seems to have cleared up, so you should have gotten a notification about this post going up because of your name being tagged at the very beginning!

What you see for people answering asks depends on a few things. If you send asks anonymously, you won't get a notification if/when the person answers them; you'll just have to keep an eye on their blog. If you send them with your name attached, as you did originally for me, I could choose to answer those asks privately, sending my replies back to your Inbox, or answer publically, posting my replies to my blog. Either way, you'd be notified!

For this round of responses, if I'd just replied to your reblog in comments as you did with my original post, or reblogged your reply with a reply of own instead of staring a new post, you’d have gotten notifications about either!  But I don’t want to put this much wall ‘o text on my followers’ dashboards without a cut, so I haven’t been responding directly, for which I apologize.

(Disclaimer: Notifications can be configured in your Settings menu; you can toggle them on and off for loads of stuff! You might wish to check what you currently have them set for rather than just taking my word for it.)

On the topic of cuts, I mentioned at the beginning that the cut option is hard to find on mobile, but just for reference, it looks like this in the post editor on desktop:

It's the same icon on the mobile post editor, it's just on the far right of the bar of icons along the bottom of the app. My screen cuts it off, so I have to scroll the bar over to find it.

Like I said, the Expand dropdown button Tumblr instituted a little while back has reduced the need for this somewhat, and you can certainly do whatever you prefer, but as I believe having the Expand dropdown automatically clip long posts is still an optional configuration in Settings, I'd feel better about reblogging from you directly if you put the bulk of your reply under a cut.

  

Don’t know what “blorbo” means. Kinda sounds like a demeaning term, but I’m going to assume it’s not.

Sorry, it’s not intended to be demeaning!  It’s just a slangy affectionate term for “character you really like.”  In my experience, I’d say it also has a connotation of protectiveness or self-identification, though I can’t speak for the whole of the internet.  I like plenty of characters, but I wouldn’t call them all my blorbos, just the ones that I really and truly love and want to explore/share/defend their honor to the death.

  

Thanks...? Is, is that a compliment?

(Re: my telling rvg that we seemed to have similar issues with the way Mina was being handled, but they were more willing to do the mental legwork on her than me.)

It’s mostly just an observation, but not a critical one!  As someone who’s very ready to read into the canon every little drip of information the canon will give me And So Much More, I have a tremendous amount of fellow-feeling for people of like minds, even if our taste in characters is different.

    

Buried At The Bottom, Why Kaminari Is A Worse Character Than Mineta, Yes I Said It And I’ll Say It Again

>>I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari. What’s up with Kaminari?

My irritation with Kaminari boils down to two main things—and forgive me, I know you didn’t ask about Mineta, but Mineta’s pretty important to my feelings on Kaminari being what they are, so he’s a part of this answer.  This is all going to be pretty openly dismissive of Kaminari, as a fair warning, on top of being based on not-exactly-rigorous familiarity with the student material, so apologies to anyone who likes him and finds him an enriching, valuable character. But man alive, that is not me.  And but so:

1) Kaminari is a watered-down Mineta, with watered-down versions of all of Mineta’s flaws, but because he’s watered down, the growth he experiences stands out less than Mineta’s.  More on this in a second.

2) Despite Kaminari being a redundant character who brings virtually nothing to the table that other characters don’t do better—with the only things that are unique to him going underdeveloped in canon—fandom loves Kaminari.  (Disclaimer: I obviously don’t spend much time in the hero-fan circles of the fandom, so this is just my perception.  I’d be curious to get your perspective of Kaminari’s relative popularity, rvg!)

To hit the second point first, Kaminari has a more conventionally attractive cute anime boy face than Mineta, so Kaminari’s pushing of his female classmates’ boundaries gets mostly ignored, while Mineta gets so many fics written about him dying that there’s a dedicated Dead Mineta Minoru tag on AO3 with almost 350 hits. 

