#in my head dabi is doing a recon mission and hawks has her own thing goin on but is pestering her hot gf on the phone ok thanks

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happy fem dabihawks friday

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Chapter 263 Discussion

Hello, it is I back from my cave to finally get back into fandom discussion.

Sadly, I don't have too much to offer this time around except speculation, and most of it is dependent on assumptions and observations of the Heroes Rising movie, so if you haven't seen it this is unfortunately your stop, but when you do eventually see it go on ahead and send me an ask geeking out about it because almost everyone I've heard agrees if nothing else that it was hype and worth the price of admission!

All right, warning and disclaimer out of the way, let me lay the groundwork for how this post will go.

1. If you didn't know, the plot for Heroes Rising is a scrapped concept for the end of the series. Because it was scrapped it can't really be used to accurately predict how Horikoshi actually intends to end the story, but finding common plot lines and elements from what we're seeing now in the manga to the events in the movie might give us a clue to which lines he dropped and which he decided to keep. In the end it's a hunch, but it's a more informed guess than not having the clues.

2. I believe we're in the end stages of the story - or at least what is the beginning of the story in the same way Naruto was a precursor to Naruto Shippuden. Because of that, I don't feel like trying to predict things very far ahead and prefer to try to stick to interpretations of what's immediately going on since I feel we’ll get our answers fairly quickly anyway. I've made some lofty ideas of where the series is going before, but those are really better as overarching themes and end points for certain characters than necessarily an accurate prediction of events.

With that, let's jump into it.

The MLA/PLF is a front for the LOV

So to start, something I really wanted to address in the last chapter was the last page:

A lot of people are amazed Hawks seemed to go so deep into their ranks without ever raising suspicion, but I think this clarified, if not confirmed, a couple of points I've been hanging onto for a while.

The LOV never cared about these folks - that much has kind of been obvious from the get-go. They just threw themselves at Shiguraki as the second coming of Christ and offered him a free army. "...I mean, twist my arm, why don'tcha?" There were enough commonalities between the groups to seem like an obvious fit, but the League has always had different plans. Now, not only do they have a disposable army to fight the heroes and die for them but were a perfect opportunity to throw off the heroes to their main objective and draw out all the heroes at once in a fight to the death - all without practically lifting a finger. Shiguraki is a strategist, and a resource not utilized to the best of its potential is wasted even if using it well uses it up completely. These aren't their people, and they signed up for this fight to begin with. It would have made less sense to not effectively double-cross them like this.

I haven't been looking much for discussion regarding the movie, but a notable thing that immediately stood out to me when I saw it was the fact that Shiguraki was individually watching Hawks, and Hawks specifically - all alone and seemingly completely unprompted. A particularly overpowered aspect of Twice's quirk is the fact his doubles are SO close to the same thing they're in every way, down to the way they think and their core motivations, that they’re indistinguishable from the real thing, even to the original and doubles themselves. They really are perfect stand-ins for the actual people they copy. It's 100% possible that real Shiguraki could be powering up under the doctor's care, and - because he's not an idiot to leave himself completely vulnerable and out of control when he doesn't need to be - literally be running the show through a double, behind the scenes, in secret the entire time without the Heroes' or the MLA/PLF's knowledge. This also means that him personally spying on Hawks while he thinks Shiguraki has been out of commission is completely plausible as well.

These two frames have been circulating for good reason. While the army and organization honest-to-god have no idea what's going on, the OG League members seem to be taking it more like a stage cue - particularly with Dabi's obvious movement against the flow of the crowd rushing to battle. This very much feels like something they've planned for; but only them and their squad. They’re known to hold grudges against those that use them and abuse/hurt their core members, but none of that protective attitude has been directed towards this larger organization/movement.

"So what's got you so convinced about parallels to the movie? That's the only one you've brought up."

This was the first thing that stood out to me this chapter as I was reading through it fresh. In the climax of the movie each member of class 1-A had to strategically use their abilities to survive against Nine and his band. One of the abilities they had to counter was calling lightning down from the sky to which they used Kaminari as a lightning rod. Though it was played up for laughs a bit in the movie, it was still very much a life-saving tactic in the moment, and the concept clearly carried over into the final product.

A point of speculation we’ll be able to verify soon is a hunch I have that Tokoyami and Toga will clash one-on-one seeing as he’s also in the front-runner group. Slice very much felt like an easy stand-in for Toga, given the knowledge that those events are modified from the original ending concept, and it was thanks to Tokoyami losing control of Dark Shadow that he was able to beat her in the end. We’ll find out in a couple of weeks, and if it proves right I’ll be pulling more common threads to see if we can’t anticipate what’s going to happen next.

So, yup!

That's it!

Nothing left to see or talk about until next week!

*sigh........*

Ok.

Let's go over what we know for sure:

That’s clearly intent to kill in Hawks’ eyes: a lot of fans are aware of the practice of falconry, which is basically the same thing as a hunting dog but with a trained bird of prey instead; and it’s the image hammered into our heads about the way the Commission has treated Hawks and the way he personally deals with threats. Hawks considers Twice the single, greatest tool the League has in their belt - able to exponentially create duplicates and reinforcements which would turn a strategy-based battle into one of attrition, and the heroes would lose the latter easily. He clearly hasn’t killed Twice yet, and we don’t know why, but if he has to he’s prepared to do so without hesitation or remorse. This is a fight the Heroes CANNOT lose.

Hawks is done: This is more inference, but bear in mind he’s been on this case long before the Commission told him to infiltrate the League. He’s been at this in some capacity for almost a year and neck deep in recon as an undercover agent for months. He’s been walking on eggshells, keeping his eyes and ears open, relaying information, keeping up appearances on both sides, and watching the threat grow from a surprisingly capable group of guerrilla terrorists into an army capable of bringing all of Japan to its knees in a matter of days, tops. The stakes are too high, personally and otherwise, to not take this threat seriously.

This is Twice’s POV: Literally everything he thought he knew about this guy he considered his friend has been turned upside down. That whiteboard that was a catalyst for their friendship is thrown aside (symbolically along with all the memories and time they spent together), and here Jin is: knocked on his back, no longer looking into the friendly gaze of a great guy out to help a friend, but the murderous glare of a wild animal - a monster, even - having no idea how he got to this point and how fast it’s unraveling before his eyes. What we’re watching now could have happened in literally under two seconds. Hawks is that fast, and he’s been waiting for this to happen.

Considering the sudden tonal whiplash their relationship has just gone through - and the fact that it’s framed through Twice’s perspective, not Hawks’ - I don’t think we can make too many solid predictions about what’s going to happen right now. Hawks has been shown to be unpredictable to anyone but himself. When we’re not hearing his own internal monologue or seeing things directly from his point of view, everything we “learn” about him from a scene has to be taken with a grain of salt. He’s guarded, private, and keeps others at arms length so he can anticipate and respond to get the results he wants. It’s not just his fighting style, it’s his survival mechanism.

Twice himself is a grab bag of surprises, and being the heart of the League may yet find a way to appeal to his humanity, question his motives/actions, or any number of ways to bring him down to earth again; but there’s an equal opportunity that Hawks is beyond that at this point. His mission is almost done, and if he wavers now he could literally end up dead in a heartbeat. There are a lot of feathers trained on Twice, but not enough to bring his wings all the way down to stubs like we saw with High End. He’s set to fight not just Twice, but everyone in that compound.

In other words, this might be the point we finally see Hawks truly go apeshit, and I don’t think it’ll be a pretty sight to see. We’ll just have to wait and see where this leads from here.