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byefolkals · 6 months ago

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On Horikoshi's Writing of Women

This is posted as a stand-alone because lord knows I spent long enough on it, but it's in response to this ask:

This got lengthy, and it could be lengthier still—it's very easy to imagine doing a full-series breakdown on this like the heteromorphobia one I'm still slowly plugging away at—but the TLDR is that I think Horikoshi's women are perfectly acceptable as people, but become much more problematic when you start looking at them as characters.

Hit the jump.

BNHA's Women As People

As people—characters who act in ways reminiscent of real-life humans—Hori’s women are relatively solid, especially the 1-A students. They have varied personalities and body types,(1) loads of different interests and styles, and outside of the unified front against Mineta, they’re never really treated like a monolith. That is, no one (as best I can recall) makes big summary statements of Girls Like X or Girls Can’t Y that go uncontested by the narrative like you’d see in truly, openly sexist works.(2)

The worst I can say about the Class A girls' characterization is that they're all too nice, but I would contend that that's true of most of the students, which is why I don't care much about Class A: With the exception of Bakugou, they're all too nice, and it leaves them undernourished, dramatically speaking. But the girls at least aren't blandly nice; they do all have distinct personalities beyond, "Pretty and sweet."(3)

They also have trackable, unique relationships. Consider, for example, the difference between Uraraka’s relationships with Tsuyu and Mina, and how different either is from Momo and Jirou’s friendship! Further, they’re allowed to be friends with boys without it having to be romantic. Yeah, there’s Uraraka’s whole thing with Deku, and that’s a chore, but Kaminari and Jirou, or Kirishima and Mina, wherever they may wind up later in life, really are just friends right now—there’s no blushing or stammering or awkwardness going on between those pairs at all.

The Class A girls aren’t defined by their proximity to the nearest male—and that much, at least, is also true of the Pro Hero women like Mount Lady and Mirko. Hell, even someone like Nana—only in the story because of her relationship with/to men—is actually so important to so many men that I’d contend that she crosses out the other side and winds up in territory that is far more often populated by male heroes and mentors, people who might be dead but who mattered to a bunch of really important living characters.

Nana may be a Dead Mom, but she’s not a saintly photo on the mantelpiece, taken down to be remembered fondly by her widower. She’s All Might’s beloved mentor, yes, but she’s also the reason Kotarou was such a mess, which is in turn a huge part of Shigaraki’s damage. She’s the reason Gran Torino is involved in the plot at all. Even AFO seems to be able to make room to be especially vindictive about her compared to the way he talks about most or even any of the other bearers.

All that, and she even still gets to be “alive” inside One For All so we get to hear her opinions on things now and again!

Things are spottier with the lady villains—mostly because there are so few of them, and even fewer who walk out the other end of their arcs—but even there, I think there’s room for nuanced reads.

Magne’s motivations, such as we ever got of them, were all about being able to live freely.

Curious may have had that flashback to her blushing in front of Re-Destro, but the takeaway from it is how something he said inspired her to mature as a writer, not her being in looooove with him(4)—indeed, Geten is much more directly motivated by RD’s approval, and both Trumpet and Skeptic pivot entirely into being driven by fear for RD’s life the instant they think it might be in danger. Even now, every single one of Skeptic’s appearances from the cave onward sees him namedropping Re-Destro somewhere. So even if RD is Curious’s Most Important Person, that just puts her in good company with the rest of her peers.

Meanwhile, Lady Nagant is no more “defined by a man” than Hawks is “defined by a woman” because of the genders of their respective HPSC Presidents. The easy way out with Nagant would have been to have Bitty Keigo play some role in her turn—indeed, loads of people expected exactly that as soon as the audience realized who and what she was. But her President being a man is immaterial; the real entity that victimized Nagant is the HPSC as a governing body; its President was simply the face of that body, exactly the way President Pearls was to Hawks a generation later. Likewise, her turn isn’t because of her feelings about Some Guy, it’s because of her own awareness of the discordance between the façade and the reality of Hero Society.

Until either of the remaining PLF advisor women get anything to say, that brings us to Toga and La Brava. And okay, yes, La Brava is motivated entirely by a dude; there's no getting around that. On the other hand, I can’t help but compare her backstory to Spinner’s. Both of them suffered judgment and ostracization because of their quirks, both were hikikomori, and both had their lives changed because of a man they saw in a video who showed them a new world. Hell, Spinner had his life changed because of a man showing him a new world twice.

