I know I've said this a hundred times but if you're worried about palestinian fundraisers being scams at least consider donating to MSF. It's a highly reputable organization which has broken its long-standing neutrality to denounce Israel in front of the UN. Here's all the aid MSF is providing to Gazans (documentation available in multiple languages).
Since I know no one's gonna click on that link, here's a quick overview of some of the various ways in which Medicins Sans-Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) is aiding Palestinians
- Since Oct 7 2023, MSF provided for 14000 hospital admissions and 7500 surgeries, on top of treating 27500 people for physical violence causes, treating 34000 people for diarrhoea (very common condition in Gaza currently due to the sanitary crisis) and holding 18000 mental health sessions.
-MSF is currently operating in two hospitals, eight healthcare facilities and fifteen mobile clinics, providing surgical support, wound care, physiotherapy, maternity and paediatric care, basic healthcare, vaccinations, and mental health services among other things (more info on the treatments provided by each facility on the link above). Additionally, they provide training for psychological, medical and paramedical volunteers, and donate first aid kits to various camps (info on the specific locations on the link above).
- Via their partnership with the Palestinian Agriculture and Development Association, they're building latrines for over 30000 people in six camps, distributing hygiene kits to 2400 families, and ensuring clean drinking water for 25000 people, on top of equipping a camp for 70 families with accessible sanitary facilities for disabled people.
- Since October 7, 2023, eight of their medics have died. Seven of them are remembered here, and their latest, Hasan Suboh, in this statement that denounces Israel's allies for disregarding the fact that the protection of humanitarian workers is not being guaranteed as they claim.
MSF does not only stand for Palestine in humanitarian terms, it also does so politically to an extent, holding Israel and its allies accountable for sabotaging ceasefire negotiation attempts.
MSF also provides aid to Sudan, the Democratic Republic Of Congo, Haiti, Ethiopia and 76 other countries.
To better maximize your donation to MSF, I advise keeping an eye out for donation doubling and tripling periods, which occur fairly often and can be checked on their website.
FUCK THIS I SPERFECT, IT SHOWS THE ARM PRONATING AND ALL THE MUSCLES SHIFTING ALONG WITH THE WRIST
IT EVEN HIGHLIGHTS THE ULNA BONE
HEY THIS IS THE ULTIMATE ANATOMY REF, FUCK THOSE MISLEADING TERRIBLE FUCKING “ANATOMY” TUTORIALS THAT GOEAS AROUND TUMBLR, THIS IS ALL OYU NEED, LOOK AT THE LATISIMUS STRETCHING OVER THE SERRATUS, THE PECTORAL MUSCLE MOVESUPWARDS AND OVER THE BICEP AND EXTENDS ALONG WITH THE ARM THERES EVEN THE CORACOBRACHIALIS;. AAAA OMFG I’M SO HAPPYYYYYY
Sorry if this question rubs you the wrong way, but wouldn't going out of their way to try to help villains to the absolute extreme that you propose be a bit suicidal? I feel like trying to talk no jutsu criminals like Moonfish who's a serial killing canibal, or Muscular who doesn't have any actual reason for commiting violence against others other than he enjoys it, would end up getting people hurt or worse.
Idk, maybe my perception is skewed because my country has problems with the justice system being too lenient with criminals, but then striking hard against honest folk.
Like, let's say heroes try to talk to Muscular about his feelings and stuff, and he just beats them to death. So should they arrest him and take him to jail now, or should they respond "understandable, have a nice day" and let him carry on with his rampage and try to talk no jutsu him the next day?
I’ve had enough exchanges with you, rvg, to assume you don’t mean it this way, but I gotta say, this is an incredibly fallacious way to frame the “talk to Villains” discussion. I wrote two responses to this, first a characteristically long and rambly response which you and anyone else who’s interested are free to read below the cut. The second response is much shorter and is here above the cut, if only for those readers who think it’s a waste of time to try and give a sincere answer to what reads like deliberate reductiveness—though again, I don’t think that’s your intent.
