Chapter 255 Thoughts

Herein: Endeavor, Jirou’s big moment, and me lamenting the long-lost AFO With Nuance.

On Endeavor

 •   The discrepancy in Enji’s recollections of his sons is, in fact, completely great.  Shouto with the glare but the small sweatdrop of awkwardness, and Touya with the big happy deranged grin.  One of your sons is so happy to see you, Enji!  It’s also notable—as others have talked about at more length than I will—that Endeavor’s thinking directly about Touya for the first time since the reveal.  He’s previously shied away from it somewhat, using kanji/furigana mismatches to conflate “my son” with “a villain,” and being extremely vague every time Shouto tried to pin him down on the matter of going and doing something about Touya, but here his thoughts are aimed directly at both of them, “facing” them even if only in his mind.  A positive sign, I feel.

 •   I think it’s interesting that he lists “this fight” among the things he brought on himself.  The wound, sure; he slipped up and let AFO get that attack in.  But the fight itself?  Hawks and All Might planned those match-ups; the most Endeavor did was go along with it against his own misgivings and guilty conscience.  Should we take this to mean he’s now thinking he should have put his foot down and gone to face Touya instead?

 •   People (both in the fandom and in the chapter itself) seem very confident that Endeavor will be right back up, and they’re probablyright?  But I wonder.  Endeavor tries to get back up, but he falls, and then there’s that close-up of all the blood in the grass, spreading ever farther.  It feels ominous. I don’t think Endeavor’s going to die, and frankly after all the hurt he’s taken in previous fights, it would feel a bit odd for one wound in his side to take him down.  The manga has ever been inconsistent when it comes to how much lasting effect any given injury is going to have, but since that inconsistency typically resolves in favor of “whatever’s going to make things more convenient for heroes,” Enji staying down because of this would be a swerve, and a welcome one.  I guess we’ll see.
   

On AFO and “Extras”

I kind of hate this.  I’ve complained about it periodically before, and maybe it’s just sour grapes from having read him wrong, but late series AFO really is such a disappointment  This is a man who built an empire out of little people, one power exchange, one favor at a time.  At Kamino, he said he hated All Might for taking out his support network, for standing atop a pile of bodies of AFO’s allies.  He always recognized Tomura’s choices in allies.  His nemesis is One For All, a power built up through the lives of “small” people.  Hell, if you take Vigilantesas canon, it’s only been a few years since Koichi’s big finale, in which AFO explicitly recognizes the power of ordinary people to rise to the occasion in extraordinary circumstances and calls that a specific danger to him in modern times.  So why on earth is he so dismissive of “extras” now?

From a Watsonian perspective, I favor the explanation that he went kind of crazy in Tartarus; it’s also about the only explanation I don’t find exceptionally tiresome, but sadly one that is almost certainly not the intended read.  It’s just so easy, so unchallenging, so plodding.  And frankly, it makes AFO act stupid.  If he can’t imagine that little people could pose a threat to him, it leaves him completely flat-footed when they do, and that’s just the deadliest fuckin’ thing for his believability as a “mastermind”-type villain who can’t shut up about all the different paths and plans he has available to reach his ultimate goals.

He and his vestige have been trending this way for some time now—certainly since Jakku!—but it’s reaching new heights since the beginning of this arc.  It’s like I’m watching Horikoshi flanderize this man in real-time.
    

Jirou and Friends (and AFO and Bakugou)

Man, I wish BNHA actually had the ensemble chops to land this moment.  But like, if we were really supposed to buy Jirou getting angry about her friends crying, maybe we could have had a) any more significant relationship between Jirou and Midoriya than him helping her organize her notes that one time and b) any relationship between Jirou and Aoyama at all.  

The most generous read I’ve got is that Midoriya and Aoyama were on Jirou’s mind because she’d been thinking mere seconds prior about how those two have been living with the terror of AFO’s looming threat,(1) but it would have hit so much harder if Jirou had had any significant presence in Deku or Aoyama’s arcs before, or had been shown as the type of character who’s overtly friendly with everyone.  Hell, what would be so wrong with letting her get up in arms for her own sake, wanting to prove she’s no extra, or that AFO is wrong to spit on the efforts of people like her just because he doesn’t think her quirk is duly impressive?

