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Ytlaya posted:I feel like Ichiban Kasuga in LAD7 is a much better execution of the sort of character MHA is going for with Deku. That is because Yakuza 7 owns.
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Dec 30, 2023 20:37
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Valentin posted:you are perfectly free to wish for a story that concludes that some deaths really are necessary and that when the suffering of the marginalized reaches a breaking point, we should kill them to maintain the peace and shrug about how there were no other options. but you are not going to find it in the brightly-colored superhero comic in shonen jump lmao I don't think that's the story anyone wants to read, and that's not really what's been built up here. That's more like "if a lovely baby with bad vibes grows up and creates a supervillain who wants to destroy the world, then that supervillain's wellbeing is worth risking the world for." MHA is great when it's actually trying to say something about the real world, the endeavor family subplot was great! But right now it just wants to bash action figures together for several years straight while mumbling something incoherent about friendship and heroism.
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Dec 30, 2023 20:45
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Mystic Mongol posted:I'd just like to point out that we've seen what the rest of the world thinks of this clash of gods, and it was largely disinterest. Sure, people are watching the super hero fight. But... Those are people around the world. The actual people living in Japan who are currently huddled in underground shelters watching their country get literally disintegrated probably feel very differently.
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Dec 30, 2023 20:46
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Mymla posted:MHA is great when it's actually trying to say something about the real world, the endeavor family subplot was great! But right now it just wants to bash action figures together for several years straight while mumbling something incoherent about friendship and heroism. if we're "actually trying to say something about the real world" then tbh "violent youth are ultimately in many ways traumatized children who can be recovered if they are reached out to properly" is like leaps and bounds more coherent than "sometimes powerful abusive men, after achieving everything they ever wanted through the violent exploitation of others, will actually decide they're not gonna be abusive anymore, and the best thing their victims and families can do is stand aside and nod and agree, and they shouldn't have to give up any of their actual power or influence, and if the media questions them then they're evil and mean for doing so." no doubt the endeavor stuff was far better executed but part of its improved execution was that all the messiness was framed in a way that made it more palatable. e: honestly a big and sincere problem with how this ending is landing is that a lot of mha is horikoshi saying that sometimes HARD MEN have to make HARD CHOICES and the rest of us just have to appreciate that we are not the fighter in the arena. the weird weird nonsense takes about the media are a big part of this in the last quarter of the manga. but part of the incoherence is that he is not saying that we have to let hard-edged practical considerations control, which is basically how the endeavor arc ends ("yeah i hosed up but i'm also one of the only heroes left standing, so shut up and don't ask me to cry about it or whatever"). so here at the end, where deku makes the hard choice to try to save shigaraki rather than kill him, people are like "but i thought we were doing practical consequentialist ends-justifies-the-means thinking." but we aren't! horikoshi just thinks when a hero is heroing and you disagree your only options are to hero better or shut up. that's a stupid theme in itself but it's clearly what he genuinely believes lmao. very great man theory. like i think horikoshi sincerely believes that hawks DID do the best he could in his situation with twice, and endeavor IS atoning as best he can, and every prior OFA holder was RIGHT to do what they did even as their failures are coming to haunt deku, and deku is RIGHT to try to save shigaraki, and the league of villains (particularly shigaraki, dabi, toga, spinner, twice) IS emotionally justified even if their actions are wrong. it feels incoherent if you try to evaluate it as a consistent moral heuristic, but the actual consistency is believing that you have no right to question what the man in the arena is doing, and events are consistently engineered such that even when our heroes' ideals would seem to clash, no one is ever in the wrong. Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 20:56
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The conclusion is not going to be satisfying but it might be stupid enough to be funny. Sadly we won't get anything as poignant and personal and petty as 6's "You didn't beat me! I actually won!" gently caress you suicide. We probably won't even get anything half as decent as the Toga/Uraraka fight/understanding because...Deku's kind of a bland character and Shirageki has spent the last 2 years of comic actively melting away the parts that made him more than the meat power blob he is now. Even at their relative best the two really didn't have the chemistry to make this desperate attempt to save the villain, to redeem the crying scared child at the start of all this, land well. It's gonna get harder and harder to land that finale the farther they scale up the carnage so god I hope the Mt. Fuji set up is just a further threat and not something we're gonna actually see. Oh man they're gonna have him turn and kill himself to stop the eruption aren't they?
