#i really should make my bnha analysis blog soon...

[everypanelofizuku]

Chapter 50 - Kill 'Em Dead

[kaedekayano]

okay, i decided to disregard/circumvent the stayfocusd time limit just for tonight because fuck it, i don’t have anything to do tonight and i definitely deserve a break. and i like thinking about characters. so i just finished bnha ep 13 (the finale), and here’s my thoughts! finally on the computer yay

for those who know bnha/follow the manga, of course you’re welcome to discuss this stuff with me, but please don’t spoil me on anything or i will cry

i’m still trying to decide the fate of all might. like i said before, he started at the top and he’s got nowhere to go but down. there are a couple routes i think he could take: he lives for a while, then dies tragically but inevitably at the end like korosensei did; he gets abruptly killed off in the middle at a climactic, suspenseful moment, shocking everyone and terrifying them because what will they do without their symbol of peace; he lives, but he has to stop being a full-time superhero and finds another way to live, basically. of course, while i do like analyzing plot for plot twists and all that, i’ve always preferred doing character analysis to everything else, and i’m not that good at predicting plot.

but honestly, sounds like the dude’s gonna die. and if he does, i hope it’s soon, because this was being foreshadowed from episode #1 and i’ve been waiting this entire season, thinking every single episode, “is this the episode he’s going to die?” and he’s not a favorite, but i do like him enough (and am aware enough of how his death will emotionally wreck izuku as well as other characters) that the constant dread is wearing down on me. i am constantly in a state of terrible suspense. (but like i said no spoilers no one is allowed to tell me what happens okay i gotta find out for myself)

kind of a tangent but everything comes back to AC on this blog, so. AC changed the way i think about a lot of things because getting so heavily involved in the canon and fandom, and being exposed to others’ interests, made me far more open-minded than i used to be. for example, i really wasn’t good at shows with large casts (AC and the almost 30 students, BNHA’s students + teachers) before, b/c i didn’t track them very well and am shit at matching names to faces as well as recalling personalities, but hey, obsessing over the entirety of class 3-E for months will change that. also, all my favorites were. usually. karma types, for lack of a better phrasing. i could never relate to cinnamon roll (TM) characters. or characters who weren’t emotional disasters. (boy i had trouble liking nagisa at first.)

regarding what i keep saying about types: the girls, in terms of personalities, aren’t quite my usual thing. the closest person in terms of preference to the characters i typically like are yaoyoruzu and jirou. but honestly who cares because right now i like them all, and they are great and fabulous and uraraka is adorable and i like her a lot. i wanna see her have some character development first, though, and oh god the girls are my aesthetic. momo’s hair and jinou’s general aloof aura + earphones and tsu’s frog quirk and holy shit, pink alien girl? i don’t know her, she hasn’t had much time in the anime yet, but she’s. she’s a girl. who’s pink with alien features. how the fuck is that not the coolest shit ever

as fond of todoroki, as always. i looked up a bit on him on the wikia but i don’t want to spoil myself. but i did pick up enough to solidify my adoration for him. >.< i need to stop but god, i’m really fond of him. fuck. so fond.

izuku’s character continues to develop and it’s really wonderful. i used to live for mentor-student relationships, but then i realised (and AC did not help) that the mentor usually ends up dying, so i’m trying not to get attached to this mentor-student relationship and it’s not fucking working. the conversation he and all might had in the hospital beds at the end. shit, man. don’t get attached don’t get attached don’t get attached

something i really appreciate is that i knew this fandom really adores bakugou (and i say this as someone who literally doesn’t know shit about the bnha fandom), so i assumed he’d be one of those assholes who gets glorified by the narrative because it’s okay if he’s an asshole as long as he’s talented and handsome uwu he’s just being snarky haha how funny!! i mean yes he is an asshole but he isn’t glorified by the narrative, the narrative doesn’t hide at all that, while not totally evil, he’s a complicated character who genuinely can be unlikable and is kinda fucking awful. so that’s a pleasant surprise. i thought the narrative would revolve around him more b/c the fandom’s so fond of him but it doesn’t and i’m really glad, the whole class is really great (and imo the school too, i’ll talk worldbuilding later) and they all deserve focus.

i’m usually incredibly fond of villains, but i also mostly read YA fantasy, where the villains are very often attractive young characters who are snarky, charismatic types who draw the reader in and are way too likable. AC villains weren’t like that for me (although i ended up liking them anyway, just blame my friends lmao). the villains in BNHA so far aren’t quite the attractive young character archetypes either, but i really like them anyway. i wanna know their motivations a lot. what’s the relationship between nomu and shigaraki (i kinda already brotp it)? what led shigaraki and kurogiri to want to kill all might so badly? who made nomu the way he was? if the motive is a personal grudge or a tragic backstory, fuck. i’m weak as fuck for personal grudges and/or tragic backstories in villains, alright? 

also, shigaraki’s hands shit + the way his quirk behaves/is animated is this level of slightly surreal horror — not really over-the-top gory/melodramatically creepy, but definitely disturbing — that’s an aesthetic i’m quite fond of, although only in moderation.

uraraka’s power, while hardly unusual, is imo something that can go really far and has incredible potential. it’s definitely gone amazing places in past characters who have the same power in other fiction. i wanna see her develop it.

and now i’m gonna talk worldbuilding, because while i’m not that great at analyzing it or doing it myself — i’m decent enough to pull together a convincing world for my fiction, but that’s about it, since i’m not great at understanding how the world works, let alone how changes would affect it on a wide scale — superpowers are something i’m quite fond of.