When you put it together with the A Band reunion back in Chapter 327 and the total lack of pay-off on that thread, it’s enough to make a blogger wonder if there was something else originally planned for Jirou and this is a hurried sub-in moment after that idea was scrapped.

You know who feels like he oughtto be having this plot?  Mr. “Extras Should Just Get Out of the Way” himself, Bakugou Katsuki.  Honestly, with as over-the-top as AFO is getting with the extras talk, I very much wonder if Bakugou will end up having to fight him after all—maybe if Kurogiri gets sprung and shuffles the fights again?  AFO having nothing but derision for weak quirks and thinking that extras serve no purpose but to make him look cooler in their defeat feels so precisely calibrated to mirror early Bakugou that’s it’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy AFO getting ganged up on by relative randos! And that, too, is thematic in its way. Jirou (and maybe Tokoyami next chapter?) getting something like this is very cool. But I wish it could come in a context where I was more convinced by BNHA as an ensemble piece. With any luck, this will be a first step of the series finally properlyturning away from the mentality the heroes still have, of using big “important” people to fight important fights.
    

AFO and Vestiges (What’s New, Pussycat?)

Once again, AFO gets all the good vestige drama.  I ask you, gentle readers, why didn’t we ever get to see Deku have to struggle with vestige interference?  Why can’t Shigaraki get some assists from vestiges who hate AFO more than they have any opinion about this new kid?  When will we get to see Vestige!Ujiko?

This is another case, though, where it’s difficult to credit that this should be such a surprise to AFO.  Has he really never had a (non-New Order) vestige try to fight him before?  Would they not have contributed their efforts when All Might drove him into a corner in their backstory fight?  I largely like the idea of them banding together only when it seems that their efforts could make a crucial difference, but it would carry more weight if we had ever gotten to see their perspective before.

And there’s even an easy prospect for that!  AFO has Search, Ragdoll’s quirk, so why haven’t we ever once seen her in any of these vestige scenes?  Hell, she could even have gotten a line or two explaining why this is only happening now, maybe a flashback to what it’s actually like to be a psuedo-sentient quirk ghost trapped inside AFO. She could be the one leading (or maybe coordinating, given the nature of Search) the charge, because that’s one of the things heroes do: inspire others to take up the mantle themselves.
    

Jirou’s Injury: Is It Sexist?

Here’s my opinion: The talk getting around about Horikoshi being a big gross sexist, possibly one with a fetish for brutalizing women, because of Jirou getting one ear jack blown off is not entirelywithout merit, but it is pretty oversimplified.(2)  Only two women have been irreversably maimed beyond simple scarring thus far: Mirko losing two limbs, and Jirou losing half her quirk.  Compare Aizawa losing an eye and the lower part of one leg, Mr. Compress an arm, Re-Destro both his legs, and Overhaul both his arms and his access to his quirk, and you’ve actually got twice as many men as women taking those lifelong, irrecoverable injuries!

Also too, that’s only talking about people who were significantly and, thus far, permanently impacted by their wounds.  If you expand the scope somewhat to people who were maimed with less severe impact on their combat effectiveness, you get people like Jeanist and his lost lung, and Hawks and all his lost feathers.  You also have to talk about people like Mirio or Shigaraki, whose maimings were severe but temporary, or Gran Torino, who didn’t lose an obvious limb, but who still doesn’t seem to be back in fighting shape, given that we still haven’t seen him out of a hospital bed.  

Virtually all the characters in these latter categories are men; the only female character I can think of that fits any of those particular bills is Lady Nagant, who at present seems to be in the Gran Torino tier.  Two women compared to four men, or three women compared to nine men: it’s not exactly the clear-cut damnation a lot of people talk like it is!  And Mirko bounced back like a damn jai alai ball, while Jirou still has enough oomph for supermoves, whereas Aizawa’s big contribution at the moment is holding hands with Monoma, and Overhaul can’t access his quirk at all!

That said, the numbers absolutely do get much worse when you start folding in deaths.  I would say that twice as many prominent/significant women have died in this series than similarly placed men—Nighteye and Twice compared to Magne, Curious, Star & Stripe, and Midnight.(3)  It looks even worse when you consider the percentages of women overall in the groups that lose them: three women versus eleven men in the UA staff; one woman and four men in the MLA; two women and six men in the League circa meeting Overhaul.  And so on; in all cases, men drastically outnumber women, but women die at exorbitantly outsized rates.

