#murderer from spinner's end

[dolche-tejada]

You know, I think this ending would have been slightly less of a fucking disappointment if the heroes hadn't been so unfairly favored by Horikoshi compared to the villains. I mean, seriously

Deku destroys every bone in his body multiple times throughout the story and is warned that if he continues, he'll permanently lose the use of his limbs ? Everything's fine, his body's just got used to being reduced to a bloody pulp somehow so there's no consequences for him. In fact even when he literally loses his arms to Shigaraki, he gets them back two minutes later thanks to Eri because guess what ? Her horn still works even when cut off from her body. How convenient.

Gran Torino gets his ribcage obliterated by Shigaraki ? Don't worry guys, he'll survive that despite his old age and injuries, and this to have no particular role in the plot afterwards.

Bakugo dies heroically trying to buy time before Deku arrives ? Lmao, did you really believe it ?? No of course not, Edgeshot just uses his last-minute Deus Ex Machina to save his life at the cost of his own and- Oops nope he's fine too, my bad !

Hawks murders a criminal fleeing for his life in cold-blood ? The best Hori has to offer is him completely free and in charge of the HSPC.

And no, losing his quirk isn't a real consequence for him because not only it literally played a major part in saving the world with Vestige!Hawks raising an insurrection among AFO's quirks, but also because his quirk has always been the element through which people exploited him.

Endeavor abused his family for years and completely destroyed his eldest son ? No jail time and no media backlash for that, the only blame he received was due to the heroes' failure to stop the League during the Raid Arc.

And don't even get me started on this bs about facing hell or whatever for what he's done : He's literally free and wealthy ; he have Rei, Fuyumi, Shoto, his sidekicks and Hawks on his side ; and all the difficulties he's apparently going to suffer are off-screened.

Deku had to sacrifice OFA and his future hero career to save the world ? Guess what, Bakugo invested all his time and money to make him an Iron-Man suit and now he can still be a hero with everyone else.

There are plenty more examples of this but I think you get the idea. Now let's take a look at the villains' ending :

Toya is now a piece of charcoal kept artificially alive for the few years he has left, unable to move a finger, and whose few minutes a day during which he can stay awake will be spent talking to his father who abused him as a child.

Toga, a literal teenager, killed herself to save Ochako and because she knew it's still better than rotting at Tartarus her whole life.

And not only did she die but she did by bleding to death. Let me repeat for those who have trouble grasping what I've just said : In a manga where the heroes can survive having their heart blown to bits, being impaled Kakyoin-style or smashed against buildings like a fly on a windshield, one of the main antagonists died of a fucking hemorrhage…

As for Shigaraki, after learning that his very birth and all the tragedies of his life have been orchestrated by AFO, after all this development and narrative promises about him being saved in the end... Deku just kills him.

Because despite all his speeches about saving him, it seems like the best he could do was beating him both physically and mentally until he crumbles to dust…

Compress on his side is apparently locked up for life and kept alive by machines too.

A begging Kurogiri tried in a desperate attempt to save Shigaraki, only to be unceremoniously blown up by Bakugo and dying off-screen without anyone giving a shit, including Aizawa and Mic.

And Spinner will now spend the rest of his life struggling with the extra quirks inside him that affect his body and mind, while having to cope with the thought that his boyfriend best friend and companions have either died alone or are locked away for life in horrifying circumstances.

Clearly not the same as with the heroes...

Now don't get me wrong, even if they suffered just as much from the consequences of their actions or the plot as the League, this ending would still be a disaster in terms of writing but AT LEAST it wouldn't reek that much of hypocrisy.

[atlasofoverthinking]

The Problem with the League of Villains

this is just me ranting after reading many people say that the lov deserved a better ending (i agree with them don't worry). most of that stuff has already been said but i'm bored and need something to write

so why is everyone disappointed?

by definition, an antagonist is someone that goes against the main character(s) and a villain is someone who does immoral and/or illegal things (wow, shocking)

so by definition, the league of villains is aptly named. shigaraki and dabi are mass murderers, toga is a killer too, and even if the others are 'less dangerous' they're all guilty of terorism and kidnapping a teenager.

not nice, right? then why would anyone would want them to have a good ending?

long story short: horikoshi made the league too sympathetic and relatable

when horikoshi has decided to make them funny, he's decided to make them likeable. that's not enough though. you can find a fictional villain funny and not root for them (for some reason the examples that comes to my mind are the disney villains. captain hook is hilarious but no one wants him to win)

the cause of everyone's disappointment is the relatable part. everyone in the league has gone through stuff viewers can relate. touya, shigaraki and toga have been abused; twice has mental health issues (and stuggling to get a job is relatable too lmao); spinner has been discriminated against... you get the idea

and even without knowing their backstory, most of the league's fights can be considered noble: they want to change society and make the world a better place. to take a more precise example, the league kidnapped bakugou because they thought he had gone through similar struggle as them

(this is mr compress talking in chapter 85) as far as i've seen, most of the fandom either think bakugou being chained and muzzled at the end of the sport festival was just comic relief or agree that it was fucked up

so yeah, you can't put a group of people rejected by society, who just want a better world and expect people to not like them

and that's why their ending is disappointing (the rest contains heavy spoilers of the last few chapters of mha)

they're all either in jail or six feet underground. we rationally could understand it, they're all criminals/villains so of course they wouldn't get a happy ending and face consequences for their actions. the only one who could have gotten away with it is shigaraki because of all the grooming/brainwashing he's gone through and maybe toga because she's a child

but if you relate to a character, you want them to get a happy ending. of course fans would want dabi to be at peace, but instead he's forced to spend his last moments being stared at by his abuser). of course fans would want shigaraki to be free from afo (but instead his only freedom was death). of course fans would want toga to be understood and cared for (but she never had that opportunity)

that's not very 'save to win' out of you horikoshi

maybe it's just a shortcut made by the fandom, but the league are seen more as victims of abuse than actual criminals. i mean, what's more important in dabi's story? the fact that he burned himself alive after overworking himself to get his abusive father's attention, or the fact that he's burned people alive? probably both, but there's more focus on the first element.

and obviously we would want abuse victims to get a happy ending

basically, their ending isn't coherent with what we've seen of them, and that's why people are disappointed

btw, the same logic applies to stain. some fans agree with stain's reasoning bc he's fighting against corruption. of course, his logic is stupid and he's delusional but he's introduced not long after we've discovered shouto's past. you can't say "one of the most popular heroes is abusing + all he wants is to get n°1 to satisfy his own ego" and then follow with "see that guy fighting against corruption? he's bad, don't do that"

the clever way to make sure no one would agree with stain would have been to make the heroes fight against injustice with good methods. i live for the fanfics in which izuku takes down the hpsc

okay i'm done ranting thanks for reading

[beware-thecrow]

I fucking hate BNHA The last panel about "granma is here" in fact further proves my point on another post of how empty and nonsensical BNHA became in the last arc because AfO wanting Tomura from the very beginning made impossible for him to be saved anyway, which means all his beef with the heroes became unjustified and his speech about violence and heroes and villains held no importance in the end. Why?

Because you cannot have a character built over the premise that society was so corrupt and selfish that put a little boy in the bad bad villain's reach for 5 arcs, to then say "oh, wait. He was fucked anyway because the bad bad guy was behind everything all along"

A bad bad guy not even all might in his prime could defeat, so it doesn't matter if people would or wouldn't help others. "It's all bad bad guy's fault anyway and he's practically immortal." Perfect, now we know granma didn't stand a chance against AfO, he planned this.

The whole idea of a society that relies on heroes too much instead of everyone doing their part from kindness falls like a house of cards if you have an evil so corrupt that none of said kindness will mean a thing. The moment Horikoshi went from "Tomura was found by AfO" to "Tomura was planned by AfO" the core theme of his series crumbled down. The league as a device lost its meaning, the characters that composed it became unjustified because whatever motivation they had was in fact a manipulation from the greater evil. And this applies to everyone.

What's the point in Toga and Twice calling out the lack of help for people with mental illness and problematic quirks if the message still is "If you do bad things out of despair no one will help you and you'll get killed." And yes, Toga died loved, Toga wanted to be loved, but she didn't wanted to die?? She was literally an abandoned child who found a family and ended up dying giving blood to the same girl she stabbed. And yeah, it's kinda poetic she died giving blood instead of taking it, but what was the point if she doesn't get to know she's loved? Further more, are we really to believe Ochako loved Toga? A girl she literally didn't know. Sorry, but once I got lost in a mall and a police officer helped me find my mom, that doesn't mean the officer loved me. And yeah, Ochako tried her best to be a good hero, but it's not about what the characters do, it's what the story tells you it happens with what they do. The story just told you the ill and abandoned die in the end before anyone helps them. And they die hunted by the police. What's the point of Touya as a whole? oh, wait. I know, it must be very awful for Endeavor to be such a bad person, his child ended up incapacitated. Very hard on Endeavor. Fuck Dabi being turned into a piece of charcoal, IT'S HARD ON HIS DAD.

What's the point in Spinner pointing out discrimination and people following him if in the end we got that he should have stayed in his lane, in his room, friendless because he only went out to be seen by someone who accepted him, just to have that person tortured in front of him before he was killed. And for what? For a teen to tell him "Yo, bro. I punched your bestie to death, make a comic about it. Btw you'll be staying in jail forever. So so sorry for you guys." Proving once again, murder is okay if you are on the right side of the story. No matter how much compassion, Tomura showed Spinner, or how much he suffered through life. Heroes had the right to kill him, and there was nothing Spinner (who legit loved his friend) could do about it because AfO had taken over. Again, another good character turned pointless, with a pointless point of view, with a pointless conclusion because he can tell the story of Tomura Shigaraki all he wants FROM JAIL, but under the public eye Tomura will go down as an insane mass murderer either way since looking at him in any other light would inevitably make a target of Izuku for killing him and that won't happen. You cannot have "the best hero ever" and "he killed this dude that was kinda right" in the same sentence. It doesn't make sense. Not to mention his case against discrimination went nowhere since everyone who followed him became a villain and the only person who actually makes a point about discrimination ends up being Deku on another, totally different chapter that had nothing to do with Spinner. And...he's a hero so he can say whatever he wants, we go back to "questioning bad, unless a hero says it" and "people are really that horrible in BNHA universe".