Here is my model version of how Heroes should engage with Villains:
Step One: Heroes should put in a basic, good faith effort to defuse and de-escalate every Villain encounter they have with the tools and knowledge they have available; the ideal result is that the Villain will choose on their own to stop presenting a danger to the public.
Step Two: If that is not feasible for some reason, or if it is ineffective, then the Heroes should make all possible efforts to arrest the Villain with the minimal possible harm.
Step Three: If there is an immediate threat to the lives of bystanders and there is absolutely no way the Heroes can come up with to stop the Villain non-lethally, then there should, afterwards, be an investigation into the death of the Villain and all Heroes who were involved should have to face questions about their role in the situation and their decision to use lethal force. Measures should then be implemented to help prevent the situation from arising again in the future. A Hero killing someone should by default be treated as a punishable failure, not a victory.
That’s it! That’s all there is to it! Try talking first, then try arresting, and if killing is truly the only way, be ready to explain why. That step-by-step should be the standard, and if there are going to be deviations from it, they should be exceptionally well-justified by both the characters and the narrative. If that’s not the standard, then I think it’s a key thing we need to see the protagonists confronting and changing.
Hero Society is obviously in the not-the-standard camp: most of the Heroes spend most of the series jumping straight to Step Two, totally skipping Step One; there are then multiple instances of Step Three being botched completely, with non-lethal tactics being discarded or ignored and lethal force being accepted without question or resistance. By the end of the series, a tiny handful of Heroes are now hesitantly attempting what should have been their very first go-to, Step One, but their prior reliance on Steps Two and Three make the Villains much more resistant than they might have otherwise been, which reenforces the push towards lethal force in a society that will still not enforce any consequences for it.
This would all be more forgivable if not for the way BNHA positions its Heroes, as lawful defenders of the status quo in a basically modern version of Japan—i.e. they’re cops but the story either doesn’t want to saddle them with the responsibilities real cops would have or else Horikoshi has some alarming views that treat said responsibilities as bothersome administrative red tape.
Therein is my fundamental complaint: BNHA makes the choice to frame its Heroes as being basically specialized police but then disregards or attempts to minimize how that framing colors the Heroes actions’ and decisions, especially with regard to the Villains. My thoughts on what the Heroes “should” be doing are nothing more than taking that framing (Heroes = cops) to its logical conclusion and asking the story to treat the Heroes accordingly.
Below the jump, find the longer version of this answer, which contains more picking apart of the ask’s premise, more references to the canon and to real life, and an extended discussion about the non-Hero institutions in BNHA that are in some way responsible for Villains and what Heroes’ obligations are re: those institutions. It is, in other words, the version of this answer that’s 4000 words long instead of 500. Reminder that it was the version of this answer that was written first, so pardon any recycled phrasing or reiterated rhetoric.
I’ll just start by re-pasting the question…
What I think is that there is a lot of air between “beating up Villains while being more concerned about the news camera catching your good side than you are about talking to the human being you’re pummeling” and “trying to talk to the Villain but just shrugging and letting them carry on if it doesn’t work”.
A perennial response Villain fans get when they talk about this is an exasperated, even outraged, “What, so you’re saying Deku should just let Shigaraki kill him or innocent people?!” And like, no, that’s not what we’re saying at all, and it’s a really reductive, bad faith characterization of the argument. So I want to talk first about what Villain fans are saying, and then I’ll circle back to your question about trying to talk no jutsu the really bad news Villains and what Heroes should do if that talk no jutsu fails.
First things first, and to get it out of the way, not all Villains are on the level of Muscular or Moonfish. For the vast majority of the series, the numeric bulk of Villains are just street criminals. It would not be a life or death struggle for Kamui Woods and Mount Lady to try and talk down a purse snatcher together. There is so much room for positive change in how Heroes engage with street-level Villains that just gets glossed over entirely when people want to spin-kick the argument all the way to S-class threats like post-surgery Shigaraki.
