At long last, A Necromancer's Guide to Arranged Marriages has been released! Thank you to everyone who has followed me since book one of this trilogy. Reviews are very much appreciated.
The book can be preordered at these links:
Amazon, paperback, e-book, and audiobook:
Barnes and Noble:
Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for books, NOOK ebooks & magazines. Shop music, movies, toys & games, too. Receive free shipping with your
Very very serious analysis on Zen(AFO) and Yoichi(who?) [Part 1] (2017 words)
(Very serious analysis, zero jokes to be found here.)
This is a post that mainly analyzes the brothers’ backstory with that generous amount of 1.5 chapters' worth of panels Horikoshi has given to us (chapters 407 & 408). Thank you…Horikoshi Kohei. Because…um…you are Horikoshi Kohei.
Anyway, for this analysis, I will primarily stick to the source material (manga) unless the anime has some worth noting addition that doesn't create plot holes or retcon anything from the manga. Let’s begin.
Shigaraki Zen and Shinpachi Youchi, a pair of orphaned meta twins from the dawn of Quirks. Their mother is a prostitute who was implied to be an alcoholic both in the anime and manga. Since we have a 100% chance of seeing her with alcohol in the grand total of one panel when she was alive, we can safely assume that she was, undoubtedly, an alcoholic.
As shown above in the image, it was stated that she didn't even know about her pregnancy of the twins for the first eight months. A full-term single child pregnancy usually lasts for 9 months and one week (40 weeks~), while twins pregnancy last for 8-9 months (37 weeks~).
So the mother had less than a month to process her pregnancy, and she chose to give birth to the twins by a river. Why? To easily dispose of the newborns, maybe. Not that we know if she had the time to crawl to the river when her water broke. Or maybe she just wants easy access to water to wash the twins.
Enough about this nameless dead mom, TWINS!
The narration says that the twins only had each other, but it was a lie. They had the rats who warmly welcomed them at birth and wanted to end their misery, but one or both of the twins swelled the river with their sheer will so they could get out of there. What did the rats do to you two, man? They just wanna be your friends!
The twins’ racism aside, I’ll be covering the analysis post in chronological order of the timeline. Because flashback within a flashback makes the greatest storytelling ever.
Here we see the twins in their natural habitat with Zen dragging Yoichi onto their mother’s corpse to use as a lifeboat, even using his newly taken power from his mother to have a better grasp on the boat. He is even smart enough to use the same power to pierce tunnels to get dying milk from it! The power of racism can truly drive individuals to unlock the skill of using tools, which is what mainly separates us from animals.
(Seriously though, was the mother’s vestige controlling Zen here? Why is this 0-day-old baby more intelligent than most people on the internet? Even saving the useless piece of brother with him?)
Thankfully, we very soon get the answer to baby Zen’s intelligence. He isn’t a human, that’s why. I bet Youchi is a monster too, given that his mother is one.
Thankfully again, we have a group of heroes rising up to take down these monsters. They are even wearing masks, goggles, and full-body protection clothing to prevent catching the disease. Role model!
Sadly, they were defeated by one of those filthy, evil, diseased monsters, also known as meta freaks or metahumans. There’s a ‘human’ in metahumans, but just know that it’s only there because these freaks are pretending to be humans, okay?
Like here, we can see Yoichi, the smaller meta freak, is shedding crocodile tears and has even learned the manipulation tactic called speaking. While Zen, the bigger meta freak with short hair, is slow on mimicking us and acts closer to his animalistic nature, wearing a trash bag, bare feet and muted.
With such intelligence that allowed them to mimic humans this quickly, it was no surprise that in just a few more years, their kind had started to demand ‘coexistence’ with the humans. The audacity. As if they weren’t the ones who messed up our society years ago. Even if you pretend to read and understand our language, we are not the same.
Although I must admit, meta freaks and us are both similar in the sense that we kill our own kind for no good reason. Even when these two meta freaks were brothers, they had no hesitation with killing each other. One of them then killed one of their fellow freaks while the other one has adapted to mimicking a hikikomori and wasting resources. Be it animals, humans or meta freaks, we cannot take violence away from us. I guess we are a little similar.
Then we have a timeskip to the two brothers in adult age, with the younger brother trying to jump his older brother because he is a violent animal that needs to be put down.
The older brother wasn’t even doing anything bad. He was just standing there, kindly using his metapower to revert a diseased man back to a normal one and spreading his disease to another normal human—NEVERMIND KILL THIS GUY! HOW COULD HE SPREAD THOSE DISEASES AROUND!!! JUST TAKE ALL THE DISEASES YOURSELF AND DIE SOMEWHERE DUDE
Although he had done it again here. At the very least, I must appreciate that the older brother has put his little victim in quarantine okay? If you know that you are diseased, please take the necessary precautions to avoid others meeting the same fate as you. Like if you caught a meta disease, it is very likely that your family would have it. Please do not lie about your conditions. Wear a mask, avoid skin contact, stand far away from civilization, do not share your food, and kindly surrender yourself to us, the heroes of this era who will save us from the meta freaks.
