First of all, thank you for Bring It All Back. Gave me chills. Second, what do you think about the newest chapters? It seems like Izuku took Gran Torino's 'killing to save' ideology to heart. Personally, I gave up somewhere around the Nagant arc.
Belatedly, thank you very much, @kermitthekrog-blog! I’m glad you enjoyed it, and I’m particularly always happy to hear people say it was chilling, upsetting, enraging, or other such disruptive adjectives. It’s a rabble-rouser of an art project, to be sure, quite intentionally so.
As to the rest, I’ve made a few posts here and there since I got this ask which probably make my opinions pretty clear, and I’ve got a new ask in the queue which wants to know my thoughts on the epilogue material thus far, so I’ll have more to say there! But in the meantime, yeah, it’s pretty appalling to think back to all Deku’s talk about “saving” Shigaraki and realize that all of it predates the Gran Torino scene?
Like, he thinks he wants to save Shigaraki when they part ways at the end of the first war arc, sure! And he tells the vestiges he wants to save Shigaraki! But does that specific word choice endure once he wakes up? Well, @codenamesazanka did some hunting recently (you can find two posts about her rereads here and here) and, it turns out, no; it doesn't.
After Deku wakes up and talks to Gran Torino, the focus switches to Deku understanding Shigaraki, choosing not to ignore him, finding out the nature of the Crying Child, all that stuff. That word completely stops coming out of Deku's mouth, and very shortly after stops coming from any of the OFA vestiges as well.
It really does read, in retrospect, like, yeah, he sincerely took Gran Torino’s words at face value and to heart. “Killing can be a way of saving, so I can save him by killing him.”
Heck, if anything, given how little he focuses after that on saving, it almost feels like that’s the moment he resolves to kill Shigaraki—rather conveniently, it allows him a way to make peace with extrajudicial murder and avenge himself for all the people Shigaraki’s hurt that Deku can’t forgive him for.
The only thing that’s different from just killing him outright is that Deku wants to understand him first, as if he has to verify for himself that Shigaraki is secretly unhappy and why so he can justify that save-by-killing—putting Shigaraki out of whatever misery Deku can make himself believe Shigaraki is in—with a clean conscience. But he absolutely does not make any further promises about not killing him afterward.
Grim fucking stuff, but it lines up. One wonders what he would have done if the Shigaraki in the mindscape had changed to Sweet Innocent Tenko and never reverted back to Shigaraki Tomura at any point. Would Deku have tried not to punch him to death? Tried to call for Eri or Recovery Girl after AFO’s vestige faded out? Felt like more of a failure because the “person” VFO devoured would have been that cute kid, meaning Deku failed to save the “child”?
As it is, he mostly just seems vaguely discouraged and unhappy about Shigaraki staying “the leader of the League” until the end—would he have preferred that his hands were ashen and flaking with the powdered remains of the crying child instead?
As to me giving up, the Nagant fight is one of two places I'd put that pin. I was discouraged by the first war arc, when so many of the advantages Shigaraki had gained over the course of MVA were stripped away from him again. I was dissatisfied with the second encounter with Muscular, when Deku's "victory" was framed in such a heroic, triumphant light despite being a categorical failure based on the standard Deku seemed to have set for himself. But Deku’s fight with Lady Nagant was so bad for so many reasons that it served as the first true hammer blow to my belief that Horikoshi would be willing or able to seriously grapple with the societal problems the manga had been building up to at that point.
My patience with the manga, and the enjoyment I derived from it, continued to deteriorate throughout the rest of that arc and the following war arc, but the hospital attack is the other place I would point to as the sequence that completely destroyed my engagement with the series.
Just—the naked contrivances of it, the excruciating treatment of Spinner, the howling tone-deafness, the monumental unfairness of the demands it laid at the feet of its oppressed minority. The series presents a backstory like Shouji’s alongside current story elements like heteromorphs being turned away from shelters in the supposedly accepting and quirk-blind big cities and still somehow comes out valorizing passive endurance so hard it starts to look like willful self-subjugation.
It is the most comprehensively noxious moral in the entire endgame, rivaled only by Deku’s murder of Shigaraki under the guise of “saving” him, and frankly? I would still put that one in second place. At least you can point to Shouto (and possibly Ochaco, though that remains to be seen) as an indication that save-by-killing is not a story-wide moral about villains who have “gone too far.”
Conversely, pretty much everything the hospital attack mini-arc winds up preaching can be read outward onto the rest of the story's antagonists as well, including Lady Nagant. What else to make of her exchange with Hawks The Optimist, after all, than that the conclusion is that she should have just kept murdering whoever the government told her to until some outside player solved her problem for her?
A Hero is someone who is willing to suffer in silence. A Villain, then, must be someone who refuses to.
Truly, the hospital attack is the poisoned well that wipes out the entire village.
At some point in answering asks, I managed to accidentally delete one. Luckily, I copy asks into a separate document for answer composition purposes, so I still had this one in the queue in the order it was sent. My apologies to the asker if they sent this under a screen name I can no longer remember for tagging purposes! I hope you see it anyway!
Now that the manga has met its end will you include the last bits of it in yours "On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia"? I know there's not much but I'm still curious to hear you out on the final bits.
Off the top of my head, I think the only thing I would be liable to talk about would be Shouji’s “peace prize” for “resolving incidents,” and the continued hypocrisy of praising the protesters for their strong feelings while ignoring the Villains who drummed those feelings up in the first place.
There would probably also be some vitriol about how, to my resounding lack of surprise, the only person shown doing anything to address heteromorphobia is a victimized heteromorph, while the best the broader society can manage is to give him an award named after Horikoshi's editor.(*) No word on whether that award comes with e.g. a monetary grant Shouji can invest in furthering his work, or what kind of assistance, if any, Shouji has been getting already. It's a marked contrast to Uraraka's updates and improvements to quirk counselling, in which matter we're explicitly told she's getting extensive support from her fellow Heroes, the HPSC, and the Ministry of Education!
(*The same editor, by the way, who we know from the last data book gave Horikoshi his "objective opinion" on the hospital material, which he praises for the care and thoughtfulness put into its writing. Maybe Horikoshi should have asked for an educated opinion rather than an "objective" one.)
As far as the peace prize and the alleged sensitivity of the writing of the hospital sequence, the barbs above notwithstanding, I don’t think there’s anything I can say that’s more vital and incisive than @codenamesazanka’s personal, eloquent testimony and critical analysis here. I did touch on the two-faced praise of the protesters in the essay itself, and at more length in my chapter thoughts post for Chapter 373. Therefore, I'm unlikely to dedicate a specific post to discussing the end of the series here, though if and when I ever get around to posting the essay to AO3, I may go ahead and do so there!
That said, heteromorphobia is a topic I’m keeping an eye on as I do my reread of Vigilantes, which I’ve been posting publicly over on my Patreon, no membership required. I’m not being as methodical about it there as I was for the main series, but it’s come up several times in only two volumes, including observations about:
Who takes Trigger willingly versus who gets attacked with it.
How Knuckleduster’s targeting of anyone with an “evil-looking” face aligns with the rhetoric of people who attack heteromorphs. (Though by all means, Knuckleduster’s definition of “evil-looking” is pretty expansive!)
Rapt’s willingness to self-identify as a lizard and how it maps to his socio-economic position, as well as how that intersection is consistent with the same patterns we saw in the main series.
I’ve been away from the reread for a bit – working on asks here and a major project for Akane Banashi that I’ll be posting the first portion of here sometime tomorrow or Monday – but I’ll be getting back to it soon, after another round of inbox work here!
I appreciate your continued interest in my thoughts on the topic! And thank you for the ask as well!
On Heteromorphs & Heteromorphobia (Introduction + Terminology + Arcs I - V, Entrance Exam to Sports Festival)
Being a project to observe and document the use of the term “heteromorph,” the people described by it, and the depiction of their experiences with discrimination in My Hero Academia
OR
“No, heteromorphobia isn’t new or a late-story retcon. The non-heteromorph main characters just weren’t confronted with it for a long time, that’s all.”
Introduction
In this series of posts, I will be examining heteromorphic characters and heteromorphic discrimination chapter by chapter, arc by arc, up through the plotline coming to a head in the attack on Central Hospital. My overall aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread assertions otherwise, heteromorphobia had ample groundwork laid long before it burst to the forefront in My Villain Academia. My analysis will generally fall into one of the following categories:
General observations about heteromorphs in the world: how the reader is introduced to them individually and as a group, their demographics, the language used to describe them, how they fit into the structure of professional heroism, etc.
Aspects of the series—scenes, character beats, worldbuilding details, etc.—which I believe canonically point towards heteromorphic discrimination, even before that discrimination was explicitly acknowledged.
Aspects of the series that could be read as evidence for said discrimination, but which may or may not have been intentional on the part of the author.
Discussion of how individual characters intersect, or could intersect, with this form of discrimination.
I would like to fold the Vigilantes spin-off into this analysis as well, as that series is very good at taking aspects of worldbuilding from the main series to their logical, street-level conclusions; I may also examine other extracanonical material (the data books, the movies, TUM and the novels, etc.) if I find—or have suggested to me—anything relevant to the topic. More on this as I get closer to the end of the material in the series proper.
The current plan being to end my mainline analysis with the hospital attack is largely because, at the present time, Shouji’s response to the mob seems to be the series’ last word on The Problem of Heteromorphobia. I may, however, continue beyond that point if the series circles back to the issue in a major way between now and the completion of this project.
In the meantime, join me below the jump as I lay out my thesis, explain the rationale behind the terminology used in this piece, and dive on into the canon material, from Chapter 1 up through the conclusion of the Sports Festival in Chapter 44.
The Thesis
Anti-heteromorph discrimination has been present as a background element in the series from the very beginning. However, this is obscured by the main character’s lack of awareness of it, the overlap between such discrimination and the broader dehumanization of villains, and, perhaps most crucially, the fact that the term “heteromorph,” while serviceable as a descriptor for a broad categorization of quirk types, is uselessly broad for discussing heteromorphic discrimination.
It’s very easy to say, “The idea of heteromorphs being discriminated against is a ridiculous retcon,” if one views the story as suggesting that all people with heteromorphic quirks are subject to the exact same levels of discrimination, while transformation and emitter types are never discriminated against at all, no matter how they look. This, however, is demonstrably false if one instead looks for patterns in the types of discrimination demonstrated throughout the series. The common element in heteromorphic discrimination is that it becomes drastically more likely the farther away one is from the “normal” appearance of humans prior to the Advent of the Extraordinary. This is particularly the case for those with heteromorphic quirks tied to animals or those who live in rural areas.
On Terminology
Baseline/Divergence:
“Baseline” is not a canonical term, but it is a useful one. I’ll use it to describe bodies that look more or less “normal,” with features like those humans would have had before the advent of quirks. Bakugou is baseline; so is Momo. Tokoyami and Koda are not. I’ll also sometimes use “divergence” or “divergent” in association with this concept, especially for people who have no more than one or two cosmetic differences that are not associated with an animal. Jirou’s earphone jacks or Iida’s pipes would be examples of such relatively minor divergences from “baseline.” It is, as I will argue, a significant factor in the extent of discrimination that heteromorphs face.
Igyou/Heteromorph:
The Japanese term Spinner objects to in Chapter 220 is igyou, literally meaning “fantastic; grotesque; strange-looking; suspicious-looking” per Japanese dictionary site jisho.org. It’s often appended with gata, “type,” and people who have quirks of that type labeled as igyou-gata no ningen. The Viz release translates igyou to “heteromorph,” and igyou-gata to “heteromorphic” or “heteromorphic quirk.” It’s much more clinical-sounding to an English ear than a more literal translation of igyou would be; thus, when Spinner suggests that the word is not very politically correct, the Japanese reader will have a much clearer understanding of why than the English reader.
Another thing Spinner says about igyou is that, despite the fact that it’s not a good word for formal contexts, everyone uses it day to day. However, as far as I can tell, and troublingly for fans who want to avoid using an offensive word, there is no polite alternative. We see people using the word to describe themselves, Aizawa uses it freely in discussing how his quirk affects the type in question, but we don’t get to see an academic paper or expert interview letting us know what we should say instead.
I’ve only seen two alternatives. One is buried in Vigilantes and is less “a polite alternative” and more “a mouthful of words to prevaricate around not having a polite alternative”: tokushuna taikaku no mochinushi, or, per the Viz translation, “individuals with unique bodies.” The other, used by the firebrand PLF advisor leading the hospital riot, is kotonaru katachi, which means, roughly, “differing forms.” It’s better, but still more of a descriptive phrase than a noun, and runs into the issue that something vague like “differing forms” could also apply to, for example, congenital anomalies or amputations. It also uses the same kanji as igyou, just a different reading of the characters, so it’s unclear if Spinner would find that wording just as objectionable.
It’s tricky to navigate this, too, because it’s not all 1:1 translation. Spinner doesn’t object to being called igyou while thinking that igyou-gata or igyou-gata no ningen would be fine—that is, he’s not saying he doesn’t like being called a heteromorph, but being called a heteromorphic type or a person with a heteromorphic quirk would be fine, in the way that you see debates about person-first versus identity-first language in e.g. the autistic community. It’s the word igyou/“heteromorph” itself that he dislikes.
Why? Well, the obvious answer is that the word itself, down to the kanji involved, denotes the people it’s used to describe as being strange or different from normal. Transformation-type quirks have a similar if less pronounced issue: henkei can mean “transformation” or “metamorphosis,” but it can also mean “deformity.” Emitters are the only ones who don’t have this problem at all, with hatsudou meaning simply “invocation” or “put into operation.”
When that kind of normativity is baked into the language itself, it’s impossible to even talk about without Othering the people you’re discussing.
While neither addresses the language issue specifically, Ujiko and Re-Destro both offer some useful insight on why the issue exists. Ujiko says, “With each passing generation, quirks become more mixed, more complex, more ambiguous(...).” Re-Destro, meanwhile, asks, “Isn’t it odd how society insists on conforming to the old ways of thinking while eliminating anyone who doesn’t fit the mold? Especially since we as a species have moved beyond the very notion of normal!”
My suspicion, then, is that no polite alternative exists because the concept itself is so nebulous, and talking about it—as we will see—leads to thorny, difficult-to-categorize places when people prefer to keep things nice and tidy, easy to sort and put away. This is convenient for people who are uncomfortable talking about it, since policing people about their language is a great way to shut down discussion entirely.
Indeed, I’ve seen as much in the fandom—thoughtful, well-articulated posts wholly dismissed with snotty rebukes against using the word “heteromorph” on the basis that it’s equivalent to a slur, with no further engagement on the posts’ actual content. I often see “mutant” used instead, but I don’t view that as any kind of solution, for two reasons.
Firstly, and more simply, using “mutant” creates confusion due to its overlap with the idea of quirk mutations—situations like Eri’s. Indeed, in the Japanese, while Pops uses the Japanese word for “mutation,” kanji that would normally be read as totsuzenheni,[1] the furigana show that what he's actually saying aloud is the English word, giving the reading as myuuteeshon. The word igyou is totally unrelated—it doesn’t even have any kanji in common with totsuzenhi—so I feel it’s best to not add ambiguity where none exists in the original text.
Secondly, and more irksomely, “mutant” is what the most widely available fan scanlation used as a translation for igyou. Scanlation!Spinner says it’s the word “mutant” he dislikes; it’s not dodging offense to use the scanlation version instead of the official when they’re both placed in the exact same objectionable context![2]
Pictured: me being extremely unimpressed with people who use “mutant” accusing people who use “heteromorph” of using slurs.
All that said, in the absence of any polite alternatives provided by the canon, and in the interest of not throwing out the only word we have in favor of a nonexistent nicety the story’s victims themselves have no access to, I will be using the word those victims themselves use: “heteromorph.”