Note how handily and briskly Hawks deals with the nudist flasher guy when he’s walking around town with Endeavor—he doesn’t even glance in his direction. Would it have been so impossibly hard to use his feathers to pin the guy’s coat back together and then cheerfully ask him why he went and did a thing like that?
So just keep that in mind, first of all: for the vast majority of what a Hero does day-to-day, especially the powerful ones who are way up near the top of the rankings, there are options available to them beyond “immediately resort to extreme violence” or “give the Villain a thumbs-up and walk away, whistling to cover the sound of civilian screams.”
But okay, how about with the more dangerous Villains? Well, the point still stands: multiple heroic characters throughout the manga show themselves to be entirely capable of carrying on a conversation—be it with the Villains or with Hero allies—while fighting. Mirio is able to temporarily keep ShigAFO talking and distracted by simply asking him a few basic questions; he and Nighteye both are able to get at least some answers out of Overhaul(!) just by asking about his intentions. Ochaco and Toga have coherent conversation every single time they fight. Hawks and Twice have a whole argument while fighting. As soon as Shouto can be bothered to talk to Dabi, Dabi’s eager to spill his whole backstory to him.
Shigaraki in particular comes off as desperate to share his grievances practically every time Heroes encounter him, and that only stops being true at the very end—and even there, it might be less true if that green twit fighting him could have been arsed to just fucking ask him, “Hey, last time we fought, when we were in the same headspace, I saw an image of you crying with a dog. What was up with that?” Deku doesn’t have to stand there with his hands in the air while asking! As all the examples cited demonstrate, Heroes are more than able to fight and talk at the same time. So why don’t they try to make that talk a little more actually useful?
What I’m saying is simply that I would like it if less of that conversation were dedicated to Heroes giving moralizing sermons about how bad and unforgiveable Villains are and a lot more of it were dedicated to Heroes just asking why the Villains are doing what they’re doing, and letting the conversation go from there, fighting defensively and keeping the Villain focused on them as much as they’re capable of doing. We see the results in the series when Heroes bother trying this—think Deku’s results with Gentle Criminal or Ochaco’s with Toga—so it’s damning that they don’t try it more often.
The likely explanation is that professional heroism as a matter of practice and culture does not tend to bother with de-escalation tactics; after all, while you’re standing there trying to talk to the bank robber, some other Hero could easily be coming in for the take-down, and then they get all the credit and glory and not least the pay. The whole system is geared towards rewarding fast, uncompromising takedowns, ignoring the possibility of more peaceful, productive resolutions in favor of stopping the Public Disturbance as quickly as possible, because it’s more important to stop random civilians feeling inconvenienced than it is to maybe try addressing a Villain’s issues so they stand down themselves and are less likely to become hardened criminals.
Heck, even Deku really only gets anywhere with Gentle because his first instinct—shutting down the fight right away with a Smash—gets him rebounded off an air trampoline with enough force to knock him back nearly a neighborhood block. The defensive, evasive nature of Gentle’s power means it’s difficult to hit him directly, and Gentle’s personality was such that he kept talking while Deku was figuring out how to beat him. That talking was really what gave Deku enough insight to trigger his empathy, so he started returning the conversation in ways that he never did against e.g. Stain, AFO, or in his first fight with Muscular. He didn’t lead by asking why Gentle was invading his school, though; he just ordered him repeatedly to stop.
Heroes and, in turn, the kids, just don’t default to trying to talk to the Villains. We see that they can, they’re just not trained to, so it becomes a tactic of last resort, or of distraction, or, finally, as being the result of moments of connection that make them incapable of continuing to ignore the Villains’ humanity. But when it’s a last resort like that, when they don’t bother asking questions until after the Villains have been pushed past the point of wanting to engage, everything gets so much harder and more dangerous.