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Dec 30, 2023 21:02
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Oh man they're gonna have him turn and kill himself to stop the eruption aren't they? He's gonna do the terminator 2 thumbs up.
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Dec 30, 2023 21:12
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TheHan posted:He's gonna do the terminator 2 thumbs up. But like, a whole poo poo load of thumbs up.
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Dec 30, 2023 21:15
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I really just wish, if this is the direction it had to go in, this arc had actually engaged with Shigaraki's trauma and that scared, abused child that's ostensibly still beneath the surface. Personally, this climax couldn't be more dull because Deku is so nothing and Shiggy hasn't been a real character for what feels like multiple real-life years now. People know I'm not like, the biggest Bakugo fan, but at least him dragging Baby AFO over the finish line to deage himself out of existence was kind of fun and novel and his character made an impact on the reader in that moment. Even if I don't love the character, there was character there, something to latch onto and remember. Meanwhile, Deku vs. Shigaraki has no emotional weight because neither of them have had anything going on as characters in ages and the story isn't really putting in the work to juice up any potential conflict. It just feels very token, like, "we need a big, high-stakes climax," even though this is maybe the least emotionally resonant fight in this entire final arc. And I mean that. I seriously think every other fight I can remember, including the two chapters of entirely wrongheaded resolution to Spinner's anti-heteromorph racism plot, had more juice than this.
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Dec 30, 2023 21:26
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horikoshi is just so enamored of the idea of people achieving reconciliation or some kind of understanding despite past conflict or violence and so so so afraid to depict any of that conflict. part of the reason the endeavor stuff works is because he can immediately frame it all as something that happened way in the past and not have to show anyone being consciously lovely in the present day. he likes deku overcoming childhood bullying and befriending his bully, but he doesn't want to actually write bakugo as a bully, so we get an extremely serious apology scene long after deku or the reader has stopped taking bakugo's outbursts seriously. he wants to write a story where class 1-a nobly bands together to save their friend deku even if it's kind of a bad idea, because they value him in himself and not as a strategic pawn against AFO. but the heroes can't actually consciously do anything stupid so the only people who object are panicky civilian/media strawmen who are obviously venal and misguided. he likes the idea that deku, the ultimate and final OFA user, has the secret ingredient that has always been missing, which is a true compassionate desire to not only keep the peace but save everyone, even his enemies. but none of the prior OFA mentors can be wrong or stupid, and none of the heroes can argue or have differences on the eve of battle, and deku can't really wrestle internally because he has no internality, so we're going to get deku's big brave decision but it's just going to kind of just happen and feel empty no matter how he raises the stakes because something (I truly dk what) prevents him from ever depicting the actual interesting conflicts he obviously raises. this all kind of links back to one of the manga's key problems as a battle shonen, which is that a huge amount of stakes are invested in the physical damage that fighting does to deku and others but also all of that damage is immediately repaired via quirk or cyborg limbs (and he's obviously not doing anything interesting like examining how mirko feels about her prosthetics). he knows that stakes are really important to making an emotionally resonant story but he's for some reason hesitant to ever actually raise the stakes for real. he only ever appears to do so. e: and this is a big part of why MVA worked well. "anything could happen to any of these characters" can be an interesting point of tension, and it works in MVA because we don't actually believe they have to win, whereas deku winning is the obvious foregone conclusion of every fight he steps into. Valentin fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 21:46
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Valentin posted:like i think horikoshi sincerely believes that hawks DID do the best he could in his situation with twice, and endeavor IS atoning as best he can, and every prior OFA holder was RIGHT to do what they did even as their failures are coming to haunt deku, and deku is RIGHT to try to save shigaraki, and the league of villains (particularly shigaraki, dabi, toga, spinner, twice) IS emotionally justified even if their actions are wrong. it feels incoherent if you try to evaluate it as a consistent moral heuristic, but the actual consistency is believing that you have no right to question what the man in the arena is doing, and events are consistently engineered such that even when our heroes' ideals would seem to clash, no one is ever in the wrong. This is actually my hangup with the current narrative, not a blood-lusting desire to see Shigaraki hanged for his horrific crimes. This entire discussion started because I found it incredibly tonally dissonant that the story wanted us to go all in on believing All For One needed to die violently because he was just born pure evil and was committed to doing pure evil and wasn't going to stop during pure evil until someone put him in the ground and then *immediately* pivoting to Shigaraki - who has been maiming and killing people for the last several literal real life years in-comic, has destroyed society, and has done infinitely more on-panel damage than AfO has ever even come close to - smugly talking about his plan to literally blow up Japan for no reason besides "gently caress you", and then the comic telling me that this person needs to be saved. I'd like some consistency in what the manga is attempting to convey. If the story wants to present the idea that literally everyone no matter how vile can be redeemed, sure, go for that, I'm all for it! It doesn't have to always succeed, but don't spin me a tale about "some people are just bad and they gotta die" if that's what you want to do. Hawks killing Twice is a good example of a better way to do this - Hawks had completely practical utilitarian reasons for killing Twice, and him doing it unquestionably saved the lives of a ton of innocent people. But the manga portrayed it as a really hosed up morally questionable thing - it didn't celebrate the death of this Evil Guy Who Deserved To Die. I'd just like the story to decide if it's about always trying to find the good in people even if they're hosed up monsters or if it's a popcorn action movie where you're supposed to cheer when Hitler gets his head blown off like in Bionic Commando, but it's not going to do so because, as you say, consistency only exists within the framework of the current mini-arc.
