Zanka's been fighting fraud allegations the past two weeks so seeing him still swing at Mymo and slash his face was very satisfying
But also these fuckers finally showed up so we get to see them in action and Riyo showing her brutal side when it comes to protecting her friends
But also Goka is such a dick. It's interesting how Kyouka is telling him to always support Zanka even if he defects or turns away from them and he still wants to rub salt into the wound
Edit: Also can't forget Kyouka did shoot at Zanka to train him, she did do that. Before I give her a little too much credit.
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Some of this will be a rephrase/expansion on stuff I said in Part 3 of the fascism essay, particularly the section about how Heroes view the prospect of long-term peace, but it’s all worth saying here as well.
Hit the jump for some roughly ordered thoughts primarily about Ochaco’s counseling program, the romance stuff and how it’s facilitated, some stray character observations, and some Stillness-typical complaining about the handling of Villains.
O It was nice to see Ochaco’s program in more detail than the jaw-droppingly bad handwave it got in 430, but I still think it didn’t go anywhere near far enough. To wit, what we see is a nice introduction to a program that could well be effective at finding some people with behavioral, familial, or quirk-based problems, but the depiction is badly lacking an illustration as to what will be done regarding people with problems that can’t be helped by a tiny bit of encouragement and support. As it’s with Toga in mind that Ochaco undertook this whole project, it seems fair to ask: How would Toga have fared in it?
If it had been young Toga Himiko in the scene instead of Shy Mining Helmet Boy, Ochaco offering her a little anti-gravity boost would have gone exactly nowhere because no amount of manuevering would have changed Himiko’s basic inability to participate in the activity. It would have clued Ochaco into Himiko having an issue, though, and perhaps that discovery could have led, with further interaction, to uncovering her feelings of repression and, critically, her problems at home. Great! That stuff absolutely needed to be uncovered!
But—then what? When Ochaco’s program turns up Himiko, a girl with a problem so severe that no amount of welcoming class play is going to resolve it, what’s the next step? Recommend counseling for her parents, too? What if they’re resistant, resentful, or they outright refuse? Do you then remove Himiko from the home? Let’s switch the lens over to a different kid for a second: Shimura Kotarou. As evinced by his massive unaddressed abandonment issues, the alternative child care system clearly did him no favors! And he didn’t have a taboo quirk[1] to add on top of the perception of his being an “unwanted child”!
So if you haven’t improved the state of Japan’s alternative child care system—and there’s no specific evidence that anyone has[2]—have you done much but kicked the consequences down the road a few years or slightly changed the color of the problem at hand? Would Himiko really fare so much better in a group home or orphanage? Would the views of the people in charge be significantly different than those of Himiko’s previous counselor? Or would they just be, as Tomura described his family doing to him, rejecting her kindly instead of cruelly?
1: And “taboo” is honestly putting it lightly. Shinto beliefs about the spiritual pollution of spilled blood being what they are, Toga’s quirk would actually be profane to a devout adherent—if the reader is familiar with X-Men, think about the kind of nastiness that periodically gets thrown at Nightcrawler by particularly militant Christians. There’s no indication that Toga’s parents are more devout than the average Japanese person, of course, but values embedded in the culture are going to be embedded in the culture all the same.
2: All we have in that direction is Uraraka enthusing that the program has a lot of support and does very thorough work, and noting that Hawks does negotiations with the Ministry of Education and other (non-specific) organizations, which we see him framing as “investing in young people.” While this could be indicative of efforts being made somewhere, by someone, to improve the situation for children in alternative care, that read is undercut by Uraraka following up with the note that all this work has done a lot to improve “the quirk education environment.” This falls far short of specific evidence for improvements to any given other aspect of child welfare.
While I’m sure we’re intended to read Ochaco’s program as one that will be meaningfully helpful to children like Toga—and I don’t even think that it categorically couldn’t be!—what we see directly on the page simply does not prove that case. Encouraging a baseline kid with an emitter quirk and age-typical shyness does not prove that The Problem of Toga has been addressed. So what was even the point of showing it to us?
