#this manga has done permanent damage to my brain

[shurup-overt]

totally forgot about this

uhm.

[flaminghelldancer]

Bnha manga thoughts 4

Manga spoilers up to chapter 350! Also some from Vigilantes.

This is about Touya's accident and the aftermath.

First of all, it's possible that it wasn't an accident. We know that AfO has a quirk that forces quirk activation and there's also the bees that made "instant villians" so it may have been provoked. He may have wanted to give him a scare like with Tenko so he'll leave his house and go with him but neither him or the doctor knew it'll damage him that much.

Then to those 3 years. These are my theories on how the doctor could have messed with Touya's mind from most to less likely in my opinion:

As shown on Vigilantes, Trigger has some side effects on its users that remain for a while after the quirk enhancement is over. It also shows that the physical changes can be permanent, but what if the phychological side effects could be permanent too? My idea is that it was used on him to help him fully recover his quirk but that prolonged exposition made his emotions and thoughts more extreme than they already were and essentialy got him stuck in a mania state.

The doctor erased or modified some of his memories to sharpe Touya's narrative as he wanted. He didn't expect even with that he would want to go back.

The doctor directly messed with the production of chemicals on his brain, augmenting or decreasing the quantity. He could have done this with meds he has access to from being an actual doctor... Talk about malpractice.

[ghostmartyr]

"and give her fucking themes a chance to actually fucking matter to the fucking plot you fucking fucked up story" thank you for being a constant voice of reason in this fucking fandom i'm never Not going to be mad about historia's story playing out beautifully and then having it all be undone. sometimes it feels like the CD skipped and reset all the progress in the story so we have to learn, AGAIN, that freedom is good and raising kids to serve you and your ideals is BAD, etc etc

Technically I left the fandom my home is the void.

(To no one’s surprise, this got angry. I should maybe consider shutting up about this, but as you can see by the number of times I use the word “fuck” in the quoted material, I have lost the self-control battle here many times.)

The part of it I always come back to when I’ve made the mistake of thinking about it and getting angry all over again is that if we learn that lesson again this arc, what we’ve really learned is that nothing that happens to these characters matters.

If their arcs can be undone by a time skip, there is zero reason to believe that any of what happens to them will stick. The entire Reiss cavern debacle is this exact thing, of Historia telling tradition to go fuck itself because it’s not a tradition worth keeping. That’s the watered down version, but for crying out loud, Historia’s whole damn arc leads to her changing the world.

Not because of any noble reason. Because she doesn’t want to die. She wants to stay herself, and for that she obliterates centuries of children eating each other. She’s her family’s bastard child who refuses to take part in what’s kept them broken for so long.

Yes, let’s have that character be shoved back into the cycle off-screen. Let’s have the girl who grows up unloved and unwanted, who breaks her family’s curse because she finally feels in her bones how wrong it is, go along with a plan to curse another child.

Historia being. fucking Historia enough to snap out a yes to cutting her life short if it saves the world does not bother me. The girl is a dumbass Gryffindor; it takes up until she’s taking her first step off the bridge to realize oh hey, maybe this is actually bad. She’s not an Idiot Hero, but try telling that to some of her decisions.

But her whole arc, as it is introduced and as Ymir’s soaks in, is about how if fate’s fucking you over this badly, maybe consider telling it to go fuck itself and use your own good qualities to carve out something better.

Nine seconds later we’re scrubbing that lesson off because the stakes have clearly changed.

Same story, only bigger. Now that it’s bigger the rules are different. Let’s have one page of Historia not looking miserable to remind everyone how the story’s shooting her directly back to being miserable.

There is no point to this. The one person who knows what it’s like to be seen as a curse and a tool, turning another child into a curse and a tool? After her entire character denouement is about picking up unwanted orphans and treating them as people?

Forget every single other part of this:

If things are as written, Historia has consented to selling away a child’s future. Several more generations, actually. She’s consented to passing on that feeling Frieda has when the weight of the world crushes her and she’s collapsed in tears in between a fence and her baby sister.

