*puts the number guy in my mouth*

O: I find Six's understated tragedy to be very compelling – that he never was a child with no identity, just one who, due to his particular strain of facial agnosia, struggled to develop a sense of self in a way that made him convenient for AFO and Ujiko, so they did what they will do and turned a kid with significant but surpassable problems into a monster. I really wish we had any idea of when they actually got their hands on him! Like, he's pretty clearly school-aged when we get that shot of the little "doll" Six looking in a mirror at a reflection of himself he can't see, and I assume that (at least if you take late-series BNHA as canon for Vigilantes) he's one of their orphanage kids, but I'd love to know if he's an orphan because e.g. his parents died or because his parents found his agnosia to be too troublesome to deal with so they gave him up/neglected him until the state removed him from their custody.

O: I love that Six, despite his incredibly flippant posturing, has all these deeply felt emotions of yearning and resentment, envy and admiration.  He’s got a lot of emotional palette in common with All For One, appropriately enough, especially in his envy of people who have the life he wants for himself, but his responses to other people feel a lot more genuine and unfiltered compared to AFO’s suffocating layers of solipsism and comic book demon lord affectations.  I also don’t remember him having AFO’s profound possessiveness of others – Six may resent others for having things he wants, but the way he expresses that is by trying to mimic them, building himself into a simulacrum because he thinks if he copies someone well enough, then obviously the rest – the relationships, the successful career, the happiness – will naturally fall into place.  AFO tries to get what he wants by locking people in vaults until they submit; Six tries to get what he wants by cuckoo-ing his way into peoples’ good graces.(1) Ultimately, I think that's much more compelling than AFO's rather shallow treatment.

1: In the way of a cuckoo, of course, this does sometimes involve trying to murder the bird already in the nest.

O: I like that the main trio of Vigilantes all have such different responses to Six. Knuckleduster, being the way that he is, doesn't really give a shit about who Six is or why the guy is so hung up on him, nor does he waste any time or sympathy on some maniac trying to kill him/Koichi/a bunch of innocent people. Pop (to the extent that you read Koichi's hallucination of her in the last battle as meaningfully reflective of the real Kazuho, and I do) has got every reason in the world to hate his guts and hold a grudge, and she doesn't not do that, but she still made a connection with him as Rokuro, one that was a lot more real than I think he was expecting it to be! The fact that her song made him cry - genuinely made him cry, not a show of crocodile tears to win her over! - left her with a degree of empathy for him despite everything he'd go on to do to her, and I love that beat of her singing for him, not for Koichi, right at the end.

And as for Koichi...

O: I disliked a lot of Six and Koichi’s last battle, but it was always about the power mechanics and pacing, never about the emotional beats.  I love what Six pulls out of Koichi, what he’s able to – as Koichi’s ultimate antagonist – draw Koichi into demonstrating.  Six and Koichi’s last fight is one of the things I point to to demonstrate how goddamn awful Deku’s approach to Shigaraki is, how judgmental and entitled and self-righteous.

I’m sure Deku fans and defenders of BNHA’s ending would argue with me that Deku “saved Shigaraki’s soul” or whatever, whereas Six went out with joyous spite in his heart, still very much a Villain, and that's Bad and Wrong.  But like, firstly, I think it’s important that Six does go out on basically his own terms, having found some measure of personal satisfaction in ensuring that someone will remember him, whereas Shigaraki goes out with a sense of deep ambivalence, more resigned and trying to make the best of Deku’s victory than truly at peace with his loss.

Secondly, I just think Koichi’s attitude about the whole thing is so much better!  It’s bullshit that Deku makes no effort to help Shigaraki separable from his attempts to understand Shigaraki – he’s not obligated to tell you his whole backstory as a prerequisite for you treating him like a human being, you little green twit!! – and thus Koichi, whose whole attitude to Six can be summed up as, “Woah, hey, let’s calm down and get you to a hospital, okay?” comes off so indescribably better and more heroic in comparison that it’s difficult to put words around.

Basically, Koichi is a perfect parallel of Knuckleduster: he doesn't waste time trying to figure out the maniac obsessed with and trying to kill him because it genuinely doesn't matter to him why Six is acting this way. But where it doesn't matter to KD because Six is still a Villain, dangerous and needing to be subdued, it doesn't matter to Koichi because Six is still a person, needing to be calmed down and helped. Six allows Koichi to demonstrate what "his" heroism looks like, and Koichi's heroism is beautiful, simple and empathetic and true.

That's all to say, I appreciate Six for being an actually functional antagonist for Koichi and the rest in ways Shigaraki and the League (through no fault of their own!) aren't for Deku and his cadre.