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Dec 30, 2023 23:24
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I was thinking about this a bit last night and I've kind of come around to the notion that it really is unfair to expect a teenager to murder someone even in this situation. I wonder if the narrative would be better suited by highlighting that Deku just isn't capable of beating someone to death like that and, as someone pointed out, redeeming Shigaraki is basically the only way to win now.
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Dec 30, 2023 23:40
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A story can say that you need to reach out to everyone, no matter what, and still have people who will refuse that reaching out until their dying breath, and All For One is the latter and made it abundantly clear, in sharp contrast to say Toga who is exactly the opposite. A story can be about how it is important to reach out and try to help even those who are dangerous without also going "but actually it's wrong to stop someone in the literal active process of murder." Deku, justified or not, firmly believes that someone is asking for his help and so he is trying to give it. He has never been given a reason to think AFO wanted or needed his help and AFO has pretty firmly shown he's got zero interest in anything but himself. They should have made the audience more likely to believe it, which is a writing flaw, but the character Deku has expressed his belief, that the person he is fighting is not in full control of themselves and needs help, and everyone around him has told him "Nah, bro, you should probably just merc the dude" but because he has his own reason for believing that he won't. If Deku did the same thing as All Might he'd be considered a worldwide hero to everyone but himself. That is where the key difference is. Deku is not going "We must save EVERY ONE no matter what" but "We must save the people who are asking for our help." If he didn't think he was being asked for help then the story would obviously be in a different place, but the tension the story is going for is "Okay, so Deku no longer has his essential protection, his opponent is a seemingly unstoppable force, there's nobody else who can act, is he going to stick to his morals to the bitter end or is he going to do the safe thing." And everyone around him wants him to do the safe thing but he wants to do the right thing and theoretically that is going to be the moment he becomes the greatest hero, because he was the singular person not willing to give up on someone who needed help. (Personally I find Toga seemingly dying far worse for the storytelling than AFO because it just feels like "you can save someone asking for help, as long as they loving die afterwards" and I hate that poo poo.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 23:52
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I don't think anyone in the story has told Deku he should kill Shigaraki, that I can recall. The general expectation from others seems to be that Deku will beat Shigaraki and then leave him to others to deal with, ala Muscular. re: Toga, that bit was framed in such a way that I'm largely expecting her to show up fine later on, with her apparent death being a way to have her escape and show up in an epilogue without having to deal with the "oh, right, all the murders" stuff. Kanos fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 00:00
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Kanos posted:I don't think anyone in the story has told Deku he should kill Shigaraki, that I can recall. The general expectation from others seems to be that Deku will beat Shigaraki and then leave him to others to deal with, ala Muscular. 
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Dec 31, 2023 00:12
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Kanos posted:I don't think anyone in the story has told Deku he should kill Shigaraki, that I can recall. The general expectation from others seems to be that Deku will beat Shigaraki and then leave him to others to deal with, ala Muscular.
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Dec 31, 2023 00:14
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I think this is a lot different than saying "Go kill that guy". She's asking him if he would be willing to do it if it was the only way to stop Shigaraki, which is an extremely important difference.