Look at Shigaraki and Toga. When Deku and Ochaco initially encounter them, the kids’ first response is basically just revulsion and terror. And like, okay, they’re students, newly fledged Hero Course trainees. They shouldn’t have been facing real life Villains for another two years, at least! So it’s not surprising that they don’t know what to do and don’t react in the most empathetic manner possible. I’m not blaming them for that. But I do want to ask what would have happened if their classes and the Hero culture were more focused on attempting dialogue with Villains.
All Might at USJ writes Shigaraki off as a faker with no real beliefs, and Deku at the mall calls him an incomprehensible cipher, but what if either of them had instead asked Tomura why he was there and what he wanted, then asked follow-up questions from there? How much earlier might they have found out that Shigaraki had some tragedy in his past that he blamed All Might for not saving him from? What might finding that out early on have led them to change about how they approached Shigaraki in subsequent encounters?
If Ochaco and Tsuyu had asked Toga why she attacked people, then followed up on whatever answer Toga gave about liking blood with some questions about consent, how much sooner might they have found out that Toga spent her whole life feeling ostracized and repressed because she was convinced by the adults around her that people finding out she craved blood would make her a freak in their eyes? How might they have engaged with her differently if they realized her parents had been verbally abusing her since she was three years old?
But we also don’t have to stop with U.A. types! Toga went on the run at only 15—how many times did she have had close scrapes with arrest before the training camp attack? How many other opportunities were there for someone to talk her down before she made it to the League? Heck, even all the way to the end, if the green twit hadn’t just insisted on antagonizing Toga one last time for the road—as if he’d learned nothing at all since the mall scene!—how much more easily might Ochaco have been able to engage with her? Maybe if Toga hadn’t set her mind to embracing Villainy because Deku functionally became yet another person calling her a freak, Ochaco could have gotten to the breakthrough point before Toga stabbed her in the gut?
I’ve been talking about the more sympathetic Villains here so far, but all this goes for the rest of them, too. Sure, Moonfish is a cannibal serial killer now, but was he always? Or was there a time when he was just like Toga, a teenager wrestling with quirk-driven hungers who was abused and ostracized for them? I’ve thought, from time to time, about the idea of a League ageswap AU, where Moonfish is that scared but defiant teenager who’s been pushed over the edge and done something violent, but is not yet past saving. Conversely, it’s all too easy for me to imagine a Toga who was never captured and never shown any compassion growing into an adult who fully embraced her vampire serial killer reputation and “deviant” hungers to become just as much an alleged monster as Canon Moonfish.
How about Muscular? Was he always a violent sadist? Was it impossible that he could have grown up to be anything else? Could that taste for violence ever have found an outlet other than murder? Could he have gotten into underground fighting, like Rappa? Could he have become a Hero like Mirko, always hungry for a better challenge than she’s getting? Quite frankly, even if Imasuji Gouto was a violent little bully who killed neighborhood pets as a child, he still deserved some kind of intervention—psychological counseling, medication, more acceptable outlets, etc.
How many Villains would HeroAca!Japan be spared if the people in power were more focused on intervention and rehabilitation at every stage of a Villain’s life and career? Why do Heroes think it’s helpful or necessary to tell everyone in earshot their personal opinion about the unforgivability of their opponents? Why is it such a problem for some readers when Villain fans point out that a lot of issues could be sidestepped entirely, and the HeroAca world considerably bettered, if the Hero Industry were less focused on showy grandstanding violence, less terrified of the optics of being anything other than maximally harsh on Villains?
That all said, that’s the nuance of what I want when I say I want more talk no jutsu. But let’s go back to your question—what should Heroes do when they run into Villains who can’t be talked down?
Say that all the interventions and counseling programs have failed, and someone—some mother’s son, some father’s daughter—has grown up to become a Villain. And not just any Villain, but a really dangerous one. What do?
