My Hero Academia

Having half-baked High Ends doesn't even diminish the completed ones anyway.

If anything, its going to make them look more dangerous when the heroes have trouble with the half-baked ones.

That's the thing. The High Ends have been built up as so powerful that five of them at the same time should completely trash all these heroes. They have to give an excuse for why the heroes can beat them without just removing all the hype that the High Ends have gotten. It's basically a setup for "they're this strong when they aren't even finished" moment. This means that when we meet a mature High End again in the future (or several at the same time) the hype surrounding them hasn't diminished and we can expect them to be suitably terrifying.

I would prefer the High Ends to be rare, incredibly costly to make, and an "Oh god we need to stop this from happening in the first place" situation. Fighting multiple High Ends shouldn't happen, at least not without it being a massive deal. I'd honestly rather the High Ends be detained or destroyed before being completed, than having the heroes fight them while they're half baked.

The chance for the heroes should be to stop it before it begins.

Where did I say that every Noumu needs to be that strong? Did I type the wrong thing?

Edited by GNinja on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:10:51 AM

Most of that reflects the current situation, with the difference being the bad Doctor was forced into a situation where unprepared High Ends were used.

I mean, everything we have seen does suggest that the High End models take at least a vast amount of resources to manufacture, maintain, and activate. The doctor saying how the hood nomu needed time to stabilize once being activated shows how they can't be quickly and easily deployed.

I know. Which is partly why I'm not a fan of them being nerfed so soon.

Just not a fan of it. I'm not saying it's the worst thing ever or anything.

But you always make it seem like it is with your posting style.

edit: Actually, I don't want to derail the conversation anymore so nevermind. I'll ask in a pm.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:37:10 AM

It’s not even a nerfing or anything major at all.

A nerf is like crippling them though poison, here they just aren’t finalized yet & chances are they’ll get stronger as the fight goes on.

That's my hope.

Giving the heroes a fighting chance is overrated anyway. Isn't it a part of the whole ethos in MHA that the villains have ALL the advantages from the get-go anyway? And one of All Might's speeches was about a true hero being able to get out of any kind of pinch, no matter how dire.

Constantly being unfair to class 1-A has been a staple of their development.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 16th 2020 at 11:49:12 AM

Tomura and his crew have pulled more than a couple shonen protagonists' staples, and getting caught with their pants down and holding on until they get their heavy hitters is a familiar scenario. Hell, it's already happened here.

Edited by Blueace on Feb 16th 2020 at 8:59:22 AM

You know, one day I do want to see a situation where the heroes need to fight a mass produced version of a Elite Mook Super Prototype, and it doesn't suffer Lowered Boss Difficulty (is that not a trope anymore?).

Mostly to be an non-conformist. That's a good way to do a downer ending I think.

What downer ending?

I think it's Degraded Boss now.

I just keep having traumatic flash backs to D Gray Man, where at first one Level 3 Akuma was strong enough to almost kill one of the main characters and give her a plot significant hair cut. Then later on the heroes are capable of beating thousands of them in one move.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 16th 2020 at 12:12:44 PM

Honestly, this is such a shonen trope, I'd be surprised if we didn't get it in MHA. Hell, we already did with regular Nomus. USJ Nomu was a Super Prototype tailor made to defeat All Might; Hosu Nomus were considerably less impressive - and they still needed Endeavor (and Gran Torino) to show up, since they were dealing with local heroes no sweat, so it's not like they're that much less dangerous.

Hell, the Summer Camp Nomu was literally the only villain present who could not be challenged (Muscular being a close second, but OFA shenanigans). The only thing Awase could do was to lug Yaomomo and leg it.

There is a sensible explanation as to why High-Ends met here would be less dangerous (as in, they were literally just broken out of their vats), and it's not like they're suddenly cannon fodder. And even if they are weaker, it's still 2 v. 5(more?), and Miruko already took a serious hit before the fight began in earnest.

Edited by FergardStratoavis on Feb 16th 2020 at 1:17:30 PM

Man. People keep bringing up the idea that the first High End gave All Might trouble. But it kind of didn't? Like he annihilated it with pretty minimal effort. The tension in that sequence came from the fact that All Might was pushing the end of his time limit and needed to win super quickly while still sparing enough power to be able to stand up to Shiragaki, not because there was any doubt about whether or not he could manage the thing under normal circumstances. And it just kind of stood there dumbly tanking his attacks the whole time.

And, indeed, it obviously couldn't have beaten All Might, because If OFA was capable of finding a combination of quirks that could beat All Might, he wouldn't have lost to him in the first place.

Really, for my money, the more impressive showing was from Hood, what with that thing requiring Endeavour and Hawks working together to take it down, and the effort taking enough out of both that they had to go straight to the hospital afterwards. Which is pretty terrifying, given that those are the two strongest heroes.

But that's a level of strength that's kind of unacceptable of our current narratives purposes, because they're a bunch of personality-less goons, and we need to have our important heavy hitters fighting the real characters. They need to be strong enough to plausibly occupy the time of 'strong-but-not-important-enough-to-make-major contributions-to-the-final-arc' characters like Miriko, but they can't be so strong that Miriko doesn't plausibly stand a chance.

USJ wasn't a High End, which was to All Might's advantage looking back. That Nomu shut down after he sent it flying, ultimately it was no worse for wear when the police retrieved him. Had he possessed the level of autonomy Hood did All Might could have lost.

Chances are those Quirks weren't available to him the last time they fought, IIRC that was pretty much stated with Super Regen.

I mean, sure, but that's a more specific case of general case in which losing to All Might the first time made him lose all the quirks he'd spent centuries saving up, and hence being relatively weak at Kamino. Surely if he had a way that he felt could've reliably taken down All Might, he would've kept it on himself and used it during Kamino, not pushed it onto to a random Noumu.

Like, I feel like it makes the most sense to consider it an experiment; OFA going 'well, since All Might's weaker than he used to be, maybe this will be enough to beat him?' And then it wasn't enough to beat him at all, so the experiment was deemed a failure.

This doesn't necessarily apply to G Ninja, but I'll note that one complaint with things like this is that people go on about authors making villains too strong, and then not pulling off protagonists being able to handle them, or otherwise dealing with protagonist that only react to stimuli.

But that's not the case here, and the situation being potentially manageable (I give it coin flip on whether the Heroes actually win overall here) is because they were acting proactively in a way to makes sense.

Obviously there are still going to be some complaints but, well, that's just something that occurs to me.

The USJ Noumu wasn't meant to kill All Might tho. It was just meant to distract him while Kurogiri (the actual first High End Noumu) killed him.

We didn't really know that at the time. It's likely Shigaraki himself didn't know that at the time.

And while USJ Nomu was ultimately but a road bump for All Might, it still came with some physical damage - and more importantly, shortened his time limit. And it was still the most impressive Nomu around the block until Hood showed up.

Gotta admit, I kind of expect the doctor to meet his end at the hands of one or more of the Noumu.

Turned Against Their Masters is the natural outcome for most Mad Scientist villains, after all.

I kinda expect a High-End to become a good guy.

Like when you have previously mindless mooks finally gain some manner of sentience, it’s common to have at least one turn to the side of Justice.

We don't know if Kurogiri is a High-End Nomu.

He seems to be something else altogether. He only has one quirk, even if it's an amalgamation, and his brain functions are far superior to what we've seen from High-Ends.

@LSBK Hell, two of my favourite arcs involved the heroes being impressively pro-active. The fight with AFO and the Overhaul arc. It's always been a strength of the series.