When MVA/MLA Arc gets animated, what will you be looking forward to the most? What (canon-compliant) additions and/or changed do you want or think Bones should make, if any?
There’s--a lot. Does that surprise anyone? There’s a lot.
o I have been foaming at the mouth for voice actor announcements for almost a year now, particularly for Trumpet, Geten and RD.
Trumpet’s superpower is literally his voice! I mean, nothing about that statement requires that voice be particularly entrancing, but it certainly seems like it should be, right??
Geten is a boku-type in the manga, but that was literally the only hint foreshadowing his pretty boy face through 21 solid chapters of Pure Feral Gremlin. Everyone was shocked by Geten’s face reveal! How do you maintain that surprise value with an actual voice actor in the mix? Do you not even try? Do you play up the disparity--in which direction? I can’t wait to see what they do.
And Re-Destro! Re-Destro requires so much range! From his peppy, silly businessman persona, to the urbane commander, from the overeager yes-man to the raving zealot--who on earth do you get to believably cover all that ground? I can’t even begin to guess, but I am living in anticipation of that article going up on ANN or the official Twitter sources.
o I’m also much looking forward to getting official coloring on Trumpet and Geten. Skeptic seems pretty straightforward--black, black, more black--and RD and Curious, we have color art for, but I wonder if Trumpet will also be all black clothes, to go with that dignified politician image of his, or if he’ll get some color to pep him up a little. What color are those tinted shades of his? His eyes? The wicked-cool Sevens Loud?
I assume Geten is all wintery shades, but it’ll be great to confirm which ones. I mean, we all assume he’s white-haired to better annoy Dabi with family parallels, but what if he turns out to be platinum blond? And are his eyes blue? Gray? White? What color is that awful parka?
Also, Re-Destro’s stress powers. Having been writing them as black since at least August--Rorschach test blots are generally black, after all, and they’re the clear inspiration--I would much like it if the anime would have my back on this. They made Destro’s mask a dark cinnamon brown, though, so I’m prepared to be unpleasantly surprised in this matter.
o Predictable MLA adaptational choices aside, I’m also eager/anxious about how they’ll handle Spinner’s narration. What I really hope is that they actually straight-up hand him ALL the narration duties--not just the stuff he dictates directly in the manga, but also e.g. the name and quirk explanation material that Present Mic normally gets, or the previews that are always handled by Deku.
The opening and closing sequences are another big structural thing, of course--based on the flashed snippets of Hawks and Endeavor in both our current and the previous OP, I’m expecting we’ll see at least a bit of something referencing the upcoming internship arc (which I expect to close out the season), but I hope the villains just walk away with the closing entirely. I want my slice of life villainy ED, dangit.
o Another thing I’m eager/anxious about would be Kotarou, and the Shimura flashback generally. There’s a brittle edge of to Kotarou that I really love, and I hope he manages to keep it in the anime, despite the anime being generally not so great at moments that I would describe as “delicate.” For example, I’d like it if he doesn’t get a super deep voice, and if they could manage to keep his pretty face, and capture how deeply bitter and tired he looks in the scene where he’s reading the letter Nana left him.
Also, I hope they keep the little montage bits and, crucially, the changes of clothes the family goes through. We see Tenko in no less than five, possibly as many as seven, different T-shirts through the course of that flashback. It seems like a small thing, but it’s one of the factors that makes me skeptical that AFO gave Tenko Decay, when so many days clearly go by between the opening with the man at the door and the tragic end. It’d be nice not to see too much resurgence on that just because the anime can’t be bothered to come up with more than one outfit for the Shimuras.
I have enough issues with the anime’s usual adaptation choices that I’m trying not to get my hopes up too high on the actual content of the episodes. The staff is diverting too much of its major talent to the movies (BAH) these days for me to expect the whole season to look all that great, and it’s never been particularly creative or daring outside of its climactic sakuga-heavy fight scenes anyway. I’ve also long had a bone to pick with its scoring decisions, and am already eyeballing the climax of the RD/Shigaraki fight and imagining the minor-keyed terrifying dirge I fear the anime will play there, at the moment that Re-Destro (and, shortly afterward, Spinner) are supposed to be experiencing something akin to religious awakenings.
