BnHA Ch. 372 & 373 - Review, parallels & comparisons: Shining the light on leaders, followers, and independent thinkers.
Fun fact: This chapter is called “Friend” and so is Ch.319, where 1A confronts Endeavor in Nezu’s office and declares their intent to find, follow, and work alongside their friend Midoriya. Ch.258, with Hawks befriending Twice, is called “FriendS”.
372 & 373 give us more Present Mic with Shirakumo/Kurogiri, woohoo! I’m psyched, as I’ve grown to love Mic along with Aizawa (and my main blorbo All Might). But I feel like Mic gets the short end of the narrative stick quite a bit. Shirakumo was the undisputed leader of the Rooftop Trio, followed by Aizawa, with Mic rounding out the back. Shirakumo pulled them both along.
Without Shirakumo, Aizawa goes off on his own, even though his quirk is “best suited for teamwork.” Mic stays in their “formation” behind Aizawa, patiently waiting for his friend and giving him nudges when he can. Mic never intentionally shields Aizawa, as Aizawa is too headstrong for that. (Plus being shielded plays into Aizawa’s insecurities, so Mic doesn’t go that route.) Instead, Mic follows Aizawa’s lead.
That means Mic at his most aggressive & protective when he doesn’t know what’s going on inside his friend’s head. Unfortunately, that’s a lot, because Aizawa doesn’t actually open up to anyone. His friendship with Mic is based on proximity, presence, and shared trauma, not talking about feelings. As far as we know, Aizawa has only spoken about his injury and recovery with Nezu, and even then Aizawa cuts off Nezu’s speech about a wisp of hope to ask about Toga.
The one time Mic and Aizawa get close to talking about something meaningful is after Tartarus, when Aizawa asks Mic what he’d do to the people who turned Shirakumo into a Nomu. But Aizawa gets cut off and has to tend to Eri.
We never really know how Aizawa feels, and neither does Mic. When Aoyama is revealed as the traitor, Mic initially asks the kids to slow their roll and think about how Aoyama betrayed them. He wants to make sure a second betrayal isn’t in the cards. Aizawa then surprises Mic by offering Aoyama a chance, which causes Mic to fall in line behind his friend. I wrote about it more in the UA traitor chapters here:
Do you ever read a chapter and feel like it’s not coming together for you? Like there’s bits and pieces that make your brain go brrr in a mi
In 372 & 373 we see Mic rush to Kurogiri’s side. Mic even leaves Shoji and Koda to handle the crowd — despite Aizawa asking him to protect the boys — so he can confront Spinner and stop Kurogiri from helping the villains. There’s a few things happening here: (1) obviously, Mic doesn’t want the heroes to lose; and (2) he doesn’t want his dead friend desecrated further as a puppet used to hurt the heroes. Mic addressing Kurogiri as “Shirakumo” and saying “if you’re still our friend…” has immediate parallels to Ch. 254, where Aizawa asks if Shirakumo is “still in there,” because if so then they can still be heroes. If Kurogiri wakes up and helps the villains, then everything Shirakumo stood for is gone, and Shirakumo is truly dead. Everything Aizawa hoped — that the trio could be heroes together — is gone. Aizawa’s hope dies here.
Kurogiri telling Mic he’s the protector of Tomura is also a direct callback to 254, where Mic reacted viciously until he saw that Aizawa was engaged and truly trying to find the wisp of his friend beneath the Nomu-fication. Mic knows the stakes for society and for his best friend. The question is what Mic will do next. Does he keep trying to reach Shirakumo? At what point does he concede his friend is really, truly, completely dead? If Kurogiri can think for himself — real, true independent thought — doesn’t that make him more than a puppet? What’s the difference between a programmed Nomu and an angry mob blindly following their leader’s voice?
Spinner also has a friend stuck beneath AFO’s distortions. Shigaraki may not be a “Nomu,” but he is a puppet with almost no will of his own anymore (it’s all down to Tenko). It’s not an accident we get flashbacks for both friend groups showing when times were simpler and their wills were their own. Look at Shirakumo’s hand and Spinner’s hand — open and gesturing towards their conversation partner. Horikoshi is drawing interesting parallels between Shirakumo/Shigaraki as victims of AFO, and Mic/Spinner as the ones who follow their friends.
