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soul-dwelling · 5 months

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I dunno if you saw the lates Heroaca chapter, but yikes, it just keeps going downhill - from the previously assumed banality of evil explanation of AFO being some spoiled manchild that got a power and lived out a childish fantasy, now he literally cralwed out as a baby evil, biting his moms corpse and magically surviving, only to terorize the world - like this should have been his fake "edgy villian" backstory, a myth - the whole "we just read comics" thing doesnt work when they were born into a post apocalyptic while AFO was the literal antichrist.

Like maybe I'm missing something and being to harsh, but AFO just being some rich kid who was spoiled and got everything he wanted and lived in a fantasy world, maybe only caring for his brother, who then felt betrayed, because his immaturity didnt let him realise that becoming a tyrant didnt jive with his little brother, which lead AFO to being even more petty in his delusions.

Idk, just sometimes to me I feel kinda sad for Hori, like he is aping things without really getting it, like the whole backstory seemed like an attempt to mimic HxH (which even I kinda would critisice for the recen Phantom Tropes backstory reveal, but that is a seperate topic and even that was compelling and interesting in the first half)

I had something I was going to share somewhere about why I don’t like Chapter 407 of My Hero Academia, I was just waiting until the actual release.

But let’s get this addressed now. I apologize, as I don’t think my points below are going to be as clear as I want them to be, and there is a lot of rambling.

I am ignorant to a lot of Hunter x Hunter and the recent Phantom Troupe reveal, so I can’t speak to that, and I haven’t looked up more information to respond to that detail right now.

I think Horikoshi had no good options, because he’s writing about comic book supervillains in relation to fascism, so either he was going to over-simplify the various ways comic book antagonists are written, or he was going to fail to address real-world concerns about fascism. I don’t think he had good options. Either All For One came into existence because society let, or All For One was born evil.

As I’ll touch upon slightly below, I can appreciate arguments that say Chapter 407 says the answer is both: yes, All For One exited the womb with an awful disposition, but if he had not been born at the advent of Quirks where vigilantes were trying to enact genocide against those with Quirks he would not have stooped to such depraved actions in the future.

I can’t help but feel offended: the chapter acts as if someone has an innate nature to act like this, and the chapter acts as if All For One’s past actions were justified and he should have just stopped at some point and that is when he went over the line.

I don’t know whether I can do a decent job suggesting an alternative way to write this story, and Horikoshi isn’t done so I should keep an open mind, but I think Chapter 407’s failing for All For One is in relation to a failure to more adequately write Yoichi as a character with more agency in this story. You want to show me that what All For One is doing was justified to protect himself? Then show me what Yoichi was doing, or show how he is complicit in accepting his brother’s help even when it is out of bounds, or do a better job addressing how All For One’s brutality got worse and worse, because starting his story with him just impaling people seems like it is supposed to show he was destined to be evil, but you’re showing his action as justified because those people intended to kill him.

(See also why the trailer for Marvel’s Echo didn’t work for me. “That guy sure was an asshole to her for using sign language!” And yet Kingpin is not justified in disabling or even murdering the asshole--cool motive, still evil.)

But I’m rambling--and will keep rambling in this response, so, please be patient with me.

As I said, I think it would have made Yoichi more compelling if we saw his culpability in all of this. And maybe we will. But for now, as people online have said, we’re just getting Yoichi and All For One as the typical binary in almost biblical stories: Abel and Cain, the Christ and the Anti-Christ, even Moses and the Pharaoh.

And it’s boring.

I’d rather have Yoichi not exactly agreeing with his brother but still in some way complicit. Think Avatar: The Last Airbender and subsequent works that don’t portray Roku in the best light: it was his home nation engaging in brutal warfare; he was too hands-off whether in diplomacy or warfare to stop it. Maybe we will get that with Yoichi, or maybe I’m overlooking his prior words to Izuku and not appreciating that he already expressed regret at not doing more to stop his brother. But I think that is missing in this chapter: we had Yoichi kick the can at All For One and tell him to stop, but we haven’t gotten more of his later years to hear him verbalize his opposition to what All For One is doing.