For further specificity, I will use “heteromorph” to describe anyone, regardless of quirk type, with a physical form that diverges from the pre-Advent baseline, while using “heteromorphic quirk” to denote quirks of said category and those who bear them.
Categorizing Quirks & the Division of Arcs:
Usually, when I denote a quirk as a given type—emitter, transformation, heteromorphic—I’m using the English fan wiki’s classification. However, note that, while these broad quirk classifications are discussed within the series, there is no canonical source that categorizes the vast majority of the quirks we see in the series. In character sheets, data books, narrated quirk explanations or the anime’s tic of showing characters’ names and quirks on-screen, the only information given is the quirk’s name and a brief explanation of its function.
Fan wikis, however, are run by curatorial fans, who want to have that information all down neatly, so I’m sure there are whole discussions behind classifying some of the more borderline cases. I will be discussing the insufficiencies of the current system of classification, but any time I declare a quirk as being classified as a certain type, that’s based on the wiki, not the text itself.
The wiki was also my reference for the breakdown of arcs in the series. They are equally noncanonical, but convenient for the purposes of keeping this piece broken down into digestible pieces.
Let's get started.
Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia Chronologically
The Entrance Exam Arc (Chapters 1-4)
Chapter 1:
On the very first page, we meet li’l Tsubasa, the winged boy who is implied to eventually become the Winged Noumu during the Stain arc.[3] No longer in Bakugou’s friend group by the time they’re in middle school; according to the data book, that’s just because he changed schools, but that information does come with an ominous ellipsis trail-off…
The very first villain we see is a heteromorph, yelling at heroes to go away. We’re told he’s a purse-snatcher who transformed into his large size—he maintains his base appearance even after being captured and shrinking back down to a normal size—when cornered. Called “pure evil” by Kamui Woods and while that does speak more directly to the dehumanization of villains than that of heteromorphs, it’s notable that this very first comparison between what heroes and villains look like shows such a stark difference between which one looks human and which one doesn’t.
o Kamui Woods himself is a transformation-type rather than a heteromorph-type, but he blurs the line between quirk categorizations. Even at “rest,” his limbs have a wooden appearance; he transforms their shape and size, but not their basic nature. In that sense, he has a heteromorphic body. His humanoid size and dimensions, though, as well as his mask, make him appear baseline at a casual glance. I’ll be discussing him in more depth later, but note that if you read this first confrontation in light of later reveals about heteromorphic discrimination, it’s the one who wears a mask that’s a hero.
But with Mount Lady getting the final blow, note how everyone in this picture is baseline except the literally muzzled villain.
Of twenty-four visible kids in Deku and Bakugou’s class, only two have clear-cut heteromorphic quirks. One girl has horns but no other divergent features nor other apparent power in use; the other is of the “different head” style, a boy with what looks like a pair of needle-nose pliers in place of a normal head. One other boy has gnashing, sharp teeth; it’s unclear whether they look like that all the time or whether it’s a transformation effect. The rest of the students all seem to be emitter or transformation types.
Introduction of the Sludge Villain, whose body is entirely fluid. Implied to kill those whose bodies he possesses, at least the ones he intends to fully hide himself within. We’re now two-for-two on villains being heteromorphs.
The crowd full of bystanders are all baseline:
Keep this image in mind for when we get our first crowd shot of villains.
Chapter 3+:
You can identify both Shouji and Tokoyami in this chapter, but Deku doesn’t talk to either of them, so they don’t have anything solid in the way of dialogue. Shouji does get one focus in the art, though: a shot of him from behind, typifying the information-gathering type. Nedzu first appears in silhouette but also has no speaking lines beyond a shared impressed noise with the also-silhouetted Vlad King. One or two other heteromorphs can be spotted throughout the exam, but they’re definitely fewer in number compared to the rest.
+: Others will crop up as Deku has his first day with Class 1-A and Aizawa in the following chapters; Tokoyami, befitting his eventual Number 3 placement at the Sports Festival, has his name regularly shown near the top of assorted exam/class activity rankings. Shouji’s name appears likewise in Chapter 7’s track and field test rankings.
The Quirk Apprehension Test Arc (Chapters 5-7)
Chapter 5:
Iida is, strictly speaking, the first named heteromorph in the class. There will never be any particular sign that Iida is subject to the judgement and bias that more divergent heteromorphs are.
Chapter 6:
Tsuyu is the next named heteromorph, the first one with an animal-associated quirk, and the first student whose facial features are clearly intended to be anything other than baseline human. Her quirk is not yet officially introduced, but she’s identified as a froggy type by her hopping, her long tongue, and her ribbit talk bubble.
In the same chapter that gives us our first instance of an animal-type heteromorph, we also get our first instance of animal-type name-calling:
Note the ever-stoic Shouji’s pointed lack of a response.
This is not particularly highlighted in the moment, but it will get a callback over 300 chapters later as something that warrants an apology. Note that both Sero and Mineta are themselves heteromorphs, but neither are animal-associated. This already sets up a discrepancy between what kinds of heteromorphs experience significant discrimination, even though the reader won’t get context for that until Spinner introduces us to the CRC.
The Battle Trial Arc (Chapters 8-11)
Chapter 11:
Shouji is formally introduced, name and quirk alike. Tsuyu proves to be relatively outgoing despite her demeanor, grouped with the affable Kirishima, Mina, and Sato in introducing herself to Deku after the indoor battles.
The first appearance of the League of Villains in the stinger with Shigaraki, Kurogiri and the USJ Noumu. None of them have heteromorphic quirks, as we’ll eventually find, but it’s immediately apparent that—like both of Chapter 1’s villains—they’re much more monstrous in appearance than the heroic cast. This correlation of appearance with criminal activity will continue to bear itself out throughout the series, getting more prominent and more explicit in the text as it goes along.
The U.S.J. Arc (Chapters 12-21)
Chapter 12:
Contains Ojiro’s character sheet, which notes that he always has to ask for clothing alterations when he’s shopping, which has become standard practice since the proliferation of quirks. Another profile page leading Chapter 32 will note similarly that he has a hard time sitting normally in a chair. Indeed, despite U.A. being the premier school for heroes, their accommodation seems to top out at exaggeratedly large doors; there doesn’t seem to be any accommodation in things like desks given for people with differently shaped bodies, like Ojiro’s tail or Mineta’s small stature.
It’s possible that specially made desks, like clothes alterations, could be provided upon request, but that puts the onus on the person with the need to ask. Between the people in question being teenagers and Japan’s culture of meiwaku (not causing trouble for others), that’s a pretty significant disincentivization compared to just incorporating different desk sizes into the class by default, either by having a selection available in all classes or by proactively asking students about their needs during the enrollment process.
Chapter 13:
Bakugou calls Tsuyu “frog-face,” starting a trend he will continue for a long, long time of immediately going for animal traits when he’s reaching for an insult to use against an animal-type heteromorph.
Thirteen talks about how the use of quirks is heavily restricted and monitored because, “It only takes one wrong move with an uncontrollable quirk for people to die.” The series will go on to provide all sorts of examples of conflicts that arise from this state of affairs—reduced bodily autonomy, repression of biological compulsion, quirk-based discrimination—but Thirteen doesn’t bring up any of that. As Mr. Compress will call out later, the UA kids are seldom given much in the way of opposing viewpoints, and that’s visible here, where Thirteen provides a very basic explanation of the status quo with zero historical or sociopolitical context.[4]
Chapter 14:
As was the case for Shigaraki’s chapter-ending stinger at the bar, it’s very noticeable that the group at USJ have a far higher ratio of frightening appearances in crowd scenes.
Venus fly-trap hands, paper ofuda body, three with weird heads, face-chest dude, the dude with four legs: some of them might well be transformation types rather than heteromorphs, but either way, they’re a lot creepier across the board.
First use of the term heteromorph, from one of the villains Shigaraki brings to the USJ attack. It’s followed up with Aizawa distinguishing “heteromorphic types” from “operative” and “transformative” types. As I said in the terminology section, “heteromorph” is less fraught than the Japanese term igyou, but one might guess that Caleb Cook didn’t see a discrimination plotline coming—especially since the first person to use the word is self-describing!—so went with something a bit drier.
Tsuyu provides the first example of a character’s quirk being named simply for the animal they resemble with the formal introduction of her quirk, Frog. I have to wonder somewhat about the politics of this—who chooses what to name a quirk?
Do the parents themselves do it, choosing a name and the kanji to use, and then just have to get the name approved when turning in a registration form at the local government office? Or does the clerk at said office do it after getting a description of how the quirk operates? Is there an appeals process if your choice is rejected/you don’t like what the clerk saddled your kid with?
Are heteromorphs, especially animal-types, more likely to just get assigned the exact same quirk name as their family members, regardless of any difference in their abilities? Both of the Iida brothers, for example, have their quirk listed as Engine, though their pipes are in different places on their bodies. We’ll later be told that Spinner’s whole family has reptilian quirks, but his is particularly weak. Nonetheless, it’s still called Gecko, the same way Tsuyu’s is called Frog, even though she has a whole suite of abilities—she can do anything a frog can do!—and all Spinner can do is stick to walls. And I wonder what the culture is like on that, and who makes that call.
As a further thought experiment, consider that if heteromorphs are more likely to get blanket names of their quirks than emitters, what does that mean for the quirk registry as an investigative tool for police? Sure, there might be a lot of fire-users in the area, but the name and description of those quirks in the database will offer more ways to distinguish between them and how a fire-using suspect wielded their flames. You don't get that when your suspect had a lizardish quirk, there are fifteen petty criminals with lizardish quirks in the city, and all the quirk registry says is, “Lizard: Has lizard-like abilities and features.”
This homogenization of people who are already discriminated against compared to the apparent effort made to distinguish people with desirable emitter-type or colorful transformation quirks[5] leaves a lot of room for lazy, shoddy or even actively vindictive police work.
(Incidentally, Hound Dog and Gigantomachia both have quirks just named Dog. Machia’s version only grants enhanced smell and hearing; he lacks Hound Dog’s canine features completely. This would seem to indicate that simplistic quirk names aren’t limited by family groups, but rather assigned quite widely.)
At the end of the chapter, Tsuyu’s character page notes that she gets cold easily—a weakness to cold that fellow ectotherm-based-quirk-haver Spinner does not seem to share, despite his appearance being considerably more divergent than Tsuyu’s. On the other hand, his power set is much, much weaker. Possibly the more abilities you have from “your” animal, the more of their more “negative” traits you also have to deal with? This would track with Mirko’s panicky “rabbit survival senses” kicking in the instant she saw Shigaraki in the tube.[6]
Chapter 15:
Nedzu is introduced as the Principal. Nedzu’s an interesting case. He must be assumed to have a heteromorphic body as he’s clearly not a baseline mouse! And his quirk is heteromorphic in the same sense that Ujiko’s is—its effect is both limited to his own self as well as being inherent to him—he can’t turn it on and off, and he can’t affect others with it. Yet we can’t quite assume he experiences heteromorphobia in the same way humans do because he isn’t human; if people assume he’s animalistic or less-than-human, well, he is an animal, and he isn’t human.
Personally, I think Nedzu’s experience of heteromorphobia is most interesting for how it might intersect with that experienced by human heteromorphs—for example, what do people assume about Nedzu that’s similar to what they assume about other heteromorphs, and what do people assume about heteromorphs because of Nedzu and other rare instances of animals with quirks?
Chapter 21:
Introduction of Cementoss. His quirk’s an emitter-type, but his body, and particularly his head, is very clearly not baseline. Similar to Tokoyami, his appearance is technically independent of his quirk, though there are visual ties. This begs a lot of questions about the arbitrary categorization of quirks and the insufficient language to talk about people whose appearances are very far afield from the old human norm, if the only word there is for a very different body is a word that’s also used to talk about a quirk category, and it’s considered a somewhat rude word at that!
In any case, with his squarish, cement-block head, he’s also our best look so far at someone with a heteromorphic body who has a visual tie to something that is a) a recognizable, extant thing in the world, but also b) inorganic in nature. He won’t be the last or the weirdest of these.
Introduction of Sansa, our first animal-type civilian heteromorph.
Shouji’s character sheet, noting that Horikoshi thinks he’s cool even if he’s not the type of guy to stand out in the crowd, and wants to feature him in the story but isn’t sure when it will happen. The character pages often—not always, but often—show what characters look like underneath various masks and costumes. Shouji is the first exception, with his face remaining covered by his mask even here. I see very little reason for that to be the case unless Horikoshi was concealing his scars for a dramatic later reveal.
Horikoshi also mentions here, for the first time, that he really enjoys drawing non-human-looking characters. Given that he will also later say that he really enjoys thinking up personal details and backstory stuff for characters, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that he might have had the idea that “rural areas are still discriminatory” from the very beginning, even if he didn’t know how much of a role it might wind up playing. This is especially the case if he had already begun conceptualizing the members and stories of the League of Villains, as discrimination is inseparable from Spinner’s reasons for becoming a villain in the first place.
The U.A. Sports Festival Arc (Chapters 22 - 44)
One thing that stands out to me about the Sports Festival—no particular chapters, so I’m putting it at the beginning; keep an eye out next time you read it!—is that the audience members are far more varied in terms of how they look than the street crowds tend to be. This is particularly the case as you get towards the finals and get more crowd commentary, and thus comparatively more detailed crowd shots.
Unincluded but equally telling panels include the ones with the skeleton knight or the parasitized snail guy.
While some of this can probably be chalked up to Horikoshi’s assistants getting better at drawing colorful random extras, I don’t think that’s the only reason, given how consistent the patterns in crowd make-up are throughout the series. Rather, it’s notable that the attendees to the Sports Festival are, by and large, Hero industry people—most of them are, judging by their costumes,[7] heroes.
We know from later on in the series that Japan has hundreds, probably thousands of active heroes in the modern day, and heroism is a good path for heteromorphs who don’t want to become villains but feel stifled at the prospect of being civilians; if nothing else, having a license is a preventative against being harassed for public quirk use just because you exist! So it’s not surprising that the mid-ranks of heroes—people with middling quirks who are, For Some Strange Reason, not popular enough to make it to the tops of the charts—are flush with heteromorphs.
Chapter 26:
The full roster for Class 1-B is shown, though only a few of them get much in the way of dialogue through the Sports Festival material, most prominently Shiozaki, Tetsutetsu, and Monoma. Class B is where a lot of the really weird first-year UA heteromorphs wound up. Class 1-A has got nobody even a sliver as Downright Bizarre as Fukidashi Manga and Bondo Kojirou.
Chapter 27:
Hatsume Mei’s character sheet implies that support goods are mostly a thing for heroes—a government license is required to produce them; using them requires a hero license. Most notable from her page is the sentence, “For those whose quirks impede everyday life, permits for special life-improving items may be granted after a rigorous examination.” That’s a lot of qualifiers, isn’t it? You might get to have support goods that improve your quality of life if you can prove to someone from the government that your life is sufficiently impeded by your quirk—oh, and that examination is going to be really demanding. There’s an obvious example in Aoyama’s belt, and Aoyama’s certainly no heteromorph, but it’s easy to imagine that kind of thing affecting heteromorphs disproportionately.
Chapter 29:
A small thing, but Tokoyami notes that the only person he has previously told Dark Shadow’s weakness to is Koda, another of the Class 1-A kids with a more significantly heteromorphic appearance. We will eventually find in a volume extra about the CRC that one of their branches is a group that rejects those who have strange heads—Tokoyami and Koda are the clear examples in Class 1-A, give or take Shouji’s unmasked features and Mina’s horns and odd coloring.
The wiki notes that Koda and Tokoyami were together for the USJ attack, so the weakness may simply have come up there, but I don’t believe it’s explicitly specified anywhere what the circumstances were for Tokoyami telling Koda that information.