Mic didn’t become a hero for Shirakumo or Aizawa, and in many ways he’s the opposite of Spinner — he’s loud, very public, and has always had his own style. People cosplay Mic and not the other way around. But Mic is often sent on missions without backup, and at heart he wants Aizawa to stand tall.
Aizawa has always had insecurity surrounding his quirk and his abilities. Unlike Shigaraki, who steadily grows in power until he’s overtaken by AFO, Aizawa has steadily lost power and accumulated injuries (courtesy of the League) throughout the manga. He’s angry, and Mic is angry for him. Moreover, Mic has his own trauma surrounding Shirakumo’s death, since the villain who brought down the building on Shirakumo used Mic’s quirk to do it. Aizawa then had his first big heroic moment taking down that villain by himself. How did he find the will to do it? He heard Shirakumo’s voice urging him on through a speaker — and Mic KNOWS it. Seeing Spinner try a voice recording to force Kurogiri to do AFO’s bidding HAS to be offensive, and it makes sense why Mic broke the device.
A voice can be powerful. A voice can be used to lead. It can be used to destroy. It can push someone forward or pull them into the past. How will Mic use his voice and his Voice in this situation? And when is Shinso showing up with his voice modulator????
Horikoshi really uses this chapter to draw an explicit parallel between voice and light/fire. There’s the heroic fire, started by All Might, that continues to burn bright and colorful against AFO’s black-and-white world of “me” and “not me.” When people stand tall and their voices are heard, they’re brought into that light.
This post could also be called “Who do you think is going to wake up, Kurogiri or Shirakumo?” I’m going to make an argument for why I think it will bee Kurogiri who wakes up undert the cut, because it ties up a bunch of themes with this arc.
1. Stopping vs. Saving
The biggest conflict of this arc, which is also the central theme of the manga (Winning vs. Saving) is if overpowering the villains in a physical fight is enough, or if the heroes need to go one step farther and save the villains. There is a lot of setup for this idea of saving villains, it starts with All Might mentioning that both of their ideas of heroism winning or saving can work together.
You can’t save anyone if you lose, but if you only focus on beating bad guys then no one will get saved. The entire previous arc before this is Deku going on a solo journey and trying to learn what exactly it will mean to try to save Shigaraki after seeing the vision of Tenko as a helpless child inside Shigaraki’s mind. The arc before that is the war arc, and remember that was the heroes levying every single hero they had in a show of military might to crush the villains and their strongest attack didn’t work.
If this arc is to be different than the war arc, then naturally it would take a different strategy for the heroes to win. I could keep going. And I will. Basically, every single fight between the heroes and their villainous foil has followed the same pattern so far.
Deku rejects Toga by saying that he would never want to hurt someone I love so therefore they’re too different, which causes Toga to lose her interest in talking to both Uraraka and Ochaco when of all people she was the one who could have most easily been turned because she wanted to seek out the heroes in the first place and talk things out and see if people like her and Jin are worth saving. Deku’s rejection causes her to double down.
Then, we have Shoto again against Toya, Shoto’s focus is on stopping his brother, as if Toya came to his violent actions all through his own free will. He only cares about stopping Toya’s violent actions without empathizing why he became this way or why he feels. Which you know is pretty contradictory to his goal to migle with his brother “We’re gonna mingle whether you like it or not” exept, Mingling requires understanding the other person’s side.
Toya, (not surprisingly) gets back up again specifically because his brother underestimated Toya’s single minded determination. Someone who learned all of his moves simply by watching news clips and memorizing them could easily copy Shoto’s move at the last minute by sight alone. Shoto didn’t understand his rother’s situation and therefore did not see Toya countering the move Shoto made specifically to defeat him coming.
This pattern repeats itself further. Enji decides to play the hero against AFO, rather than face the son he abused, and because of that even exhausting himself and his powers completely to burn AFO alive, AFO just gets back up again. If there is a mistake the heroes keep making, si that they consistently refuse to see the villain’s point of view and perspective. It’s what Toga mentioned at the end of her fight “you think that heroes and those they protect are the only one who count as real people” which echoes Twice’s callout “You people ain’t heroes, you throw all of us downtrodden folks to the dogs.” The heroes have yet to answer to that challenge in any real way. When Shigaraki sees all the effort the heroes put into saving Bakugo, he is just reminded of the trauma he suffered as a child. The heroes will stop at nothing to save someone... as long as they’re innocent, but Tenko when he was still a child, when he could have been saved he wandered for hours on the populated city streets because he looked filthy, and came to internalize the idea that he didn’t deserve to be saved as punishment for what happened to his family.
