Chapter 353 Thoughts

These are belated, but also, extremely extensive. I have a lotof thoughts about this chapter. A couple of those thoughts are even positive! I wish more of them were, but I have a lot of issues with, for example, the continued lazy handwave of just how many heroes are still active, and the even lazier characterization shortcuts at a time when the narrative themes would seem to demandthat no villain just gets dismissed as Bad because heroes can’t be bothered to ask basic questions about their motivations.

Hit the jump.

I am so unbelievably weary of the heroes always having all the people they need to do any given thing.

• Fighting literal thousands of trained warriors scattered in bases all across the country?  No big; the heroes have more than enough people!
• All the heavy hitters ran off to fight Machia?  Well, they won’t stop him, but the split in their forces still won’t have enough of an effect for the PLF at the villa to turn the tables.
• Heroes dead or resigning in mass numbers up against a resurgence in villains?  Eh, whatever, there are still more than enough no-names to fight off near-High Ends and explicitly station “dozens” of heroes everywhere they could possibly be needed!

Seriously, why even bother with the “heroes resigning” angle if it’s never really going to matter that they’re short-handed?  Why can’t I watch the heroes have to struggle to overcome a problem with the people and resources they already have on hand, rather than all their plans always coming together to drop them perfectly timed reinforcements and all the cannons and spare prosthetic limbs anyone could ever ask for?

And you know, it’s not like the general shape of things would even have to change overmuch to make things seem marginally more dire!  One simple thing would do it: skew the age range.  If ever so many heroes are dead and/or gone, then just show us more students. 

We already know students have been involved in professional actions, so why do we only ever see the UA kids—and only the ones we know, at that?  Why not show some of those briefly-glimpsed 2-A students?  Do literally any third years exist at UA other than the Big Three?  Where have the Ketsubutsu and Shiketsu kids been in all this?  Maybe make some of those background characters obvious teenagers instead of obvious Pros, and that’d help address the number issue.

Then too, you could get some more drama out of their relative inexperience or insecurity.  Of course, some of the window on that is already gone, since presumably even students whose classes weren’t getting attacked by villains on the regular have now all had work studies, internships, and whatever their parts were in the raids on the PLF—but even still, the mass reduction in the numbers of Pros, on top of the shifting tide of public opinion, would by rights have a psychological impact.

Instead, we’re continually stuck with the Class 1-A kids, a smattering of whatever Bs help the story, and a periodic shot of one of the Big 3 somewhere, and then a pile of Pros, never failing to have just enough people to succeed at whatever they’re doing, and my god, it’s so boring.  Thank god for Toga proactively lassoing her would-be love interest through a portal at the last second so we got anyshake-up on this at all. 

Cripes.  If Hose Face’s judgment is that the heroes were only pretending to be scattered and without unity, what does it say about what the villains are facing, and why should I believe Horikoshi when he tells me that no, really, the heroes totally are stretched thin!

And like, okay, having a bunch of people stationed to protect Machia, that’s a totally fair call.  It’s incredibly obvious that AFO would want Machia back on the field, and that the heroes would really, really not.  But what did Hawks and co. have to sacrifice to station so many people there to guard Machia?  What or who did they have to make the strategic choice to leave underdefended?

We know the police numbers are a bit thin where Ujiko is being kept, so is that going to matter?  Is a villain detachment going to show up to spring Ujiko?  What about Kurogiri?  Is Spinner going to run into enough opposition to stop him, especially since it’s been made so repeatedly clear that All Might and Hawks weren’t really planning for Spinner, much less a mid-sized-kaiju Spinner?  (More on him in a bit.)

And, if AFO is really so S+ Intelligence, did he foresee any of these calls?  It remains deeply weird to me that we had All Might saying he predicted AFO would throw everything he’s got at Deku/One For All a mere handful of chapters removed from AFO saying he never puts all his eggs in one basket; he always has multiple possible routes to take to get to the same end.

On the evidence of the manga, I’m forced to assume that Hawks just tacitly ignored All Might’s opinions and arranged for there to be back-up in multiple locations. If the task force had just taken All Might’s word for it, Machia and Kurogiri’s locations would have had whatever the standard complement of security is and no more. But then why let All Might even have that big triumphant moment about how they totally predicted that AFO would bring his army with him?