Chapter 30:
A “raccoon eyes” from Bakugou aimed at Mina, a reference to her black sclera. The Japanese here just translates to black eyes, though—still a reference to a heteromorphic feature, but not an animal insult.
Chapter 32:
Opting to rest up during the Sports Festival’s pre-final break, Tokoyami, the bird head guy, does this by stashing himself up on a tree branch. While I don’t think Tokoyami tends towards a lot of avian mannerisms, he will later be deeply impacted by Hawks encouraging him to fly.
In a strategic tactic to rile up Midoriya by insulting his classmate, Shinso derisively calls Ojiro a monkey. It’s super-effective!
Chapter 33:
In a not-so-strategic patch of angry internal monologue about Ojiro spilling the beans on his brainwashing quirk, Shinsou thinks of Ojiro as a monkey.
Chapter 35:
Mount Lady comments on Shiozaki’s strength by calling her another plant user when talking to Kamui Woods. We’ll see this sort of quirk solidarity in a number of other places—Endeavor’s agency full of fire types, a fire-type dude on the street expressing his support of Endeavor, Hawks quipping about both him and Tokoyami being birds—but this is the nice, safe version of something that raises a lot more questions when it’s e.g. Tsuyu’s parents both being frog-type heteromorphs. More on that in the relevant bonus chapter. In short, the solidarity’s nice, but pushed too far, it’s easy for that kind of thing to turn exclusionary.
Chapter 41:
The introduction of Stain. Stain’s another interesting case of someone not being denoted as heteromorphic—Bloodcurdle is an emitter-type—but, like Cementoss, having physical traits that clearly fall in line with their quirk. I would say Stain’s an even more borderline case than Cementoss, actually, as far as having a quirk that blurs the line on typing.
Cementoss is clearly strange-looking—less scary than Stain, but also less human—but his physical features do nothing whatsoever to facilitate the use of his Cement quirk. Stain, though, has his tongue: too long to be a normal human feature, and certainly helpful in terms of making it easier for him to taste other peoples’ blood. Yet we don’t call Stain a heteromorph because, in contrast to a feature like e.g. Sero’s elbows, Bloodcurdle would work the same way even if Stain had a totally normal tongue. So how would one discuss any discrimination Stain might ever have faced over it?
Thus, my belief that the discrimination we see in the story is based, not simply on having a heteromorphic quirk, but on having a sufficient number of heteromorphic features.
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Thanks for reading so far! A lot of this first post was introduction and set-up, but the hints will be growing more overt as we press on. I'd like to make this series either weekly or biweekly, time and other projects depending, but it's written all the way up through the Edgy Deku arc, so I don't anticipate major delays.
I hope you all enjoy; this one has been in the works for a long, long time.
Next time: the Stain arc on through the License Exam, plus the (very telling) Tsuyu bonus chapter.
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] AFO uses the correct reading when he’s explaining Decay’s sudden appearance to Tenko in Chapter 222. I assume this is because Pops is a mobster while AFO has been married to a quirk scientist for seventy years.
[2] Also too, even if I were inclined to pick one word to use as the rude word and one to use as the more formal term, “mutant” is closer to the rude connotations of igyou than “heteromorph.”
[3] Knowing what we know now, it’s possible that l’il Tsubasa is fine, and that said Noumu only has a copy of his quirk via Ujiko. Its impulse to save/grab Deku could be chalked up as something caused by said quirk’s vestige, which the lower tier Noumu might simply lack the brain function to filter out. It’s difficult to say if the current story will find time to address this.
[4] One has to wonder if hero schools save all the crunchy classes about Hero Civics and Modern History for the third-years, if the younger grades are learning it but Horikoshi thinks it’s too dull to show, or if students are just never taught about it at all beyond the bare minimum necessary to do their jobs by the book, and anything more than that is the reserve of higher education or specialized study.
[5] Consider the simplicity of animal-type quirk names and then compare them with e.g. Helflame vs Hardflame Fan, Explosion vs. Landmine, Float vs. Air Walk, Magic vs. Poltergeist, Bubble vs. Clean Bubbler, or Scalemail vs. Scales vs. Shield. And that’s limiting myself to only quirks named directly in the manga! It gets even more ridiculous if the patterns in the anime’s invented names for quirks are taken into consideration.
[6] Of course, lots of people get chills from being around Shigaraki, even before the surgery but especially after. Everyone else has that response to a conscious Shigaraki, however.
[7] Conversely, when Mei scopes out some Support industry dudes in Chapter 35, the two she focuses on as well as nearly everyone seated around them are just baseline dudes in suits and ties. Only one of the fourteen visible faces in that panel is a probable heteromorph.
On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XV - My Villain Academia)
(Skewing away from the wiki arc titles here, because come the eff on; everyone on god's green earth calls this My Villain Academia, not "The Meta Liberation Army Arc.")
At the request of a kind asker, I'm trying something different with footnotes this time; you'll find them at the end of the relevant bullet point, rather than at the bottom of the post. I've also flagged the numbers in purple, though I left the text itself the default color. I hope people find that a little easier to handle than having to scroll all the way to the bottom, have two tabs open, or wait until the end when they've forgotten the context.
Content Warning: Mentions of the KKK, as well as anti-Korean hate crimes/speech in Japan.
The My Villain Academia Arc (Chapters 218-240)
Chapter 218:
Tsuyu’s weakness to cold is noted in-canon, rather than in a volume extra profile.
All of the people featured specifically in the Detnerat commercial are heteromorphs—a four-armed woman, a walrus gent, and a little gelatinous boy. Re-Destro pontificates about how people with these “newer types of bodies” struggled in the new era because they couldn’t find products that would meet their daily needs; mass production was not equipped—could never really be equipped—to handle the endless variety of body shapes and sizes that came about due to the Advent of the Extraordinary. It recollects the mall scene back in Chapter 68—or, even further back, Ojiro’s character sheet and UA’s lack of varied desks—and calls the reader to consider, once again, the sorts of special needs that those with heteromorphic bodies might have, and how difficult it can be to meet those needs.
RD says that his company’s ability to rapidly customize and produce unique goods for every customer has made them #1 in their industry (lifestyle goods). Assuming there’s at least some truth to the commercial shpiel—and the newscaster does at least call Detnerat “a big player”—it suggests that plenty of other companies are not so good at the rapid+customizable combination. Of course, not all companies are trying to be all things to all people, but specialization costs money—as do speed and customization, really, and note that nowhere in the commercial is there a talking point about affordability! So mainly what the commercial leaves me wondering is what degree of inconvenience is still felt by heteromorphs, especially those who are somewhat cash-strapped.
That strikes me as a particular hazard when it comes to child bullying. Of course, Japanese schools have uniforms, but I wonder how available tailoring and alterations are for students with particular needs? Is there a provided budget for that sort of thing? Financial aid? How much did Ojiro’s parents have to pay for him to have a full set of uniform pants with a hole for his tail in them? How about Shouji getting all his uniform tops made sleeveless? What arrangements had to be made for Shouto’s gym uniform to be fire retardant?
Even setting uniforms aside, there are also their social lives outside of school to consider. Kids will absolutely notice when one of their number wears the same clothes all the time, or home-made clothes instead of name brand, or with obvious patchwork and repair. As in real life, it’s at the intersections of more than one type of disadvantage—in this case, a heteromorphic body combined with a low-income family—that problems become more likely.
Here in 218, almost fifty chapters after the first mention of them, we finally get the proper introduction and explanation of the Meta Liberation Army. Of course, they aren’t heteromorph-specific—the closest any of the named commander-types in RD’s inner circle get is Curious, with her bright blue skin and black sclera,[1] though certainly Re-Destro himself has drifted somewhat away from baseline compared to his ancestor. Regardless, their foundational belief is the deregulation of quirks, stemming from a time when any deviation from the norm made meta-humans targets. The compromise society reached—that quirks require a license to use—is restricting enough on those whose abilities are found with a baseline body, but, as I’ve brought up before, it makes life even more potentially fraught for heteromorphs. That kind of thing is basically a pre-written excuse for heroes or police to stop and harass a heteromorph they don’t like the look of! And while the evidence of that kind of bias has been pretty circumstantial thus far, it’s about to get way, way less so.
[1] Wacky hair colors being somewhat de rigueur in anime, we’ll give her a pass on the purple hair.
Chapter 220:
Here we finally hit the major leagues: the Creature Rejection Clan, or CRC. The Japanese is igyou haiseki shugi shuudan, with igyou and shuudan being pretty straightforward—igyou is, of course, “heteromorph,” and shuudan is any sort of organized or self-identifying group of people, anything from a family unit to a business organization, even all the way up to a nation. Haiseki shugi is the important bit, with shugi meaning “doctrine; principle” and haiseki meaning “rejection; expulsion; boycott; ostracism.” Thus, “group whose doctrine is the rejection of heteromorphs.”[2]
Note that, in the Japanese, the word in the group’s name is heteromorph; they didn’t pick something more insulting or derogatory. They didn’t really need to, since igyou is, as discussed back in the introduction to this piece, plenty derogatory all on its own. So Caleb Cook went with a translation of igyou that would better get that derisiveness-in-the-context-of-a-hate-group across than his choice way back in Chapter 14. Creature Rejection Clan is a fairly localized translation, but Cook was pretty frank in his Twitter thread on the chapter that he was thinking about the KKK when he made the decision.
And it’s not an unwarranted comparison! Of course, I wouldn’t think to presume Horikoshi’s that up on the history of racism in the U.S., but combine the cod-religious trappings and the full robes and hoods with an explicit textual description of hate crimes, and it’s an extremely easy parallel to draw.
[2] The Japanese also gives the abbreviation of CRC, with the databook eventually coming out and revealing that it really stands for the name they’ve chosen for themselves in English, the Curious Rejection Committee.
That established, it’s notable that Spinner, in describing them, says that they commit hate crimes against “people with heteromorphic quirks”—a nearly word-for-word translation of the Japanese igyou-gata no ningen. This leaves aside the idea I’ve spent so much time talking about, that heteromorph discrimination is aimed broadly at those with heteromorphic bodies, and not only those with the more narrowly defined heteromorphic quirks. Shortly, however, I’ll cover some evidence that Spinner is over-generalizing, or just misinformed.
In the meantime, take note of a few things the CRC guys[3] actually say here, starting with the fact that they call Spinner a lizard. Instantly, a word that was previously a snippy and dismissive little shrug in Dabi’s mouth takes on the weight and ugliness of a slur.
Further, they call the League of Villains “sins against nature”—or, in a more literal translation, “impure criminals.” I provide the more literal translation there because it’s more specific. My immediate question of the English translation would be whether the CRC judge the League as being sins against nature simply because of their criminality, or because of their association with Spinner, but the Japanese makes clear that there are two separate labels being flung there: the League are both criminals and impure.
This idea of impurity brings in a religious dimension to heteromorphobia, a dimension heightened by the line (dropped by the English translation) in which the CRC accuses the League of invading a sanctuary—in Shinto, shrines have to be kept pure. The CRC calling their hideout a sanctuary, with the added context of, “They have a lizard with them. How disgusting,” thus makes it pretty clear that the impurity is about Spinner’s presence, not just the League’s assorted crimes. This spiritualistic justification for bigotry will later be made even more explicit in Shouji’s flashbacks.
[3] With skull masks right there on their hoods! A real, “Are we the baddies?” moment, but given some of the other things we get on them later, it's possible the skulls are meant to contrast what e.g. Spinner or Koda’s skulls might look like: baseline human versus animalistic or “misshapen.” Credit to @codenamesazanka for connecting the dots on that!
Spinner also gives us here the line that I covered back in the terminology section at the beginning:
We’ll go with the official version this time.
So here we have the observation that the word absolutely everyone uses, the word that, as far as we know, academically defines an entire category of quirks, is an unpleasant, even rude word. But what is the alternative? We’re never given one. Indeed, Spinner doesn’t suggest one; he says that the nice thing to do is “avoid” the word instead. In other words, talk around it. See again what I said at the start about all the difficulties baked into that prospect.
Later, we get the first drops of Spinner’s backstory, and hit again on the “lizard” thing, with the note that Spinner’s backwater, stuck-in-the-last-century hometown called him “the lizard freak.” He grew up with it, grew accustomed to it, thought there was nothing he could do to change it—he might even have internalized it somewhat, though clearly by the time Chapter 160 rolled around he was ornery enough about it to complain.
It's perhaps also notable that Spinner knows who the CRC are. Though we’ll later find out that their numbers have hugely diminished, he not only recognizes them, he’s not even surprised to see them—unlike many, Spinner knows the CRC never truly went away. (Compare his lack of reaction to, for example, Shouji's unsuspecting classmates, who will later be shocked, just shocked, that this kind of ugliness still exists in their country.)
So just to state the obvious here, yes, the presence of active hate groups does irrevocably shift the lens on everything we’ve seen up to this point. You can’t say calling a heteromorph an animal is harmless, a little insensitive at worst, maybe even meant as a cute nickname, when that same language is used by openly violent bigots.
The volume version gives us, at the end of the chapter, further notes on the CRC. It’s full of relevant tidbits, so I’ll provide the text in its entirety:
Once superpowered society grew more stable and less chaotic, this group emerged, based around a lack of acceptance for those with body-altering quirks. They started out with demonstrations and protests but eventually started committing violent hate crimes. Most felt this was taking things too far, so the group saw a sharp decline in membership and a scattering of factions. These days, one faction might only reject people with animal properties, while another focuses its hate on people with irregular heads. These two, among others, have very few members left. The faction that Tomura and the villains attacked was one that stood by the original group's fundamental tenets.
So what is there to gather from this? Let’s break it down a point at a time.
“Once superpowered society grew more stable (...)”
If you’ve ever lived through a time of increasing acceptance for a marginalized group, particularly if that acceptance involves measures for legal protections being passed, you’ll recognize what this is. Just to pick a few U.S. examples, the KKK didn’t exist until after the Civil War;[4] proactive federal bans on same-sex marriages didn’t start getting passed/proposed until individual U.S. states started legalizing them and civil unions. When opposition to something is the norm, said opposition often doesn’t start organizing until they see that status quo being threatened; they weren’t organized before because they never imagined they’d need to be! That’s what we see with the CRC: they didn’t formally declare themselves until it started looking like quirks—and especially non-baseline quirks—were going to find legal acceptance.
[4] Literally. The last day of the war was May 26, 1865; the date the first Klan was founded was December 24 of the same year. Easily the most vile thing I learned in the process of writing this piece.
“(…) based around a lack of acceptance for those with body-altering quirks.”
This is what I was referring to when I said Spinner's characterization of the CRC might be a little bit off: the CRC wasn’t founded because of a hatred for specifically heteromorphic quirks; they were founded because of a hatred for different bodies, a descriptor that could also apply to those with transformation-style quirks! Those, too, are quirks that alter bodies, after all; it’s just possible for people to turn them off, which is not the case for those with heteromorphic quirks. So Spinner was not quite on the mark before.
Further, note that the phrase “body-altering quirks” is used here—a phrase that’s similar in meaning and much less othering than igyou. It doesn’t fully cover everything I use “heteromorphic” and “non-baseline” to cover, in that it’s still murky in situations like e.g. Cementoss’s, where his emitter quirk is entirely independent of his oddly shaped head, but it’s still a useful term! Except for the small complication of where it isn’t found: anywhere in the actual story. The fact that Horikoshi uses it in an author’s note, but it comes up nowhere in BNHA proper, puts it in an unclear place as far as in-universe alternatives go. Has it just not come up because Horikoshi hasn’t thought to include it? Or has it not come up because it’s not a phrase people in-universe use?
“They started out with demonstrations and protests but eventually started committing violent hate crimes. Most felt this was taking things too far, so the group saw a sharp decline in membership and a scattering of factions.”