Tomura's case it's even more fucked because even when he said he didn't want a future, every single wish he had fell flat. His hatred for not being saved as a child proved to be out of anyone's control, his desire to destroy society didn't land because nothing really changed. There are still schools for child soldiers, and people are still not questioning the violence heroes use to keep the status quo, and certainly no one is wondering how is that a couple of heroes were able to kill a couple of villains (because so far Hawks still has a job). His friends ended up dead or locked away, and the child in him that begged to be saved ended up...being not. In the end, we got a suffering festival for Tomura, from his granma being pushed to drop her kid, his dad being tricked, his parents getting killed in front of him, Mon-chan and Hana's memory squeezed dry and young Tenko asking for help while Tomura was assaulted by his creepy guardian for 200 chapters straight just to tell us that Deku at sixteen was a great hero for putting a twenty one-year-old dissociated guy out of his misery like a euthanized dog. And for what? To finish a guy who was infatuated with his dead brother AND THAT COULD HAVE BEEN EXECUTED IN JAIL LIKE...300 CHAPTERS AGO, since the manga already made the point that villains can be executed with little repercussion, and it can be justified if said villain it's a threat. Then...why was AfO alive to begin with? Oh, I guess this is something we can trust to a 16 year old instead of... the government or whatever. And yeah, these are tragic figures, they certainly are, but you can hardly claim that they achieved anything in the end because the first premise of the league, why it was formed and why they joined was

To live as we want/are. And now they are dead, or locked away, or bedridden crispy for something that was planted by someone else from the very beginning. And what they believed didn't change anything in the end because it's not like the public saw them do something meaningful but, again, they are being told what to believe, by whom? BY THE HEROES. Are we really arguing that Iguchi's comic will change society? ARE WE FOR REAL????? Have you ever read the story of Jesus Christ? he died for our sins by Marvel. And on top of that as the last nail in the coffin to prove that NOTHING changed, Hawks really said rebranding + target audience =📈���🏼 StOnKS✨ I wish I was joking.

[haine-kleine]

after sitting with my thoughts about the epilogue for some time, I think the thing that broke the story had started right after Dabi's dance. said thing is LOV' utterly out of character treatment of each other and Shigaraki specifically.

them just standing there and passively observing the scene makes absolutely zero sense, if you use anything from their previously established relationships within the organisation for reference. especially with All for One's creepy comments. Spinner even points out shortly before this chapter that AFO!Shigaraki seems nothing like his normal self and this person is not the one he had chosen to follow.

and yes, Spinner does approach screaming Shigaraki and tries to help him, and his concern later leads him to seeing Shigaraki's mutated form in the cave, and on its own this development for Spinner is in line with his character and all around fine. pretty reminiscent of Toga and Twice, too.

(except Spinner is not allowed to really help Shigaraki in any way, unlike Toga was allowed to help Twice, and this entire thing between Shigaraki and Spinner only ends with Spinner's regrets and survivor's guilt instead of anything good or meaningful that isn't meaningless angst porn)

it isn't Spinner approaching Shigaraki that is the issue, it's the other's complete lack of action or even reaction besides appearing mildly disturbed. this is simply out of character for all of them, just judging by Twice's example who had similar breakdowns and wasn't plainly ignored by the others until his fit stops. this reaction makes even less sense, when you take into account the current state of the League. Twice had just been murdered by Hawks, the double agent who had infiltrated the League via Dabi, and Mister Compress had just sacrificed himself to give the League a chance for escape, and was sent to Tartarus immediately after his condition was no longer life threatening. Kurogiri is also being held captive by the heroes. there are only four of them left, with two dead and two captured. and none of them even mention the dead or the captured outside of the context of Kurogiri and his quirk.

this straight out makes no sense if you look back to the Overhaul arc and remember how far Shigaraki and the rest of them were willing to go to avenge Magne's death and Mr Compress' destroyed arm. this was important.

the event had motivated Shigaraki to be a better leader, because he had realized these people depend on him, and he won't let them be hurt under his protection. it had started the seed of self-doubt in Jin which would eventually grow to the desperation that allowed him to overcome the mental block against his quirk in the MVA arc, because he wanted to do everything he possibly could to help the League. it allowed him to make his clones despite the crippling trauma, because he saw Toga's hurt, bleeding body, and he didn't want her to die.

even fucking Giran, a broker whose very profession requires him to care about himself and his own well-being first and foremost, had sacrificed all of his fingers to prevent Redestro from getting his hands on the League. because he wants to protect them, to save them. and then we never actually see his mutilated hands or hear anything from him ever again.

and when Twice actually dies? all we get in response to that are two upset faces from Dabi and Toga's fury. that's it.

i really want to stress how out of character this barely-present reaction is, because Magne's example is right there and when Overhaul had killed her, the League knew each other for no longer than a month. this League has been together for at least half a year, had been through thick and thin together, had spent months on the run, homeless, having no one but each other to rely on, has defeated the Meta Liberation Army, quite literally, with the power of their friendship. they all cared enough about each other and Shigaraki specifically to stay with him during those months they had to fight Gigantomachia with barely any breaks for rest, still homeless, barely scraping by. it was imperative that they all survive through this together, especially for Shigaraki, who had went on this quest of getting stronger at least partly so that he would become a more reliable protector for the League. and when Twice falls victim to the hero who had murdered him in cold blood, because no one except for Dabi was there to save him, Shigaraki doesn't even get to react to Twice's death, and possibly never even learns about the fact.

on topic of Dabi, his reaction being exactly two frames of sad expressions and including the footage of Twice's murder into his broadcast, and ending immediately after that, also makes no sense. Dabi is someone who holds himself accountable and despite his declarations, cares about the League, it's the very reason he was keeping Hawks from the League and sprinted to Twice as soon as he realized Hawks' intentions with him, to protect him. Dabi's unsuccessful attempt to save Twice is another iteration of Overhaul, a combination of Shigaraki and Twice's roles in the tragedy. but unlike Shigaraki, who had steeled himself into taking care of his subordinates and becoming a responsible and strong leader, or Twice who had never forgotten about his role in the incident, Dabi just somehow forgets about the entire thing as soon as the first war is over. Toga is the one whom the narrative allows to actively react to Twice's death and express her grief. it makes sense that her reaction would be the strongest, as she was the closest with Twice, but why are two LOV members no longer allowed to care about the same incident at the same time? why aren't they allowed to protect each other anymore, when Giran, who is not even in the League, had made that sacrifice for them?

These are pretty small things, but it's these instances of Toga and Dabi preventing Machia from being injected with the sedative, protecting the League that are sorely missing in the second war.

and the biggest act of devotion and protection to the League, which was the last time we saw anything like this for them, Mister Compress' last moments with the League.

Mutilating his own body just to buy them five seconds to possibly escape. Because he loved the League, because he wanted all of them to be happy and achieve their dreams, to be free, and to live.

and in return for the favour, not only do they not come back for him like they did for Kurogiri (because his quirk is important for the plot, while Compress' isn't), but none of them mention Compress ever again. same with Twice (with the exception of Toga), same with Magne. from this point onwards, none of them are allowed by the plot to even care about the League of Villains. the interpersonal relationships between two individuals still shine through, occasionally, like Spinner's devotion to Shigaraki (and him alone), Dabi and Toga's pyromaniac trauma lane visit to her house and him giving her Twice's blood, Kurogiri reaching out to Shigaraki in the very end. but what about the League? ahd what about the dead members of the League, or Mister Compress?

somehow, at the point of the final war it boils down to the generalized conflict of heroes vs villains and the morality gymnastics involved in the concept. on its own, this would have been an okay development, if the examples the story was using to prove its point weren't people who had become very close friends and who had lost four people to this war against the heroes.

if the individual conflicts, like Toga's desperation to be acknowledged as human being deserving of affection, Dabi's familial abuse trauma and Shigaraki's lifelong manipulation by All for One not giving him any chance to be saved at all, were the finishing line of the villains' story development, why join them within the League at all? LOV is a separate concept functioning as a collective uniting all these villains, giving them a place to belong and people who give a fuck whether they live or die. except not anymore, because for some reason after the first war this concept is scratched completely.

so why not make them mere acquaintances who sometimes collaborate to bother the heroes together, if the bond between them got in the way of the story and wasn't the point of the story? why prove the depth of their bond with the Overhaul and My Villain Academia arcs? why make Shigaraki develop relationships and a sense of responsibility for these people at all, if in the very end his desire to save these people is denied by the author himself?

the previous arcs have spent a great deal of effort establishing that the villains are human too. they have human feelings, human desires and human relationships. so why is it that in the final arc their ability to experience human emotions towards each other is turned on and off manually by the author? at the very end even the author stops pretending like anything happening to the villains is evaluated on the scale of human experiences (unlike the heroes, whose injuries and deaths are talked about and mourned in great detail) and Kurogiri and Shigaraki are wiped out like plot inconveniences rather than important and well written characters.

honestly? it's ironically meta that the story ended up proving the very point it has spent 400 chapters arguing against.

[deusvervewrites]

I’ve been working my way through your stories and your lore posts. I’m also finally catching up to the end of the MHA manga. My thoughts on the endings of various character arcs is something you might vibe with. Sometimes, mercy to the guilty becomes cruelty to the innocent. It’s great writing when the villains are people you can sympathize with, but it’s weird that the heroes are this focused on saving the villains that are causing so much death and destruction. Your thoughts?

The entire point of My Hero Academia is saving people.

From the first page of the first chapter until now that has never changed.

I've seen people criticizing Midoriya for not going out onto the battlefield to personally and deliberately murder Shgiaraki and I wonder if they're the same people who think Aang should have killed Ozai.

The idea of mercy to the guilty leads to cruelty to the innocent is what caused the entire plot. Had the people at the Dawn of Quirks not immediately started murdering children for being born "wrong", All For One wouldn't have had to cope by doubling down on their propaganda to justify his own existence to himself. But those people were "guilty" of being born wrong, and if they showed mercy to them, then what? What if those people turned on them? No, no. Better to not take that chance.

If Kotaro had forgiven his mother, Shigaraki would never have happened.

If the Togas had accepted their daughter, Himiko would never have become a murderer.

Spinner never left the house because he was seen as "guilty" of the sin of being a mutant. People were massacred for that sin.

Civilians nearly murdered Ippan Josei, a civilian herself, because they believed that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to themselves.

The greatest flaw of the Hero System is that it dehumanized everyone under it. The Heroes were flawless paragons who could never live up to their own hype and swiftly abandoned for failing. The Villains were deemed to be inherently bad and punished for it.

Endeavor was allowed to abuse his wife and all four children and faced no repercussions. Because he's a Hero and Heroes are good. Touya wasn't born correctly enough and was punished over a one-sided feud a generation before him.

Nobody was seen as human. That's literally the point of the final battle. Midoriya, Uraraka, Todoroki, they all had to recognize the humanity of the people they were fighting and remind them of it.

The thesis of My Hero Academia, of every single arc of My Hero Academia, is that Heroes are not "good" and Villains are not "evil." That failing to recognize that fact leads to dark places, like a government that doesn't bat an eye at murdering its own citizens to maintain power. Laws that strip you of your own bodily autonomy.

During his battle against All For One at Kamino, All Might states the the reason Heroes never lose is because they have people to save. The chapter titled Bakugou Katsuki: Rising, his origin chapter, is about 300 chapters into the manga and the first time he saves someone.