What Himiko really needs—if you’ll pardon my MLA Stan coming out here for a bit—is a complete reevaluation of what quirks are and how people can use them. She needs a world that’s willing to throw out its old ways of thinking, to update its “notion of normal” to something that will allow the Toga Himikos of the world to live without suppression. For all the good I'm sure it will do, I don’t see Ochaco’s program doing that.
O It’s so hilariously telling that we got that whole shpiel about updating the Billboard Charts such that non-professional Heroes can be recognized for their efforts, only for the last chapter to give us jack shit on any non-Pro Heroes charting at all. And like, I’m willing to be generous here: I always assumed that Hawks wasn’t talking about adding non-Pros to the charts verbatim, but rather creating a brand-new chart for the recognition of Civilian Heroes. But we don’t get anything like that at all—and Deku being a teacher and public speaker gives us a perfect opportunity to indicate such a chart’s existence! But then, maybe he can’t count because he does Hero work on the weekends, which leads me to my next point.
O Ochaco and Deku should both have just retired, and Shouto should be on sabbatical. Seriously, if Horikoshi really had the courage of the convictions he was putting to paper, and if it were really true that the Villain emergence rate was down and Heroes were beginning to have more free time, then Ochaco and Deku should both have decided to prioritize the work they believe is more meaningful and helpful than Professional Heroics, and Shouto should feel free to take some time completely off for his self-exploration. That none of this happens suggests that Horikoshi either didn’t believe or didn’t trust his audience to accept his idea that there are meaningful ways for these characters to be heroic without them also having to be Heroes.
O Ochaco musing about Toga still existing somewhere inside her, and especially all the junk about the dead bisexual teenager being used to encourage the exhaustingly hetero endgame, really just makes me want to read the actual ghost story where Toga is literally haunting Ochaco. Toga still loves Ochaco-chan, of course, but her encouragement for Ochaco-chan and Deku to hook up is aimed solely at getting the two of them alone in a quiet, private room. Once that happens, Ochaco’s eyes will go gold and slitted, the walls will start dripping blood, and Deku will find out quite quickly that not everyone is so willing to move on from him murdering Shigaraki Tomura of the League of Villains.
O I miss the Bakugou who was on-course for a big personal growth arc about learning to work in a team. I feel like that Bakugou, alongside having had a way less tiresome endgame battle, might actually have been able to keep some sidekicks without being chiefly concerned about the level of their personal ambitions. I don’t give a shit about his (or anyone else save one guy’s) chart position, but it’s exhausting that he had great development into being a proud but capable team player all the way up through the 1-A versus Deku fight, and then all of that gets flushed down the toilet to revert to him getting a badass solo fight against All For One and an epilogue that allows him no work partner options whatsoever outside of the main character.
O The comedy visuals of Deku’s dumb face being subsumed by Bakugou’s plush backseat make me want to die. Someone please throw this main character away.
O I’m glad Mina reclaimed at least some aspect of her original Alien Queen aspirations with the “Ridley Hero” thing. Good for her.
O On a worldbuilding note, my attention is caught by Shinsou being described as “not contending” for a chart position, though the kanji can also mean things like “out of contention” or “beyond the sphere of.” I assume it’s just indicating that Shinsou is an underground Hero like his mentor Aizawa, but a) I feel like that runs a bit counter to his goal of proving that he can be a Hero even with a quirk like Brainwash, and b) isn’t it a bit sketchy if underground Heroes can just choose to exempt themselves from the most visible, public-facing form of Pro Hero evaluation? Maybe the HPSC charts them for its own records and then removes them from public visibility, of course, or maybe the charts only go down to 200 or so and stop after that, with Shinsou, not seeking for attention, comfortable to be below that cut-off. Not sure, but there are some interesting possibilities there, as well as some concerning ones.
O HOLY GOD, Monoma’s new look. I like it very much. He is also the only person I want to see on the charts at all. Two hundred ranked entries of Monoma's daily work antics. I support him wholly and with only the most loving of faceitiousness.