La Brava calls her feelings love, while Spinner calls his devotion, but it’s the same story, just wearing a different costume. At the very least, then, you can’t say that that plot is one Hori only gives women. Rather, I think it just ties into the broader theme of how the public consumes people they see on TV, for better or for worse. You could tie that to a lot of stuff in the series, including Deku’s own heroic aspirations as embodied by that iconic video of All Might he saw as a kid, Can’t-Ya-See-kun's fannish opinions about Endeavor’s heroic persona and his later attempts to reject Dabi’s video, the refugee civilians having to wrestle with the reality of heroes as opposed to watching them from the couch, and so on.

Meanwhile, Toga is so fascinating because, yes, her concerns and interests are stereotypically feminine—her appearance (both in the sense of cosmetic things like A-line coats but also her transformation quirk), cute things, talking about boys, relationships in general, her prioritization of her own inner landscape as opposed to big worldly ambitions.

On the other hand, Horikoshi really commits with Toga. She’s stereotypical in some ways—the predatory bisexual being a big glaring one—but she is in no way a shallow stereotype. The reader can’t just write her off as being a collection of tired tropes because of the degree to which the story insists on her being specific and deserving of attention. She’s not Like That because, for example, that’s what Horikoshi thinks of all bisexuals. She’s Like That because of an array of factors in her nature and nurture, her societal conditioning, her lived experience, others’ reactions to her, and so on. Bisexuality is really only the tiniest fraction of who Toga Himiko is. That’s my feeling, at least.

(As an aside to Anon's suggestion about Toga being polyamorous, while that is clearly the case in the sense that she freely falls in love with multiple people, rather than having monogamous affections, her being interested in poly relationships is much more in the air. As she is now, her idea of fulfilling love lies in becoming the object of her affections, not being with them. I feel like if she could find someone into bloodplay, she’d do just fine with that without having to get to the point of murder, but as it is, it doesn’t seem she or anyone she’s met has considered that an option. That being the case, we don’t know if she’d be willing to limit herself to taking only safe and consensually given amounts of blood, or if her desire to become the people she loves can only be satisfied by murdering the other party. If the latter, it rather takes romantic relationships off the table entirely!)

To sum up: As people, Horikoshi’s women are generally just fine. He was a wide variety of them and they all manage to stay pretty distinct! There are some that look more stereotypical than others, but even those still tie in well with the story’s overarching concerns or feel like sincere explorations of the stereotypes they represent.

Horikoshi’s problems with his female characters come in, to me, much more when you start looking at them as characters, instead of as people.

BNHA's Women As Characters

Consider the female characters in BNHA. Do their stories contribute in a major way to the narrative as a whole, or are they just side color? How much focus do they get? Are they granted comparable interiority as their male counterparts?

Given the story’s nature as a shounen battle comic, how many big wins do women get compared to the dudes, and are they fighting those battles against equally dangerous opponents? Do the women always and only fight other women? Do they only ever beat other women, but lose to men? How much would be lost or radically changed if they were removed from the story?

Mount Lady’s a fantastic example of the characterization/attention dichotomy. I’m inclined to agree with Anon that she’s probably Hori’s best lady-type Pro Hero, allowed to have real flaws, enough backstory to get an idea of where she’s coming from, and a startlingly clear character arc. However, unlike e.g. Endeavor, whose arc is taking place entirely in the foreground, given lavish amounts of time and attention, Mount Lady’s is all background. We don’t know what her crux point was in realizing that she needed to get her priorities in order, if she indeed ever had one. It’s possible she’s simply matured over the course of the story without ever quite clicking into Endeavor’s mode of self-reflection.

People like Ryukyu fall even farther behind. She’s been heavily involved in the climaxes of two major story arcs—the Shie Hassaikai arc and the War arc—yet we don’t know the first thing about her away from the job. Same with Mirko: She gets that huge blowout against the Near High Ends, but as far as what she wants, why she became a hero, what she thinks about this huge collapse she’s witnessing? Total blank slate.

