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stillness-in-green · 2 years

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Chapter Thoughts: 370 — HIStory

Sorry for how late this one is, all. Between Spinaraki Week, Life In General, and having, holy crap, SO MUCH I want to talk about this chapter, I'm running a bit behind. I may come back to try to finish out some fills for the rest of Spinaraki Week eventually, but I wrote all my really burning ideas at the start, so my desire to get back to my reams of meta was much more pressing. I'll try to hit the ask backlog before the next big post! (As you might be able to guess, I'm going to have a lot to say about Chapter 371, too.)

That said, hey, guys, guess who’s in hella Talking Point instead of Bullet Point Mode this chapter; that’s right, it’s me. WHAT a chapter. I’ll work my way through it in a broadly chronological fashion; the big stuff starts in the third section.

Kurogiri At the Hospital:

The narration calls Kurogiri “the closest thing to a masterpiece out of all the High Ends,” and I wonder just whose value judgment that is? After all, Kurogiri was completed years ago and Ujiko clearly isn’t the type to rest on his laurels. He’s never called Kurogiri his masterpiece; indeed, he explicitly says Hood-chan and the other High Ends are his finest work to date. So who else would talk about Kurogiri like that?

The narration tends to default to Deku, but it’s a weird statement to give to anyone other than AFO or Ujiko. What exactly makes Kurogiri the nearest thing to a masterpiece in the narrator’s opinion, anyway? His capacity for independent action is the only thing he really has up on his competition, and his independent action has been shut down since Aizawa and Mic pulled out the might-as-well-call-it-a-vestige of Shirakumo Oboro.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that if the story’s going to call Kurogiri the most advanced High End, the only thing Kurogiri can be said to be the best at is his ability to mimic a human being, so we’d damn well better see him getting another chance to do that as Kurogiri, not as the remnant of Shirakumo.

While we’re talking about Kurogiri, I do have to ask who tipped off AFO about his location and when. Per Chapter 325, if you’ll recall, it was supposed to be a secret.(1) Of course, AFO has ever so many conveniently placed friends who can do anything the plot needs them to do, but I can’t help but think that if he found out where Kurogiri was prior to this clash, he’d probably have done better to, I dunno, send in Toga or something, especially if he could have had her rendezvous with someone on the inside.

(Note that if we get AFO’s inside man next week, it will make for a nice parallel to Endeavor and company being greeted by their plant inside Jakku General Hospital in 259. Since a certain 1-A student wants to bring up hospital raids and all.)

As to Present Mic thinking of Kurogiri solely as Shirakumo, I can only continue to hope that this stubborn refusal to acknowledge even the possibility that Kurogiri might in some way be a meaningful existence will be back to properly bite him and Aizawa in the ass. The heroes have a consistent pattern of refusing to acknowledge the humanity in villains—their trauma, their motivations, their close relationships—beyond whatever little personal tidbit they trip over that they can’t look beyond. I would very much love it if, with Kurogiri, we get a direct consequence of that via Kurogiri choosing the boy he basically raised for a decade+ over the school friends the person he was constructed from knew for like a year and a half.

In and About The Crowd:

First things first, I want to mention that I got a few asks about racism in response to the leaks for this chapter—one about the way the fandom talks about this plotline and one about how the story itself is handling it. I do want to answer those, as I definitely have thoughts on both fronts (especially considering the content of Chapter 371), but I also want to do some research first.

If I haven’t said as much before, I’m white myself, so when I talk about these topics, I always want to make sure I’m doing so carefully and respectfully. In the case of Rock Lock's role this week, that’s going to take me some time. Be expecting an ask round-up about fandom shorthand, the iconography of the CRC, the heteromorphs shouting ignorance at Rock Lock, and anything else I get on that topic in the interim, sometime in early-ish November.

That said, this certainly is a crowd with some…accessories, isn’t it? CRC heads on pikes! Or possibly just masks, though if that’s the case, they’ve stuffed something else in there that fills the cowls out more than just the bare pole.

If it is just the masks, though, it’s in line with something the mob does three times in this chapter: unmasking. They pull Koda’s mask and mouthguard off, tear the helmet off one of the police officers, and, of course, my favorite pint-sized firebrand consciously chooses to unmask himself. The count goes up yet again if you include Shouji’s mask being torn apart, though in his case, it’s just the rigors of battle, not anyone specifically removing it.

