Has the trope of a man getting redeemed by the love of a good woman aged poorly?
I don't understand why people hate stories of love as a healing force for people. I mean one it's fiction if you base your real life stories on what you read in fiction that's kind of a you problem and two if you don't like the beauty and the beast trope Ulquiorra and Orihime don't even get together.
Like why is everyone suddenly against telling optimistic stories of people healing because they receive support and unconditional love from others and learning how to treat people in their life the right way and form healthier connections.
Dude, just discovered you for your AoT analysis. That was AWESOME! You have such a different perspective on everything. It's incredibly enjoyable to read. I must also admit that you do an incredible amount of overreading and overanalysis, but I mean that as a compliment. Because, especially in most works, some events are really underdeveloped or not even addressed at all. It's like a writer brings great ingredients from a great restaurant but something is missing when they cook the meal—you provide that missing touch. Reading some of your thoughts, certain things start to make more sense, especially for shounen animes.
The thing I wanna ask is kinda personal, Is this the main platform where you share your thoughts? Or are you active elsewhere too? I looked around a bit but couldn't find anything. Would you consider being more active on platforms like Twitter or Reddit etc. which are more discussion and writing-focused? I think you should show yourself more. YouTube video essays would be good too. But be warned, you might get lynched on some topics, theres no escaping that :D.
I dont know, tumblr has a very chill and safe vibe which has some understanding nature that makes u feel free that maybe platforms like twitter and reddit seems like some "Dark Chaotic Lands" to you.
I've actually finished my first ever video essay. It's a Bleach Essay and it's on the Lust Chapter, and Ulquiorra, Orihime and Ichigo's characters specifically.
What ending would you have liked for the League villains in BNHA?
Well, there's two answers to this question. What would be my ideal ending to the League of Villains requires major story structure changes. To the point where it almost becomes an entirely different story,v venturing into fanfiction territory.
Basically keeping the story as it is until My Villain Academia, there's no longer a clear and distinct line between Hero and Villain. Shigaraki is now the real deuteragonist of the story, and the story is split between Deku's journey and Shigaraki's.
The league are no longer just an insane fringe element that doesn't deserve to be listened to or have their wrongs redressed. Since they now have the MLA they have public support behind them, they like become actual rebels against hero society with even public support. Either the War Arc doesn't happen, or the villains win and society is effectively destroyed so that the heroes no longer have their tight grasp.
A bunch of kids die in the war, because they weren't relevant and it's a consequence for UA raising child soldiers. The remaining relevant kids are forced to cope with two realities, number one they were violent enforcers of a broken system, number two the villains are right in some ways. A moment of the kids going "Are we the bad guys?" However, they can't agree with destroying everything so they have to fight to rebuild. The kids have lost faith in the adults, break off from them entirely so the adults no longer hog all the screentime and try to attempt to solve the problem on their own. Also, Enji dies in the war arc because Hori didn't do anything satisfying with his character beyond that part, and Dabi is hit with feelings of: oh no killing my father didn't fix my problem.
Then you'd basically have to have the narrative find a compromise between Shigaraki's complete radicalism but lack of any motivation to rebuild, and Deku's desire to save others but lack of self-awareness about the evils of his society and how the system can't be fixed as it is. Like a war between the opposite forces of preservation and destruction and Deku and Shgiaraki having to eventually work together to build their world. Maybe Deku even manages to convince Shigaraki there is a future, and save him from statements like "I don't care what happens next." The League of Villains and the reduced Class 1A are like two parallel groups in the manga running in tandem, and also Deku's bonds with his friends are closer now and actually shown in story they become a tight knit group so both sides are trying to protect the people they love too.
Here was my realistic ending I was expecting when the war started. The kids fight their respective villainous foils and then manage to talk them down and solve things with words instead of violence. Then the villains and heroes team up in order to save Shigaraki from AFO, which is the first step of redemption of the league, and also the kids realizing that the league love each other. At the end of the fight Deku tells Shigaraki what he's always wanted to hear when he was Tenko, "You can be a hero, too." bookending the story with the words All Might told him. The villains either get rehabilitated because they helped take down AFO, or they run off to become vigilantes.
What we got was everyone being sent to hell instead and that sure is something.