Do not be like those two freaks who aimed for the opposite and released a diseased man to the outside world. We, the anti-meta heroes, understand that you are likely just a victim of this unknown disease that those meta freaks keep spreading. We will protect not only you from further suffering and also the others too. How so? Our pipes will ensure it. Do not worry. Your body will be safely cremated and not returned to your family.
Ok I’m done roleplaying this NPC. Before you called his group racist, metahumans aren’t a race, they are a whole different species—Ok I’ll stop. Let’s start over again with a more serious tone.
Due to how metahumans started appearing and all, the old humans are reasonably afraid of the new humans. So naturally there’s a group of people dedicated to eliminating the new humans.
I’m not going to point fingers and say that ‘these anti-meta people are evil’ or ‘the meta freaks are evil’ despite me doing just that five minutes ago. Obviously the metahumans(or Quirked people) cannot actually spread this metapower thing around like it's a disease. (All for One excluded). But there do exist some metahumans who use their powers for evil. (All for One included)
Like in chapter 193 (anime cut content), we can see metahumans robbing the powerless. Just as what I have said when I broke out of my roleplaying as the anti-meta NPC character earlier, we cannot take violence from anyone. No matter who and what you are, violence is a part of us.
Enough humanity analysis in my Shigaraki brothers’ analysis, baby Zen! Here we see him showing himself to the anti-meta group, who then recognized that he is a poor orphan, but probably carries diseases and moved away from him. Then Zen killed them.
It is pretty easy to assume that this baby is born evil, I honestly agree. I mean, this baby is a metahuman—Fine I’ll drop the roleplaying for real this time.
From the above pages, we can tell that the anti-meta groups were armed and are taking notes of metahumans’ activities, particularly about a group that assaulted the protest group. So can it be said that ‘oh, the anti-meta is doing this in self-defense’? Did a group of metahumans kill the humans unfairly first? The argument of who is right and wrong is silly. They are all wrong in some ways. Some of them are just more wrong.
From their reaction, it is implied that metahuman orphans aren’t rare. One of them showed pity to Zen but otherwise nothing. I get it. What if you get his unknown disease by helping him? At the same time, leaving an orphan is as good as killing them yourself. This is a baby bro! At least place a can of food far away like you’d do with stray cats! (Though metahuman babies are different and can somehow survive to adulthood)
Also I want to talk about why Zen attacked the anti-meta group. There are two possible answers that I have:
Answer #1. Judging from the ‘he was born an arrogant baby’ line, Zen is born arrogant. Not born evil, mind you. Arrogant people aren’t necessarily evil, they are just mostly annoying.
Speaking of this, I die inside knowing how mistranslated these sections can be. Even the screenshots I provided above are not so accurate. Instead of ‘nuisance’, it was more of ‘he distrust/suspect them’ (‘疑問)
Anyway the point is that Zen killed the anti-meta group because he was suspicious of them for ignoring him/he felt hurt that he was ignored. For the former, his hunch was pretty spot on, if he didn’t kill them, they would probably come for him when he grew older because he would have lost his baby status and would feel less guilt when killed.
For the latter, the feeling hurt part is a lot more based on headcanons, but not totally baseless. In the entire manga, Zen has shown and declared himself as someone who likes to be remembered and focused on. It is very likely that this stems from his childhood trauma growing up as a neglected nobody who only really has his little brother looking at him.
Although Yoichi is in a similar position, he didn’t turn out like his brother possibly due to their different Quirk nature, or how Zen was doing all the hard work feeding his brother while Yoichi can be a shut-in. Many reasons on that part too.
Answer #2. Zen has a history of cannibalism, so he was just hunting his food. Yummy yummy.
(There are other possible reasons like Zen killing the anti-meta group because they were willing to let him die or Zen was just poking at anything that moves out of baby curiosity, but they aren’t as funny)
Anyway, we got a small timeskip where Zen wears his trash bag differently and is taking powers from metahumans. Remember what I said about we can’t take violence away from us? Youchi craves violence too. He is only the lesser evil of the brothers.
Anyway x2, again, we don’t have the full context to why Zen is attacking people again. It can be said that they actually hurt Yochi because we see how beat up he is here, so Zen hurt them in retribution.
But it can also be said that Koichi just fell all over himself and got himself those injuries, or that Zen abused Yichi more often than this one time we see him physically beat him.
There is no concrete answer to the backstory, all we will have are headcanons that can no longer be obliterated by Horikoshi because the story is over. And so, my headcanon here is that Yoichi is manipulative and his injuries are fake just like his tears. This all connects to the hidden lore of him having a brainwashing Quirk and he has used it on everyone in the story at every chance possible. I explained more of this in another post. This is why Zen kicked him. He saw through his evil little brother’s BS.
Anyway I’m ending part 1 of the analysis here. I will release part 2 before Horikoshi releases the next chapter. Stay hydrated. (It was 5k words but Tumblr doesn’t allow 30+ images.)
blakekathryn
janainaart
jacobvanloon
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
jbbartram-illu
vaporwave
