The Arc that broke MHA

here we go [Applause] who could it be [Applause] it's me austin oh son of a [ __ ] what ah my hero academia how the tables have turned if you have been paying any attention to the manga sphere at all you might have noticed one thing about koi horikoshi's hit shown in manga namely that a lot of these recent chapters have been getting a mixed reception how did a popular darling like my hero get to a point where each and every one of its plot points gets hyper scrutinized and broken down where any enthusiasm regarding the series is being overshadowed by a general heir of either cynicism or aggressive defensiveness i cannot and will not speak for anyone else but in my case mha has lost a lot of what made it special and the more mixed reactions to its final arc give me some degree of confidence that i am not just entirely insane thus i want to indulge in this general negative vibe a bit in order to figure out and elaborate on why how and when mha lost the plot figuratively and literally one arc in particular stands out as the moment mha broke in my opinion spoilers for the manga obviously [Music] i guess we should first define what broke and broken even means in this context has the story turned into an unintelligible mess no not really value judgments aside the narrative is still functional and fulfills the criteria of being well a story has the financial revenue of the series crashed then also no in fact the volumes are selling way higher than they ever did so how can a story that still functions and still sells hundreds of thousands of books be broken maybe to you it cannot but to me a story simply being functional isn't enough and money doesn't really matter to me when i try to assess how i perceive quality it's just kind of not important to me what i mean when i say mha is broken is that it has lost something crucial a codifying style of pacing structure and payoff that up until a certain point was the core of its identity at least to me mha is broken because it lost that something that made it special that made it my hero academia so i guess we better get around to describing what that something actually is this is obviously going to be very subjective but to me what made mha special was a specific intersection of three elements preparation deliberation and consequence as well as the intense singular focus each of them received now all three of these are present in any good story but their specific mix was what made mha special to me the majority of the series was structured in a way where current events were always preparing future events in a clear and deliberate manner to then follow up on them with believable and interesting consequences the second element deliberation is especially crucial here there was always a point a purpose to the various narrative beats purpose which was founded on solid planning and the willingness to make those beats have lasting impacts and most importantly that deliberation was not just for the sake of progressing the story not just to move forward but because there was something interesting to be said here let's look at this structure through an actual example or rather a question why was it ida and todoroki who fought alongside deku in the stain arc dumb question because those are the characters the author put there duh but why them specifically the stain arc is so early on it could have been anyone else's brother who got hurt it didn't need to be tensei you could have literally just made a brother up at this point we hadn't really seen most of the families and of deku's classmates any one of them could have come to help out todoroki was not the only possible candidate this is where deliberation comes in there are established and narratively important reasons for it to be these two and these two only eda is fairly sneakily but nonetheless directly established to be well off his family is a central pillar of generational heroism and also filthy rich his familial legacy thus represents an outwardly ideal heroic dynasty which is the perfect target for staying solo crusade by harming tensei and accusing him as a vestige of the system's corruption stain threatens to destroy ida's whole framework of what heroism really is and also attacks a core institution of heroism at large at the same time he is not wrong the idah have gotten very wealthy off of a profession which pretends to be generally altruistic this is a conflict ida struggles to internally resolve a conflict which is as much about what it means to carry a legacy as it is about heroism as a whole a conflict which leads him down the path of attempted revenge this clearly cannot stand he needs to be stopped saved by someone who can directly empathize with the weight of expectations legacy and emotional conflict oh hey todoroki shoto is primed perfectly to help eda because his shaky relationship to his father asks many similar questions but also because he has recently learned to overcome them slightly thanks to deku so through this specific seemingly random combination of characters multiple narrative ideas are paid off in ways that feel natural and believable without centering entirely on deku but still being in indirect results of his actions he saved shoto which allowed shoto to save ida and as a result not only do the boys survive they walk away with an increased sense of responsibility and self-reflectiveness which causes both change and turmoil in all of them so we have preparation the established narrative traits of these characters and events which beckons the liberation the specific positioning of these characters within events that allow their traits to shine which in turn causes consequence the behavior lessons learned as well as the more critical look onto the hero system this example is a microcosm of how the majority of mha used to function by establishing aspects of its story and characters sometimes explicitly sometimes sneakily the series prepared a sort of itemized list of who cares about what topic and why so then when a story beat brings up ideas and themes that intersect with something pre-established the series goes out of its way to have them link up and reverberate through the story this structure is not revolutionary by any means but it nonetheless made for an extremely satisfying reading and viewing experience because it felt like you were being rewarded for paying attention and keeping track of who what and where since that knowledge allowed you to predict and theorize in ways that felt tangible less like you were grasping at straws and more like you were playing chess against the author and keeping up a story being predictable isn't by itself good but a story being engaging and exciting to try and predict generally is it makes you feel like