That ties into a further disparity, which is the gender balance on which characters are allowed to keep contributing to the plot after their injuries, versus which ones die or get booted off-camera.  

For the men, you once again have Twice and Nighteye, and I would add Overhaul as well—his brief return doesn’t see him doing anything remotely significant save giving Deku a quick moral trial.  You could possibly count Gran Torino as well, though he at least got to give Deku some words of advice for the road, and it remains to be seen whether he might make an appearance at e.g. the hospital Spinner’s currently attacking.  That’s four men significantly removed from prominence out of a list that I would probably say constitutes eleven men overall—add on Aizawa, Mr. Compress, Re-Destro, Best Jeanist, Hawks, Mirio and Shigaraki.

For the women, conversely, Jirou and Mirko are the onlytwo who have bounced back, from a list that would in full include Lady Nagant, Curious, Star & Stripe, Magne and Midnight.  Fewer women on the overall list than men, but the men have much better rates of recovery.  There’s no getting around the fact that Aizawa wakes up in a hospital after chopping off his own leg like a badass while Midnight dies on her hands and knees.

Which also brings up the topic of how sexualizedwomen’s injuries are compared to men’s.  Off the cuff, and without going back over all the relevant scenes in detail, I feel like there’s at least some measure of reflexive sexualization of women’s bodies going on there, stuff that is being read in a worse light than Horikoshi intended it.  I would call it a factor with Midnight and Mirko for sure, though, and I might think more with some research.  The only male counter-examples I’d even consider broaching would be Mr. Compress (shirtless, posing, dramatic reveal of his hair and unmasked face; it’s all very intentional and agency-having compared to the women) and Shigaraki, who we really do have to watch get brutalized, shirtless, at profoundly uncomfortable lengths and extremes; he does far more agonized floorbound writhing, for example, than Mirko, though their respective outfits mean you see a lot less of his thighs when he’s doing it.

So, yeah.  The trouble isn’t the simple number of women taking bad injuries, nor even the extent ofthose injuries.  The trouble is how impactful those injuries are on the whole, and what percentageof women are taking them compared to the men.

That said, Jirou’s not out of the fight yet—again, she still had the oomph for that big supermove—and as a 1-A student, I don’t expect her to be bowed out of what remains of the plot entirely, at least not more gallingly than any number of the second string 1-A kids.  Her injury was not sexualized at all, and while it was somewhat graphic—that panel of her severed jack!—I wouldn’t say it was more graphic than, say, Shigaraki getting his fingers pinched off by RD, or pretty much anything going on with the remnants of Dabi’s face.  We’re also very early in this fight still; there’s lotsof time for more students to take more injuries, so the full scope of how 1-A’s girls fare in this fight compared to the boys will not be apparent for some time yet.  

That all said, while I would call Jirou’s injury part of a larger pattern, I’m not prepared to jump to “Horikoshi was just sitting at his desk slavering at the chance to brutalize this teenage girl.”  Frankly, I’d far rather see girls out there taking an active role in fights against major threats like AFO and Near High Ends and taking their licks for it, like Mirko and Jirou, than girls sequestered in support roles on the sidelines and never getting anything interesting to do, like poor Momo.  And I will feel even happier about it if some boys—anyboys—take some comparable licks too.

Stray Thoughts

 •   “I could tell from the sound of his breathing, which my feathers picked up on.”  Lawd, this is stilted.  Why would Hawks need to tell himselfthe bit about his feathers?  Surely he himself knows the method by which he detects Endeavor’s breathing?  Some of his lines here I could chalk up to him being a very methodical thinker in combat—as is the case with, “We go forward with that assumption!”—but some of it just feels like a combination of Horikoshi holding the audience’s hand(4) and C.Cook’s translation being awkwardly phrased.

 •   Dark Shadow asking after Jirou: what a cutie.  I like it when he interacts with other people—Tokoyami, of course, but the rest of the class as well.

 •   I’ve really enjoyed the dynamism of this fight.  I’m deeply tired of the BNHA fight scenes all boiling down to Deku punching and/or kicking something really hard, or people like Bakugou, Shouto and Endeavor all having these huge elemental-based attacks that might be distinguishable in color, but just aren’t very interesting in black and white.  Also, like, none of those people can truly fly;they can only propel themselves violently in a certain direction.  So the high maneuverability of a true aerial combat between AFO, Hawks, and Tokoyami-carrying-Jirou, with Hawks in particular zipping around with a pair of swords, and Jirou and AFO’s attacks tending towards more serpentine visuals, has been a welcome corrective.