And if AFO is so S+ Intelligence, did he in turn predict what the heroes would choose to prioritize? Will there be a single area that he targets that the heroes didn’t already guess that he would? Seriously, for a villain who we’re constantly told is such a spider at the center of the web type, AFO certainly never seems to have counter-moves of his own prepared for when he takes the field.

Alternatively,are the attacks on Machia and Kurogiri’s locations not AFO’s work at all, but Skeptic’s?  Does that mean AFO is actually giving Skeptic a relatively free hand to manage the PLF’s resources, rather than dictating their deployment: you handle your people and I’ll handle mine?  If that’s the case, who on the hero side has got enough of a handle on Skeptic’s tactics to try to outmaneuver him?  The heroes haven’t even managed to disable his communications network!  Come on. Stop just telling us the heroes saw everything coming every chapter and make them have to workfor something for once!

OKAY, with that rant out of my system, let me move on.

I like Mineta nodding in tearful, vehement agreement to Mina’s comment that Todoroki got the job done. 

My favorite aspect of Mineta is that, while he’s prone to envy and poking fun at his classmates, he’s actually extremely invested in them, to the point that he’s reliably one of the most emotional in any given scene involving a previously endangered classmate turning out to be okay.  He’s the one bringing the get-well-soon gift at the hospital; he’s the one who hugs Bakugou; he’s the one who’s always in tears about someone the class was worried about turning out okay. 

It always baffles me somewhat to see fans of the students expressing confusion that Mineta cared about X Student whenever something like this comes up—like, guys, it’s always been that way, even very early on, and it’s only gotten more prominent as the class has gotten less safe.

On Hose Face:

Nice to see he’s got eyes under that mask.  I wonder if we’ll see what he actually looks like under there?  I’m so curious about that big trunk appendage he and Lunch Rush have.  And what’s with the headphones?  I remain interested in anything Horikoshi’s got to give us on him, and any of the rest of the Advisors, and I hope they’ll do anything at all interesting with the page-time they’re obviously coming up on.

However. 

What in god’s name was up with that transparently obvious nod to Midnight?  Surely Midnight was not the onlyhero Hose Face’s group had to overcome the day of the raid, and in the time they’ve been active since?  Why call her out specifically?  What’s the in-character motivation for highlighting that specificdeath?  While it’s easy to imagine Midnight was a fairly divisive hero, I would hardly expect “schoolteacher” to be the part anyone taking issue with her would focus on.  So is it rather UA in general that Hose Face has a beef with?

Or is it, as I suspect, not that he’s got anything against her personally, but rather that none of the UA kids have any way to know who killed Midnight unless her killer just says it out loud within one of their earshots?  Is the only reason he made that comment because Horikoshi could not come up with a single more credible, more elegant way to get the kids that knowledge?  Like, it couldn’t even be deployed as a battle taunt next chapter??

Right now, it just looks like a brute force way to get Mina and Kirishima psyched up for this fight, because god forbid any student should have to engage with Liberation ideology intellectuallywhen we can just throw a body count at it and use that to write it off. 

As if Shigaraki Tomura doesn’t have a body count!  As if Stain didn’t have a body count! And yet, Tomura is seriously engaged with as someone who needs help despite his crimes; we’re allowed to have heroic characters acknowledging that Stain had a point despite his methods. Why can’t we get the same for anyone from the MLA, especially when their point is apparently so compelling that tens of thousands of people across the country and across generations have found it worth dedicating their lives to?

And I don’t know; maybe Horikoshi will surprise me, and Hose Face will lay out some actual accusations against Hero Society that Mina and Kirishima will be called upon to respond to, something that will even get us as far as the “cool motive” part of, “Cool motive; still murder."  Maybe.

I feel like we particularly need that here because what we have right now are two members of the three pairs who failed the practical portion of their mid-term exams, who couldn’t think their way out of what their teacher/principal threw at them.  Mina and Kirishima had a good(-ish) tag team moment against Gigantomachia, so what newchallenge will this bring to the table for them?

More importantly, is whatever it’s got in store worth killing Midnight for?  I mean, hers will still be a death that serves no purpose but to motivate other characters’ development,* but will at least be gooddevelopment?  I have my doubts.

I further remain somewhat confused as to why this character beat is going to Mina. It’s not like the set-up is completelyabsent? Mina is the one who confidently declared that Midnight would be fine when her classmates worried; Mina was among those who found Midnight’s body/were there when she died. Sure, okay.

