My Hero Academia

I don’t know if “ideologically driven” is the same thing as “moral”. Ideology aside, Dabi doesn’t seem to have any compunctions about who he kills as far as I recall, whereas Spinner has been against killing people that Stain approves of and has expressed reluctance to kill police.

Yeah, Dabi is pretty big on the whole wanton murder thing. Which I still find interesting, by the way, because he apparently wasn't doing that, or any crimes really, until joining the League. So that's a pretty big leap for him to take so nonchalantly.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 17th 2019 at 11:42:51 AM

We sure he didn’t kill anybody before joining the League? I could have sworn he had some sort of record, even if no one knows who he is...

Nope. Giran specifically notes that Dabi hasn't committed any noteworthy crimes when introducing him to Shigaraki.

It should be noted, the only people Dabi has killed are people who were already scumbags.

The exception being the sand guy obviously. But given how casual he is about immolating people, we can infer he has a record.

Ah, okay. My memory’s rather foggy for stuff like that. Suppose it felt to me like he had or something.

Actually, he does seem to have some conflicted emotions about killing Snatch, so there’s that. Mind you, he doesn’t seem to have any problem with innocents getting caught in the crossfire of the High End attack...

Edited by KarkatTheDalek on Aug 17th 2019 at 12:46:37 PM

Well, now that My Villain Academia arc has (presumably) reached its conclusion, I think I figured out my main gripe with it: Curious. Or rather, her ignoble death as the only noteworthy casualty (since other generals of MLA survived, including Re-Destro, and there were no casualties on LOV's side either). Now that MLA surrendered to LOV, hindsight comes in like a crashing wave with a sobering realization. There was no need for Curious to die.

Toga, 239 chapters in, remains the only female villain in the manga (that isn't some two-bit thug like the few from the USJ or La Brava, who just renounced villainy together with Gentle; someone tell me how things look in spinoffs). Curious, given her background as a famed reporter and a CEO of Not!Shueisha, could have been an invaluable asset to LOV's large-scale operations in the future (since they are now in possession of powerful public persons and already there was some prospect of using mass media to discredit the Hero Society, see Dabi).

Instead, the designated catfight ends with that one other female villain dead. Toga promptly passes out from her injuries after inexplicably powering up (that wasn't shedding the mental shackles off like Shigaraki or Twice), so she can't contribute to anything else this entire arc. I want to give Horikoshi the benefit of the doubt, but after the Yakuza arc had the ladies (one of them being a part of the Big Three, and the other being a top ten hero) just fight some thugs off-screen, I don't know how long I can smile and nod along to that.

Vigilantes has Kuin Hachisuka, but she's, for all intents and purposes, dead.

Most Shonen writers are men, who seem to have this weird mental block when it comes to writing girls and women into stories effectively.

They are still several years behind on a general level in that regard.

Not at that point where to use a phrase, they are willing to highly advertise a Captain Marvel or Wonder Woman.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 18th 2019 at 6:36:50 AM

I mean, there's no defending the Overhaul thing, but in this arc Curious and Toga got several chapters dedicated to their fight. And considering how each of them ended up, you can't really accuse Horikoshi of holding back with women. Toga is probably the third Lo V member that got the most focus after Shigaraki and Twice.

Back in A vs B, I want to say about 75% of the girls contributed meaningfully to their fights despite being only around 25% of the characters.

I second the notion that Curious dying just seems weirdly out of place with how this whole thing concluded. However, given how that fight actually went down I don't think you can actually argue he held back on either of them for being female. Honestly, I'm not even sure you can call it a Designated Girl Fight, because that implies that the reason the characters are fighting is specifically because they were both female, which I don't think was specifically the case, and most of the people Toga were actually fighting were still men.

