#herobloggin

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I asked around on my Discord server for some examples, and was linked four!  The always excellent Deedeli, The L Reads, Makeste, and Ranubis.

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in my hero academia one of the students is a mushroom girl who can make mushrooms grow in your throat if you breath in the spores and I think that’s genius and also fucking terrifying

anyways plant people are incredibly dangerous and if you introduced me to these girls and told me their general themes this is the one I’d be most afraid of so far

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Bakugou’s an interesting case, because while I had that reaction to him at the beginning (though muted, because I read at approximately mach twelve and thus sped through his bits fairly quickly), he catches massive  amounts of shit from his fellow students, and he’s turned into a fascinatingly nuanced character.  Seriously, he’s fascinating--not the least because he is completely incorruptible.

He never even considers joining the villains when offered.  He’s laser-focused on being a hero, it’s just that he has a flimsy understanding of what heroism is.  Personally, I think he started taking a step back and realizing the path he was on--which was that he’d have been the next Endeavor--when he heard Todoroki’s backstory; the look of horror on his face as he listened in was possibly the single most memorable Bakugou moment for me.

I do still rebel against his attitude and relationship with the other characters in a few ways.  Most notably, anybody who’s talked with me about My Hero Academia for any length of time has noticed that I adamantly refuse to call Midoriya Deku.  I was bullied as a kid, and it’d take a helluva lot more to get me to adopt a mean nickname my childhood tormentor gave me than some cute girl saying she liked the nickname without understanding the history behind it.

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I was asked my thoughts on this by @krixwell-liveblogs, and it got long enough that I decided to just make a post about it.

It's a fair criticism, but I find the story is more about Midoriya's spirit, the qualities that made All Might CHOOSE him.  It shows All Might's priorities in choosing a successor; he's willing to resign himself to finding a philosophically good enough person with a quirk to take his power, but the moment he finds a philosophically perfect person who hasn't got any powers of his own he drops all his plans and goes with him instead.  As a result, the story isn't some broad parable about how anyone can be a hero, it's an examination of the kind of person the local Superman equivalent values--kind, hard-working, unwilling to flinch from danger when others are in trouble.  Heroic, basically.  And he finds that not among the superpowered populace, but amongst the powerless minority that society so often kicks aside, neglects, and generally treats as an embarrassing sideshow.

The whole comic, in fact, has a theme, and it’s not “anyone can be a hero”--it’s “heroes need to be heroic.”  Stain’s a lunatic, but he’s a lunatic with a good point who just takes it too far--and his point is that people are getting into heroism because it’s now just another job, not because they actually want to help anyone.  It keeps coming back to that point, in fact; the Vigilantes side-story has unsanctioned heroism versus government-sanctioned nine-to-fivers as its central philosophical conflict, and actually itself examines a quirkless hero in the course of things.

This is not to say that people are inherently bad for getting into saving people because it pays the bills; in fact, people like Ochako are explicitly called out as being good people despite their simplistic, relatively self-serving motivations, but while the hero industry in the present day of MHA Japan still largely self-selects for Good People, alarming anomalies like Endeavor are popping up at an increasing rate.  Like the American police system, people are starting to enter a job meant to protect people because they instead want to have power--power over the weak, over history, or just in the eyes of the public.  One of my favorite bits of subtle character development is how utterly horrified Bakugou is by Endeavor after he learns Todoroki’s backstory; he verrrryyyyy slowly starts becoming more like Midoriya and All Might, though he still has a long way to go.  One of my dream scenarios is Bakugou getting to spend time with Endeavor until he loses his shit and attacks the bastard.

If you want a similar story about a powerless hero who stays powerless, I’d recommend the very fun webcomic PS238--though that one’s about an elementary school for the kids of that universe’s supers.  I haven’t kept up with it recently, but I enjoyed it immensely.

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I would like to once again share my Discord avatar:

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I haven’t, but honestly what I’ve heard doesn’t make it seem like it’d be my thing. 

For reference, this is my Discord avatar :P

I am a huge huge fan of My Hero Academia.  It’s my second-favorite manga of all time after Fullmetal Alchemist, and the only reason i put off watching it for so long are my many issues watching anime and my general nervousness about the anime living up to the manga.  I’d love love love to liveblog it, but I read the manga religiously so I know about 97% of what happens...though you may eventually get some alt dialogue skits :P

That’s one of the ones on my radar, yeah!

I was given the first few volumes as a gift last year!  They’re quite fun.

I haven’t!  I really should.

I actually started reading One Piece a ways back, and just...kinda gave up after the Skytopia arc.  It just wasn’t holding my interest, my attention, or my enjoyment.

Huh, interesting.

I reread Dragon Ball Z and Fullmetal Alchemist every so often (I donated 85% of my local library’s FMA collection about ten years ago while it was ongoing), my second live”blog” was a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure commentary in a Skype group chat back in 2014, and I read My Hero Academia religiously.  I actually prefer manga to anime, in no small part because I can experience the story at my own pace (aka “mach twelve”)

That’s actually one of the shows that just got voted on over on my Patreon!  It lost out to something you guys will be seeing very soon.

I actually watched the first few seasons of Adventure Time back in college, 2012-2013.  My interest was high at the start, but after three seasons of no plot, I just kinda gave up.  The characters were interesting, the setting was interesting, but while I don’t begrudge people their slice-of-life shows, I enjoy series-spanning plotlines rather than episodic, disconnected short adventures.

I mean, it’s not great in English either, but hey :P

Hmmm!  That’s an interesting idea that you definitely shouldn’t dwell on too much, because I’ve definitely not got the first season sitting in a folder, waiting.

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@koolerestkid To be honest, at this point my tag IS “herobloggin”.  Please assume that when I talk about MHA I’m going to be up-to-date.

FUCK YEAH I AM SHE’S THE BEST

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Man, it’s always weird to see the people who inspired you again after you’ve become successful.  One of the livebloggers I followed in Homestuck’s heyday is doing the My Hero Academia anime, and is drawing conclusions that are...kind of ludicrous.

Vagueblogging because I want to put my thoughts out there but don’t want people to go give them grief over it, but it’s really disappointing.  That’s my second-favorite manga of all time and they’re aggressively, angrily misinterpreting it.