But Mina doesn’t, to the best of my recollection, have much prior relationship with Midnight. Mina isn’t the one Midnight expressed specific confidence in during the mid-terms. Mina isn’t the one Midnight entrusted dealing with Gigantomachia to. Mina isn’t the student Midnight was thinking of at the very end.

That’sallMomo. So why is Momo—whose plot for this entire series has been about learning to trust her gut and utilize that intelligence and flexible quirk of hers quickly, on the ground, in the moment—stuck doing support for a girl who can’t be bothered to remember her name instead of being out on the field? Hell, if Momo was there, we could even have something go drastically wrong, and there’d be someone there smart enough to roll with it and come up with something. Indeed, I’d expectthat to happen because it’s where I’ve been expecting her arc to be leading all along.

Instead, it’s Mina and Kirishima, and I just don’t know why it’s them. As with so many things about the current set-up, I’m desperately hoping that it’s still the early days, and things will still go to hell in interesting ways that will require some more ingenuity from our ostensible lead characters.

What’s the escort mission Kirishima mentioned?

Where could he possibly have been escorting someone to in the ruins of Jakku?  And why do I get the extremely exhausting feeling that it’s just going to be another tiresome case of the heroes always managing to have all the pieces they need set up in advance of when they need them, while the villains are scrambling to keep up, but for some reason I’m supposed to see the heroes as the underdogs in any situation ever?

What’s up with Sero’s "…”? 

I’ve seen it proposed that it’s just a comic beat because he’s one of the ones who had to get cartoonishly overpowered to show how strong Todoroki was?  But the official translation of Ojiro’s line doesn’t feel like it leads into that?  Nor can I chalk it up to someone who was a little closer to Shouto feeling that brother fighting brother is not something that should be cheered for, regardless of which brother came out on top, as Sero was neither in Shouto’s hospital room in Chapter 298 nor his makeshift dorm room in 342. 

I really have no clue what to make of it, but it strikes me as potentially interesting, especially since Sero strikes me as a bit more sensible and canny than Sato or Ojiro.

(I also liked it because it felt like a very brief part of the chapter that broke up the hype parade of heroes prematurely celebrating a victory I remain unconvinced they’re having to work very hard for.)

Kunieda is very nifty, even if I think he is making some extremely questionable fashion choices vis a vis where he puts a shirt collar and coat lapels.

I like his big creepy red-black flowers.  I do wonder what the motivation is behind “proving his utility to AFO."  A materialistic desire for the things a victorious AFO can offer?  The ideological zeal of a True Believer? Fear that he needs to keep himself on the Demon King’s good side? 

I thought Dictator’s phrasing on a similar note was odd back when we got him. He talked about the securityhe’d gain by bringing Deku in, like he was in some kind of danger if he didn’t, be that a threat to his life or a loss of something he valued. I was frustrated back then that Dictator was such a transparent villainous caricature that an exhausted Midoriya Izuku felt no need to follow up on that hint—here’s hoping Kunieda gets even a little more engagement!

While we’re in the Kunieda scene, let me add that Aoyama would make a more convincing Aesop’s Bat if he’d ever actually wantedto be on AFO’s side to begin with, or made a choice to come clean to the heroes because he thought it’d be more beneficial to him, as opposed to him being discovered inadvertently through no choice or action of his own.  His lack of agency continues to undermine his potentially interesting situation.  Well, at least him peeking out from behind the ever-delightful Fat Gum is cute.

Spinner’s section hurts my soul. 

God.  The hand reaching for his face, not with AFO’s usual forceful, commanding dominance, but more a terrible, and terribly gentle, intimacy. Spinner’s small, regretful smile.  God. 

My flailing about the way Horikoshi drew AFO and Spinner in That One Panel aside, I liked Spinner’s outside viewpoint on Dabi, and how you could sayhe’s just wrong about it—Dabi’s pretty flagrantly gunning for the murder-suicide with Endeavor, after all!—but at the same time, that very desire hasdriven Dabi to survive, doesfill him with passion and purpose in ways Spinner has always had to look outside himself to find even a semblance of. 

And maybe Spinner was doing and would have continued to do better with his feelings for Shigaraki, but circumstances, as well as Shigaraki and Spinner’s own flawed decisions, have split them apart from each other, so Spinner can’t really fall back on his feelings for Shigaraki either, at least not and feel at all good about it.  I sympathize, because I am also in quite a lot of pain over it.