so, there’s this one YA series called the reckoners, by brandon sanderson. he writes a lot of stuff about people with magic, and i love his work, especially the reckoners. i am bringing this up for two things. one, the protagonist is also a guy with no powers who’s unusually obsessed with the intricacies of the superpowered people and their superpowers in a world where superpowers just started randomly appearing and became integrated into society, although he’s obsessed because of a vastly different reason from izuku.

two, the worldbuilding is really good, and the powers are unique. it’s very different from your typical story about superpowers. in my opinion, every kind of basic power — telekinesis, manipulating elements, reading/controlling minds — has been used. i wouldn’t say it’s impossible to come up with new basic powers, but it’s damn near close. but what’s good about superpowers nowadays, what makes them interesting and original, is not the power itself, but its limits. how far can it go? what are the weaknesses? how can it be used?

i’m gonna give an example i’m really fond of — regalia from the reckoners. she’s a character who first appears in the second book. regalia has the ability to manipulate water, which we’ve all seen plenty of times in fiction, right? but it’s not just typical shit like “oh, look at this huge tide destroying a building!” my memory is fuzzy, but one of the things she can do is use the reflections created by water as windows. 

it’s hard to explain, but like, if you look into a puddle (and remember, water can reflect), and she’s paying attention, she can appear and look back at you and talk, like in a mirror. she’s able to communicate with you through it. she can keep an eye on the city she rules over because she flooded the entire place with water, making it a sort of island, and is able to watch everyone through its reflections. now that’s something new, even though water powers have been done to death.

i like how bnha handles the drawbacks of superpowers — it makes a little more unique. i’m not entirely pleased, but:

one post i’ve read on howtofightwrite (an excellent tumblr, writers who write action or anything involving combat should check it out!) is how, realistically, if you have super strength, every time you actually use it to anywhere near its fullest potential, it will fucking shatter your body. which is kinda what’s happening to izuku, i’ll explain in a sec. but like, if you punch someone, your knuckles hurt afterwards. except izuku’s punches are super super strong, so it hurts him way more than the normal person.

so i think that’s good! it’s a nice twist on how super strength usually works! but i’m still a bit displeased, because seriously, super strength is not at all new and it’s implied he’ll learn to control it instead of continuing to just have to deal with this particular drawback. all might learned to control it, which i don’t see how it makes physical sense, but whatever, fuck it, magic is magic. so i don’t think the blowback (looking for a word here?) resulting from his punches are actually because of realistic physical reasons TM that i just theorized, it’s just magic/being unable to control it, which is sad because c’mon, science and magic working together is cooler instead of “he got used to it by getting Good at his powers!”, but oh well. i’m not a doctor, anyway

honestly, i’m kinda disappointed that the most powerful heroes have super strength/superspeed, and that’s the only twist on it, and not even a terribly big one if izuku’s just gonna learn to control it through the power of experience. it’s not unique or new and i’d like to see something a little cleverer, i guess? like, i really like the idea of people adjusting to their powers and any drawbacks through just intelligence and the power of science and technology and wit, instead of practice/improvement upon the ability itself.

anyway, enough about izuku’s power. something else i’d like to see addressed is the emotional impact of izuku being quirkless all his life, and suddenly he has a power and everyone thinks he’s amazing. because it sounds like being quirkless fucked him up a ton. the protag of the reckoners is powerless and makes the best of it, and that’s what i really appreciate about the series — he never ever gets a power, he just figures out how to get through terrible life-or-death situations based on wit and his allies and cleverness and being amazing because you can still do amazing things without being born with those things. while i’m not saying izuku needed to take that route — what is it when he’s thought all his life he’s inferior, worshipped this one guy who turns out to be horribly vulnerable, and suddenly he’s got one of the most powerful quirks out there? (im assuming this gets addressed later though)

something else: how does society restructure itself now that everyone has a quirk? here’s the best thing about the reckoners: the people with the powers are the bad guys. like, not “oh, some people misuse their quirks” but almost everyone does, and what all the superpowered ones do, after they suddenly get their powers, is basically taken over the world. they’ve set up this tyrannical government in the usa where different superpowered people rule the cities and it’s basically a dystopia with superpowers, but the superpowered ones aren’t the rebels, they’re the oppressors. it’s a great twist on the typical superhero narrative. it changes the structure of society a lot. think legend of korra, but worse, more pronounced, a more oppressive regime.

so like, how does the world in bnha change now that 80% of people have a quirk? i really wanna know. UA is a start, but there’s got to be more to it than “there are schools trained to teach heroes, quirkless people feel bad about themselves, and heroes fight villains. and the villains don’t like the heroes because of that.” give! me! more! you don’t have to write me an encyclopedia of information (dear matsui, thank you for building your characters so much shit like the rollbook info exists, but not everyone does that) but what else is there? there has to be more than that.

some of the superpowers are interesting, yeah, but none of them stick out so much. i’ve read too much stuff about superpowers to be easily impressed, but really, “school of heroes” has been done a lot and while i like bnha a lot so far, they’re gonna have to go above and beyond what they’re currently doing to really impress me. rn i’m really curious what they’re gonna do with mineta ‘cause his power seems so fucking useless but he’s clearly there for a reason (how’d he pass the entrance exam?). the other powers don’t stick out much to me. stuff like tsu’s frog quirk or todoroki’s half-hot, half-cold shit (instead of just one) are just unconventional enough for me to raise an eyebrow, but not much more.

anyway. hoping they expand on that. but the worldbuilding isn’t horrendous or anything, i’m really enjoying all the powers and the worldbuilding’s good enough, just could be taken a lot farther. like, the potential is wow. god, i already love the characters so much, though

oh, also. not interested into getting into bnha fandom or the manga as of right now, and this blog is staying AC, but talking about it is still fun (i like discussing things!) and i’m gonna watch s2 when it comes out.