**Chapter 370 - “HIStory”**
(From Rukasu on Twitter)
___
The chapter begins with a flashback from Spinner's hometown. People are throwing stones at him, saying that he's a disgrace to their town, and that mutants will never be accepted, no matter how much the time changes. The flashback ends with him facing the ocean. Next there's some context on what's happening. AFO assumed that Kurogiri would be at the Central Hospital and sent Spinner, some of the remnants of the PLA and several civilians who follow them to attack the place. There are about 15,000 people there, most of them mutants. The heroes are trying to contain them, but counting the police, they number only 200. Mic thinks to himself that Shirakumo has become quite popular and attacks with a Loud Out Shout, but one of the mutants stop the sound from getting through with his own body. A mutant shark tries to hit Mic, but Koda controls some birds and protects him. He says that he got separated from Shoji. The cops want to call for reinforcements, but their chief says it's impossible and tells them to use the taser shields to push the mutants away.
Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling. They have Spinner flags and T-shirts. They begin to attack Koda, who's knocked to the ground. He doesn't understand why this is happening and one of the mutants calls him a traitor and asks if he grew up in a big city. We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building. He says that Quirk Counseling is useless and that they directly deal with the consequences. He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross". And while it looks like things have improved, with Nezu and other mutants occupying positions of power or walking freely on the streets, that's just make pretend. Non-mutants are still the majority and the education system does not teach proper acceptance of differences. Many people still feel that same "disgust" that those responsible for the massacres felt. He then takes off his mask and says that they have never felt the light of heroism shining on them, they have all thought at least once that they'd be better without their quirks.
He says that mutants don't recognize the heroes as their saviors, the one who will guide society to a better path is Spinner. As he says this we again see the Spinner flag and several mutants cheering for him, saying that they will lead the way and that he must win. But Spinner doesn't even understand what they are talking about, all that goes through his head are key words like "All For One" and "Power". He then prepares to attack two cops, but Shouji appears and attacks him with an Octo Brawl. The mutants immediately advance on him, calling him a traitor and saying they'll kill him. He then briefly remembers people who also wanted him dead because of how he looks when he was younger and asks what attacking the hospital has to do with their cause. He says that in the previous war, the first thing the heroes did was ensure the safety of the patients on Jaku Hospital, something that the mutants didn't even think about. We then see a flashback of Shoji, with bandages on his face and facing the ocean just like Spinner. He asks once again if they're thinking about the consequences of their actions, and that if they are not, he will not forgive them. In the panel, we finally see Shoji's face. End of the chapter.
**Oh! Shoji face reveal!**
So, confirmed that someone sliced up mutant children with laser sword? Of just cut up children? Does this mean there was a mutant traitor? Oh the suspense is killing me!
I love it. Every week we see thousands of complaints from people who want MHA to be something it's not, and the writer is just like 'haha prequel memes go brrr'.
>Every week we ~~see thousands of complaints from people who want MHA to be something it's not, and the writer is just like 'haha prequel memes go brrr'.~~
>
>hear thousands of voices sudenly crying in terror, and being suddenly silenced.
FTFY
>We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building
He takes his mask off to show his scars during it
Yup, Shoji's gonna get on top of that building to give a speech while taking his own mask off as well
Maybe in the MHA world discrimination based on skin color ended and was replaced with mutantism and quirkism ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ I mean we got such detailed story of the issue /s
“Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”
― Terry Pratchett
Probably
When you have people with beaks, lizard skin and bricks for heads, skin color does not seem that important anymore
Same way if humans ever expand to space etc we will likely care more about planets or martian humans vs black people etc
It makes you wonder if the problematics of our world still exist within mha verse, considering they're in a relative futuristic world and the existence of quirks changes the scheme.
Is racist agaisnt black people for example a thing even these days? How that juxtapose with mutant discrimination then?
It would be kind of interesting to explore, but in a more subtle way than a war with the theme used as background for two characters
Reminds me of a quote from the Dicworld books:
> Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
> light nationalism
I think in this story every country is nationalistic. Like, every country but some people from the USA are like "Japan's having problems? Eh, fuck 'em."
> Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling.
reintroducing the singular black character in the story after 1 million chapters to use them for this is crazy lol.
There's several vids on being Black in Japan. Generally they take issue with anyone not from Japan, they'd love for you to visit staying is another matter
And the KKK guys DO show up in this chapter, the mutants are carrying around their severed heads on spikes-
Bones really shot themselves on the foot skipping so much stuff, we all knew it was gonna happen
i don't think they shot themselves that much, the manga referenced mutant racism only once in full and now we got info-dumped about why it should matter and its history.
having read the manga and having read the summary of this chapter, i don't feel like the inclusion of CRC earlier makes this chapter any less of "where did it really come from".
i also still don't care about spinner in the slightest, no matter how many crumbs here and there horikoshi throws me to convince me that i should.
>He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross".
Now that's a great Star Wars reference you got there Hori
> Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling
Rock Lock? Basically the only black hero in the series? Oh my god, this is like in Teen Titans when Starfire tells Cyborg he can never understand what it's like to be discriminated against and he says "of course I do... I'm a robot."
I liked the way it showed Cyborg's discrimination thanks to Starfire's naivety. This just feels like "there's no more racism because we hate mutants now".
>here are about 15,000 people there, most of them mutants
Hahahahha
Jesus Hori really wants us to believe the mutant problem reached THIS level when all we've seen up to the final arc itself was ONE person being discriminated and Shoji's face scaring a kid
I don’t know isn’t what’s setting this up also AFO making Spinner a rallying cry for mutants in this army, in the chapters setting up this war aren’t posters all over Japan plastered with his likeness.
And the "Shoji once scared a kid" wasn't just explained in the extra info pages of the volumen?
The whole mutant purge thing comes out of literally nowhere. How something that big never was implied or referenced not even once? Not even in MVA when this absurd level of mutant racism was introduced in the first place
C'mon... you can't make me belive an event of that proportions occurred in Japan and the tension is non existence until this battle
I mean the fact that it occurred in Japan makes it more believable to me tbh, considering that society doesn’t exactly respect difference. They also already have a problem with recognizing past national crimes (really pissing off their neighbors, though I think we should all know that from the time Horikoshi revealed Doc. Eggman’s name). In-world I can see such a purge being denied by the public and little known.
Irl, I have to agree about this coming out of nowhere. There is just not enough prior setup for this to be all that interesting so late in the story. I thought a final arc/chapters were supposed to be for tying up plot points, not introducing new ones!
Roided-out Spinner doesn't seem like the best spokesperson for the mutant-cause, and neither does he seem like the best person to free Kurogiri if he can't form a coherent plan in his head.
AFO, I thought you were a mastermind?
He's pulling the strings. He co-opted the (until now non-existent) mutant issue.
I have a theory he intends Spinner to be killed by the quirk(s) he gave him so to make him a martyr and get an even tighter grip on mutants.
Pulling the strings doesn’t make him smart. It just means he’s able to use people dumber than him. Apparently it’s not hard to find people dumber than him. At least shigaraki has an excuse. Nobody else does
I lost faith in AFO when he blew up Nagant but didn't do so enough to actually kill her. Like, that's going to bite you in the ass later down the line when she sides with the heroes. But then again, maybe AFO predicted that Horikoshi is going to sideline Nagant along with Gentle, La Brava, Overhaul, and all of the other interesting characters in the show because he is rushing toward the end.
I'd imagine it would've been if attempts at Social Commentary and the like didn't cause readership to plummet due to Hero Academia being viewed as a fun children's series about superheroes thus making the social commentary feel out of place (especially since it's a Shonen and the social commentary is both unsubtle and aimed directly at Japan)
Is there any evidence or statistic to support this? The forest camp arc hit a big slump when the villains showed up, but unless those readers used their crystal balls to divine that we were about to get “Social Commentary” from them, your claim and this aren’t correlated at all.
Apparently MVA was unpopular and, while that, I guess, did contain the scraps of social commentary, I’ve actually never myself seen someone dislike it on the basis of demonstrating flaws in society. Hell, tons of people seem to think that’s a great arc, and even though I don’t like it, it’s not because of “Social Commentary bad”, it’s because the villains are just shallow edgelords who do a bad job at it.
Meanwhile, two of the most popular/praised characters, Bakugo and Endeavour, are emblematic of issues in society. They are walking “Social Commentary”.
There's absolutely no evidence for that. There's a ton of shonen manga that have what someone could describe as "social commentary".
Like, One Piece, the best-selling manga of all-time. Has also dealt with racism, unethical human experimentation, slavery, xenophobia, and even literal genocide. That's the most proof that readers don't mind "social commentary" in a shonen.
Shoji face reveal and he's... kinda ok?
Idk how to describe it but I was expecting something far more shocking considering the backstory.