Spinner ending kind of confirmed for me that even if Horikoshi does bring back Shigaraki/Tenko, it won't be so he can heal the League, and they can reform together. I get the sense that we are even supposed to feel like all of the villains *deserved* their fates, that it isn't something they deserve saving *from*. It's like he couldn't decide between having them be evil + getting punished for it and having them be sympathetic to an extend + humanising them. I'm seriously trying my hardest to wrap my head around this, it feels so cruel??
I already talked about it in this post, but Obito's death is a much better example of how to "save the villain's heart" then what MHA is trying to sell us.
It's this excessive focus on whether or not the league's crimes are forgivable that's really the problem, because it comes down to the implication that once the league has crossed a certain line into unforgivable territory they're "no longer human" and therefore not deserving of human empathy for what they've suffered.
The main characters constantly use that line "I can't forgive them" so they don't have to think about the league as human beings who have suffered greatly.
What does it matter if they're forgivable or not? My Hero Academia is not a work that analyzes moral philosophy. I'm not reading Crime and Punishment here.
The theme they brought up is "Are heroes obligated to save the villains too, even if those villains have done unforgivable things."
I've stated this before but whether their crimes are forgivable or not is irrelevant to that question, because it's about the heroes obligation to save everyone not pick and choose who to save. They are government servants who are supposed to use their quirk to stop villains and save lives, but at the start of the story heroes only focus on the brutally beating down villains part of the job. The central theme of the manga is that the greatest hero wins by saving, and saves by winning, therefore Deku must save even his enemies.
The worst part is that despite bringing up the topic of forgiveness, MHA basically has nothing to say about the issue of what should be forgiven, what shouldn't, and how justice should be applied in this situation. It is wildly inconsistent because the villains are all held to task, whereas characters like hawks are never held accountable, and Enji while put in a wheelchair suffers way less consequences than his son and victim Toya.
Since MHA has like nothing intelligent to say about accountability, redemption and what merits justice and what merits forgiveness it might as well have just swept everything the villains did under the rug and thrown them in prison because we would have gotten the same result regardless. The story never addresses anything it brings up or applies consequences to the heroes so why do villains need consequences too?
I'm reading another comic right now Gunnerkrigg court, which actually discusses these themes of morality, and whether victims should be saved even if they've harmed others in the past.
Zimmy is a character being used as a human battery for the court's (a shadowy organizations) plan to create a new world without the Ether, which is a chaotic force that warps reality. Omega is a character who is for this plan, because she is 1) a semi-omniscient being who sacrificed her own bodily autonomy in order to help the court by giving them predictions of the future that furthered it's plans.
(Therefore, she does have the understandable perspective of, Well I sacrificed myself for the greater good so why can't Zimmy?)
and 2) Zimmy is kind of a jerk, who has an incredibly dangerous ability that puts everyone around her in harm's way. Therefore if you're going to sacrifice someone for the greater good she makes sense.
Zimmy isn't a perfect victim. She constantly gaslights her girlfriend by telling her that everyone hates her except for her so she'll never leave. (A girlfriend who is rather selflessly devoted to I might add). She is like, a walking bomb ready to go off at any moment.
At the same time the story never minimizes Zimmy's suffering with the idea that she "deserves it" for being a bad victim. The main character is consistently advocating for her, which also SHOWS the main character's empathy rather than MHA's habit of continually INISTING upon Deku's empathy without ever showing it.
I don't think the author expects us to side with Omega, but it does entertain her argument so it's a two sided discussion. To cap this off I hope this demonstrates the difference between what I think is a thoughtful depiction of a bad victim and to what extent the main characters are responsible for saving them, and a completely thoughtless one and why one is more entertaining to read than the other.
Does it ever frustrate you (like it bothers me), that the heroes and civilians (and many of the fans) have no concept of "the big picture"?
I mean being optimistic is one thing, but the hero kids are going back to class, hero society is being rebuilt and the same structures are getting back in place with barely a question of what might change, if anything will...
Like shouldn't they know by now??!!
Hawks looked into the league of villain's pasts.
Deku was told directly by shigaraki what was wrong with their society in the last war.
There was a whole (plausibly canon) movie revolving around the threat of the quirk singularity, and still nobody cares.
Judging by the recent chapter, the civilians are the same as they always were, or have become even worse in their mindset.