Confirmation here of what Spinner said about the CRC and hate crimes, but note what this doesn’t say: that the CRC was outlawed. There are, I suspect, a couple of factors influencing that.
o Firstly, while Japan has legal methods to restrict undesirable organizations,[5] making it difficult for them to raise funds or engage in publicity, the country doesn’t actually de facto criminalize membership in such organizations. That distinction is part of the legacy of violent crackdowns on labor groups and protest movements in the first half of the 20th century; people tend to get very loud about anything that whiffs of the government trying to give itself the power to get that heavy-handed again.
Assuming that the laws haven’t changed overmuch in HeroAca!Japan, then, I wouldn’t expect membership in the CRC to have been criminalized outright, but the volume extra doesn’t mention any kind of legal repercussions at all. That, I think, may go more to my next point.
[5] The relevant laws are aimed mostly at terroristic groups or organized crime.
o Secondly, another thing Japan has very, very little of is hate crime legislation. From my research, there are only two laws of any note: a federal law passed in 2016 and widely regarded as toothless thanks to it lacking any criminal provisions targeting offenders,[6] as well as a local ordinance passed in Kawasaki in 2019 that went as far as mandating fines against repeat offenders, among other measures.[7]
[6] It required the government to start “implementing measures” to eliminate such speech/behaviors, as well as to “respond to requests for consultation” from victims, but did not directly mandate consequences for offenders.
[7] I suspect from some of what I read that Osaka has picked up a similar ordinance, but I didn’t find anything detailing it specifically. Osaka and Kawasaki are home to the largest and second-largest population of Koreans living in Japan.
One major thing neither of these measures did, though—and something activists have been pressing for—is to establish standards for considering discriminatory motivations when issuing sentences against those who have committed violent crimes. To pick an example that made the news last year, a man committed arson out of openly admitted hatred for the Koreans he targeted, but nowhere in the trial or discussion of his sentence did the prosecution ever bring up discrimination.[8]
[8] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20220829/p2a/00m/0na/015000c
Also, it’s worth noting that both of these measures were aimed at ethnic discrimination—speech and behavior targeting people living in Japan while being themselves, or being children of, people of non-Japanese ethnicities. They did not address discrimination based on e.g. religion or sexuality.
Folding both of those points together, the image we have of the CRC is of a violent hate group whose existence is regarded as perhaps distasteful and extremist, but not actually illegal. Even what few laws Japan has now wouldn’t have applied to anti-heteromorph discrimination, because, while they may look wildly different from a prototypical Japanese person, heteromorphs still are Japanese, and therefore not protected by a law based solely around ethnic discrimination.
Incidentally, the ordinance in Kawasaki laid out a number of specific examples of the kind of behavior it was looking to address, and one of those examples was likening victims to something other than human. I know why that was included in the context of anti-Korean sentiments,[9] but it certainly does shade e.g. Dabi calling Spinner a lizard more harshly to know that there’s legal precedent for categorizing such dehumanizing language as hate speech.
[9] An extremely common form of anti-Korean hate speech in Japan is to refer/allude to Koreans as cockroaches.
“These days, one faction might only reject people with animal properties, while another focuses its hate on people with irregular heads.”
This is a good echo of the sort of factionalization you see in organized religion, wherein the minutiae of tenets that seem similar to an outside eye are the topic of vicious, vehement inter-group debate. More to the point, however, it provides an excellent illustration of the senselessness of bigotry. They can’t even keep their own discriminatory dogma straight!
Probably the second most common complaint about the story’s use of heteromorphobia—after calling it retconned-in bullshit that didn’t exist until Chapter 220—is that it’s illogical, that it makes no sense to judge people because they look a little different in a world where everyone is now a little different from the way we see the world.
And I wonder if the people who say that are listening to what they’re saying. “Illogical bias that has no foundation in reality is unrealistic?” What do these people think bigotry is? Racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, religious discrimination, all the many different shades of queerphobia: all of these are built on foundations of fear and hate for people who are fundamentally still as human as anyone else, yet they all exist, and have existed, and will go on existing for quite some many years still. Because irrational hatreds are, by definition, irrational. Heteromorphic discrimination is the most realistic societal dynamic in the entire series!
That little rant aside, I also want to highlight the first group in the excerpt above—people with animal properties. Check any talk on the theme of, “So you can believe dragons but not black people in fantasy?” and you’ll run into the ways people are much more ready to suspend their disbelief for full-on fantasy than for something that, rightly or wrongly, pings them as incorrect, and it’s easy to imagine animal-associated heteromorphs running into a similar issue: it’s fine for people to just look weird, but looking like an animal, that’s bad and unnatural. A heteromorph who just looks like nothing in particular other than “non-baseline” is not evoking the baggage of animal anthropomorphization and cultural animal symbolism that someone who looks like a bird, a lizard, a dog, an orca, etc. is.
Chapter 223:
Shigaraki refers to Gigantomachia as a gorilla. It’s debatable how much this is of a piece with Dabi calling Spinner “Lizard”—Machia’s only actual animal quirk is Mole, not anything simian, nor is Machia particularly ape-like in anything other than his large size—but it does stand out to me that Spinner, who we know to have strong opinions about animal epithets, just refers to Machia by name or as “the big guy.”
Chapter 224:
Mr. Compress calls Machia “our pet gorilla”; see note above.
Chapter 226:
Curious introduces the idea of quirk counselling, telling us that its goal is to align people to a unified understanding of how the world and society work, but that it’s flawed in that it winds up emphasizing peoples’ differences instead. The advisor at the hospital raid will include quirk counseling in his litany of grievances, so I’ll discuss its possible utilization against heteromorphs more there, but for now, recall that I talked previously about how quirk-based behavioral tics might vary from person to person by comparing Hound Dog with Sansa. With that in mind, it’s not a big reach that some heteromorphs might run into similar problems with quirk counselling.
There are a good number of what appear to be heteromorphs through the Curious fight; whatever the MLA’s core views on quirk supremacy, the organization self-evidently makes ample room for heteromorphs, even if, like e.g. the red panda guy in the crowd jumping Toga inside the noodle joint, they don’t seem to have any other stand-out powers beyond the fur and fangs.
Chapter 229:
Twice notes in his flashback that something about his eyes always rubbed people the wrong way, scared them. We’ll eventually see this same thing with Tenko on the street—a totally normal-looking child, but the look on his face scares people away even more than the blood. And I can’t help but think, “If even a totally baseline person’s eyes can creep people out, how much easier—and more extreme—is that reaction for the more out-there sort of heteromorph?”
Gori makes the tiniest of cameos in Twice’s flashback, playing backup off to the side when we will, in current times, find him having worked his way up to the interrogation chair himself.
Chapter 230:
Geten brings us quirk supremacy via his understanding of the MLA’s goals. It’s hard to say how accurate this is, since the MLA leadership is inconsistent on what exactly their vision of Liberation entails. Whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t seem to dissuade the MLA’s own heteromorphs, though of course there’s a big difference between how e.g. Spinner or Ojiro versus Gang Orca or Mirko would fare in a societal quirk free-for-all. Likewise, the MLA is a cult, so one can’t discount the likelihood of double-think in its members.
Chapter 232:
Re-Destro talks about the state of the country in Destro’s infancy, a period in which metahumans suffered “constant abuse—blatant discrimination.” Merely for speaking out that her child was just like everyone else—that his special power was just a quirk—Destro’s mother was killed by an anti-meta mob. This gives us further evidence of the violence metahumans faced. Of course, in that time, the hate wasn’t distinguishing between types of quirk, but with that being said, an emitter and a transformer can still hide the truth about themselves with far more ease than heteromorphs—recall All Might’s discussion about the early days of quirks back in Chapter 59, in which the panel showing four people with quirks contained only one baseline person. It would be entirely unsurprising for an outsized number of the metahumans killed in those days to be heteromorphs.
Chapter 233:
The confrontation between Trumpet and Spinner gives us Trumpet clucking about Spinner having a weak meta-ability—Gecko lets him cling to walls, and that’s about it. It’s a striking contrast to someone like Mirko or Gang Orca, or even Tsuyu, all of whom have some combination of big power moves and a veritable fleet of sub-abilities. We can see the way Hero Society prizes powerful, flexible quirks in this. Having a strong quirk can help overcome the societal bias about heteromorphs, but if you’re stuck with a weak quirk and a weird face, you lack that metaphorical ticket out.[10]
[10] Incidentally, the fandom reflected some of that attitude as well. There was a widespread assumption that Spinner’s quirk would be really useful or situationally powerful, otherwise why would Horikoshi have hidden it for as long as he did? Then, after the reveal, there was a certain amount of complaining that Spinner was useless to the League, and why even bother with him? Sometimes, life imitates art in some very unflattering ways.
Trumpet brings up that Spinner was a recluse, “mocked and pilloried,” and we see Spinner in his hikikomori days. What we’ve gotten on Spinner up to this point suggests that the abuse he endured was mostly verbal, though one can imagine it was pretty rough when he was young enough to be the target of school bullies. There’s a certain amount of temptation to minimize that in comparison to his response: most people who are bullied or targeted by discrimination don’t grow up to become terrorists. But there was, we will eventually find, more visceral stuff going on—and parts of the country that were even worse than Spinner’s hometown.
Spinner spent most of his life trying to fit himself into the world around him; his strongest parallel in the League
in this regard is Toga, as they were the two that held themselves back, let the world define what they were and how they should act, right up until they saw something that caused them to snap.[11] Trumpet tries to do much the same to Spinner here (albeit probably less as an intentional psychological attack than Skeptic’s attempts on Twice), but Spinner, like Toga, is long past the point where he would swallow that abuse without fighting back. When you tell someone they are something long enough, they eventually start to believe it—but if you aren’t careful, they’ll start to embrace it, at which point those weaponized words change hands.
[11] Shigaraki and Dabi, by contrast, pushed back harder, trying to get the world to accept them and never accepting it when their families (and particularly their fathers) told them to stop. Twice was ejected without getting the chance to try to contort himself into a shape that fit the world, whereas Mr. Compress seems to have been raised to reject his society's accepted norms from the start.
Chapter 234:
We see an image excerpted from Quirks and Us, a children’s book published by Curious’s outfit, that exhorts the reader not to judge people by their quirks. It really, really begs the question, “If this is what’s being said in literature published to coax people towards anti-suppression radicalism, what on Earth is normal society saying?”
Regardless of that absolutely wild disparity, though, the fact that there are children’s books being published about quirk bias being wrong suggests that the world very much does have a problem with quirk bias. Indeed, that much has been shown throughout the series, not merely in terms of anti-heteromorph bias, but also the bias against “villain quirks,” as well as the widespread idea that people with weak quirks—or no quirks at all—are weaker people overall, pitiable folk who lack the power to live their fullest lives or pursue their dreams unhindered.[12]
People on more than one of these axes of discrimination will, as in real life, be more likely to experience discrimination and violence.
[12] Villains like All For One and Geten may say it more loudly, but it’s not only villains who believe it—perfectly good-hearted people like All Might and Midoriya Inko fall into that trap as well.
Chapter 237:
Nothing much to say about Shigaraki’s flashbacks save to note that, if people won’t stop to help a lost and bloodied (and baseline) child, they sure as hell won’t intervene in anti-heteromorph bullying. Recall that Kirishima was accused of sticking his nose where it didn’t belong for trying!
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Thanks as ever for reading along, everyone! How was the new footnote format? Should I keep that up for lengthy meta going forward?
I was kind of expecting to be able to wrap this up (the main canon, at least) in one more post, but I underestimated the amount of writing I'd be doing for the first war arc. For next time, then, I'm looking to cover the Endeavor Agency, Paranormal Liberation War, and Dark Hero Villain Hunt arcs. See you all then!
On Heteromorphs & Heteromorphobia (Arcs VI - X , Hero Killer to Provisional License Exam)
(This post will also cover the bonus chapter “Tsuyu's Ribbity Diary.”)
Thank you all for your amazing response to last week's post, my goodness! I thought I'd found about all the audience I was likely to get for my harping about heteromorphic discrimination, so I was delighted to see a number of new names!
I do have to warn you all, if you haven't done much looking into my archives, that I'm pretty critical of BNHA these days, especially of the ways it insists on holding up individualistic solutions to problems clearly established as systemic in nature. That will become more apparent when I get into the post-war material, as the endgame is absolutely rotten with it.
This week, though, we'll start by getting out of the school to get a look at signs of and contributors to heteromorphobia in the wider world.
The Vs. Hero Killer Arc (Chapters 45-59)
Chapter 45:
Mina’s preferred alias, Alien Queen, in reference to the Xenomorph queen from the Aliens franchise, is turned down by Midnight. The reason for this is never made especially clear. Class 1-B gets away with a number of villainous or monstrous hero names, like Phantom Thief and Gevaudan, violent ones like Battle Fist, even an animal reference in Jack Mantis. But Mina, for whatever reason, gets pushed towards the indescribably twee Pinky instead. Does Midnight the R-rated hero not think girls should get to have hero names with some edge? Surely not; her entire persona is based on titillation. Length is clearly not a factor, given that Midnight personally approves Can’t Stop Twinkling.
I don’t know exactly what went down here (from a Watsonian perspective, that is; the Doylist guesses are readily apparent and all eyeroll-inducing), so I will simply point out that a non-baseline gal wanted to name herself after a famous monster with acidic blood and was pressured into going with something cutesy based on her skin color instead. Bakugou’s choice gets turned down as well,[1] but he actually has “murder,” like, right there in the name; Alien Queen is quite roundabout by comparison!
Chapter 48:
Introduction of Uwabami, the Pro Hero gal with the head snakes. She’s a bit of a weird case. Given that all we know she does is find hidden people using the snakes’ keen senses, do they have some self-awareness that makes them able to communicate with her—a case somewhat like Tokoyami and Dark Shadow, perhaps? Does she just tap into their senses at will rather than being able to speak to them? Or are they rather just extensions of herself, with no particular consciousness of their own, and they function like what must be a fairly dizzying array of extra-sensory perception that she receives at all times?
Whatever the case, she’s a model and celebrity, and thus our first clear example of a heteromorph who doesn’t seem to suffer for her looks. Her looks are, of course, quite accentuated, given that her hero costume is a low-cut evening dress with a slit in the side up to her hip. Other than the hair-serpents, she’s a baseline woman who checks all the boxes for modern beauty standards; she will serve in this fashion as a good predictor of other highly ranked heteromorphic Heroes.
Chapter 51+55:
Endeavor, as will be made clear in Chapter 55, doesn’t really have any idea what the Noumu’s deal is. As far as he knows, it’s just like any other villain—and yet in Chapter 51, he opens up with an attack that bathes the Noumu in flame anyway, and comments in 55 that he’s never known anyone to remain conscious after such an attack. While I think this mostly speaks to the general brutality with which villains are treated by heroes—much different from standard police practice in real-life Japan!—it’s nonetheless notable that the Noumu he attacked with such casual ferocity certainly doesn’t look very baseline to the casual eye, between the exposed brain, the significant height, and the crawling movement.
Chapter 56:
Midoriya is startled by Chief Tsuragamae’s “woof” interjections. He doesn’t comment on it out loud, so I’m not inclined to hold it against him (not like someone else I’m about to bring up), but it wouldn't be the first time he’s come across this kind of vocalization: Tsuyu makes ribbit noises pretty frequently.
Tsuragamae notes that the authorization of a certain class of people, called “heroes,” to weaponize their quirks against others was initially a heavily criticized decision, one which only garnered public support because those original heroes were careful to always obey the laws dictating the circumstances in which they used their quirks. He goes on to say, of using one’s quirk to inflict harm without explicit instruction from the powers-that-be, “Such action would represent a stunning breach of law.” Like Thirteen before him, he completely omits any mention of how such laws disproportionately affect heteromorphs, who can’t turn off a permanent physical trait, and, particularly in cases of people whose entire bodies are divergent, have little choice in whether or not to use their quirk in any sort of physical altercation that might lead to harm.