part of the entire process and when a prediction became fact or even just very likely you could revel in the possible consequences that plot point would have as a story put strong emphasis on the long-term impact of its own plot points from huge paradigm shifts like all might's fight at comino to tiny mini stories like deku's hands it always felt like every moment of the story mattered in seeing these moments click together to create a web of narratives that was founded on diligent preparation deliberate writing and consistent consequence made the story just very cool and interesting to follow and then it fell apart now let's be clear here this structure i just laid out wasn't 100 consistent all of the time it was a core aspect of the series often enough that you'd get used to it but that doesn't mean there weren't a few duds and non-conforming elements in fact not only did those duds exist but they gradually became more frequent as we approach the ark that broke the series a great example of that is kurogiri whose twist has all of its prep work and actual substance outsourced to a spin-off and thus doesn't conform to the model we created and there are numerous other examples because at the end this is just a model this is me a random dude trying to make sense of something after the fact however even so these instances remain fairly rare and mostly concerned with smaller less central parts of the narrative while the heavy hitter still followed this three ingredient recipe in fact its strongest example came right on the cusp of the breaking point dobby i will just go out and say it to me dobby's dance and its associated flashbacks are the last part of mha's old identity one final hurrah before everything changed but what a send-off it is so meticulously prepared that everyone predicted it years before it happened and yet so narratively deliberate and impactful that it was still hype as [ __ ] years and years of build up and careful planning gave way to a stage where all the pieces endeavor hawks the war were in just the right deliberate position for the trigger to be pulled and for the reveal to have massive effects on the already beaten and battered hero system dobby had been for the last few months shown to be so much smarter and much more dangerous than he let on until then and he was ready to enact his revenge it was this structure's greatest hit and should have been another paradigm shift just like camino it was delightful but as we were getting ever closer to the breaking point this did not last and while the war arc went on for a few more chapters the style already began to shift towards a new signature structure one which to me has become synonymous with the ark that broke mha villain hunt yes i know the official start of the ark is a few chapters later but shush this is my video before we even enter the main arc properly things start changing already after spending years to build up dobby going as far as hinting at larger plans beyond just his revenge we suddenly get a conga line of plot developments aiming to ridicule and depreciate his character and his build up not only is genus not dead dobby has no contingency plan of this scenario despite stating that he predicted this okay then and before this had time to sink in multiple things happen at once deku unlocks a new quirk muriel comes back compressed reveals he is a descendant of one of big three villain lords and annihilates his own ass cheek and all for one possesses shigaraki more on all of that later for now with this salad of bizarre plot decisions the war ends and we enter villain hunt properly this prelude already clues us in on one of willenhunt's main features its bonkers pace and general laissez-faire attitude towards honoring pre-established narrative elements and preparation deku is a vigilante now so no time to lose we race from set piece to set piece with very little in terms of actual downtime this also applies to some rather crucial stuff with deku's mastery of the predecessor's quirks being essentially entirely skipped either way while out hunting for villains that escaped in the very cool tartarus prison break deku spirals down mentally until his entire class shows up and subdues him urging him to come home while this is an exciting premise with balls to the walls action this is also the arc that broke mha and it does this by taking that narrative structure we discussed earlier and shooting it in the head a constant factor to deku's presence in the story is the state of his body much of his journey is determined by the various injuries he incurs and the threat of their consequences in particular we are continuously reminded of the severe damage to his arms and how the next big injury might paralyze them permanently it is this threat that hangs over him for the majority of the series pushing him to develop new fighting styles that are distinct from those his idol relied on again we see preparation leading to a situation in which this character is pushed and directed in a deliberate manner a journey dictated by the threat of consequence and that threat loomed to become fact during the war arc when an enraged deku pummeled shigeraki relentlessly using his already damaged arms we are once again reminded in the middle of this of what might happen if deku overuses arms again it by all intents and purposes seems like the series is finally pulling the trigger on a plot point it has been flirting with for actual real life years it is ready to make reality of the threat of consequence whoops no no no not no actually deku is totally fine and his body has magically acclimated to the strain and he probably won't have to worry about it anymore now while the explanation given here is logical enough it nonetheless represents a complete abandonment of consequence regarding this plot element what was the point of using deku's physical condition as a guide rail for his development for all of those years when the one time he actually oversteps it the threatened consequence is just hand waved away the point is who cares we got to keep moving look how cool deku is now whoa you could say that this is a tiny issue that i am nitpicking and you are right but a small issues add up if they become common enough many bigger narrative problems are often built on small insular but regular hiccups and b this isn't a one time thing just like how our earlier example of the stain arc was a microcosm of the series general approach to structure and causality this too is a condensed but representative glimpse of mha's post-war narrative structure this begins a trend of how most of the plot elements within the arc are handled dobby's televised reveal was based on its execution and just logic supposed to completely erode and destroy the