And at least so far, the heroes haven't shown anything concrete in how they plan on doing things from now on, if their actions or beliefs made any real impact.
At this point it really feels like either:
A. The Lov (Toga, shigaraki and some others) make a miracle resurrection/recovery.
or
B.it's the cycle of violence until inevitable extinction...
Do you feel differently or the same?
Hello, friend.
I definitely share your frustrations.
I think this post by Tumblr User BNHAObservations might be onto the type of societal reform that Horikoshi might be going for in this epilogue.
So there's two approaches that you can approach to MHA, and specifically it's endings. BNHAObservations is using Literary Analysis. That is they're not talking about the work in terms of "thing good, thing bad", but rather assuming that everything Horikoshi put into his work is intentional analyzing the themes which Horikoshi is putting forward. What is the theme of MHA and how does Horikoshi demonstrate that theme with characters and events in story?
That's the question to ask if you're taking a literary analysis angle.
(By the way if BNHAObservations sees this I'm not criticizing your post in any way sorry if I give that intention I'm just using it as an example, and also reccomending people read it because it's a good post. This post isn't a response to this post I promise I'm just linking it to provide an opposite point of view from my own).
The second is Literary Criticism. While I prefer Literary Analysis, I've been taking a Lit Crit approach as to late because. My question is not "What is the theme of MHA?" but rather "Does MHA use the tools of storytelling to communicate it's theme to it's audience well?" So, let's discuss how Hori chooses to convey the themes of the fictional world he created.
So as I said BNHA observations has an answer to your question from a literary analysis perspective. The gist being "Horikoshi seems to be suggesting that the improvement to society will come from the public being more involved with stuff like community outreach to assist the heroes, and maybe with Spinner's comic the villains voices will be heard on top of that." Which is a valid perspective and why I linked it.
However, from my literary criticism angle I don't think that particular theme is communicated well by the story. This is why while I think acknowledging the cultural context of the story is an important perspective, it's just one perspective because MHA is still A STORY and it has to use the tools of storytelling to get those messages across. MHA can exist as a piece of cultural commentary and still be confusing about what exactly kind of commentary it wants to make, because it doesn't function as a story.
So here's the literary critcism angle of: Why is it so gosh darned frustrating that the public at large doesn't seem to have changed at all by the ending of MHA?
When you are a writer you can write anything you want. But if you want to write a story that people want to read you have to follow the rules of good storytelling.
There are reasons why storytelling rules exist. A story is a bond between author and reader, readers to other readers. It is a communication between humans and humans work in a certain way.
I'd also argue that literary criticism is something that exists across cultures, like for example I watch Japanese Horror movies with my friends. Japanese Horror movies are very different from american ones because what that culture considers scary is different. However, if I'm watching the movie that has bad lighting and uncreative camera work, and I criticize it on that grounds, I think the rules of what makes good and bad camera work and shot composition work across cultures.
To quote this post:
Storytelling rules are rules of communication. Rules for handling expectations and saying what you intend to say without it being misheard. Rules for tugging at emotions and pulling heartstrings in a good way rather than a bad way. Storytelling rules are lessons learned by authors of the past that failed to communicate what they needed to. They are not that subjective.
So to address your ask finally friend, I believe a lot of audience comes from Horikoshi's inability to get his theme across in his own story with the tools of storytelling, just what he wants to say about the the society that he's created in his fictional world.
The first is the very obvious discrepancy between setup and payoff. As an example I read the Sam Vimes discworld novels, which you could say is copaganda about a good cop who does his job. However, the story is not trying to be a deep analysis about the crimminal system, it's a fantasy story taking place in a deeply corrupt medieval city where the main character is a parody of Dirty Harry. In other words it doesn't bring up any of those deeper issues so I can just read it for what it is, knowing it's kind of dated.
MHA sets up these deeper issues in a way that calls to be addressed. It's made clear several times in both Shigaraki's walk, and his speech during the first war arc that there's already enough heroes and yet problems in this society persist.
Theme is basically the story asking a question and then providing an answer. The question is: If there are so many heroes then why are there so many people who don't get saved?
It seemed like the answer we are building towards is that heroes need to change the way they deal with villains, hence why everything post War Arc focuses on the main trio trying to save their villains without just putting them down. You have Twice's death at Hawk's hands, and the question of why heroes only save the good victims. You have the parallels between Shigaraki and Eri. You have Deku say "ONE FOR ALL IS NOT A POWER FOR KILLING."
