Being a last collection of asks and replies-to-replies on 350.  One long one about Touya’s chances of survival without AFO (re: my repeated claims that Dabi doesn’t exist without AFO, not because of AFO’s manipulations, but because Touya just dies on the mountain without him), and two shorter ones about the plot holes and the narrative implications respectively.

Hit the jump!

By this point, I don’t recall what the early translations had to say, but from the official release, I don’t think Ujiko really said anything to that effect?  He had no concept of how Dabi had survived all this time, so wanted to ask him straight out; his conclusion afterward was simply that Dabi’s powerful grudge kept him going.

That’s not very realistic, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s terribly out of place in the shonen genre on the whole nor BNHA in specific.  This is, after all, the series that gave us, on the one hand, Nighteye’s deathbed speech about “wishing energy” allowing Deku to twist fate, and, on the other hand, explicit narration that Shigaraki died for real, but revived himself out of sheer hatred and the desire to pursue his apocalyptic dream.

If Shigaraki can literally wish himself back from the dead out of pure loathing, I don’t think we really needan explanation for Dabi’s survival beyond, “Spite is an excellent motivator.”  Particularly since it’s coming from Ujiko, it mostly feels to me like Hori giving us a cheekily wicked twist on the uplifting scene where a patient pulls through something the doctor never expected them to survive, and the doctor enthuses happily if somewhat confusedly over what a miracle it is, and really, it’s thanks to the patient’s determination.  You know the scene.

As to a quirk awakening, it seems to me that we already have one strong possibility: Touya’s fire turning blue the winter of his death.  It’s possible his fire turning hotter was simply his body continuing to develop, the same way his cold affinity took time to make itself known, but given that he’d been out training in secret, I also think it’s perfectly plausible that he unlocked that particular upgrade through his doomed backstory efforts.  It’s not exactly the combat awakening we seen in most cases, but they don’t haveto be combat-driven exclusively, as Geten’s proves; they can come about because of sufficient emotional upset.  And Touya would have been both pushing himself harder than was safe to do andgetting pretty worked up out on the mountain, given everything we know about him.

Could he have survived without AFO’s help?  I mean, I guess in a world where hate-fueled resurrections are possible, any level of truly ludicrous injuries are surviveable with the right emotional motivation.  It doesn’t feel like the best thing for the story to me, though.  Touya “dies” on Sekoto Peak; it’s one of the Todoroki family’s foundational tragedies.  Him surviving changes the entire course of the family’s plot—it might have been the one thing aside from actually getting the Number 1 spot that could have shocked Endeavor out that pursuit.  Him surviving might have been the push Rei needed to become the woman we see come to confront her husband in Chapter 301 (as, indeed, the same thing led her to said confrontation canonically).

Alternatively, none of that might have happened in Touya lived; they might all have fallen back into old patterns in time.  That’s in keeping with what we generally see from the Todoroki family, which is that they require outside intervention to change.  Endeavor doesn’t change until he gets the Number 1 spot through no effort of his own.(1)  Shouto doesn’t break out of his spiral until Midoriya shouts some sense into him at the Sports Festival, without which Shouto doesn’t go to see Rei, triggering her own improvement—which is then catalyzed by Dabi (who by that point definitely counts as outside intervention himself) projecting his video to the world.  Touya surviving feels the same way to me: it doesn’t happen without an outside hand.

There’s also the logistics to consider.  At the time AFO found Touya, he (AFO) had basically whatever quirks the story needed him to have, possibly including that empathy quirk he could have used to zero in on Touya’s location, as well as a teleporter and a mad scientist doctor.  He could have gotten Touya to help extremely quickly.

Conversely, per Chapter 302, Endeavor was still pushing through crowds when the entire mountain was already ablaze; we didn’t see him in the woods until the fire had already passed, whereas AFO appeared against a backdrop of still-raging flames.  Even if Endeavor was able to find the fire’s origin point relatively quickly,(2) he still would have been at best precious minutes later than AFO, and would have had to either physically carry his son off the mountain (at a time before he’d figured out flying, no less) or hope for an EMT chopper that could drop down a lift, which would then have only been able to give emergency care on the agonizingly long trip back to the nearest hospital.