And sure, that’s true of plenty of male heroes too—look at all Mount Lady’s teammates, for example—but we don’t have any female heroes equivalent to Endeavor, Hawks, or even Best Jeanist, the latter of whom has gotten ample room to espouse his ideals and a variety of his beliefs about heroes, even as we don’t know anything about his personal life.

I think Momo’s the clearest example of this issue on the student side. Virtually all of her development is narrated by other characters, mostly male ones, rather than the reader getting to see Momo’s own thoughts directly the way we do with buckets of male characters.

Momo contributed the tracker that got Deku and company to Kamino, but was given no contributions to the action of retrieving Bakugou. She’s ultimately the one who organized the students into dosing Gigantomachia,(5) which did eventually take effect some chapters later, but in the moment it happened, it looked like a failure, so instead of it being a big triumph for her, we had to see her and the rest on their knees in what seemed like a moment of total defeat.

Momo lost two mentors in the war—Midnight and Majestic. What does she think about that? Who knows? We’re just not privy to it. Momo spent her entire arc learning how to be more decisive and better at overseeing resources. Where is she now? Popping out industrial goods for a girl who doesn’t even know her name.

Meanwhile, we have things like the ludicrous disparity between Gran Torino, a shrunken geezer in his 70s getting punched through the chest by the final boss and surviving, and Midnight, a young and healthy 32-year-old getting merely jumped by a third-string PLF guy who hasn’t even gotten a name yet and then dying off-panel. Don’t get me wrong; I love Hose Face, and I don’t even mind that Midnight died as such. I mind that it was so ignominious compared to the fates of all the similarly important male heroes who took part in that battle.

Star & Stripe? She is alleged to be the strongest woman in the world, yet her arc could be removed from the story with zero consequences whatsoever. Everything she brings to the story is new for her arc; she doesn't resolve or remove anything save that which was introduced in her own set of chapters.(6) Her accomplishments are arbitrarily defined, and could be equally arbitrarily redefined without her.

That’s just a few examples of story structure issues, which is where my main concern lies, but you could certainly look at surface stuff, too.

Consider: Does the way women in the story dress match their personality? In movement and at rest, does their body language match who they are as people? How does the “camera” view them? Are they introduced as people or as collections of attractive body parts? Are they allowed the same range of expressiveness men are, or are they more limited because their anger or pain still has to be attractive to the presumed audience and/or the artist?

Some of this Hori does okay with—Mirko’s doing some fantastic angry glowering this week, and Toga can absolutely tip over into horror manga expressions sometimes, ones that are very clearly not intended to be sexy or cute. But he does sometimes let his women down on this front, too—speaking of Mirko in this week’s chapter, WOW, that sure is a boob hanging right there front and center at eye level, when it would have been so easy to just have ShigAFO’s hand-o-rama wrapped more fully around Mirko's torso.

Toga is a bit more complicated to me, in that, taking it at face value, I actually don’t really mind her frequent goopy unclothedness. Her posing in those scenes stays pretty true to her personality and the situations at hand, and she's drawn with what seem to be to be decently realistic curves and weightiness. Rather, the issue with Toga's nudity goes to another frequent problem with the way the women in the series get treated, and that’s the inconsistency between how men and women's quirks interact with clothes.

The go-to contrast here is Mirio and Hagakure. Neither of them can affect clothes with their quirk, but for some reason, Mirio can get a costume made out of his own hair and thus stay respectably clad during all his fights. Hagakure, by contrast, is noted more than once as fighting completely nude save for her gloves—why doesn’t she get the haircloth fix? If there’s an answer to this, it’s arbitrary.

Toga’s quirk would seem to be based in DNA, in that she requires blood to use it, but DNA certainly wouldn’t explain her ability to shapeshift clothes. It’s easier for the story if she can shapeshift clothes—it’d be a lot harder for her to impersonate specific costumed heroes if she didn’t have ready access to their costumes!—but it doesn’t make much sense as a blood-based ability. Taking it a step further, if she can shapeshift clothes because Magic Wand That Says She Can, why can’t she just change the shape of her own clothes? If her goop can change her body, why can’t it change her clothes? Because Magic Wand Says Then She Couldn’t Be Nakey When She Changes Back, that’s why.

For a contrast to Toga, consider the Hassaikai’s Mimic, whose power is to merge himself into objects, including ones much, much smaller than he is. Yet somehow he doesn’t have to strip before he merges or lose his clothes to the ether when he exits.