Shouto, angry over what he perceives as punishment for a good deed, calls Tsuragamae a mutt. The chief doesn’t react particularly strongly to this, but as the chief of police, you have to imagine he’s pretty used to the slings and arrows of public opinion. The incident passes without comment, but it will not be the last time we hear a Todoroki derisively referring to another human being as an animal.
There are some sweatdrops and exhortations to get the kid to cool it, but those were ongoing before the animal words came out.
Chapter 57:
Gran Torino notes that the age they live in, for better or for worse, is one of suppression, and that the situation with Stain and the League will draw people out who are influenced by that ideology. Gran doesn’t elaborate on exactly what sorts of people he has in mind—All Might says only, “Then heroes will deal with them,”—but it’s an early hint that there are people in this society who feel unjustly suppressed. Crucially, Gran Torino doesn’t even necessarily think those people are wrong; he just thinks it’s a necessary evil. But what, exactly, is it that he’s grudgingly accepting as inevitable for the sake of maintaining the status quo? And how might his circumstances need to differ for him to have a different opinion?
In Chapter 27, we learned that producing support goods requires a government license; here we find out, courtesy of Giran, that dealing in and producing support goods without such a license is a major crime. So if you, for any reason, failed that “rigorous examination” to get cleared for support goods for quality-of-life reasons, you’re unlikely to find someone who’ll just provide them to you out of sympathy provided you keep quiet about where you got them. Instead, you have little choice but to turn to black market brokers—all because the government doesn’t think your quirk is affecting you negatively enough to qualify you for support equipment.
Again, this isn’t specifically about heteromorphs, but someone having an emitter quirk they can’t control well who needs the support item because they are choosing to pursue a career requiring them to learn that control is a very different case than someone who needs government support because of an immutable, always-on physical trait.
This chapter contains the first appearances of both Gigantomachia and Spinner, both fairly extreme heteromorphs: Machia for his size and rocky hide, and Spinner for animal traits considerably more prominent than e.g. Tokoyami’s bird head or even Tsuyu’s conglomeration of mildly froggy traits. Indeed, Spinner’s heteromorphic traits are so much more prominent than something like Jirou’s earlobes that it hardly seems accurate to even categorize their bodies the same way.
The sidebar for Daikaku Miyagi, the anchorman with the quirk that gave him two big horns who amputated one so that it would be less in the way during newscasts and other things that required there to be a camera on him. This in and of itself wouldn’t necessarily be notable, save that the same extra goes on to describe how the decision garnered some backlash from “a certain human rights group” who said that decisions like his fostered discrimination and were linked to the rejection of quirk-based society on the whole. Horikoshi further notes that he enjoys thinking about the lives and stories behind minor characters—even this far back, then, three and a half years before the introduction of the CRC, we have concrete evidence that the author was thinking about quirk-based discrimination and the politicization of heteromorphic features.
Chapter 59:
All Might drops some exposition about the Advent of the Exceptional, during which we see an image of a crowd full of implied-quirkless people holding up signs proclaiming their humanity and the monstrosity of those with quirks. Conversely, three of the four quirked people we see have obvious physical divergence from baseline human appearance. So from early on, that “monster” turn of phrase was heavily associated with changes in the physical appearances of those with special abilities. Later on, the PLF advisor at the hospital will tie these two things together explicitly.
The Final Exams Arc (Chapters 60-69)
Chapter 61:
Ectoplasm’s character sheet. The teeth are creepy no matter which way you cut it, but they look much more profoundly unsettling when they’re right there on his unmasked face, as opposed to behind a black cowl, where you can let your eye fool you that they are in some way part of its design. His hero costume, naturally, includes the cowl, but his daily clothes do not—I wonder if he ever tried to have a gentle talk with Shouji about why Shouji wears the mask even in his downtime? I wonder even more how much the teaching staff in general, and Nedzu and Aizawa specifically, actually know about Shouji’s history.
o It’s also noted that Ecloplasm looks scary, but has received continued support after coming back to the job after losing both legs in a fight with a villain—we see this same pattern with Jeanist after Kamino. No word on how regular his support was before the traumatic double limb loss, though.
Chapter 66:
Nedzu, we find, was “toyed with by humans in all sorts of ways in the past.” Nothing we know about him suggests that he has any particular longevity, but his dynamic with Endeavor,[2] many chapters down the line, does suggest to me that he was at least on the staff when with Endeavor was at UA some thirty years ago. Thirty years is within the span of All Might’s career, well after society began to stabilize with the formalization of the Hero System. And yet, despite that, a sentient being, one with human—above human!—intelligence, was mistreated badly enough that he bears a grudge to this day. Nedzu is, again, not in precisely the same situation as a human heteromorph, but he serves as an indicator of what humans have, even in the age of heroes, been willing to do to those they think of as “animals.”
A shot of Koda and his mother, who look much alike. Interestingly, the biggest difference in their appearance is that she has horn-like protrusions that her son lacks. We’re a long way from the first quirk evolutions, and even farther from Koda’s quirk evolution, but we will later see Koda’s mother specifically tie those horns to her animal communication quirk becoming more powerful. This makes for another good piece of evidence towards Horikoshi having a grasp of heteromorphobia from early on, as the evidence is pretty good that Koda-mama got those horns as a result of a quirk evolution of her own, and those don’t happen under normal, non-stressful circumstances. More on Koda’s parents in a bit, as they're a pretty stand-out case in another way that isn’t immediately apparent here.
Can we call it foreshadowing for Koda defending Shouji at the hospital that Koda is wearing the same scarf as the main character in Horikoshi's Oumagadoki Zoo? Hmm. I'll leave that one to codenamesazanka.
Chapter 67:
A flashback panel to Mineta’s days in middle school. While I don’t doubt that there are P L E N T Y of reasons Mineta would be unpopular with the girls in his class, it is nonetheless notable that the popular boy getting showered with attention is perfectly baseline, while Mineta and his friends are not.
Note also that the cute heteromorph girl has long-ish ears and no other obvious divergent features.
Chapter 68:
Shouji and Iida are specifically called out to at the mall, trying to attract them as customers with claims that whichever storefront employee is hailing them can help them find anything they need. Midoriya mutters to himself about the difficulties of catering to everyone, given the many different types of quirks scattered across multiple age groups.
Crowd scenes at the mall show scattered numbers of heteromorphs, a somewhat higher number than usual for such civilian crowd scenes. The Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall is noted for being the biggest and trendiest in the prefecture, with a variety that attracts lots and lots of people, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see somewhat more heteromorphs than usual there.
The Forest Training Camp Arc (Chapters 70-83)
Chapter 70:
Introduction of the Wild Wild Pussycats. A team of three Emitters and a Transformation-type, none of them in the slightest heteromorphic (give or take Tiger’s permanent :3 mouth), they nonetheless theme themselves after cats, including fake tails, big costume paw gloves, and cat-ear-esque headsets. It’s cute and unobjectionable in and of itself, but I do wonder what people like e.g. Officer Sansa think of it.
Chapter 71:
Shouji is missing from the hot springs scene. It doesn’t hugely stand out in the moment because Aoyama and Sero aren’t there either, but it does read a bit differently with the benefit of hindsight. Given the strong possibility that Aoyama is off doing Traitor Activities and Shouji is avoiding any possibility of having to torpedo the hot springs fun-times with an explanation of that time he was savagely beaten by people in his hometown right in an open street, it kinda leaves Sero as the only one who maybe just skipped for normal reasons, like that hot springs would gunk up his tape or something.
Chapter 73:
Bakugou addresses Ojiro as “Tail”—referring to him by his heteromorphic trait. He’s not even particularly angry at the moment; he’s just still nursing a grudge about Todoroki’s underwhelming performance in their Sports Festival match and wants to swap partners for the Test of Courage. Early Bakugou is very much a “judge a person by their quirk” sort.
Pixie Bob ushers Tsuyu and Ochaco into the woods for their turn at the Test of Courage by referring to the latter as Uraraka-kitty and the former as Ribbit-kitty.[3] While in the English, this reads as a baseline woman in a cat costume referring to the heteromorphic student by her animal-themed verbal tic and the baseline student by her actual name, uraraka is a fairly onomatopoeic way to say bright and cheerful. I would guess that Pixie Bob is probably referring to Ochaco’s personality here, which makes it somewhat less egregious. It won’t be the last time someone refers to Tsuyu via the frog sound instead of her name, though.
Chapter 75:
Mandalay telepathically compliments Spinner, calling him both cool and handsome. While I doubt he’s the only person in the world who’d react the way he does—he blushes, gets flustered, and missteps, giving Mandalay an opportunity to attack him—the moment does get some new context when you consider how everyone called him “the lizard freak” in his hometown. Approximately zero people calling him cool and handsome back there, one imagines! Having it immediately turn out to be a ploy likely informs some of the outraged anger in his response.
Chapter 81:
Mandalay points out that Spinner never used his quirk during their combat, implying that she doesn’t think just his lizard-like appearance or his claws “count.” Chalk another one up to the classification problems of “heteromorph” as a descriptive term. This will turn out to rather neatly illustrate one of the issues I’ve been talking about with regard to the way heteromorphs are unfairly disadvantaged by the current laws about public quirk use. Remember, a “Villain” is someone using their quirk illegally. So if Mandalay doesn’t think Spinner used a quirk here, and since he has no record, why does he get categorized as a Villain instead of just a garden variety criminal?
Now, one could say that by associating with the League of Villains, Spinner is rather claiming the designation for himself, and we don’t know how the legal system will technically classify him, when and if he ever actually faces trial. To that, I would say to hold the thought, because Skeptic will eventually back me up on the, “Heteromorphs are unfairly targeted by Villain designations,” claim all but word for word.
BONUS CHAPTER 1: Tsuyu’s Ribbety Diary
We meet Tsuyu’s family, all various froggy types. They’re a cute family, but the husband and wife both being froggy kind of raises some questions about pressures that might exist about marrying your same “type,” or at least refraining from marrying anyone too obviously not. I’d be more willing to wave it off if not for two things.
First, we get the same sort of scenario from Spinner’s character sheet, that his is “a family full of reptilian quirks.” Second, there are very few romances in the series between someone close to “baseline” and someone with a more extreme heteromorphic appearance. The most obvious, clear-cut, canonical example is Koda’s parents—his dad has slightly weird hair but is otherwise entirely baseline; we see him defending his wife from other peoples’ mockery. That, of course, is a single panel limited to a flashback inside a flashback, so not exactly very visible to the reader! The next-most significant one I can come up with is Natsuo and his mouse girlfriend, who has likewise been seen in one (1) panel, had no dialogue, and whose appearance and identity were so incidental the anime deleted her entirely.
Who’s next? Well, if you assume all those No Comments from Kamui Woods and Mount Lady about their relationship are indicative of a relationship between them, they’d be another, though we don’t actually know what Shinji actually looks like under his mask, only the implication that it’s divergent enough that he prefers to cover his face. Next up on my tally would be Thief Takami and Tomie, but since the sum total of Takami’s animal traits are tiny little elbow wings, you can see how fast the drop-off is there.
Compare this to the number of pairings/families we have between people of like type: Bakugou’s parents, Iida’s, Jirou’s, Aoyama’s, Tsuyu’s, Ochaco’s, Shouto’s, Toga’s, Spinner’s, and Tomura’s whole family on both sides.
Then you get the ship-teasy stuff that’s more about crushes, people dating, or hints that are perceived as pointing towards epilogue romances: Deku and Ochaco, Jirou and Kaminari, Shindo and Yo, Gentle and La Brava, Miss Joke’s flirting with Aizawa, and Toga’s variety of crushes (among which Tsuyu is the most distant from Toga’s own body type).[4] I think Kirishima and Mina are right on that borderline, with Mina having a normal body type but a collection of minor but highly visible divergent traits.
So like, the vast, vast majority of the romantic relationships in the show are between relatively baseline people. In that context, it sticks out like a sore thumb to me that Tsuyu and Spinner are both explicitly said to have the same type of animal heteromorph quality on both sides of their family tree. It’s not an incest concern or anything, just that I wonder what the pressure is on cross-type couples, or what social circles look like post-graduation.
Two classmates talk about how it’s hard to tell what Tsuyu is thinking; one of them says, with her eyes hooded and a kind of cool expression, “That expression of hers never changes. Maybe ‘cuz she’s a frog?”
Tsuyu tells us that she never really made any friends; while some of this may simply be because Tsuyu didn’t have much time to socialize, between hero training and looking after her family, it’s also true that all of her classmates that we see have baseline appearances.
This lasts until she starts getting stalked by a snake-headed heteromorph girl named Mangusu Habuko—a fellow loner. Tsuyu is initially frightened by Habuko’s behavior, but has an intuitive sense for what the deal is, that Habuko wants to be friends but is awkward and doesn’t know how to broach it.
When asked if she wants to be friends, Habuko flips out. She calls herself treacherous and untrustworthy; she calls Tsuyu a foolish frog and says she must be joking, and that she should choose her friends more carefully. She then immediately dissolves into tears. Somehow, I doubt all this self-loathing about her innate nature manifested out of thin air!
The Hideout Raid Arc (Chapters 84-97)
Something that’s observable throughout this arc is that we’re in another sequence, like the Sports Festival, where the percentage of people with heteromorphic features in the crowd shots tends to run a bit higher than the norm of the series to date. Unlike the Sports Festival, though, these crowds are just civilians, not heroes. So what’s the difference between Kamino and the earlier on-the-street crowd scenes?
Well, the neighborhood the Noumu warehouse is in is a somewhat rougher area. Part of the visual shorthand for that is people in edgier clothes, stuff that’s indicative of districts with bars, clubs, sleazy hangout spots, and so forth, but another shorthand is an increased number of heteromorphs.
These panels are respectively from Chapters 87 and 92.
Chapter 87:
The character sheet for Kamui Woods notes that the story of his early childhood is “grand and compelling,” and that his story was made into a documentary. That, to me, has Inspiring True Story written all over it. Probably not coincidentally, Kamui Woods is another character whose face we’ve never seen. As more pointing in the direction of him having a childhood marked by severe discrimination, he’s not sure of his age—it’s given as “29 since he started counting.” So was he abandoned as an infant for his weird face? I could come up with other explanations, all equally over the top (extreme confinement, for example, that left him unable to properly mark the passage of time), but the fact that he can’t e.g. look up a birth certificate for himself suggests that whatever went so wrong for him, it happened very early.
…Though I suppose there’s the possibility that he’s not human, but rather a tree that manifested a quirk. As documentary-worthy origins go, though, that feels less Inspiring True Story and more Educational Biopic About Rare Phenomenon.
The Provisional Hero License Exam Arc (Chapters 98-121)
Chapter 99:
Shouji’s room is shown, all but barren. He says that he doesn’t care much about owning things, but knowing what we come to know about his history, it’s easy to wonder if he really doesn’t care about owning things or if this is rooted in a childhood in which it was believed that anything he touched would be polluted. Not a situation that led to him being given much of his own, one suspects!
Chapter 103:
This chapter introduces Yokumiru Mera, from the HPSC, who gives an opening statement that has some very interesting ruthlessness lurking in its subtext. Particularly relevant to our current topic is his comment that in the modern era, the time it takes to resolve a given incident is incredibly short, so the test that year will be prioritizing speed. Prioritizing speed (wouldn’t want some other hero to get the metaphorical kill first, after all!) is a surefire way to guarantee that heroes are not taking the time to really examine all factors in a situation or make any attempts whatsoever at calm, considered de-escalation, but rather are just making snap judgements based on their biases and gut reactions. Guess what group of people that’s going to disproportionately impact?
o Now, it’s notable that Mera says the test prioritizes speed, but the conclusion many others come to is that the test only pretends to do so; that actually, it prioritizes care and information gathering. Indeed, we find a few chapters later that the actual priority is teamwork, as requested by police higher-ups—the idea is to fill in the gap left behind by All Might with hero squads that work well together.[5] However, while the intention may be to gather those good at teamwork, it certainly doesn’t stop people like Shouto and Inasa from cruising through—and, in any case, whether the groups learn teamwork or not doesn’t take away from an HPSC rep telling them to their face that speed of incident resolution is one of the most important things to a modern hero and never following that up with any kind of amendment or clarification.
