My Hero Academia

The league members have all faced tragedy, yes, but that doesn't give them carte blanche or absolve them of their sins. Several of them are still serial killers and they all aided in both the kidnapping of Bakugo, but also the dequirking of Ragdoll, the maiming of Pixie Bob, and are ultimately the reason All Might had to fight All for One and be forced into retirement.

Yes, society does need to change so that people don't turn out like the League did, but the members themselves if anything are simply a cautionary tale. They themselves need to be either arrested or put out of their misery.

Hawks was doing what he was supposed to: taking out a dangerous criminal who refused to be arrested. Twice's story may be tragic, but it doesn't change the fact that he was too dangerous to be left alone and absolutely refused to abandon the League, his True Companions. So Hawks only had two options: arrest him, or put him down. The same will have to happen to the others, since the only one to have commited the least criminal activity out of all of them is Spinner, and as the My Villain Academia arc demonstrated, he's devoted himself body and soul to Shigaraki now. There is no hope of redemption for the members, at least, not enough to get them dodging jail time.

This is simply a recurring theme of the series: The Villain Has a Point, but it doesn't change the fact that they are villains, nor does it change the fact there's a counterpoint.

• Stain: Heroism is not the same as it used to be, but he's still a Serial Killer, and its not wrong for people to have different reasons for being heroes so long as they do what a hero is supposed to do.
• Chisaki: Quirks are dangerous and growing stronger every day, but he's still a psychopathic child abuser and people are working to keep a handle on Quirks.
• Gentle: Hero society is reactionary despite the current state of the world, but he's not entirely doing this for altruistic reasons and heroes are aware of this flaw and trying to address it.
• Redestro: People are forbidden from using part of who they are, but the MLA is a terrorist organization and no regulation is just as bad as too much regulation.
• The League: Not all Villains are pure evil and instead can be people dealt shit hands cause of the society they live in, but that doesn't excuse their actions, and hopefully society will learn from them in stopping future situations.

Edited by RebelFalcon on Mar 28th 2020 at 4:46:01 AM

Honestly, I think Hori making the League so sympathetic and fleshed out is kind of working against the story; you can't exactly put the blame entirely on fans when the story goes out of its way of building up these characters and fleshing them out in way that makes them likable, and then not expect fans to be upset when they're put in unfavorable situations.

If you're a fan of Twice seeing him being betrayed by someone he considered a friend, and then is subsequently killed is going to leave a bad taste in your mouth, no matter how "justified" it was. Add the fact that most of the fanbase are pretty damn young to not understand nuance that well. The only takeaway they're going to have is "Why the fuck is my favorite character being treated like shit"

If they were all simple, Card Carrying Villains then this wouldn't be an issue I believe.

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 28th 2020 at 4:51:46 AM

But to answer the question, yeah, it does seem Hawks saved Twice on instinct. He wasn't going to push it any further if Twice stayed down, but then Twice explicitly tried to go outside and overrun the place with his clones, so Hawks had to stop he before he could do that.

Edited by LSBK on Mar 28th 2020 at 4:02:05 AM

~LSBK It's a minor thing, but I'm happy that you got my gender right. Looks like you read my troper page.

Regarding the True Companions bit, I've rescinded on my original idea that the most of the League didn't care about each other, given reminders of what's been said in several arcs.

You could make the argument that every member of the League (except maybe Dabi, considering he freely shoots flames at his ally, not seeming to care at all if he gets incinerated if it means he can barbecue a hero) care about one another as people, but Twice's care goes beyond just caring about them. He's at the point where he's willing to do anything for them, defines himself in terms of how "useful" he can be to them, and blames himself when they get hurt or killed. Toga might be in the running for that, considering her scenes with Twice, and Shigaraki has mentioned that he cares about his subordinates and wants to see them happy, but none have reached the extreme devotion of Twice.

I have thought about it more as well, I initially thought this was gonna set up Twice as the Token Good Teammate or Heel–Face Turn guy...but seeing any of the villains turn to good at this stage would be...a bit of a hard sell, similar to how Hawks turning to villainy would be a hard sell. Even Twice, yeah. But he might be dead at this point, so that would be moot anyway.

