#vigilantes has a pretty severe Early Installment Weirdness hurdle but I'm so glad we have it around as a supplement anyway

[stillness-in-green]

The Spinaraki in me is screaming but the Villain society stan in me is disappointed that Spinner doesn’t seem to think more about his fellow mutants.

It certainly does make for a curious confrontation in the making with Shouji (my assumptions, let me show you them), anon! In this corner, a guy who’s always kept his head down and lived behind a mask! In this corner, a guy who just wants to get his boyfriend out from under the thumb of his controlling dad! And behind the scenes, a bunch of people who are definitely all-in on this confrontation, but have a bunch of ideology gumming up the clarity of the message! Truly, are there any heteromorphic people out there who just want to speak their own truths?!

Well, maybe, maybe not.

I don’t think Spinner doesn’t think about his fellow mutants, really; he just has other priorities. Spinner, despite his early feints otherwise, has never been an ideologically motivated villain, and I don’t expect him to become one now. As he told us himself, he was never really into Stain because of the content of Stain’s antisocial ideology, just the fact of Stain having an antisocial ideology. Even that, Spinner’s long outgrown.

As @codenamesazanka lays out here (in response to an extremely silly anon), none of the League are really societal reformers or principled anarchists who want to make the world a better place.(1) And for the most part, I think that’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to continue passing out Stan the MLA propaganda for all my principled villain needs, especially since they’ve gone ahead and provided me with a specific sub-group who very much are thinking about their fellow mutants. I also don’t think it’s such a bad thing that Shouji has mostly kept his head down and Spinner’s got more pressing concerns; both of those are perfectly realistic responses to real-life experiences of bigotry and oppression, especially from people who, having grown up with it, may well have grown jaded about trying to change it long ago.

My trouble is and remains that the story desperately needs to find someone who a) can speak to heteromorph problems with intellectual honesty and rigor and b) isn’t going to get stomped flat in the first hero fight they come up against and get thrown in prison where no one has to think about the points they were making anymore. The closest people we have to that right now are Shouji—who has problems with the intellectual honesty department—and Average Woman Heteromorph Gal, whom Horikoshi has still not even seen fit to name.(2)

I very much do not like the current set-up, in which no one with active involvement in that plotline is just there because they believe it, without some kind of outside cause/manipulation. I quipped somewhere once that the heteromorphs need a Tsukauchi Makoto, and I stand by that. Sadly, I don’t think we get characters that well-spoken in history and law and social analysis outside of Vigilantes, because Furuhashi Hideyuki is, himself, either more interested in or freer to explore those things than Horikoshi Kohei.

Thanks for the ask! Let's hope for the best together, anon!

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1: Dabi and Compress probably come closest; Compress might even still get there, if he deigns to someday give us a proper explanation of exactly what his motivations were wrt to the League, but I think at most he and Dabi are probably in a similar place of “Burn out the rot and what’s left, no matter how shit it is, will still be better than what we have now.”

2: I was and remain unbelievably salty that someone with as much importance-relative-to-bit-characters as she has didn’t even get a name on her goddamn volume compilation character page, while the small fry villain chump who lived and died in two pages, just long enough for ShigAFO to crash through his living room wall and try to pass New Order off to him, got named upon his introduction. That’s a crock of shit, Horikoshi. Give her a name.