Midnight and Momo both have quirks that emit material from their skin, nominally justifying why their costumes are Like That. Okay, sure, but where are the equivalent male heroes who just have to wear skimpy or easily shredded costumes for reasons of quirk utility? Wash and Bubble Girl both emit bubbles from their bodies, but for some reason the dude wears a cartoony washing machine costume,(7) while the woman is saddled with an underboob-exposing crop top.

Suneater’s another easy referent; he transforms parts of his body into much larger animal parts, yet he still manages to have a costume that covers up everything except his feet. Even his arms are covered, when his arms are his most frequently transformed limb! He might have a bare spot on his back for his wings, but if so, the reader never gets to see it because Suneater wears an enormous hooded cape that covers that area right up.

It makes sense that Mirko would prefer to leave her legs bare, given her all-kicking fighting style—but Deku switches to a kicking style and just gets heavier, reinforced shoes. (To say nothing of All Might and other punchy heroes still having full sleeves, when you'd think the same reasoning would apply as does with Mirko's bare legs.)

Eri’s power only works on “people”—except that it totally works on clothes, too, otherwise we’d have to see a dude naked when her power separates Overhaul and Nemoto.

And so on and so forth. I don’t hold any of these individual examples against Horikoshi (except maybe Momo, who runs afoul of the “does this costume match this personality” critique pretty hard), but it really does become a bigger problem in the aggregate.

BNHA's Women In the Aggregate

And that’s kind of how I feel about a lot of it. I think Hori means well—you are never going to catch me out there yelling about how Horikoshi is just slobbering all over himself to brutalize his female characters—and he legit is doing better than a lot of other manga I’ve read. But then, I’ve read a lot of manga, you know? “Better at feminism than manga that say straight to the reader’s face that women will never understand a man’s desire to win,” is not a high bar.(8)

Regardless of Hori’s good intentions, though, I think Shounen Jump is not an environment that is challenging him to think more critically about his women, nor one that is pushing him to include them more or give them better material. He could absolutely do better, though, and yeah, I’m as tired as everyone else of new female characters who show up for a handful of chapters and then get obliterated by a villain or put on a bus to imprisonment and obscurity by the hero who defeats them.

If nothing else, I’ve got to hand that to Mirko. Down two limbs and that rabbit is still going strong, and not for one single second is there a suggestion that prosthetic limbs are going to slow her down or force her into retirement.

Thanks for the question, Anon, and sorry for taking so long with the reply!

---FOOTNOTES---

1: Not a huge variety, and the adult women have less than the high school cast, but I’ve read plenty of manga across all demographics that are far worse at having female characters you could distinguish by bald silhouette.

2: For some really clear examples, see e.g. everything the Death Note guy has ever written.

3: I might make an exception for poor Hagakure, who never had a chance to establish a personality because she needed to stay a viable candidate for the Traitor Plot. Definitely the most Generically Peppy of the girls, but at the very least she's balanced out some by male students like Ojiro, Sato and Koda in never getting enough attention to transcend their characterization shorthand.

4: And speaking as a writer, let me tell you, a critique like the one Rikiya offers in that flashback is absolutely the kind of thing that would leave me red in the face, but definitely not because I was internally swooning.

5: And even that isn't entirely her moment, given that it stems from her being ordered to do it by Midnight and ends with Kirishima getting the final move, a move he gets at Mina's expense.

6: Wow, a Reflect quirk! Neat! Wonder why that hasn't come up anywhere before? Regardless of the three sentence back-and-forth I could get into on that subject, Reflect is the only named quirk New Order destroys, and it was nowhere to be seen at either Kamino or Jakku.

7: Assuming, of course, that Wash isn’t a washing machine heteromorph. Jury’s still out on this.

8: See again a lot of Ohba's work, but the same sentiment is why I ragequit Megalobox in the first episode. Likewise, I will love Eyeshield 21 until my dying days, but I super could have done without that late-series swing at, "Mamori will never understand Sena's Man Feelings about Sports because she is A Girl."

#bnha

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byefolkals · 6 months ago

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Who's to blame when the stakes are missing?