Fandom built a whole tottering edifice of fanon about Traitor Kaminari despite the howling absence of compelling evidence in the manga[14] for, so far as I can tell, the sole reason that people wanted the cute anime boy to have crunchy angst.  Then, when the actual traitor reveals landed (first the fake-out and then the real one), fandom deemed Hagakure an ungrateful bitch and Aoyama a whining coward.

So like, the fandom discrepancy is what pushes me over the edge from the bottom end of neutral into active dislike.  But I would be awfully close to it anyway for the whole “redundant-ass character who contributes nothing to this story we couldn’t get better from someone else” thing.

Kaminari being kind of leery and unpleasant about his female classmates would be a lot more glaring if it weren’t stacked up against Mineta’s actual sexual harassment, even though Kaminari is a frequent co-conspirator!   

Kaminari has a brief tussle with fear at the beginning of the war arc, but it’s neither as sustained nor as convincing as Mineta’s frequent wrestling with cowardice, present from USJ all the way up through his terrified confrontation with All For One.   

Mineta is frequently, openly envious of his classmates, a whole extra flaw that Kaminari never demonstrates in more than fleeting glimpses.   

Kaminari’s quirk is redundant next to the other high offense types in the class.   

Kaminari’s personality is not distinct enough to add anything irreplaceable to the classroom dynamic.  That’s not to say he brings nothing to the web of relationships amongst the students or the ways the class as a whole reacts to the events of the series, just that what comes to mind for me is mostly extra layering to existing dynamics, not anything truly original and unique to him.  Which would be fine—I love extra layers!—if he were contributing more as a character on literally any other fronts.

I can think of only two things that Kaminari uniquely brings to the table, but both of them are mentioned once and then never come up again.  Firstly, he’s the only one in the class to voice open admiration for Stain, a willingness to admire cool traits in Villains that never leads him to any interesting conflicts with people (classmates or otherwise) who hew to the more standard flat refusal to consider that a Villain might have or express positive aspects.

The other thing is less about Kaminari himself and more about how he’s one of three places where the story brings up the idea of people using their quirks for non-hero jobs and then refuses to develop that premise.[15]  It’s interesting worldbuilding, but as far as I’m aware, it’s never directly shown—everyone we see using their quirks (legally) in the series is doing it as a hero.  We never get much sense of what other options there are for quirk use because heroism and villainy are the only contexts we ever see it in!  This would be a little annoying on its own, but I also find it undermines a lot of other established facts and characterizations.

(Bear with me and I promise I’ll loop this back around to Kaminari.)

My interests being where they are, the biggest problem for me with the fuzziness about the legality of quirk use is that it leaves Destro and the MLA with no coherent cause.  They want free quirk use, but are they really so incredibly averse to just getting a license that they’re willing to become terrorists over it??

You could argue that naked quirk supremacy is what the MLA is currently after, and that’s obviously incompatible with the laws as they stand, but Destro Classic is never really framed as a quirk supremacist, so why did he so virulently despise the quirk use prohibitions if all they really did was require people to get a license to use quirks in public, no different than a driver’s license or a permit to serve alcohol?  Sure, you get small clutches of people sometimes with that kind of “any government oversight is bad government oversight” black-and-white thinking, but the original MLA was a powerful enough force to stand against the government for years, which doesn’t exactly scream “a handful of malcontents” to me.

Rendering the MLA’s cause mindbogglingly asinine is my biggest problem with the “other jobs can get quirk-use licenses too” tidbit, but there are also things like how totally invisible the entertainment or sports industry is.  That would make perfect sense if quirk use is illegal in those fields—people want to see cool superpowers getting used, so industries that bank on public attention dollars but can’t have their celebrities use their quirks are going to decline when they can’t compete with industries/celebrities that can.