Chapter 107:
Introduces the HUC, or Help Us Company, professionals trained to act as victims in disaster rescue exercises. Given that context—what they’re communicating to students training to understand what “victims” look and act like—it’s extremely worth examining what they, well, look like.
God, this is so Yikes.
And having asked that question, we find that the only people in this group that might not be baseline—the ones with short, childlike statures—are dressed to emphasize that stature. The end effect is a crowd of “victims” with not a single heteromorphic representative.
Chapter 109:
Shiketsu’s class rep, Mora Nagamasa—the extremely hairy one—approaches Bakugou to extend an apology for Shishikura’s behavior during the exam. It’s noticeable here that, having matured somewhat since Early Series Bakugou, and having been approached in downtime in a reasonable manner, Bakugou manages to refrain from coming up with any demeaning nicknames centered on Mora’s appearance. Kirishima remarks internally on all the hair, but only internally; he’s much too polite to say anything out loud.
Chapter 110:
A big splashy introduction for the man ranked #3 in the Heroes Who Look Like Villains ranking, Gang Orca. He’s at the test to play villain and is, just as noticeably as all the play-victims are baseline, a heteromorph. At the time of his introduction, he’s ranked Number 10 in the Hero Rankings, but will be bumped out later on. This does, however, make him the highest-ranked known heteromorph who doesn’t have a human face,[6] with the possible exception of Kamui Woods—who, like Shouji, covers it with a mask.
Gang Orca’s character sheet notes that, while he’s a popular guest at aquariums, his intimidating face and “stony personality” always result in weepy children. He apparently finds this relatively upsetting (“lots of angst”) but, unlike Shouji or Kamui Woods, has not taken to wearing a mask, nor trying to tone down his personality on any level—to the contrary, Present Mic suggests much later on that he exaggerates it.
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Next time, I'll cover from the Shie Hassaikai arc through the end of Joint Training. Thanks for reading!
[1] Initially. He sticks to his guns long enough that he gets away with it in the end, though.
[2] The big tell is that Nedzu addresses Endeavor as Todoroki-kun rather than Todoroki-san or simply by his hero name, but his observation that Todoroki-kun has “matured” (literally in the Japanese, “become an adult”) doesn’t hurt, either.
[3] Kerokero neko and Uraraka neko.
[4] You can get further out there with this, but by the time you get to e.g. Shouto and Momo or Ojiro and Hagakure, the ice is definitely getting thinner on whether you’re seeing groundwork for future wedding bells or just reasonably close male/female friendship. Your mileage may vary depending on how tightly attached your shipping goggles are or how cynical you are about shounen authors’ tendencies towards timeskip marriages. Also, I can’t be bothered to dig up and list out the crushes or shipping patterns among the Class B kids. Koroiro likes the mushroom gal?
[5] Note that Mera phrases this as being merely a stopgap until they find the next All Might. The HPSC is not so eager to change the methods they’ve come to rely on over the last thirty some-odd years!
[6] We don’t know enough for me to say for sure whether Wash is a heteromorph.
On Heteromorphs & Heteromorphobia (Arcs XI - XIV, Shie Hassaikai to Joint Training)
Thanks again for all your great responses, everyone! This week I'll be covering, among other things, the early indicators gradually getting more overt, the way the Hero System in its current incarnation is set up to fail rural heteromorphs, the eye-rolling shallowness of thought that says heteromorphobia is fake because Hawks is the Number 2 Hero, and some spitballing about Watsonian reasons that the One For All's bearers are all baseline.
Hit the jump!
The Shie Hassaikai Arc (Chapters 122-162)
Chapter 122:
Gag sequence with Hound Dog, playing up the discomfort of the students when Hound Dog “forgets how to talk when he flips out.” Also a very weird instance of an animal-type heteromorph wearing a costume accessory that would be seen as a method of control if an actual animal of his type were wearing it: a muzzle. There will be another of these in a hundred chapters or so.
Chapter 123:
Nejire asks Shouji directly what’s up with his mask. He looks legitimately shocked—as well he might, given that he’s been in this class for five months and none of his classmates appear to have asked about his scar yet! He nonetheless starts to explain, but only gets as far as, “A long time ago, I—” before Nejire interrupts to ask Shouto about his scar. This chapter was published five years and ten months before the chapter in which the reader finally gets the rest of this tragic, violent story.
The gag with Nejire goes on for another page, of her hopping from person to person, asking six of the students in all about some distinguishing feature of theirs. With the sole exception of Shouto, all are in some way heteromorphic, though it’s obscured somewhat by Mineta not being one of the class’s really obvious heteromorphs, and Mina having an Emitter-type quirk. It’s unclear whether Nejire's questions were leading to some point or if she just completely blanked on anything she’d been intending to say about work studies when her curiosity reared its head. It definitely feels like her targets are all kind of taken aback to be asked about this so openly—even Mina has a small sweatdrop, while Mineta (being Mineta) excitedly charges her with sexual harassment.
Very shortly after, we find Nejire toying with an extremely uncomfortable-looking Mina’s horns while Mina asks her to stop.
Chapter 126:
Quick shot of Kaminari playing with Ojiro’s tail in the classroom, but no accompanying shot of Ojiro’s face, so we don’t know how he’s feeling about it, but it and the bit above with Mina’s horns could speak to a certain amount of tendency to treat heteromorphic features as open property to play with or poke at regardless of the person in question’s feelings. That’s a bit reachy even for this piece, but there will be one further example later on. Three examples in 300+ chapters does not exactly make for a phenomenon, but then again, that kind of physical forwardness in Japan is probably pretty unusual as it is. Could be a case that’s more common in countries that are more culturally comfortable with casual touch.[1]
Chapter 131:
It’s not clear heteromorphobia, per se, but this chapter has another one of those fights with “giant villains”—two fighting each other, in this case—where they just get carted away in the background and no one asks—nor does the narrative concern itself with—why they were fighting each other to begin with. Indeed, Ryukyu and her interns just stand around in the foreground chitchatting about work while, in the background, the dust settles on the two villains Uravity and Froppy just buried under rubble. Hope they don’t revert to normal size and then have to be rescued from under a collapsed building!
o The “heroes stand around and talk in the foreground while villains get carted off behind them” thing comes up so often, and in most cases, it’s totally absent of context, just a cut-in on some hero in the middle of a work day. Only very rarely does the audience get any context on what the villain's deal is, and it's striking that all of the examples coming to mind for me —Starservant, Ending, the gang mook dude coming up shortly—are non-heteromorphs.
Chapter 141:
Tabe, of Overhaul’s trash trio, is described by Hojo as having been tossed aside when he didn’t mesh with society. This makes Tabe both the only heteromorph of the trio and the only one described as having been rejected by society at large, rather than victimized by a specific person as in Hojo and Setsuno’s cases. That said, given that his appearance is—while a bit manic—not all that far from baseline, and that his character blurb says he’s always hungry, I suspect Tabe’s ostracization is rooted more in the kinds of difficulties faced by characters like Toga, whose quirk comes with a strong psychological component they have difficulty managing and were not given any outlets or coping mechanisms for.
Chapter 144:
The bullied kid who middle school Kirishima tries to help is a heteromorph. The reason he’s getting bullied, however, is that the two kids bothering him want him to use his quirk to transform leaves into money; it’s a pure Emitter quirk. Still, the kid is shorter than average and literally mousy, only marginally more humanoid than Nedzu.[2]
Chapter 159:
The other incidence of Tsuyu being addressed by frog onomatopoeia rather than name—Suneater calls her Miss Ribbit.
Chapter 160:
A moment that looks small at the time, but will look considerably different when My Villain Academia rolls around: Dabi addressing Spinner as “lizard” and Spinner angrily firing back that his name is not Lizard, it’s Spinner.
This makes Spinner the first heteromorph to protest being addressed as their associated animal. In true microaggression fashion, I imagine a lot of heteromorphs in similar situations just run the mental arithmetic and decide they don’t feel like making a stink about it and getting into a debate or coming off as a killjoy. This would be especially true in Japan, with its culture of meiwaku, not being a bother to others. Spinner, being a villain, is already resolved to make lots of trouble for others, so he comes right out and complains.
Dabi, for his part, brushes Spinner’s anger off with, “You don’t need to flip out,” which I have to imagine is also pretty typical. It was just a joke, I didn’t mean anything by it, why are you getting so angry?: all probably pretty common responses to actually trying to push back against that kind of name-calling.
The Remedial Course Arc (Chapters 163-168)
Chapter 164:
Gang Orca compares the students under his charge unfavorably to plankton. I suppose if you get to the animal comments before they get to you…? That or he’s leaning into it.
The children’s teacher calls Gang Orca “Mr. Whale” rather than addressing him by his hero alias or any generic titles. It stands out a bit more than Suneater doing the same to Tsuyu, in that there’s little reason to assume the teacher shouldn’t know what Gang Orca goes by, given his exceptionally high rank (on both leaderboards we know he’s on) and the fact that she would have had to agree to this whole exercise on behalf of her class.
The U.A. School Festival Arc (Chapters 169-183)
Chapter 169:
When Jirou is getting angsty over her music hobby not supporting her hero work and snaps at Kaminari about it, there’s a shot of Koda watching her with concern. They were, of course, paired up for their final exams, but it stands out to me as being the first time Koda’s had a relationship beat with a student that isn’t as blatantly heteromorphic as he is? Jirou still is a heteromorph, but she doesn’t have the animal features or Weird Head that the students Koda’s mostly been associated with previously do.
He joins Kaminari in encouraging her later in the chapter, which is, again, about the most concrete character beat I think he has with another student in the entire series up until the hospital material.[3]
Chapter 173:
In the panel showing the totally spectacular original fantasy screenplay from Class B, I can’t help but notice that of the eleven students shown, all eight of the baseline/near-baseline types are in standard fantasy gear, while two of the three heteromorphs—Shishida and Pony—seem to have been decked out in wings and are playing at being quadrupeds. Mounts? Wild animals? Sure, the giant eagles in Lord of the Rings (which is namedropped in the play’s title) are sapient, but it does stand out that the animal-associated heteromorphs in the shot are playing animals, not humans.
o Incidentally, the third, Bondo, is a bit less clear. Only his head is visible atop a swatch of black cloak, so he could be some kind of wacky flying monster, but given his position up by the dark castle, I would assume he’s playing the main villain. In the play itself, however, later on in Chapter 183, he seems to have been downed prior to Tetsutetsu’s character, and is at least collapsed amidst the heroes’ number. Perhaps he’s a minion who joined the good guys or something?
Whatever in hell is going on in this exchange between Midnight and Midoriya:
I’m assuming what’s happening here is that Midnight, being Midnight, is flavoring her facetiousness with a kinky metaphor.[4] But like, wow.
Chapter 175:
Hound Dog—this being the arc in which he gets the most screentime—shows up to run the students out of the gym. He’s still wearing the muzzle and has spittle flying comically from his mouth. Gets a “Yikes!” response out of the kids, comedic fear.
Chapter 183:
Hound Dog finally gets a good moment. The bit starts off much as his scenes usually do, with Midoriya standing rigid and on-edge as Hound Dog leans in too close, panting heavily and shout-scolding. The tension bleeds out of Midoriya, however, as Hound Dog segues into the stern reminder that teachers are there to protect students, and they should and can be relied on if fights break out. It’s a nice scene, though it transitions back to cartoon violence immediately after as Hound Dog turns on All Might. Ectoplasm gives us a reminder that Hound Dog forgets how to talk when he gets mad.
The billboard showing the beauty pageant entrants is exceptionally loosely drawn, but from what we can see, it contains only people who are at least close enough to baseline to have normal hair and facial features. One girl has ears that look enough like fins that the anime went ahead and made her a reptilian heteromorph, with a face somewhere between Tsuyu’s and dragon-form Ryukyu, but that’s pure extrapolation. Regardless, even if you count her, she’s the only full heteromorph in the six entrants. (And it’s not like the contest is even about traditional beauty, because reigning champ Kenranzaki Bibimi is a joke.)
First appearance of Gori, the gorilla heteromorph police officer. Between him, Tsuragamae and Sansa, an extremely sizeable portion of the named police officers are animal-type heteromorphs, though certainly police in crowd scenes run baseline enough. It makes a certain amount of sense: if your animal quirk doesn’t give you enough badass superpowers to become a cool hero, joining the force is probably the next best thing. It’s a slightly odd choice to make given what will later be implied about heteromorphs and their rate of villain designation, but perhaps, as with Shouji and Shinsou, there’s a degree there of wanting to prove oneself as well-intentioned and worthwhile against persistent dehumanization and discrimination.
o Gori and Sansa are both played pretty straight—no stray animal sounds or mannerisms from them. Honestly, looking at how completely reserved they and numerous other animal-type heteromorphs are compared to Hound Dog’s tendency to meltdowns, I begin to think one could make a pretty decent argument that people with animal-trait quirks experience the same spectrum of psychological compulsion other quirk users do: on one end are people who are so completely in control of their quirks that their quirks seem almost incidental to who they are as people (ex. Momo, Sansa), while on the other end are people who are so deeply impacted by their quirk that it gives them significant issues with self-control (ex. Toga, Hound Dog).
The Pro Hero Arc (Chapters 184-193)
Chapter 184:
The Hero Billboard Chart chapter, in which the criteria that determine a hero’s rank are listed are incident resolution rate, contributions to society, and public approval rating. I’ll ask the reader to consider how these metrics might combine to keep many heteromorphic heroes squarely in the mid-ranks, while also indirectly contributing to rural heteromorphobia.
Public approval is the most obvious place where they’re going to run into difficulty. In a society where heteromorphobia is openly espoused in certain parts of the country, and, as we will find, simmering below the surface even in less regressive areas, heteromorphs are obviously disadvantaged. I don’t know how the public approval rating is calculated, but if there’s any way for bigots to register their disapproval, that’s going to be a significant hit to a heteromorphic hero’s popularity. Likewise, there’s plenty of room for unconscious bias to be present, in the, “I’m not biased against heteromorphs; it’s a complete coincidence that I think all these other, non-heteromorphic heroes are more worthy of my approval!” mode.
Poor public approval in rural communities is an excellent motivator for heteromorphic would-be heroes to come to cities—you can hardly have a good approval rate if the only people who’ve ever heard of you hate your guts!
Societal contributions would seem to require at least some amount of demand that heteromorphs can’t control. Public appearances, charitable activities, maybe all the commercials and modelling gigs if contributing to the economy counts as contributing to society—how much of that can a heteromorph do if they aren’t being requested by other parts of society?
For example, we know Gang Orca is in high demand to make appearances at aquariums, but he's also the Director of an internationally popular aquarium, and clearly does extensive charitable work in that field. How much demand is someone who hasn’t made that much of a niche for themselves going to be in? What about someone whose power and personality aren’t as strong as Gang Orca’s? If they can’t make much headway in other metrics of the ranking, how can they stand out from the rest of the pack enough to get those opportunities?
This also feeds into the pressure for heroes to move to cities—a small-town hero can work themselves to the bone for their small community, but that’s just one small town in the whole country. It hardly compares to someone who can make contributions on the national level!