All For One and the HPSC are both cruel relics of the past doing their best to manipulate their way to power, viewing everyone in their way as disposable pawns. They're the same. You could even make an argument that the laws against Quirk use means the HPSC is literally giving and taking away Quirks via licenses. And they both completely crumble in large part because of their refusal to see people when it is so much easier to see the enemy.

My Hero Academia is a story about extending your hand to those in need.

[goosegooserevolution]

spinneraki fic where they become roommates and it sparks the most insane "Am I the Asshole?" reddit story hero society has ever seen.

It starts with Kurogiri being captured before the canon story starts and AFO sends Shigaraki to a safe house out in the boonies. Giran owns the safe house, and since he never thought it would be used he rented it out to one of the locals, Spinner.

Shigaraki enters, already pissed, and there's just some guy there.

Spinner is innocently playing GTA when a villain breaks into his house and starts screaming about how he shouldn't be there. He takes to the internet asking for advice, and if he's the asshole for staying in the villain's house unknowingly. He is met with a myriad of responses, most of which consisting of "what the fuck dude call the police", but Spinner ignores these sane responses because "actually i think hes pretty cool for being a terrorist."

Shigaraki and Spinner slowly learn how to live with each other, and the original reddit post is given plenty of updates. People especially freak out when Spinner reveals that Shigaraki has been attacking him, but Spinner theorizes that "he's testing my strength and skill set". This theory ends up having merit when Spinner gets the drop on Shigaraki, and he says he's proud of Spinner.

So, they're sort of friends?

Spinner notices Shigaraki is a bit sheltered and hasn't experienced tons of the outside world. Spinner takes him out to arcades, festivals, all sorts of things with the intention of broadening his sort-of-friend's horizons, but any outsider would think they're on a date.

While spinneraki is learning how to tolerate each other, Kurogiri was spilling AFO's secrets. His DNA was matched with Shirakumo's, and Eraserhead and Present Mic have stuck by his side as he's been deprogrammed. The result of this is AFO flailing around trying to keep his villain organization together but failing miserably. He's been rather sparse with keeping in touch with Shigaraki, so Shigaraki has unlocked free thinking.

This comes to a head when Shigaraki is playing Minecraft and has a moral crisis over killing a baby sheep. He ends up naming the sheep "Red Pill" and firmly decides that murder is bad, actually.

Spinneraki share their first kiss when Spinner wins Shigaraki a stuffed Minecraft sheep from a claw machine. Spinner's now large reddit fanbase goes insane over the update.

[vaguelyaperson]

as much as i understand shigaraki's death, narratively speaking, i'm also so goddamn tired of society needing martyrs.

what made me fall in love with shigaraki is that he's an excellent villain. all his character development built towards him becoming a more competent, driven, effective villain. he became an incredible symbol of fear just as deku became an incredible symbol of peace. this is who he was, in entirety. there is nothing else shigaraki could be.

when shigaraki told izuku, in his final moments, to pass on the message to spinner that "shigaraki fought to destroy until the very end," it really emphasized how it would have dishonored him to be vegeta'd, as it were.

shigaraki made it his mission to tear down hero society. this was his noble mission. this is what made him a hero to the league of villains. because he saw the systemic evils, he saw the evils that hurt his friends, and sought to destroy it all.

there's something to be said about trying to change someone who doesn't want to change, but for shigaraki, it was more than just trying to rehabilitate him from mass murdering. because to him, and the league of villains, what he was doing WAS the right thing. to tell shigaraki not to destroy would be akin to telling deku not to save. "you may not understand, but that's what makes me the villain."

there was a binary choice here: either he'd be left free to complete his mission and destroy everything, or he'd be stopped, permanently.

Izuku, by reaching tenko's heart, but ultimately stopping shigaraki, was choosing the only third option he had: declaring that he would not let all of society be destroyed, but not without promising that he'd do everything he can to reform it here on out.

shigaraki destroys. deku saves.

that's it. that's the bnha narrative in its most basic foundation. horikoshi did not fail to tell that story.

I think what ultimately fucking sucks about this ending is that it's too realistic. society often DOES need a martyr - or often martyrs - to realize that they fucked up, that they let an evil persist too long. they need a shocking enough tragedy to point to and swear they'll never let it happen again. society needs to be rocked to its very core before people can be motivated to get their heads out of their asses and work together towards reforms.

and that in itself is an evil, that people can't see how much harm they're causing or condoning without some horrific tragedy.

i think we're all mad at horikoshi for failing to follow through on the story because we didn't WANT the realistic ending. we wanted the hopeful one. the against all odds one. we didn't want another story about society using the image of martyrs to get its shit together. because we already know that story. and we're so so so tired of it.

especially when we know it only leads to a temporary peace.

because people forget. they put in enough reforms to feel good, and then get comfortable and ignorant again. when does that cycle end? when can we finally notice the evil in time to PREVENT it? so that everyone, 'heroes and villains,' get a happy ending?

I think our anger with the bnha ending is good. we want different - not just in fiction, but in real life. we're willing to hope for different. we should hold onto hope and fight for different.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 428: Night of the Kouhai

Previously on BnHA: Well at least Spinner is sort of kind of doing okay??

Today on BnHA: I see the check that I sent to Horikoshi finally cleared.

okay first things first, you all know how it is right. I’ve never made a secret of my Kacchan bias on this blog. I promise you I did actually write a recap to 426 and 427 as well, but both of those chapters went HEAVY on the themes and drama and philosophical shit, and my reactions were kind of all over the place, and the Todoroki one in particular was like a million words wrong and it needs a shit ton of editing which I don’t know when I’ll have the spoons for

on the other hand however, a chapter like this which features class 2A cuteness and an absolutely unreasonable amount of Kacchan character development fanservice to hyperfixate on, takes absolutely no spoons at all and in fact actively recharges some of my spoons, so yeah. here we are

anyway so when we last left off Kacchan and Shouto were in terrible danger from a threat more terrifying than any they’ve ever encountered before. so I already knew this chapter was going to be great

“IIDA IS BIG AND STRONG AND AUTHORITATIVE, LET’S HIDE BEHIND HIM, HE WILL PROTECT US” everyone, I’m delighted to announce that the BnHA manga ending arc, despite having its ups and downs until this point, has officially been saved thanks to this panel right here. pack it up folks. this was officially a sweeping success. this panel brought Tomura back to life and teleported Touya’s mind back into his childhood self from roughly ten years ago time travel fix-it style. Horikoshi you beautiful bastard

Shouto trying to explain that he can handle them one on one but just not ALL TOGETHER IN THIS TERRIFYING SWARM LIKE THIS... buddy you don’t have to explain yourself sob. or is he trying to negotiate with them??

meanwhile Kacchan skips the negotiations entirely because he’s already assessed the situation and knows that the best way to handle this is to appeal to Iida Tenya’s boundless love of regulation and social order

y’all it’s killing me that this boy can handle being LITERALLY MURDERED by the greatest evil the world has ever known. but a group of admiring fifteen year old kouhais? no sir. that’s where he taps out

“but I thought Bakugou liked attention” yes well, you see, Shinsou, it’s kinda a “monkey’s paw curls” sort of thing

Kaminari with the BLACK SPEECH BUBBLE lmfao. FRIENDSHIP WITH KACCHAN HAS BEEN CANCELLED. NOW MIDORIYA IS MY BEST FRIEND

“well you see up until recently the ladies all thought Kacchan was a feral troll so they avoided him at all costs” wow Deku this man literally died for you and you just throw him under the bus with zero hesitation just like that

“SOURCE: ME, HIS CHILDHOOD FRIEND” just adding in his credentials in that little footnote there lest anyone question his authority on the subject

wait so is Shinsou surprised that girls used to not like Kacchan? or is he surprised that Kacchan and Deku were childhood friends? I can see how the latter might be surprising (oh Shinsou, sometimes I forget that you effectively just got here. we have so much to catch you up on. you will not BELIEVE how badly the two of these kids just want to hold hands all the time), but ngl, I’m rooting for the former just for the implications. “you’re seriously telling me a certified ten like him never had any girls interested in him?”

Horikoshi, hear me out, I know there are only two chapters left after this, and they’ve both already been written. but if you wanted to rewrite one of them at the last minute in order to add about a dozen more pages solely dedicated to Shinsou interrogating the rest of class 2A about Kacchan’s love life, out of what he insists is just innocent curiosity with no ulterior motives. well, I would not complain about that

anyway so yes Shinsou he is still single, for now. though I don’t really think it’s the girls you need to be worried about

meanwhile Mineta is all, “I just wanted to let all of you know MY opinion, which is that Bakugou isn’t morally upstanding enough for my delicate sensibilities.” yes you heard that right. Mineta of all people is weighing in on which personalities are deserving of being popular. that’s some audacity right there

A WILD DEKU FANBOY APPEARS???!

“IT GAVE ME COURAGE” omg yesssssss. jotting this down for essay material at some future point in time!! because THIS. this right here is the true “what it means to be a hero” in my opinion. a hero is someone who brings reassurance, yes. someone who makes people feel safe. but I think a hero should also be someone who makes people feel brave. someone who inspires other people to be heroic in turn. so yes, this, all of this, inject it into my veins. wtg Deku

having an official fanboy apparently broke Deku’s brain. hang in there bud. I know you’ve still got villain angst to work through, but try to enjoy this. you’re allowed to have nice things

IS MINETA STRANGLING KACCHAN BY HIS FUCKING TIE OMFG. THAT’S WHY HE NEVER USED TO WEAR THEM. also you’ve worn my patience down all the way now Mineta. get the fuck out of my blog

also Kacchan successfully beat the shit out of him with his ONE GOOD ARM so take that Mineta

also shoutout to this KiriBaku moment right here which feels like the first time we’ve had the two of them together in ages. good stuff

I’m LOVING this panel of Ochako staring at Deku all indecipherably, but ngl it’s also giving me just the slightest bit of anxiety, because does this mean we’re finally gonna get answers on what ultimately happened to Toga. it better not be sad. please don’t ruin my happy chapter with depressing things Horikoshi

“tell them no” OH MY GOD AIZAWA’S TURNING DOWN ALL THE INTERVIEW REQUESTS FOR HIS KIDS SO THEY CAN JUST BE KIDS AGAIN FOR A LITTLE WHILE nooooo what is this. “yeah but I’m prioritizing the kids who aren’t up for dishing to the media about all of their horrific trauma.” omfg. it’s been too long since my last Dadzawa feels. I wasn’t ready after all this time

you guys Izuku finally got a new hero costume that’s not in tatters after all this time. all it took was his old costume getting literally torn to shreds. and now he’s back to looking twelve years old again lol

JEANIST AND FATGUM REUNION?!?! RETURN OF KACCHAN’S THIRD DAD, AND A SECOND WACKY UNCLE TO BACK UP GOOD OLD MIC? GOD BLESS