So recently I’ve been hearing people complain about Eri’s Quirk and how it destroyed the stakes and I decided I just wanted to talk about the whole issue BNHA has with stakes and how it’s not tied to the devices it uses, be they Quirk or medical knowledge, but to how it decides to use said devices.

But let’s start with order.

“If anything and everything in a story can be theoretically altered with absolutely no in-universe constraints whatsoever—bound only to the whims of the writers themselves—then why does anything that happens in the story matter?” [State of the Arc Podcast, "The Problem with Time-Travel"]

This is how the tvtropes page “No Permanence, No Stakes” opens.

The lack of stakes is a problem BNHA faces in a way that’s so embarrassing that when it really ends up killing characters many readers ended up doubting they were really dead… or annoying them when the dramatic problem just created ended up being resolved way too easily (see Midoriya’s arms coming back so quickly there was really no point for him to lose them).

The problem though isn’t Eri’s Quirk that can fix everything… it’s that the story never had some solid rules that managed to keep the stakes alive even when in the story existed devices to undo the damage.

What do I mean?

I’m going to talk of another manga, one who had plenty of methods to undo the damage that’s made through the story, but that still managed to keep the stakes alive because it sets rules. This is a shounen which made history, aka “Dragon Ball” by Toriyama Akira (by the way I’ll use only the original Toriyama’s manga for this, forget the side material and the following anime series and manga series, okay? And before you ask “Dragon Ball” isn’t perfect but boy, it did things so much better in this camp and it’s a classic authors study so I don’t get how Horikoshi couldn’t have learnt from it).

In “Dragon Ball” nothing has to be permanent, it seems as if Toriyama had fun trying all the ways he could think of to undo the damage he were to give to his characters and his words… yet each magical device to undo the damage comes with rules. The characters know them, the readers know them and the stakes are created by having the characters move through those rules to use the magical devices that will undo the damage.

Let’s start with the titular artifacts of the series, the “Dragon Ball” (ドラゴン球ボール), who can be used to fulfill whatever wish you were to have. They come with a large set of rules. First of all you’ve to collect all 7 of them, as they spread themselves through the world each time they fulfill a wish, a task not easy if you don’t have a radar to locate them (and while some characters have it, others don’t). Once they’re collected you need to be the fastest to express your wish because if someone else will beat you on it, it’ll be their wish that will be fulfilled. As said before the Dragon Balls spread themselves after fulfilling a wish… but you can’t try to collect them moments after it as it won’t be possible to track or use them again for a full year. The Earth Dragon Balls also come with the rule they can’t resurrect a person twice, while the Namekian Dragon Balls come with the rule they can resurrect more than one person, although they can fulfill not one but three wishes. Also, if their creators or the dragon they summon die (it’s actually the dragon the one fulfilling the wishes), they stop working.

When in the series there is a Dragon Balls hunt, or the characters need to use them for a wish, they’ve to fight with those limitations. The limitations become stakes, become part of the battle, part of the story. You know that at the end the heroes will manage to use them to undo the damage but the point becomes how they’ll overcome the stakes that will try to stop them from using them? Toriyama did entire arcs playing with those rules, having characters trying to overcome them.

For minor things like characters risking to die but not being dead yet we also have devices that will reverse this.

The story in fact introduces the ‘Senzu’ (仙豆 lit. “Hermit Bean”), which are mystical beans with immense rejuvenation properties. When eaten, a person's physical condition is near-instantly restored to its natural peak. Too bad they aren’t everyone and you can’t have an endless supply of them. Characters need to get them and to make sure they don’t overuse them. Once they’re out of them, they’re on their own. And, of course, they can be stolen.

Next come the ‘MEDICAL MACHINE’ (メディカルマシーン), large containers filled with some form of liquid that can completely heal a person from near death. Of course they’re owned by the big bad of the series so it’s not so easy to get free access to them, they need time to heal the person who wants to use them, time during which the person can’t move from them, and can be destroyed.

We’ve then the ‘kaifuku’ (回復 “Healing” Lit. “time again”), which refers to a variety of special techniques used throughout the series to restore physical condition… only not everyone know how to use such technique, so you’ve to find someone who can use it and the user can be killed by an enemy.

But what if a person truly dies?

Well, if are given special permission, they can go back on Earth. Limitation? It works for one day only and they need permission to do so.