It’s a far cry from AFO being able to have Kurogiri warp them right into the heart of Ujiko’s lab nigh-instantaneously!

Also too, even setting aside the narrative and mechanical considerations, it’s probably worth asking if Touya had the will to survive at that point.  It’s something I’ve thought a bit about in the wake of all the expected AUs coming out of this reveal: if Touya had stayed with his family, if Endeavor hadcome for him after the blaze, would he still have had that emotional drive to go on?

On Sekoto Peak, Touya was in despair, angry but more upset; it’s all too easy for me to imagine that, if he’d opened his eyes to see Enji’s frantic face above his own, there would have been a real danger that he would have felt some awful satisfaction, and thereafter acceptance, and would have simply, quietly passed away, because his dad came for him; his dad was looking at him, and that’s all he ever really wanted.

So, in summary, for a lot of reasons, I don’t think Touya could have survived Sekoto without AFO’s rescue, at least not for more than an hour or so.  We’ll see if there’s some kind of quirk-based explanation in the wings, but I’m not really expecting one.

Thanks for the ask, anon!

1:  Other than all the effort it took him to hold onto that Number 2 spot as long as he did, I mean.  But that just got him to Number 2; it took All Might retiring to get him to Number 1, and that, he didn’t have any influence on.

2:  As a fire user himself, I could buy Endeavor being able to rapidly navigate to origin/heart of a blaze through intuition or long experience.  He might also have known about where to look, if Touya was using the same training spot he himself had used.

———

Yeah, it’s an issue either way.  Either he had some additional resources he was sitting on and didn’t expect Touya to ever call him out on the blatant contradiction(/the writing fumbled the moment), or, as you said, he was just sounding out his personality for Noumu base potential, which begs the question of whether three years of intensive care and life support were a cheaper alternative than just making a judgement call at the outset on what level of Noumu to build him towards.

———

Yep!  No, I really have nothing else to say about this; you have summed up in one paragraph everything I’ve been saying since my first post on the topic pre-leaks.  Good work, anon; I applaud your brevity.

Those all answered, this will, I think, be my last round of asks on 350.  Feel free to reply to any of my posts on it or send comments in, but after this, I make no promises about answering anything else about this chapter.  I have said about all I can imagine saying on it and I’m very ready to move on to other topics.

Chapter 350 Ask Round-Up (I Think We Hit a Plothole ver.)

As you can see, it’s a whole Thing.  Hit the jump!

Plot Holes I Have Counted So Far:

  ●  Why is this only coming out now?  If Ujiko has been so willing to talk about his and AFO’s plans that he’ll do so basically unprompted, why on Earth didn’t this come out the moment someone sat down and asked him what he could tell them about the League of Villains?  Seriously, Ujiko’s unsolicited little opinion column here is material that it’s all too easy for me to imagine Tsukauchi getting out of him with very little difficulty in the first week of his captivity.

Obviously, Ujiko wouldn’t want to tell them anything that would tip them off in a serious way, but just telling them, Oh, by the way, Dabi surviving his injuries is my work; what do you think?  Isn’t he something? doesn’t actually tell them anything especially helpful. The only difference is that Endeavor and Shouto could have found out about it weeks ago rather than Shouto having to go and ask.  The latter’s better for the drama, of course, but these concurrent explanations from Ujiko and Dabi himself feel awfully conveniently timed.

  ●  Speaking of Ujiko’s captivity, it’s been a solid month since he was taken into custody.  Why in heaven’s name is he still in lock-up at a police department?  I might normally assume ease of access for interrogations, save that the chapter repeatedly suggests that the cops are not interested in anything he has to say, no matter how revelatory.  Honestly, if this is the approach the system takes with all villains, it’s no wonder even relatively minor or accidental offenders like Jin and Gentle Criminal had their lives completely fall apart the moment they got in any trouble at all.

Possibly the system is already reeling with trying to process the 115,000 other people arrested that day, so Ujiko, presenting exactly zero physical danger to anyone, was just left at the police station.  Still, though, while Ujicakes is not dangerous himself, he is, one has to assume, a pretty high priority target for a villainous rescue effort—or a murder to silence him.  So why still in police station lock-up?