FAT HIRED TAMAKI AS A SIDEKICK D’AWWWW

now they’re putting the kids to work. glorified janitorial duty. Deku you better not be using up any more of your embers on this sob

this motherfucker did not just liken my baby boy Kacchan to “distressed denim” omg. we have less than three chapters left and we’re spending our hard-earned time on this and I TRULY WOULD NOT CHANGE A SINGLE THING

“Kacchan on light duty” PROTECT HIM!!! don’t think I don’t see you over there too in the background, Aizawa. he’s surrounded by dads. they’re not letting him out of their sight again until he’s thirty

meanwhile he’s out here quietly sorting through trash with his one good hand without complaint and without even the barest hint of a gremlin face. with his half-and-half costume so we can’t see how fucked up his arm is. AND NO MORE MASK. we burned the mask. my thank you letters are in the mail, Horikoshi. and you too TomurAFO, this was your actual greatest contribution to society

ANOTHER DAD?!?!?!

dfjsdlfksldkfjl

“don’t worry, I’m gradually recovering” fsdfkslfkj r.i.p. my ability to take this man seriously ever again. do you think his voice is like the normal sexy Edgeshot ASMR voice except all high-pitched like a squirrel in a Disney princess movie. it is, isn’t it

he can make hands now. buddy you’re amazing. mvp of the entire fucking manga. my son literally owes you his life. please let me see you sitting Jeanist’s shoulder like a parrot before this wonderful glorious chapter ends

Kacchan’s little cheek scar is somehow both badass and adorable at the same time. I can’t stress how fucking much this chapter is just surrounding me with “protect him at all costs” feelings.

MORE SOFT KACCHAN FEELS ON THE NEXT PAGE BECAUSE HORIKOSHI WROTE THIS CHAPTER SPECIFICALLY FOR ME, THANK YOU SO MUCH

“are you... [ever] gonna go back to normal?” because if not he’s gonna cry himself to sleep every night for the rest of his life!! no big!! YOU WOULDN’T DO THAT TO HIM WOULD YOU EDGESHOT?

NO HE WOULD NOT. THANK YOU EDGESHOT. ONCE AGAIN YOU ARE A REAL ONE

...or wait. so does he mean he is indeed going to go back to normal eventually? or is it that he’s embracing this new form as an exciting new evolution, hence the “even further”? it kind of feels like the latter, ngl. especially with this weird sad little smile Kacchan gives in response... fuck me. what the hell am I gonna do when this series ends in two weeks. nobody can rip my soul to pieces as utterly and effortlessly as Horikoshi does, man

THEY MADE THE KIDS LUNCH AWWWW. though in fairness there’s something seriously messed up with Japan if any of these kids ever has to pay for another meal again for the REST OF THEIR LIVES. like come on

noooooo goddammit I’m tired of seeing Izuku quietly despairing over things that AREN’T HIS FAULT

I am glad to see this side of the civilian population, though. sure have come a long way since the low point that was the U.A. clown mob. I like this a whole lot better ngl

what’s up with this mysterious bus all of a sudden

OH MY GOD THEY’RE BACK LMAO. QUICKLY BAKUDADS. form a perimeter

they’re apologizing again dsfkjlskdfjlsfd THEY DIDN’T EVEN CONSIDER EVERYONE’S CIRCUMSTANCES!!! holy shit these first years are all collectively my new favorite character

Cementoss couldn’t take the pressure omfg. is this your first year as a homeroom teacher?? YOU CAN MAKE ANYTHING OUT OF CEMENT BUT CAN YOU MAKE YOURSELF A FREAKING SPINE, CEMENTOSS. I love him

Cementoss is telling them to go work in the corner so they don’t bother everyone else lmao. stuck them as far away from Kacchan as possible. good looking out, Cementoss. how many dads are we up to now?? five? six if we count Iida????

“hey so anyway what actually is up with these fucking kouhai though” I don’t know but my greatest regret is that this only became a thing three chapters before the series finale. where has this nonsense been all my life

“I don’t really understand” me neither fella but here in BnHA land we just roll with it

now we’re cutting back to Ochako who’s making yet another mysterious face that makes me think she knows perfectly well how much we all want to know whether Toga is alive or not, and she’s deliberately dragging it out just to fuck with us

okay I honestly can’t tell if Ochako is being fake cheerful or genuinely cheerful. but it’s definitely fake cheerful right??

aaaaand there’s a close up of Deku with FULL LIGHT back in his eyes like the clouds just parted for the first time in an age. accompanied by a THROB sound effect. ohhhh buddy. did my boy just have a hormone. is it finally that time

THEY’RE LETTING THE KIDS GO BACK HOME OMG. if they want. awwww. r.i.p. fanfic dorms. poor Shinsou missing out ONCE AGAIN

THEY DIDN’T CATCH THE CONCLUSION OF THE TOGACHAKO FIGHT ON FILM??! oh hell no. that settles it, she’s definitely still alive

tell me this cheeky motherfucker (Horikoshi, not Ochako lol) isn’t going to try and actually END THE SERIES with Toga’s fate still all ~mysterious~ and ~up in the air~ like I’m starting to get the sneaking suspicion that he’s doing

HORIKOSHI I SAID I DIDN’T WANT A DEPRESSING CHAPTER WHY ARE YOU HITTING ME WITH THESE FEELS AFTER I LET MY GUARD DOWN

YOU REALLY GAVE MY GIRL A SYMBOLIC FRODO STYLE ANGSTY STAB WOUND SO SHE CAN NEVER FORGET THE PAIN OF THAT DAY ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW WITH THIS

DEKU AHHHHHH

oh my god lol. I’m so curious what’s going to happen next week. my money for the record is on them bonding in a STRICTLY PLATONIC WAY over their respective dead(!??!?!) villains rather than a Romance Thing happening. but I wouldn’t be bothered if they do go there though just so long as we don’t get any timeskip epilogues where they’ve all got fucking kids and such now. don’t you do that to me Horikoshi Kouhei. I swear to god two chapters left omfg. this is really happening. the inexorable march of time etc. etc. ahhhhhhhhh

[sherylhooper]

Now that BNHA is ending, I can finally say.... I didn't care about LoV at all, lmao. I didn't care about Shigaraki (kinda pitied little Tenko, sure), didn't care about Toga at all, didn't care about Spinner, Dabi, Compress, etc. Mind you Overhaul was more interesting with his "end the quirks cuz they are desease (kinda turned out true from AFO and Yoichi's backstory)".

People calling mangaka bad writer just because most of the criminals died and faced consequncws of their action and weren't "integrated into the society" (as if they hadn't killed hundreds of people) to live their "sunshine and rainbow lives" and how dare mangaka only make it seem like only children deserve to be saved and not villains...

How delusional are you, people? They were fucking murderers! Young or not, abused or not, shamed or not, discarded or not, they killed people! Do ya'll know how many serial killers had horrible childhood and were abused as children? Should we make it okay for them to roam the street juat for that and discard all the crimes they did?

"Just because it's realistic, doesn't mean that mangaka wrote it well, they deserved better" 🙄

And I say death for most of them was mercy and deserved to rot in Tartaros, end of story.

(LOV lovers dni, cuz I see one word and I'm gonna block your delusional selves)

[bibibbon]

I made a huge mistake in going to the MHA subreddit. The braindead takes on 427 have me convinced I'm stuck in a parallel universe where we're reading a completely different story:

"It's great seeing Deku play therapist with the LOV, but all it seems to have done is make things worse!" A) Izuku shouldn't be having to play therapist to begin with, considering he's a 16 year old kid. B) most of the LOV don't see anything they did as wrong, so idk what the fuck Izuku can do about that. Also, WHY AREN'T PEOPLE HELPING IZUKU WITH HIS OWN GODDAMN FEELINGS?!

Apparently Bakugou killed Kurogiri, and there's absolutely ZERO reaction to it both in and out of universe. So of fucking course Izuku is a murderer, but not their precious Bakugou 🥱.

"I feel like Hori's really underrated as a writer!" Horikoshi doesn't know Show Don't Tell, how to actually develop characters, and how to craft actual stakes in the narrative from a hole in the ground. Also, MHA is one of the most popular mangas worldwide, so you're not even using underrated right.

"I feel like Horikoshi sees our discussions and then implements them in the story!" This I can kind of agree with, considering how much y'all hate Izuku and worship Bakugou. But on the other hand, I really doubt Horikoshi thinks the MHA subreddit is as important as you think it is.

"Bakugou's totally going to ask Izuku to start their own hero agency together at the end!" Jesus fucking Christ, just say you hate Izuku. How would that be a great ending for him? He not only has to see the source of his low self esteem and borderline suicidal feelings achieving the dream he'll now never have, but you want them to WORK together?!

@nutzgunray-lvt 👋

Well a lot of the time looking into Reddit is always a mistake unless you're asking a very niche question and you get an answer from 9 years ago or something.

I feel like a lot of people whether that be in universe or in fandom forget that izuku is a 16 year old child soldier. Izuku is more than a decade younger than a lot of the villains in the leauge. He is a child who has been exploited by the system and abused. We have seen in 425 izuku try and talk to someone but simply get brushed aside and while I don't blame shoto or ochako for doing that as they probably didn't mean it and are traumatised themselves it kinda of shows how much this has effected izuku. Also this doesn't help BECAUSE HORI GAVE US NO FLIPPING INTROPSECTION ON IZUKU'S BIT AGAIN!! Also Iam not sure if it's just me but Izuku's eye bags are heavily prominent in this chapter especially when he is talking to spinner.

The fandom especially the lov stans side of it love babayifying the actions of the leauge and hyper fixating on the humane soft side they may have while completely ignoring the horrible actions they commited. I talk about this better in one of @palesweetscherryblossom asks

I still can't believe that bk may of killed kurogiri. I don't even know when that happend and I checked the wiki but it says that kurogiris status is unconfirmed so I will be waiting until the last chapter to fully acknowledge if kurogiri is dead or not. However this brings up the point that the fandoms is being quite hypocritical if they're calling izuku a murder but not bakugo. They both killed people but for some reason it's izuku thats put into public light and bashing instead of all the other characters that have killed in the series including villains.

Yeah sometimes it feels like hori is looking at discussions of his series and implementing ideas but I think that goes more for his Japanese fans than us to be honest because after all they're his target demographic. I remember when I first joined Tumblr one of my earliest posts talked about how horikoshi's writing decisions were heavily influenced by his fans which may or may not be true.

