#heteromorph

[kiabugboy]

A school of Macroscaphites search for the best plankton-rich current for suspension feeding

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

WORDPLAY WEDNESDAY...and YESTERDAY'S TRIVIA ANSWERED

Happy Windsday everybody (it's pretty darn windy in eastern Oregon right now lol)

All right, down to business. First, let's answer yesterday's trivia: when did ammonites first evolve?

The middle Devonian Period around 410-385 million years ago!

Second, time to learn a new word! And that word is HETEROMORPH. This is a word I have used a bunch this month but what does it mean? Let's beak it down:

hetero-different

morph-to gradually change

therefore, heteromorph means to gradually change to something different. Our ammonites started with coiled shells with some gradually unfurling or curling in a different manner.

Isn't linguistics cool?

[makethiscanon]

*bouncing up and down in excitement*

OK. The BNHA manga is talking about heteromorphs. Good. Good. Lots of Shoji content. Wonderful. OK.

BUT DOES THAT ALSO MEAN MAYBE AN OJIRO FOCUS CHAPTER OR AT LEAST MORE PANELS OF HIM PLEASE IF NOT BACKSTORY?

Surely talking about mutation quirks includes him, even if it’s only his taaaaaail.

[dcclown]

I’m back on my mha bs so let me just say the way in which heteromorph discrimination is written and how Shoji speaks to the mob of heteromorphs was kinda refreshing to hear. I do like the underlying theme of angry not being inherently bad or evil which is not something you see a lot of.

[autumnmobile12]

So do you think Hawks has always had feathers or was he born with the fuzzy down feathers that newly hatched chicks have and he spent his toddler years with sentient, red bits of fluff before the actual feathers grew in?

...

Same goes for Tokoyami, which is why I can see this convo happening:

Tokoyami: I have not been this upset since I lost my baby fuzz.

Hawks: .... *loses it*

[zombiestarillustration]

Heteromorph Ammonite shells always look like wizard hats to me, and so here are a few varieties depicted as anthropomorphic wizards. Once I have a reliable printing set up I hope to compile these, along with seven other wizard designs, into a zine.

[cryiling]

anyways ive decided if deku doesn't get his ass over to bakugo's corpse in the next 2-3 episodes im gonna cave and just read the manga. bc im sorry but i do NOT care abt any of these other fights right now 😭

[jackdaniel69nice]

Does anyone else think the bird jokes are overused and redundant :/

Like people reduce Tokoyami’s whole personality to a single physical trait and I just think it’s weird. In mha canon not a single (good) person makes jokes about tsu, shoji, or Tokoyami’s heteromorph traits. Tokoyami doesn’t even exhibit any bird traits (except the perching), that’s all headcanon. The only one who brings up his avian appearance is hawks. There are only 5 instances I can remember someone saying something about mutant appearances (excluding the direct assault against shoji and ordinary woman)

Mineta calling shoji octopus, which he then apologizes for after finding out how rude that is to say

Jiro saying “that damn bird” when dark shadow blocked her attack. It felt more like a statement of her frustration than an insult.

Bakugo calling tokoyami bird brain, which is normal for him

Dabi calling spinner lizard, and spinner getting offended and yelling at him (I don’t remember if he continues to do it afterwards)

Shoto calling that police chief a mutt, there was no excuse for that, that was just racist

And still I think these are pretty tame compared to how the fandom treats heteromorphs!! The stereotyping of Tokoyami and hawks is absolutely insane. I love when people come up with headcanons for them having more avian traits but when those traits become the butt of the joke it’s extremely distasteful. If I see one more cannibalism joke about eating chicken I’m gonna hurt something. You guys do realize birds eat other birds all the time right???? There is a reason “chicken hawk” is a name. A hawk literally tried to attack my chickens yesterday, they love chicken. That is the reason hawks favorite food is chicken. I can see why tokoyami would want to hide his avian traits because if people in mha are like ours he would have been bullied to hell.

I know people making bird jokes are just having fun, but it’s just really weird to me. It’s important to see the comparison between real life racism and the heteromorph racism in mha. There is a reason horikoshi adds the mutant rally in the final war arc, the lesson there has flown over so many people’s heads. I hope this post gives you more insight to look beyond appearances and actually try to understand these side characters a bit better.