Finally, incident resolution requires a power that’s good at quickly, efficiently stopping villains and saving people, and, at least in terms of raw power, I think this doesn’t immediately disadvantage heteromorphs. Heteromorph Mirko has a brutally simple power set and she makes it work like gangbusters. Transformation-type Crust’s power is dead basic, yet he places just fine. There are plenty of weak emitters and wildly OP heteromorphs, so in terms of who’s best suited to stopping trouble on a dime, that feels like a relatively even playing ground.
However, this one is the real killer in terms of keeping heroes out of rural areas. After all, having a high incident resolution rate requires working in a place with a high number of incidents happening! That means coming to cities, where the higher population means higher amounts of villain activity. It's not like bigotry is even illegal, after all, nor does it require the illegal use of quirks.
I’ll be coming back to this topic again later, after the series gives us more context for how ugly rural heteromorphobia can get, but this chapter gives us the pieces we need to understand how absolutely ill-equipped the Hero System is to address heteromorphobia in the places where it most needs to be addressed.
We find that the Top Ten is comprised of a whole array of baseline or near-baseline types, with the ones who’re farthest from human appearance either wearing a mask (Kamui Woods) or being cartoon appliances (Wash, who could just as easily be a normal dude wearing a costume and doing a bit).
One of the frequent bits of sophistry I see about heteromorphobia is that it can’t be that bad because Hawks and Mirko are in the Top 10, but you only have to look at those two's cover-ready, conventionally attractive faces and tertiary animal characteristics to know that they’re hardly comparable to someone like Spinner. Kamui Woods makes the better argument, and he is, again, masked.
However, I don’t want to harp on this too much, because the fact of the matter is that Gang Orca is noted to have been in the prior Top Ten, so certainly a scary demeanor isn’t necessarily that huge a deterrent. (Though Gang Orca does a lot of public appearances at aquariums and the like, so his societal contribution score is probably crazy good. Very powerful quirk, too.)
Chapter 186:
This chapter has the other incidence of the “non-heteromorph puts their hands all over a heteromorph’s divergent feature without any sign of asking for permission first” thing I discussed back in Chapter 123. And while it is technically only one incident, it’s notable that it’s rather more than one case.
Not pictured: any of these grabby little assholes asking permission.
Hawks has the line, “The son of the Number Two would’ve been a nice feather in my cap,” which I would normally count as an animal-themed quip and talk about, but there’s no bird metaphor in the Japanese line. I’m not going to comb the entirety of his dialogue in Japanese to see how regular bird puns are—maybe Caleb was fitting one in here in place of one he couldn’t work in elsewhere, or maybe he was just localizing colorfully without much thought for how it reflected on Everything Else About All Heteromorphs.[5] Hawks will present another opportunity later.
Chapter 187:
This reads like absolutely nothing in the moment, but it’s noticeable in hindsight that, when Fuyumi brings up the possibility of Natsuo having gotten a girlfriend in college, Natsuo blushes and frantically deflects without confirming or denying. We will later find out that he has gotten a girlfriend—she’s mentioned in his character profile page following Chapter 189, and we will later see a picture of her on the cover page of 259. That cover page will establish that she’s a heteromorph, which, together with the knowledge of later reveals about the Himura family being blatantly heteromorphobic, adds some less-cute context to Natsuo backflipping out of talking about her in Himura Rei’s room at the psychiatric hospital.
The Joint Training Arc (Chapters 194-217)
Chapter 195:
First real insight on Shishida Jurota, whose quirk is technically a transformation type, but whose appearance is plenty bestial even in his resting state. Another interesting case of someone whose animalistic powers do have an effect on his personality, though it only comes out in his transformation; he’s otherwise pretty collected.
Chapter 197:
Shishida protests Shiozaki calling him “Apocalypse beast,” but I’d say it’s just as possible that he’s objecting to her using the wrong mythological critter, seeing as his hero alias is a reference to a mythologized historical man-eating beast, so he’s clearly not above claiming monster cred himself.
Rin echoes the nickname literally a single panel after Shishida complains about it. It’s not a great look, honestly.
Chapter 199:
Hawks has that “’Cuz we’re birds of a feather!”[6] line to Tokoyami, who asks him, in what looks to be an extremely unamused fashion, “Is that meant to be funny…?” So, Hawks feels comfortable making bird jokes about himself, but Hawks literally does modeling work and is on magazine covers; he has extremely cool bird wings that he doesn’t even have to fly with normally, because he can control them with his mind, meaning they can carry a lot of weight—including his own—that physics would not normally allow. Tokoyami, meanwhile, is of a body type (specifically, a head type) that we will later find had a hate group specifically dedicated to it. It’s easy to imagine Hawks having a more flippant view! (This might even be exacerbated by him being raised first in an abusive home and second by government agents. One doubts he’s exactly learning wonderful lessons about body positivity and self-love.)
Tokoyami has one line that’s a bird reference, while the other is another bird pun inserted by the localization. Relevant to my point is that the bird-themed one is the “dumb carrier pigeon” bit—in the Japanese, it’s “not a dumb messenger bird.” It’s coming out of frustration and annoyance that Hawks seemingly recruited him for no reason but to grill him about the stuff going on at his school. He’s being derisive towards the thing he thinks Hawks is using him as.
o The other bird allusion is, “He took me under his wing again.” In the Japanese, it’s just, “He accepted me again.”
That said, while Tokoyami may not think the bird jokes are cute, Hawks does make the biggest impression on him by taking him flying and encouraging him to find a way to fly freely for himself.
Chapter 200:
The proper introduction of Fukidashi Manga, a character who makes a complete mockery of quirk classifications. His head alone marks him as heteromorphic as all get-out, and indeed the wiki classes his quirk as heteromorphic. But given that he can both make sound effects appear on his face and then transmute them to real manifestations (a transformation effect) as well as use the regular old voice he somehow has to manifest his sound effects by yelling them (an emitter effect), his categorization seems deeply arbitrary.
Chapter 203:
Proper introduction of Tsunotori Pony. Not the most obvious heteromorph to ever walk the planet, but the tail and the satyr-esque structure of her legs and feet are a giveaway that her horns wouldn’t be on their own. Like Hound Dog, she's making some very weird choices about her hero costume: stirrup accessories on her boots and a hairpiece clearly designed to resemble a bridle. Pony’s a bit of a mishmash, really. Her tail and horns say goat heteromorph, but her name and costume say horse-type.
Chapter 204:
In a flashback, Iida’s older brother Tensei mentions that their grandfather, the founder of their hero family, passed down the tidbit about how the Iidas can rip out their pipes to regenerate stronger ones. I really have to wonder how in God’s name anyone would ever just happen to figure that out, and some of the possible answers are wildly grim.
The most probable answer is simply that he found out after taking a bad injury in his hero career—having one engine torn out or damaged so badly it had to be removed—only to unexpectedly recover later on. But if it wasn’t that, and assuming he didn’t just intuit that his pipes would grow back stronger if violently dismembered, that really only leaves removing them because he wanted to get rid of them permanently, only to find that they’d just grow back, or having them removed against his will.
The former, removing them himself, seems unlikely—even if he’s, say, a decade or two older than All Might, that’s still well after the period in which metahumans would have been such a persecuted minority that I can see one self-mutilating to hide it—though he might have been told the story by an ancestor of his own. The latter, them being removed against his will, would also have been more believable some generations prior, but given the existence of the CRC, remains ominously plausible even in the modern day.
Chapter 205:
An extremely rare case of an animal-type heteromorph using dehumanizing language towards another animal-type heteromorph: Pony tells Shouji that she wants to wrap a clash with him up quickly because she can’t stand octopus. It has a similar tenor of Dabi calling Spinner a lizard, and Hawks calling himself and Tokoyami birds, 1:1 equating heteromorphs with their associated animal. I believe Hawks is the only other animal-associated heteromorph[7] who does this, at least up until the hospital attack.
Shouji responds, “I’m no stranger to being feared,” another explicit canonical nod towards his still-unknown backstory.
Chapter 207:
A good look at Class B’s Kamakiri Togaru, unusually open about his bloodthirst for a heteromorph, much less a heroic one.
Bakugou calls Jirou “Lobes,” another in his pattern of referring to heteromorphs by their defining feature.
Tokage Setsuna is a somewhat interesting case of having a bunch of animal signifiers—her name, the name of her quirk, her hero alias, her costume—but not actually resembling an animal to any degree at all, barring her pointy teeth. Also, remember when I raised the point that animal heterormorphs can seem to get stuck with very plain quirk names that don’t distinguish them at all from other heteromorphs associated with the same animal, regardless of how many sub-abilities come as part of the total package? And compared that to people with other quirk types, who get wildly varied quirk names despite having relatively similar abilities? Here we see that with Tokage—she’s a transformation-type, and her quirk name is Lizard Tail Splitter.
Bondo Kojirou, Class B’s other really bonkers heteromorph. Seriously, what is life even like for this guy? How do your senses function when you have a glue lid for a head?
Chapter 208:
Bakugou calls Kamakiri a bug, saying, “I guess bugs do have quick reflexes!” He follows up with a muttered, “Quick at scampering away, too,” that is likely aimed at Kamakiri’s bug-ness as well.
Conversely, Tokage (in flashback) merely refers to Bondo as “big-boned,” which is true: Bondo has one of the largest frames of any of the first years.
Chapter 213:
Introduces the SIX QUIRKS!!1 element of the story. This has nothing to do with heteromorphobia per se, but I do think it’s somewhat interesting/telling that neither AFO nor OFA seem to much like heteromorphic quirks. Despite All Might implying rather strongly in Chapter 257 that OFA is a completely random assortment of weak-ish quirks,[8] accumulated from those who just happened to be there to help one another, every single quirk within it is an emitter-type. Likewise, all of AFO’s quirks are either emitter or transformation-types, with the only known exception being Ujiko’s Life Force—a heteromorphic quirk by sheer technicality, and one that does nothing whatsoever to shift the bearer’s needle away from baseline.
Now, I can’t rightly accuse OFA of being heteromorphobic—again, it’s allegedly pure luck of the draw—but it is still worth comparing OFA’s train of 100% baseline prior bearers with the demographics of heroes, villains, and society in general. To wit, if heteromorphs—especially strongly divergent ones—trend more towards villainy compared to the population at large, perhaps there’s a reason there haven’t been any heteromorphs willing to reach out a hand to someone in need?
There are other things I’ve posited about where heteromorphs tend towards gravitating in Hero Society that could be reflected in OFA’s composition, but it’s hard to theorize in greater depth without knowing more about the context of the OFA “passes.”
o Did the bearers know their successors in advance, as seems to have been the case with almost all of them? Then it’s probably down to social groups, and we will see that heteromorphs often band together in times of social upheaval, which was the case for most of One For All’s span of existence. Perhaps the prior bearers simply weren’t close with any heteromorphs because heteromorphs were distrustful of baseline-types back then.
(The bearers having pre-existing relationships would seem to conflict with All Might’s noble sentiments in 257 about the bearers not being chosen ones, but rather just people writhing in hell whose only capabilities were to receive OFA and to entrust it to another. This writer will humbly ask you to take that up with the man who decided to portray every single bearer barring Shinomori and Nana as having some indication of a relationship with their predecessor prior to the latter’s death.)
o How visibly disruptive were the prior battles with AFO compared to the ones he has with Nana and All Might?[9] If they were very dangerous, that could explain there not being a lot of mid-rank, so-so power-wise heteromorphic heroes at the grounds zero of those battles. On the other hand, if they were very hidden, we’re back to the only people knowing and being present for a given bearer’s final battle being their own allies and possibly a random selection of cliquishness-prone bystanders.
Of course, the most likely explanation is pure Doylist: Horikoshi didn’t want anything that would radically alter the design of his main character. Still, how hard would it have been to give even one of the bearers some kind of minor heteromorphic body trait like Koda’s weird head that wouldn’t have been a function of their quirk, and thus wouldn’t necessarily reflect itself on Deku’s body?
(I can and will accuse AFO of being heteromorphobic as all get-out, however.)
Chapter 217:
A largely facetious note, this, but All Might has a small comment during his, Deku and Bakugou’s conversation wherein he tells Bakugou not to call Deku a dweeb. It’s the first and only time I can remember any teacher pushing back on Bakugou’s habit of assigning classmates derisive nicknames. I believe there are instances of both All Might and Aizawa telling Bakugou to calm down or ratchet back on his temper, but nothing more specific than that. As with Mineta’s sexual harassment, Bakugou’s heteromorphobic microaggressions go completely unrebuked, with All Might only protesting the nicknames when Bakugou insults All Might’s successor.
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Have you been enjoying these lengthy rambles? Do you want even more? Then come back next time for a special installment devoted to one arc and one arc only, the arc of my heart, my one true arc love: My Villain Academia.
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER.
[2] For Kirishima’s efforts here, he’s told by his friends that he should stop butting his nose in where it doesn’t belong. Which is a hell of a thing to say to a guy trying to intervene with school bullying, but apparently that’s “old-fashioned.” This probably speaks less to heteromorph discrimination than it does to the civilian attitude towards helping others when one is not a hero, a point that would be more relevant to e.g. the essay defending Shigaraki’s philosophical points, rather than this one.
[3] Which is a Problem, given how much emotional load the series is going to try and saddle him with regarding Shouji, a character with whom he has zero established dynamic. But we'll get there, though this will probably still be off-topic even then.
[4] Not that, “Let Hound Dog off the chain,” would be any better in this circumstance.
[5] Insert, “RIP to him, but I’m different,” meme of choice.
[6] In the Japanese, tori nakama, lit. bird buddies/comrades.
[7] I keep specifying “animal-type” because of the incident early on with Sero and Mineta referring to Shouji as an octopus. All three heteromorphs, but only one with that extra distancing factor of having an animalistic quirk rather than a simply fantastical one.
[8] Because AFO “went around crushing the strong,” also per 257.
[9] I’m perennially vexed by the question of how serious AFO was being in those fights. The image of OFA being passed from bloodstained hand to hand is striking and all, but why would AFO be so freely trying to murder these people if he wanted OFA for himself? I have theories about this, but they’re getting pretty off-topic for this series of posts!
On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)
To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is. While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!
If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic. Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended. While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”
That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it. In any case, let’s get to it.
1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well. Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!
(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)
Chapter 370:
O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji. It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”
2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement. I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression. After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.
So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it? Here’s the full scope of that. It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away. Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.
The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like. They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages. The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas. While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure. While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.
3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens. Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.
4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.
O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause. It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace. So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.
O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda. With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs. None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.
O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!” I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!
The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to. After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”? Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.
O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities. Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?
5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city. So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be. That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.
O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric. And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!
Demagoguery for Fun & Profit
O Quirk counselling and quirk education? Phony nonsense, he says. That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.
• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title. The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves. Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:
Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified. Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.
Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.
Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.
The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks. It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.
So of those options, what is #2 talking about? I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks. But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time. Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof. While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not. So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.
It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame. So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks! However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.
• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant). So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs? My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”
For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga. Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable. It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in. She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.
So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs? That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble? Let me just spitball a few possibilities:
A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling. That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward. So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.
A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous. She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.
A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school. He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts. He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife. (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)
Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer. It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better. But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects. What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior? It’s important to nip these things in the bud.
That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.
O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types. He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge. These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6] Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.
6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.
Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons. Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains? Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.
He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8] This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot. No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.
In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target. Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.
7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.
8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it. The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on. But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun. As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.
9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease. As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.
O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters? He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front. It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves. Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.
O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes. Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu. Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes! I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.
10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying. The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.
In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination. I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!
Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend. However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers. Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?
Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady. Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.
O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot. Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.” But discrimination very much does exist in cities! It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there! Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be? Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.
O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes. What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life. Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.
O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy. Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.
It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality. For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider. Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.
O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar. We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance. That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly. In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]
11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on. There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land. Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence. Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.