“it’s not like anybody would even look at me.” So you have this continued theme of the heroes refusing to look at the villains perspectice and suffering, and that too is egregiously repeated in the fight between Shoji and Spinner.
Shoji delivers this speech about who Spinner is trying to protect... when we as the audience know that Spinner is literally only rampaging as a mindless godzilla right now, because he accepted a quirk to save his best friend Shigaraki. He tells the crowds of innocent people not to let their wounds be exploited the way that Aoyama, was exploited, but Spinner is also currently in the process of being manipulated and exploited the same way by AFO that Aoyama was.
But Shoji doesn’t see this, because there’s no care given to why the villains are committing their cimes only on stopping them. SO once again, Kurogiri and Shirakumo who will wake up? I want to point out there’s another repettition of this pattern in the way Aizawa and Mic both view Kurogiri. Kurogiri’s legitimate care for Shigaraki is something both of them brush off and are confused by.
Even though, Kurogiri’s desire to take care and tend to Shigaraki is what Aizawa recognizes as a sign that SHirakumo is somewhere deep inside of Kurogiri. However, to Aizawa and Mic Shirakumo and Kurogiri might as well be different entities. The metaphor of the cat is used in Aizawa and Shirakumo’s backstory.
Aizawa leaves an abandoned cat in the rain because he didn’t think he would be able to protect or take care of it, however, when Shirakumo saw someone in trouble he instead saved the cat without a second thought. Does that not reflect the current situation?
Mic and Aizawa along with the rest of the heroes have already given up on the idea of saving Shigarki, in fact they actively discouraged All Might form doing so when it would have been much easier to reach him before his multiple power ups. THe attitude towards Shigaraki from the start is that he’s beyond all hope of redemption, and yet is Shigaraki not another orphaned cat left out in the rain?
Aizawa is someone who does everything to protect his students, he even took in Eri someone who was in a similiar cirucmstance to Shigaraki being kidnapped and abused by a villain who rtied to convince them they were evil deep down isnide and yet Aizawa is compelely unable to see Shigaraki as another child who was lost and hurt.
Kurogiri however, cares for Shigaraki and this is another thing that Aizawa ignores about his friend’s identity because he doesn’t even see the half of him that is Kurogiri. He is SHirakumo every time they refer to him. It’s not about helping Kurogiri, it’s about getting Shirakumo back.
So, what could possibly remind Aizawa and the rest of the heroes that Shigaraki too is a lost child, but Kurogiri waking up at Spinner’s call rather than Mics. Because it would be a physical reminder that Kurogiri too wants to save and take care of Shigaraki. if Kurogiri sees Shigaraki as someone who can be saved, then Aizawa can learn that many of the villains they are fighting against right now were once hurt children too, children like the ones they are currently trying to protect, children who should have been saved back then, and still can be saved.
I got a theory! More like a "what if" scenario... you know what I mean-
What if Kai was able to separate Kurogiri? You know how Kai fused with other people right? Right, that would mean he'd also be able to separate them. Now, I'm not certain if my nomu knowledge is correct, but a nomu is a single human form with a bunch of quirks stuffed in it, if Kai is able to-
WAIT SCRATCH THAT-
HOW COULD I FORGET THE ALMIGHTY HONEYCRISP!!!!
ERI!!!!!
ERI!!! Ok, forget about Kai, Eri could rewind Kurogiri!!!! She could bring back Oboro!!!!! WHAT IF SHE COULD ONLY REWIND HIS MIND SO THAT OBORO COULD STILL USE THE PURPLE WEED SMOKE PORTAL THINGY QUIRK!!!!!
YOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
ERIIIIII!!!!! MY FELLOW APPLE JUICE LOVER!!! YOU ARE SO BADASS FOR EXISTING!!!!!
