DelawareDetroit

also horikoshi really could have cooked with AFO - deku and deku - nagant if he wasn't so committed to making AFO a larping demon lord brocon who sucks at scheming and pseudo-fridging nagant to expedite deku's transformation into dark deku so he can get to what he actually wants to write (bakugou's apology, ochako's rooftop speech)......

I agree with all of your first paragraph and about Lady Nagant. Izuku and All Might’s relationship is the cornerstone of BNHA. There was so much lost potential in Izuku’s parallels with Toga, Hawks, and Lady Nagant, and the story repeatedly used Izuku to paint Bakugou in a more favorable light. (If we’re talking about the Izuku parallels with blonde characters, his under-explored quirklessness parallel with Aoyama also deserves to be mentioned.)

As for All for One, his larping tendencies are part of why he makes for such a good foil for Izuku in the first place. Izuku and All for One wanted to be defined exclusively by their roles. Neither wanted to be seen by others beyond that created image. It weakens that parallel if All for One isn’t larping as a larger than life demon lord figure. And…if Izuku is going to cling to his early relationships no matter how toxic, it makes sense that All for One’s relationship with Yoichi would work as a twisted mirror of that concept.

Majestic repeats the same sentiment to Momo that Tokoyami gave Hawks after he killed Twice. In both cases, the person being reassured violated the heroes’ rules: Hawks killed someone and Momo created drugs and plotted to non consensually administer those drugs to a person. It’s not clear whether the audience is supposed to take these comments at face value, or whether this dialogue is meant to draw attention to the consequences of the morally gray decisions made by the heroes.

The sheer scope of Gigantomachia’s rampage gets lost without the cultural context. A quick google search clarifies that he ran through about 170 km without any civilian evacuation by the heroes because they were mostly at the raid of the PLF. The civilians in BNHA are rarely particularly sympathetic, but it makes sense why the public largely stopped believing in the heroes, took matters into their own hands, and raked the heroes over the coals for this. Why wouldn’t they? From a bird’s eye perspective, the heroes picked a fight with the villains but bit off more than they could chew, and the civilians in the Kansai region paid the majority of the price for the heroes’ mistakes.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, the question Izuku asked All Might in chapter one was can I be a hero without a quirk. The hero suit ending makes that dream a reality. It fits into the hero’s journey structure popular with shounen where the hero/protagonist returns to the start transformed by his journey. Izuku returns to being quirkless, but everything he learned and the bonds he forged during his journey allows him to return to heroism regardless.

I don’t think chapter 431 undermined the dreams becoming reality theme. BNHA also established a structural critique of hero society and asked the audience to imagine a world where after enough progress, heroes and villains may no longer need to exist as categories. To demonstrate that our heroes are making progress towards achieving that, they should be thinking of other paths to find fulfillment in their lives as the need for professional heroism decreases. Izuku’s choice to also continue teaching doesn’t take away from the fact that their society progressed enough to accept a well respected, quirkless active hero.

On the other hand, it’s upsetting to see all the work Izuku put into controlling One for All disappear. And if Izuku losing One for All was a consequence for failing to physically save Shigaraki à la Mirio losing Permeation temporarily for refusing to save Eri at their first meeting, the hero suit ending arguably undermines that consequence. Unlike Eri and Mirio, it’s not like Izuku could remedy that failure because Shigaraki is dead. (Horikoshi might have been able to square that circle if Shigaraki continued “living” as a vestige, but I digress.)

This scene where Aizawa thinks of Eri before slicing off his leg parallels All Might’s last stand in Kamino. All Might decided to live at Kamino because he realized that Izuku still needed him as his mentor. In this scene, Aizawa chose to live not because he is the hero Eraserhead but because there is a child that needs Aizawa’s support and guidance. Furthermore, both used what they learned from the child who became their reason to keep living to survive their brush with death. All Might used one of his arms as a feint to disguise his true attack like Izuku’s strategy during the Battle Trials. Aizawa cut off his leg to avoid losing Erasure because of the knowledge he obtained from his cooperation with Eri to understand Rewind.

Shigaraki: "I feel like...there's nothing that can stop me now. As long as I keep...my dreams...my origin...within my heart."

Forgiveness (and the choice not to forgive) has been a theme throughout Act Two, but until this point it was mostly limited to The Hellish Todoroki Family and implied concerning Izuku and Bakugou. This was the first time this theme was introduced to the All for One/One for All plotline.

Izuku cannot forgive Shigaraki for the harm he has caused to others. It’s impactful that Izuku later chooses to try to save Shigaraki despite finding his actions unforgivable. That choice would have been less meaningful if Izuku had chosen to forgive him. Beyond that, Izuku’s forgiveness would feel hollow because it isn’t Izuku’s place to forgive harm Shigaraki caused largely to innocents he does not know.

Thanks for the interesting reading on that Ijime scale anon. Some googling on the issue revealed that Japan started requiring schools to keep track of bullying about a year before BNHA’s first chapter was released, so perhaps the Japanese public including Horikoshi were thinking of this social problem more at the time.

However, the concept of the bully who is a victim of other bullies is not at all an unusual concept. It’s a more common combination with folks with certain behavioral/developmental issues (it’s well documented with ADHDers for example), but generally people often mirror how we are treated onto others. If someone is consistently mistreated by peers/upperclassmen, they might repeat the same pattern at the first opportunity because they know nothing else.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the higher prevalence of the bully victim in Japan also had something to do with how recently it was a monarchist society where the emperor actually had real power. Those under monarchy tend to be preoccupied by their particular social position and how to treat those below and above them and who fits into what class. And Japan even has different ways of speaking for a superior versus equal/inferior in the pecking order…(To give another example, see everything about British public boarding schools).