  ●  No explanation for how AFO is tracking all these promisingly resentful children.  I know he has empathy and all, but seriously, how did AFO even find these people?  My going theory is that he habitually keeps an eye on the families of heroes—probably good quirks, fair odds at resentfulness due to the conflicting demands of heroics and family life, and easy to Arrange something if he really wants someone.*  It’d be nice if Horikoshi would stop waving the magic wand of “AFO has friends everywhere” and actually show us that process at some point, though.

  ●  What was up with AFO telling Touya, “You’ll never exhibit the power you once did,” and, “Despite our best efforts, we failed,” only to immediatelydo a full 180 to, “I might just be able to restore your flames to their full glory”?  Is that not a blatant contradiction?  Did he just think Touya was too distraught to notice and call him out on it?  Did he expect that hitting him with a one-two punch of, “You’re weak now but I can make you strong,” would just totally bypass any questions like, “But you just said you did your best to restore me and failed.  What, did you come up with a new idea in the last fifteen seconds?”  I’ve complained before about how the writing AFO has been saddled with since the breakout is blunt to the point of caricature, but I think this is a new low.

  ●  What in the holy fuck is the point of tying Overhaul to any of this?  See my prior post for some more breakdown on that topic; it is its own complete trainwreck.  That’s the case for a lot of reasons, but the one that I can’t shake is, “Why include an out-of-nowhere play for sympathy via the possibility that Overhaul is so messed up because he spent his formative years in an evil orphanage, when the last time Overhaul was in the story himself, the extent of the sympathy it could muster for him was Saint Deku the All-Saver stonily telling him that he, Deku, wouldn’t be doing squat to alleviate Chisaki’s suffering until he ‘wanted to apologize to Eri.’”  On so many levels, what the fuck?

  ●  So did this evil childrens’ home just happento be in not only the same town as the Todoroki home but also not even very far from the neighborhood?  Because Touya sure did flee from a burning building penniless and barefoot in PJs with an obviously traumatized and desperate look on his face, and apparently made it all the way back home without getting reported, waylaid, or intercepted by a concerned hero.  How convenient!

This is, of course, exactly the same thing as happened to Tenko—a stricken kid goes right through urban surroundings and gets no help at all despite how obviously he needs it.  But the plot hole here is not that Touya wasn’t intercepted, but rather that the orphanage and the Todoroki house were so close together that he could get there on foot and unaided rather than e.g. running a ways, wearing himself out because he just woke up from a coma and he doesn’t even know where the building he just set on fire was located, and finding his way to a police booth because he’s Todoroki Touya, Endeavor’s son, and he’s alive and just escaped.  People might have thought he was a nutjob, but I bet the phonecall would have gotten made.

AFO had Kurogiri by that point; they could have put Touya literally anywhere in the country!  But no, they apparently just plopped him right down in his own neighborhood and called it a day.

  ●  If Touya’s body was going to die within a month of waking, and the kids were being kept as vessels, why did AFO and Ujiko bother with preserving Touya?  It seems clear that AFO and Ujiko were lying about having done everything they could; if Touya was still a consideration for being a vessel, they must have had further ideas about how to fix up him up, and AFO even told Touya there might be a way to restore him.  But if those options were available to them, then why let him go so easily?  Why pour the time and resources into saving his life and preserving him for three years if they would just shrug and call it more trouble than it was worth the moment he rejected them?  It’s not like they didn’t have all the time they needed to get his quirk or a copy of it off him, and if they could fix him up enough to be a vessel, they could presumably fix him up enough to be good base material for a Noumu.  And it’d be much less of a security risk than letting him live, however briefly, to tell the tale.  On which note…

  ●  What was the plan for if Touya did reunite with his family?  Ujiko and AFO thought Touya had just a month to live, but they didn’t have any way of knowing he’d run back to his house and see something that upset him so much he immediatelyturned around and left again.  Indeed, the fact that he was so set on returning to his father suggests that he’d do exactly that—go back to his father and pick up the obsession right where it left off.  And what would have happened, then, when the boy’s family, frantic with relief and desperate to know where he’d been for three years, called in the police?  How was sunflower guy going to explain to the cops and social services how the son of the Number Two Hero came into his care and why he never reported the presence of this horrifically injured burn victim to the proper authorities?

