My Villain Academia

as of this week the manga of my hero academia is officially heading into a new arc and while that brings with it a whole slew of exciting prospects and potential developments I think it's appropriate to look back on the arc that just ended and appreciate just how good it was so liberate your hearts take a seat and join me in reviewing my villain academia if there is one strength in MHA I would have to highlight in particular it would be it's incredible willingness to depict the societal consequences of a super powered world in a surprisingly nuanced and multifaceted way this started all the way backward stain which was the first art to really focus and thematize the influence society and interaction between public opinion and commercialized heroism this approach can be observed in almost every subsequent arc the public defeat of all might the mundane despair of gentle the bombastic struggle of endeavor each event in a story has either had a defined origin in or consequence for the society at large and with my villain academia horikoshi finally decided to go all in on that concept the first thing of note here is just how unorthodox this arc is handled in a lot of Shonen manga and in Weekly Shonen Jump especially the main cast is seen as a flagship for a series protagonists in particular are often the face of their respective stories their image plastered all over the series that's why removing the main casts from a Weekly Shonen Jump manga for 22 consecutive weeks is pretty unusual and already gives the arc a sense of novelty this is further capitalized on by what the arc is actually about and it starts with a title itself this isn't just a somewhat weird arc of my hero academia this is a full-on inversion of what this series is usually about turning its focus completely on the villains and this is something I massively appreciate we get to see the rise in evolution of the main villainous force in all of stories the main villain will already be an incredibly powerful force when they enter the story and that is not a bad idea at all because it immediately builds an interesting power dynamic where we want to root for our as-of-yet underpowered hero to overcome the wall of villainy however it's clear that horikoshi has different priorities here throughout most of the story the league of villains was rather well incompetent they were a ragtag group of barely functional crooks whose main threat came from their shadowy leader who left a story after Kamino and while they did have moments of coordinated villainy they were by and large vastly outclassed by the heroes at every turn and this is seen pretty well in their poster boy and de facto leader Tamura shigaraki an aimless unmotivated manchild who is a far cry from the main antagonistic force he is supposed to be but this was clearly the plan horikoshi wanted to specifically show the villains rise to the top as a sort of inversion of the slow but steady crackdown of hero society similarly he wanted Chiaki to be a mirror of Deku hence why he just like our protagonist starts out pretty underwhelming and develops both his personality and skills incrementally almost like the percentages and I really think that these ideas truly came together in my villain academia we start the arc with a league stricken by poverty at brink of collapse now tasked with defeating an invincible monster as their only hope began to machiya and in the middle of that they are thrown into a citywide skirmish with a vastly more organised force the metahuman Liberation Army DML a fighting for liberation of meta abilities in the name of destro led by his descendant Reed destro huh this large conflict is used for three distinct purposes for one it further flashes out hero society the dead Naruto is one example but it goes deeper than that MHA has a desire to show villainy as a consequence of societal structures most people aren't just villains for the sake of it often they're pushed into it either by society by their nature or their ambitions this is present and emla as their desire to liberate superpowers is a direct consequence of the heavy amount of regulation imposed onto their use it is also present within the league as the causes for the descendant of villainy get explored too it allows the league to grow in power both through the quirk awakenings and through their eventual victory over the MLA and lastly 3 it develops and explores shigaraki in the league as characters delving into their past and person those last two points are interconnected as we get three separate occasions on which a quirk awakening is the result of a personal exploration twice toga and jig Araki all get extended backstories which then lead to them accepting / understanding something about themselves and accessing abilities they didn't know they had I am gonna be honest when this was first introduced I was skeptical the idea of conveniently awakening powers didn't quite sit right with me however on reread with the full context it actually makes more sense than I initially thought when people are born with a quirk they don't receive a pop up telling them what it is rather they have to discover it and as is brought up in season one often people don't quite understand their power until later in life hence why the government allows people to legally change the registered quirk with this in mind toga already becomes a lot more believable her quirk necessitates the consumption of blood which is pretty disturbing thus she probably didn't have much opportunity to experiment with it or push it this means that her discovering a new facet of her power in a panicked State is not a huge stretch society just wouldn't have let her use her quirk and actually train and discover it it's a similar problem as with Qin so where the quirk gives people a preconceived notion about you and that can limit you and in the case of twice in jjigae rakhi both of them power up their quirk in response of them coming to terms with who they are twice realizes that he is real and the original causing him to be more daring and reckless whereas shigaraki remembers his past and accepts himself as a harbinger of destruction finally unleashing the original night of his quirk that had remained locked behind his amnesia overall I think this is a fairly interesting addition to the system of quirks until now we saw how quirks could influence a person's mindset as the ability you're born with in every changes the way the world sees you thus influencing your emotional state see shinzo but now we know that it also works the other way around with your mindset and emotional well-being being able to lock certain sub abilities away and locked them as well this also ties into the idea of quark evolution of corpse becoming stronger as the world barrels towards the ominous point of quark singularity something that both overall Ark and the joint training ark already brought up I think its