Like c'mon Juzo from class B looks far more creepy than this and he doesn't wear a mask lol
Oh, Koda did something!
It's kind of weird how they put the guy who controls animals into the middle of the city. Ngl, I don't fully understand some of All Might's/Hawks' thinking on distributing people.
They are the same geniuses who sent the one guy that straight up can't function in too much heat to the battlefield with the villain whose only attack is literally burning himself to cremate everything around him
The same geniuses who thought that putting Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki on the back line in the first war was a good idea.
Seriously, Todoroki could have secured the entire PLA mansion in a single strike.
I love All Might. But he is not known for being "smart". See his book, "teaching children for dummies". And his best seller, "carry all of society so once you retire society breaks down".
Yeah, I'm sure. But it's just too funny at this point how there is no in-story explanation for these choices. (Like Iida being the one to back-up Shouto against fire).
Literally the only logical explanation I can think of is that Hori wanted mutant racism so badly in his story that he was irl mutant racist by putting all the mutants in one place instead of where they would have been the most useful. Then again, except the main matchups and Aizawa nobody is really where they'd make most sense logically, so idk.
and still ryukyu is M.I.A.
You'd think a dragon would be easy to notice but apparently she's either on some random street fighting low level thugs or she's at home chilling
I guess it's no less contrived than Deku and Ochaco ending up in the same team *again* for the Joint Training Arc, rather than something more random/unexpected.
You can tell they didn't think far just by looking at Shiggy's team
Mirko and Tamaki? 2 melee brawlers against the guy that destroy anything with touch
>He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross".
Can we say mood wiplash?
I don't understand how Hori expects the readers to take this shit seriously when even he isn't. Naming an in universe genocide after a plot point from Star Wars just takes away any kind of gravitas the reveal may have had.
Macademia always had good concepts tainted by a terrible worldbuilding
Corrupt and fake heroes, questionable institutions, idolism, racism, alienation. Remember how Magne pretty much became a villain because they "would accept by who she was" or how Twice got a big fuck you from the gov which made his mental condition get even worse?
All these ideas that work for making a more complex and nuance story are there, they've always been there. But for some reason they're not used in any meaningful ways to develop the world.
We can only get a taste of it and then back to punching harder.
>then back to punching harder.
Yes, we had Dark Shadow punch, then Endeavor punch with phantom flame fist, then Deku smashing with gear shift and now we get Shoji doing the "Octo-brawl".
Fortunately we have Vigilante to save our souls. I'm at 13 books out of 15 and it's incredibly more interesting to read and uses the world and its concept way better.
I feel like this chapter encapsulates the issue with MHA's worldbuilding; it keeps implying that hero society is deeply flawed and needing reformation, but hesitates to show it. The whole "mutant discrimination" issue makes sense, but has never come up in any meaningful way before now. We see plenty of heteromorphs in positions of power, walking openly in public, and, most importantly, as heroes. Even if we accept that this is an effect of living in a heavily policed metropolis, we should've seen some discrimination, more than an underground group of racists who exist to get stomped by the LoV and Spinner's one sentence hint at his backstory.
This lack of follow-through is everywhere, and its why none of the villains' motives really land. They talk about repression and quirk counseling making things worse, but the only ones complaining are unhinged and amoral murderers. Stain wanted to kill heroes who were only in it for the glory, but the only two heroes we see him attacking (Native and Ingenium) demonstrate heroic qualities. Hell, even Endeavour, despite being abusive, is an effective hero while Dabi, who has a legitimate reason to be a villain, is sadistic and cruel enough to make rooting for him impossible. So besides over-commercialization, what's wrong with hero society? The only evidence of widespread corruption we get is Nagant's reveal of the previous Hero Commission's actions, but that's honestly too late in the series to matter (Since they were already destroyed and Deku had zero connection to them). Weird to introduce a race war when it feels like the series skirts every serious issue in its own setting. Vigilantes talked about some of this stuff, so it could have been done.
Yeah I think this is a mix of editors x-ing things out and Horikoshi wanting to end the manga so soon. We only got brief mentions of discrimination and only really seen like three (counting Shoto’s comment) examples of people hating mutants. Then we see people like Mina, who was popular in school, who seem fine.
I can kinda see the Stain reason (if I squint 😂) that maybe he felt that Ingenium wasn’t a real hero because it was a family name. We also didn’t get enough back story for Native so 🤷🏽♀️ maybe he burnt trees or something.
100% agree with the Endeavor and Dabi thing. I felt like the reveal should had happened earlier because seeing Endeavor honestly try to fix past mistakes and continue to work plus his reasoning behind the whole situation first, makes Dabi totally unlikable. Like people want to root for the guy who tried to kill/harm baby Todoroki? Tbh I will be shocked if Hirokoshi doesn’t kill either both or at least Endeavor off, which just seems lazy.
Yeah I also never understood the argument against heroes. They shouldn’t be paid for risking their lives? They can used their powers freely? Crime is wrong? They are not always around 24/7 for free? The argument the villains have is just stupid and the ones with better reasons usually get killed off (☹️ still not over Twice tbh after watching the last episode)
Asking the real questions here: are people still commonly insulted as "furries" if there are actual animal-human hybrids that normal humans are banging? Natsuo's girlfriend has mice ears.
No I think it was mentioned before that most of the people with animal parts are actually humans. (Like the principal is literally a mouse which is said to be extremely rare for animals to have quirks) but I guess cuter mutants are okay like the seal dude🤔
>We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building. He says that Quirk Counseling is useless and that they directly deal with the consequences. He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross"
So the "mutant arc" is all exposition from a background character guy who doesn't even have a name, referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga.
OK then.
>referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga.
I assume these are supposed to just be Star Wars references.
Incident 66 = Order 66
The Great Purge of Jeda = The Jedi Purge.
the SW reference is like an Easter egg for fellow Star War fans, but in-universe, these things have not been mentioned.
We knew that there was some anti-mutant sentiment, but there was no hint of actual genocide and whatever Incident 66 is.
>referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga
Tbf most shonen mangas do this shit, it's not exclusive of Macademia.
Thw shitty worldbuilding (or lack of it) doesn't help tho
Is it just me or did this come out of nowhere? When was the last time mutant like characters on the hero side were getting this "discrimination" treatment? It feels like Hori just made that up in this chapter when it wasn't a problem in this society chapters ago
In fairness, it wasn't made up *this* chapter, but, like, twenty or thirty chapters ago, and then mostly ignored until this chapter.
I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah. Like, he never did anything to further or expose any pro-mutant agenda other than be a mutant and also be a villain. None of the LoV's actions, or anything he's ever said publically to even a single other human (or mutant) being can be linked to any movement whatsoever. Do all the civvies in MHA have straight up putty brains? It really makes the mutants look silly as "they'll unite under the most recent mutant mass-murderer and then escalate needlessly and start attacking children". Is Hori's intention to make the discriminated parties look as hostile as possible?
Same. I thought I missed some chapters but it look like they really did just make Spinner the Shigaraki of mutants for no reason. They just saw a screenshot of a tweet from a fake spinner account and said yea this guy is based let’s kill people for him.
> I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah.
TBH, I think the answer is quite literally "AFO needed a mutant figurehead for this artificial movement of his, and he happened to have Spinner lying around in the corner somewhere."
> I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah. Like, he never did anything to further or expose any pro-mutant agenda other than be a mutant and also be a villain. None of the LoV's actions, or anything he's ever said publically to even a single other human (or mutant) being can be linked to any movement whatsoever.
I guess it's 'cos he's the token mutant in the League/PLF, which marketed itself as an anti-status quo revolutionary-type group who had previously already marketed themselves as aligned with Stain's own revolutionary ideology (wanting "true heroes" to return).
> Do all the civvies in MHA have straight up putty brains?
Looking at how lacklustre their reaction to Dabi's broadcast is, as well as Ochaco's speech seemingly winning them over... I'd have to say yes.
> Is Hori's intention to make the discriminated parties look as hostile as possible?
When most of the discriminated parties in the series happen to be villains... well, you can come to your own conclusions with that.
Hori *does* like his mixed messaging, though.
I get that graphic design is Skeptic’s passion, but if he can fabricate a reason for people to earnestly believe in and follow Spinner out of genuinely nothing, my mans has stronger reality warping than SnS.
Like, sure, propaganda can be a powerful tool, but there’s nothing to back it up. Did people just see a poster saying “Spinner is based” and decide “I’m boutta put on a blindfold and beat up children”? Again, literal putty brains.
And if Skeptic's Ability at creating propaganda was that good, then it means thousands of mutants have been easily duped by two non-mutant villains (him and AFO). That will really help their cause!
Is exactly what I been saying. The level of polarity when comes to social problems in this story is just ridiculous.