Hori is an author who makes choices and he chose to deliberately bring up these issues and not address them, and that makes the story feel unsatisfying to read because serialized stories hook the audience by promising future development.
Read this story because you want to see how the Todorokis will find a way to unite their family. Read this story because you want to see how Bakugo and Deku will become the greatest heroes, by saving by winning and winning by saving.
Twice's death, Toga's question about if Uraraka is going to kill her, Shigaraki's walk, OFA is not a power for killing these are all things that mattered in the story and then suddenly didn't. If you promise a story is going to address something and then you renege on that promise the audience will find it unsatisfying. If I'm reading a murder mystery and it ends with everyone eating cake and the murder hasn't been solved (and that's not the point of the story) I will feel like the story has wasted it's time.
So it's not just a case of "MHA was never going to be a story of deep societal reform because it's a shonen jump manga" but these themes are brought up, and then never addressed again.
Which is where we get my second layer of criticism, the massive tonal whiplash. My Hero Academia seems like a story of how kids are going to grow up to be better heroes by saving their villains, until it's not.
My Hero Academia is not a tragedy, until it becomes a tragedy in the last five minutes. Every single person thought Shigaraki was going to be saved somehow, until he wasn't. Everyone thought that Twice's death was going to be the last death in the league of villains, because the kids were going to realzie they have to find another way than killing the villains, until it wasn't. The audience isn't stupid for thinking this was going to happen, that's what Horikoshi was foreshadowing in his story until he threw it out.
The worst part is the tragic tone doesn't work, because it's poorly written as a tragedy. Greek Tragedy revolves around the fall of the heroes (this is a japanese work and japanese theatre is different, but Superheroes are inspired by the greeks). If the villains failed to get saved, then it should be a failure on the heroes part, it should be devastating on the heroes.
Hawks failed to save Twice but he's fine, Deku failed to save Shigaraki (OFA is not a power for killing) but he's fine, the only hero who seems personally affected by their loss is Shoto who is losing his brother. If this is a tragedy then heroes should be the ones to fall because tragedies are about the tragic flaws of the heroes.
However, we get this tonal inconsistency instead where no consequences stick to the heroes and every single bad thing that happens to them gets magically done away with by plot convenience.
So Hori has shown that he can just handwave away whatever kind of grievous injury he wants, and yet he still chooses to go out of his way to unnecessarily punish the villains for their actions, in the manga that's supposed to be about saving them.
And even if we go with the "Well, their hearts were saved" approach, the manga fails to demonstrate how their hearts were saved. Naruto, a manga running in the same magazine, does this so much better with characters like Obito.
Look at Obito's sendoff in the manga. A character who also is responsible for directly harming the main characters and who went to war with the entire world.
Obito has a dream sequence where he realizes he could have always gone home and still tried to become Hokage and he wasn't beyond redemption. He lives long enough to assist Naruto in the fight against the final villain. He gets called awesome by Naruto for trying to become Hokage because they shared the same dream.
His last moments in the manga are Rin the girl he loved comforting him in the afterlife, by saying she was watching his suffering all along. His literal last action is to lend his power to Kakashi his best friend in order to fight together once more against the villain.
Shigaraki on the other hand doesn't even get the majority of screentime in his own death chapter, he gets two pages compared to AFO's five.
It's not just the fact they get unsympathetic deaths, the story also bends over to show that they deserved it. Toga doesn't want to accept prison for her actions so it's okay for her to commit suicide even though she's a young girl. Shigaraki didn't want to give up being the hero to the villains, so it's okay that Deku didn't save him.
People are discussing whether or not Spinner should be held accountable for not saving Shigaraki because of his character flaw of deciding to not think about things and go with the flow, but that ignores the fact that once again Spinner is not the main character. Yes, characters should be held accountable for their flaws, but the protagonists are the one who should be held the most accountable because the story is not about them.
Spinner and Deku both failed to save Shigaraki, but let's look at their punishment. Spinner is in prison for the rest of his life probably, almost became a Nomu, and has survivor's guilt for being unable to save Shigaraki in time due to his own actions.
Deku... has to live with the fact he killed Shigarki and will "never forget it."