(The above is another post I might write eventually on the extremely consistent pattern of heroes only being unmasked against their will, while villains—usually—choose when and under what circumstances to unmask themselves, and how that ties to the overarching themes of heroes staunchly resisting any sign of weakness while villains are more open to showing vulnerability, be it for the strategic value of doing so or out of a genuine desire to connect. Keep an eye out!)

On top of the crowd’s growing mask collection, they also have Spinner flags! You love to see it. Or you would, if Spinner weren’t in such dire straits right now. I’d still buy one, though.

As to the actual characters present, it’s nice to see some familiar faces with the Spinner fanboys and the USJ guy, who’s particularly notable here for being the very first person in the series to use the term heteromorph. He self-identified with it, exhibiting—at least on the surface—none of the distaste Spinner would later express for the word.

I’d love to know what the percentage breakdown is on this crowd’s membership. We have dissatisfied civilians, PLF remnants and, as evinced by the USJ guy, also some prison escapees, for the completely wild total of 15,000 people. While my primary response to that is, “I don’t think Horikoshi understands numbers very well,” taking it at face value, no matter how you cut the numbers, it is a bad look for the heroes.

I suppose we can assume there aren’t too many prison escapees here, since the narration didn’t even see fit to mention them as a factor, so that leaves mainly PLF and civilians. So is what we have here mostly civilians—nearly fifteen thousand people willing to take their lives and their futures into their hands for this cause? Or do we instead have many thousands of escaped PLF members, quite contrary to the pathetic number we were told were in the wind after the war arc?(2) Or is it about half and half?

There’s no good answer! It’s Real Bad no matter what!

That all said, we all know who I’m really here for, right? Let’s talk about the returning PLFers. (Alert: Incoming non-canonical advisor names.)

It’s long been eyebrow-raising to me that Spinner’s Number 2 advisor (hereafter called Scarecrow) does all the talking, while his Number 1 advisor (hereafter Nimble) never says a single word. While I appreciate that it’s yet to joss my headcanon that she actually can’t talk because she doesn’t have a mouth, I would really like it if we could get some demonstration as to why she outranks her extremely verbal subordinate.

We saw her exactly once in this chapter, on the second page, advancing through the crowd just ahead of Spinner. If she’s managed to keep up with him, this would seem to suggest that Shouji ought to be getting up close and personal with her next week, especially if the pattern of MLA types getting very angry when people attack their leaders holds (and it seems to be doing so; more on that below). I’d be really quite happy to watch her and Scarecrow tag team this, with her taking on Shouji physically while Scarecrow fights him for the crowd’s morale.

(Edit in light of Chapter 371: *pause for bitter laughter* Well, maybe she can be sneaking into the hospital instead.)

As to Scarecrow, while I didn’t get everything right, I’m thrilled that I did call him correctly as an insect heteromorph! I initially thought that his hands and fingers looked the way they did because they were prosthetic replacements for missing limbs; now I think it’s just that they’re segmented in an insectile fashion. Here, they look more consistent with the way his shoulder-mounted bug legs are drawn than they did at first,(3) and, with the clarity of the official scans, you can see that his knees and possibly his ankles are also segmented.

I love his row of mandibles, I love his head stripes (and wonder what color the anime will make them, since his coloring as of Season 6 Episode 2 is a very uninteresting light gray), and I have definitely noticed the prominent scar.

But enough about how Scarecrow looks. Far more interesting are all the things he says.

Scarecrow’s Speech | Historical and Modern Discrimination:

Everyone and their mother has talked about the Star Wars references, and I don’t have enough Star Wars knowledge to say anything new or compelling there, save to note that the implications are incredibly grim.

Much more interesting to me is the variety of phrases that crop up this week in regard to heteromorphic discrimination. The first of those was the phrase the Viz translation renders as “those who don’t fit the mold”—the same phrasing Re-Destro used when he was talking to Giran back in Deika about how societal mores lag behind the new reality of the world. I immediately wanted to know if the wording was the same in Japanese as well, as that would be a good tell about how consistent the MLA messaging is.