hero system casting endeavour and hawks two pillars of it as irredeemable monsters but instead hawks's guilt is weakened by genus being alive and endeavour sees very little consequence from him being outed as an abusive [ __ ] besides some mean comments in fact the destroyed and broken world we see in this arc isn't really the result of the war arc at all the chaos and destruction are caused by the prison break and the attack on the hpsc both of which happen separate from the war not only that but the actual post-war world of mha receives almost no emphasis at all due to reasons we will get into villain hunt will likely remain the only arc to really have had the chance to traverse this broken world and it is only 37 chapters long by comparison we spend almost 200 chapters in a post-communal world which allowed the weight of losing the symbol of peace to truly breathe and show itself obviously length is not how you automatically make a plot point good but when we're talking about something as massive as a societal paradigm shift time spent in that new world does equal emphasis camino was a quiet devastation that allowed for extended exploration of how the system was failing the war by comparison was a loud train crash and its consequences should reasonably have deserved a similar emphasis maybe even more as it was a much more dramatic change thus much of the build up and deliberation that went into setting up the war and its various potential effects on the world are either castrated to barely factor into the series going forward beyond isolated details or hijacked by sudden more influential developments so villain hunt is only marginally about the state of the world what is it primarily about then it establishes early on that it wants to explore deku's mental state and that japan's broken streets are a sort of externalized metaphor this also means that it would by necessity have to explore his relationship to all might throughout the story it is consistently brought up that all might is an unrealistic standard an unreachable ideal whose pursuit only causes problems we see this in endeavour in the post-communal tensions and most crucially in deku his self-destructive recklessness and god with all attitude are continuously and explicitly stated to be a direct consequence of his admiration for all might and the latter's encouragement of a simple sacrificial heroism all might post-communal story is in a sense his reconciliation with his mere humanity and that his existence as a deity symbol did more harm than he imagined then in the war arc we see deku at his most reckless his self-destructive heroism turning him into a raging mass of tendrils and wrath pounding into his enemy with pure furious abandon this darker toxic side of all might's teachings is something the series had been building up for years and villain hunt set out to finally explore its ramifications fully except it doesn't we see deku dirty tired battered and bloody we seem confused about his state of world and his role within it exhausted the prospect of how much is riding on his shoulders he's grinding himself into a muddy smelly paste trying to do everything himself but while all of this is a good showcase of how the outwardly positive messages of all might's example have affected him negatively and while scenes of him leaving all might behind are pretty well executed it overall doesn't actually go anywhere much of his actual journey is just skipped over and the moments we do get to see only serve to formulate a placid damn some villains are more evil than others that's crazy and for as much as it revels in how broken deku is the actual solution to this year's long bad mindset ends up being two speeches and a bath all very sweet moments but they ultimately don't address the core issue they are saccharine declarations of camaraderie that aim to distract from the real problem the fact that deku is willing to kill himself if he thinks he can win through it the ark in fact goes out of its way to never really address the self-destructive part of deku only his lone wolf attitude the ark thus becomes more about vaguely teaching deco to rely on others rather than to curb his penchant for reckless abandon thus it ends with deku trusting his friends a far less interesting conclusion that is book ended by a celebratory bath scene that speed runs all possible character interactions in order to just quickly move on the most interesting one deku talking to uraraka after her emotional speech about him gets the funniest excuse in all of mha she just doobie be sleeping though this half heather's conclusion extends to with the other half of the subplot as well all might while he gets a pretty great scene with stain his reunion with deku is very underbaked to put it lightly turned into a quick gag that gives the two characters no room to actually explore anything that matters this man had to face the reality that his careless attitude endangered his beloved pupil and all we get from it is a joke so this plot point too has all of its preparation and deliberate narrative structure devalued as its consequences are confined to superficial and breezy moments that ultimately don't deliver on the potential these ideas promised so villain hunt fails to deliver on the two narrative beats it absolutely had to deku's mental state and the broken post-war world it does that by giving neither idea time to breathe condensing it to the bare minimum and always moving ahead at 500 miles per hour thus it under delivers on the consequences these ideas promise in their earlier stages breaking the so far established style of mha structure in favor of a style that heavily heavily relies on just speed moving forward and being cool these are the two big examples but there are so so many more let's list some for fun hawks is established from the get-go as being defined by his quirk his entire life being usurped by his job for the hpsc and by extension his prowess with fierce wings he also immediately communicates that his wings are extremely weak to fire thus setting up the danger of him having to eventually face stabby who is linked to him within the first chapters of hawk's appearance due to their collaboration this danger is made real as they do end up clashing in battle which results in dobby brutally burning hawks leading to a dramatic panel in which dark shadow declares that there is nothing left on his back this seems to be a clear setup for hawks having lost his wings permanently as only his feathers are confirmed to regenerate not the stems but instead they grow back almost like new this further removes any consequence of dobby's actions during the war and makes the event less impactful to characters that actually matter endeavour's life has been