"Make some friends and forget about being a hero."
Aw, Touya took his dad's advice after all.
This is probably a weird note to end my time with MHA's run on; but I find it so strange how I still see people calling Tomura out on just being a destruction-hungry villain with supposedly no plan or follow up...as though he is unique for that simplicity. Especially after the ending we got. Like, Deku and All Might never really had a plan when they were reshaping society by beating up the enemy and everything worked out fine for them, but does anyone call them out for just using violence to mindlessly solve everything with no further plan? (Well, yes. Me. Right now.)
Because like, really thinking about it; how different was All Might's plan from the start of his career to take down AFO and become a symbol, and Deku's plan to end the villains and bring everything back, from Shigaraki's plan to end hero society and bring about a world accommodating to the League? It all seemed to boil down to the same basic premise of Step 1) Beat everyone & everything making things worse, Step 2) ...it all just kind of works out from there. (I guess All Might planned on being inspiring and uplifting, but then we could also count Tomura's plan to be imposing and...uplifting but for different people. Deku was winging it every step of the way though.) Everyone's getting on Tomura's case for doing nothing but destroying; but all evidence from when the heroes do it suggests violence & destruction works. And it just never fails to bug me when people call Tomura out for stuff that's fine when heroes do it.
Which, yeah, let's touch on how it did just work out for Deku that way for no logical reason, least of all anything he planned. He punched out the big bad just like All Might and now things are like a hundred times better than they were under All Might with no more Tenkos abandoned in the street. If stuff like that just happens if you punch out your enemies hard enough, then why couldn't that happen for Tomura? Maybe if he had destroyed the government & hero society it would've, idk, been so fear/awe-inspiring that all the villains would've been nice and cooperative under the PLF and everything would've been fine. Or something. No more contrived than what we saw with the old lady plot line, MHA is just a series where that stuff works out. Heck, one time it actually did just work out that way for Tomura:
Again, violence and destruction works in MHA. I mean; duh, it's a shonen manga.
Plus all this is ignoring the fact that, unlike those two, Tomura did have a follow up to the violence. He did have a step two, or at least one & a half, after "beat down all the bad guys in the country." Rather than just going "and everything will work out from there," he had his guys plan for the future so he could say "and Spinner, Toga, and RD et. all will make sure everything works out from there." (Admittedly, not much; but also, not hopes and dreams.) He did have a plan, it was just the plan from the Overahul arc, where he was last asked to have a plan: leave it to his allies.
And hey, that means it's actually better than what we saw from genius All Might and brainiac Deku. So why are we still, even after everything was over, acting like there's some expectation as a villain he didn't meet? I guess it's just in the nature of a 'tantrum-having man-child who wants nothing but destruction' to put more forethought into the future he wants to build than the society-uplifting greatest heroes.
That or maybe everyone had really detailed follow-ups for when they won that Hori never went much into, but that'd render this post a bit pointless so shhh.
i'll be real this foreshadowing was a little heavy-handed. so let's editorialize a bit. spinner looks SO cute in his panel lookit him i wanna hold his face so fucking bad. and dabi won't even PEEK, he will not GLANCE. this is why i'm right when i say that dabi is a fuckin
Boy, the heroes of MHA sure do find their questionable actions needing defences like “but it’s a war” or “AFO/Shigaraki/Twice is/was so dangerous though” or “well the villains are committing war crimes too” lately. You don’t really see other media’s heroes needing those excuses; at least not the ones going for MHA’s optimistic tone. I’d like to talk about why for a bit, as well as why MHA changing that script doesn’t really work for the heroes.
You see; while we on Tumblr like to make fun of how villains in media are always trying to fix something but kick a puppy so you know we’re supposed to side with the people not trying to fix things: the way it’s supposed to be is that villains, at least the well-(enough-)intentioned extremist types like the League & most of the PLF, try to better the world but go *dramatic voice* too far in the process. Meanwhile the heroes harden their resolve and take them down by the book through ingenuity and determination; and although they are protecting the status quo, in the process of this victory the heroes prove that whatever problems initially sparked the conflict can be solved in *dramatic voice* a better way.
But if the heroes also go *dramatic voice* too far in their efforts to protect the status quo, as they do in BNHA, well that kind of undercuts their platform. I mean what’s the message there? That there actually isn’t a better way because underhanded & sketchy tactics are the only way to get things done? That message sucks and so do these heroes.
I can see why the manga keep trying to ignore or brush aside the heroes’ moral darkening, clumsily hand-waving Machia’s brainwashing or framing Hawks as still a good guy ‘cause he’s so optimistic and the like. It makes it really hard for them to be inspiring with all their ‘light of hope’ talk if you don’t forget all that. I know because I make a point not to forget this stuff and I don’t find these heroes inspiring at all.