Having checked the raws, as it turns out, the wording is completely different! I can’t be mad, though, because the language Scarecrow’s using is exactly in line with a phrase I’ve been using in my (ongoing) evidence-gathering about heteromorphobia, and I love it when I’m right about things.

So, the phrase Scarecrow uses there is kotonaru katachi, katachi meaning form or shape, kotonaru meaning to differ/vary/disagree. Thus, being more accurate to Scarecrow’s use of punctuation: “The history of the Paranormal is that of oppression of ��differing forms.’”

This is important because one of the big gotchas a lot of people try to use to discredit this whole plotline is the protestation that people like Hawks and Jirou and Iida are all technically heteromorphs, and they aren’t being discriminated against, so clearly heteromorphobia is totally bogus. If you look back through the series with Scarecrow’s phrasing in mind, however, the pattern becomes much clearer. It isn’t about quirk types; it’s about body types. There’s overlap between the two categories, the same way there’s overlap between heteromorphic quirks and “villain quirks”, but they’re distinct categories nonetheless.

Interestingly, if you look at the kanji—異なる形—the phrase is very close to the kanji used for “heteromorph”: 異形, igyou. Literally all the phrase does is tack in some verb conjugation and use different readings of the kanji, and suddenly the whole tenor changes!

Speaking of igyou, though, for a chapter that’s all about anti-igyou discrimination, the term hardly crops up at all this week—even in the narration! It calls the civilians there, “ordinary citizens who sympathize with [the PLF’s] cause.” Scarecrow, as discussed above, uses “differing forms.” There’s also a lot of “our kind” in the Viz release that’s implicit rather than explicit in the Japanese text (e.g. the old man who snarls at Koda calls him merely a traitor, not “traitor to your kind.” But “heteromorph”? It’s used exactly once: by one of the people throwing rocks at Shouji in his chapter-opening flashback.

Yikes.

The flashback people use much worse language than that, though, language the Viz translation particularly gets at it when it uses the word “defiled.” As that word choice implies, the vitriol being hurled at Shouji in that scene is specifically telling of religious belief. The two terms to consider are kegare (汚れ) and imi (忌み), both more tied up with Shinto practice than Buddhist.

Imi was translated simply as “dirty” in the line about “dirty blood.” Online dictionaries give translations such as mourning, abstinence, or even holiness or religious purification, but the throughline—and another offered translation—is simply “taboo.” Imi isn't necessarily a bad thing,(4) but it is that which is to be shunned and denied, especially in the context of religious rituals. It is clearly intended as a negative thing here, though!

Even more charged is kegare, a concept of spiritual uncleanliness that is thought to further be spiritually contagious, the sort of thing that can spread if not purified and/or contained. Crucially, kegare is not nominally about moral failing necessarily; it’s not quite the same thing as sin.(5) Kegare is a natural state that one picks up via exposure to things like death, disease, and waste, but also childbirth, menstruation, and so on. Obviously, those are things that everyone is going to encounter eventually; the solution is appropriate acts of purification and boundary-setting.

…Except that’s just the party line on kegare. People who have enough sustained exposure to sources of kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners, morticians—came to be considered incapable of purification, and so were classed prior to the pre-Meiji period as something very like an untouchable caste,(6) eventually coming to be called burakumin, and subject to severe discrimination in housing, marriage, and employment, as well as more generalized oppression that endures even today to those of burakumin lineage.

Shouji’s story here feels very akin to that. The people hounding him are not doing so because of any exposure he’s had to a source of kegare, but because he himself is said source! If he personally is the source of the corruption—corruption that will spread to his entire village, spiritually polluting other people and even the land itself—that is not something that can be purified. Rather, the only thing to be done is A) drive him away or B) force him to never leave his house.

More on this next chapter, where we get even more awful details.

The last bit of descriptive terminology I want to touch on is ”human-faced people.” I’ll talk about it more in the ask round-up, but I’d really love to know where the phrase came from, in-universe. The heteromorphs are human, too! Therefore their faces must de facto be considered human faces! But that Spinner fanboy sure is yelling it with enough vitriol to suggest that he doesn’t agree, and I wonder how many times he had to be told that himself to internalize it in such a raw way.