I can see these questions being an excellent reason to just let the building burn after Touya lit it up—fire makes the clean-up so much simpler—but even in that case, wasn’t Ujiko, noted paranoiac, concerned about the authorities investigating the place, digging up a paper trail, anything at all?

Is This or Is This Not an Evil Orphanage?

That last point leads into the biggest issue I have, which is the wild disagreement between whether this is a creepy prison orphanage or a fairly up-and-up facility, and how that impacts AFO’s decision to let Touya go even though him having a month left to live meant he had a month left to talk to cops about howhe lived.

There’s a lot to this one, so bear with me here.  

POINTS IN FAVOR: 

  ●  Touya is told when he wakes up that he can’t go home; he ishome.

Though it’s judging someone by their body type, and there are of course exceptions, that sunflower guy is waytoo brawny to come off as just some normal childcare worker.

  ●  Direct line to AFO on the computer.

  ●  “A seedbed of ferocity and hatred.”

  ●  Kept Touya hidden for three years right under Endeavor’s nose, apparently without fear of being found out by any routine inspection from whatever bureaucratic office is in charge of overseeing alternative childcare facilities.May have let the building burn because it’d be easier to cover their tracks that way, since there’s pretty much no way to explain to police why your Totes Legit Children’s Home concealed the presence of their Mr. Sleepyhead for three years.

  ●  Dabi assuming that he’d have been Noumu fodder if he stuck around.

Overhaul apparently came out of this or a near-identical facility, and we all know how heturned out.  

POINTS AGAINST: 

  ●  The building is just out on the street, with an obvious playset outside and a big sign on the wall.  It’s clearly not any kind of secret facility, and that means there’s a limit to how Obviously Evil it can be.

  ●  Further, it’s a matter of public record that Garaki Kyudai founded a number of orphanages and is accepted and respected in many communities.  This means that at least some portion of his facilities haveto appear on the up-and-up.  They can’t have a reputation for kids dying, going missing, or turning out nothing but hateful little misanthropes.  They have to be accessible to and capable of passing government inspections.  Not to say that he couldn’thave secret, more evil orphanages, but if those were on the table all along and Touya was at one of them, why even bother mentioning the existence of the legitimate ones?

  ●  Those kids are not being trained up on ferocity and hatred, come the fuck on.  I know we only saw them for three panels, but they pinned up Get Well Soon signs for their house’s coma patient.  They folded paper cranes for his recovery.  They were thrilled to see he’d woken up, excited to welcome him into their home and family, and perfectly happy to share what they knew about his situation with him.

  If those kids were supposed to be possible back-ups for Shigaraki, who was having his hatred honed and cultivated to be as strong as possible; if Touya was saved and placed there specifically because of his potential as a warped seed, we really needed to get literally anything other than bog-standard Energetic Child vibes from them.  For god’s sake, they weren’t even as surly as Kouta, which you’d think would be the bare minimum.

  ●  Touya was apparently only permitted to escape because his body was in such rough shape and his obsession with Endeavor was ruled too difficult to manipulate.  Neither of these were the case with Chisaki, but for some reason, if he was from one of these places, he was able to escape and get himself adopted by yakuza with no difficulty worth remarking on.

  ●  Chisaki could further leave the orphanage still ignorant of its real purpose, which I wouldn’t expect him to understand as a child, but certainly when he started hearing about a supernaturally long-lived Emperor of Darkness who lives in the underworld and can give and take peoples’ quirks, I’d expect him to have been just as capable of connecting those dots as Dabi was, ifthe orphanage was so obviously evil to the children living in it that said evil is why he ran away.  That he still said, later, that All For One was just an urban myth to his generation, suggests strongly to me that he, as the meme goes, didn’t connect shit.

See the trouble here?  All the signals are in conflict with one another.  I’m damned if I can make heads or tails of exactly what we’re supposed to make of the place, much less how in the hell Overhaul’s character is in any way served by being associated with it.

On Anons’ Points

I got that first one back when leaks were just dropping, but I think the full release made it pretty clear that not only was the computer placed by AFO, it was actually just him talking in real time.  I touched briefly on how he might have known about Touya and Sekoto Peak in the first section up above, but to reiterate, I think it’s mostly down to this manga’s difficulty in establishing exactly what AFO’s support structure/web of evil actually looks like.