Yoichi doesn’t have to be out there opposing him like a superhero against this supervillain, and I don’t want him to be a willing or unwilling participant in his brother’s empire. But I do want something that makes Yoichi feel more real. What if his brother was protecting him--and he didn’t know the extent of how unethical All For One went in that protection? What if Yoichi is still young and just not old enough to put into words that what All For One is doing is wrong? We got a bit of that in this newest chapter, where it comes across that Yoichi isn’t old enough to put into words that All For One should not be killing people. But this comes off as Yoichi is just innately good, rather than us seeing how he learns what is good.

I will debate “nature versus nurture” in a bit, and while I’m going to come down on the side of “nurture” being more influential on people than “nature,” I do get the point people make, that they see innate goodness in kids, who want things to be fair and just and with equity, before they learn that this world as it is right now is unfair, largely because people make it unfair for others, and that we can believe Yoichi since birth would have that mindset. The problem, however, is again that it’s boring. Show me how Yoichi gets to that ethical system, otherwise he is too passive a character to feel like he’s compelling or worthwhile to this story. And that could be the point, that the holders of One For All were too passive for too long, and that Yoichi’s greatest power was sitting and waiting, as it is his Quirk, to stockpile and not seek out.

(And I have a rant about how tiresome “the Quirk influences your personality” is as text rather than just thematic or symbolic in this story. We did not need to be told that Toga’s Quirk is what made her like she is: that limits her potential, and we are again limiting potential here with Yoichi and All For One, suggesting that both of them were destined to have these personalities because their Quirks said so--Yoichi’s Quirk is stockpiling, so he has to be passive and inactive, whereas All For One’s Quirk is about theft, so he has to be the bad guy. That is boring, it leaves no room for more complex personalities. I know I could keep going with this until we exhaust anything interesting in these characters because we nitpick too much: “Oh, so Bakugo has an explosive ability, and we had to give him an explosive personality? That’s boring!” I mean, yeah, Bakugo’s Quirk and personality as related to each other are a boring combination--that is a problem that is fair to address. I do wish the series gave us more people whose Quirks were not so connected to their personalities. I’m not sure I would even want Quirks that are ironic, such as someone who is timid and meek having a superpower that is shiny, eye-catching, or requiring them to be the center of attention to work most effectively. Honestly, just give me someone with an engaging personality--and a Quirk that has nothing to do with that personality, like a practical joker who has ice powers. Or be more clever than this: shy character with telepathic communication--so the irony is less that the powers are the opposite of the personality, and more that their power lets them address a seeming flaw, or allows them to express themselves in an unexpected way such that they are not great at verbalizing but when you can hear their thoughts they are super-eloquent or just clear. But this rant is taking too long, so let me get back to the topic.)

If you ask me whether someone is more likely influenced by nature or nurture, I’m going to likely say “nurture” every single time.

And yes, I can admit that there is some muddying of the distinction between “nature” and “nurture” that I am asking for with this new information about All For One, that it wasn’t just that he was evil from birth but that the circumstances in which he was living, the “nurture,” was still bad: bands of vigilantes trying to kill off people with Quirks would lead All For One down horrible roads.

But the problem is that, even if I want to read that as nurture, the chapter starts with All For One shown since birth being “greedy,” whether taking more nutrients in the womb or feasting on his dead mother’s breasts: the story is already saying All For One was destined for this, not that it was potential but just the thing itself, he wasn’t potentially evil, he was just evil since birth, and that is boring and I would hope unbelievable…although, given a lot of the evil we’ve had to see in a post-2016 world, yeah, sometimes you want to believe that there are people who were just evil since birth and that they were never going to be good people.

I’ll get to this later, but I wish that this story revealed some caregiver to All For One and Yoichi, just to explain how these babies survived so long immediately upon birth, but with a fringe benefit: it would muddy the distinction between whether All For One does what he does due to his nature or the nurture. Think Oliver Twist, think Bungo Stray Dogs: Chuuya at 15, think Arcane: here is a rogue taking care of this kid, and we see how much of that rogue’s demeanor and attitude about life, society, survival, laws, honesty, and ethics influence that next kid. Heck, think Trigun as well with regard to Rem and Knives.

The point is, give me a character whose conduct would have influenced All For One, for good or bad, either a caregiver who like him said life is unfair and you have to have the will to take what you need, but who meant that instruction in a matter of pragmatism that All For One later perverted into in a matter of fascism, or a caregiver who was just irredeemable and whose behavior was a model for the fascism All For One would later implement, thus that while All For One certainly had the potential in him since childhood to be this awful, he needed a model example to learn the most effective way to be a horrible person. All For One being inspired by the supervillains in comics is fine: it’s silly, but (and this is the one time I will use this excuse, given my rant against this approach below) comics are silly, this is a comic book, I can allow All For One being inspired by comics because it’s silly and it’s about the only good meta-commentary we got in this chapter. But give me an actual person existing in the actual world that showed him how to make it a reality.