At this point IAM convinced that izuku isn't getting a proper happy ending. Every time I think it can't get worse it does. Just by your comment of them starting an agency together haunts me just like the possibility that bk may become the number one hero

[scary-grace]

Enough to Go by (Chapter 14) - a Shigaraki x f!Reader fic

Your best friend vanished on the same night his family was murdered, and even though the world forgot about him, you never did. When a chance encounter brings you back into contact with Shimura Tenko, you'll do anything to make sure you don't lose him again. Keep his secrets? Sure. Aid the League of Villains? Of course. Sacrifice everything? You would - but as the battle between the League of Villains and hero society unfolds, it becomes clear that everything is far more than you or anyone else imagined it would be. (cross-posted to Ao3)

Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Chapter 14

When you agreed to be Tenko’s sidekick, playing for keeps this time, you made a promise to yourself that you wouldn’t involve anyone else. You broke that promise almost immediately, but Kazuo made you break it, so you decided it doesn’t count. Your friends who were killed in the Kamino incident weren’t dragged into it by you specifically, but you’re still part of the reason they died, so you have to count them, too. Mitsuru’s stayed out of it by having a girlfriend and being too busy to notice whatever the hell you’re up to, and Yoshimi’s got enough to worry about with her illness. You never wanted your friends to get caught up in this. You thought you’d hidden it well enough to keep Mitsuko and Ryuhei safe, too.

Except now Ryuhei and Mitsuko have met Tenko, and they’ve become the League’s first ever sleeper agents. Every time the two of them show up at your apartment, for any reason, League-related or otherwise, you can’t help feeling like you’ve failed them. You feel like you’ve failed Tenko, too.

Tenko’s not here today. He’s been spending at least some time at the new hideout Overhaul provided in order to keep up appearances, and with Kurogiri on another mission, it’s harder to move people back and forth safely. Toga and Twice are embedded with the yakuza full-time, which means you haven’t heard from them other than a request from Toga to go thrifting and find her a new coat. It’s cold in the Hassaikai base. Compress is usually at the new hideout, too – now that he’s got his prosthetic, your services are no longer needed. The people who spend the most time at your apartment now are Dabi and Spinner. And your friends from before.

Dabi and Spinner aren’t here today, but your friends are supposed to be here at any moment, and as soon as the thought crosses your mind, you hear the secret knock on the door – followed by an order to “let us in, you criminal”, which sort of defeats the purpose of a secret knock. You unlock the door and open it. They both push past you eagerly, only to pause, disappointed, when they realize your apartment is empty. “Come on,” Ryuhei complains. “I wanted to meet the rest of them.”

“Not even your weird boyfriend’s here? Lame,” Mitsuko agrees. “I wanted to give him this.”

She’s holding your high school yearbook. “Why?”

“So he can see all the bad haircuts he missed out on. This –” Mitsuko gestures at you “ – is the result of five years of my influence on your fashion sense. He owes me.”

“Yeah. I’ll be sure to let him know.” You’ll show Tenko the yearbook when hell freezes over. You shut the door. “Do you guys have questions about any of the stuff we talked about last time?”

“No. I don’t care that I’m not fighting,” Mitsuko says. “My quirk sucks for it.”

“Not if you fine-tuned it enough. If you could sense people’s intentions towards you really closely, you’d be able to tell their moves ahead of time,” Ryuhei says. “My quirk could be good for fighting, though. Is he sure he doesn’t want me fighting?”

“Yes,” you say. Tenko was impressed by Ryuhei’s quirk, but if Ryuhei gets captured, he’ll be a potential link to you, and Tenko’s still trying to keep you out of any suspicion. “For right now, anyway.”

“Fine,” Ryuhei says. He sits down on your couch with a thud, and Mitsuko grabs the armchair. You take the other end of the couch. “We got some stuff going. Inada’s been looking into the Hassaikai a little more –”

“We’ll get to that,” Mitsuko says. “Tell her our real idea.”

“Supply caches,” Ryuhei says. You blink. “Storage units aren’t that expensive. We could rent a bunch of different ones all around the country and fill them with stuff you guys need – like medical shit, food, supplies –”

“New information, if we’ve got any,” Mitsuko adds. “Phones aren’t safe. If they’re tracking where your signal is coming from, they’ll find it bouncing all over the place, and that’ll be suspicious from somebody who’s supposed to be in Yokohama.”

“Why wouldn’t I be in Yokohama?” you ask. Then it clicks. “Wait, you think I’m going to be with them?”

“Uh, yes.” Mitsuko and Ryuhei trade a glance. “At some point you have to, right? If you’re their medic, they need you to be with them wherever they are.”

“Kurogiri just comes to get me.”

“What if they need you and he’s not with them?” Ryuhei is giving you a weird look. “What happened with the one guy’s arm – it could have been bad if you weren’t there, right?”

It would have been. Nobody else in the League carries medical supplies, and without you to smooth the way at your clinic, Compress could have easily been reported to the police and arrested. “And it would make more sense for you to be with them,” Mitsuko continues. “Your boyfriend’s a lot more hinged when you’re around. If that’s what hinged looks like for him, I don’t even want to think about what he’s like on his own.”

Tenko’s more grounded when you’re around, or so you’ve heard from Spinner. He and Dabi don’t argue as much, and he’s apparently a lot less apathetic about things. But you’re still taken aback by what your friends are saying. The role they’re envisioning for themselves when it comes to helping the League is the role you’re playing right now, because they don’t expect you to play it for much longer. You hadn’t even thought of that. Are they right?

You’re not going to think about that right now. “I think supply caches are a great idea,” you say. “How many were you thinking?”

“That depends. How much money are we working with?”

Money’s not the only thing it depends on. It also depends on where the League is likely to be, and how easily they’ll be able to travel, and whether they’re more likely to be spotted in big cities with tons of surveillance or small towns where everyone knows everyone, and a whole lot of other questions. Mitsuko points out another benefit of you traveling with the League full-time; the cops still don’t know your face, which means you can move around freely even when the rest of the League can’t. The longer the three of you talk about it, the more it makes sense. You’re starting to wonder why Tenko hasn’t brought you with the League full-time already.

You’re in the middle of looking up storage units when the doorbell rings. The sound scares the hell out of you, like most unexpected sounds do these days, and you rocket to your feet. “Where are you going?” Ryuhei asks. “It’s probably just a delivery. Did you order something?”

You shake your head. “The others might have. They’ve done stuff like that before.”

Ryuhei accepts the explanation, but Mitsuko doesn’t. She follows you to the door. “I’m getting a weird feeling.”

“Like a feeling that the delivery guy is going to kill me?” you ask. Mitsuko shakes her head. “Then it’s fine. It’s easier if I just grab it now.”

You unlock the door and find yourself looking at a man holding a manila envelope. You can see your name written on it, along with your address, in neat but spidery handwriting. You hold out your hand for it. “Do I need to sign for this or something?”

“Nope. Just confirm your name and address.” The delivery guy holds the envelope just out of reach until you confirm both pieces of information. “Perfect. Here –”

He places the envelope in your hand, but once you’ve got it, his other hand comes up, and both enfold yours. The delivery guy is holding your hand, and in the split second before your mind registers just how weird this is, you find yourself feeling sick. Really sick. Dizzy. Nauseous. Another split second later, just as you’re thinking you should pull away, pain knifes through your skull. It’s not just weird. It’s a quirk.

A status effect quirk? You try to pull your hand away, but your arms feel like lead. Your voice comes out strange and slurred. “What –”

“Overhaul requires your presence,” the man says, and your stomach twists. “Come with me.”

“Fuck you.” A pair of arms wrap around your waist and yank you backwards into your apartment. Mitsuko pulls you away from the door and keeps pulling, even when your legs give out and she has to drag you. “Sasegawa, get your shit together!”

The man steps across the threshold into your apartment, dropping the envelope on the floor. “Thought you’d be alone in here. This is going to get messy.”

He reaches for you, but before he can make contact, Ryuhei hops the couch and gets between the two of you. The would-be kidnapper’s hand collides with Ryuhei’s face instead, and Ryuhei’s quirk activates. You’ve seen Ryuhei’s quirk at work before, but it always amazes you just how fast the rebound happens. The kidnapper’s got next to no resistance to his own quirk. Most people don’t. He throws up all over himself and the floor. He’s throwing up blood.

“Okay, what the fuck?” Ryuhei snaps. “What kind of quirk was that? Who is this guy?”

“Hassaikai,” you and Mitsuko both say at once. Mitsuko keeps talking. You’re too busy trying not to retch. “See how his eyes glow green? His quirk’s called Irradiate. It can paralyze people if he wants it to. Or it can kill.”

“So how the fuck did you miss it? You’re supposed to read intentions!”

“His intention was to kidnap her, not to hurt her or kill her! Hurting her is just a byproduct! My quirk doesn’t do what you think it does!” Mitsuko sounds as pissed as you’ve ever heard her. She shakes you. “If you’d just listened to me –”

“We have to do something about him.” You cut her off and gesture at the delivery guy, who’s now having a seizure just inside your doorway. “Emergency services. I have to call them.”

“You want to get him medical help? He just tried to kidnap you!”

“I need him to leave. And I don’t need the cops here.” You know the Hassaikai are under investigation. You’ve already come into contact with them once that the heroes know about. If you’re documented making contact with them again – “This guy is just a delivery guy. We don’t know what happened. When I opened the door and took the package, he started convulsing. That’s it.”

“And what about you? You look like hell,” Ryuhei shoots back. “You’re a nurse. Isn’t helping with shit like this your job?”

Shit. It is your job. If the cops come here, they’re going to ask why you’re not tending to the guy who tried to kidnap you. “One of you needs to call,” you say. You pull away from Mitsuko, fighting the urge to throw up, and head to the delivery guy, tilting him onto his side so he won’t aspirate if he starts vomiting again. “Now.”

While Mitsuko places the call, you try to remember what you know about radiation sickness. Not a lot. You seem to remember that the symptoms correspond to the dose, and that instant vomiting isn’t a good sign. Vomiting blood is never a good sign. But you got nauseous right away, even though you didn’t throw up. If this guy actually irradiated you, you’re in trouble, too. Did Mitsuko say his quirk was radiation, or just that it mimics the effects? You need to ask her, but she’s still on the phone, acting really panicked and hysterical to ensure that the EMTs get here fast. You’ll ask once she hangs up. In the meantime, you’ve got one hell of a headache and a guy having a seizure on your floor. You’re busy.

The EMTs don’t question your story when they arrive. They get the gang member off your floor and onto a stretcher, give you a bodily fluids cleanup kit to deal with the vomit, and book it. Ryuhei’s too squeamish to help you clean, but Mitsuko isn’t. The two of you work on taking the stain out of the carpet while Ryuhei opens the envelope the Hassaikai member brought with him. “I should be the one to open it,” he says when you protest. “If there’s a quirk in here it’ll bounce off of me.”

“Why would there be a quirk in an envelope?”

“Why would the Hassaikai send a delivery guy to kidnap you? These people are insane.” Ryuhei rips open the envelope. “No quirk. Just a letter. It’s – well, fuck. This is bad.”