I consider myself about halfway to being right on the money about Shouji when I called this back in November, but there are a lot of caveats in place before I can consider myself remotely happy about it.

I’ve written a fair amount about my concerns about Shouji foiling Spinner, but it occurred to me recently that there’s a worryingly large chance that my fears are exactly on point, and the reason for it will prove to be a cultural thing. 

To wit, my Western individualistic lens says that, no, it’s not Shouji’s job to wear a mask his entire life to save ignorant people from nothing worse than passing discomfort.  In a more community-minded society like Japan, though, would the perspective be different?  I have a sizeable concern that we’re going to get Shouji’s choice lionized, that the message will be, yes, choosing to make people uncomfortable when you could easily make a "minor” sacrifice like wearing a mask when you go out is breeching meiwaku,so Shouji is correct and kind and noble, and the heteromorphs raising hell because of the way they’re pre-judged are just being selfish.

I desperately want Horikoshi to prove me wrong on this.  I hope he will.  But good god, Shouji thinking about how proud he is to be in the same class as a kid putting himself through the meat grinder because of Family Duty is notfilling me with confidence.

Shouji. Shouji, you are carrying the weight of one of the only Societal Issues in this story that Horikoshi would have a really hard time trying to somehow make All For One’s Fault. Please, please,pleaseaddress that issue with a response that doesn’t boil down to, “Hurting people is wrong. Just because people mistreat us because of their baseless prejudice doesn’t give us the right to make trouble over it. All we can do is try to prove them wrong and suffer in silence in the meantime.”

All my thoughts on Dabi and his glowing circle can be found here.

All except one: “Vmmm”is certainly not a very biological-sounding sound effect, is it?  I looked up the Japanese sound effect there (it transliterates to kiiii) on manga SFX translation site The Jaded Network, which suggested that the kana there typically represent a high-pitched squeaking or screeching sound, as of a chair being pushed back when someone stands up or a car slamming the brakes.  That definitely sounds more like a sound ice could plausibly make than vmmm, but as before I remain mostly content to just see where the story’s going with whatever’s going on there.

I love that AFO is so known for mindgames that Hawks is like, “Oh, here it fucking comes.”

About which a post on Chapter 354 would probably be a more appropriate place to expound.

That’s what I’ve got for 353. What do people think: should I keep doing these chapter posts? I obviously (very obviously) won’t always have this much to say, but I’ve been getting more asks of late about current events, so I can try to keep up these big round-up posts if there’s interest.

I’m not super into the prediction game—I’m much more interested in observation and reflection—but I suspect I can usually muster up at least a few talking points. And I’m not completely unswayed by the modest bragging rights available when one notices+publically comments on a weird discrepancy months before the manga calls active attention to it. (For what of the manga remains, anyway.)

Let me know! Or that one anon can just keep messaging me asking for my chapter thoughts; whichever works.

(* Which I only can’t call a fridging because most of the characters who’ve had really strong reactions to it thus far have also been women.)

On Chapter 352/Dabi’s Hypothetical Healing Powers/Dabi’s General Arc

Not a lot very detailed in exchange for the wait, I’m afraid, but here’s what I’ve got: 

I wish the official translation were not so obtuse.  There’re quite a few lines from Shouto that made much more sense to me in the fan translations, where it’s usually been the other way around.  But when I correct for “Shouto’s lines making any damn sense,” I continue to mostly like them!  Shouto deserves a chance to declare himself against his brother’s relentless attempts to define him, and the fire/ice fusion is a lovely culmination of his ongoing attempts to find and define himself as his own person, to figure out who he is in and of himself, connected to but not defined by his family circumstances.

At the same time, him finding himself doesn’t really address Touya’s issues, nor does it do much to offer Touya a different way forward, so while I’m very ready to spend time elsewhere, I think it’s perhaps for the best that Dabi’s got a dangling plot hook in the form of whatever’s going on with his body.  Which brings me to the other ask I’ve got about Dabi: 

Honestly, anon, I have to say that I’m not nuts about either of them.  That said, I only mostly know what the phoenix theory even is and am even more touch-and-go on the ice one, so I’m not really in a place to answer this question in detail while maintaining due rigor.  I don’t really seek out Dabi and Todoroki meta, you know?  From what I do know, though, I don’t particularly think eitherof them is greatfor the story.