entirely derailed by his perceived inferiority to all might it is this feeling of never being able to catch up to him that led him down a dark abusive path a path which ruined the lives of his entire family and created a monstrous villain in villain hunt he discovers that all might superiority was neither inherent nor earned and was instead a transferred power that instantly made him nyon invincible and put him into an unreachable echelon by default thus making all of endeavour's life and suffering kind of pointless endeavor has somehow no thoughts on this we are given no reaction no payoff nothing regarding what should have been a shocking moment that would have opened the door for some interesting characterization all night's story is inherently tied to endeavor and yet this enormous piece of info just doesn't seem to matter to ng initially we are given the tiniest crumb regarding this dynamic one arc later but by this point it's too little too late the arc makes it a point to show students out in the field compensating for the lost and retired pro heroes among them we get to see two of the big three tamaki and ninjire doing their part mirio is conspicuously absent having in fact not shown up since his return as of writing this video all the hoops the story had to jump through in order to bring him back prematurely are rendered even more ridiculous as his non-existence within the story makes his role in the war even more pointless and frustrating than it already was his subplot and by extension eris were rushed to completion only for him to now not matter gran torino is dramatically impaled by shigaraki during the war so hard the earth shatters beneath him and then he passes on his cape to deku as he lays broken in the hospital bed but he isn't dead or rather the series just forgets about his existence never actually following up on whether or not he croaked this is so weird because it diminishes the weight and meaning of the cape while also making shiraki look so incompetent that he couldn't even kill one old man and there is no reason to just not confirm he died what the hell dobby is continuously hinted at having a lot of insider knowledge regarding the hpsc and hawks with him shockingly knowing his real name this together with his adversarial attitude towards heroism and his obsession with hawks seem to set him up to have some connection to the secret hero training program that keeps being shown in the background this is later however revealed to be just him having a bunch of unnamed never again mentioned goons which harassed hawks's mom for info the secret hero program is also never brought up again and remains a dropped plot point toga dramatically spits off from the league to pursue uraka and after a brief scuffle is reported missing separately from the rest of the league this might seem like a setup for something interesting but instead she just reunites with them off screen this isn't like story breaking it's just plain weird why would you even bother having her split off and then mention specifically that she's separate from them now if it just isn't going to lead to anything that why reed estro compress and dr garaki all leave the story with seemingly no further plot relevance to be had they are arrested and not mentioned again thus far even as the villains attack and break open seven prisons all across the country none of these three up to this point fairly relevant characters are given even the briefest mention again not the end of the world but just bizarre overhaul is broken out of prison which immediately screams relevance he was the main villain of a massive arc in the past after all even unarmed his reintroduction into the story should bring with it something at least instead he bumbles about and is captured again without doing a single thing even deku's speech to him isn't really anything of note so what was the point of breaking him out in the first place who knows the series definitely doesn't the common trait all of the mentioned and the numerous unmentioned examples have is their priority move forward to the next cool moment at all costs no matter what pre-established subplots or character motivations may weigh it down the narrative just has to keep moving no matter what things like hawks's wings or endeavour's opinion on one for all are just distractions from what matters moving forward and being exciting this central attitude continuously detaches and diminishes the concept of consequence within the various plot elements and turns the series into a fast and thrilling fireworks show at the cost of ignoring many of the underlying ideas and deliberate prep work that made this series what it is this dogmatic devotion to always moving to the next cool thing reaches its most hilarious extreme in chapters 3 16 and 317. in 316 deku and a gaggle of pro heroes locate and infiltrate a mansion set to be one of all for one's hideouts unfortunately the mansion is rigged and the chapter ends on a cliffhanger as the entire house explodes with our boys inside they obviously can't die plot armor but naturally chapter 17 starts with an exciting montage of deku saving the no no wait sorry i had the notes muddled up uh no sorry chapter 317 starts with all of them fine sitting in a warehouse acting as if nothing happened besides briefly mentioning the deck who saved them thanks to danger sense what would have been a great opportunity to show off deku's mastery of his abilities as well as justified respect the pro heroes have for him is entirely shafted in order to move forward once again the explosion simply didn't matter and was just another cool cliffhanger this isn't the ark's greatest sin by any means but its blank-faced absurdity and nonchalant pace make it extremely funny like something i'd expect out of family guy but it's not just consequences that villain hunt diminishes in some cases it manages to muck up preparation and deliberation as well and wouldn't you know it confined within villain hunt is a secondary mini arc that shows us an extreme example of how this new structure can backfire and fail on basically every front imaginable now before i get the usual smug comments i am aware that some consider this an arc entirely separate from villain hunt and i think that's fair but for the purposes of this video i will be treating stars and stripes as an attachment to villain hunt because i can and you cannot stop me as the conflict in japan is heating up the country requests foreign help which stalls at the bureaucracy of the u.n the number one u.s hero star and stripe takes a platoon of jets and heads to japan on her own as she feels she owes it to all might who saved her when she was a young child all for one and shigaraki take his opportunity to face her as her