O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki. It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all. It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]
12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates. Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.
O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.
13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object. It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed. Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.
Chapter 371:
O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.
O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero. It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally. Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]
14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.
15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga. Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait! Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.
※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia. Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had. Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it. Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.
O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.
Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit
O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone. This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork. This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone. This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.
16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.
Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.
This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like. The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl. Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent? That’s hard to say. On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare! On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there. Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!
17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.
18: The duplicated ones, at least. I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.
Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks. As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with. While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene. Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.
Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents. The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder. Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language. The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child. The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is. Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?
Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls. I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean. However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.
Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background. If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede. I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother. That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.
So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.
O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents. He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.” That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.
Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people. While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives. In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it. Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.
And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19] Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with. In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal. After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time! If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?
19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.
20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.
All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either. Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter. Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible? After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure. That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?
Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways. For example:
They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”
Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory. Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.
Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A. Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.
To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.
O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21] It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country. It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.
21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks. My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.
It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning. Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.
This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status. It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on. The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.
O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger. That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole. This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.
O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything. Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.
He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless. At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing! It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene. Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.
O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings. We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?
O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge. He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up. He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool. I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled. I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]
Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up? I have my doubts for two reasons. First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]
22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch. It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga. Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March. In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants. The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.
23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.
O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs. Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose. While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:
Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.
It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification. (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)
Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes. So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.
O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories. He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers. As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries. This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.
24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3. The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.
O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.” Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”
The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.
How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV? Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person. And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?
How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner? Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?
It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs. Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR. As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?
I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.
O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]
25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry. To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words? He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.
Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism. And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?
His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.” Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?
O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross. Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed. (Christ, I hate these chapters.)
Chapter 372:
O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group. Points of note:
Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size. Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones. However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height. In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.
Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment. Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him. (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)
Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.
O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.
26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.
Breaking those down, we’ve got:
The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such. If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it. Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!
This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced. Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere. Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country? That might track with the overalls she was wearing. And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time. Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.
The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students. That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger. Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it. To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do. It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.
O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen. Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like… That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building! The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds! The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner. Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.
Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side. No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla. Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.
This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.
O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.
O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today. This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child! Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town. Children already and still are being targeted! Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.
O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary. She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.
27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology? Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?
Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted. And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right? And doesn’t every one count?
Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself? Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing? Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her? Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence? If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages? If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?
For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly. He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.” Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself. It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.
In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!
O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying. This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good. Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.
28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too. While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.
O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!
But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?
Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse. Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with. That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding? After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict? How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?
29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box. That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry. That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system. Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”
O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward. This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction. So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.
O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man. This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.
What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?
• If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?
If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline? If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him. But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?
Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of? To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing. This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.
This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims. That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.
Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly? “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care. But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all. Is that what I am? Not nice?” On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person? Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?
I hate this panel so much.
Chapter 373:
O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies. It’s real bad.
O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes. However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains. It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far. All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly? Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?
O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today. Sorry for not realizing sooner.”
Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place? Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent? This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad. It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might. Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.
Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change. We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:
And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it. Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news. The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building! He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.
How much more heroic would he have needed to be? How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been? In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?
Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better. If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it. And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it! It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims! But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.
As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him. His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own. As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.
Conclusion
Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned? No, I don’t. I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society. I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable. Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power. The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.
I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is. I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism. That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.
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Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.
However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.
You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.
Minor advisor note: Katana Advisor was in episode S7EP15, for a brief still among the Villains captured...except they got his colors wrongs XD You still know its him from his head shape and neckbrace armor/but they still messed up his color scheme.
So I finally had the free time to go dig this episode up! I had to watch most of the episode to find the shot you were referring to, and then ducked back to the previous episode as well, as I’d always intended to at least watch Scarecrow’s big speech moment. Unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts.
Firstly, regarding Katana Advisor, I can only laugh and shake my head. Great job, Bones—add in a brand new shot of people getting captured, but the only established character whose capture might possibly be relevant has the wrong colors, so you can’t even conclusively say that it’s him. Impeccable work: Net Zero changes to the material.
(I agree that it’s obviously supposed to be him—that neck brace is very distinct—but I elect to ignore the implication because I will take any crumbs I can find that any given distinct MLA character is still in the wind at the end of the series. Not that I consider myself beholden to the anime’s garbage take on the MLA anyway, but still.)
That aside, hit the jump for the rest! There’s one particularly big one—a translation error in one of Scarecrow’s lines that in turn drew my attention to an issue with Viz’s translation of the same line in the manga—that I’ve saved for last.
O I enjoy that the anime makes it even more clear that Spinner did not run over any-damn-body. Like, that assumption was so omnipresent when people were talking about that chapter in the manga, but it never stood up to a close read of the actual details of the art. Does it make Pig Nose Guy’s crisis of conscience even more obviously dumb and contrived? Oh hell yes. But the hospital plot was that anyway, so I appreciate anything that makes it easier to explain why.
O Speaking of the human chain, chatting about the moment with Nal made me realize a particularly egregious thing about the set-up with the hospital. So like, the medical staff are willing to risk their lives for their patients, right? To the point that they’ll do a real damn stupid human chain instead of, say, trying to use all the chairs and benches and desks you’d find in a hospital to put together a fucking barricade, all for the sake of making a point?[1] But you know who very pointedly is not behind that human chain? You know who we never see a single person inside the hospital trying to defend? Kurogiri, that’s who.
I guess the doctors just didn’t count him as a patient who needs to be protected, huh? Honestly, where is the brave whistle-blower hospital admin who’s going to give a bombshell interview about how Central Hospital begged the Heroes and the police to move Kurogiri somewhere else only to be refused, because one of the Heroes is personally attached to Kurogiri, and also because Hawks and Tsukauchi knew that Villains attacking a hospital would do irreparable damage to their cred, and that would be important for legal proceedings in the aftermath of all this?
1: Not at all how this would go in real life, especially given the conceit that the only patients left in the hospital are those whose condition is so delicate that they can’t be moved. But I guess Horikoshi was too busy asking his EMT contact about open-heart surgery on the battlefield to think to ask about hospital procedures in the event of an active terror threat. Also putting together a barricade inside the hospital would imply that the staff believe there’s any chance the defense force, who are outnumbered 75 to 1, could fail, and we all know from BNHA’s endgame that being proactive in the face of danger voids the Hero Protection Warrantee. Only those who are patient and wait for help to come actually deserve help; trying to help themselves makes them Villains.
O Scarecrow’s first appearance in the scene is so, so funny. He just floats downward into the frame. He’s not rappelling downwards using webbing, he’s not climbing down with his spider legs, he doesn’t have insect wings; he just drifts down like he has some kind of flight quirk. You know, the dude who will be defeated by knocking him off the roof of a tall building.
Why did you think it would help to knock this guy off a roof, Koda? He can clearly just hover right back up there. Perhaps his flight operates under similar principles as hot air balloons? Did attacking him with birds deprive him of most of his gas?
O WHERE IS HIS GODDAMN SALUTE.
THIS IS NOT THE LIBERATION SALUTE.
O I notice the anime kept the scene with the handgun—including actual bullet sounds!—despite the fact that that plot element goes absolutely nowhere, and in fact they also see fit to add police-issue lightning rifles. (Which, wow, that sure is a choice. Love to just make police look worse by electrocuting unarmed civilians. What, they couldn’t get a good supply of teargas ready in time?)
O It is so, so funny to me that the anime has finally, seven seasons in, started to care about dramatic lighting, but they’re stuck with the fact that the hospital attack happens in broad fucking daylight, before the other battles really start mucking with the weather. They do their best with a bunch of lit fires, using the orange light and smoke to suggest sunset lighting and distant stars, but that doesn’t change the fact that The BNHA Anime Cloudscape is lurking just beyond the haze.
This becomes extremely clear when the smoke instantly evaporates the red hot second the mob finally stops for good. Check the before and after here:
Hysterical. I guess all these people had to do for the light to shine on them was to stop rioting! Being good civilians who meekly endure their mistreatment and wait for salvation to be handed to them from outside can literally make the sun come out! Who needs One For All punches to change the weather? Apparently enough civilians can replicate the effect just by feeling bad enough about themselves.
O I was being fairly annoyed about the BGM scoring Spinner’s internal monologue right before he makes the last push through to Kurogiri. Like, it was so plainly ominous and scary, emotionally keying the viewer to view Spinner’s reflections as foreboding a horrible change of the tides. As someone who was mostly grieving for Spinner in that moment, it rubbed me the wrong way pretty badly.
...And then that music just kept on playing as the POV of the scene switched to Present Mic and I remembered that Spinner’s last push doesn’t actually come until after the incredible bit where Yamada Hizashi confirms that Spinner has been incapacitated and then apparently decides he needs to kill Shirakumo Oboro anyway, just so his existence can no longer trouble their mutual friend. And that, dear readers, made me way more forgiving of the ominous BGM!
O I would like to give Shimono Hiro, Dabi’s voice actor, a fucking medal for his line deliveries immediately before and after he goes through Kurogiri’s warp. The laugh when he realizes he’s going to get teleported to his dad is breathy, pervy, a perfect encapsulation into a single two-syllable sound of his deranged anticipation for tormenting Endeavor some more. Then his, “Otou-san!” as he appears before Endeavor is even better: high-pitched, off-balance, questioning and eager like he can’t believe his good luck. Truly, Shimono-san understood the fazacon assignment and he delivered.
O The closing sequence is…really strange. It’s like it’s pretending that it has a visual theme of reaching out to others, hands extended to those in need, and then the viewpoint cuts to a wider angle and you realize all the characters who were reaching out are actually just sinking down through clear water, their arms floating a little above their torsos. The last shot, of Deku settling to the sea floor and smiling serenely with his eyes closed, is especially bonkers. Like, what’s the message here? That no one involved has any agency in what they’re doing, but are just going with the flow established by other people? Deku reaches rock bottom, at peace with the knowledge that he doesn’t have to try to do hard stuff like “save Shigaraki” anymore because the grown-ups have sorted it all out for him?
I mentioned this in my chat group and Nal pointed me to the lyrics of the song, which use the word rokutousei, “sixth-magnitude star.” While a bit of research suggests this is actually a not uncommon bit of metaphor in Japanese songs—I found at least five different ones that used it in lyrics, title or both!—personally, I was immediately reminded of Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans’ third intro, Rage of Dust, which uses the same term but with a wholly different emotional tenor, and one that I dearly wish the Heroes could have emulated the energy of.
The difference is that BNHA’s closer, itself titled Rokutousei, is about the sixth-magnitude star (or rather, the singer who is comparing themselves to it) searching for someone else, with an overarching tone of wistfulness, while IBO’s Rage of Dust is about said star screaming defiance and vowing not to flicker out and die quietly, shouting its existence and will in the face of a system that would as soon grind it into dust without even noticing. Rather than dust, become stardust, proclaims the song, carrying on the dreams of others. And that defiance, that refusal to let themselves be exploited by the more powerful figures around them, fits perfectly with the struggles of IBO’s main characters.
And like, okay, sure, Rokutousei having a tone of, “I’ll do it, I guess, I hope, I mean, at least I’ll try, even though there’s such a lot against me, so much so that I’m already feeling wistful about how likely I am to succeed, but at least trying is beautiful and meaningful, right?” is certainly on-brand for BNHA’s endgame and Deku’s failures in particular, but good lord is it ever an odd tone to intentionally strike.
The essential difference between these two sequences: Deku letting himself drift aimlessly, eyes closed, arms lax at his sides vs. Mikazuki stubbornly dragging himself through the dirt with his one good arm, gaze fixed and hand grasping for the giant robot that allows him to fight for his future.
O While I think he performs it perfectly well—indeed, my biased heart found his Yamero, yamero! pretty wrenching!—I still don’t like that Scarecrow is clearly being interpreted by the anime as an older man. There’s nothing about him that looks especially old, insomuch as we can tell from his physical appearance, and neither is there anything I recognize in his word choice that suggests he’s a crotchety old man, either. It's a taste call, mainly, but man, I just like it better when he and Spinner and Shouji are all young men with diverging views on their oppression.
O Finally, the sub I watched had a whopper of a different translation of one of Scarecrow’s lines. @codenamesazanka turned up the raws for me, and we found that while the anime very obviously got it wrong, the Viz translation, too, was pretty eyebrow-raising. It’s one of those localization moments that leaves with the, “Oh, Caleb Cook, I want to shake your fucking hand….with a joybuzzer,” feeling I periodically had to wrestle with back when I was still doing chapter posts.
The line in question is this one:
Note how blatantly horrible this is, so nakedly manipulative that it stops even being very effective manipulation because no one could possibly say, “Don’t stop to think!” in good faith? Well, that’s probably because the line wasn’t originally that bald-faced. Even Translator Sis, who normally more or less agrees with C.Cook’s choices (certainly compared to the fan scanlations!), had a real :grimace_emoji: moment and said it was the kind of translation that could only come from a place of bias against the character.
The Japanese line here is, “Yamero yamero reisei ni naru na!” which would more literally translate to, “Stop, stop! Don’t calm down!” The first bit is straightforward: a simple repetition of one word that (particularly as delivered quite well by Scarecrow’s voice actor!) really gets across his desperation and panic that the highly important mission he was spearheading is falling apart in front of him. It’s much more openly emotional and unchecked than Viz’s, “Enough nonsense!”
The bigger issues is the second part. Reisei ni naru is basically a verb construction about cooling off, calming down, collecting or recovering oneself when emotions are threatening to cloud one’s judgement—Scarecrow’s line is telling the mob to not do that. I can certainly see where Caleb was coming from—it’s still a very Bad Guy thing to say!—but there is a clear difference between telling people to not let their passion evaporate and telling them outright not to think.
It feels a bit like a response to a tone policing argument, Shouji begging the crowd to be calm and think rationally because this sort of display of anger isn’t helping. And Scarecrow frantically tells them not to collect themselves and be rational because what has that rationality ever offered them? What is it offering them now? It’s just a prelude to telling them to go back home and endure their pain some more.
In much the same way as the idea of light/shadow/illumination is being argued between Scarecrow and Shouji, similar ideas of emotional temperature are implicit in the kanji used in the characters’ word choices. Netsu, 熱, literally meaning “heat,” is the word Scarecrow uses for the emotions of the crowd, their fevered zeal and passion—Spinner uses the same word later in the chapter when reflecting about how he was swept up by passion and followed Shigaraki. Reisei, conversely, contains the kanji for “cold,” 冷.[2] It's not about thinking or not thinking; it's about ferver vs. composure, passion vs. presence of mind.
2: The same 冷 is the kanji used for Rei's name, incidentally.
Notably, the idea of thinking does come up in the chapter also, and it's very much not Scarecrow telling the crowd not to think. Rather, he exorts them/Pig Nose Guy to think of the mistreatment they've suffered, to think only of that; Pig Nose Guy uses the same verb (考える, kangaeru, meaning to think about, to contemplate, to reflect on) when he replies that he is thinking about it.
Caleb correctly communicates the idea of thinking in that exchange, so it actually reads a bit weird to have Scarecrow, over the course of two pages, go from telling PNG to think to telling him not to. It comes off as Scarecrow's rhetoric failing him so him just desperately flailing for whatever words he can find, even if they blatantly contradict what he literally just said. That instant, hypocritical contradiction is not there in Japanese because he's talking about two different things!
I'm happy to know this—“Don’t stop to think!” is one of the very worst lines in that whole stretch of chapters to me!—but I do wish I'd known it much sooner. I was so cynical about Horikoshi's writing of the erstwhile MLA by that point that it never even occured to me to check the Japanese! So thanks for that, I guess, wild mistranslation by the anime subbers! XD
And thanks as always @shockersalvage for the ask! Who knows when I would have realized, if ever, if you hadn't given me the anime update to go check!