“Don’t just say ‘this is bad’. Read it,” you say. It’s quiet for a few seconds. “Well?”

“It’s not addressed to you. It’s for Shigaraki,” Ryuhei says. Your stomach lurches. “I guess the guy was supposed to leave it here for Shigaraki to find after he kidnapped you. Overhaul’s saying he doesn’t trust Shigaraki to behave himself just for Toga’s and Twice’s sake – wait, are they hostages? – so he’s going to hang onto you, too. And – fuck, this guy is a freak.”

“Wait, let me see.” Mitsuko strips off her gloves and goes to investigate. You come over, too, but she shoos you back. A moment later, she swears. “We can’t let him see this.”

“See what?” You’re not done with the bodily fluids cleanup, but you peel off your gloves and step around Mitsuko. “He was going to kidnap me. I should get to –”

“You don’t want to,” Mitsuko snaps at you. You’ve never heard her take that tone before, and you’ve heard her get really harsh. Then, to Ryuhei: “We can’t let him see this. If he sees this – look, I’ve been around the yakuza before. I’ve seen some shit. This is fucked up even for them.”

“What is it?” you say, exasperated. You’ve met Overhaul. He creeped you out plenty in person. You doubt a letter could do the same thing.

“I think we should show him,” Ryuhei mumbles. “Let him see what he’s up against.”

Your phone starts buzzing in your pocket, and you pull it out to find a text from Tenko. We got him. We’re on our way over.

They got who? And why are they coming here? How are they coming here without Kurogiri? Are they really traveling through Yokohama on foot? They’re going to get caught. You can’t think straight. Your head hurts. “Mitsu, is that guy’s quirk actual radiation or just the symptoms?”

“Actual radiation.”

You might be screwed. The thought that your would-be kidnapper is even more screwed than you are isn’t much of a source of comfort. You put on a fresh set of gloves and go back to cleaning up the mess of guess-it’s-radioactive bloody vomit on the floor.

Tenko and the others don’t arrive until half an hour after you’re done cleaning, when you’ve switched clothes and showered off and you’re sprawled on the couch, reading the Wikipedia page on acute radiation sickness and trying to decide whether the continued urge to vomit is the result of anxiety or whatever dose of radiation you caught from the kidnapper. You hear the secret knock, but Ryuhei’s at the door before you can even get up from the couch. The door opens, and a moment later you hear Compress’s voice. “Who are you?”

“New ally. Who are you?”

“We don’t have time for this,” Tomura says impatiently. “Let us in.”

Ryuhei lets him in, and the rest of the League piles into the apartment after him. The entire rest of the League – Twice and Toga are back, looking extremely pleased with themselves, and everybody else looks like they’ve had a great day, too. “Overhaul’s fucked,” Tomura announces. “Turn on the TV. I bet they’re covering it.”

You switch on the TV, and everyone comes to settle around it. Twice plops down on the couch next to you, only to scramble up a moment later when Tomura comes over. Tomura’s not shy about being affectionate with you in front of the League. He pulls you against his side, not quite into his lap, and you lean against him, squeezing your eyes shut. You didn’t want to tell him about the attempted kidnapping, and now you don’t have to. It’s a relief.

It turns out that the League’s revenge against Overhaul is just the final piece of Overhaul’s worst day ever. The heroes moved against him at last, destroying his headquarters and capturing his lieutenants, effectively destroying the Shie Hassaikai for good – and on top of that, Tomura, Dabi, Spinner, and Compress attacked the convoy that was transporting Overhaul to a villain-specific hospital. A hero’s dead. Two cops are badly injured. And Overhaul himself is now short both his arms, and his quirk.

“I was thinking,” Tomura says, “somebody who hates quirks shouldn’t have one of his own. We got revenge for Compress –”

“I took his arm myself,” Compress says proudly. Twice high-fives him. “And in revenge for Magne, we took everything else that mattered to him.”

“Those quirk-destroying bullets he had? Those are ours now,” Dabi says. “Smug bastard. He had it coming.”

“You have no idea,” Mitsuko mumbles. Dabi gives her a weird look.

“We messed with them during the heroes’ raid,” Toga sings out, grinning her sharp-toothed grin. “And I got to see Izuku! He’s so cute when he’s covered in blood. Ochako and Tsu were there, too! I wish I’d gotten to talk to them more – they’re so pretty –”

At least Toga likes the idea of having age-appropriate friends. She’s got a few screws loose already, but only hanging around with you and a bunch of older guys probably isn’t helping. On the TV, there’s another alert – something about a girl the heroes were trying to rescue from Overhaul, who’s since gone missing. “And on that note, Saintess,” Compress says over Twice’s crowing about just how badly they pissed off one of Overhaul’s lieutenants, “we have a present for you.”

He extracts one of his spheres from his pocket and uncompresses it on your coffee table to reveal a messily severed arm. Mitsuko yelps and recoils. “Wrong one,” Compress says hastily, and compresses it again. “This is for you.”

You have a bad feeling about it, and once he uncompresses the second sphere, you’re proven right. In place of the arm, there’s a tiny girl sprawled out on the table. She’s wearing a hospital gown, her arms and legs heavily bandaged. She has greyish-white hair, just like the girl in the picture on TV, and just like the girl in the picture, there’s a horn on the right side of her forehead. She’s also asleep, or maybe unconscious. There’s a hectic, fevered flush in her cheeks, and her breathing is rattling and uneven in a way that raises a whole host of red flags.

“This is Eri,” Twice says as you stare in horror. “Isn’t she cute?”

“She was the key to Overhaul’s plans,” Tomura says. “Her quirk’s Rewind. It activates when she touches someone, and it turns back the clock on their body, or parts of their body. Overhaul was using it in the deleter rounds to turn back quirk factors until they no longer exist.”

“He was being so gross with her,” Toga says. Her mirth from before is gone. “He kept cutting her and using his quirk to put her back together again. We could hear her crying if we went down to that level.”

“The heroes were trying to rescue her, but we nabbed her when their backs were turned,” Twice adds. “And we brought her back here! She should be with us, don’t you think?”

You can barely think. “Can she control it?” Mitsuko asks. “Like, is it active right now?”

“Maybe. Why?”

Mitsuko doesn’t answer. She grabs your hand away from your side, yanks it towards the coffee table, and slaps it down on top of the little girl’s hand. Your entire body jolts, and you struggle to pull free, but Mitsuko leaves your hand there for a second, two seconds, three. When Tomura grabs you and pulls you back, she lets you go. “What the hell was that?” Tomura demands.

Mitsuko doesn’t answer him. “I can Google shit just as well as you can,” she says to you. “Feel better?”

You do. Your headache’s completely gone, along with the nausea, and it’s easier to think – and now you get why she did it. The exposure to the little girl’s quirk Rewound you, past the point where you were exposed to the radiation quirk. You’re not irradiated any longer, which means that by bringing Eri back here, Compress and the others have saved you a lot of trouble. But they’ve also caused a problem. A really big problem. “We can’t keep her.”

The League stares at you. “Why not?” Spinner asks.

You’d expect that question from Tomura or Dabi. Not from Spinner, who lived at least adjacent to the real world until four months ago. “She’s a little kid,” you say. “Kids need stability. They need a roof over their heads and to know they’ll have food and a safe place to sleep every night. And if one of you is about to say that you didn’t have that and you turned out fine – no, you didn’t.”

Dabi snorts. “But she’s so cute,” Toga complains. “Look at her little cheeks. I just want to bite them!”

“No biting the kid. If you’re going to bite the kid we’re definitely not keeping her,” Tomura says. You can’t believe he’s still thinking it’s a good idea to keep her, and when he turns to look at you, you can see that nothing you’ve said has sunk in. “She could stay with you. It’s safe here.”

“No, it isn’t,” Ryuhei says, and you glare daggers at him. “Don’t. I’m not going to act like there wasn’t –”

Whatever he was going to say, it’s cut off when the girl on your coffee table startles awake. She pushes herself to seated with shaking arms, glancing left, then right. Her eyes are bright red, like Tomura’s, and as you watch, they begin to fill with tears. Her mouth is trembling, and so is her voice when she speaks. “Where’s Deku?”

“Oh, come on,” Tomura complains, and the girl cringes. “You want Midoriya? Really? I – hey!”

You’ve elbowed him into shutting up. The girl is curling in on herself, arms wrapping tight around her knees. “He was going to save me,” she whimpers. “Him and Lemillion and the man with the glasses –”

“They did save you. From Overhaul. Then we saved you from them!” Twice chirps. “It was no trouble. Say thank you!”

“Hey,” you warn. They brought Eri to you. It’s your job to help her. You turn to her and soften your voice. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re safe here. Nobody here is going to hurt you. I promise.”

She shakes her head. “Nobody here will hurt you,” you say again. You don’t even want to think about what it must have been like for this girl to live under Overhaul’s thumb, being tortured by him to manufacture the quirk-canceling bullets. “You aren’t in trouble. You’re not going to be in trouble, and even if you were, there’s nothing you could do that would make one of us hurt you. That’s not what we do.”

“Overhaul –”

“He’s gone,” Tomura says. Eri looks at him. “We got rid of him. I took his quirk away and left him for the heroes. He’s not coming back.”

“We’re not him,” Spinner adds. “He sucked.”

Eri’s shoulders relax slightly at that. Then her face crumples. “I want Deku.”

You preemptively elbow Tomura, then start strategizing. If you touch her, you might get rewound further than you want to be, so you need to find a different way to comfort her. You hand her a box of tissues first, pluck a few out to show her that it’s okay to take them, and get to your feet. “The rest of you, stay where you are,” you order. “I’ll be right back.”

Your apartment doesn’t exactly have kid stuff in it. You find a spare blanket in your hall closet and come back, unfolding it and settling it carefully around Eri’s shoulders. She’s picked up the tissue box, but instead of using it, she’s hugging it. At work, you keep a box of cheap stuffed animals to give to scared kids, for them to hold during their appointments and take with them when they leave. You don’t have any stuffed animals here, so maybe you can give her a pillow. Or –

You head to your room on autopilot, dig into the box of things you brought from your parents’ house, and come back. Tomura’s eyes go straight to the object you’re holding. You know he recognizes it. He wouldn’t be staring like that if he didn’t. “Is that –”

You nod and crouch back down next to the coffee table. “Eri,” you say, and she looks at you. You hold up the plush corgi Tenko gave you for your sixth birthday. “I’ll trade you for the tissue box. This is way more fun to hug than that is.”

Eri’s red eyes brighten ever so slightly, but she’s hesitant to reach for it. Maybe she thinks you’re going to take it away. You set it down on the table and push it towards her, making sure to pull your hand away so she knows you aren’t planning to snatch it back. You feel the smallest sense of relief when she drops the tissue box and grabs the plushie with both hands, hugging it tight against her chest. It’s really cute. Or it would be, if you didn’t know why this is happening to her. If you didn’t know why she’s in your apartment in the first place.