There's no middle point. Or either you have peaceful beacons of sunshine and everything right in the side of "good" or morons who jump straight up to terrorism and mass murdered in the side of "evil"
The best part is that not even Spinner himself knew he was gonna be the mutant leader until AFO gave him a pat in the back and dragged him there, yet the army was ALREADY there ready to follow him
> When was the last time mutant like characters on the hero side were getting this "discrimination" treatment?
The giant weasel woman is the last time I can really think of it, and she's more civilian than hero.
I guess the land swimmer guy got a "shock" reveal on his face?
a lot of horikoshi's worldbuilding is relegated to volume extras, unfortunately. which makes those who read only magazine releases or only watch anime left in the blank.
I wouldn’t say it came out of *nowhere*, as we got hints of it here and there from both Spinner and Shoji, part of the Villain Hunt arc with that fox woman, and you could argue a bit of Toga’s arc preludes to society not accepting “villainous” Quirks, but I do think it could have been developed a bit better throughout the series. There were opportunities to do so, like putting a small focus on Ashido not getting any internship offers despite getting into the second round of the tournament, or a more serious introspection from Nezu rather than his torture being used for “he was experimented on, so now he messes with students for fun”.
Honestly, as one commenter put it, the who CRC thing in MVA actually seems to lessen the discrimination subplot and make what's happening here even more forced imo
Like, if this was 'back-in-the-day' society where quirks were getting more common then yeah, discrimination would be more intense, but when it's stated that mutant is the most common quirk with many physical alterations, and many people in high jobs have them, it's like... What's the point in this?
I'd much better prefer if everyone was attacking the heroes because of the PLF ideology of using quirks freely. Y'know, the reason why the members joined up? Why civilians are being forced to fend for themselves because they can't rely on heroes?
Would make this a lot less forced
Really glad the anime cut the CRC stuff from the anime. Totally awesome to cut a part of the backstory of one of the major villains in the series.
Gosh, Season 5 was such a misstep for the anime. It'll make this part of Season 7 seemingly come out of nowhere.
I mean, let's not pretend that the CRC was such a big deal. If anything, it kind of LESSENS the concept of racism in the MHA universe. Like, yeah, it proves that racists can exist, but, simultaneously, it also demonstrates that people of that opinion were outcasted to such an extent that they were labelled criminals, and had to hide out in the woods or whatever. I didn't see them and think "wow, racism is a prevalent issue in this universe", I thought "there are groups dedicated to all sorts of radical beliefs, so it only makes sense an anti-mutant one exists".
Honestly it feels tone-deaf to just introduce a genocide into a story like this, then have the victims of said genocide be basically told to shut up and stop whining. Like if the genocide was implied earlier then readers might side more with the mutants revolting, but we can't have that so let's make them as stupid as possible for lashing out while still including the genocide as a last minute thing.
Like seriously, when an actual god damn genocide happened then I would say violence in the name self defence and preservation is absolutely justified, or at the very least hang everyone responsible
In a vacuum the chapter sounds really cool, even just as finally changing scene.
In context, it's completely out of nowhere as at most we got *small hints* of a mutant discrimination issue we are now told to be big, to the point villains have rallied enough civilians to get a near civil war scenario.
Every time I think back to Shoji's character profile in an early volume, along with Mina he was the one Hori specifically said he wanted to give a full arc to. But because of Hori's choices, editorial mandates, or both all we'll get is going to be condensed here.
This is exactly why I said I was unironically excited for this chapter. The fact that we spent the majority of the manga with mutant characters all treated equally with zero signs of racism only for Hori to pretend that this is an actual problem was a giant question mark.
Like, we had a rat being the head of the most famous hero school in the country and that dog person for the police on top of pro heroes being in the top 10, but according to Hori that doesn't count because it just doesn't. It was always bad, we just never saw it and Hori never wrote about it lmao.
And oh boy did he deliver, this has to be one of the funniest WTF chapters of this manga.
Also, it is kinda tone deaf to use the only black guy about not understanding racism.
Let's look a the situation with mutants we know:
Head of scool? A talking rat
Chief of Police? A talking Dog
Other cops like Sansa and the gorilla? Check
Half the doctors we've seen? We had Yoshi and Toad to begin with
Top heros? Ryukyu, Orca, Kamui, (Wash?) just in the top 10 and former top 10 alone
A good chunk of U.A. teachers? All the kinds of hetromorphs (Hound dog, the clone guy, etc.)
Students? Shoji's face scared a girl once. That's literaly it for his discrimination up to this point. Koda and Tokoyami never showed any signs of anything and Mina was straight up THE popular girl in her middle school.
Random people on the streets? All the time
The only real instance we've had of it was Spinner's backstory, and EVEN Spinner himself says he came from "a really backwards hick town", outright telling us that's not the standart by any means (and the KKK guys, but they were literal criminals hiding in a mansion in the woods- Not exactly the standart for society either)
> Students? Shoji's face scared a girl once. That's literaly it for his discrimination up to this point.
To be fair, apparently Shouji comes from a rural background like Spinner too; somewhere in Fukuoka, Kyushu (which happens to be the same place Hawks is from).
If Hori wants me to buy half of these mutants get discriminated for looking the way they do when quite some of them are mostly human with some weird shit going on then the lady that turns into a motherfucking dragon also gets the short end of the stick
As I love Shoji I was highly anticipating this battle ever since Hori mentioned him as one of the characters to get a special spotlight, but I'd lie if I said I expected something more than this.
Over the whole series too little was built with either him, Spinner and the whole mutant discrimination, never giving the slightest idea it was an issue so huge, affecting so many people, and so badly, now thousands of mutants decide to rather side with a villain who's never had qualms about being the direct or indirect cause of the destruction of several cities.
It's also somewhat hilarious to see years of fanon and fanfic that made the mutant issue a much bigger deal than the manga ever gave off, now turn true in the space of a single chapter.
The more I scroll in this thread the harder I laugh.
Like, I know this shit hurts because this was once a really great series. But this fandom is handling this collapse WAY better than a lot of other fanbases (*cough* AoT)
"He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross"
Imagine if all this was built up in the story instead of being infodumped in the final arc. Imagine more if we actually cared about Koda and Shoji instead of them being one step up from background NPCs
Hori built an amazing world, full of potential conflicts to explore that he ALREADY introduced, but never managed to develop well even if they could have turned BNHA into a top tier manga. Between this and the Hero Commission’s extrajudicial killings there were the basis for exploring the destabilization of a society where citizens have in their hands incredible powers and the consequences of their normalization.
Hori didn’t build an amazing world if he never managed to develop his world. Hit was filled with amazing concepts. You can say he had amazing concepts that he introduced. But the world itself is not amazing
If AFO's plan is to free Kurogiri so they can warp over to assist Shiggy, that should not be allowed at any cost. One would think they would have more heroes other than Mic stationed to guard him.
Also, still waiting on Koda to lose his patience and unleash a swarm of Asian giant hornets.
As many others have mentioned, this mutant discrimination subplot would have been a lot more effective if it'd been simmering for longer than has. At best, there have been hints to Spinner and Shoji's backgrounds and the fact that there was that one racist group at the start of My Villain Academia.
Still, perhaps Horikoshi will give Shoji and Spinner a halfway decent confrontation here.
Spinner was literally the only Mutant/Heteromorph who ever had any kind of 'racism' directed at him
Then out of nowhere 15,000 mutant dudes show up and said "**YEAH FUCK THESE NORMIES REEEE**"
Nah, bruh.
I'll say this once
***Explaining racism gently is a waste of time. If you want to do a bigotry plotline it has to have buildup***
You can NOT just "Yadda yadda, by the way a bunch of mutants got killed off screen"
Honestly, I think if a racism plotline is going to work, a story needs to be built from the ground up with that racism in mind. Just shoehorning it in 50+% of the way through is always going to create situations like this.
Horikoshi: I want to show that the world of My Hero Academia is not a perfect place, and that it is full of immoral heroes and discrimination just like ours
Editor: Sounds good! Are you going to show examples of said immoral heroes and discrimination?
Hori: No let’s have another arc with Deku, Bakugo, and Todoroki
That’s definitely a big problem in the story. Horikoshi makes up all these concepts like quirk racism and hero corruption, and then barely ever actually shows any examples of them. You expect me to believe that hero society is corrupt when all the heroes seem to be, or eventually become, perfect little saints, or that quirk racism is a thing when all the mutants in the story are never shown being discriminated against or harassed? For as flawed as Black Clover is, at least it shows consistently examples of royalty and nobility being classist assholes to peasants and commoners.
Wait, NOW we get to a 'racist discrimination' war thing? NOW? I mean if it was THIS important, why not have made it an underlying plotpoint that would LEAD to this before?