If quirk licenses can be gotten for all sorts of jobs, though, then why have sports and entertainment become so invisible?  If “frivolous” fields like those are not aren’t seen as “contributing to society” enough for quirk use permits, then which fields do?  Why does HeroAca!Japan still mostly look and behave like IRL!Japan if quirks are in use in “all manner” of industries?  And if it isn’t the case that heroism—a dangerous job which sometimes gets people killed and which generally requires cultivating a socially demanding public brand/identity—is the only path to being able to use the special power you were born with to earn a livelihood, why does every single middle-schooler in Deku’s class and countless other classes across the country want to become a hero?

I just feel like the way the world looks and operates, the kinds of repressiveness described by even the heroes, the structures that drive people into heroism and villainy alike—the former because they don’t see any other viable way to achieve the happiness they’re looking for, the latter because they can’t become heroes but still have desires that their quirks could help them achieve—all of that makes much more sense in a world that has super powers but has tightly restricted their use to a single job class of person.

So, tying back, obviously that’s not a fault of Kaminari’s, but he is the character where that gap is most apparent.  If there aren’t many lightning heroes because lightning is in high demand in other industries, it would shed significant light on who Kaminari is as a person if the manga would tell us what those other industries are. 

What other paths could Kaminari have chosen?  What’s so much better about those other industries that people with quirks tailor-made for heroism,[16] in a society that worships popular and powerful heroes, are so willing to choose those other industries instead?  Why did Kaminari not make that same decision?  What does heroism mean to him personally that he chose it when so many others in his situation did not?

Kaminari could present a huge in on that angle of the worldbuilding, but instead he’s a complete dead-end.  Mineta’s motivations are base as hell, but at least we know what they are!  Further, it tells us interesting (uncomplimentary, but interesting!) things that people like Recovery Girl and Deku hear said motivations from Mineta’s own mouth, and shrug and accept them as perfectly valid.

And that’s just his professed motivations!  His final exam scene actually drops an early hint about the admiration for Deku he’ll later wholeheartedly declare in the 1-A vs Deku fight!  I don’t remember Kaminari ever getting anything a fraction so revealing; he just coasts through the story contributing nothing unique or meaningful.  He’s hardly the only 1-A character with that particular lack of depth—Sato, Sero, Hagakure and Ojiro are all similar blank slates in terms of their motivations or histories—but then, none of them are a fraction as popular as Kaminari is in the fandom as I experience it, either.

So to sum up, I dislike Kaminari because he’s a wishy-washy nothing of a character, a generically Inoffensive Anime Cutie Boy adored out of all reasonable proportion compared to more compelling and equally underdeveloped classmates alike.  Mineta is, by any measure, more problematic, and it's even worse that U.A./Aizawa are so blasé about him, but, at least from where I’m standing, he’s still more layered, more compelling, more dynamic, and speaks in more interesting ways to the world around him than Kaminari ever comes close to matching.

(…Kaminari’s thing with Jirou is fine.  Perfectly reasonable character relationship building material.  I just don’t count it one way or the other because it’s a self-contained relationship dynamic that has no bearing on the way either character engages with the broader world/system the series’ overarching narrative is challenging.  They motivate each other in small ways, but that motivation doesn’t lead them to truly grow or change as people, only to overcome modest internal confidence hurdles blocking them from things they already wanted to do anyway.)

--

And that's it! Thanks for forging through, good lord, over twenty pages of this, rvg and anyone else who did! I hope you were at least moderately entertained, give or take my blatant Kaminari slander. See you next time, and enjoy the Footnotes.

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

[1] We’re not shown any personnel or drugs or anything, but I assume they’ve been keeping Machia drugged since Jakku, same as Kurogiri in between interviews.  It’s the only thing that worked on Machia before, so why wouldn’t they have more on-hand?

[2] Despite watching the Sports Festival with Shigaraki, natch.

[3] I would like it if he would do that with a lot less insufferable power scaling bullshit, you understand, but I’m spotting the comic its plot arc here.

[4] Outside of, say, the Persona games, where the MCs can change ability sets by swapping out what companion spirit they’re packing, but even that doesn’t make them specialized for status effects, merely capable of using them.