And if all this isn’t enough?

Just grab the ‘TIME MACHINE’ (タイムマシン) and redo everything. Be mindful though that only 1 person has a time machine, that the time machine can be broken or stolen and that, if you go back to the past and do something, you’ll alter it and you can’t predict how or if it’ll go for the better or worse. Also your timeline WON’T CHANGE AT ALL, so as not to create a time paradox.

Now let’s go back to BNHA and see how things work there.

The first magical device introduced in the story to undo damage is Recovery Girl’s Quirk ‘Iyashi’ (癒し “heal”). At first it seems to work like the “Dragon Ball” healing technique… Recovery Girl uses it on a fainted Midoriya and, in a second all the damage he received is undone, the completely shattered bones resetting themselves and healing just fine (chapter 4). It would have worked just fine like this, but Horikoshi felt the need to retcon it to add a rule, it would consume the stamina of the one being healed… so that if the person were to run out of stamina he would die instead than being healed (chapter 7). In case you don’t know, stamina is the bodily or mental capacity to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity. Midoriya fainted in chapter 4, rightfully so as he should have worn himself out completely due to using OFA’s power and getting injured as he completely shattered both his legs and one arm… but the healing administered didn’t kill him. This retcon wasn’t enough as we later learn that Recovery Girl has to set the bones before administering healing and that scarring will remain anyway (chapter 40), something she hadn’t done in chapter 4, when the damage was way worse, never mentioning Midoriya never reported any scarring in the previous 3 times in which he was healed. Lastly, chapter 342 will introduce the idea Recovery Girl gets older if she uses her Quirk… something we were never told before and that doesn’t really affect the plot. All those setbacks that the story introduces aren’t obstacles the characters have to overcome to get access to the healing, they’re just things tossed in after the damage is done that have no real weight in the story. If in chapter 11 Recovery Girl claims she can’t heal Midoriya because he is too low on stamina, this won’t mean much for the story as Midoriya won’t have to do anything else for the day and will be healed the day after before lessons starts. When she’ll heal him the first time during the sport festival, the loss of stamina won’t make him too weak to fight Shouto. The only time in which her limits seem to have some weight is when she can’t heal Nighteye… but this could have resolved just by having her reaching him when it was too late. When, in “Dragon Ball”, Dende refused to heal Vegeta, this could have as a consequence Freezer to kill them all, when Recovery Girl refuses to heal Midoriya, the stakes are inexistent, because Midoriya isn’t in desperate need of healing to do something, he can just wait to heal on his own… or the next day when Recovery Girl will be willing to heal him.

In order for the rules/drawback of such device to work as stakes, they need to be introduced BEFORE the device will be used and the characters must try to overcome them or, at least they’ve to affect the plot in some way to create an interesting story, otherwise there’s no point to them. “Dragon Ball” does this, BNHA doesn’t.

Then we get Chisaki’s Quirk, ‘Overhaul’ (オーバーホール), which gives the user the ability to disassemble and then reassemble matter with their bare hands. This process happens instantly, as long as the user is touching its target, is effective on living and non-living things alike and can even recombine two different objects or beings into a single entity that possesses components of both subjects. The reassembling can heal any injuries or ailments the target had by reconstructing them to a biologically perfect state. Stakes? There’s a minor cool down and, if the user’s hands get destroyed, he can’t use his Quirk. Oh, also, that this Quirk is owned by an enemy who use it against the Heroes. This though wouldn’t be a real problem as Chisaki will get arrested and team Hero has Monoma who can copy Quirks… but, while they thought to use Monoma to copy Eri’s Quirk and learn to use it so that he could taught Eri how to use it, they don’t think to copy Chisaki’s Quirk so that they can use its healing properties. Nope, even if they gain Chisaki back, his Quirk will never be used again, not even to heal Bakugou’s arm… which will eventually heal enough he can move it just fine… while Chisaki’s boss was healed by doctors. This makes one of the Quirks with the greatest healing power useless and therefore also recovering Chisaki becomes useless since the plot doesn’t know what to do with him (and, to be honest, Chisaki wasn’t even that relevant in the Midoriya/Nagant fight). Really, Chisaki’s Quirk is used only in the Shie Hassaikai arc as a weapon against Heroes and then dropped.