Well, I do still want to see Heroes try to talk first, unless they have some reason to believe talking won’t work, like knowledge that knowing that efforts in that direction have already been made and documented in previous encounters between law enforcement and the Villain in question. There’s also some flex here based on how capable of dragging out an encounter the Heroes on-scene are, and how much danger any bystanders would be in—I would want more effort from someone who can hold their own for long periods like Deku than e.g. Manual. But like, anyone can yell a few basic questions about motivations to see what sort of response they get.
But say our Hero is up against someone like Muscular, who just laughs off questions like that. What to do then?
Then arrest him.
Seriously, this is not that complicated. I’m not asking some run-of-the-mill Hero to get their arms ripped off trying to give battle therapy to Muscular! But I do want Muscular to get therapy, or at least be offered it, once he’s no longer presenting an immediate threat and those conversations can happen in a safe environment. And if he doesn’t accept it,[1] I still want him to be treated as humanely as reasonably possible in prison, with the therapy option always on the table if he ever wants to try it. I also want his prison term (even if it’s for life) to not involve methods of punishment that are considered by the United Nations to constitute torture, like Tartarus’s apparent extended solitary confinement.
1: Perhaps because he would rather rip his own arms off than talk about his feelings or waste any more time getting analyzed by shrinks than he already has; pick your poison based on why and for how long you think he’s been killing people.
I truly do not have any problems, ethically speaking, with Heroes arresting dangerous Villains. My problem has always been that Hero Society is comprehensively awful in how it treats those who don’t fit neatly into society’s little boxes. Their social support networks are full of holes, their law enforcement is financially disincentivized from attempting de-escalation, their judicial process is completely invisible, and their prisons are concrete holes that only serve to make people worse, as we can see clearly in the case of people like poor Ending—already unstable when he was first arrested by Endeavor, but so blatantly suicidal when his sentence is up that the literal first thing he does after release is to investigate Endeavor’s personal life so as to find a way to goad Endeavor into killing him.
Now, sure, Heroes are not responsible for prison policies and practices; those are under a completely different part of the criminal justice umbrella. Nor is it up to them to determine how e.g. financial aid programs or family services work. But I want Heroes to be better in the ways that they—personally and professionally—can be, and I want them to be cognizant of the flaws in the system they uphold. I want them to have some basic intellectual curiosity about the Villains they fight—why they turned out like they did, if they can be helped, and what’s going to become of them after the Hero hands them off to the police.
Like, what is All Might’s opinion on Tartarus? He spent 30+ years fighting for the society that maintains it—does he think or care at all about the fact that some extremely damaged, abused people wind up in there after he gets done beating them up? And if he doesn’t, what does that say about him? What would Ochaco have done if Toga had lived and said she’d rather Ochaco kill her than let her go to prison forever? Does Shouto think now about the family situation of every Villain he fights, or did his ability to care about “some mother’s son” begin and end with his mother’s son?
Obviously, Heroes stop Villains all the time; I’m not asking them to do deep dives into the history and treatment of each and every one. I just want them to ask the questions they can while the Villain is in front of them, and to care about the state of both the systems that produce Villains and the ones tasked with their care. I think that when handing people over to state custody, Heroes have a responsibility to be meaningfully confident that the state won’t abuse that custodianship. If they aren’t—if they truly don’t give a shit about what happens to Villains once the police van door swings closed—then in my view they’re no different than any professional who shirks their duty.
So many people insist that the kids—that Heroes in general—have no duty to care about the Villains, but to me, this view comes off as wildly ignorant about the wide variety of jobs in the real world that do, in fact, confer a duty of care.
If…
…a teacher sees a child with unexplained bruises but doesn’t bother to do their due diligence as a mandatory reporter—
…a prison guard leaves a handcuffed inmate alone in a room with a fellow warden wearing brass knuckles—
…a medic doesn’t speak up when a flight attendant asks if there’s a doctor on the plane—
…a bartender just keeps on serving someone who’s obviously intoxicated and then lets them stumble out the door to the parking lot—
—then they are shirking their duty. There is no shortage out there of examples of this sort of responsibility, one that you can be held legally responsible for, one that you choose to accept when you sign up for the job.