I appreciate Horikoshi reducing a fascist like All For One to a mere comic book supervillain, because the fascists we are dealing with right now in our shitty post-2016 reality are just mere comic book supervillains--but the problem is, those gutless, immoral, no-good rotten sick pieces of shit fascists did not just learn from comics, they learned from putting those ideas into action to see how far people and society would let them get away with it. Show me who inspired All For One to put those ideas into action because I don’t believe he learned it just from comics or his own experiences. Who inspired All For One?

And yes, this is me basically writing fanfiction that introduces a new original character to populate this world, who has a close and intimate relationship with a canon character, trading quality character design and progression for the sake of shortcuts such as “they were All For One’s teacher, therefore I don’t need to do much work to actually define this character because they’ll be killed off soon enough.”

And yes, this opens up more problems, and pretty much ripping off Vash, Knives, and Rem from Trigun: killing off a teacher figure or a parental figure for All For One and maybe Yoichi is a shortcut to progressing characters where you need them to be, for All For One to realize the world is a disgusting place that he needs to rule, and for Yoichi to realize people are innately good and deserve agency and the freedom to live happy lives.

But damn it, it’s an effective choice, and one more compelling than, “All For One was always evil, we will not quibble over society’s responsibility in creating him, we will not give you an emotional investment in Yoichi to care about his worldview, we’ll just reduce everything down to comics.”

(Or, if it’s not some OC who raised All For One who inspired his fascism, make it clearer in this chapter who did. Was it already answered in this new chapter? Was it the Golden Baby? Chapter 407 brings him up, so actually show what they were doing as a revolutionary so we understand how All For One’s actions are a response, whether because All For One is imitating the Golden Baby or because All For One is doing the opposite. Will we get that detail in a later chapter, or are we rushing to the finale?)

And since I did bring up OCs, let’s get to the next point:

I’ve talked before about how grateful I am that I get to work with others who are interested in the idea of how to revise an existing story to clarify what it was going for or, in a far less clear way of putting it, “fix” what isn’t working.

All For One and his brother surviving after their birth is one such detail that needs a fix.

I know this is a comic book series where you are supposed to suspend disbelief as pertains to things that don’t make sense or are so fantastic that you need the “fiction” in “science fiction” to make sense of them, such as Hagakure’s powers, how Hawks’s feathers can support so much weight, and so on.

But there is a problem with “it’s just a comic book, suspend disbelief.”

First, My Hero Academia consistently goes out of its way to insist to the reader that this isn’t your typical comic book. This is a response to what works and doesn’t work in comics, akin to Watchmen. Heck, we just had a chapter with All Might imagining Nighteye chastising him, saying that a mentor having to die to motivate their student is like something out of a comic book, and what All Might is living through is not one of the comics he read, this is his real life. You can’t insist “this is a comic book, suspend disbelief,” and then insist at the same time that this isn’t a comic book, this is its own reality, make it believable and take it seriously. By that guideline, no, there is no way baby All For One and baby Yoichi would have survived on their own--there had to have been some caregiver or series of caregivers for them.

Second, at the same time My Hero Academia is asking us to suspend disbelief, the series then over-explains details in order to make this world feel believable. We have limitations on characters’ abilities so that the stakes are still high and the protagonists don’t just win because their Quirks are more powerful: Iida’s engines have a temperature limit, Todoroki can only go so hot or so cold, Ochaco can only lift so much weight that her equilibrium can handle. You can’t point to those limitations and insist that All For One and Yoichi survived that long as newborns without help--that doesn’t work.

Therefore, I have to be open to the idea that All For One and Yoichi were not entirely on their own since birth. There had to have been a caregiver, or series of caregivers, whether individual people who found them and took care of them--until All For One likely just killed them--or communities that they came upon where there were others like them--orphans, homeless people, people marginalized in this newly emerging superpower society…before, again, All For One probably just killed them, too.

#spoiler #spoilers #my hero academia spoiler #my hero academia spoilers

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