Terminology aside, what else can be gathered from Scarecrow's speech? Well, one thing that stands out is the conflation of the history of quirks with the history of heteromorphic discrimination. And he's obviously over-simplifying—there are emitters in some of those early images of meta-abilities, and there are cases where it can be difficult to tell transformers and heteromorphs apart when a transformer's quirk is active, so they'd have been targets as well. Still, whether Scarecrow is omitting that because he's priming this specific crowd to be angry or because he truly believes it himself, the words are not entirely without basis.

I can't remember if I've talked about this before here, but something that's always been very striking to me about the timeline of quirk acceptance and historical villainy is the suggestion that the original Meta Liberation Army and the Creature Rejection Clan are contemporaries. Both groups are dated to the period in which society was beginning to stabilize after the chaos of the advent of quirks.

So, while Destro and his cohort were getting angry about laws that would restrict the outside-the-home use of natural-born abilities to only those with a license, the CRC were getting angry about laws that would tacitly admit the equal humanity of people the CRC considered to be much less than human. They started with protests, but soon moved into hate crimes, and in that, we get to something else that's very notable about the group: they were never banned.

The volume extra note on them says that, because people disapproved of their turn to violence, they lost popularity and splintered off into factions. But this is a group that was and is committing hate crimes, that bases their whole identity around that hatred. Why in heaven's name weren't they targeted legally?

Well, firstly, because while Japan has ways to limit the freedoms and financial prospects of certain groups (primarily organized crime and terrorist groups), it doesn't actually criminalize membership in such organizations.(7) Still, there's no indication that even the controls the government can enact were ever utilized against the CRC—again, the thing that led to their diminished influence is simply that people at large thought they were going too far.

This, I think, is down to the other issue: Japan has basically no interest in anti-hate crime legislation. From my research, there is exactly one federal law about hate crimes, one activists regard as woefully insufficient because it contained absolutely zero criminal provisions targeting offenders; the only things it actually required at the time of its ratification were that the government "begin implementing preventative measures"—things like community education or banning displays of hate speech/writing in public areas—as well as respond to "requests for consultation" from victims. Consequences for offenders? Absolutely none.

There have been one or two prefectures that have gone one small step farther in the institution of fines for repeat offenders, but one crucial thing that's nowhere to be found is one of the most basic features in hate crime legislation: the enactment of stricter sentencing guidelines for crimes proven to be committed due to demographic bias.

Finally, if those laws have remained unchanged in HeroAca Land Japan, none of them would protect heteromorphs anyway, because they're only aimed at discrimination against those of non-Japanese ethnicities! Which plainly doesn't apply to ethnically Japanese heteromorphs! Here again, we can connect heteromorphs to burakumin, who have only been granted legal equality (way back in the Meiji Era, when the laws declaring them a separate caste were repealed), but no greater legal protection.

Small wonder this crowd is so big.

Moving on, Nedzu's presence in that image of accepted-and-well-off heteromorphs is really fascinating—Nedzu is really fascinating. Like, we know he has a nasty history with humans, and he certainly doesn't consider himself to be one of them, as we see when he talks about the various failings of humanity as a species. But there he is, being considered a successful and integrated heteromorph.

And sure, by the base considerations that go into determining quirk type, he is a heteromorph: his body is permanently altered from the baseline state of his species(?) by his quirk. But I wonder how much oversight he's subject to, what his citizenship (if he even has it) was contingent on, and stuff like that. Nedzu feels very much like someone whose acceptance could be revoked at any time it became inconvenient, so he's worked hard to make himself as indispensable as he can. And, in fact, he's done such a good job of it that he can even push back against government officials sometimes!

As the heteromorph giantess demonstrates, however, no matter how stable such positions seem, there's always a level of chaos that can destabilize them. (More on her next time.)

As a final note on the content of Scarecrow's speech, I will point out that we can see just a smidge of his MLA origins here. He doesn't ask for justice or reparations; what he says Spinner and this movement will do is lead heteromorphs to "prominence in society." It's not enough that they be equal; they have to be, if you will, the new main characters.

That aaaaall said, let's turn to Shouji's response.