That, combined with other things makes me feel like what happened with Overhaul was more about wanting to wrap things up quickly (I believe Horikoshi has said the arc was very draining on him) rather than a specific anti-female bias. Of course, it could be easily argued that sidelining them, specifically, is an indicator of unconscious sexism.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 18th 2019 at 10:27:19 AM

This somewhat of an inversion of the High-Heel–Face Turn trope. It's usually the sole female villain turns good while the men die, but in this one it's the sole female who died, while the rest "turn good" (not the quotation mark).

I wonder now if anyone investigating Curious' death / disappearance will end up being a thread that ends up leading to the League of Villains/Meta Liberation Army team-up. She was a celebrity, unless they use Twice to replace her that can't go unnoticed.

Edited by sgamer82 on Aug 18th 2019 at 9:23:21 AM

Killed off in order to create and keep some tension within the MLA and towards the LOV in form of Skeptic(and his secret, now forever unanswered, crush on her, for all I can tell) and his vendetta against Twice and Toga?

With his obsession with "perfection", he won't let the "failure" with Twice alone...

Even if Twice, by some miracle, manage to give him a clone of Curious as a "apology"...How that is supposed to play out, I don't know.

But regarding Curious and Dabi's identity, and how the League could play that, I don't think that's going to be a thing. Like, some people seem to be assuming that Dabi has these grand designs for when he'll publicly reveal his true identity, but I don't think the character has really acted in a manner that implies that.

Like, he refuses to reveal who he really is to the League, and even when he does get media attention ala the High-End fight, he forgoes any big public statement in favor of saying he wants to talk a bit with Endeavor.

There's no master plan brewing there.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 18th 2019 at 10:28:06 AM

Reminds me of this tweet I saw earlier

Which, for context, says "When you really love him but he’s a Shonen protagonist so you can’t tell him until he needs it for character development" and has pics of Hinata Hyuga, Orihime Inoue, Ochaco Uraraka, and Mikasa Ackerman.

I agree that Curious was terribly underused. But like, isn't that a recurring thing at this point? Maybe it's an unconscious bias to kick women out of the picture, but Horikoshi clearly kicks everyone out of the picture eventually. Hell, Bakugou has been out of the picture with the exception of the four times a year Hori reminds us that he's still a main character.

reminds me of that sketch with all the 1A students that assigns roles/archetypes to all the guys and then just lumps all the girls together as "girls".

I hope Re-Destro gets a bit more focus at some point.

I feel the fandom will mostly remember him as a bitch who got jobbed out to Ultra-Instinct Shigaraki, when this is a guy who, seemingly without any hesitation, hacked his own legs off with a broken piece of metal. That's straight up badass if you ask me.

It's just the nature of Shonen: characters eventually fall by the wayside as things escalate.

Which is, depressingly, true in other works (not this one necessarily but it feels that way at times).

Ochako actually has a good motivation since its completely unrelated to her relationship with Deku, yet she's just pushed to the side until Hori remembers she exists then it's right back to the sidelines.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Aug 18th 2019 at 1:16:21 PM

In general I think it's mostly just a side effect of the pacing. He generally tries to keep things moving along, which is why this arc fills just over a volume's worth of chapters, whereas in a lot of other series it would've been twice as long because every single character would've gotten a five-chapter battle. The downside is that it means that pretty much any side character is going to get like maybe a chapter or two of focus per arc if they're lucky. I'm honestly surprised we got as much backstory on Toga as we did, considering the arc as a whole is pretty much entirely focused on Shirageki.

As far as Re-Destro goes, my main gripe is that the MLA never really got shown doing anything onscreen between their introduction and getting absorbed into the LOV. The fact that they pretty much have a city all to themselves shows that they have the means to do stuff, but they basically show up and then pick a fight with the bad guys almost immediately afterwards.

I do hope that they built them up a bit more as the story goes on, if only because of that.

Edited by JapaneseTeeth on Aug 18th 2019 at 12:25:49 PM

You mean this one?

Edited by WashTheLaundryHero on Aug 18th 2019 at 11:26:16 AM

So it was a face thing huh. still kinda eeeeeeh honestly.