There’s also the issue of the violence and gore--judging by how the anime handled the scene where Shigaraki and Compress maim Overhaul, I have some severe reservations about how much blood they’ll be allowed to get away with, particularly in the scene where the League brutally decimates that CRC group and, of course, Shigaraki’s backstory. I’m looking at MVA to serve as a preview for how all the same issues will be addressed in the War Arc.
That bit of pessimism aside, as to what I’m hoping they’ll add or change? Well, off the top of my head.....
o I would love to get a full episode devoted to the time the League spends fighting Machia. Not that first tussle, but the six grueling weeks in the mountains. There’s so much you could add there for character building and atmosphere that Hori didn’t so much as montage through. Where was their food coming from? How’d they pick out places to pitch camp? How much access to news from outside did they have, and how frequently? What were the circumstances in which Gigantomachia “told them himself” about his great sense of smell?? Stuff like that!
I don’t think we’re at all likely to get this--honestly, the series of late has had enough of a problem with trimming bits and pieces that I’m as worried about what they might cut as I am hyped about things they might add--but the one thing that gives me some hope is the training camp arc. Specifically, the moment 1-A first gets to the Pussycats’ forest, they get jumped by earth golems, a fight that the manga off-panels entirely, but the anime spends a modest amount of time on, giving the kids a little bit of time to show off their moves and such. I’d love to get something equivalent for the League.
o On a similar note, I wouldn’t turn it down if they fleshed out some of those running street fights a bit. One obvious thing comes to mind: there’s a weird jump in the manga between Skeptic and a horde of his golems being all but on top of Twice at the beginning of 233 and then that fight just--doesn’t happen. There’s no mention of it at all. I think the suggestion is that either Machia’s appearance or the tower going down interrupted it--Skeptic breaks off from his fight the same way Geten and Trumpet do theirs, shifting focus to protecting Re-Destro--but it’d be nice to see the anime touch on it.
o It’d be nice to get a bit of expansion on the nature of the bullying Spinner endured. We’re told he was, but was it limited to verbal? Did he get beaten up a lot? Was there an online element? Deku’s our only other reference point for “bullied kid,” and whatever one might think about the story’s development of Bakugou’s mentality, it’s been made clear in retrospect that there was a lot more too that than just the matter of Deku’s quirklessness. I’d love to know how Spinner’s bullying looked in comparison (not least because of some of the theories about Spinner and Deku needing to come to some kind of accord to free Shigaraki from AFO).
o Make the Villa (both here and during the War Arc) look more realistic. By which I mean, I know Horikoshi is capable of drawing interesting and lived-in interior spaces--he has an entire chapter dedicated to it in the 1-A dorm room contest, after all--but he normally doesn’t bother much with it. At UA, it’s not too distracting, because we know good and well that that whole building is probably maintained by Cementoss anyway. Ditto places like Tartarus (intentionally, dehumanizingly barren) or the League’s post-Kamino hideouts (abandoned homes and industrial spaces). But the Villa?
For heaven’s sake, it’s called a mountain villa. It has a clear reception desk on the ground floor; it’s obviously some sort of high-end hotel, if not an outright resort or rentable retreat lodge. Speaking as someone who’s worked in one, places like that don’t look as fuckin’ bare as the rooms we see there always seem to. For fanfic purposes, I’m happy to go on telling myself that e.g. the pool and the bar and the restaurant(s) and the gym are in the building Cementoss doesn’t tear in half, but it’d be nice if the anime could class the whole place up a little, maybe put some real furniture and decor in the rooms that are in use. (Yes, I know this is a ridiculous nitpick.)
o This is less a change and more a correction, but for fuck’s sake, BONES, give us white-haired Shigaraki. The climax of Deika is a solid time for it, given that it’s obvious in the manga that Shigaraki’s hair gets paler in Deika--you can see it in the way Horikoshi inks it (which is to say, the way he stops inking it)! I think if we ever get white-haired Shigaraki in the anime, a somewhat better time as far as narrative justification goes would be when Shigaraki gets out of the tube in the War Arc; you could easily justify it as a side-effect of the surgery. Still, I’d rather see it here. I want white-haired Shigaraki, gleaming and brilliant through the scattering ash in that crater, a veritable angel of sacred destruction.
Honestly, more than anything, the crater sequence is the one I hope I love. It’s probably my favorite single moment in the entire manga, as Shigaraki wins over Re-Destro, Spinner and Gigantomachia in the same moment, and finally comes into his own. If they can at least nail that, I’ll consider myself pretty satisfied.
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