quirk new order needs to be either stolen or destroyed before all for one's plan can succeed let me say right out of the gate that this fight is awesome some of the coolest panels in the series and as far as premises go a fight on top of fighter jets in the stratosphere is pure peak fictionium if rule of cool where all that matters this mini arc is fantastic unfortunately we are cursed with frontal lobes and thus must have these pesky things called thoughts like for example what the point of this arc was the stars and stripes arc sets out to essentially solve two issues for one it explains the absence of international action in the next big war as the next fight with all for one looms the series seemingly wants to avoid having to utilize foreign heroes in battle so it needs a way to explain their absence which is done by having star's defeat scare off any international support and secondly the arc endeavors to address new order star's quirk which is literally plot breaking an ability that can effortlessly rewrite the rules of reality the story can't progress without dealing with this power as its continued existence would result in an instant win for any side that has it it would kind of be a time turner like in harry potter so to speak an element that should be the instant solution to anything and anytime it isn't on screen you should be asking why aren't they using new order so clearly it needs to somehow be dealt with so the arc sets out to solve two problems and gets rid of both of them good writing 101 right yeah except neither of these problems needed solving and that is because neither of them existed before the ark brought them up the presence of international hero associations has always been light in mha to say the least what little we did here of the outside world continuously painted the picture of disharmony and overall bureaucratic stagnation with no nation seemingly being able to agree how much agency and authority heroes should have this alone is already a good enough base to counter the potential question of where are the foreign heroes during the big fight the idea that the un council will be too slow to react in time is by itself perfectly reasonable additionally all for one mentions that his uprising has caused all of his former associates across the globe to raise hell meaning that nations are now concerned with their own domestic issues both of these were perfectly fine explanations as to why international health will be unavailable the entire idea of foreign heroes going rogue and helping japan is only introduced by star and her quirk new order that absolutely needed to be dealt with it is not mentioned once before the fight starts star herself isn't either as she is very sloppily retroactively given an identity in a movie exclusive extra so this arc is so ultimately pointless that the only narrative solutions it offers are two problems it invented in the first place it is built on no foundation other than the haphazardly manufactured issues that didn't exist five seconds before the arc starts it is the definitive rejection of the series's original structure there is no preparation as all possible connections to pre-established story facts are ignored in favor of just making [ __ ] up there is no deliberation as no one involved in this arc intrinsically needed to be there since their reasons for existing in this situation are entirely fabricated as the arc goes on and consequence the final piece of the trifecta the story goes through absurd lengths to make sure this fight didn't matter new order messes around a little but disappears and only destroys a handful of quirks that are non-essential to all for one's plan and that's it this omission of relevance is so baffling that the series managed to confuse numerous translators into accidentally giving it importance both official spanish translations and some english fan translations have all for one note that this moment is the late effect of new order this is false the proper translation has him specifically say that not even new order could do this star is so thoroughly removed from the concept of consequence that her only posthumous influence over the plot is an annotation about how useless she was spoken by the guy she was supposed to stop oh speaking of we should probably talk about potato man [Music] all for one is the worst thing to happen to mha i'm sorry i know people get very mad at me every time i say it but there's no two ways about it he sucks if there is one single element that has derailed mha structure and story the most one guy that can be single-handedly blamed for what we have now it's this ball sack looking [ __ ] within his original appearance in mha all for one held a wonderfully elegant narrative position him and his counter almight represented the old guard titans of a bygone era where singular titans could actually exist in the first place all for one was like all might a crumbling monolith this mattered because much of mha's story seemed to focus on the idea of passing the torch as all might sought to leave the world in the hands of someone who could maintain what he had built this reveals itself as ultimately futile though as almighty was an unrealistic perfect hero that no one could replace thus the modern era has to produce a modern idea of heroism and the unity between public and hero through all for one and shigaraki this transitional conflict is mirrored on the villain side all for one is a perfect unyielding evil and shigaraki's generation must find a way to move on from the legacy he left behind it was a very cool thematic link that gave the story a strong direction and identity especially considering that mha itself having started only shortly after the immensely popular naruto ended was also extra diagetically about taking up the mantle of an older greater master and trying to become its own thing in the wake of that series's legacy now the thing about transitional narratives is that they actually have to transition the entire idea of passing on the torch hinges on that torch actually being passed which means that the old needs to eventually [ __ ] off and give this stage to new so it can show if it lives up to the task all mike does this in pretty much the best way imaginable one last hurrah one last great fight but then he's out not dead but narratively greatly diminished in his influence and maybe even better he bows out too early deku is not yet ready the world isn't ready but they all have to cope and it's that copium which leads to interesting choices and story beats all for one initially also follows this concept with his incarceration essentially removing his narrative agency with him gone the story begins building up shigaraki and turns him into one of my favorite