For some further food for thought on that topic, try to reconcile this idea:

• All Might spent decades taking out the bulk of AFO’s supporters, smashing “everything [he] worked so hard to build.”

with this one: 

• All For One has friends everywhere, even internationally, such that the instant he gets out of prison, he’s able to slide right back into easily inserting multiple moles into UA and pulling strings with international contacts to have them start stirring up trouble in other countries.

Basically, All For One has all the contacts and resources he needs to do whatever the story needs him to do at any given time, be that having a miraculous line on every discontented child in the country or the ability to say a word and start shit in othercountries so bad that it impacts their international policy decisions!  And yet we’re still meant to believe that All Might was so effective against this man that AFO foresaw his defeat and sent people like Gigantomachia into hiding years before his and All Might’s backstory fight.  Okay, BNHA, whatever you say.

On subduing Touya, setting aside the fact that he wasn’t there in person, it does make me wonder about what, precisely, he and Shigaraki were thinking about when Shigaraki asked for his help with subduing/convincing/otherwise dealing with Bakugou.  For a man of such profound evil, I’m sure he could have subdued Touya somehow or another; I think the main explanation there for why he didn’t is that he thought Touya’s body wasn’t long for the world, so it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.  See the point above about the conflict between Touya as potential vessel and Touya as more trouble than his body’s worth.

Regarding the matter of Endeavor’s home security system, that actually didn’t jump out at me because, well, Touya lived there.  He would have come and gone perfectly freely, at least to school and whatever else he and Natsu and Fuyumi got up to in their spare time.  Sure, if whatever the security system is required a card or something, Touya wouldn’t have that, but if it was something like a gate with a keypad, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that he’d know the entry code.  A bunch of locked doors would be trickier to bypass without damaging them, but I also don’t have much trouble buying that living in the home of the Number Two Hero, a man with the reputation Endeavor has, means the family mostly feels pretty safe from outside threats.  It’s a wrinkle, but not nearly as much of one to me as the distance from the orphanage to the Todoroki house being quickly traversable on foot.

That all said, I don’t have a neat wind-down here.  I’ve always been entertained by the comedic potential of Dabi’s six weeks spent with Ujiko, so I was happy to see a flashback to that with Ujiko being his old bubbly self.  And I mostly liked Touya’s emotional material in the chapter.  I think the most I’ve ever felt for him was when he was crying alone on the mountain because his dad hadn’t come, so getting a callback to that moment via Touya immediately starting to rationalize it was legit affecting!  I like how telling it is that his response to seeing Shouto’s training at its most brutal was not to try and help his brother, but rather to double down on resentment without even sticking around long enough to check on Natsuo and Fuyumi.  And I do appreciate that if we had to get AFO’s hand here, it was extremely minimal in terms of its effect on Touya’s mentality.

But a funny Ujiko flashback and Touya having a coherent emotional throughline don’t make the rest of this chapter any less of a mess.

Thanks for the asks, everyone!

—

*Yes, this would mean he probably knew about Koutarou from the beginning.  If we’re heading in that direction anyway, I may as well try and get out ahead of it with versions I don’t hate.  Here, that means that circa Nana’s death ~40 years ago, the “vessel” and Noumu research were still underway, so all AFO and Ujiko were doing at the time was keeping an eye out for good quirks, not next-body candidates yet.  Still, they were aiming in that direction, so AFO kept an eye on Nana’s boy as he grew up, never addressed his abandonment issues, and started passing his damage down to his own kids—until the house went down unexpectedly one summer night, and, well, at that point you might as well call it fate.

Endy/Hawks/Dabi Ask Round-Up

Three asks, all in the general sphere of Current Events With the Fire-Folk and Attendee. Hit the jump!

lolol not sure what you mean, anon; Endeavor’s probably my favorite Todoroki, and I love watching him have a bad time.

(Note: This ask says “latest chapter,” but I got it just after the 354 leaks, so it’s about the last last chapter, not the one coming out officially later today.)