Heroes are not Samaritans doing the work out of the goodness of their hearts; they’re not vigilantes just trying to keep their own patch safe. They’re government employees, crucial members of the lawful system they represent. They have to care—not personally, not individually, but on a professional, structural level, they have to care about the people they fight because the system has to care about those people. And if the system doesn’t care, the system has to be changed.
I'm segueing here into real life stuff, so let me note as a disclaimer that what follows is based on my cultural familiarity with American policies, as well as periodic research into that of other nations. I don't know what country you live in, rvg, so I can hardly speak to its crime-and-punishment situation. This is all a lefty American's opinion on what reading she has done about American, Japanese, and, in the case of this particular post, Scandinavian criminal justice systems.
That said: in real life, de-escalation works. One of the things you’ll often see talked about in police reform/abolishment circles is that the police are, quite frankly, doing too much work. Or, more specifically, they’re doing the wrong kind of work, work for which their training has not prepared them and which other groups would be far better suited to handle.
Here’s an article on offering a campus police force de-escalation training and the resulting 26-36% drop in injuries suffered by both civilians and officers; it also talks about how de-escalation tactics are used by SWAT teams but regarded with suspicion by patrol officers, with this quote being particularly telling: “[Special operations] officers were taught to use time, distance and cover to their advantage. For patrol officers, time was viewed as 'The more time you give a suspect, the more danger you're in.'” De-escalation is not the usual training patrol officers get, so it runs against their gut feeling, despite its proven effectiveness—compare this to BNHA’s repeated focus on speed in shutting down altercations.
Here’s an article on the results of a test run of a program in Denver, Colorado, in which police officers were completely removed from response teams to 911 calls about situations considered low risk (drug abuse, trespassing, welfare checks, etc); instead, teams of mental health specialists and paramedics were dispatched. Reports of nonviolent crime dropped 34% over the course of the time the program ran, and the direct financial cost of the response was four times lower than sending police.
The classic dramatic image of this sort of thing is the hostage situation—and when I looked into it, numerous articles said that containment and negotiation tactics have over a 94% chance of resolving hostage crises without fatalities!
The common element in this sort of thing is refraining from showboating displays of force, loud assertions of power and authority, arguments, moralizing, threats, and so forth. Far more effective is listening, active attempts to communicate and understand, not throwing one's weight around and not rising to aggression even when provoked.
Meanwhile, on the carceral side of things, restorative justice leads to greater satisfaction from both victims and perpetrators, more feeling that they were listened to and respected, and increased belief that justice was served. While the evidence on its impact on recidivism is mixed, it certainly doesn’t seem to be less effective than traditional retributive justice, and may well be considerably more effective if combined with programs that focus more specifically on lessening recidivism than restorative justice alone (research is ongoing).
This article on how “cushy” Scandinavian prisons are far more effective at reducing recidivism than their much harsher, bleaker American counterparts argues that a crucial factor in reducing recidivism is minimizing the amount of resentment criminals bear towards the system. When perpetrators can point at unjust or disproportionate punishments, cruel treatment by wardens, rejection by society, etc, it’s much easier to stew on resentment, to turn nastier themselves, to blame outside factors. Conversely, when life inside prison is made as much like life outside prison as possible with the key difference being the crucial deprivation of freedom, that resentment is defanged, leading to more more self-reflection and willingness to accept responsibility. And again, it works: Norway is a world leader, with their recidivism rate being a mere 20% compared to the U.S.’s nearly 77%.
The studies and the evidence for this stuff is out there, it’s just fighting this huge, ugly uphill battle against people who care far, far more about inflicting punishment than they do actually improving outcomes. And so much of that is based on cultural values—what people believe, what values they’re taught. That's where pop culture comes in.