[5] Interestingly, while Bakugou fought off the villainous sales pitch with as much verve as he brings to all his fights, if he had fallen off the righteous path there, we might have observed that his pridefulness was explicitly fostered by the people around him giving him excessive praise for his powerful quirk and ignoring his resulting violent arrogance.  That is to say, Bakugou would have fallen under the same, “Villains are created by the failures in their society,” pattern that BNHA applies to all of its sympathetic villains.

[6] There was one other instance, but iirc it was an error in the translation C.Cook had done for the BNHA databook.  It would not surprise me that he was being less careful or was more pressed for time when translating the reams upon reams of text in one of those.

[7] At least until the fifteen-thousand-strong mob shows up.

[8] Which frankly should be all he’s sore about.  As others have pointed out, Machia’s anger about being abandoned is kind of incoherent.  Yes, AFO left him on the battlefield, but he didn’t exactly leave him to rot in prison forever.  The moment AFO made his big push, he sent people to spring Machia, so in what sense exactly does Machia think AFO abandoned him?  If it was just the last straw after a string of abandonments from both AFO and Shigaraki, the manga could have stood to make that much clearer.

[9] AFO and Ujiko created Kurogiri out of Shirakumo—as a babysitter for Tomura, yes, but Tomura didn’t choose that.  And as to Shigaraki’s very existence trampling on Nana’s memory and causing All Might pain, well, Shigaraki didn’t ask to be brought into the world, abused by his father, neglected by his family, and then raised by a supervillain, did he?

[10] And speaking of Unbreakable, compare how explicitly we’re shown Kirishima’s growth and the foundations of it with how the inspirations for Mina’s attacks are relegated to passing mentions, not direct depictions.  She just casually tells Kirishima that his Unbreakable inspired her Acidman, and likewise only internally reflects on asking Bakugou and Todoroki to teach her their training method, which let her develop her Max Power Acidman Alma move, without so much as a single scrubbed in doodle depicting said training assistance.

[11] Somehow.  The story is unclear on whether he disseminated threats, contacted them directly, or just used the combination of Search+Warping to drag them all back into his presence, and that last option in particular runs into complications given the limitations of both quirks.

[12] In this AU, we would have gotten to see the class have an actual discussion about Saving Villains, prompted by the way the reveal about Aoyama solidified Deku, Shouto and Uraraka’s desires to help their respective villain foils.  The class would carry that resolve forward not only for those three villains alone, but also Shouji for Spinner, Kirishima when talking to Hose Face, Mina, here, with Gigantomachia, etc.

[13] None of the things I can think of that might be considered evidence of protest meet all the criteria.  The original MLA became violent, Harima Oji was a lawbreaker and also ineffective in the long term, the small group that yells at Endeavor and the rest in Chapter 311 is not portrayed as linked to any broader efforts to unseat “fake heroes,” and the group that “condemned” the newscaster Miyagi Daikaku was ineffective and didn’t even seem to rise to the level of open protest.

[14] "His grades are poor but he namedrops a Hemingway novel! He must be concealing the fact that he's actually super-smart!" "He's doing a Liberation salute! He must be the traitor, even though the Liberation salute uses the other hand, and Kaminari has been using finger-gun gestures to fire off his lightning attacks since at least the License Exam if not earlier, and the League had no connection to the MLA at the time when the traitor was most active!"

[15] A blurb about Kaminari in, iirc, one of the volume extras, Suneater’s flashback to a teacher telling his class that they can “make fine use of their quirks at any number of jobs,” and Uraraka’s early mention that she’d considered “getting permission” to use her quirk to help with her parents’ construction business.

[16] See the previous discussion about the kinds of quirks that are popularly accepted as “good hero quirks.”

[sassypantsjaxon]

Yknow, maybe the my hero ending disappointed me more than I originally thought because I'm... seven? episodes behind now...