My Hero Academia

I'm not sure if anything will make the belief that the villains are the real heroes flip.

Some people just really like cheering for the bad guy, and inherently see the heroes as boring and uninteresting as a matter of course (which I personally consider unfair: a character should be judged by what they do, but that's true in real life as well).

And yeah, the current real life subtext is likely not helping. It's not the manga's fault, but so it goes.

Re: The Joker: The real issue with killing him is that in a lot of iterations of the universe, doing so would probably result in him somehow gaining demonic powers or taking over hell. Yeah, having him run around Gotham wreaking havoc is awful, but at least it's relatively mundane havoc.

As far as people rooting for the villains, I think it's honestly more just a perfect storm of various factors coming together:

• Applying tropes to the villains that are usually applied to heroes
• the current social emphasis on social justice and having empathy for marginalized demographics (that most of the villains fall into, while most of the heroes have more conventional upbringings)
• current events making government authority figures extremely unpopular

It all combines with the usual Draco in Leather Pants tendencies that all fandoms have and blows it even further out of proportion.

As for why other works (Naruto was mentioned) didn't have similar claims, I think it largely boils down to the facts that 1. most of these social issues weren't as hot-button at the time those works was published as they are now and 2. Naruto takes place in a Constructed World, while MHA is ostensibly our world, but with superpowers. It makes it easier to project RL issues into it because it's meant to resemble reality.

Edited by JapaneseTeeth on Jun 5th 2020 at 10:53:52 AM

Apparently, he got kicked out of Hell in some version.

....I thought it was more of an Evil Power Vacuum. The Joker kept most of Gotham's lesser criminals in check because nobody was crazy enough to mess with him.

With Joker gone, all of the riff raff come out.

@Black Yakuzu For myself, I don't think I'm rooting for the villains just because of Evil Is Cool.

When I saw Toga on her emotional warpath, there was a part of my mind that genuinely wanted her to succeed. Because "fuck these people, they're on the same side as the person who killed her best friend."

It's not rational, but I don't think I'm completely alone in that reaction either, and it's a bit more than just liking Toga because she's cool.XD

Edited by GNinja on Jun 5th 2020 at 3:58:53 PM

No, that's closer to Black Mask and the modern day Penguin (and Wilson Fisk from the other aisle).

Joker always makes things worse because he doesn't have any longterm plans, he just wants to makes as much chaos and tragedy as possible because he wants to prove that, deep inside, everyone is as rotten as he is, all it takes to show is one bad day.

(Which, side-note, was something that originally the Punisher said to Daredevil on Frank Miller's now legendary run, back when he still knew how to write)

It's why he is so obsessed with making Batman break his Thou Shalt Not Kill rule.

Edited by HailMuffins on Jun 5th 2020 at 1:00:11 PM

How are people even arriving to these conclusions? I'm sorry but you have to be willfully misinterpreting the story to get some of these takes.

Current event forces us to reevaluate the story whether we like it or not.

Is what I wanted to say, but considering most of this has been going on for ages before the Floyd protests and the most likely scenario that the story will go is for the MLA to take over Japan and become the opressing establishment, who knows what the actual effects this'll all have o the series' reception.

I do believe that is what they have been doing, yes.

You can interpret any form of media as you wish, but some people take leaps so big it's surprising they don't crash head first with the moon or something.

[x6]That's probably right. Framing is everything. Things would be very different if instead of seeing Toga and Twice bond during all this time, we'd had been following those heroes she killed (or the random people she's also killed) interacting with their friends and loved ones that they probably have.

So whether people stop rooting for the villains is clear: They'd do if/when they do something clearly and irrevocably evil explicitly on screen. Which they very well could do. The city Shigaraki destroyed was empty of civilians. But if Horikoshi could very easily have set up the scene so it wasn't and we saw little kids and elderly ladies getting killed in the decay wave.

Although that might lead to some people crying that it's OOC and the series is ruined (even though most of the villains have been willing to kill children pretty much since they're introduction).

Edited by WashTheLaundryHero on Jun 5th 2020 at 9:28:09 AM

One of the main times we actually see them slaughter civilians on-screen and it's this world's equivalent of a KKK rally. XD

Edited by GNinja on Jun 5th 2020 at 4:24:59 PM

People can interpret media in any way they want to, I ain't trying to take that away. However, some of these are like if I told you to not touch a stove, showed you why you shouldn't touch a stove and you did it anyway.