That last article I linked above talks about the efforts made in the U.S. to turn prisons into a for-profit industry, and how demonizing criminals to encourage maximum sentences helps that effort; here’s another on how U.S. police departments rehabilitated the popular image of the police in the early part of the 1900s as bumbling fools or a corrupt gang by consulting on the writing of police procedurals, most crucially starting with Dragnet in 1951, but continuing even today. Here’s one on a growing concern in Japan about the relationship fostered between TV studios and police when police permission and cooperation is required for filming those popular reality TV police documentary programs.
Mass media and pop culture informs this stuff. True, Horikoshi is not having to get his work cleared by a police PR department to publish it, but you can see from the above how the police have used and do use mass media to polish up their image; they see it as an effective tool to use because it is. And the closer to our reality a work of fiction is, the more obviously it resembles the world around us, the more it seems to purport to moral instructiveness, the more true that becomes. That’s why I criticize BNHA much more harshly than any number of other manga or anime I follow where Good Guys Kill Bad Guys all the time and no one thinks twice about it: because those series aren’t parading the Good Guys out as Japanese citizens working with Japanese police under Japanese law to maintain the rosy image of the Japanese status quo.
I’m long past the point where I’m just rambling, so I’ll wind it down here by pointing out this: Horikoshi also thought that things in his world needed to change. As much as I loathe BNHA’s endgame and think much of its epilogue is trite shoulder-patting pablum that fails to meaningfully address the setting’s real problems, multiple aspects of Hero Society were at least nominally challenged and subsequently changed: citizen inaction, the dominance of professional heroics as a career path, the diminishment of non-Hero careers, quirk-based discrimination. As a direct result of the main characters’ efforts to address places where the old system was failing people, the incident rate of Villains is decreasing.
The fact that these changes are made provides in itself the evidence that they needed to be made. I think they need to go further still: my number one greivance with the epilogue is that we've seen all these changes aimed at reducing the numbers of Villains that arise in the first place, and that's nice and all, but we don't see any evidence that the Villains that do arise are treated any differently than they ever were, not even the common purse snatchers, much less the serial killers, the cannibals, and the terrorists.
So, should Heroes have to get themselves nearly killed trying to reform a Villain? Ideally no, but that assumes a world where Heroes are working in concert with a bunch of other people who are also dedicated to preventing, reforming, or rehabilitating Villains. If none of that other personnel infrastructure exists, then, well, to paraphrase Nedzu, someone has to take the first step. Why shouldn’t it be the combat-trained professionals with shounen battle stamina who also happen to be the main characters?
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Maybe it's just because MHA's ending & epilogue otherwise seemed to set everything else in their ways with little other progress, but man does Uraraka's campaign in the epilogue chapter not seem like it'd be enough. This does not look to give the assurance of improvement Hori seemed to want it to.
All we hear about her efforts is a plan to "expand access to quirk counselings," and like...seriously? Toga got that and it just made things worse. It just hammered in that she needed to be "normal" until she snapped because that "normal" couldn't fit a girl like her.
We only here about expanding access too, no improvement on the content. Nor do we get reason to think the content would change due to any other factor; the basic premise of quirk counselling as we saw is the denial that people should use the powers they're born with except for hero work (y'know, because people are still holding on to the pre-quirk status quo over a century later). This is an idea never challenged or even brought up aloud once in the war arc, not even by Toga. It's entirely possible Uraraka just thinks Toga never got counselling, and so thinks putting every kid through that will prevent any cases like her.
The only reason to think this'll be better for kids like Toga is that "Main character Uraraka and her classmates are backing it,"...which was the exact reason we expected Toga to get saved. For Shigaraki to get saved. And how did that go? How much faith did the final arc of MHA tell us to put into a concept or idea just because the protagonists are backing it so that means it'll all work out?
Yeah, that's not gonna work for me. Personally speaking; I decided before the final war arc even began that any benefit of the doubt I'd give the heroes in any kind of epilogue we got would be directly proportional to how well the villains were saved. And, well...0 for 4.
Unless I'm mistaken, the original Japanese text didn't talk about access but rather only expansion. I guess the translator messed up.