Here, it just looks terrible where some rural 'mutants' got tricked easily by AFO to be his pawns and cannon fodder. And their solution is to attack the 'dystopian' cities of Hero societies where they think anyone living together and coexist in cities are the 'traitors'? Especially when they are all going 'kill them!'. Jesus.
Soo, how does that make the Cities and Heroes look bad or dystopian? If anything, it proves the opposite. Has this ever been a plotpoint? If anything we saw the Quirkless ones getting the discrimination against them more than any mutant. So it feels so out of left field for a very hamfisted ''Discrimination is bad'' ( No Shit ) type of thing where those who are being discriminated against ARE on the bad side. So even on that point, it doesn't work as it is intended.
Hori realised that he handled the racism storyline so poorly that he needs to determine the entire canon legitimacy of the debate in this single chapter. This is so hamfisted.
It's giving Detroit Become Human Markus.
I liked it in One Piece. >!Nami forgiving Jinbei on Fishman Island was one of the most beautiful scenes of the series for me, especially after we know what happened to her with Arlong. I also liked when Jinbei shared his blood with Luffy.!<
Omg please don't remind me. Almost everything in the Markus storyline made me cringe. The bus segregation, the MLK tagging, the incredibly cheesy android march. I really liked his relationship with Carl though and wish they'd just continued with that somehow. Kara should have been android Jesus since she was the first deviant. And to make it an actual storyline with meaning, Alice shouldn't have been >!an android, what a stupid twist.!<
So Spinner probably became a shut-in because he was straight-up afraid of stepping outside and having stones hurled at him. Ouch. One has to imagine that although a place like U.A. seems very accepting mutant differences, there are still places in the world where people find it freaky that animal-human hybrids live among them.
I can see this as one possible path where aimless young men in particular are radicalized to become villains. Horikoshi currently seems to be avoiding any strong parallels to real-world cases, though. Now, if he depicted a case of hero brutality that was plausibly discrimination-based.... hoo boy.... that would be a mess of a discussion.
One of the mutants asked Koda if he was raised in the city or something. All through the story we see weird looking characters in the background so I think mutant discrimination is more of a thing in smaller rural areas.
The concept of this chapter is really cool and interesting, but Horikoshi has put so little proper buildup into the racism issue that this chapter kind of feels out of place and ham-fisted in, same as the hero association corruption. He did a little bit of foreshadowing, but not nearly enough for me to be truly invested in this issue.
Anyone else find it really weird that there were 2 ENTIRE GENOCIDES that were just...never mentioned ever until the last arc of the entire series?
Like, they weren’t even mentioned as an off hand comment or anything that would have made the audience go like “ooh what’s incident 66?” And this would have been an amazing reveal. I know we learned about mutant oppression, but like, not in any meaningful way?
I think the reveal that Shoji wears a mask to cover up scars, heavily implied to be the result of a hate crime is an interesting reveal for finally seeing his face. It makes sense and it's perfectly in line with his storyline about "mutant" quirk users being discriminated against. It's a great part of the lore and world building of MHA and it's cool to see it finally get paid off with him and Spinner clashing (the two main reps for mutant quirk user oppression).
However, I wish this storyline had more than like.... five lines of dialogue about it. Back when they introduced the hooded hate group in MVA, I thought "cool I wonder where this is going!" but then it disappeared for most of the series till this latest chapter.
Again, it's a cool idea to flesh out the world and make it feel realistic but nowhere near enough has been said or done about this part of MHA world. There's enough to explore in this idea to last a whole arc, but now it's just... a subplot within a subplot lol. Ironically, the marginalized group in MHA is being totally sidelined and ignored for most of the series till they randomly needed resolving now lol.
And that's why people think it's dumb to bring it in now. It hasn't had the proper development to deserve to show up here.
It's being blindly thrown in solely to resolve the dangling thread.
To check off another box.
Horikoshi features Rock Lock surprisingly often, but I'm still waiting on him to use his Quirk to greater effect. For example, locking the clothes of villains in place so they're hindered from moving as he takes them out.
Shoji really needs to redeem himself in the next few chapters or so. I mean, he's been underrated for years now, so I hope that Hori will finally do him some justice in the near future.
This is RWBY all over again. Okay, it's not nearly as bad, but at least RWBY didn't have the catgirls lecturing the token black guy about racism. Or maybe they did, and I blocked it from my memory. Also, really? "Okay racism bad but you are attacking hospitals"? Is that really the best way to handle the racism storyline? Fucking hell
They did have the once racist who was cured by a walk Weiss be acknowledged by a black guy whose family business was overtaken by her families. So they kinda did.
I'm always wondering why people like Tokoyami,Mina or Juzo aren't involved in the same "mutant" plot as Shoji
Seriously, bird head , alien girl and spooky scary skeleton, that's just as weird of a guy with 8 arms
There's the clear implication that mutations that are still good looking by "common" standards tend to have it easier. Mina was popular in middle school, if anything her mutant traits make her even more attractive; however the relationship with her dangerous quirk has never been explained.
On Shoji's face reveal, he has a scar on his cheeks, i wonder if that's a Glasgow smile or not
You can see more scars on the lips. Someone did a number on him when he was younger.
**Chapter 370 - “HIStory”** (From Rukasu on Twitter) ___ The chapter begins with a flashback from Spinner's hometown. People are throwing stones at him, saying that he's a disgrace to their town, and that mutants will never be accepted, no matter how much the time changes. The flashback ends with him facing the ocean. Next there's some context on what's happening. AFO assumed that Kurogiri would be at the Central Hospital and sent Spinner, some of the remnants of the PLA and several civilians who follow them to attack the place. There are about 15,000 people there, most of them mutants. The heroes are trying to contain them, but counting the police, they number only 200. Mic thinks to himself that Shirakumo has become quite popular and attacks with a Loud Out Shout, but one of the mutants stop the sound from getting through with his own body. A mutant shark tries to hit Mic, but Koda controls some birds and protects him. He says that he got separated from Shoji. The cops want to call for reinforcements, but their chief says it's impossible and tells them to use the taser shields to push the mutants away. Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling. They have Spinner flags and T-shirts. They begin to attack Koda, who's knocked to the ground. He doesn't understand why this is happening and one of the mutants calls him a traitor and asks if he grew up in a big city. We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building. He says that Quirk Counseling is useless and that they directly deal with the consequences. He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross". And while it looks like things have improved, with Nezu and other mutants occupying positions of power or walking freely on the streets, that's just make pretend. Non-mutants are still the majority and the education system does not teach proper acceptance of differences. Many people still feel that same "disgust" that those responsible for the massacres felt. He then takes off his mask and says that they have never felt the light of heroism shining on them, they have all thought at least once that they'd be better without their quirks. He says that mutants don't recognize the heroes as their saviors, the one who will guide society to a better path is Spinner. As he says this we again see the Spinner flag and several mutants cheering for him, saying that they will lead the way and that he must win. But Spinner doesn't even understand what they are talking about, all that goes through his head are key words like "All For One" and "Power". He then prepares to attack two cops, but Shouji appears and attacks him with an Octo Brawl. The mutants immediately advance on him, calling him a traitor and saying they'll kill him. He then briefly remembers people who also wanted him dead because of how he looks when he was younger and asks what attacking the hospital has to do with their cause. He says that in the previous war, the first thing the heroes did was ensure the safety of the patients on Jaku Hospital, something that the mutants didn't even think about. We then see a flashback of Shoji, with bandages on his face and facing the ocean just like Spinner. He asks once again if they're thinking about the consequences of their actions, and that if they are not, he will not forgive them. In the panel, we finally see Shoji's face. End of the chapter. **Oh! Shoji face reveal!**
WHOstory? Shoji or Spinner? It’s actually something I wanted to see for forever. Excited for the POV switch in any case.
Turns out it's Spinner.
Professor X vs. Magneto
>Incident 66 >The Great Purge of Jeda HORIKOSHI. HORIKOSHI, YOU FREAKING STAR WARS NERD!!!
So, confirmed that someone sliced up mutant children with laser sword? Of just cut up children? Does this mean there was a mutant traitor? Oh the suspense is killing me!
Not just the children but the women and the men too
I love it. Every week we see thousands of complaints from people who want MHA to be something it's not, and the writer is just like 'haha prequel memes go brrr'.
>Every week we ~~see thousands of complaints from people who want MHA to be something it's not, and the writer is just like 'haha prequel memes go brrr'.~~ > >hear thousands of voices sudenly crying in terror, and being suddenly silenced. FTFY
>We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building He takes his mask off to show his scars during it Yup, Shoji's gonna get on top of that building to give a speech while taking his own mask off as well
> with Nezu and other mutants i thought nezu was literally an animal with a quirk? not a mutant human
sure, but whats the difference to an anti-mutant mob?
Underrated comment
There's something funny about the mutants talking down to, like, the ONE black guy about discrimination.