Shouji’s Response:

It’s a mess. The whole scene is, but since I’m running behind, I’ll save the full breakdown on why for next time, as 371 will round out Shouji’s response somewhat more than just the little we get here. Focusing just on that little opening, then, let’s break down—as a lot of people already have—the fallacies involved here. Because there are a ton of them in only the one penultimate page, holy shit.

“What’s any of that got to do with attacking a hospital?”

Shouji, please. Spinner said it right before you hit him with a x8 punch multiplier: they’re here for Kurogiri, without whom they won’t win this, and society won’t change. It’s the exact same reason the heroes raided a hospital at the start of the last arc; they believed that securing the creator of the Noumu was an essential part of guaranteeing their victory.

The villains are not just attacking a hospital for kicks; they are doing it to secure a valuable strategic asset. And it’s not as if this hospital is completely defenseless, so the heroes can’t claim ignorance of this outcome! They saw an attack coming because an attack was easy to predict, and they chose to leave Kurogiri here anyway, rather than—at least temporarily—moving him back to more secure holding.

That doesn’t magically make the people who masterminded this attack blameless, of course, but the heroes do have to take some of the responsibility here for the same reason UA had to take responsibility for Bakugou’s kidnapping(8) and police had to do the same for the League’s highway attack on the convoy transporting Overhaul.

Bakugou’s safety was UA’s responsibility just as much as a prisoner’s safekeeping is the responsibility of the state once they’re in custody. That’s why it’s called custody—because it confers custodianship.

“Back in Jaku, the first thing the heroes did was take action to make sure the patients and staff were safe.”

No. No, it was not. In fact what happened was that they stormed the building without warning with part of the team dedicated to evacuation and the other part dedicated to securing Ujiko. The two teams took action simultaneously. They didn’t even have everyone out when they confronted Clone!Ujiko in the middle of a hallway within line of sight of two innocent (and clearly not notified of the ongoing evacuation!) staff members. They still didn’t have everyone out when the Noumu came up through the floor.

The fact is, the heroes couldn’t spring their trap with a more generous lead time to guarantee civilian safety because doing so would have tipped off Ujiko. And, indeed, given that Ujiko was already talking about the heroes' presence when the POV cut to the real man in the lab, he clearly did get tipped off, though the story doesn’t say how exactly.

*** Minor tangent:

I might guess he found out via Mandalay’s telepathy, but, again, it didn’t seem like the pair of staff members that came to his defense had been notified of an emergency, which suggests the telepathic message only initially went out to the people in the immediate lobby, rather than "everyone on the premises except Garaki Kyudai the clone I have mistaken for Garaki Kyudai."

When I worked at a hospital, there were emergency codes for various circumstances; I would think something like that being called would be the immediate reaction to a bunch of heroes showing up and saying to evacuate the building, and yeah, of course a facility-wide evacuation code would do the trick for alerting him!

Frankly, it’s a heap of nonsense that the heroes got everyone out as quickly as they did. For heaven’s sake, given Mirko’s speed and the ease with which she ripped through the Noumu in the basement, it cannot possibly have been more than ten minutes between her leaping through the main entrance and her kicking down Ujiko’s front door, and Mandalay reported a completed evacuation mere moments after that. The hospital is four stories with at least two sizeable wings, and given that it was the middle of the day, it’s very likely that there would have been surgeries and other such procedures in progress. Unless the heroes snuck Quicksilver onto their team, evacuation categorically could not have happened in ten or so minutes.

But, me griping about how flawlessly the heroes’ raid plans tend to go off given the hurdles they ought realistically to be facing is not new. I now return to the rest of the chapter post. ***

Shouji, in any case, wasn’t at the hospital, so his word on what the heroes did is unreliable. The students didn’t even know what they were doing at the start of that day, so anything he knows about the details of the Jakku raid is going to rely on hearsay from classmates or the media, none of whom were in the hospital advance team, either.

Moving back to the hospital currently in question, I have to ask Shouji how much authority over the space does he think a mob of 15K people actually has? Even though the Jakku team wasn’t holding the building to start with, they still had the societal cachet to walk unimpeded into a bustling hospital, say, “Everybody out,” and be listened to with minimum fuss and maximum police backup.

The mob, conversely, is attacking a building from which they are being vigorously denied entry. Their number is composed of malcontents and villains, people who have no authority to make any demands of those inside the building save whatever obedience they can brute force their way into commanding with numbers and threats.