The torture that Frieda goes through is not the driving force of Historia’s resolution to give a damn about her life, but it’s something she knows just as keenly as her own pain, and it helps guide her speech to Eren. Her raison d'être comes from her entire family’s exploitation at their own hands.

There are ways to have characters become everything they hate. Those stories can even be interesting and very well done.

Interesting and well written ways do not include the literary equivalent of a character checking the Yes box on becoming everything their arc says they never want to be. Historia has like. Twenty pages where she’s drawn in between her arc’s conclusion and 107. Six of them have her saying anything, and four of those six are her reacting to Ymir’s letter and telling EMA she sure is golly chuffed to see how they aren’t permanently scarred.

Then 107 happens.

You can’t hit the undo button on a character’s arc that efficiently and still pretend like anything they go through has a lasting impact. Ymir’s choice to turn herself in is cut from the same contrived cloth, with every single new thing we find out about the world only making her decision somehow looking worse in addition to the character mutilation thing.

There’s a lot to what’s going on that skeeves the ever-loving fuck out of me. In the realm of squick, this is where my brain will never willingly live.

But it’s the complete bastardization of Historia’s arc that pisses me off.

Would the stupid kid agree to die in thirteen years five seconds after hearing that’s an option?

Yes, she’s a fucking idiot. All the growth in the world won’t ever undo that.

Would the stupid kid agree to have a child so its child, and its child after that, could eat their parent to become a tool of war?

…

“Everything That My Personal Arc Stands Against, I choose you!”

Thank you, I’m so glad we sat through all your parental and existential angst to have land you in a place that would come much closer to making sense if those pages had never been written. Brava.

-takes a very deep breath-

And that’s why I’m still clinging to hope that things aren’t as they seem. Because this story has always cared about character. When something doesn’t make sense, it’s because something is missing, not because the story didn’t care.

In theory.

Historia’s thing is the strongest test to that theory since Ymir’s thing, and as loud as I am about the latter, that hasn’t actually been resolved yet either.

Paradis agreeing to use children to fuel their survival is the kind of permanent marker stain that is hard to go back on, but it’s also nearly impossible to move forward with, because it would mean that Our Heroes’ one truly heroic trait is bunk.

They are the ones meant to break the damaging cycles, no matter the personal cost.

This is where they’ve chosen perpetuating them to escape personal cost.

Hence my growing opinion that they can all go ahead and die if this is where they’re at. If they’re growing more of these cycles, they’re just another villain, and I’d rather watch them all be wiped out while they’re still trying to be heroic and failing than what comes if they keep up with this.

So.

I’d like to think the story isn’t really doing this.

That it is threatening this, and driving itself deep into the muck, but will ultimately call out the illusion of this much darkness as an illusion.

I really don’t want to read a story where it goes, “our themes matter! …unless we don’t think the plot progresses the way we want when we let them matter.”

Character should determine story, or story should determine character. Pick one, but they shouldn’t ever be at war. If a character’s arc is about telling fate to go fuck itself, but fate fucks them, you can’t expect the audience to buy it when any other character fights fate–but for real this time!!1!

Hell this makes me so frustrated.

I really, really would like to believe it will turn out fine, because you legitimately could not write something that flew more in the face of everything Historia’s grown into, and despite this story’s eccentricities, its character work is some of the best I’ve ever seen.

Eren’s out murdering children and making Mikasa cry, and it’s a given that something more is behind it.

Historia’s pregnancy breaks essential themes of the entire story, but yeah, it is totally what it looks like.

(inb4 it’s not what it looks like but somehow manages to be even worse because that’s the kind of bloody trail it’s been)

I don’t mean to keep beating this horse, because I’m guessing most everyone is sick of me losing my temper about it by now, but it drives me up the wall. I obviously have a personal interest in Historia’s arc, but I like the manga, and part of the appeal of Historia’s arc is how it is singing directly to the beauty that’s to be found in the cruel world instead of bowing to that cruelty.

Now one of the voices of that appears to be on bended knee and just. pleeeeease be a ploy. Please don’t turn into one of those series where I have to get out MS Paint and draw a bad graph about where a really great story gave up on itself.