More seriously, Endeavor having a paternal meltdown here strikes me as a positivesign.  I think the pragmatic, for-the-greater-good approach espoused the way people like Hawks and the HPSC espouse it is a sign of the rot in a system that writes off people it deems too difficult to help.  Endeavor being unable to close his eyes and harden his heart even if that complicates the battle in front of him is a good thing.  The heroes of a story shouldbe facing difficult odds; if everything were easy, why would the audience even care?  Maybe in some light novel isekai power fantasy, or a comedic series like Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto, but that is decidedly not the mode BNHAdoes its best work in.(1)

Endeavor’s arc isn’t about him becoming a stronger hero; it’s about him becoming a better person.  So while him losing his cool to AFO’s taunts is not totally optimal—presumably optimal would be having+expressing confidence and faith in his youngest child’s capabilities—it’s still better than being so detached from his sons’ circumstances that he can fire off witticisms like Hawks can.

I’m a lot more shrugemoji about Hawks, who I like aspects of in theory but find has been diverted away from some of his more interesting potential paths.  I never expected him to actually turn traitor and join the League, but I do think his Icharus theming has been largely betrayed by largely weightless consequences—he can still do whatever the plot needs him to do even with damaged wings; he’s freed from his handlers through no effort of his own;(2) he’s suffered no significant repercussions for admitting to manslaughter on national television.

So, Hawks having a bad time this past week, suffering setbacks and consequences for continuing to abet the status quo, is what I wantto see.  Fair, though; I suppose if you’re a Stan who thinks he was right all along, this would be pretty painful!

1:  [insert complaining about the Muscular rematch here]
2:  I don’t buy the whole thing about how Hawks dithering about killing Twice saved him because it gave Re-Re-Destro time to kill the HPSC President.  Firstly, I think the evidence suggests that Twice’s clones can endure even after the original’s death—else how would one have saved Toga and Mr. C?—and RRD just dissolved from damage taken, not automatically upon Twice’s death.  Secondly, while it sounds nice at first blush, all it would really mean is that Hawks hesitatedbefore doing something terrible but ultimately did the terrible thing anyway, and was then rewarded for it with his freedom.  That’s, like, the oppositeof earning your karma.  I’d be much more on board with the read if Hawks had followed his gut and notkilled someone he thought was a good person out of brutalistic expediency.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

He wants Endeavor to stop getting back up.

Endeavor’s whole thing as a hero is that he doesn’t win things easily, like All Might, but he perseveres.  He persevered until he was Number One by sheer dint of holding onto the Number Two spot until All Might retired.  He got back up and got back up until the High End didn’t.  He lost his son on Sekoto Peak and got right back into what he was doing.

As Fuyumi said back during the Hood-chan fight, Endeavor’s defining trait, for better andfor worse, is his stubbornness.  The final straw that turned Touya into Dabi was seeing that not even Touya dying was enough to make Endeavor give up his dreams of strength.  What set Dabi off about the press conference was Endeavor getting up and making a bunch of calm statements of fact that concluded with the news that Endeavor intended to go on doing hero work regardless of what that hero work led him to do in the past.

Dabi wants to break Endeavor.  I don’t think that hasto mean Endeavor’s death, but it does have to mean Endeavor stops coming back for more.  Time will tell if he’ll get that, much less in a timely manner,(1) or whether Shouto et. al. will come up with some other way to pacify him.

1:  By which I mean that Horikoshi would have to work very hard to sell me on Dabi being satisfied by Endeavor retiring from being a hero if Endeavor doesn’t do so until the epilogue.  Narratively speaking, Endeavor doesn’t really sacrifice or risk anything to prioritize his family if he waits until after the greatest threat of the modern age is defeated and the kids have demonstrated that they can handle things without him.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Sorry to hear you’re having a bad time with it, anon, and my sympathies on the writing woes.

I think I about halfway agree.  I’ve been enjoying the Endeavor we’ve had in these last few chapters—as stated above, I think the meltdown is good for him.  I can’t say the same for the Endeavor we had during the Edgy Deku Arc, Sad Man In Trenchcoat!Endeavor, whose writing just mystified me.  I never got a sense for why he was apparently willing to just helplessly follow Deku around, reaching new depths of impotency in Chapter 316, where he was apparently incapable of having a scene in which he didn’t look to Deku for approval or to yell unheeded warnings.