While it’s not a perfect work and it has its mistakes, I can’t remember something of this magnitude being dropped in “Dragon Ball”. We’re talking of a Quirk that can heal everything, be it an illness, an injury or whatever, perfectly. And it gets forgotten.

We move to Eri’s Quirk, ‘Maki Modoshi’ (巻き戻し “Rewind”), which gives the user the ability to reverse a living being's body back to a previous state. This allows the user to undo or bring back injuries or modifications from the present or the past, revert people back to a point before they even existed, and even rewind genetics, basically erasing a Quirk factor. Downsides? Eri doesn’t know how to use it, which can cause her to also lose control of it, making her activate it by mistake or making her unable to stop using it. Also, it’s a power that work through accumulation of an unknown element, so it can go dormant once it’s overused and Monoma can’t help her to learn to use it. Too bad that she never activate it while she’s under Chisaki’s control, that once she uses it too much, Eraser Head will stop her, that she’ll learn to use it just fine on her own just in time to rewind Lemillion and give him back his Quirk when he needs it… but hasn’t accumulated enough power to heal Eraser Head’s sight… yet it has enough power to heal Midoriya’s arms. Never mentioning when Eraser Head stopped her from Rewinding too much Midoriya the first time, her horn wasn’t decreased yet, meaning she still had power… (chapter 161) but when she wakes up from her fever the horn has decreased even if her power wasn’t used at all (Chapter 167), a clear sign this was a retcon to make her power more manageable. Also Eri cuts her horn… which Ectoplasm helped her to do even though they’ve no means to send it to Midoriya… but her horn will regrow back just fine… but it’s pointless as we will never see her using it again since she wants to become a singer… besides… Eri had problems using her own Quirk and Aizawa can do it just fine?

There are basically no rules for all this, it’s just the author adding to it things as the story goes on.

Never mentioning giving Eri such a big healing power which will never be used is kind of bad. Eri doesn’t want to become a healer, she wants to become a singer which is totally fair and she should be allowed to do it… but Eri’s Quirk can literally save the lives of plenty of people, could restore Bakugou’s arm, could have saved Touya, could erase the burn scar from the whole Todoroki family. Eri should be allowed to choose what she wants to do, she’s not a healing machine but… her choosing not to become a healer condemn people who aren’t healed by her to death. This is not a good moral dilemma a series focused on saving people should pose to its readers. Should we force a young girl to become a healer or should we let people die? Horikoshi likely didn’t notice he ended up posing this question when he drew Eri with a regrown horn.

We continue the ‘medical magic’ of Garaki first and of Central Hospital and its doctors later. This is different from the medical machines of “Dragon ball” as we aren’t told beforehand what it does, we just find out that they can do things after they did the things. Garaki can basically resurrect AFO, restore Touya’s body, he can take the rewind bullets and inverse their power so that they go back on rewinding people instead than Quirk factors, it can extract Quirk factors, copy them, modify people so that they can host more Quirk factors but lose their brain or keep it… and somehow Central hospital learns to duplicate its techniques so that Best Jeanist can be put in a state of death or they can save Shuuichi and wake up the boss of the Shie Hassaikai. To the list of the ones capable to use ‘medical magic’ we should probably add Edgeshot, who could magically restore Bakugou’s heart. All this has no rules, we aren’t told beforehand they can do it, ‘medical magic’ becomes just an excuse for when something impossible is done by medicine. The text doesn’t call it ‘magic’ yes, but it’s just the same. Oh, the Shie Hassaikai boss couldn’t wake up anymore… no wait, it can because we have doctors that can NOW wake him up. With all this medical magic that can do the impossible though, becomes hard to accept they can’t save Touya (even though they now have Garaki captive and can ask him how he did it the first time) and they actually ended up doing more damage to Kurogiri or that blood transfusions now kill, ask Himiko.

But all this can be, because there are no rules and so the result is that ‘medical magic’ becomes deus ex machina that moves according to the whims of the author, that it can do everything and nothing at all according to what Horikoshi wants. In the end it becomes unpredictable in a bad way because it destroys the stakes instead than setting them.