But yes, I agree. We definitely didn't get enough information on this campaign to make me reassured that the future children with inconvenient and scary quirks will be saved. Like, what will the counselors say to a child who has an unyielding need to use their potentially dangerous quirk? Only way people can legally use their quirks is to do hero work or get a permit for a specific job (like how Ochako could have gotten a license to use her quirk for construction work). But what if their quirk doesn't directly translate to any existing occupation, or more importantly, what if they don't want that occupation? So, what will the counselors do then? Without avenues for people to express their quirks in a healthy manner, Toga's tragedy will be repeated.
It is very weird that the story introduced us to MLA, a whole faction of people whose goal was to liberate people from suppressive quirk laws, and then the valid issues they brought up were never mentioned again.
Nonnie asked: are we supposed to believe that saving shigaraki means saving only his heart and not not killing him??lol
Well, what did you expect? 🙃🙃🙃
Deku had to stop the sadness somehow - am I right?
What point would have been with trying to engage Tomura in a discussion of his criticism of society? Of trying to make him see the changes? Of reassuring him that his friends are alive and there are people caring about addressing their complaints? Did you expect him to use his genius quirk analysis skills to come up with a way to capture him alive?
Nah, you see, if you keep smashing at his soul until it breaks into pieces then the trauma and hatred will just die with it. And then conveniently you can help his body be taken over again by paper-evil guy and then you can smash his body to pieces. It’s a win.
That way, you don’t have to worry about difficult questions like what you do with someone like him who has been groomed and targeted since before birth by the most powerful villain.
Never finding a complex problem that you can’t just smash away with punches is the stuff greatest heroes are made of after all. (please read it with sarcasm) [Smile or comment on the answer here](https://retrospring.net/@class1akids/a/112534068031916049)
The level of disappointment I have for BNHA ending is unmatched with any type of series I invested in.
The whole reason this story didn’t feel like a carbon copy typical shounen manga was because of the league.
They felt humanized and their trauma was so complex just for them to be thrown away in favor of the heroes learning their little lessons.
These basic ass tropes these main characters carried throughout the series felt so recycled.
The bootlicking was tangible, I mean shit Endeavor got a shot at redemption and he got that opportunity because of his privilege.
It really reflected a lot about society in general.
The worst part is nothing fucking changed, but people eat it up because they fell for characters we’ve seen a 100 times before.
It just sucks, there could’ve been so much more. It really shows even if fiction there’s no solution for the issues each of the villains represented.
I honestly feel if I blindly followed the manga in favor of the heroes and their “struggles” to become super happy plus ultra then maybe I wouldn’t feel so bitter.
But I do, I can’t help that I do. Because there was a swing with so much force behind it just to miss.
And man did it fucking miss.
Perhaps twice’s ending should’ve been a good indicator where the series was headed. But I held onto to hope.
I mean right before Shigaraki died he was told his whole life was orchestrated by afo and that is so fucking tragic.
And my god Toga sacrificed herself, and Dabi is barely even alive. I think he was “spared” so Endeavor could have more time to apologize for his mistakes.
It’s just so fucked, I don’t know how else to put it, I’m disappointed.
I am so desperately preaching about how this ending favors abusers of its victims SPECIFICALLY for Touya/Dabi’s sake.
Because ah yes the one victim of abuse who forgave his abuser is the hero (Shouto) and the one who could never forgive his abuser is forced to live in agony until he dies (Touya).
I don’t know if it’s a cultural divide between me, American, and the author, Japanese or what but I’m simmering with rage at this conclusion
It is also very disturbing to me, as Japan's legal system in real life is fucking horrific. Yet this series just turns into being complete copaganda.
Even before I fell in love with the League, I got into this series as I thought it had set out to challenge toxic norms. I feel ripped off and disappointed.
I also feel like if you are going to bring in real life & parallel issues such as discrimination that you should have the decency to take it seriously. Especially when it's not something you suffer from