[itz-rae]

I hate when people say the Heteromorph prejudice was last minute

because remember our introduction to the MHA world was through Midoriya and guess what? he isn't a heteromorph or live in an area where hate against heteromorphs is common

like if you look at his classmates they mostly have mutation quirks, so it makes sense he would be ignorant to heteromorph issues, and even at the beginning of the series you can see hints of it

Spinner getting upset at being dehumanised by Dabi (Ik the caption is wrong)

Shoto calling the police chief a mutt like even everyone around him was surprised

Pony calling shoji a ugly octopus (I remember her being meaner in the anima, but I couldn't find it)

there's definitely more but you get my point that no the Heteromorph prejudice didn't come out of nowhere if you were paying attention

[did-sm1-say-catfish]

hc: touya(as a kid) knew that the "Going outside in the cold gives you a common cold" myth was, well, a myth, but he would still tell his younger siblings to put on an extra layer because of getting sick. HE FED THEM LIES

fuyumi is a smart lady, she (current day) knows that he was lying but she still wears her coat a lot (even tho she has a fuckin ice quirk) just to think about her "dead" brother with a smileee

and natsuo never figured it out. he just accepted it as one of those things you learn as a kid that could never be incorrect and deceitful. and he still tells shoto to put on a jacket or he'll get sick.

and shoto just complies with natsuo and doesn't really believe it one way or the other. he can just heat himself up y'know'?

[stillness-in-green]

First of all, thank you for Bring It All Back. Gave me chills. Second, what do you think about the newest chapters? It seems like Izuku took Gran Torino's 'killing to save' ideology to heart. Personally, I gave up somewhere around the Nagant arc.

Belatedly, thank you very much, @kermitthekrog-blog!  I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I’m particularly always happy to hear people say it was chilling, upsetting, enraging, or other such disruptive adjectives.  It’s a rabble-rouser of an art project, to be sure, quite intentionally so.

As to the rest, I’ve made a few posts here and there since I got this ask which probably make my opinions pretty clear, and I’ve got a new ask in the queue which wants to know my thoughts on the epilogue material thus far, so I’ll have more to say there!  But in the meantime, yeah, it’s pretty appalling to think back to all Deku’s talk about “saving” Shigaraki and realize that all of it predates the Gran Torino scene?

Like, he thinks he wants to save Shigaraki when they part ways at the end of the first war arc, sure!  And he tells the vestiges he wants to save Shigaraki!  But does that specific word choice endure once he wakes up?  Well, @codenamesazanka did some hunting recently (you can find two posts about her rereads here and here) and, it turns out, no; it doesn't.

After Deku wakes up and talks to Gran Torino, the focus switches to Deku understanding Shigaraki, choosing not to ignore him, finding out the nature of the Crying Child, all that stuff.  That word completely stops coming out of Deku's mouth, and very shortly after stops coming from any of the OFA vestiges as well.

It really does read, in retrospect, like, yeah, he sincerely took Gran Torino’s words at face value and to heart. “Killing can be a way of saving, so I can save him by killing him.”

Heck, if anything, given how little he focuses after that on saving, it almost feels like that’s the moment he resolves to kill Shigaraki—rather conveniently, it allows him a way to make peace with extrajudicial murder and avenge himself for all the people Shigaraki’s hurt that Deku can’t forgive him for.

The only thing that’s different from just killing him outright is that Deku wants to understand him first, as if he has to verify for himself that Shigaraki is secretly unhappy and why so he can justify that save-by-killing—putting Shigaraki out of whatever misery Deku can make himself believe Shigaraki is in—with a clean conscience.  But he absolutely does not make any further promises about not killing him afterward.

Grim fucking stuff, but it lines up.  One wonders what he would have done if the Shigaraki in the mindscape had changed to Sweet Innocent Tenko and never reverted back to Shigaraki Tomura at any point.  Would Deku have tried not to punch him to death?  Tried to call for Eri or Recovery Girl after AFO’s vestige faded out?  Felt like more of a failure because the “person” VFO devoured would have been that cute kid, meaning Deku failed to save the “child”?

As it is, he mostly just seems vaguely discouraged and unhappy about Shigaraki staying “the leader of the League” until the end—would he have preferred that his hands were ashen and flaking with the powdered remains of the crying child instead?