There’s an annoying conflation being made between Shimura Nana’s choices and Gran Torino’s choices here. Shimura picked the least bad option in putting Kotaro up for adoption. Refusing One for All or even refusing to join En’s resistance organization may not have been enough for her to keep Kotaro given her husband’s involvement in the resistance against All for One. He killed anyone with a meaningful connection to Kudou. The son of one of En’s comrades was already on the menu before it accelerated to Shimura receiving One for All. Shimura was never alive at a time where All for One wasn’t at the peak of his power.

To the extent she made a wrong decision, it was the blanket prohibition of Gran Torino contacting Kotaro, but it’s not like she had any way of enforcing that after she died. It’s even arguably true that Shimura’s decision to give away Kotaro wasn’t choosing heroism over her family because she originally got involved to avenge her husband and Kotaro was at risk before her own involvement with En’s group.

However, her choice to transfer One for All to All Might was a decision to choose heroism over Kotaro. Based on her dialogue in the final arc, her most ideal goal was originally to kill All for One herself and return for Kotaro. Taking a chance on Yagi Toshinori meant abandoning any hope of seeing Kotaro again. Even then, unfortunately it was not the wrong choice. It took All Might more than 30 years with One for All to defeat All for One. Shimura could not survived more than 15-16 years longer if she chose to keep One for All and was never caught. At best, she could have given Kotaro closure at an age where he would have understood the gravity of the situation, but he still would have found himself alone by young adulthood in a much more unstable world.

It’s unfortunate because this is such an important theme, but Shigaraki isn’t exactly the most effective messenger for it. Shigaraki barely interacted with hero society while he was in All for One’s care until his villain debut. And by that point, of course society would reject someone whose modus operandi appeared to be destruction for the sake of self-satisfaction. Society didn’t reject Tenko as much as they refused to protect him in his moment of need.

It was Kotaro and the Shimura Household who rejected Tenko, and if anything, Kotaro was the one expressly rejected by hero society. Kotaro, like Kota and Twice, was an orphan because of the endless conflict between heroes and villains. Society abandoned him to his fate and left Kotaro without the space to more productively air his grievances with heroes/hero society. He took out that rejection on his own family and Tenko/Shigaraki internalized that rejection from Kotaro.

Nah, Endeavor’s age doesn’t seem like a writers can’t do math situation. It’s more likely that the priorities of the themes Horikoshi wanted to address changed. Endeavor getting into a eugenics marriage at twenty years old makes sense thematically if the idea was to criticize the institution of marriage in Japan, as twenty was the traditional age of majority. But the marriage at twenty years old undermines the hard work Endeavor is supposed to represent in comparison to “natural talent” All Might. As Horikoshi mostly ran away from the former and focused heavily on putting Endeavor into the hard work versus talent narrative, Endeavor’s age when he married Rei feels thematically inconsistent.

Despite Shigaraki’s claims to the contrary, he did not always have these ideals. Early Act One Shigaraki had no ideals at all. Shigaraki did have a comprehensible critique of hero society by the Kamino Arc, but it was quite different from his PLF critique. In late Act One, his criticism surrounded a society that didn’t allow anyone, heroes or otherwise, to make mistakes. His earlier argument blamed the public more than the heroes themselves, but by the PLF Arc, he decided heroes and civilians were equally to blame.

Interestingly, Shigaraki still reserves harsher language for the civilian population. It makes sense because no civilian taking action before Tenko was taken by All for One was what damned Shigaraki. As I’ve said before, despite his dislike of heroes, Shigaraki doesn’t seem to inherently dislike the concept of saving. He hates civilians in part because they refuse to save anyone. His hatred of heroes evolved from hating those who interfered with his mindless destruction to hating that they enabled civilians to not save and because they refused to acknowledge those who weren’t saved in the name of selling the hero profession to the public.

”It wasn’t that Ashido wanted a boyfriend of her own, really. She wasn’t after love for herself, since she knew full well that she and the others had to devote themselves to their hero education for the time being. That said, once the seed of romance was planted in her brain, it had to sprout and bloom. She needed that tight-chested feeling that only came from the perfect sappy story.” School Briefs Light Novel 2, p. 144.

I think cupioromantic Mina is a headcanon that has some canon support from the light novels. Her pov from the second light novel was about her wanting to stir up interesting romance stories and living vicariously through others rather than seeking it for herself.

In retrospect, this scene is meant to parallel Bakugou saving Izuku in the Bakugou Rising chapter. Both pairs knew each other before UA, and the one who was unheroic in middle school saved the one who understood the meaning of heroism from a young age.

Unfortunately, Kirishima and Mina’s version was less effective. Unlike Izuku, the manga does not establish what heroism means to Mina leading up to this moment. Unlike Izuku’s fight with Shigaraki, Mina doesn’t get the opportunity to show her strengths before fumbling her dose and nearly being crushed by Gigantomachia. (It’s also far less dramatic because Kirishima comes out of it unscathed, but to be fair, Mina did not have a history of dramatically injuring herself while saving people.)

It would have been more meaningful if Midnight reached out before her death only to pass the torch and tell her that she trusted Momo’s judgment.

Because deciding the general plan and directing Momo to break the law when Midnight would not be alive to take the fall for that decision makes Midnight look terrible and limits Momo’s growth. If Momo came up with the plan to create unauthorized pharmaceuticals and drug someone against their will with those homemade substances, that would be one thing. It would have avoided the disaster of a pro hero teacher directly encouraging violations of their law and professional ethics to a student. It also would have demonstrated Momo’s improved ability to strategize on the fly and act as a leader.