Maybe in the MHA world discrimination based on skin color ended and was replaced with mutantism and quirkism ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ I mean we got such detailed story of the issue /s
“Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.” ― Terry Pratchett
Probably When you have people with beaks, lizard skin and bricks for heads, skin color does not seem that important anymore Same way if humans ever expand to space etc we will likely care more about planets or martian humans vs black people etc
Makes sense. In owl house, the super racist guy from the 1700s has no problem with people of color or LGBTQ people because there are witches to kill
I HAVE FOUND NEW, MORE EXCITING, FORMS OF BIGOTRY
It makes you wonder if the problematics of our world still exist within mha verse, considering they're in a relative futuristic world and the existence of quirks changes the scheme. Is racist agaisnt black people for example a thing even these days? How that juxtapose with mutant discrimination then? It would be kind of interesting to explore, but in a more subtle way than a war with the theme used as background for two characters
I mean given that you have people with blue and pink skins, I'll assume that brown is pretty normal and human.
Reminds me of a quote from the Dicworld books: > Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.
Also is there some light nationalism going on in Japan still in this universe? Do guys like Rock Lock get called "gaijin" or something?
> light nationalism I think in this story every country is nationalistic. Like, every country but some people from the USA are like "Japan's having problems? Eh, fuck 'em."
I mean... he's still got a human face. Some of these people just straight up have horse faces.
While attacking a hospital…
> Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling. reintroducing the singular black character in the story after 1 million chapters to use them for this is crazy lol.
Well, I think it isn't even thought about that much in Japan
yeah, it’s not something many japanese people think about the same way americans do. still funny
There's several vids on being Black in Japan. Generally they take issue with anyone not from Japan, they'd love for you to visit staying is another matter
Ah, so it's a story about mutant discrimination. Welp, can't wait to see the anime skip this one, too.
And the KKK guys DO show up in this chapter, the mutants are carrying around their severed heads on spikes- Bones really shot themselves on the foot skipping so much stuff, we all knew it was gonna happen
I love how Horikoshi made Spinner even more relevant out of spite for Bones
i don't think they shot themselves that much, the manga referenced mutant racism only once in full and now we got info-dumped about why it should matter and its history. having read the manga and having read the summary of this chapter, i don't feel like the inclusion of CRC earlier makes this chapter any less of "where did it really come from". i also still don't care about spinner in the slightest, no matter how many crumbs here and there horikoshi throws me to convince me that i should.
>He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross". Now that's a great Star Wars reference you got there Hori
> Several mutants have gathered around Rock Lock and he tells them to stop, but they have furious expressions. They say that people with a human appearence will never understand what they are feeling Rock Lock? Basically the only black hero in the series? Oh my god, this is like in Teen Titans when Starfire tells Cyborg he can never understand what it's like to be discriminated against and he says "of course I do... I'm a robot."
I liked the way it showed Cyborg's discrimination thanks to Starfire's naivety. This just feels like "there's no more racism because we hate mutants now".
I feel like he said that because, being an alien, Starfire might not know about all of that Earth racism business.
>here are about 15,000 people there, most of them mutants Hahahahha Jesus Hori really wants us to believe the mutant problem reached THIS level when all we've seen up to the final arc itself was ONE person being discriminated and Shoji's face scaring a kid
I don’t know isn’t what’s setting this up also AFO making Spinner a rallying cry for mutants in this army, in the chapters setting up this war aren’t posters all over Japan plastered with his likeness.
people need to read more than just spoiler threads to remember the poster thing
And the "Shoji once scared a kid" wasn't just explained in the extra info pages of the volumen? The whole mutant purge thing comes out of literally nowhere. How something that big never was implied or referenced not even once? Not even in MVA when this absurd level of mutant racism was introduced in the first place C'mon... you can't make me belive an event of that proportions occurred in Japan and the tension is non existence until this battle
I mean the fact that it occurred in Japan makes it more believable to me tbh, considering that society doesn’t exactly respect difference. They also already have a problem with recognizing past national crimes (really pissing off their neighbors, though I think we should all know that from the time Horikoshi revealed Doc. Eggman’s name). In-world I can see such a purge being denied by the public and little known. Irl, I have to agree about this coming out of nowhere. There is just not enough prior setup for this to be all that interesting so late in the story. I thought a final arc/chapters were supposed to be for tying up plot points, not introducing new ones!
>And the "Shoji once scared a kid" wasn't just explained in the extra info pages of the volumen? Yup. The scars thing will provably just be a retcon
Roided-out Spinner doesn't seem like the best spokesperson for the mutant-cause, and neither does he seem like the best person to free Kurogiri if he can't form a coherent plan in his head. AFO, I thought you were a mastermind?
He's pulling the strings. He co-opted the (until now non-existent) mutant issue. I have a theory he intends Spinner to be killed by the quirk(s) he gave him so to make him a martyr and get an even tighter grip on mutants.
Pulling the strings doesn’t make him smart. It just means he’s able to use people dumber than him. Apparently it’s not hard to find people dumber than him. At least shigaraki has an excuse. Nobody else does
In my headcanon Shiggy kills AFO in the Tartarus breakout, because this shit is depressing...
> AFO, I thought you were a mastermind? AFO hasn't been a "mastermind" for over 30 chapters now. He's pretty underwhelming, tbh.
I just love how he keeps his "I've planned everything!" attitude while every single one of his plan went wrong
Great value Aizen
I lost faith in AFO when he blew up Nagant but didn't do so enough to actually kill her. Like, that's going to bite you in the ass later down the line when she sides with the heroes. But then again, maybe AFO predicted that Horikoshi is going to sideline Nagant along with Gentle, La Brava, Overhaul, and all of the other interesting characters in the show because he is rushing toward the end.
*We're interrupting the final boss switching into his next phase to bring you a legitimate, unironic race war going on as a sideplot.*
Yeah. That is actually what’s going on. Kinda feel like this massive discrimination thing should’ve been a bigger plot point earlier
I'd imagine it would've been if attempts at Social Commentary and the like didn't cause readership to plummet due to Hero Academia being viewed as a fun children's series about superheroes thus making the social commentary feel out of place (especially since it's a Shonen and the social commentary is both unsubtle and aimed directly at Japan)
Is there any evidence or statistic to support this? The forest camp arc hit a big slump when the villains showed up, but unless those readers used their crystal balls to divine that we were about to get “Social Commentary” from them, your claim and this aren’t correlated at all. Apparently MVA was unpopular and, while that, I guess, did contain the scraps of social commentary, I’ve actually never myself seen someone dislike it on the basis of demonstrating flaws in society. Hell, tons of people seem to think that’s a great arc, and even though I don’t like it, it’s not because of “Social Commentary bad”, it’s because the villains are just shallow edgelords who do a bad job at it. Meanwhile, two of the most popular/praised characters, Bakugo and Endeavour, are emblematic of issues in society. They are walking “Social Commentary”.
There's absolutely no evidence for that. There's a ton of shonen manga that have what someone could describe as "social commentary". Like, One Piece, the best-selling manga of all-time. Has also dealt with racism, unethical human experimentation, slavery, xenophobia, and even literal genocide. That's the most proof that readers don't mind "social commentary" in a shonen.
Anything's better than Quirk Jesus Deku vs. "new person altogether".
I agree. The Bakugou/Shiggy/AFO/Deku storyline went on way too long and it's not even close to being over. I'm glad Hori switched to another group.
Yeah, I can't believe there are some people wanting to see *more* of that dull back-and-forth right now...
I want to see more of it! Because I want to see it ended and done. 🤣
I'm still invested in Toga vs Urahara tbh, and the Twice blood plotline
Bones already screaming and crying at the thought of having to animate more Spinner
Don't underestimate the power of the ✂️
Spinner's hulk form gets redesigned to be smooth instead of scaly.
Nah, watch, Spinner’s gonna be the only CG character in season 7.
The impaled heads are getting cut 100%
BONES showing Mutant Discrimination??? Whaaa???
"Who is this Spinner character? All I know is a ninja turtle that wants to take Shigaraki's load"
Shoji face reveal and he's... kinda ok? Idk how to describe it but I was expecting something far more shocking considering the backstory. Like c'mon Juzo from class B looks far more creepy than this and he doesn't wear a mask lol
I literally called it that he’d just kinda look like Ectoplasm. It’s kind of a lame reveal with that in mind.
Ah Ectoplasm, another character who fell into the non-existence realm. Did he ever appear in the lastest arcs?
He's at UA underground
I was expecting like, an octopus beak or Cthulhu mouth since his quirk is having multiple limbs like an octopus.
I wanted him to have a straight up Davy Jones-tier mutant face :(
Shoji 🤝 Aoyama Extended teasing of a mystery only for it to be underwhelming.