Like, my god, Enji, you successfully mentored this kid for weeks; step the fuck up already.  Watching Endeavor trailing steps behind Deku feebly calling for him not to be reckless as Deku completely ignored him and strode on towards the CRC mansion was physically painful.

It really annoyed me at the time, because like, here’s this guy trying to atone for the way he treated his wife and kids in his pursuit of strength, but he’s….totally willing to let this clearly emotionally compromised sixteen-year-old take the lead in the hunt for All For One and the League?  For no apparent reason but that the sixteen-year-old is the heir of One For All, the strongest quirk there is?

How does thattrack?  Am I meant to understand that Endeavor hasn’t given up his belief in strength at all, he’s just come to believe he himself doesn’t have it, so he’s lost all sense of authority and willingness to pull rank?  Is it just that he’s in despair, incapable of mustering the energy to assert himself, and thus spends the arc letting himself get steered by Deku and Hawks?

I suppose the idea was that he was only barely keeping it together, and is too much a product of the Hero Society status quo to figure out how to evolve on his own, but man, it was just embarrassing to read. 

In fairness, this profound sense of Cringe could easily be a result of how much I hated the way that arc executed every potentially interesting idea it had in the most banal and safe way imaginable.  It does not escape my notice that I like broken Endeavor when he’s up against villains or weeping in his hospital bed, but have no time for him at all when it means he’s letting Deku run over him.

Anyway, I’d be curious to read more of your own thoughts, anon!  You’ve got me very curious for how you’d prefer to see Endeavor handled post-Jakku.  Feel free to follow up!

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Thanks as ever for the asks, anons.  ^^

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.

(Very Late) Thoughts on the Villain Report

Per some asks about the Hawks Villain Report, I extremelybelatedly went back through the translations of it and noted down my thoughts on what’s in it and what isn’t (Spinner). Hit the jump if you’re curious!

•  The idea of different classifications of villains is interesting but also strikes me as fairly arbitrary as presented here.  What “past standards” can Gentle and La Brava not be measured against?  Why include Stain, the very image of a society-rattling criminal motivated by ideology, in the category of “traditional lawbreakers using their quirk for criminal purposes”?  What does, “villains born from a change in hero society” even mean?  The MLA have been around since before Hero Society even got settled, so how could they possibly be classified as people born from that society changing?

•  I’m particularly shaking my head over the idea that there are “special case” villains for whom “caution must be paid when arresting, as their arrest may influence society,” as if there was any difference at all between the arrest of Overhaul and that of, say, Trumpet. 

    Both featured a big joint task force between police and a bunch of heroes Raidin’ the Enemy Base, with about the only difference I can see being that Overhaul was ultimately arrested on an open street while Trumpet was arrested outside the eyes of the public.  That strikes me as less a difference in methodology than one of expediency and circumstance, however.  Consider that Slidin’ Go, an honest-to-god hero, was alsoarrested right out on an open street, and I fail to see how any particular caution was paid to what “society” would think.

    God knows we didn’t get any follow-up on how politicians, CEOs and heroes being arrested “influenced” society.  I think the onlyscene that even hinted that anyone cared about any of those types being arrested was the scene with the two Tartarus guards, and that was all just supposition on their part that the audience never got to see.  Literally every other scene with rattled civilians that had anything to do with villains was about the fallout from Dabi’s video, Hawks’ murder of Twice, the failures of (non-MLA) heroes to contain Gigantomachia’s damage, and the pervasive fear of Shigaraki/AFO.

•  I was already salty during the events themselves that Shigaraki—whose speed was commented upon by both Deku and Re-Destro, many, many chapters apart, even beforethe surgery—was always lagging behind Deku during the Jakku confrontation.(1)  It does not assuage my salt levels to read the report say that Shigaraki “easily outspeeds” Deku.

•  Dabi’s quirk being officially designated Blueflame is silly.  As others have pointed out, quirks are named when they first manifest, and Touya’s flames were red when he first manifested them.  No one knew that Touya had become capable of manifesting blue flames until his reveal as Dabi, so there’s no reason for his quirk registry information to have been updated accordingly.