O Extremely funny to me that all the people I saw on Twitter talking about this chapter confirming KamiJirou had to first ignore Jirou explicitly denying that there’s anything going on and second be very disingenuous indeed with the panel crop they used to wave around crowing about their ship. I don’t have a strong distaste for KamiJirou relative to my distaste for Kaminari himself, but my tolerance for him pretty much starts and ends with KamiJirouMomo as a poly arrangement, so I was pleased to see that left open here.
O If I dislike Toga’s image being used to encourage Ochaco to hook up with Deku (and I dislike it very much, particularly given the loathsome last words Deku spoke to Toga when she was alive, but at least I can see the sense it makes from a thematic and characterization perspective), I have only profanity for how much I hate Shigaraki’s image being used to encourage Deku in confessing to Ochaco. Just take my entire folder full of negative reaction memes. Jesus Christ.
I have said before, and will have more to say in the future, about Deku’s assorted failures as a protagonist and hero, but him deciding that the kind of adult he wants to be is a Hero high school teacher really is the ultimate indicator of just how little he cared about who Shigaraki was and what he wanted. Ochaco is making a good faith effort to help the Toga Himikos of the future. Deku, meanwhile, is shallowly paddling around in his Hero Worship wading pool, ignoring both the Shimura Tenkos and the Shigaraki Tomuras of the world—the people Hero Society outcasts, villainizes, and sweeps under the rug.
Shigaraki’s last behest—that Deku ensure the things Shigaraki fought to destroy remain destroyed—was wasted on Deku, who, once he got Spinner and Overhaul off his conscience, clearly could not give less of a shit about helping the people Shigaraki fought for. To see that last behest come back in the context of Deku using it to bolster his goddamn love life is a fucking travesty, and I hope Ochaco dumps him inside of a year if Toga Himiko’s vengeful ghost doesn’t get him first.
O DON’T WORRY, GUYS; I’M SURE THE HEROES TOTALLY TRY TO BE MORE COMPASSIONATE AND UNDERSTANDING TOWARDS RANDOM, DOWN-ON-THEIR-LUCK VILLAINS NOW. THINGS ARE SURE TO BE TOTALLY DIFFER—
Oh. Oh, it’s not different at all, is it?
(Have I mentioned enough times yet how much I really, really dislike the street crime scenes where Our Heroes stand around and chitchat in the middle of a crime scene, having successfully dealt with the big bad villain whose actions they did not even attempt to de-escalate and whom they have immediately forgotten all about?)
O Wow, thanks for letting us know you don’t think impulse criminals aren’t wicked to the core, Iida. That makes me feel real reassured about how you guys are handling Villains who premeditate! (It does not.)
O I’ve already said I disliked how Toga’s “image” is used here, but let me not shortchange the fact that it also sucks because it puts the last nail in the coffin of Uraraka having any agency over sharing her own feelings. She has a lengthy arc about how she is—like Toga in the past—repressing her feelings for the one she loves; she gets through to Toga by frankly admitting to those feelings, as well as all the other things she was sitting on about Toga herself. And then in the aftermath, she goes right back to repressing her feelings, now ones of paralyzing grief over Toga’s death. Deku witnesses those feelings not because she chooses to share them with him, but because he tracks her down mid-cry. And now we find out for sure what Chapter 430 left unclear: that in eight years, Ochaco hasn’t said a word about her once-again repressed feelings for him. Instead, just as she did when she was a teenager, she’s doubled down on putting those feelings away in the name of what she “should” be doing.
And here? Does she finally take control of her own life, her own feelings, her own expression? No. At least, not until after Deku has been the one to confess first and Vision!Toga psychically shoves her forward to close the gap. The only thing left for Ochaco to do, the only assertiveness asked of her, is to accept or rebuff Deku’s overture. Good god, you’d think she was Eri, a helpless waif wrestling with indoctrination about how much she’s not allowed to want anything for her own sake, whose turning point in the narrative is finding the strength to reach back for the hand being extended towards her.