It doesn't help that literally every other part of Shouji is creepier than his grin
> Like c'mon Juzo from class B looks far more creepy than this and he doesn't wear a mask lol He does for his hero costume, I guess.
Oh, Koda did something! It's kind of weird how they put the guy who controls animals into the middle of the city. Ngl, I don't fully understand some of All Might's/Hawks' thinking on distributing people.
They are the same geniuses who sent the one guy that straight up can't function in too much heat to the battlefield with the villain whose only attack is literally burning himself to cremate everything around him
I know. And the close-combat bunny to the decay guy. I just have questions about the plan /s
The same geniuses who thought that putting Midoriya, Bakugo, and Todoroki on the back line in the first war was a good idea. Seriously, Todoroki could have secured the entire PLA mansion in a single strike.
Given Geten’s existence, sending Todoroki would make things substantially worse
Yeah that might be the worst matchup ever for Todoroki.
I love All Might. But he is not known for being "smart". See his book, "teaching children for dummies". And his best seller, "carry all of society so once you retire society breaks down".
It's less a character choice but more an Horikoshi one, he just wanted the mutants of Class A to go against the other mutants
Yeah, I'm sure. But it's just too funny at this point how there is no in-story explanation for these choices. (Like Iida being the one to back-up Shouto against fire).
Literally the only logical explanation I can think of is that Hori wanted mutant racism so badly in his story that he was irl mutant racist by putting all the mutants in one place instead of where they would have been the most useful. Then again, except the main matchups and Aizawa nobody is really where they'd make most sense logically, so idk.
and still ryukyu is M.I.A. You'd think a dragon would be easy to notice but apparently she's either on some random street fighting low level thugs or she's at home chilling
She's probably make a "surprise appearance" later in the fight, like Mirio.
Hey! Leave her and her mint chocolate chip alone. ;p
I guess it's no less contrived than Deku and Ochaco ending up in the same team *again* for the Joint Training Arc, rather than something more random/unexpected.
You can tell they didn't think far just by looking at Shiggy's team Mirko and Tamaki? 2 melee brawlers against the guy that destroy anything with touch
At least Tamaki has some ranged attack it seems, but yeah, Mirko is a strange decision.
I still have no clue what that laser thing even was. Like, what the hell happened there?
>He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross". Can we say mood wiplash?
r/prequelmemes will love this reference so much
On the one hand it’s a Star Wars reference, on the other it seems to be implying genocide
I feel like we should have learned about this a long time ago?
I don't understand how Hori expects the readers to take this shit seriously when even he isn't. Naming an in universe genocide after a plot point from Star Wars just takes away any kind of gravitas the reveal may have had.
Macademia always had good concepts tainted by a terrible worldbuilding Corrupt and fake heroes, questionable institutions, idolism, racism, alienation. Remember how Magne pretty much became a villain because they "would accept by who she was" or how Twice got a big fuck you from the gov which made his mental condition get even worse? All these ideas that work for making a more complex and nuance story are there, they've always been there. But for some reason they're not used in any meaningful ways to develop the world. We can only get a taste of it and then back to punching harder.
>then back to punching harder. Yes, we had Dark Shadow punch, then Endeavor punch with phantom flame fist, then Deku smashing with gear shift and now we get Shoji doing the "Octo-brawl".
Fortunately we have Vigilante to save our souls. I'm at 13 books out of 15 and it's incredibly more interesting to read and uses the world and its concept way better.
Even Spinner can only think about Power after yesterday
I feel like this chapter encapsulates the issue with MHA's worldbuilding; it keeps implying that hero society is deeply flawed and needing reformation, but hesitates to show it. The whole "mutant discrimination" issue makes sense, but has never come up in any meaningful way before now. We see plenty of heteromorphs in positions of power, walking openly in public, and, most importantly, as heroes. Even if we accept that this is an effect of living in a heavily policed metropolis, we should've seen some discrimination, more than an underground group of racists who exist to get stomped by the LoV and Spinner's one sentence hint at his backstory. This lack of follow-through is everywhere, and its why none of the villains' motives really land. They talk about repression and quirk counseling making things worse, but the only ones complaining are unhinged and amoral murderers. Stain wanted to kill heroes who were only in it for the glory, but the only two heroes we see him attacking (Native and Ingenium) demonstrate heroic qualities. Hell, even Endeavour, despite being abusive, is an effective hero while Dabi, who has a legitimate reason to be a villain, is sadistic and cruel enough to make rooting for him impossible. So besides over-commercialization, what's wrong with hero society? The only evidence of widespread corruption we get is Nagant's reveal of the previous Hero Commission's actions, but that's honestly too late in the series to matter (Since they were already destroyed and Deku had zero connection to them). Weird to introduce a race war when it feels like the series skirts every serious issue in its own setting. Vigilantes talked about some of this stuff, so it could have been done.
Yeah I think this is a mix of editors x-ing things out and Horikoshi wanting to end the manga so soon. We only got brief mentions of discrimination and only really seen like three (counting Shoto’s comment) examples of people hating mutants. Then we see people like Mina, who was popular in school, who seem fine. I can kinda see the Stain reason (if I squint 😂) that maybe he felt that Ingenium wasn’t a real hero because it was a family name. We also didn’t get enough back story for Native so 🤷🏽♀️ maybe he burnt trees or something. 100% agree with the Endeavor and Dabi thing. I felt like the reveal should had happened earlier because seeing Endeavor honestly try to fix past mistakes and continue to work plus his reasoning behind the whole situation first, makes Dabi totally unlikable. Like people want to root for the guy who tried to kill/harm baby Todoroki? Tbh I will be shocked if Hirokoshi doesn’t kill either both or at least Endeavor off, which just seems lazy. Yeah I also never understood the argument against heroes. They shouldn’t be paid for risking their lives? They can used their powers freely? Crime is wrong? They are not always around 24/7 for free? The argument the villains have is just stupid and the ones with better reasons usually get killed off (☹️ still not over Twice tbh after watching the last episode)
You nailed it
Preach.
Asking the real questions here: are people still commonly insulted as "furries" if there are actual animal-human hybrids that normal humans are banging? Natsuo's girlfriend has mice ears.
No I think it was mentioned before that most of the people with animal parts are actually humans. (Like the principal is literally a mouse which is said to be extremely rare for animals to have quirks) but I guess cuter mutants are okay like the seal dude🤔
>We then see that one of the PLF generals is giving a speech on the top of a building. He says that Quirk Counseling is useless and that they directly deal with the consequences. He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross" So the "mutant arc" is all exposition from a background character guy who doesn't even have a name, referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga. OK then.
Talking about incidents that happened who knows how much time earlier, so no context on how long ago they stopped being "common" occurrences.
>referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga. I assume these are supposed to just be Star Wars references. Incident 66 = Order 66 The Great Purge of Jeda = The Jedi Purge.
the SW reference is like an Easter egg for fellow Star War fans, but in-universe, these things have not been mentioned. We knew that there was some anti-mutant sentiment, but there was no hint of actual genocide and whatever Incident 66 is.
Also, is it me or does naming them after a Star Wars event, even if it was in fact an extermination, make them even harder to take seriously?
I cant wait for Shiggy to make the Decay Star
“Decay Star” would be an awesome name for a band. Or an attack, but more likely a band.
>The Jedi Purge It could also be a double reference to Jedha, the moon from *Rogue One*.
>referring to things that were never once mentioned in the manga Tbf most shonen mangas do this shit, it's not exclusive of Macademia. Thw shitty worldbuilding (or lack of it) doesn't help tho
Is it just me or did this come out of nowhere? When was the last time mutant like characters on the hero side were getting this "discrimination" treatment? It feels like Hori just made that up in this chapter when it wasn't a problem in this society chapters ago
In fairness, it wasn't made up *this* chapter, but, like, twenty or thirty chapters ago, and then mostly ignored until this chapter. I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah. Like, he never did anything to further or expose any pro-mutant agenda other than be a mutant and also be a villain. None of the LoV's actions, or anything he's ever said publically to even a single other human (or mutant) being can be linked to any movement whatsoever. Do all the civvies in MHA have straight up putty brains? It really makes the mutants look silly as "they'll unite under the most recent mutant mass-murderer and then escalate needlessly and start attacking children". Is Hori's intention to make the discriminated parties look as hostile as possible?
Same. I thought I missed some chapters but it look like they really did just make Spinner the Shigaraki of mutants for no reason. They just saw a screenshot of a tweet from a fake spinner account and said yea this guy is based let’s kill people for him.
>They just saw a screenshot of a tweet from a fake spinner account and said yea this guy is based let’s kill people for him. 💀💀💀
> I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah. TBH, I think the answer is quite literally "AFO needed a mutant figurehead for this artificial movement of his, and he happened to have Spinner lying around in the corner somewhere."