    Blueflame (souen) is not entirely without precedent in the manga, but that precedent is that it’s what Getencalls him.  As with so many things Geten says, I get the feeling we shouldn’t be taking his word on this at face value!

    Fun note about that, by the way: So like, souenis the on-reading of the kanji for “blue” and “flame,” words which in spoken conversation would use their kun-reading pronunciations, aoandhonou.  However, souenalso crops up in a number of medical terms involving inflammation of various body parts.  It definitely isn’t the sameword—itssou is a different kanji, one that translates to something like “nest/hive” rather than “blue”—so I could just be reaching here, but given Dabi’s crispy physical state and Horikoshi’s love of wordplay, it strikes me as not coincidental that someone insulting Dabi would use a non-standard pronunciation of “blue fire” that just so happens to be homophonous with a word fragment that’s in at least three different medical terms for different kinds of rashes and inflammations.(2)

•  I recall seeing some jokes around about Dabi’s section being written particularly stringently Because Hawks, and I don’t entirely disagree, but at last as far as the, “Keep in mind that he is always up to no good,” goes, given that Dabi is the core League member most likely to murderate whatever random schmucks he crosses paths with, it seems like a fair cop.

•  Forever annoyed that Dabi is the “natural enemy” to “non-heat-resistant” people like Hawks and Kamui Woods,(3) and yet neither Hawks nor Kamui Woods sustained permanent damage after being immolated by said natural enemy.

•  I only really pay attention to stats when they’re funny, as I think they either don’t translate well or are arbitrary as hell, but the only one of Dabi’s that seems abnormally low to me is his Technique score—a D is a hell of a grade to give someone who’s taught himself most if not all of Endeavor’s moves.  I’d cut it some slack for being “written” (by Hawks) before Dabi started using said moves openly, but even during the war, Dabi did demonstrate Endeavor’s “flight” and the beginnings of a Prominence Burn.  A Technique of D is fine for something like Dabi’s fight against Geten, in which literally all he does is blast away, but it’s very low for “decisive second war” Dabi.

•  “Hawks” noting that Toga is considered “different” even within the League of Villains—is that Hawks saying that even the League find her a bit odd?  Or is that him saying that heroesconsider Toga to be a different sort of villain than her compatriots?  If the former, that speaks of more Hawks/League interaction than we ever got, which seems a shame.

•  I think it’s interesting, and probably intentional, that the manga is making such a big deal out of the villain/student pair-ups, to the degree that the villain report even says Ochaco should be Toga’s counter, but none of those students get their thoughts on “their” villains included.  I like to think this is because Deku, Ochaco and Shouto, if asked their thoughts on Shigaraki, Toga and Dabi, would probably not give the ‘woooo, a scaaaary villain’ response that was clearly the general thrust of of the piece.

•  I’ll believe All For One is an S+ Intelligence character when he starts getting more creative in combat than “punch super ultra hard.”  Also when we get any motivation for him other than, “Demon lords are cool.”

•  If Re-Destro’s strength was meant to stand out even among villains, maybe Horikoshi shouldn’t have shown him or a clone of him being overcome four times.  Christ, Re-Destro was robbed.

And that’s what I’ve got on a cursory read-through of the translations.  As to what isn’tin there, the omission of Spinner feels like some cross between the way people in canon keep conspicuously not bringing him up or planning for him—like, no duh, of course Hawks doesn’t see him as enough of a threat to even waste a page on—and yet more real-life “Spinner isn’t popular, so he gets regularly shafted everywhere outside of the manga itself” tiresomeness.  I can only continue to hope that Hori himself is not being unduly pressured about Spinner.

Thanks for the asks, two anons who sent asks about it!

—

1:  To say nothing of my salt about the fact that Black Whip was treated as a safe way to keep Shigaraki at arms-length, even though it’s apparently physical enough for Deku to detach it to use as a distraction during the Nagant fight andfor Toga to slice through it with a perfectly mundane knife.

2: Housouen, ransouen, andseisouenare the three most common results yielded by an off-the-cuffsearch.  Respectively: cellulitis, ovarian inflammation, and epididymitis.

3:  Though it seems more appropriate to call them “heat-vulnerable,” rather than simply not being especially resistant, no?