She peers at you from between the plushie’s ears. “Who are you?”

“I’m Saintess,” you say. You’ve never called yourself by your code name before. You feel twenty kinds of dumb. “It’s really nice to meet you. But I know it’s probably not comfortable to sit on the coffee table. How about you go sit in that chair –”

Dabi’s in it. Tomura glares at him until he moves, and Eri stumbles over to it, trailing the blanket and clutching the toy. “And get comfortable,” you tell her. She burrows into the blanket, watching all of you with enormous eyes. “Do you feel okay?”

“Cold,” she says. Chills, then. Probably a fever, too. “It hurts.”

All those bandages. You don’t want to know what’s underneath them. “Okay. I’m going to put on some gloves so it’ll be safe for me to touch you, and then I’ll take your temperature and check to make sure you’re okay. Is that all right with you? It’s okay if it’s not.”

Eri hesitates. “Will I feel better?”

“You won’t feel worse,” you say. She nods, and you go back to the hall closet for your first-aid kit.

You try to tune the others out as you tend to Eri, but you can’t quite make it stick. Dabi is asking Toga and Twice about which heroes they dealt with during the operation against the Hassaikai, Compress is raiding your kitchen, and Spinner is way into your personal space, wanting to know what’s going on with Eri. Tomura is, too, at first. You catch him watching you more than once, a weird look on his face. You know him well enough to know most of his expressions, and that one’s new. You wonder what it means.

Then, while you’re waiting for the thermometer you just put in Eri’s mouth to beep, you glance back to check on Tomura, and he’s gone. He’s over by the kitchen table instead. There’s an envelope in his hands.

No. No, no, no. You grab Ryuhei, order him to take the thermometer out when it beeps and memorize what it says, then race towards Tomura – but you’re way too late. The envelope and the letter inside it crumble to dust as you reach him, and when he looks up at you, his jaw is clenched so tightly that the tendons in his neck are standing out. “What happened?” he snarls.

“Lower your voice,” you beg. You don’t want him to scare Eri. “It’s not a big deal. Nothing bad happened. It’s just –”

“Don’t fucking lie,” Mitsuko says, coming up beside you. You don’t have to warn her to keep her voice down. “That yakuza bastard sent a hitman here to kidnap your girlfriend. It would have worked if Ryuhei hadn’t been here to give him a taste of his own quirk.”

“It’s fine,” you say. “The Hassaikai’s been dismantled, right? It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“They knew where you were,” Tomura says flatly. “When I find out who told them –”

“Nobody had to tell them.” The pieces are coming together in your head, slow and ugly. Overhaul saw the bandage on your hand at the warehouse. He’d have known that the League would need to seek help for Compress, and the free clinics are the only place where an injury like that won’t result in immediate police involvement. “A Hassaikai member showed up at my clinic. He asked about my hand.”

“Overhaul brought it up, too.” Tomura’s right hand lifts, clawing at his neck – lightly at first, then harder. “You – Inada – why did you use the kid’s quirk on her?”

“She got radiation poisoning. That’s the fucking hitman’s quirk.” Mitsuko ignores you when you tell her to shut up. “My guess is, Over-fuck knew he could fix whatever his hitman did when he got ahold of her. Him fixing it wasn’t an option. So I used the kid.”

“I owe you.” Tomura is still scratching, and now he’s focused on you. “They knew where you were. They’ve known since we made the alliance. It – fuck!”

“Hey, keep it down,” Spinner calls anxiously. “You’re scaring the kid.”

“Her temperature is 40 degrees,” Ryuhei adds.

Shit. “We need to table this,” you say to Tomura. His eyes flash. “That girl is really sick. It’s not safe for her to stay here, and I can’t help her the way she needs. She has to go to people who can help her.”

“The heroes? Fuck that.”

“She has to,” you say again. “They can help her. We can’t.”

“What makes you think they’ll do anything?” Tomura’s expression twists. One of his nails digs deep into the side of his neck and pulls up blood, and just like you did before, you cover his neck with your hand. “They won’t give a shit. They didn’t when it was – when –”

He breaks off. You wait, and he looks away. “Forget it.”

“They’re running her name and picture on the news,” Mitsuko says. “They care about what happens to her, and you all are in enough trouble without another kidnapping on your record. They’ll look for you twice as hard.”

Tomura’s fingernails scrape lightly across the back of your hand before his hand comes to rest over yours, index finger raised. “I’m not just dumping her on the street.”

“You won’t be,” you promise. “I’ll take her to the police station. I can say I found her wandering around –”

“So they’ll think we just dumped her on the street.”

“Or that she got away somehow. I don’t know.” You don’t have time for this. “Her fever’s high enough that she might not remember anything. If she does, she’ll remember we didn’t hurt her. That we took care of her while she was with us. She’ll know we aren’t him.”

Tomura’s shoulders relax slightly. It matters to him to be better than Overhaul. It matters to you, too. “Hang on,” Dabi says from where he’s leaning against the wall. “Maybe we shouldn’t send Saintess to drop the kid off. She’s had one run-in with the Hassaikai already, and the police already know about it. Her turning up with the kid is too big of a coincidence. Inada should be the one.”

“Two run-ins. Overhaul sent somebody here for her.” Tomura’s hand tightens around yours. “Her identity’s compromised. When we leave this time, she’s coming with us.”

Your stomach drops. “The kid trusts her,” Tomura continues. “And she’s a nurse. It’ll look like we left the kid by the clinic or something.”

“Why does it matter where we drop the kid off?”

“So we don’t end up looking worse than they do,” Tomura snaps. “What’s the point of revealing their hypocrisy if we just throw someone away?”

It’s quiet for a second. “Wait until nightfall, then,” Dabi says shortly. “So we can at least keep a lid on the number of people who see Saintess wandering around carrying a missing kid.”

“She’s sick,” Spinner says. “Doesn’t she need help as soon as possible?”

“Not if it gets us caught!”

You’re on Spinner’s team here. “What if Compress uses his quirk on me and Eri both? Then he can bring us near the police station, so we won’t have to walk as far and risk getting spotted. We won’t even show up on camera until we’re right there.”

“What kind of distance can you release your quirk from?” Tomura asks Compress, who shrugs. “If it’s far enough, you can give the sphere to Inada or Sasegawa to carry.”

That’s the plan they settle on, eventually. Compress will use his quirk on you and Eri, Mitsuko will carry you both to the police station and text when she’s there, and Compress will deactivate his quirk from a distance. Eri’s breathing is raspy. You need to hurry. You roll her up carefully in the blanket, making sure she doesn’t touch you. “The puppy,” she mumbles. “Can I keep him?”

“Of course,” you say. You were too old for it, and you don’t need a keepsake of Tenko when you have the real thing. “He’ll take good care of you as long as you take good care of him. Are you ready to go?”

She nods. You pick her up. Rolled in the blanket like this, she’s unwieldy but light. You turn to face Compress. “Okay, let’s do this. We –”

You get compressed mid-sentence, and the next thing you know, you’re standing in an alleyway a block and a half from the police station, face to face with Mitsuko. “Be careful,” she says. She looks pissed, and you’re not sure why. “Look, me and Ryuhei are activating the sleeper thing right after this, and you’re going with them. We’re not going to see each other for a while.”

Oh. “I’m going to miss you,” you tell her. Mitsuko laughs. “They still don’t know my face. We’ll see each other.”

“We’d better.”

“Keep an eye on Yoshimi for me,” you continue. “And Kazuo. I worry about them.”

“We all do,” Mitsuko says. “And now we have to worry about you, too.”

You feel a surge of guilt, one that melts into bemusement when Mitsuko leans in and plants a kiss on your lips. “Go on. I’ll see you around, Saintess.”

Saintess. That’s your name now, isn’t it? It’s the one everyone’s going to use. Mitsuko leaves the alley first, heading in one direction. You stand still and watch her go, watching a piece of the life you had before disappear around the corner. Then you adjust your grip on Eri and aim for the police station.

[codenamesazanka]

(prev page)

Like before, when Spinner's overwhelmed, his go-to cope is give up and stop thinking. When the heteromorphobia of his hometown got too much, Spinner gave up. His heart was emptied out.

When Shigaraki was writhing on the ground in a cave and there's All For One telling him things are fine and handing him the phone to rally up the heteromorphs, Spinner's sick with worry about Shigaraki and troubled about being a spokesman because he knows he never had such noble goals, but he gives up there too.

Here, Spinner tries to do the same thing again. Stop thinking. If he thinks, if he continues down the memories and his despair, he'll end up hurt.

(I wonder if that's why he was looking like that last chapter - lying in bed, hearing the door open but not even bothering to turn his head or sit up. Looking so empty.)

But this time, Spinner keeps thinking. That's what I'm taking the line to be - he's already thinking, so he's telling himself to stop thinking, but it's not working, because he keeps speaking. He keeps talking about what Shigaraki means to him.

Shigaraki allowed him to dream, despite Spinner being empty and a loser, and it was one such that Spinner felt like that dream would awaken to something big. Spinner thought by following Shigaraki, he could finally be someone.

(Spinner's had this thought before - and it ended with him thinking about Shigaraki watching him. He wanted Shigaraki to see him - what he's doing for Shigaraki, for the League, what he's done for himself. It didn't work out, but Spinner was thinking it.)

Spinner takes action too - grabbing Midoriya Izuku, the boy who killed Shigaraki Tomura, to tell him: Shigaraki Tomura was my hero.

In this, it parallels and responds to what Shigaraki himself was saying in Chapter 418, even after his hatred was smashed, after his past of guilt and trauma was relieved: Those guys/the League/The Villains need a hero of their own. Shigaraki wanted to be the Villains' Hero.

So Spinner confirms it. Shigaraki was his hero. Shigaraki let him joined the League, Shigaraki answered his question with the horizon, and Shigaraki promised to destroy everything and let the League lived as they saw fit.

Shigaraki accepted him, listened to him, fought for him. Of course Shigaraki was his hero.

*

Meanwhile. Deku. while still not showing much emotions and we still have no access to his thoughts, is still listening. In fact, he accepts Spinner's words and feelings completely.

Spinner hulks out, and the doctor becomes concerned. It's not written up there in the scanlation, but the doctor calls for control. He looks like he's gripping something - a walkie talkie? Some other kind of device? The doctor is concerned for Spinner's health, of course, but I think he was also ready to call for backup. To bring Spinner back under control, to restrain him. What you do to unruly people, dangerous people. What you do to villains and monsters.

But Deku stops the doctor. Deku wordlessly says a clear 'No' to bringing Spinner back under control, whether by Spinner's own will or by external methods. Deku allows Spinner to fully express himself - to even grab him from his chair with giant hands.