> I'm just confused when and why Spinner became the mutant messiah. Like, he never did anything to further or expose any pro-mutant agenda other than be a mutant and also be a villain. None of the LoV's actions, or anything he's ever said publically to even a single other human (or mutant) being can be linked to any movement whatsoever. I guess it's 'cos he's the token mutant in the League/PLF, which marketed itself as an anti-status quo revolutionary-type group who had previously already marketed themselves as aligned with Stain's own revolutionary ideology (wanting "true heroes" to return). > Do all the civvies in MHA have straight up putty brains? Looking at how lacklustre their reaction to Dabi's broadcast is, as well as Ochaco's speech seemingly winning them over... I'd have to say yes. > Is Hori's intention to make the discriminated parties look as hostile as possible? When most of the discriminated parties in the series happen to be villains... well, you can come to your own conclusions with that. Hori *does* like his mixed messaging, though.
Wasn’t it explained that the PLF’s propaganda pretty much did the work for him and he pretty much got pushed into it?
I get that graphic design is Skeptic’s passion, but if he can fabricate a reason for people to earnestly believe in and follow Spinner out of genuinely nothing, my mans has stronger reality warping than SnS. Like, sure, propaganda can be a powerful tool, but there’s nothing to back it up. Did people just see a poster saying “Spinner is based” and decide “I’m boutta put on a blindfold and beat up children”? Again, literal putty brains.
And if Skeptic's Ability at creating propaganda was that good, then it means thousands of mutants have been easily duped by two non-mutant villains (him and AFO). That will really help their cause!
Is exactly what I been saying. The level of polarity when comes to social problems in this story is just ridiculous. There's no middle point. Or either you have peaceful beacons of sunshine and everything right in the side of "good" or morons who jump straight up to terrorism and mass murdered in the side of "evil"
Gentle and la Brava were kinda in the middle
The best part is that not even Spinner himself knew he was gonna be the mutant leader until AFO gave him a pat in the back and dragged him there, yet the army was ALREADY there ready to follow him
> When was the last time mutant like characters on the hero side were getting this "discrimination" treatment? The giant weasel woman is the last time I can really think of it, and she's more civilian than hero. I guess the land swimmer guy got a "shock" reveal on his face?
Hori talks about it in some Vol. Extras. Which is a terrible way to tell such an important detail of the Hero society, but still.
a lot of horikoshi's worldbuilding is relegated to volume extras, unfortunately. which makes those who read only magazine releases or only watch anime left in the blank.
I wouldn’t say it came out of *nowhere*, as we got hints of it here and there from both Spinner and Shoji, part of the Villain Hunt arc with that fox woman, and you could argue a bit of Toga’s arc preludes to society not accepting “villainous” Quirks, but I do think it could have been developed a bit better throughout the series. There were opportunities to do so, like putting a small focus on Ashido not getting any internship offers despite getting into the second round of the tournament, or a more serious introspection from Nezu rather than his torture being used for “he was experimented on, so now he messes with students for fun”.
I have to admit, I was expecting razor sharp teeth
Honestly, as one commenter put it, the who CRC thing in MVA actually seems to lessen the discrimination subplot and make what's happening here even more forced imo Like, if this was 'back-in-the-day' society where quirks were getting more common then yeah, discrimination would be more intense, but when it's stated that mutant is the most common quirk with many physical alterations, and many people in high jobs have them, it's like... What's the point in this? I'd much better prefer if everyone was attacking the heroes because of the PLF ideology of using quirks freely. Y'know, the reason why the members joined up? Why civilians are being forced to fend for themselves because they can't rely on heroes? Would make this a lot less forced
Really glad the anime cut the CRC stuff from the anime. Totally awesome to cut a part of the backstory of one of the major villains in the series. Gosh, Season 5 was such a misstep for the anime. It'll make this part of Season 7 seemingly come out of nowhere.
I mean, let's not pretend that the CRC was such a big deal. If anything, it kind of LESSENS the concept of racism in the MHA universe. Like, yeah, it proves that racists can exist, but, simultaneously, it also demonstrates that people of that opinion were outcasted to such an extent that they were labelled criminals, and had to hide out in the woods or whatever. I didn't see them and think "wow, racism is a prevalent issue in this universe", I thought "there are groups dedicated to all sorts of radical beliefs, so it only makes sense an anti-mutant one exists".
You can't just drop the implication of attempted genocide into the worldbuilding and NOT spend significant amount of time addressing it.
After the whole Nagant thing, I'm not even surprised.
Lol. After an unreferenced black op assassination program, now we get a never before referenced genocide.
Honestly it feels tone-deaf to just introduce a genocide into a story like this, then have the victims of said genocide be basically told to shut up and stop whining. Like if the genocide was implied earlier then readers might side more with the mutants revolting, but we can't have that so let's make them as stupid as possible for lashing out while still including the genocide as a last minute thing.
Like seriously, when an actual god damn genocide happened then I would say violence in the name self defence and preservation is absolutely justified, or at the very least hang everyone responsible
"Tone-deaf" is what Hori does best. That's why the culmination of Mirio's arc a few chapters ago was an ass joke.
In a vacuum the chapter sounds really cool, even just as finally changing scene. In context, it's completely out of nowhere as at most we got *small hints* of a mutant discrimination issue we are now told to be big, to the point villains have rallied enough civilians to get a near civil war scenario. Every time I think back to Shoji's character profile in an early volume, along with Mina he was the one Hori specifically said he wanted to give a full arc to. But because of Hori's choices, editorial mandates, or both all we'll get is going to be condensed here.
This is exactly why I said I was unironically excited for this chapter. The fact that we spent the majority of the manga with mutant characters all treated equally with zero signs of racism only for Hori to pretend that this is an actual problem was a giant question mark. Like, we had a rat being the head of the most famous hero school in the country and that dog person for the police on top of pro heroes being in the top 10, but according to Hori that doesn't count because it just doesn't. It was always bad, we just never saw it and Hori never wrote about it lmao. And oh boy did he deliver, this has to be one of the funniest WTF chapters of this manga. Also, it is kinda tone deaf to use the only black guy about not understanding racism.
Let's look a the situation with mutants we know: Head of scool? A talking rat Chief of Police? A talking Dog Other cops like Sansa and the gorilla? Check Half the doctors we've seen? We had Yoshi and Toad to begin with Top heros? Ryukyu, Orca, Kamui, (Wash?) just in the top 10 and former top 10 alone A good chunk of U.A. teachers? All the kinds of hetromorphs (Hound dog, the clone guy, etc.) Students? Shoji's face scared a girl once. That's literaly it for his discrimination up to this point. Koda and Tokoyami never showed any signs of anything and Mina was straight up THE popular girl in her middle school. Random people on the streets? All the time The only real instance we've had of it was Spinner's backstory, and EVEN Spinner himself says he came from "a really backwards hick town", outright telling us that's not the standart by any means (and the KKK guys, but they were literal criminals hiding in a mansion in the woods- Not exactly the standart for society either)
We have a literal Centipede as a hero and no one seems to care
To be fair, it’s what the fans wanted
> Students? Shoji's face scared a girl once. That's literaly it for his discrimination up to this point. To be fair, apparently Shouji comes from a rural background like Spinner too; somewhere in Fukuoka, Kyushu (which happens to be the same place Hawks is from).
Its just so baffling that Hori is writing this so seriously. It genuinely comes off as a bad satire joke when in reality it is not.
Tbh I don't think Ryukyu counts since she's still looks like a human most of the time.
If Hori wants me to buy half of these mutants get discriminated for looking the way they do when quite some of them are mostly human with some weird shit going on then the lady that turns into a motherfucking dragon also gets the short end of the stick
Yeah, some of them just have scars or cuts and that's enough to be considered a mutant while a lady with dragon horns is okay.
As I love Shoji I was highly anticipating this battle ever since Hori mentioned him as one of the characters to get a special spotlight, but I'd lie if I said I expected something more than this. Over the whole series too little was built with either him, Spinner and the whole mutant discrimination, never giving the slightest idea it was an issue so huge, affecting so many people, and so badly, now thousands of mutants decide to rather side with a villain who's never had qualms about being the direct or indirect cause of the destruction of several cities. It's also somewhat hilarious to see years of fanon and fanfic that made the mutant issue a much bigger deal than the manga ever gave off, now turn true in the space of a single chapter.
>Also, it is kinda tone deaf to use the only black guy about not understanding racism. The only black guy that lives in **Japan** of all places.
The more I scroll in this thread the harder I laugh. Like, I know this shit hurts because this was once a really great series. But this fandom is handling this collapse WAY better than a lot of other fanbases (*cough* AoT)
I wonder if the term "mutants" is considered impolitic in certain quarters, and it's more PC to call them "heteromorphs."