And even so, you know what the mob spends most of the chapter saying? Spoilers: it’s not screaming for blood and vengeance. They have a few very common refrains—make way, clear a path, push the enemy back. When they come up against Rock Lock, there are calls to get his hands, to tie him up. Their intent is to restrain him, not to kill him, not even to knock him out! When the crowd briefly overwhelms Koda, the elderly beaked heteromorph does nothing but tear off the kid’s mask and call him a traitor.

I’m not saying no one would get killed in the case of a villain victory; certainly, when violence has already broken out and emotions are running that high, with so many angry people there, it’s entirely likely that things would continue to escalate (though if Scarecrow were able to continue rallying the crowd, he would likely be able to direct them somewhat(9)). Still, Shouji asks what their plan is to avoid innocent suffering, and I would point out that their modus operandi seems to be to not inflict undue suffering even on the people actively opposing them, much less the civilians inside!

No, one thing changes the mood of the crowd for the worse, and that’s Shouji’s attack on Spinner.(10)

That’s when the content of the cries suddenly gets more bloody-minded, calling explicitly for death, just like back in Deika when the MLA rank-and-file would go nuts when their leaders were attacked. (Though, honestly, Spinner’s guesses back then notwithstanding, it’s not like that’s so strange or cult-like. Attacking leaders of social or political movements directly is always going to piss off their followers. Feels a bit like a foul, you know?)

I don’t have a lot to say about Spinner this week, because frankly the situation with him is just too damn depressing. More on that—and on the matter of who’s expected to plan and who gets away without plans—next time.

“Do you have a plan here? Because if not, I won’t let this stand!”

“I won’t let this stand” lolol does that mean Shouji would let this stand—just step back and roll out the red carpet for them—if they did have a plan?

Well, no, because his actual line there is the well-worn, “I won’t forgive you.” According to Translator Sis, it’s kind of a Whole Thing in the American translator community that no one wants to just translate that line straight, so you see all kinds of weird permutations to get around it. I'd venture to guess this is because the phrase has Cultural Baggage in Japanese that it lacks in English; I remember reading once, years ago, that the reason Sailor Moon concludes her speech every episode with, "I won't forgive you!" is that forgiveness is considered a Very Big Deal in Japan.

Of course, I should think forgiveness is a pretty big deal in most parts of the world, but Japan values societal harmony very highly, so yeah, I can see that declaring one's refusal to forgive someone (et tu, Natsuo?) would be regarded as a very grave statement indeed.

(More on that next time, too.)

Stray Notes:

O The chapter opens with, “Turning back the clock a bit…” and it strikes me that there’s not much point in turning back the clock if Spinner isn’t going to win here. I mean, I obviously thought that already—there are far too many loose plot threads on this battle for it to be wrapping up yet—but as VFO foreshadowed last chapter, I think we must be right on the cusp of a shift in fortunes.

After all, if Spinner and the rest were just going to be defeated here, it wouldn’t matter that all this was happening slightly earlier than the (seeming) climax of ShigAFO’s defeat. So while things look dire here, and look even worse in 371, I’m all but positive at this point that the hospital fight will represent the tides turning again. We wound back the clock so that no one would be confused when Kurogiri and whoever-all else teleport into the middle of the UA battlefield right where we left Deku and ShigAFO last time.

O My schadenfreude at the police and Rock Lock’s complaints about how organized the mob is cannot be overstated. Lolol, “There’re only 200 of us, we’re so short-handed, and they’re so mean for splitting us up, weeeeh!” YEAH, THAT’S HOW IT FEELS. SUCKS WHEN THE ENEMY SPLITS UP YOUR FORCES AND CUTS YOU OFF FROM BACKUP, DUNNIT?

O A point to Horikoshi. I’ve been complaining for months now that the alleged shortage of heroes is empty talk because Team Hero still always had all the people they could ever need to attack and defend all their objectives. Well, here we finally, finally have a shortage that matters: not enough people to defend Kurogiri is going to mean they fail to defend Kurogiri, with all the consequences that come after. It’s about time.

