Reviews Manga / My Hero Academia

I do disagree that the female characters get the shaft (if anything, their small numbers ensure they get more screentime than many of the background boys of similar prominence), and I think you spend a bit too long complaining about specific characters. (Even though I 100% agree on both counts, and I can\'t deny I\'m glad to hear such sentiments from others.)

I also worry that last paragraph trying to cover the animated adaptation in one paragraph does it a bit of a disservice, and also underplays that a great deal of My Hero filler is pretty poor or gratuitous. But I reckon I did something kinda similar in my own work, so glass houses and stones. And I do wish you could\'ve put something in there about the aesthetics, if only because I worry I didn\'t talk enough about the appealing character designs and exciting blocking of the original comic, since at the time my experience was largely with the animated version.

It\'s a good review in general, if very character-focused. And hell, I guess I might\'ve technically cheated to get mine out, so... can\'t judge!

It's true that the female characters get more focus than the least interesting boys, and there's the whole "quality vs. quantity" argument. On the other hand, I'm hard-pressed to defend how in the Internship arc, the female heroes' fight happens almost entirely offscreen. It would have been nice if Tsuyu got the same Character Development that Midoriya and Kirishima did, or if Nejire got a real chance to show off her skills, like Mirio and Tamaki.

Likewise, out of the 16 contestants in the final tournament of the sports festival, only five are female, and only two girls get past the first round, losing in the second. Apart from Uraraka vs. Bakugo, most of the girls' fights are cut short or off-panel in the manga. MHA, much like Naruto, has the glass ceiling firmly in place for female protagonists.

I'm not very good at evaluating manga art unless it's hideously bad, so I generally leave that sort of judgment to other people.

I'll concede that I spent a fair amount of time on the characters, but I decided to use them as examples of two less than likeable characters who get screentime at the expense of others, as well as two of the more problematic members of the cast. People who have been bullied or sexually harassed may have issues with Bakugo and Mineta going unpunished, respectively, even taking Values Dissonance into account; at least Endeavor admits that what he did was wrong and accepts that his wife and kids don't have to forgive him.

Yeah, I actually like how Endeavor\'s character is more complex and dynamic than his introductory story made him seem he\'d be. I cut that part in what turned out to be a woefully-foolish attempt at controlling the wordcount, but it was a bold gambit to make him, for lack of better terminology, a human being rather than a caricature.

Don\'t know much about the Internship arc, admittedly, and I do feel that the girls also benefit from filler expansion. But I\'d argue the glass ceiling is more for side characters than girls; it\'s just more noticeable because the class\'s gender balance as a whole is so skewed towards... well the Sausage rather than Taco Side of the Force, to use an extremely crude metaphor. A more-even gender balance would probably be a better answer overall. It does sound like later stories involving conflict with their sister class are a bit better about that.

And again, I can\'t deny that I spent as long and longer on characters in my own review, or that I agree with your assessments. So I guess I can\'t really complain, can I?

I updated my review to reflect my changing thoughts on the series.

I'll concede that the class being mostly female comes into play, and I have to wonder- is it because in MHA-verse!Japan, heroism is a male-dominated profession, much like many occupations in real life!Japan?

Of course, there's also the fact that female characters get killed off with little to no fanfare. Midnight dies off-panel, and the only mourning she gets is one panel of her students sobbing over her body; compare how Sir Nighteye got an emotional death scene and his funeral was briefly shown. Star and Stripe is also hastily written in and written out just as quickly. Even Magne, who's not only female but a transwoman, is mostly forgotten about after the Internship arc.

I'll concede that Uraraka got a bit more story relevance with her speech about Midoriya, but her and Tsuyu's fight with Toga seems to have gotten mostly offscreened.

I don’t think the rewrite works. I understand that you have a bunch of complicated and nuanced feelings and want to leaven your initial praise, but as it stands by tiptoeing around the spoilers that presumably turns you off the series it makes it extremely difficult for just about anyone who doesn’t already know what you’re talking about to understand what you’re talking about.

I also disagreed the handling of the night was particularly notable because that seem story arc involve the deaths of a bunch of other heroes in a cataclysmic event that left Japan on the brink. Yes, midnight was an extremely popular character in mini circles, but she was a pretty minor character overall And using her as an example of how the story in general disregards female characters, as I said before, ignores how the story disregards minor characters in general.

Now, the fact that there are almost no female major characters is definitely a point in your favor. But I consider it a separate problem from the story’s relative difficulty sharing focus among its cast.

And at the very least, the story has done a pretty good job of tying up plot threads left behind by previous story arcs, to the point that the only major one I’m hoping will come in to play in the final battle that hasn’t already is Gentle Criminal.

I am really sorry to see that my initial once over trying to catch speech to text errors missed a bunch of important things. I will postpone responding further until I have a keyboard in front of me.