If we are going for a tragic ending, and Deku is the center of that tragedy, than Deku should be the one suffering for his failures. Deku should be held just as, if not more accountable than Spinner.
Spinner is held accountable and that makes him a good character - but to what end? I know what it's to slide blame away from Deku, which is also why Spinner randomly says something racist at the end of his scene.
So in all it's not frustrating because MHA isn't some deep, thoughtful criticism of Japanese society. It's frustrating because it violates the rules of setup and payoff, and it also is extremely tonally inconsistent.
A common response to this is I've seen is "You should just like MHA for what it is, and not what you want it to be."
However my underlying problem is that MHA as a story seems to be very confused about what kind of story it is. That confusion shows in Horikoshi constantly throwing out his own foreshadowing, and the wild swings in tone from tragedy to a story about optimistic young kids who are going to be the best heroez eva. Hori can tell whatever story he wants, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's telling it well.
As I said Hori's indecisiveness shows by this point in the story. I've already discussed this with Class1aKids but it really seems like Horikoshi is setting up two things with scissors-kun:
He'll either be A) A new villain that Deku and the kids prevent from becoming the next AFO or B) a resurrected Shigaraki who can save the rest of his league and fulfill his role as hero of the villains.
At this point there's equal foreshadowing for both, and this is my personal theory but it truly seems like Hori is gauging audience reaction to see which path he should take. If the japanese audience is satisfied with the villains "hearts" being saved, or if he should bring Shigaraki back to let the villains end on a more hopeful note.
overhaul with his quirk likely never had to face consequences if he accidentally injured one of his subordinates he could just heal them
Hello, kiddos.
This is the perfect time to explain the new term I just coined called: Narrative Gaslighting.
Narrative Gaslighting is not:
Breaking Show Don't Tell: A story failing to properly demonstrate in story something, usually a narrator tells you about a character, or setting. For example: Telling us Endeavor is on a journey of atonement, but never having him take any action in story to show this.
Retcons: Short for retroactive continuity, an ongoing story, a new story detail revising something in the past often changing or imposing a different interpretation of previous described events. For example, in doctor who the reason why Wilf wasn't at Donna's wedding in "The Runaway Bride" is because he apparently had the Spanish flu. Retcons aren't necessarily bad, because sometimes you get cool new ideas, like Wilfred objectively the best doctor who character.
Plot Holes: An inconsistency in the narrative. These are sloppy storytelling but they're not usually done onpurpose.
An Unreliable Narrator: The classic example of this is the Agatha Christie novel "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" where the narrator / perspective character is the murderer, and hides his role in the murders the whole novel until hercule poirot exposes him. This is a character in the story deliberately misleading the audience, either to conceal a twist, or sometimes unreliable narrator adds to characterization, like a character says something untrue and you're supposed to go "no that's wrong" and it turns out the character is lying to themselves.
Narrative Gaslighting is when a narrative deliberately tries to mislead you, straight up lies, or just insists that that did not happen totally happened guys. Much like real gaslighting it makes you question what you just read. The intent is to just manipulate you into read the story way the author wants you to instead of what's written.
The ask that anonymous sent to me is an example of narrative gaslighting because it's insisting upon something that's blatantly untrue. Overhaul faced consequences, he lost both of his arms and could no longer use his quirk, he was jailed and kept in isolation so long he was reduced to a state where he couldn't do much more than beg for someone to help restore his father figure from his coma. The main character also seeing Overhaul in such a desperate state, instead of agreeing to help wake up Pops who was in a coma (and innocent of the whole affair with Eri mind you, he told Overhaul to stop) instead put a condition that Overhaul is only worthy of human sympathy if he apologizes to Eri first.
Another example of Narrative Gaslighting is the narrative insisting that Deku is someone who "is possessed by a drive to save others that eclipses all common understanding" because his action of not wanting to save Overhaul directly contradicts this, but Horikoshi still wants us to believe Deku is an all-loving hero who's the embodiment of "Heroes who Saves" so he just straight up lies to manipulate us into seeing Deku the way the narrative wants us to, even if it doesn't align with his actions at all.
Here is another example of narrative gaslighting, where a story just insists upon events that are patently untrue to the point where it makes you question what you just read.
No he didn't. No he did not. You're lying. You're a liar.