Honestly, one of my dearest hopes is that I’m going to feel like a massive idiot for getting this worked up over this because it’s all going to be fine.

Time will tell, I guess.

For the time being…

-twitch-

[drink-n-watch]

Welcome one and all. Today is a very special day for me. I have been looking forward to this season of My Hero Academia since…well the last episode of season 3, and I was actually a little guiddy. Not gonna lie. I haven’t been this excited about a new anime season in a while and I can’t quite explain it.

And you know what else I really enjoy? My weekly episode reviews with Crow. I always get a little nervous at season’s end that he’ll tell me he’s too busy to renew our collabship so I sort of avoid the question as long as possible. This time I thought for sure it would be it and then he goes, we could watch MHA? Wanna start it?

I think I said something along the lines of – Why sure my good chap, as always it will be an immeasurable pleasure to work with you and an honour to get the ball rolling. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. Ok so my brain was just going Omergred SCORE!!This iz gonna be awsomecakes! But I must have typed that first thing…

Hummm.., Crow? Still here?

< Flipping through my notes… > Yep! That’s exactly what you wrote. You said “chap!” I remember thinking, “Wow! What a cultured response! I am most impressed!” Seriously, the honor’s all mine. I was worried you’d be too busy! So I’m very happy to be collaborating with you on MHA season 4. And after season 3’s multiple of amazing character moments (remember Tsuyu Asui in tears when she thought Izuku Midoriya and the others who went on the rescue mission for Katsuki Bakugou?), my hopes are high for season 4!

Ok enough fooling around. This is serious stuff! Season 4 of My Hero Academia is finally here and I’m not sure about where you are, but for me it airs on Saturday mornings! How perfect is that???? It actually goes up at 7h15 a.m. and I fully intend to get up and watch it in my jammies with a bowl of cereal.

I can’t get up that early on a weekend! But it’s nice to know it’ll be there waiting for me when I do manage to haul my sorry self out of bed.

For all my anticipation, I didn’t really know what to expect from this episode. I haven’t been reading the manga past the anime or anything. Crow, what did you think the premier would be like?

Good question, because I’d been wondering about the same thing! I had a vague expectation that we might start off with the villains as they plotted something, and as they were about to kick off their plan, switch back to the school. What we got, through, was something very different, and I think I liked it.

From the first few minutes there were some really nice visual narrative elements. The OP starts off on Deku’s hand, for instance. I mentioned it before, but MHA really uses close ups of hands as visual metaphors more than eyes. It has done so since the beginning, and I’m starting to see the trend seep over into other shows. Of course, it’s hardly the first show to employ this imagery, but it is one of the more popular, and it has used it extremely consistently.

Even in this first episode it comes up later on as Midoriya and the journalist are talking about the future of professional heroes. It may seem like a random thing to pay attention to, but I think it’s symbolic. Isuzu is a physical hero, like All-Might and his incredible punch. But Isuzu also feels helpless and lost a lot, he had to readjust his power as his arms were never going to be able to match All-Might’s, and he’s already damaged the muscles too much. You see all that in the way he stares at his hands, feebly flexing his fingers. It’s a ritual of self-awareness and season 4 made it the opening imagery of every single episode.

Interesting that you brought up his feelings of helplessness. I can’t imagine Isuzu standing up in front of a crowd and saying, “It’s fine now. Why? Because I am here!” And yet, there’s no doubting his bravery or heroism. He’s already done some great stuff, and he’s only gettings started. Heck, the fact that his muscles are so damaged is a testament to his will — even knowing his actions would result in long term or permanent injury, he stayed in many a fight! 

You know, it’s going to be a lot of fun talking about these characters!

The second visual cue I really enjoyed was having that random journalist crying at a video of All-Might’s last stand from season 3. Smart scene all around. For us fans, it situates right back into the MHA universe and reminds us of the climax of season 3; for animators, it’s a pleasant break as they get to reuse footage; and for OCD types like me, it’s a beautiful parallel to Deku crying in front of All-Might clips in season 1. A neat little circle to bring the whole story together and show us that the world needs its heroes. It’s not just Deku.