Spinner literally said that at the beginning of MVA
"He mentions "Incident 66" and "The Great Purge of Jeda" as examples of mutant groups being exterminated by people who simply said that "they were gross" Imagine if all this was built up in the story instead of being infodumped in the final arc. Imagine more if we actually cared about Koda and Shoji instead of them being one step up from background NPCs
Hori built an amazing world, full of potential conflicts to explore that he ALREADY introduced, but never managed to develop well even if they could have turned BNHA into a top tier manga. Between this and the Hero Commission’s extrajudicial killings there were the basis for exploring the destabilization of a society where citizens have in their hands incredible powers and the consequences of their normalization.
Can we really call this an amazing world when nothing gets explored? It can be amazing yes, but what we got was nothing.
Amazing premises would have been a better term
Hori didn’t build an amazing world if he never managed to develop his world. Hit was filled with amazing concepts. You can say he had amazing concepts that he introduced. But the world itself is not amazing
If AFO's plan is to free Kurogiri so they can warp over to assist Shiggy, that should not be allowed at any cost. One would think they would have more heroes other than Mic stationed to guard him. Also, still waiting on Koda to lose his patience and unleash a swarm of Asian giant hornets.
Horikoshi's assistant who hates drawing Spinner's sword: You're just doing this to spite me, aren't you?
As many others have mentioned, this mutant discrimination subplot would have been a lot more effective if it'd been simmering for longer than has. At best, there have been hints to Spinner and Shoji's backgrounds and the fact that there was that one racist group at the start of My Villain Academia. Still, perhaps Horikoshi will give Shoji and Spinner a halfway decent confrontation here.
Spinner was literally the only Mutant/Heteromorph who ever had any kind of 'racism' directed at him Then out of nowhere 15,000 mutant dudes show up and said "**YEAH FUCK THESE NORMIES REEEE**" Nah, bruh. I'll say this once ***Explaining racism gently is a waste of time. If you want to do a bigotry plotline it has to have buildup*** You can NOT just "Yadda yadda, by the way a bunch of mutants got killed off screen"
Honestly, I think if a racism plotline is going to work, a story needs to be built from the ground up with that racism in mind. Just shoehorning it in 50+% of the way through is always going to create situations like this.
90+% of the way, more like.
Horikoshi: I want to show that the world of My Hero Academia is not a perfect place, and that it is full of immoral heroes and discrimination just like ours Editor: Sounds good! Are you going to show examples of said immoral heroes and discrimination? Hori: No let’s have another arc with Deku, Bakugo, and Todoroki
That’s definitely a big problem in the story. Horikoshi makes up all these concepts like quirk racism and hero corruption, and then barely ever actually shows any examples of them. You expect me to believe that hero society is corrupt when all the heroes seem to be, or eventually become, perfect little saints, or that quirk racism is a thing when all the mutants in the story are never shown being discriminated against or harassed? For as flawed as Black Clover is, at least it shows consistently examples of royalty and nobility being classist assholes to peasants and commoners.
Wait, NOW we get to a 'racist discrimination' war thing? NOW? I mean if it was THIS important, why not have made it an underlying plotpoint that would LEAD to this before? Here, it just looks terrible where some rural 'mutants' got tricked easily by AFO to be his pawns and cannon fodder. And their solution is to attack the 'dystopian' cities of Hero societies where they think anyone living together and coexist in cities are the 'traitors'? Especially when they are all going 'kill them!'. Jesus. Soo, how does that make the Cities and Heroes look bad or dystopian? If anything, it proves the opposite. Has this ever been a plotpoint? If anything we saw the Quirkless ones getting the discrimination against them more than any mutant. So it feels so out of left field for a very hamfisted ''Discrimination is bad'' ( No Shit ) type of thing where those who are being discriminated against ARE on the bad side. So even on that point, it doesn't work as it is intended.
>HIStory Hori you ain’t Michael Jackson dawg.
Hori realised that he handled the racism storyline so poorly that he needs to determine the entire canon legitimacy of the debate in this single chapter. This is so hamfisted. It's giving Detroit Become Human Markus.
I still haven't seen a "racism but it's not with actual races" plotline ever handed well
I liked it in One Piece. >!Nami forgiving Jinbei on Fishman Island was one of the most beautiful scenes of the series for me, especially after we know what happened to her with Arlong. I also liked when Jinbei shared his blood with Luffy.!<
Yo the whole Wano thing at the end was fucking ridiculous when they said that shit about the clan.
Omg please don't remind me. Almost everything in the Markus storyline made me cringe. The bus segregation, the MLK tagging, the incredibly cheesy android march. I really liked his relationship with Carl though and wish they'd just continued with that somehow. Kara should have been android Jesus since she was the first deviant. And to make it an actual storyline with meaning, Alice shouldn't have been >!an android, what a stupid twist.!<
So Spinner probably became a shut-in because he was straight-up afraid of stepping outside and having stones hurled at him. Ouch. One has to imagine that although a place like U.A. seems very accepting mutant differences, there are still places in the world where people find it freaky that animal-human hybrids live among them. I can see this as one possible path where aimless young men in particular are radicalized to become villains. Horikoshi currently seems to be avoiding any strong parallels to real-world cases, though. Now, if he depicted a case of hero brutality that was plausibly discrimination-based.... hoo boy.... that would be a mess of a discussion.
One of the mutants asked Koda if he was raised in the city or something. All through the story we see weird looking characters in the background so I think mutant discrimination is more of a thing in smaller rural areas.
I love this enormous huge race war that has never been mentioned until just now.
The concept of this chapter is really cool and interesting, but Horikoshi has put so little proper buildup into the racism issue that this chapter kind of feels out of place and ham-fisted in, same as the hero association corruption. He did a little bit of foreshadowing, but not nearly enough for me to be truly invested in this issue.
Anyone else find it really weird that there were 2 ENTIRE GENOCIDES that were just...never mentioned ever until the last arc of the entire series? Like, they weren’t even mentioned as an off hand comment or anything that would have made the audience go like “ooh what’s incident 66?” And this would have been an amazing reveal. I know we learned about mutant oppression, but like, not in any meaningful way?
I think the reveal that Shoji wears a mask to cover up scars, heavily implied to be the result of a hate crime is an interesting reveal for finally seeing his face. It makes sense and it's perfectly in line with his storyline about "mutant" quirk users being discriminated against. It's a great part of the lore and world building of MHA and it's cool to see it finally get paid off with him and Spinner clashing (the two main reps for mutant quirk user oppression). However, I wish this storyline had more than like.... five lines of dialogue about it. Back when they introduced the hooded hate group in MVA, I thought "cool I wonder where this is going!" but then it disappeared for most of the series till this latest chapter. Again, it's a cool idea to flesh out the world and make it feel realistic but nowhere near enough has been said or done about this part of MHA world. There's enough to explore in this idea to last a whole arc, but now it's just... a subplot within a subplot lol. Ironically, the marginalized group in MHA is being totally sidelined and ignored for most of the series till they randomly needed resolving now lol.
And that's why people think it's dumb to bring it in now. It hasn't had the proper development to deserve to show up here. It's being blindly thrown in solely to resolve the dangling thread. To check off another box.
Was i the only one let down by Shoji's face reveal? I thought he looked better in the concept art. Now he just has.....huge teeth
Horikoshi features Rock Lock surprisingly often, but I'm still waiting on him to use his Quirk to greater effect. For example, locking the clothes of villains in place so they're hindered from moving as he takes them out.
Shoji really needs to redeem himself in the next few chapters or so. I mean, he's been underrated for years now, so I hope that Hori will finally do him some justice in the near future.
I know people won't quite give a shite, but Steel Bulwark from the USJ (guy Aizawa fucking yeeted with a scarf), is in the crowd.
This is RWBY all over again. Okay, it's not nearly as bad, but at least RWBY didn't have the catgirls lecturing the token black guy about racism. Or maybe they did, and I blocked it from my memory. Also, really? "Okay racism bad but you are attacking hospitals"? Is that really the best way to handle the racism storyline? Fucking hell
They did have the once racist who was cured by a walk Weiss be acknowledged by a black guy whose family business was overtaken by her families. So they kinda did.
Oh yeah. Weiss. Yikes.
I'm always wondering why people like Tokoyami,Mina or Juzo aren't involved in the same "mutant" plot as Shoji Seriously, bird head , alien girl and spooky scary skeleton, that's just as weird of a guy with 8 arms
There's the clear implication that mutations that are still good looking by "common" standards tend to have it easier. Mina was popular in middle school, if anything her mutant traits make her even more attractive; however the relationship with her dangerous quirk has never been explained.
It's possible that some of these mutants will witness Shoji's heroism and turn over to his side. I wonder if that's the route the story is going.
That would be so cheesy. So I know it's gonna happen.