I'm out of touch with the manga, but how come Dabi's fate is so cruel and bad?
Your guess is as good as mine. My speculation is that Hori changed his endgame plans three times. At first Hori planned on killing Endeavor early during the high-end battle.
"Truthfully, Endeavor was supposed to die during the 6th season, but when I was drawing the High-End battle in Kyushu, I decided to delay that. Maybe because of that impact, there was a little delay after the High-End battle..."
At this point you can tell that Hori didn't think of how keeping Endeavor alive would effect the endgame plot, because Endeavor's arc remains stagnant since the Pro-Hero arc. He basically doesn't do anything, but is kept alive on the promise that he will eventually do something to atone. My guess is Hori simply didn't plan far ahead enough to think the point he wanted Endeavor's arc to end at.
In the original scenario me and class1akids speculated together that since Enji wasn't going to be there, Shoto using Phosphor would actually work to take down Dabi non-lethally and the confrontation would end there.
The second change is because Hori kept Endeavor alive, he needed to make it so Enji and Dabi had a final confrontation, but because he also made the choice to have Enji fight AFO instead, the battle had to be split into two parts with the finale being Enji and Dabi's confrontation.
This second change is what resulted in the horrific burning off of Dabi's skin. If not for this change then likely we would have got an ending where Shoto visits Dabi either in prison or in rehabilitation like Rei, and that's the first step to Dabi's recovery paralleling the end of the Tournament Arc.
The third time is that it's clearly foreshadowed that Toya would eventually be able to sit down at the dinner table, and Shoto would ask him his favorite food. Enji has a dream about his family eating dinner together and wants Toya to be there too, Natsuo once mentions he doesn't know Shoto's favorite food, much much later this prompts Shoto to think about Toya's food and declare he'll make him sit down and eat Udon.
What we got instead was Dabi in an iron coffin on life support, with his family just expressing their condolences and getting to say their goodbyes in the short time Dabi has left.
I have no idea why this change was made. Maybe to pander to a part of the fandom that loved Enji's redemption arc, but despised Dabi because of all of the trouble he caused his family. Either way it's very weird, because it's not just killing each character off. It's subjecting them to these ironic hells like it's the twilight zone. Toga wanted to know if the heroes would save her or they'd kill her like twice, the answer is no and they'd just put her in prison so she kills herself. Shigaraki was afraid that he was born evil and wasn't in control of his life, AFO reveals to him that apparently AFO controlled his entire life from the beginning, and then Deku kills him and he dies having destroyed nothing meaning his life was indeed meaningless. Dabi's greatest fear was that he was a born failure, his life meant nothing, his death was unmourned and his family moved on without him. Well, now Dabi is going to die in a life support machine with no skin that looks like the torture devices from hellraiser, slowly, painfully, only able to be conscious a few minutes a day and his family is just going to move on without him.
This isn't just "the villains have to die to atone for their sins" this is like Hori specifically torturing them for the audience and also insisting they brought their suffering upon themselves for not wanting to atone like Hawks, Endeavor, Lady Nagant and Gentle and therefore are disqualified from being human in the end.
My god what is annoys me is that if Horikoshi point is that the LOV are beyond saving and that it’s about the hero prevent what happened to them happen to other, then allow them to be that; allow them to hurt and kill characters that are narratively important and when the heros fail make it a tragedy instead of all might calling deku a great hero. It’s weird that horikoshi went out of his way to frame shigraki as this ultimate victim even making his backstory worse in the final arc to then be like 5 chapters later “he’s beyond saving and needs to die”
I think the biggest inconsistency to me is that people call My Hero Academia, "My Disney Academy" because of how there's never any stakes or consequences for the heroes. Bakugo dies and they somehow fix his heart by having... a character shrink and do active heart surgery. Then Edgeshot says that he'll be sacrificing his life to do that, only for him to turn out to be fine later. Deku loses his arms and you think he'll either get prosthetics or use his feet from now on and he undoes it one chapter later.
it's "My Disney Academy" where if the heroes are hurt Hori will immediately bullshit a solution so they can have their consequence free happy ending, but like the villains are stuck in a horror manga where they suffer the most cruel inhumane treatment and apparently can't be saved or healed even though Hori is completely willing to just make up bullshit for the heroes, we're reading Hello Kitty Hellraiser.