characters in the entire series more on that in this video here but for the purpose of this video what made chigaraki an engaging character to follow is much the same as what made deku engaging they are both abandoned by their perfect monolithic masters at a time when they are completely and utterly out of their depth they are both insecure incompetent and now tasked with facing the future without the guidance of superman and satan respectively these humble beginnings are what make their eventual growth so much more satisfying seeing shiggy a dumb nerd who could barely utter a coherent sentence upon his debut stand tall in a crater of his own making being crowned grand commander of an army of villains is supremely cathartic in much the same way as seeing deku dismantle overhaul is this also again plays into the transitional narrative all for one and almight seemed like they were perfect from the start never really growing or changing because there was no need to this stag and perfection sets them apart from their torchbearers who must struggle and adapt in order to earn their position and lead their respective communities this very elegantly identifies this new generation as more grounded realistic and by implication more productive and stable as it isn't based on a single inhumanly perfect pillar to support it deku and chigaraki carried his narrative together very effectively because they take the stage severed from their masters and then all for one comes back hijacks shigaraki's body takes over the plot and becomes the actual real final villain this right here might be the most frustrating single development in all of mha it happens right before villain hunt but its real effects are only felt as villain hunt goes on suddenly this character whose journey we had followed whose rise we had witnessed and whose growth had provided catharsis is completely usurped by every mustache twirling villain trope in a trench coat trademark pending also yes this is all for one 2.0 not chigaraki all of his mannerisms of behavior is potato man and in japanese he even uses the specific pronoun unique to all for one within the show shigaraki is a few outbursts aside completely gone alright let's try and be generous there are possible benefits to this twist shigaraki being a likable and cool character that gets usurped by someone who is irredeemably evil feeds into deku's desire to save tanku strengthening the specific plot point in turn additionally as we were talking about transitional narratives maybe the point wasn't that deku and chiggy would offer individual solutions as to how to move onwards into a world without their masters but instead it was maybe about the heroes that will ultimately triumph because all might was able to let go and allow deku to lead the future while all for one couldn't help himself and clung on way past his time which might end up being his demise in a way this replaces the transitional narrative we've had before with a new one additionally focusing on tenko as someone to be saved rather than the main villain while this would be a functional thematic evolution it has several issues in my opinion here is the tough pill to swallow that no one online wants to talk about you can write a technically competent thematically coherent story and have it still fail if it isn't also enjoyable and playing to the story's strengths yeah i think you can make the argument that all for once takeover can fit into the narrative's established goals and concepts but that doesn't change the fact that he simply not as interesting to watch and explore as shigaraki was when shiggy outsmarted and triumphed over his enemies it felt grand because he had a journey and a specific humble starting point shigaraki's goals were founded on a tangled web of impulses trauma and ideas that stem from a brutal past and it made following him exciting all for one on the other hand is just a bad dude don't get me wrong i do think he is kind of funny and how he never lets any problem ruin his mood and how the story wriggles and bends in order to have every bad thing ever originate from him but beyond that he simply isn't all that interesting he has no real motives no actual backstory no personal ties to any currently active character he is in short just not as kino as shigaraki was something i've been saying for years is that the story gets less interesting every time something is revealed to be all for one's fault my reasoning is that one of mha's biggest strengths to me is its focus on grander issues that you cannot solve by punching the biological inequality of quirks the biases within the hero system the resulting systematic abandonment these are fundamental conflicts that require social action and awareness in order to solve and thus fall out of the usual bracket of shonen problems and that made him fresh and cool to see explored this is also why shigaraki was such a great main villain because instead of being the mastermind behind all of those problems he was their ultimate victim their dysfunctions of this world taken to a devastating extreme beating him didn't mean solving the world's issues which made the world feel bigger and more separate from our main cast beating him simply meant that you had resolved to take the first step all for one meanwhile is the puppet master and with every plot threat he gobbles up more and more of these interesting issues are condensed into a man who you can very much just punch until he stops moving while he didn't invent quirks yet his influence over the story and the series is lore tightens every chapter and so more and more of the story centers around beating this one guy instead of actually addressing the problems that created the rest of the rogue's gallery this collapses the larger more inherent issues of mha's world and makes them in typical shown fashion dependent on just the bad guy which robs them of that grander feel i just described shigaraki was an interesting villain because he was the result of the inherent dysfunctions of the world systems and defeating him was never going to solve them it was just a step along a much harder socially relevant path all for one is by comparison uninteresting because he has the origin of those dysfunctions and boils their solutions down to just beating this old man very hard so even if all for one cheating his way into the story is the point that doesn't change the fact that he derails a much better character in order for it to happen in general something being the point cannot excuse the damage done if the point leads to an overall less enjoyable product but all of this is under the assumption that this takeover is technically and narratively competent and that its issues lie in the fine print which is not the case all