O Koda is a sweetheart, and he doesn’t deserve to be called a race class allegorical discrimination victim traitor to his face. I do, however, feel less bad for him in the wake of 371 than I did just after this chapter.

O The blood splashed on the ground is an evocative touch, and I particularly like the panel layout of Scarecrow, arms up and reciting his toll of grievances as the image of the crowd he’s talking to today gives way to that image of spilled blood, and then to a crowd from times past, where heteromorphs are on the opposite end of the violence, and then even further to the image of the surface peace people fool themselves into believing exists today.

It’s really excellent in the way that it matches Scarecrow's verbal addressing of all this—the crowd, the history, the social veneer—with an image of his visually addressing it. He’s even the only one who isn’t contained in a panel, the ledge he’s standing on jutting out subtly in front of the other images, giving the impression that he’s standing in front of this gallery of horrors and explaining them to an audience like a particularly fire-and-brimstone museum guide.

Fantastic work!

O In terms of translation, I don’t love the choice to render Spinner’s broken language as caveman-speak. I realize that it’s not really possible to get at the same effect in English—indeed, it wouldn’t be possible to get across the effect in spoken Japanese, either! Still, I think a closer equivalent would be to leave Spinner’s language as-is, but spell it all phonetically, like a grade-schooler trying to write words they’ve heard but haven’t learned how to spell yet. That’s a much closer replica of the way regular kanji are broken down into their component sounds or the wrong system of writing is used.

O With Scarecrow waving Spinner onward like that, I have to wonder how cognizant he is of Spinner’s dysfunction, and what he thinks of it if he does know? Next week’s chapter is unclear on this as well.

O Someone please save me from civilians standing around with slack looks of shock on their dumb faces the moment a hero makes an ill-considered rhetorical point. Cripes, I’m so tired of civilians in this story not being allowed to have opinions, beliefs, or motivations that are well-considered enough to stand up to a single conversational parry.

----FOOTNOTES----

1: So much a secret that Horikoshi himself hadn’t figured it out at first, judging by Kurogiri’s presence in Tartarus circa Chapter 297.

2: “Gigantomachia’s rampage allowed one hundred and thirty-two of them to escape. Their bases scattered around the country were hit too, and the sympathizers were rounded up.”

3: In his villa raid appearances, his shoulder-mounted bug legs and his hands looked different enough that I didn’t read them as being of the same material. In particular, the segments of his bug legs had a very ball-and-socket joint look, whereas his hands and fingers looked connected by cables in between their individual segments.

4: I might compare a sacred avoidance to, say, the Jewish prohibitions on how the names of God are to be written or not written.

5: Tsumi would be a better word for that concept.

6: There's a certain amount of scholarship around exactly how the burakumin came to be, and to what degree their status was as a result of a sincere belief in kegare or more political in nature. Much of said scholarship is paywalled or in Japanese, but from what I can find, kegare was certainly used as a justification, even if there were other factors in play at the time.

7: Largely because the idea of giving the government the power to start reenacting the March 15 Incident is massively unpopular with the voter base.

8: It shares a lot of circumstances with that, in fact. Both the location of the training camp and Kurogiri being moved to Central Hospital were supposed to be cloaked in secrecy. Both the training camp and Kurogiri were recognized as possible targets. The training camp attack involved the villains getting information from an inside source, which is likely how AFO found out Kurogiri’s location as well.

9: Direct them to do what? Well, he’s got no reason other than crowd morale management to spare the hospital’s defenders, but much less reason than that to call for anything very awful to be done to the hospital’s civilian occupants. I’d have said the same thing about Hose Face bringing up Midnight’s death, though, so far be it for me to deny the possibility of nonsensical cruelty from the villains Horikoshi isn’t asking us to care about.

10: In fairness, because Spinner is about to crush a pair of cops with his Mega Sword-Sword. Spinner is not thinking straight enough to be thinking at all about incapacitation versus maiming versus death; he’s just cutting a path ahead.

#bnha #bnha 370 #plf advisors #octolad #heteromorph discrimination plot #bnha civilians #chapter thoughts #bnha meta #my writing #bnha worldbuilding #(musing about the canon's worldbuilding that is)#stillness chanting that advisor's name like she's cheering him on at a cage match #SCARE-CROW SCARE-CROW SCARE-CROW

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