Reposting, with edits, some for clarity, some just because I don\'t think my initial points were well-written or would\'ve survived a once-over if I\'d had a keyboard instead of a phone screen:

I don’t think the rewrite works. I understand that you have a bunch of complicated and nuanced feelings and want to leaven your initial praise, but as it stands by tiptoeing around the spoilers that presumably turned you off the series you\'ve made it extremely difficult for just about anyone who doesn’t already know what you’re talking about to understand what you’re talking about. (Heck, I have a pretty good idea and I was confused in a couple places!)

I also disagree that the handling of Midnight was particularly notable because that same story arc involved the deaths of a bunch of other heroes, some of them also recurring characters, in a cataclysmic event that left Japan on the brink. Yes, Midnight was an extremely popular character in many circles, but she was a pretty minor character overall and using her as an example of how the story in general disregards female characters ignores, as I said before, how the story disregards minor characters in general.

Now, the fact that there are almost no female major characters is definitely an extremely fair point of criticism. But I consider it a separate problem from the story’s relative difficulty sharing focus among its cast. A conflux of problems, not a single issue.

And at the very least, the story has done a pretty good job of tying up plot threads left behind by previous story arcs, to the point that the only major one I’m hoping will come in to play in the final battle that hasn’t already is Gentle Criminal. I realize I weight that much more heavily than you, but I do weight that pretty heavily.

I haven't forgotten about Gentle Criminal. I just don't think that him falling by the wayside is as much of a problem as Shigaraki getting possessed by AFO rather than continuing his arc to become the true Big Bad. Perhaps this will help if Shigaraki eventually gets redeemed, but it comes off as a frustrating development that derails the narrative.

Perhaps Midnight is minor in the grand scheme of things, and other minor characters were similarly disregarded(for example, Majestic, who was Yaoyorozu's work study mentor, was disposed of even more unceremoniously), but it's still disappointing that the story all but forgot that she's friends with Aizawa and Present Mic.

Speaking of character deaths, I wish Bakugo had died. It's not out of hate for him, but because his character arc is more or less complete and his death would have been rather significant for Midoriya's character- could he forgive Shigaraki despite knowing that among Shigaraki's other crimes, he'd killed Midoriya's best friend? Unfortunately, the impact was almost completely blunted by Mirio saying something to the effect of, "Don't worry, Bakugo's going to be fine."

I'll concede that it's harder to make my points if I refrain from spoilers, but I also believe that reviews should be aimed at those who are considering watching the series and would rather not have to run into spoilers. Additionally, in cases when problems come up later on in the story but the early part is still worth watching, (e.g. Game of Thrones), I believe that rather than spoiling the later developments (e.g. Daenerys in "The Bells") I should warn them that the end may not be as good as the beginning, and leave it up to them whether they want to continue, since while consumers of media often decide whether to get started on a series based on what they heard from others, they usually choose to continue based on their own feelings and experiences. Of course, I consider spoilers fair game when it comes to a Foregone Conclusion or a sufficiently old or famous work- for example, Romeo and Juliet counts as all three.

That being said, I'll consider including spoilers when necessary, but only in moderation and whiting them out if I do.

I mean, is that seriously in doubt at this point? I can\'t tell you how it\'s going to happen, but at this point if, after all the foreshadowing, Shigaraki doesn\'t ultimately break free of his manipulative and abusive guardian\'s control and find redemption, whether through destroying himself or through somehow getting past his trauma to begin the road to recovery, I\'ll have to agree that yes, the narrative\'s been botched.

And yeah, I was similarly unimpressed with the way Bakugo\'s survival is being handled. I give the comic praise for successfully rehabilitating the character to the point that I felt neutral-bordering-on-mildly-down about his apparent demise, when once I\'d\'ve been cheering and celebrating, but that was just way too quick. At the very least, if he were going to live, it should\'ve been milked a lot longer to add more suspense; I can\'t help but wonder if gross commercialism was playing a part there. If between the creators and the editors someone got cold feet about looking like they were going to kill off a hugely popular character. We at least know that character popularity is the reason the creator never got to do a Mina-focused story arc the way he did for Kirishima or (now) Shouji; I never said it flat out but I\'ve always reckoned that the reason Stars and Stripes died as soon as she did was because she wasn\'t making as big an impact as quickly as they\'d hoped.

Finally, as our bitter disagreement about Danganronpa V3 shows (well, our disagreement wasn\'t bitter; I\'m just bitterer about it in general than you), I think I just care more about endings than you. I would struggle to recommend something to someone if I felt it stopped being worth reading after a certain point, since I see that as just setting them up for crushing disappointment one way or another, either getting an incomplete product or a rotten aftertaste. Obviously, we disagree on whether or not that applies to My Hero Academia, but I often lean towards trying to look at the whys and wherefores of the ending if I can\'t talk about it directly, hence why my series review of Danganronpa talks about the overarching problems of characters getting more and more wacky, unrelatable, and inhuman, the shock-jock sex and violence more and more extreme, the setting darker and more vicious, and the surreal final plot twists crazier-for-craziness\'s-sake, none of which directly spoils anything but can still talk about them without having to shrug and say \"I don\'t like it but I can\'t tell you why without spoiling it.\"