for one's reintroduction causes numerous structural narrative and even just logical problems structurally it removes shigeraki a very major character from the story entirely and thus once again breaks the three-piece structure we discussed earlier in the video all the preparation that went into making shirak a competent villain and all the deliberation of how his journey parallel deku are disintegrated and swallowed into the gullet of the sentient scrotum and consequences well they are simply obliterated into nothingness remember twice his frankly shocking death and how heavy of a blow it was to the league and especially how excited people were to see how shigaraki would react regardless of if he would care deeply or reveal he doesn't give a [ __ ] it would make for a defining moment for not just our main villain but his relationship to his comrades and could be used to catalyze different relationships within the league of villains well too bad we don't get to see that shiggy has as of yet which is by the way over a year maybe already two years after twice's death not yet expressed any thoughts towards the loss of twice in fact it is unclear if he was informed of off-screen or if he straight up doesn't even know shigaraki is left unable to express or signify anything confined to rare panicked responses that managed to slip through all for one's control by having his agency an ability to create an experience consequence based on his build up stripped from him shigaraki's entire journey in the story prior is retroactively devalued and made kind of pointless this is also the case for that transitional narrative as it is very much hinged on shigaraki's agency not to mention all for one is just a guy who honestly no one in the story has any direct beef with sure he is evil but he doesn't really connect to any character's arc naturally only by retroactively forcing him into endeavour and deku's stories shigaraki instead was much more directly tied to class a's journey and the overall decay of heroism and while all for one was obviously the guy who set it all into motion the actual personal connections just are not there class a's first traumatizing experience with the villains at usj was orchestrated by shigaraki and he has personal relevance to them and especially to deku something that all for one simply lacks then there are the logical problems all for one raises as a mysterious figure with an unknown background a nonsense end goal and non-defined limitations to his powers he is constantly surrounded by an aura of why did he do that and why didn't he do that instead when you don't know why he is the way he is and what he can and cannot do it makes most of his actions and achievements feel random like an easy get out of jail free card for any narrative dead end dobby's rebirth is mysterious and raises questions about potential third parties as he seems to have no connection to all for one's empire nah never mind it was all for one anyway and everyone involved just so happened to never mention it the ua trader is a mysterious figure that hasn't come up in literally 100 chapters well guess what they were all for once direct subordinates all along and we're just keeping quiet as discussed earlier this shrinks the world dramatically because everything starts swirling around this one guy but it also begins turning all for one into a punch line a joke character that can at any point just say i did that and take over any plot line in the story there are two common theories about his further involvement with deku and tenko being that all for one is the former's father and the one that gave the latter decay originally i hate both of these theories as they further feed into the issue of all for one depreciating the more interesting problems of the world but what i hate even more is that now i can absolutely see both of these happening i cannot wait and this doesn't even mention the absolute bollocks that is the actual writing allowing for his return in the first place quirk duplication is introduced almost sneakily casually and yet it's the single most game-breaking new element in the entire story the having and not having of quirks is a core part of mha's world and all instances of that part being able to be altered all for one one for all etc are treated as they should be with massive focus and reverence quirk duplication falls into the same category and should be a massive deal but the story just casually establishes its existence and never revisits it aside from moments in which it needs a crappy excuse as to why all for one does something a certain way his entire continued existence within the story hinges on this half-assed non-explanation but beyond what he does do some goofy [ __ ] also arises from the stuff he doesn't do let's talk about the best one and play a fun little game called why didn't all for one steal overalls quirk what is specifically all for one's goal we haven't heard all of the details yet but essentially he wants to become a quirk bank holding a monopoly over who gets to have what quirk under which conditions in order to do this he needs to eradicate all opposition and become untouchable and stable one way he does this is by merging partially with shigaraki allowing him to exist both in his own body and as a dominant vestige within tomorrow the main things holding him back are his own broken body and the difficulty of maintaining a link with tomorrow as well as an implied limit to how many quirks he can safely hold despite having the quirk all for one overhaul is a quirk that can freely control matter reshaping it at will this goes so far that we have seen chisaki perform miraculous acts of healing even bringing people back from the dead and healing pre-existing conditions all the way down to mundane [ __ ] like cavities additionally it can also be used to merge people and even retain their individual quirks within the new being thus being able to collect quirks so with that laid out why didn't all for one yoink chizuki's quirk here it seems to be tailored to serve his purposes as it could heal his body and even facilitate his merger with shiganaki if combined and mixed with whatever else is swimming around in him hell it could even provide an alternative way of collecting quirks in order to bypass the natural limit of the body and honestly even if that doesn't sound convincing to you all for one is established as someone who just can't help himself he has to steal quirks he considers worth taking the only people spared from his hunger are those he needs intact for his machinations overhaul is basically a more versatile version of decay with infinite possible applications so clearly it should be good enough for him so why not take it this is a case where preparation