Consider this. You're a Hero in training. You're meeting a Villain to tell him his boss' last words. The boss you killed. This Villain has multiple quirks, attacked a hospital, still lost the battle, and now glares nonstop at you. The first thing the Villain says is to call you a murderer. You meet with him anyway. There is no one in the room with you except the doctor. (Police presence is strangely missing.)

Spinner hulks out and lunges at Deku and wraps his giant hands around Deku's puny torso - but Deku allows it, not dodging, not shouting for Spinner to stop, not breaking out of the hold. Spinner, in his anger, can surely crush him, but Deku allows him this.

Obviously it's Deku being cool and stoic and very tolerant here, but I think it's also him accepting that Spinner's anger at him is justified. Just like he's not denying Spinner calling him a murderer, he's not stopping Spinner's emotions and actions, even. And the whole time, he's still listening.

I don't know if I would go so far as to say he even trusts Spinner to not harm him, but there is an element of trust in this.

This is high praise from me, noted Deku-hater. But I want to think this is Deku having changed from his encounter with Shigaraki, with Toga. During his encounter with Toga, Deku opened his big mouth to tell her his perspective and that he can't understand her; with Shigaraki, he shouts mostly things like 'I can't let you do that!'; and while Shigaraki is extremely chatty with him, Deku never actually seems to be listening to the content (when we see his thoughts, it's mostly strategizing). Here, though, Deku's accepting Spinner however he acts. He's facing a Villain with no intention to stop him, even when threatened, because he's here to listen.

It's too late, but he's here to listen to Spinner talk about who Shigaraki Tomura was. Finally.

[todomitoukei]

Honestly it’s a depressing ending for the villains. We get hardly any follow up for the remaining ones, Toga was the last one I expected to die and I was hoping it was a ruse at first. But since it’s official it’s heartbreaking. It’s lacklustre just throwing in a character to portray Tomura and what would happen if a civilian did reach a hand out, and throwing in another character for Deku to interact with. Honestly even the heroes were pointless, nothing has really changed in the system. Hawks never got a consequence for his actions, hell it could have been explored of a hero murdering a villain questioning the like of what makes a villain or hero. But he rises in ranks and has done nothing. I just feel it’s such a rushed ending, and I would have been ok with the same ending if it didn’t feel so messy and compiled together. There are so many loose ends and follow ups from characters, Shoto especially. It’s unfortunate, but honestly I’m glad it’s over. I lost passion after a while, but I appreciate the joy it’s gave me when I first started following the manga and getting into the anime, and experiencing the highs and lows of manga leaks. Dabi was my main one, and it’s one positive I gain from this ending for how open it is to his fate. It’s just sad that it ended this way.

Hori's biggest strength is for sure coming up with interesting ideas - like you said, exploring certain parts could've made for an incredibly interesting story. However, his biggest weakness is not following through with what he's starting, doing a 180 right at the end every time.

The cast has always been too big, yet he chooses to show us minor villains like Gentle and La Brava - who receive a happy ending - while the main antagonists endings aren't even being shown.

As much as the villains dying sucks (subjectively but also objectively since the story spent so much time telling us it's about reaching out and helping everyone no matter what), if they had been at least given a proper conclusion it could've been acceptable, yet after 400+ chapters, the author couldn't even bother to show all the main antagonists and their endings.

Where exactly is Spinner? We know he wrote and published a book, but is he in jail and if so, how did they allow him to publish this book?

Is Compress in jail forever? Is he still in a cell with Geten? He read Spinner's book, but how did he get hold of it? Was the prison kind enough to give him a copy?

What about Touya? Assuming he's dead, how much longer did he have? Did his family care when he died? How is the family coping? Are they getting along? Why did Horikoshi not show us Natsuo and Touya talk after spending so much time saying they used to be so close? Natsuo not saying anything and having mixed emotions after all of this was actually an interesting idea, but not when you don't do anything more with it - now people just think Natsuo is an asshole when in reality, he has every right to feel conflicted, but it sucks as a conclusion when we've all been looking forward to seeing him and Touya finally get to reunite and be happy.

What was the point of Shigaraki appearing as a ghost to Deku? Why wouldn't he at least appear in front of his friends? Why wouldn't we see him show up in front of Spinner, approving his book or something?

And yes, Shouto, too. Why is the main info we get in regards to his father? What about his hero costume, which we aren't even being shown? Did he ever change his hero name or is it going to be Shouto forever?

I wouldn't even say it's rushed as much as it's an unbalanced focus. The last few chapters could've been focusing on these subplots, but instead Hori tried to mimick the tone of the first season by showing the kids returning to school and whatnot, something that could've been shown in less time to also make space for elaborating on a bigger variety of characters and plot points.

I'm also glad it's over, I just wish these characters could've been in a better story.

[itsnothingofinterest]

Oh wow so my hero is ending in five chapters, any idea what those five chapters will be? We know we have that new stranger and the todoroki household to deal with so what else could they cover?

Well there’s obviously a lot to go over, but I expect some things (todofam) to get a lot more focus and page space than others (Gentle and Nagant) so to focus my answers on, well, what I expect to be the focus:

One chapter (426) will be, as I think we all can tell, the Todoroki resolution. Talked about my expectations/ worries for that here.

Next (427) will probably feature Uraraka & whatever happened to Toga in some way. Although since Hori dosn't always treat her the best (I mean I do think her villain fight was the best, but I don’t believe that was on purpose), I wouldn't be surprised if her chapter shares page time with other student plot lines, whatever happened to Spinner and/or the heteromorph plotline, and other miscellaneous stuff like Gentle getting released from prison.

Mystery person I'll bet will probably actually be two chapters (428 & 429): a) because it's Midoriya's resolution and b) because it'd naturally need more time for that; introducing a new character and all, bit of backstory to explain why they were tied up in some house and had to cut themselves loose with with sissors. Especially if it goes the way I except; mystery guy's a poor jaded victim-villain on their way to becoming the next Tomura, but Deku will save them and it'll be presented as though that means society is now improved such that it won't fail any more future Tenko Shimuras. ...Even though a) that's a hard sell after murdering Tenko Shimura in the arc that was specifically representing how thing will go from now on and b) that idea entirely misses the point of Tenko Shimura's story. But even giving this two dedicated chapters, that's the best Deku can really do so...guess you've still just got to hope a hero's around to save you. If not; sucks to suck, good luck with villainy and/or dying.

And uh, last chapter (430 if all our math is right) will probably just be your standard fare “5 or so years later" chapter about everyone as pro heroes. Everything is great and fine and so much better for no real reason and they'll all live happily ever after for anyone still alive; The End.

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Although if I may be spiteful; one thing I hope doesn’t get touched on is the quirk singularity doomsday plot line. Because as is, it still looks like the best case is for humanity to become an endangered species as soon as around the time of Class 1A’s eventual retirement (presumably their last decade or two spent dealing with panic over that). All because hero society refused to look where things are bad or inconvenient; and just when a solution, a treatment & cure to this condition was available to them anyway…Deku smashed it into dust because that’s the only way the little All Might clone could conceive of to beat the big bad villain.

And again, I know this is spiteful, but I rather like the idea of Deku murdering Tomura having such a serious consequence.

[amiya-shirou]

My take on My Hero Academia now that it's finished is that ultimately as a story it was utterly unwilling to fully commit to the highs it was trying to reach. There are so many moments when it feels like the manga is trying to do something more but either gives it an half-assed conclusion that undermines everything it was trying to say (any of the more gray-morality and hero critique stuff) or only really aims for the superficial look without proper substance (the dark Deku mini-arc). It started as a more typical want-to-be a hero story, evolved into something a bit more complicated and interesting when it started focusing more on the villains, but then fucked it up and now we get an ending that seems more appropriate for what the manga was at the beginning than what it has become and it just feels weird. It was weird seeing them at school again when the story had long since evolved beyond the "academia" setting. And there is potential in doing something like this, like with Deku and Uraraka who seemed to feel so out of place while everyone was congratulating them because they knew they failed to save Shigaraki and Toga and that the matter isn't really solved, Deku straight up accepting being called a murderer by Spinner, but then here comes an immediate time-skip for a last chapter that only focuses on the new generation of heroes finding their place and this won't ever be brought up again, I guess.

And in concept I get the message of the old lady helping the boy and thus preventing a new Shigaraki from being born; I approve of the idea of everyone rising up to make things better rather than leaving everything to a single hero; It's a fine message. too bad that since Horikoshi wants his cake and to also eat it that message had already been ruined by his insistence on having All For One take over as the uninteresting villain who had everything planned since the beginning, to the point that it really wouldn't have mattered if someone had helped Shigaraki as a kid because All for One would have just killed them and make it so that everything went according to his plans anyway, so the idea that she was preventing the new Shigaraki like this feels a bit empty now. kinda looks to me like a band-aid solution to end the thematic core of the story without the society of heroes really having to ever face itself in a satisfactory manner, because again Horikoshi never fully committed to anything and wanted both the moral grayness and the simple battle shounen ending where everything is revolved by punching the unquestionably bad guy who caused all the bad stuff and everyone is now happy and grown-up and the kids have taken over in the new rebuilt hero society.

[thatshakespeareanfool]

Bellatrix is not as such your local crazy lady as the fandom tends to pretend. The movies and Helena’s performance played a big part in this but she gets often totally mischaracterized.

Bella is unhinged and broken in the same way Sirius is after 12 years of brutal prison but she is definitely quio sane. Her obsession with Voldemort has nothing to do with madness but that’s an another topic to discuss.

The only scene where we see her acting out is the Battle of the Department Ministry when she continuously mocks the “group of children” who is there to fight them. Later in the battle she is purposefully trying to rile Harry up perfectly knowing what are his triggers.

In the spinner’s end chapter she is reasoning with Narcissa till they arrive to Snape. She is somehow the only person who is actively questioning Snape’s loyalty and despite her devotion to Voldemort she is questioning his judgment as well, that’s when Snape touches the sensitive subject that she and V are not on talking matters right now.

In DH when the golden trio is in the Malfoy Manor she is capable to understand the grave situation of their if the Cup from her vault is missing. Narcissa and Lucius have no idea what’s going on, but Bella knows Voldemort is gonna kill them all if the cup have gotten stolen and yet she treats the whole situation pretty reasonably. (Yes her method is to torture Hermione but again that has nothing to with her mental capabilities rather the fact that she sees muggleborns as inferior).

So portraying her as someone who doesn't know what she is doing or the consequences of them is quite wrong. Her moral compass is obviously nothing one should agree with but that doesn't mean she is not in her right mind.

She has enough control over here emotions to master Occlumency and she gives at least a few displays that are probably blatantly false and used for emotional manipulation, like Narcissa does in HBP.

Also Bellatrix never participated in the murder of Dumbledore in the books because she was never there at the first place. She doesn't burn the Burrow down or does any other grandiose acts which paints her character as unnecessary unstable.

One does not need to be insane to be bigot.