overall a nice way of fleshing out the system and I'm excited to see what horikoshi does next with it but among all the fighting and powers the real highlight of this arc is undoubtedly shigaraki and his growth his backstory is straight-up the darkest [ __ ] MHA has ever shown and it really paints the picture of a person who is doomed both by his birth and by society at this point chigi rocky definitely deserves his own video so I'll save the deeper analysis for then but for now suffice to say he has become a top tier villain in my eyes at least one thing I want to quickly talk about is the big twist of the arc 3 destro surrendering and giving shigaraki command over his army I have seen tensions as to say I've seen people complain about this turn of events calling it stupid and contrived and to be honest I cannot agree with that let's put ourselves into Reed s for shoes for a moment he is an idealist who has built an army on the foundation of absolute liberation the idea of being able to use quirks free from any governmental restriction societal stigmas or personal limitations as oppression continues his power grows as his quirk transforms stress into strength he scouts out the league is a competitor who is getting too famous someone who could steal the spotlight once Reed Estero makes his move so he hatches a plan kill the league and use the incident as a tale of brave civilians using their quirks to defend themselves a surefire plan after all it's just six crooks with known abilities against an entire city of quark top fighters except things don't go as planned abilities develop commanders are slain and Kegan to machiya appears but while Reed Esther deeply cares for the lives of his people he pushes on as it's still for the greater good for the will of destro except that his power starts shrinking his stress starts decreasing and the reason for that is that shigaraki in an ironic twist has become the very embodiment of liberation unencumbered by doubts or restraints he uses his quirk freely and openly accepting who he was born as and suddenly read Astro isn't sacrificing his power and his people for Destro's goal it dawns on him that he's fighting against what he should be fighting for shigaraki is the embodiment of his ideals this is why his heart becomes at ease as he fights him this is why his power starts shrinking and this is why he realizes that further conflict would not only be catastrophic alas she gerak his power grows and kills more people but would also be pointless as their kind of fighting for the same thing now so he cuts his losses and surrenders seeing shigaraki as the one to be truly liberated and to bring true liberation overall I think it's a pretty smart way of both powering up shigaraki and keeping the new characters in the story the MLA and Reed estro are pretty interesting concepts so it'll be a shame if they just left a story after one arc in terms of story it also makes sense as we are quickly approaching the potential halfway point of the series it's not unreasonable to want the main threat to finally crystallize and thus shigaraki becomes a force to be reckoned with just like any good villain will usually be but because he entered the story as a weak manchild this progression feels a lot more satisfying and interesting at least in my opinion it also creates an interesting push and pull power dynamic between him and midoriya after a six quark reveal midoriya is on his way to becoming insanely powerful outclassing shigaraki by default or so we thought now shigaraki is the leader of it a 100 thousand people strong army and has the ability to flatten a city while Deku can shoot puffs of smoke essentially horikoshi is setting this up to be a very continuous dynamic of the hero and the villain growing alongside each other to eventually clash which I personally am really excited for but before we go I think it's also fair that I should mention the things I didn't like of which there are 3-1 I'm starting to get tired of a lot of MHA oryx just being one big fight pro hero joint training MVA pretty often horikoshi zahrk's will just be one combat encounter and while that can be a quick exciting hi I would prefer it if he would use a few different arc structures in the future maybe somebody actually build towards confrontation first instead of consisting of just that confrontation too many arcs don't really feel like arcs as much as they just feel like one event which is something I actually appreciated in the overall arc or is actually more of an investigation at first with the first confrontation with smaller skirmishes before the final big fight of the arc happened - while I don't fundamentally have any issues with quirk awakenings anymore I still think that the way it's introduced with toga is pretty clumsy it's just not made clear enough what is actually happening curious saying her fear power up her quirk is just too vague in all the wrong ways luckily later context makes it all more stomach able but I wish this moment were executed a bit better and I hope that the eventual anime adaptation because let's be honest the anime impatient is gonna reach this eventually he's gonna fix it and three we got robbed of dobby and compress these to stick out is being basically forgotten for a good chunk of this arc dobby does get a cool fight and a few details about his quirk you know in case it wasn't obvious enough yet who he is but it's just very little compared to what the others get and compressed us literally nothing and well obviously not all characters are gonna have the same shine all the time for an arc focusing on the villains leaving these two this hopefully untouched is a tad disappointing and I think this covers it all in conclusion I'd say my villain academia was an absolute success it absolutely blew me away with its development of the characters with its evolution of the societal aspects of MHA and also because of the cool action because I mean I read Shonen and I can appreciate some good action so yeah I would say it was a pretty great arc what you want a ranking I'm kind of bad at these but I think I'd put MVA along my top three arcs together with pro hero and culture festival I give it nine chest-beating gorillas out of ten thanks for watching and take care I'll see you all next time bye bye

Channel: Oceaniz

Views: 164,381

Rating: 4.956964 out of 5

Keywords: MHA, My Hero Academia, BNHA, Boku no Hero Academia, Shigaraki, Dabi, Todoroki, Destro, League of Villains, Horikoshi, All Might, Hero, Villain, All for One, My Villain Academia, MVA, Oceaniz, Oceaniz96, Anime, Manga, Review

Id: MFbI76bxcB4

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Laguz01]

One thing I had a problem within the arc was power scaling. Deku got 6 brand new quirks, whoopee, now shigaraki has massively powered up his quirk. I just think they could have gotten stronger in a more subtle way.

[u/[deleted]]

Aw man I wanted to post this