Coming from a long-term abuse victim, that’s a perfectly worthy character arc, even a deeply moving show of strength, but it’s wildly pathetic for BNHA’s most prominent female hero, the gal whose character arc was founded entirely on balancing her desire to help others with pursuing her own happiness. Good lord, did Shonen Jump tell Horikoshi that boys don’t like it when girls are too forward or what?
Got confused, I thought we weren't getting a chapter.
Rudo's wolf form is so cool and learning it's not actually a life changing form but rather a transformation was so smart. Gountess taking a page from Too Lily to stop Rudo from disintegrating b/c of 3R.
She would be proud. But also Where Is She?? We need a Too Lily appearance again and soon.
Best shot in the chapter no, the whole arc maybe, bar none. My son boy is going to make Mymo his chew toy.
Thoughts on Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween Chapter 4: Dick's relationship with both of his fathers, the realities of circus life, and flying without a net.
A little while ago, I touched on how I wished we got a more nuanced version of Dick's parents and his time pre-Bruce. In particular, I talked about how there was something inherently selfish about his parents involving their son in an act that didn't use a net that I couldn't quite let go of, and how some of those negative character traits that Dick has that Bruce is often blamed for could have originated from his time pre-Bruce.
Which is why I am absolutely in love with the latest chapter of Batman: The Long Halloween - The Last Halloween, which surprised me by delving a bit more into Dick's relationship with John Grayson.
All the things the chapter discussed/hinted at that I loved:
The adultification of Dick at a young age, where he is performing multiple shows a day (including on Christmas Day, because his father thinks it is important to entertain other children at the expense of his own), has significant responsibilities beyond his age, and feels solely responsible for whether the people in his life live or die.
A discussion of how John Grayson leans deliberately in the 'death-defying' nature of not having a net because it draws bigger crowds. This idea that people didn't come to see The Graysons fly but to see them die was such a big moment for me, and why the lack of a net has always been something I get stuck on. We don't know why having bigger crowds at the expense of the safety of his family is so important to John - be it because of the atmosphere, being the center of it all, the money it brings in (etc), but I love how it horrifies Dick a little. It makes me think of the Coliseum in ancient Rome, where the audience sits in anticipation of bloodshed.
In light of the above, involving Dick in their act takes on an even darker edge. The only thing more exciting than potentially seeing John or Mary die? Potentially seeing an 8-year-old die. This feels as much of a deliberate choice by John as not having a net in general. How else do you attract even bigger crowds? Roll up, roll up! Come watch the show and an 8-year-old maybe fall to his death for your pleasure!
When Alfred is dismissive, cold, irritated, and abrupt with Dick (while worried about Bruce), Dick compares that behaviour with how his own father treated him, in particular around his work responsibilities.
All the above leads to this fantastic contrast between Dick and John, and what flying without a net means to each of them. For John, he flies without a net because it could mean death (and that excites and draws in the crowd). For Dick, he chooses to fly without a net to save Bruce (and he does it alone, in the dark, with no audience). For both, it is a deliberate choice. For both, flying without a net comes at a cost. John and Mary died due to John's decision, and the Calendar Man is going to break free because of Dick's.
In general, I LOVED how the chapter gently challenges the status quo of what life was like both before and after Dick lost his parents, and instead has Dick saying that Bruce didn't simply save his life, but gave him one. If you envision Dick as someone who is basically <i>working</i> in the circus as a child, 7 days a week, multiple shows a day, dealing with adult responsibilities in a likely non-child friendly environment (because circus' were terrible places for children, but in particular for acrobatic children who underwent grueling training to be able to do the kinds of things that Dick was able to). Bruce gives him Christmas and holidays, he gives him school and mathletes and basketball and friendships, computers and chemistry and options. He restricts his Robin hours to the weekend when he is younger, because Dick being a <i>child</i> is important to Bruce. This chapter is, at its heart, a contrast between the two father figures in Dick's life, and I'm so pleased that Bruce gets some of his dues for once. It doesn't negate at all that his parents didn't also give him so much as well, but that Bruce has his own, incredibly important impact on Dick growing up.