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Dec 31, 2023 00:30
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Nessus posted:Himiko Toga, the Phlebotomy Hero, will work with Brad King's agency and live with her wife She'll go undercover under the name "Okimih Agot," as is vampire tradition.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:32
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Valentin posted:e: honestly a big and sincere problem with how this ending is landing is that a lot of mha is horikoshi saying that sometimes HARD MEN have to make HARD CHOICES and the rest of us just have to appreciate that we are not the fighter in the arena. the weird weird nonsense takes about the media are a big part of this in the last quarter of the manga. but part of the incoherence is that he is not saying that we have to let hard-edged practical considerations control, which is basically how the endeavor arc ends ("yeah i hosed up but i'm also one of the only heroes left standing, so shut up and don't ask me to cry about it or whatever"). so here at the end, where deku makes the hard choice to try to save shigaraki rather than kill him, people are like "but i thought we were doing practical consequentialist ends-justifies-the-means thinking." but we aren't! horikoshi just thinks when a hero is heroing and you disagree your only options are to hero better or shut up. that's a stupid theme in itself but it's clearly what he genuinely believes lmao. very great man theory. I find that a sort of shallow media criticism is often something you see manga/anime resort to when they're encroaching upon a topic that is fundamentally "political" in a way that the author just isn't willing or able to address. A good example is the way "the idol industry" is discussed in a lot of "realistic" idol-related media. Instead of treating the actual idol industry as the responsible party, the responsibility is instead laid at the feet of "the exploitative media" (and sometimes, if you're lucky, "a few bad idol producers"). It kind of makes sense, in a way. In the absence of any coherent political ideology, you're going to end up caring the most about the things you personally see and hear - in this case "the media." Instead of thinking about things like "the way our society incentivizes exploitative industries like the idol industry," you instead just think about "all the cruel paparazzi who write the mean articles I sometimes see/read." Not that that's entirely wrong (since obviously media that tries to prove that idols are dating or whatever is harmful), but those media organizations are bad for the exact same reason idol producers are (and the idol producers are supporting and promoting the same values that make people think "idols dating" is bad to begin with!).
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Dec 31, 2023 03:00
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Unfortunately, there's a pretty hard limit to where most manga can go regarding direct criticisms of existing power structures in a way that might be perceived as adversarial or controversial due to publisher oversight in their publication of choice. When you couple that with a lot of authors just wanting to tell a cool story without needing to actually take real positions on very complicated and potentially uncomfortable issues, but still wanting to touch on those issues because they provide interesting hooks, you end up with stuff like the MHA racism arc which presents a real problem that is an integral part of several characters' backstories but the resolution is "don't worry racism is solving itself, everyone go home".
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Dec 31, 2023 04:12
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Horikoshi's thing here that he clearly wants to do but has struggled with is that his idea of "Hero" is like, an actual hero and not the "job" version of it he created for his world. He says his overall belief on what constitutes a hero has changed over the series but the original ideal was something like "When Goku shows up", where no matter how hosed up everything is you just see this guy show up and you immediately know everything is gonna be fine. The school's motto is Plus Ultra: The step beyond defeating AFO is also defeating the All Might death prophecy. The step beyond stopping the self-claimed irredeemable unstoppable villain is to save them. Heroes do the impossible. It's just that it's hard to write this without it seeming like an incredibly stupid thing to do. He succeeded with Bakugou vs AFO because Bakugou is preventing collateral damage (namely saving All Might), this thing with Shigaraki is seeming pretty dumb because saving Shigaraki involves letting him delete parts of Japan from the map since Deku has proven unable to keep him from using Decay on the ground. You'd have an argument here if you made it extremely clear that Deku cannot beat Shigaraki now in a fight, and that saving him is the only solution and also something Deku is uniquely capable of doing. Kanos posted:Unfortunately, there's a pretty hard limit to where most manga can go regarding direct criticisms of existing power structures in a way that might be perceived as adversarial or controversial due to publisher oversight in their publication of choice. When you couple that with a lot of authors just wanting to tell a cool story without needing to actually take real positions on very complicated and potentially uncomfortable issues, but still wanting to touch on those issues because they provide interesting hooks, you end up with stuff like the MHA racism arc which presents a real problem that is an integral part of several characters' backstories but the resolution is "don't worry racism is solving itself, everyone go home".
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Dec 31, 2023 05:40
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The racism subplot was also really weird because it would've been extremely easy to set up, there are multiple people in 1-A who barely look human, but as far as I can recall none of them ever mentioned anyone being racist towards them, it just hasn't been a thing in the setting up until... just now, basically. It just felt like horikoshi decided on a whim to make a few chapters about how racism is over, actually, and you guys need to calm down over there in america.