Mostly what I’ve seen leaves me thinking that both theories are kind of grasping at straws to explain how Dabi can survive the amount of damage he’s doing to himself, as well as looking for ways to explain his backstory survival that don’t involve taking Ujiko at his word.  But I like hatred-fueled resurrections for Shigaraki just fine, and I don’t require that the story prove Ujiko wrong about everything he’s ever said as some kind of Hayes Code-esque moral imperative, so I have no issue with Touya demonstrating spite-based longevity.

After all, he was in Ujiko’s care for three years.  Surely if his survival had anything to do with his quirk, Ujiko—likely the world’s foremost quirk expert, given all the enhanced lifespan he’s devoted to studying them—would have figured that out?

It does seem, however, that the story’s not going to rest on spite-based longevity, so maybe the theorists will be right, and there’s some other answer to the question of how Touya’s survived.  I don’t love the idea of AFO foisting a quirk off on him either—though again, it’s not like he lacked for a timeframe to do it in—so I really have no idea what’s going on there.  Honestly, left to my own devices, I’d make the strange circle on Dabi’s collarbone be a laser sight from a sniper rifle, and pick back up the HPSC agent plotline such that Shouto, having saved Touya from himself, now also has to save Touya from an uncaring world.  I don’t suspect that’s what’s going on, though.

We’ll see when we see, I guess!

One other thing, though: something I think is interesting about Dabi right now is the way he’s completely embraced we/us/our language to talk about the League, other villains, the Lost of Hero Society, and so on.  It stands out to me in particular because Dabi spent so, so long being aloof from the League, rejecting their bonds, complaining about the way they behaved, openly insulting Spinner and Toga in particular, and generally acting like he considered himself to be so much more dangerous and noteworthy a threat to Hero Society than anyone else around him, be they random back alley thugs all the way up to Shigaraki himself.

That was when he was still keeping his identity secret.  Pretty much the second that secret came out, though, suddenly it was all, again, that we/us/our talk.  He counts himself among society’s outcasts, he does (his version of) a nice thing for Toga and encourages her, he tells Shouto to burn and die for oursakes.  And I like this turn-around, more or less, because it’s in line with something I’ve always kind of hoped for from Dabi, which is that, insofar as his personal relationships go, he’ll echo Endeavor’s path: ruthlessly utilizing the people in his life he ought to care about to advance his own goals, and only stopping to look back and regret the carnage after he gets what he wants and realizes it isn’t everything he thought it would be, by which point the damage has already been done.

I never really bought Dabi as overtly soft on the League, but I was willing to accept the possibility that he had a small soft spot that he was consciously throttling in the cradle because he refused to let it interfere with his goals.  With those goals halfway accomplished, however—Endeavor’s sins made public, Touya’s own survival revealed, Endeavor personally gutted and the family’s attempts to move on from his death pretend he never existed thrown into disarray—his ice is beginning to thaw.

…Just in time for it to be too late for it to matter.  The League’s a stomach-turning mess right now for anyone who cares about them even a little, and with Dabi where he is right now, there is absolutely nothing he can do to change that.  Nothing, perhaps, save rely on the younger brother who wants both to stop and to help him.

Ngl, it would make me much more warmly inclined towards Shouto if he, in his under-socialized literal-mindedness, would take all Dabi’s we/us/our talk to heart and ask him seriously what he thinks can be done for all his villain friends, who Touya must surely care for as much as Shouto cares about hisfriends, right?  And then Dabi can be like, “Wow, you took that much more to heart than I expected you to.  Uh.  Um.  Hm.”

Crucially, Dabi can’t fix any of the League’s current problems on his own, no more than Shigaraki can make the world better by annihilating it, or Spinner can help Shigaraki by encouraging all of Shigaraki’s most self-destructive tendencies.  And the adult heroes don’t care about fixing it, because the adult heroes have never cared about the circumstances that led the villains to their current outlooks.  That’s what the studentsre have to do: take the first step, be the bridge, improve on their predecessors’ performance, do what they couldn’t, save the people they failed to save.

Admittedly, I don’t really know how that would look in the story right now.  My concern is that we’re headed squarely for a, “The students will save the villains that they happened to receive a personal insight on and never think about the plights of all the villains that they didn’t happen to receive a personal insight on,“ ending.

But again, I suppose we’ll see when we see.

Thanks for the asks! I have rather more to say about Chapter 353; I’ll see about getting something up on that front soon.