I find Horikoshi's handling of the League interesting, and think it works for the story as a whole by introducing some complexity to the hero and villain system. While in-universe the masses treat hero vs villain largely as Black-and-White Morality, for the audience, things are a bit more gray.

Over the course of the series, he's been dropping hints that, despite functioning well enough to keep lots of people safe and our heroes being proponents of it, hero society is extremely restrictive and has a lot of cracks in it. Giving the League sympathetic backstories tied to their inability to fit into hero society, and thus their turn to villainy, is one of those ways. At the same time, he's not about the whitewashing or justification/excusing of the bad that villains do, despite how many points they might have. Shigaraki's backstory is sympathetic, but he's still out to destroy shit at the end of the day, and isn't going to be steered from that path. I think it's a good way to handle it. The world is gray, and bad people can have sympathetic motivations, but that doesn't make doing terrible things okay.

Granted, you're right that nuance is most often lost on younger readers, but it makes it interesting to analyze for older readers.

Edited by ILikeRobots on Mar 28th 2020 at 2:07:16 AM

But, assuming that Twice is actually dead, this is probably the best way to handle a character death. The fact that so many people are genuinely invested in his character means it'll hit harder than someone like Nighteye's death. And his character arc is basically complete - unless you were seriously hoping he'd change sides, there really wasn't anywhere else to go, so the curtain's being pulled on him as a fully realized character, again, unlike with Nighteye were it feels like people would have preferred to have explored things deeper with him before any eventual death.

Edited by LSBK on Mar 28th 2020 at 4:29:43 AM

I'm not sure if it's come to or not but there's a One Shot on the Shonen Jump app "My Hero Academia - League Of Villains Undercover"

Not sure myself what to make of it, though if we're assuming Dr Garaki is giving Tomura new quirks, we may have a nasty one to fight on our hands.

From a narrative standpoint killing Twice makes the most sense out of all of the villains. But it's definitely not going to earn Hawks any new fans, I'll tell you that much.

He just debuted in the anime for the people who haven't seen Heroes Rising, so he's already making loads of new fans.

tl:dr cool motive, still murder

Edited by asterism on Mar 28th 2020 at 10:06:08 AM

I will admit that AFO is definitely casting a huge shadow over this - his decision to recruit these people to the League has made it very difficult for them to achieve public sympathy.

But I’m going to play devil’s advocate, so to speak. Certainly, if the League wins, everything will go to shit, I’m not arguing against that, but if the League never existed...would the circumstances that created the individuals that make it up ever have a chance of changing? If the villains are taken down without their stories ever coming to life, can things ever get better, or will they just say the same, or maybe even get worse? (There is, I think, maybe a bit of dissonance here between the audience and our heroes - we are aware of how much the villains’ lives have sucked, while they are, and if any real change is going to happen, it has to come from them.)

If people are unwilling to acknowledge society’s sins, then they must be made to see. That, I think, is the purpose of villains, or at least the ones like Shigaraki - to expose the rot in society. It is not good or nice, no, but it might be necessary. The only way there can be change is through pain.

More seriously: If you're lashing out at society supervillain-style because you had a terrible childhood, the main thing you're accomplishing is ensuring a bunch of entirely innocent people also have terrible childhoods, and frankly I have no sympathy for that.

When dealing with a rabid dog, feel sorry for it all you want but it’s still gotta be put down.

Another unintended consequence of making the villains too sympathetic and showing how flawed the hero system is...well...it makes our protagonists look much worse for supporting such a system to begin with, at least to certain people.

How likely is it to bring up the issues the League's actions would cause to people with mental illness or issues fitting in?

I'm pretty sure the heroes know about the villain's backstories, except for Dabi and Shigaraki. They know their real names, and it's not like their lives are a secret or anything. And Hawks in particular is most definitely aware of Twice's backstory.

All Might knows Shigaraki is Tenko Shimura, but beyond that, how much they might know is debatable.

I don't get people who make this argument. How is it any of the protagonists' fault that they were born into a society that needs to regulate the use of superpowers? These are people that were raised in what to them was a normal society, and they're just following the laws and keeping as many people safe in the best way they know how: by heroing (notwithstanding that some heroes have less idealistic motivations, but still, they all save people).