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Dec 31, 2023 06:43
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Mymla posted:The racism subplot was also really weird because it would've been extremely easy to set up, there are multiple people in 1-A who barely look human, but as far as I can recall none of them ever mentioned anyone being racist towards them, it just hasn't been a thing in the setting up until... just now, basically. It just felt like horikoshi decided on a whim to make a few chapters about how racism is over, actually, and you guys need to calm down over there in america. I remember early on there were hints that Shouji faced racism growing up in like, character bios in the volume releases or something, and I remember an interview years ago where Hori mentioned that he had ideas for an arc involving Shouji. So the idea was definitely there, it's just that he either never found a good place to do it or his editors kept nixing the idea until the very end of the manga. Rhonne fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 07:09
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One of my favorite bits in vigilantes was that mantis guy whose life was ruined just by being a mantis guy. It's kinda ridiculous the main story fails to be as effective as the spinoff in showing how the my hero world disproportionately favors conventionally human people.
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Dec 31, 2023 13:13
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Yeah, I think Vigilantes being able to focus on the neighborhood itself and the people in it was a big benefit to the story. It's not a guy who could blow up the whole world, but maybe will destroy your local shopping district.
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Dec 31, 2023 17:08
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I hope the series ends with Shigaraki preventing a deus ex machina eruption of Mt. Fuji, brought on by events completely unrelated to the ongoing battle, by sacrificing his life to reshape the mountain and in doing so he also puts a Mt. Rushmore style monument of all his friends in the League of Villains on the mountain.
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Dec 31, 2023 18:30
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Scholtz posted:I hope the series ends with Shigaraki preventing a deus ex machina eruption of Mt. Fuji, brought on by events completely unrelated to the ongoing battle, by sacrificing his life to reshape the mountain and in doing so he also puts a Mt. Rushmore style monument of all his friends in the League of Villains on the mountain. If he carves Compress's face into that mountain then it will be someone's moral duty to blow it up.
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Dec 31, 2023 19:34
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the mount fuji thing could plausibly be the thing that finally pays off overhaul showing back up for absolutely no reason and I for one think that would be hilarious
Valentin fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Dec 31, 2023 |
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Dec 31, 2023 19:56
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Eri fixing Overhauls hands off screen like she did for Mirio would be so funny.
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Dec 31, 2023 20:52
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Overhaul will use his power to somehow split Shigaraki into two people, the scared traumatized little boy who just needs a hug, and the genocidal mass murdering psychopath. This way Deku can punch Shigaraki's head off guilt free while still "saving" Tenko.
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Dec 31, 2023 22:44
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Rhonne posted:Overhaul will use his power to somehow split Shigaraki into two people, the scared traumatized little boy who just needs a hug, and the genocidal mass murdering psychopath. This way Deku can punch Shigaraki's head off guilt free while still "saving" Tenko. the same thing but deku punches the baby
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Dec 31, 2023 23:23
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serious gaylord posted:Eri fixing Overhauls hands off screen like she did for Mirio would be so funny. Eri will fix Overhaul's hands wrong As a joke
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Jan 1, 2024 00:37
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Electric Phantasm posted:Eri will fix Overhaul's hands wrong 'Puts em back' on opposite arms. Left hand, right arm. So very annoying because the world is not built to accommodate in weird ways.
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Jan 1, 2024 00:40
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Electric Phantasm posted:Eri will fix Overhaul's hands wrong She rewinds him too far and he winds up with baby hands.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:33
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TheHan posted:the same thing but deku punches the baby Deku beats the evil one and Bakugo runs in from offscreen and punts the baby while yelling TWO FOR TWO
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Jan 1, 2024 01:40
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Eri accidentally rewinds Deku and Mr. Shiggums gets to punch the quirkless baby.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:16
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MadFriarAvelyn posted:Eri accidentally rewinds Deku and Mr. Shiggums gets to punch the quirkless baby. Ah, the good ending.
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Jan 3, 2024 05:08
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is it over yet
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Jan 4, 2024 06:41
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Flesnolk posted:is it over yet Yes
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Jan 4, 2024 07:26
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don't say that, we still don't know what kurogiri and eraserhead are up to.
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Jan 4, 2024 16:52
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So next week Granblue's doing a cross-over event with MHA with Deku and Bakugo as recruitable units, so soon you, too, will be able to bully a baby.
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Jan 4, 2024 18:26
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