As to me giving up, the Nagant fight is one of two places I'd put that pin.  I was discouraged by the first war arc, when so many of the advantages Shigaraki had gained over the course of MVA were stripped away from him again.  I was dissatisfied with the second encounter with Muscular, when Deku's "victory" was framed in such a heroic, triumphant light despite being a categorical failure based on the standard Deku seemed to have set for himself.  But Deku’s fight with Lady Nagant was so bad for so many reasons that it served as the first true hammer blow to my belief that Horikoshi would be willing or able to seriously grapple with the societal problems the manga had been building up to at that point.

My patience with the manga, and the enjoyment I derived from it, continued to deteriorate throughout the rest of that arc and the following war arc, but the hospital attack is the other place I would point to as the sequence that completely destroyed my engagement with the series.

Just—the naked contrivances of it, the excruciating treatment of Spinner, the howling tone-deafness, the monumental unfairness of the demands it laid at the feet of its oppressed minority. The series presents a backstory like Shouji’s alongside current story elements like heteromorphs being turned away from shelters in the supposedly accepting and quirk-blind big cities and still somehow comes out valorizing passive endurance so hard it starts to look like willful self-subjugation.

It is the most comprehensively noxious moral in the entire endgame, rivaled only by Deku’s murder of Shigaraki under the guise of “saving” him, and frankly? I would still put that one in second place. At least you can point to Shouto (and possibly Ochaco, though that remains to be seen) as an indication that save-by-killing is not a story-wide moral about villains who have “gone too far.”

Conversely, pretty much everything the hospital attack mini-arc winds up preaching can be read outward onto the rest of the story's antagonists as well, including Lady Nagant. What else to make of her exchange with Hawks The Optimist, after all, than that the conclusion is that she should have just kept murdering whoever the government told her to until some outside player solved her problem for her?

A Hero is someone who is willing to suffer in silence. A Villain, then, must be someone who refuses to.

Truly, the hospital attack is the poisoned well that wipes out the entire village.

[kiabugboy]

HOT AMMONITE AUGUST! Screw it gonna make daily ammonites!

This first guy is Pseudocrioceras coquandi from the Early Cretaceous. A heteromorph ammonite that seems to start its life with a normal coiled shell before it turns into that fish hook shape in adulthood.

[heroinetales]

It's probably a shot in the dark but I believe it's Shoji and Koda who's visiting Spinner in the hospital instead of Midoriya like they're suspecting. They were the ones who battled him after all

[epickiya722]

Seeing my boys get their cards brought me such joy. I'M SO PROUD OF YOU TWO!!! 😭💜

[poppy5991]

Jeanist: I can excuse your heteromorphobia, but I draw the line at pleather.

Hawks: You can excuse heteromorphobia?!?!

Mirko: Yeah, can we walk that back for a minute?!?!

[delawaredetroit]

also he kills off any chance of actually doing something interesting with bnha's attitude towards gay or trans folks (which is obviously problematic given Magne's backstory) along with her in a really obvious and hamfisted way. Why set something interesting up, draw your fans into it only to cut it off before you do anything with it in the same arc?

Anon, respectfully what are you talking about? Maybe it's my age showing, but BNHA is above average for how it handles LGBT issues in a Shounen Jump manga. You know, the magazine with a target demo of teenage boys.

The LOV had two canonical LGBT characters: Magne and Toga. Magne was trans and Toga was bisexual.

The hero side had at least one trans character with Tora from the Wild Wild Pussy Cats. If you include information from the novels and spinoffs, LGBT hero side characters also include Kendo (nonbinary).

The canon LGBT heroes are side characters, but the canonically LGBT villain characters get character arcs that are intended to be taken seriously. They aren't the but of a joke. These aspects of their identity were not portrayed as a character flaw for any of them.

Magne's character wasn't given enough time to get her story across effectively, but it doesn't come across as mean spirited. I don't know if you mean her story is problematic because she and her friend didn't pass well. Why would they pass though? Would there be comprehensive trans medical care in a society that is so rigid about people playing particular roles? In a society where people are put in jail if they can't control their quirk when they know that quirks are slowly becoming too powerful to control, why would they randomly be progressive about trans healthcare?