—–

1:  Which is a fair cop for Aoyama, but is on thinner ice where Deku is concerned, seeing ashe and AFO never had a direct encounter at Kamino, the Jakku encounter was AFO’s vestige rather than the man himself, and the post-Nagant material was spurred on entirely by a prerecorded video.  Deku had never met AFO face to face until literally the beginning of this combat.

2:  And, tumblr being tumblr, wildly over-accusatory.

3:  Counting all nameddeaths evens the raw numbers somewhat, but I categorically refuse to grant side characters and one-offs like Native, Majestic and Snatch the same prominence as arc-starring characters like Star & Stripe and prominent arc villains like Curious.  Crust comes the closest to making my cut, but he’s just such a one-joke character, completely lacking the slightest hint of interiority, that even though he’s in twice as many chapters as, say, Curious, he doesn’t have half of Curious’s motivation, personality and clear sense of history with her compatriots.

4: 1:  I wonder, sometimes, if Horikoshi was a little traumatized by that whole thing where he had everyone writing in to ask him about Deku using OFA One Million Percent against Muscular and having to explain that that was just Deku thinking1,000,000% to get himself hyped up, not a literal representation of his power output.  The BNHA fandom is full of pedants, East and West alike, it seems.  (I say this as an unbelievable pedant myself, of course.)

Chapter 354 Thoughts

Gonna see about making these an ongoing thing. Fair warning that they’ll probably be running a bit late, as chapter reaction posts go, seeing as I typically prefer to draw final conclusions from the official English release, not the often-garbled scanlations. It’s tempting to let them trail a full week late, in fact, largely to avoid big in-depth posts about things that turn out to be ludicrous fake-outs like that Hagakure “reveal” a few months back.

• The opening of this chapter provides another excellent example of the bizarre funhouse mirror BNHA is in right now with its character sympathies.  In Chapter 346, it was Best Jeanist and company dubbing the arena for Shigaraki a coffin in the sky; here, it’s Hawks talking about how the best way to target AFO is to take out his life support.  The divide between the adults’ approach, which explicitly has death on the table as the likely and probably even intendedoutcome of these battle plans, and (some of) the kids’ approach, as they ponder if there’s any possible way to helpthe people they’re being set against, is so sharp.
          
  I really am just waiting for the other shoe to drop, because Horikoshi can’t possibly be expecting me to root for the heroes’ plan, can he?  No amount of cool gadgets and heroes utilizing the villains’ resources against them is going to distract me from the fact that the heroes have all the advantages here.  I feel like I’m watching a heist flick where the casino security knew the heist was coming and so has the scrappy band of thieves split up into their own personal kneecap-breaking backrooms faster than you can say “gross income disparity.”
          
  When do we get to the point where the plans start falling apart?
          
  And on thatnote, I rather enjoyed this chapter.
          
          
• I’d love to have a better handle on how exactly Hawks having “prosthetic feathers” works.  Did somebody make Hawks a pile of replica feathers?  How exactly does he control them?  How do they work alongside his remaining real ones?  How do they help boost his speed?  If Hawks has taken permanent damage to his wings, and his speed has dropped accordingly, why couldn’t it just have stayed as his speed dropping?
          
  It feels like another weird thing like all the back-and-forth about Shigaraki’s post-surgery timeframe-until-perfected.  Every single one of the 3+ timeframes provided was equally arbitrary, so why did we have to spend so much time shuffling it around?  If Hawks’ speed is lessened by some arbitrary amount, why does it have to be boosted back up equally arbitrarily with “prosthetic feathers” that are (at least so far) completely indistinguishable from his real ones?
          
  Personally, I’ve always been partial to nimble dual swordwielders, so I dig Hawks’ twin black swords look.  I would have been entirely happy if that’s just what he was packing now rather than the vagaries of his alleged prosthetic feathers.
          
                
• “So we’re both crippled, huh?” is a good roast.
          
          

• Horikoshi has learned about Poor Little Meow Meows.  Look at the cat ears on this helmet.  Ridiculous (affectionate).  But seriously, I like AFO’s new look in general.  The waistcoat is very dapper, and the rolled up sleeves very flattering.  I’m enjoying watching him float around gesticulating with his ankles crossed.
          