“Dragon Ball” had people holding on their chairs as they waited for Goku to finish healing in the medical machine, not because we believed he wouldn’t be healed, but because the rules established the healing would take a certain amount of time and we were worried three other beloved characters would die first. The same will never happen in BNHA, not even when we waited for Bakugou to recover (which had all the potential to do this) as the story didn’t really played up on the struggle of the others against Shigaraki but moved on focusing on other characters.

We go on with ‘Quirk awakening’ a random way to boost a Quirk up at random that all of sudden gets mentioned when Himiko gets her own Quirk awakening. Rules for the Quirk awakening are hazy, you can get it for a near death experience (Himiko) or because you just worry a lot (Geten who worries when Re-Destro burns himself) and it does things at random (Himiko can use the powers of those she transform into but only if she loves them and she’s not too angry, Geten can change ice temperature, Tomura’s decay can spread to other things, Touya also gets ice and so on). There are no rule but there is knowledge, even Enji knows about it yet no one tries to deliberately force it except for Garaki with Tomura? I mean, are we going to believe Enji gave a pass to his chance to get even more powerful? “Dragon Ball” is famous for its power up too, but they often come from training or, since the Saiyans are alien, from near death experience. When this rule becomes established, we’re told about it WAY BEFORE the characters try to use a near death experience for a fast power up. The same goes for the Super Saiyan, who’s also introduced way before Goku will finally manifest such power… and the reason why Saiyans in the past didn’t try for it is because they believed it to be a legend. The moment the possibility is on the table it’s all a run to get such an amazing power up. Quirk awakening? Happens for random reasons, solely when the plot needs it (otherwise why Touya didn’t get it when he nearly burned on Sekoto Peak? Why Hawks didn’t get it when Touya burned him? Why Best Jeanist didn’t get it after his fight with AFO? Why Nighteye didn’t get it either as Midoriya fought Overhaul?) and again, except for Garaki with Tomura, no one truly pursues it… not even in the MLA where people is willing to die for their cause and where apparently only Geten got it due to Re-Destro getting burned.

And should we mention the ‘magical rage power’ which can keep alive Tomura and Touya. Tomura dies but he is brought back to life by his dream and his hatred (Chap 296), Touya shouldn’t have survived a month but his grudge keeps him alive for years without medical aid, clothes, a place to stay, money and a job (Chap 350). Do we need those powers when Tomura could have very well be resurrected by the zap of electricity which made his whole body contract so dramatically but that somehow X-Less didn’t even feel because it was likely retconned as useless or would have killed X-Less? Do we really need to be told Touya would have only survived a month without Garaki’s aid as a way to excuse why they let him escape when a month was more than enough to tattle the truth to his Hero father had he decided to stay at home? Is the magnitude of the revelation they survived thanks to magical rage power worth it? Especially when they won’t manage to pull it out again at the end of the manga?

This is the sort of device the story doesn’t need to have… and that in a way ties to Bakugou’s resurrection as well as we’re told Edgeshot couldn’t resurrect it, Bakugou came back to life thanks to one of Bakugou’s tiny bead of explosive sweat somehow finding its way to his heart through his bloodstream and, instead than blasting Bakugou’s heart in pieces again, just restarting it so that Edgeshot can tell him he came back to life due to his own power as it combines with Edgeshot medical magic and bring Bakugou back to life. Really, we were already being asked to suspend our disbelief when Edgeshot jumped in action and sterilized himself with a soap bubble that somehow he kept on his persona without dirtying it and then started sewing a heart around without any medical degree. Do we need a totally random extra beg for suspension of disbelief that pleads at us through the “rule of cool”?

It’s the poor use of all the devices that can rewind things back to how they were what truly ruins the stakes. As long as the devices are bound by rules that are stated early, they’re part of the world building and the stakes exist and the story thrives on trying to make use of those rules to get the rewind. However when there are no rules or the rules have no use or are told only after the thing happen… well, here the story is moving according to the whims of the writers who use the devices as random deus ex machine to change back the status of things and force the story in the direction they want.

Again:

Horikoshi could have used more cool healing Quirks and rewinding Quirks and even time rewinding Quirks and medical progress if he had done it by first setting the rules and then having the characters navigate through them to use all of the above. Instead it’s all things that pop up at random to fix what can’t be fixed by other means or to make things look cool.

But you can ask suspension of disbelief only for so long and Horikoshi outdid his quota, which is a pity because really, this could have turned a lot better.

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