Yeah, but even if current events make us recontextualize or re-examine the situation...the parallels are incredibly poor.

The MLA aren’t regular people with legit grievances getting brutalized by an oppressive state, most of them are indoctrinated violent anarchists who don’t care how much collateral damage they cause who believe that your superpower, something you’re born with and have no control over (cough, cough) determines your worth in society. I mean, their former leader Re-Destro outright murdered that mouse guy in cold blood for criticizing the MLA even lightly.

You can’t draw a line from that to real life without arguing in bad faith.

Even the League, sympathetic as they might be, still kidnap, murder and terrorize in the interest of seeing everything and everyone they hate destroyed.

Edited by ILikeRobots on Jun 5th 2020 at 9:34:23 AM

Its mostly in the framing yea; Hori frames the Lo V in a way where while its obvious that what they're doing is wrong, they're fleshed out enough to garner sympathy.

It can be difficult to know when you're meant to be rooting for them or not, and I feel Hori makes it intentionally ambiguous

The League may be trying to destroy society and kill loads of people but at least they're not racists.

[x6]Exactly. Later we see them wrecking an entire city, but it's essentially self-defense. Now Shigaraki destroys another city, but it happens to be empty, and the heroes being on the offensive now also kinda makes the villains fighting back self-defense as well. When they attacked Overhaul's a few cops died (plus Snatch), but the main focus was on Overhaul, which had it coming.

If Horikoshi wants people to see the villains in a darker light they'd need to either:

a) Do something particularly cruel (such as killing helpless civilians very explicitly instead of always cops/heros/other villains which are established enemies).

b) Do something bad to a character people care about (like killing Aizawa, or a student, etc.)

c) Both of the above (like killing Izuku's mom)

Edited by WashTheLaundryHero on Jun 5th 2020 at 9:38:16 AM

Everyone on the team is cool evil not bad evil like a predator or something.

I think the point is that the MLA have very little to do with the groups that are currently protesting IRL, and are generally closer to Japanese terrorist groups like the Aleph cult.

Who, I might note, came this close to getting a honest-to-God nuke and had very influential and powerful people in its ranks at their peak, not unlike how the MLA has some of the most powerful Quirk users in its ranks.

The fact that the league aren't racists and respect trans characters is some big ass cognitive dissonance lol.

When they corrected Overhaul on deadnaming Magne, you almost forget they're murderers too.

So Endeavor vs Shikaragi. Can decay work on energy?

Doesn't exactly earn them a lot of brownie points considering there is at least one well-known, well-respected trans hero, and presumably many more.

Not sure, but it will still work on the one creating the energy.

Endeavour can't exactly create a energy field of flames or anything to protect himself, so even if he tried to barbecue Shiragaki, he'd likely still get decayed to death.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Jun 5th 2020 at 10:55:14 AM

I don’t think it’s ambiguous if we’re supposed to be rooting for the League. Fleshing out one’s villains and making them interesting or sympathetic isn’t an endorsement of their actions and goals.

Other than MVA when it’s villain vs. villain and we’re rooting for the villains we know and care for more than the new guys, I can’t think of a moment in the manga where Shigaraki and co are portrayed as the heroes we are supposed to want to win. They have sympathetic traits and care for their inner circle to show they’re not completely monstrous, but the MVA arc opened with the League killing the KKK equivalent to establish them as A Lighter Shade of Black and that Even Evil Has Standards, not that they’re good people we are meant to root for to succeed.

Edited by ILikeRobots on Jun 5th 2020 at 9:57:12 AM

I remember when the MLA first appeared there were plenty of comparisons to gun regulation arguments. And although the comparisons aren't perfect since the world is also different, the closer irl equivalent would probably still be libertarian 2nd amendment radicals in the US.

Not sure what the current PLF really stands for now, since most of the Lo V don't really have any discernible ideology, other than apparently Dabi who has his own agenda anyway. Probaly still something about "government is evil, we wanna do what we want" considering what we know about them.

Edited by WashTheLaundryHero on Jun 5th 2020 at 10:03:50 AM