They did so many smart little things like that in this episode. In this case, up until this point, I was wondering about the journalist’s motives. I’m from a time when journalists were heroes (like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who helped bring down the corrupt US Nixon administration). But nowadays, they’re painted with a different brush, so I was worried! This scene not only put my suspicions (almost!) to rest, but it really humanized the reporter.

Ok, we can’t go on about every minute of the show for a paragraph, so let me try to streamline this a bit. In large the episode was really just a recap and reintroduction to the characters. Considering there are 20 students in class A1 alone, and numerous other students, teachers and villains to take into account, it makes sense to give the audience a little refresher. This is a gargantuan cast.

Using the device of having a journalist snoop around for the next Symbol of Justice was a nice organic way to make that happen and frame the episode. There even a little photo montage in the middle that’s sure to delight fans. At least – it delighted me! It was like meeting all my old friends again for the first time. Does that make any sense?

Yep! Absolutely! As it dawned on me what the writers were doing, I was more and more impressed that instead of a static information dump, we got a story where it made sense to review the characters and situation. 

And is it okay to admit that the shot of an emancipated All Might, barely able to stand, pointing and saying “Next, it’s your turn” still gives me chills? Just thinking of the weight Isuzu must feel like he’s under…

They didn’t go into it, and MHA may actually never go into it, but what was left unsaid is that Deku is now under a huge amount of pressure. Ah! Great minds! It was already daunting to think of himself as All-Might’s successor when the latter was still in some respects around, but now that he’s just Toshinori Yagi, it’s all up to Deku. And as earnest as he may be, there is no way he’s ready for that. I wonder if he’ll be able to take the pressure.

His humility gives him a head start. He knows he’s not ready, so he’ll prepare. And did you catch what All Might said to him? “Next, it’s your turn— No, it’s all of your turns.” Was that just a way of phrasing it, or will Deku’s version of One for All somehow be a more distributed power? Maybe together they’ll be the symbol of peace instead of Deku alone? The idea of a singular symbol of peace seems to have sown a lot of conflict. Just look at Endeavor’s relationship with All Might!

We did get a bit of foreshadowing for what I think will be the first arc this season. The “unease” everyone is feeling and the upheaval that All-Might’s retirement has caused upsetting the balance between professional hero and villain. It’s a good premise, ripe with conflict and potential drama. Combine that with a possible unravelling of Deku’s character, and this season could prove to be way more intense than past ones.

That’s saying a lot — it’s not like previous seasons were calm strolls through the park!

All in all, nothing happened during the episode. Not really. And that was great. I think it’s a pretty smart way to set everything up and get your ducks in a row. We got to see everyone a little bit, but not much. Most of the main characters didn’t even have lines. Still it was good to see them. My favorite is Aizawa as always, and he was in fine grumpy form. Who were you happiest to see?

Aizawa was up there! I love how he watched the reporter talk to Deku. It was great seeing Ochako Uraraka; my opinion of her did nothing but go up after her bout with Bakugou. Also nice to see Froppy yeah – always nice to see Froppy!; since she was so solid beside Isuzu when the villains invaded the school, I’ve liked her. The more I think about it, the more I’m reminded of your comment earlier that “This is a gargantuan cast.” It really is! And not only that, it’s packed with interesting and varied characters. So my final answer to which I was happiest to see is cheating: All of them!

Well I’m excited for what comes next. Any thoughts on this first episode?

I think you covered it! Great mechanism to reintroduce us to the cast and get us ready to hit the ground running next episode!

Random thoughts; Has All-Might’s voice always been this nice? I really liked the OP song. I wonder who the unicorn girl is.

Great! Now I’m even more excited to see the next episode! 

My Hero Academia s4 ep64 – The Heir Welcome one and all. Today is a very special day for me. I have been looking forward to this season of My Hero Academia since...well the last episode of season 3, and I was actually a little guiddy.