Hero society refusing to acknowledge any nuance in villains is an issue to an extent, sure, but it's not like hero society is some sort of tyranny oppressing completely innocent people with heroes as a police state or anything; while many villains are victims of society and its prejudices, they've all murdered or stolen or assaulted people in the past, and have deal with being responsible for their actions.

The system isn't that bad. It's flawed and could do with some change, and people should question it and its rules and traditions more, yeah, but it's hardly worthy of society dissolving back to anarchy and countless people getting killed because of it.

Even for the audience, the alternative to the hero society system we've seen is All For One et al cultish violence and devotion, or the MLA's Social Darwinist anarchy. Hero society allowing people to live more or less normal, structured and safe lives is much better than either of those.

Edited by ILikeRobots on Mar 28th 2020 at 3:33:35 AM

I'd counter the 'regulating superpowers' bit thusly: I, and most humans on the planet, have the ability to, for example, kill someone with our bare hands. But we don't.

There are quite a few things we can do with our bodies that are banned, or at least forbidden in public.

Edited by asterism on Mar 28th 2020 at 10:33:48 AM

I'm pretty sure most people are speaking from a personal space when they make those arguments; as a person of color myself who has to continuously see his people unfairly treated by a system designed to work against them, I can understand how watching a similar system in a fictional work can be a bit hard to swallow. Same for trans people in the case of Magane.

If the conclusion is simply "All villains are dangerous psychopaths that need to be put down to uphold the status quo of everyone's lives" then it's pretty much the equivalent of saying that the villain's lives don't matter regardless of their circumstances.

I do agree that blaming the heroes or system is wrong; but this is kind of a question that has no real right answer. The easiest solution is to just blame the villains and put them all down like dogs.

In fact, as the latest chapter of Vigilantes reveals, you actually have to be a serial offender to be considered a 'Villain', unless you did something really bad.

Well, there's also the fact that Twice was offered a chance to turn himself in, with the possibility of making a new life for himself, which he refused.

I think it's a matter of scope. Regular people in our world could kill people with just their hands or teeth or feet, true, but regular people don't have the capacity to do things that superpowered people do just by their nature. Somebody who can shoot fire from their hands, make things explode, or transform into a giant monster could kill people much easier, and on a much larger scale. Add on the fact that, unlike real life, any of the 80% of people with Quirks could potentially have abilities that could cause mass destruction. There's no way of knowing what anybody on the street is capable of.

Plus not all regulation is to prevent malicious people from hurting others; it also prevents accidents from people who haven't had proper training or enough skill to use their Quirks safely, like Gentle's well-meaning, but clumsy and ultimately unhelpful intervention attempt.

Basically the MHA world has too many variables to relax that particular clause too much without risking safety on a large scale.

Yea, but Twice would have still had to answer for his crimes and probably would have had to potentially rat out the rest of the league. All that was waiting for Twice is a jail cell.

I mean, he is a criminal. Hawks was offering him an opportunity to get back up after doing his time (let's not forget that the reason Twice ended up like this was because nobody would give him an opportunity after the accident.)

Probably too little, too late from Twice's point of view, so it's understandable he doesn't accept.

But that's not really Hawks' problem either. He tried to do it nicely and it didn't work, so he went for the kill. Honestly the 180 he does really makes him come across a dick, but that's his character: He's always too fast.

Also, Twice mentally rejects Hawks' pity this chapter and declares he's not been unlucky in life.

Edited by WashTheLaundryHero on Mar 28th 2020 at 4:09:14 AM

Also, with Twice specifically, I don't see what the heroes could do to help him. The thing that triggered his spiral was something that could actually happen in real life, and wasn't even related to Quirks or anything.

Him blaming heroes for not helping doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Twice never blames heroes for what happened to him; he knows he just had a shitty draw in life. What he does blame Heroes for is creating a system that pretty much left him no choice but to become a villain just to survive, and then demonizes the likes of him over it.

So basically, it's a combination of bad luck and terrible circumstances that led Twice to where he was but he's simply labelled an evil, despicable villain over it and that's his beef.

Its certainly a BIASED perspective, but that's his main gripe

Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Mar 28th 2020 at 7:20:57 AM