One of the things I also loved about the chapter was how odd it actually feels. It feels like Dick is narrating a Christmas fairytale, but what is interesting here is that the fairytale is about Bruce and not about Dick himself. There is something almost childish about Bruce's situation - that fairytale aspect, being woken basically by true love's kiss - while Dick is living through a nightmarish situation in contrast, caught up in death and fear and desperation. Even when Bruce wakes up and Dick hugs him, Bruce barely acknowledges him or what he has done, and the plot itself doesn't start advancing again until after Dick leaves. There is something interestingly weird about how Bruce thanks Alfred and heads off with Selina but doesn't acknowledge Dick, but it makes sense when you view the chapter as having been narrated by Dick up until that point, and who maybe doesn't quite see himself as part of the fairytale.
In all seriousness, I love how they’re all aghast that Wars has never been in a dungeon. We all knew they would be but it’s fun to see it in canon.
Also love how Wild isn’t technically included since he has Divine Beasts, not dungeons.
Leg is really letting his gremlin side take over. I can’t tell if this is new or if I just need a refresher on the older chapters…
Speaking of chapters, I just want to take a minute to look at the quality of this comic and appreciate it. The expressions! The colors! The movement! The poses! The character designs! Big shoutout to Jojo! She is outdoing herself!
Sky being all smug that he’s not the one being messed with this time.
And Legend being smug about messing with Warriors.
All is right in the world.
First of all, I love how realistic this is that they all can’t fit in one area. Some of these spaces are small.
I also love how the frames themselves are very jittery and cut into each other. Really makes you feel how the Links keep getting in each others’ ways in this scene.
Oh boy I can feel a Conflict brewing between the boys and Time. Time just wants to keep them safe, especially after almost losing Twi, but the boys are all heroes in their own rights and obviously are stubborn as hell.
I doubt that bad letter from a few chapters ago is making Time’s mood any better either.
I can’t wait for the Links to split off in little groups. Get to see them one-on-one together and working together. I wonder how they’ll split up? What will their teams be?
I cannot wait for this dungeon crawl!
As always, credit goes to @linkeduniverse for the panels. The chapter is Entrance.
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I won't talk much about the new chapter. I liked it but I don't have a way to express my thoughts. But Lucy's reaction to Zoe holding her had was very amusing. She was so confused, lol.
Glad to be back in the nightmare hell scape! Fun Tokyo Blade vibes.
Bro is so BORED of the horrors. He looks at his sleep paralysis demon and goes “augh you again??”
The most obvious answer to 123 that we’ve all been waiting for for like a year.
Seriously though, on one hand it’s a bit annoying that we’re matter of facting this conclusion after a whole volume worth of playing the ‘What is Aqua thinking?’ game during the aqrb section of filming, it feels disproportionate to the buildup (a very common criticism for subplot resolutions lately)
On the other hand, they’re finally saying what everyone with reading comprehension has been thinking! Aqua doesn’t want this stupid badly written ship to happen, and neither does fucking Gorou!
But Gorou changing the subject from the big revenge life dream to “so what girls do you like” after he just admitted he was like, fading away is a little jarring to me. Maybe it’d read better with voice acting but right now it’s just a little tonally weird.
“You don’t need to act anymore” goes hard though, all things considered. Tbh, I don’t even really dislike the conversation, it just feels a little fast to me. It’s a dream sequence though so I’m being nit picky.
You and the girl who’s telling you not to worry about
Akane aggressively playing matchmaker is a pretty funny role for her, it utilizes her knowledge of people and Aqua adjacent manipulation skills while keeping her motives as well meaning yet overbearing as I’d expect from her.
The current dynamic of her Kana and Aqua has a very Kaguya feel, which I mean positively. It’s refreshing and reminds me why I like this cast and their interactions in the first place. Again, it’s a pretty stark contrast to the rest of this volume which has been steering into horror territory, but I’m suspecting this is probably to set us up for another tone shift later.
The dual flashbacks of their building crushes and feelings is very cute, I think their ship still walks the line of healthy and toxic, but it’s still built on a strongly established foundation. That said, there’s no way they get out right now and it works out. Not without at least one more solid complication first.
So happy for you to admit that, babe. Not gonna go well for you though.