          
• I love watching All For One drop bombshells, and the Touya reveal (remix) is no exception.  He just sits on these soul-shattering truths like fine jewels he takes out to admire from time to time before putting them away until it’s time to use them.  And then, when he does finally decide to deploy them, you can just hearhim savoring them, rolling the syllables of the words around in his mouth like a wine connoisseur.  The “Shimura Nana’s grandson” reveal was exactly the same way.  Truly, it’s one of my favorite modes of AFO’s villainy.
          
          

• #nice
          
          
• This is a good Hawks chapter.  As others have said, I enjoy how obvious it is that he expects everyone else to be able to just shut off their emotions and act rationally, like he does, and that’s just not something Endeavor right now can do.  It’s not something Twice could do, which experience you might expect Hawks to have learned from, but not so much, apparently!
          
  I like, too, that he’s so resolved to keep being there for Endeavor-san, who he cares about so, so much, but this isn’t something that his “being there” is going to assuage.  If one were an Endhawks shipper (and one is), one might be tempted to read a bit of possessiveness into a lot of Hawks’ behavior post-Jakku: shepherding Endeavor around, having his back, not pushing him to stay in touch with his family, and ultimately letting him avoid a family confrontation for a bunch of reasons that I’m sure all sounded really great in Hawks’ head, but also all meant that Endeavor would be there with him, not with his sons.  Of course Endeavor’s head isn’t in the game!  No amount of Hawks rooting for him is going to change that, and honestly, that feels like the closest thing Hawks has had to a real emotional setback since his Screaming Internally face applauding in the audience of the League/MLA merger speech.  
     
               
• AFO giving Endeavor a scar to match/mirror All Might’s is nice and all, but I feel Endeavor really ought to have lost his quirk right there?  Let me demonstrate: 

(Okay, maybe a few inches further up, since we’re running in a shonen mag and all.)
        
See?  But frankly, even not quite touching him, AFO really ought to have been more than close enough.  Hori may have forgotten (or be trying to retcon) that bit in Chapter 193 where AFO leaps over a crowd with his hands outspread and takes four quirks simultaneously without touching a single one of them, but I have not (and will not).
        
Tragically, people getting their quirks’ previously demonstrated capabilities nerfed to make a fight scene work is not new, and it happens to the villains more than most.*  Perhaps it’s meant to read as AFO playing with his food, but like, the man’s got stuff to do, and Hawks’ despair at watching that brilliant flame be stolen would surely be equally tasty.

• Given aforementioned stuff about Hawks and Endeavor’s disunity as caused by Hawks not being able to account for the effect of Endeavor’s feelings about his kids, it’s quite satisfying to me that Hawks had to get saved by the kid he’sbeen resolutely dodging.  Hawks really does not deserve Tokoyami.  And honestly, while I’d still like to see some conflict there re: Tokoyami’s respected mentor stabbing a fleeing man in the back, I’m all for anything that reminds the top heroes that students other than Deku exist.  It feels of a piece with Class 1-A showing up to lovingly kick Deku’s ass with the power of friendship and a united will, and makes a good contrast for Endeavor and Hawks, who absolutely are not working on a united will right now.
          
          
• “Jobber characters” Caleb Cook why. My first instinct is to question whether this is a term AFO knew from back in the day, and can thus be used to date him, or whether he picked it up from Tomura, and it’s thus a very ridiculous “How do you do, fellow kids” moment.  Upon further research, though, the Japanese there seems to just mean “supporting characters,” derisive sneer entirely optional, making “jobber” a particularly embellished localization.  More on this topic next time.
          
          
• If Tokoyami and Jirou manage to take out All For One, I will literally never stop laughing.  I may not think it’s particularly great storytelling, but I will think it is extraordinarily funny. Do your best, you two!!  I’m rooting for you!  AFO has been very annoying lately and he clearly needs to go back to Character Hiatus prison until he can come back with more nuanced characterization!

—

* Off the top of my head: the aforementioned disparity with All For One, Mr. Compress not being able to just compress and decompress his way out of Jeanist’s cables, Uraraka suddenly needing to touch bare skin to make people float when it has literally never worked that way for her or Toga, everything about what inanimate objects/background characters Dabi can incinerate compared to his flames’ effect on named characters, etc.