O: I love the child imagery in Vigilantes, and moreover, I love it so much more than the same beats in the core series.  Vigilantes got there first, it did it better, and it makes me so preemptively annoyed that the anime-onlies are going to think Vigilantes is just ripping that imagery off from BNHA Core.[2]

2: The truth, of course, is that they’re both ripping it off of Chainsaw Man, which does it better than either of them.

(Apologies for the extended slagging of the main series I'm about to do, but I want to establish why I loved this moment in Vigilantes despite having nothing but disdain for it in the main series. I loved it from the moment Vigs debuted it, of course, but I've only developed more appreciation for it in light of seeing how much worse it could have been done.)

See, the child imagery in the main series is basically just an extension of Horikoshi’s wretched late-series turn towards valorizing “shoulder-patting heroism.”  It’s evoking these tragic “what ifs” about how everything could have been different if only the (three, hyper-specific, connected to the main character) Villains could have had someone there to encourage them when they were younger, but those what-ifs don’t mean anything.  They’re fundamentally built on false premises.

“Wow, what if Ochaco and Toga could have connected as children?”  Well, what if they had?  How would that have changed anything?  What could a four-year-old Ochaco have done about the profound abuse Toga was suffering at the hands of no fewer than three Responsible Adults in her life?

“Wow, if only Izuku could have been there to reach out a hand to Tenko when he needed it!”  Okay, except the real Midoriya is even now using that hand to punch the real Shimura into ashes because he's only capable of reaching out to crying children, not grown men, so what does that cutesy child imagery even prove?

“Wow, if only Touya and Shouto could have had this talk sooner.”  Yeah, wow, if only they oh wait, Touya already had a kid brother to talk to and it didn’t solve shit because it’s not on toddlers to bring salvation to other toddlers.

Would it have been okay to leave Eri with the Shie Hassaikai if there’d just been some other kid there to comfort her after each time Overhaul got done cutting her up?  Of course not, but that’s pretty much what late-series BNHA is saying – all across the endgame and epilogue, but especially in these Sad Cute Child Imagine Spots.

Aggravatingly, it would actually be more emotional resonant if BNHA would just let those moments play as-is!  It is meaningful that Ochaco is talking to Toga!  It is meaningful that the Todoroki family are finally connecting![3]  But it’s meaningful because it’s happening now, in spite of everything that’s come before and is yet to come after.  Trying to make it about how sad it is that this couldn’t happen when they were young is just treating child abuse as some kind of inevitable, unavertable natural disaster that children should band together to help one another endure rather than laying the blame where it deserves to be: on the adults abusing them.

3: It is not meaningful that Deku is committing psychic assault on Shigaraki to get him to reveal a truth Shigaraki would happily have just told him if he'd bothered to ask during e.g. the first war arc just so he can find out Shigaraki's secret truth before annihilating him. Fuck Deku for real.

Conversely, nothing in the scene of Six and Koichi playing together tries to suggest that maybe everything would have been fine if only there was someone there when Six was young to pat his shoulder and tell him everything was going to be fine.  It wouldn’t have been fine, and so that’s not what Vigilantes is using that imagery to say.

Unlike in the main series, what the audience sees is not just the actual conversation that's actually having except with a Cute Child Filter slathered over it in a cheap play for emotional resonance. Instead, it's a combination of Six’s crisping brain hallucinating and Koichi’s unflagging desire to just be there – with Six, for Six – until the “real heroes” come along to fix everything and save them. Them playing together with dolls is invoking themes of companionship and commonality: their shared immaturity, shared desire to emulate those they admire, shared lack of place in the “real” world. It’s lovely and transient and heartbreaking because they’re not children and heroes are not going to come and save the day, but just for that moment, Six feels like he’s being seen and connected to, not as a false identity, but as his true faceless, formless self.

This connection is, I think, what allows Six to be satisfied with leaving a mark on Koichi – because Koichi saw him, because Koichi was there, then Koichi knows enough that the scar will have some meaning. Where BNHA's child imagery is about how sad it is that what's happening now couldn't have happened then, then maybe all this could have been avoided, the Vigilantes child imagery is about how, even if Koichi can’t ultimately save Six and maybe never could have, what's happening now still has meaning and worth. That layer of unreality that depicts a deeper truth is what makes the child imagery poignant where BNHA's use is lazy, shallow, and, ultimately, hollow.

...Which I appreciate is a lot of talking around Six as much as it is about him. But it is a thought I have when asked, "How do you feel about Six?" and so I dutifully provide it.