and deliberation are present but not acted upon all for one has all the established characteristics that would make taking overhaul make sense and the two meet and nothing happens overhaul just remains pointless within the series unused for even something like this the two most common counter arguments i've seen regarding this mini theory is that a overhaul doesn't have a quirk to steal anymore and b overall is too complicated to use and all for one avoids complex quirks argument a is straight up wrong at least based on what the series tells us quirks are defined by the quirk factor which itself is made up of two components the physical activator of the quirk and the gene the quirk is codified on the physical activator would be overhaul's lost arms so yeah he doesn't have that part anymore but the genes if dna works the same way it works in real life and mha never says otherwise then the quirk gene should be stored in every cell of the body not just those that can actually activate the quirk so at the very least the genetic quirk factor is still intact with an overhaul and since all for one is as of right now basically magic there is no reason to believe he needs both factors to be intact to seal the quirk the genetic one is probably enough and if it isn't well the story has not told us that yet so we can't really know argument b goes above and beyond and is actually wrong twice it is never stated that overhaul the quirk is exceptionally more complicated than any other power sure it's not a wild assumption to say that probably requires quite a bit of precise control but nothing regarding the difficulty of its use is ever explicitly stated you might need to precisely calculate physics and chemistry or you might just be able to say guy explodes in your head we don't know and secondly all for one does not mind complex quirks in the first place he would take any he could get his hands on the dialogue box most people misremember here is this one where he specifically says that he's avoiding complex quirks because tomorrow would not like using them he himself has no issues with them and in this situation here at the prison he would only be thinking about his own use case so as we can see it wait wait wait wait wait hold on what what was the point of this why did all for one even bother to select quirks tomorrow would prefer if he was just gonna possess him anyway now that he's a meat puppet shigaraki surely has no influence over what quirks are used how if all for one wants him to use a difficult quirk he will just make him speaking of why did all for one put so much emphasis on teaching shigaraki how to be a leader he needs his hatred to overcome one for all but beyond that why did he bother to ever impart on him lessons on how to lead and how to control people he specifically refuses the doctor's offer to rewrite shigeraki's memories because he wants him to grow naturally all for one even has numerous scenes in which he speaks of passing the torch of making shigaraki the true symbol of evil he straight up muses on the fact that shigaraki will replace him to himself and to the doctor was was he just lying to himself and his closest friend was he just being a tad goofy did he just feel silly that day why doesn't this make any sense oh my god this entire takeover was not planned was it it was just a random last minute decision [Music] now a lot of what we have talked about was pretty dramatic realistically speaking these are small to medium-sized issues all for one's resurgence honestly being the only genuinely big problem and a lot of these problems could still be fixed hell while i was writing this video we got a chapter addressing endeavour's feelings about owen for all a very tiny bit not enough to fix my problem with it but hey it's something i do however believe that it is undeniable that the general style and structure of mha changed drastically during the villain hunt arc it's hard to speculate on why but either way we now just have to look and see many of these plot points could still be salvaged somewhat deku's internal conflict could be picked up in a future arc and hey maybe shigaraki will free himself of all for one and return as a true main villain who knows what the future holds oh sorry i forgot to turn my phone off very unprofessional i know uh let me check real quick what the [ __ ] [Music] my hero academia is ending in late 2022 or early 2023 everything i just said in the previous paragraph is rendered utterly meaningless by these news as the villain hunt arc was winding down series author koyorikoshi confirmed personally that the series is now about to end with the next arc being the final one when exactly the series will conclude is still unclear as mangaka are notoriously bad at estimating how long a section will take to write and publish but even if the series lasts longer than hori expects it doesn't matter the issue here is the intention no matter the specific length left the series is now definitively moving towards finale and that means that any developments on any plot points gets now is likely to be that plot point's final development so all the issues and narrative hiccups we discussed earlier aren't just stumbles along a grand path they are their final destination and oh my god does that suck sure the story could go through all of the aforementioned plot points and give them good satisfying payoffs right at the end but guess what that would not solve anything there is a time and a place for everything you can't tell your best jokes at your grandma's funeral writing is the same how good your story sounds on a spreadsheet doesn't matter if you don't pace the flow of narrative development well things like shigaraki's reaction to twice deku's training with the vestiges all might's reunion with the class etc etc could technically be revisited within this final arc but it would be too little too late their moments have passed and the best you could do now is to try and band-aid the issue such the story looks a little more solid on a wiki summary the endeavor chapter that came out while i was writing this is a great example it's solid stuff absolutely but it comes so late and so removed from the rest of angie's story that it ultimately doesn't contribute much aside from you know giving more screen time to young endeavor which again is cool it also suffers from the same issue mirio's return had namely that a lot of the narrative weight is trying to be carried by short out of context flashbacks and you simply cannot construct a good story purely out of quick memories during hype combat moments you actually have to create proper scenes and events that build up towards these stories because if all it took for your story to be good was that the facts are there and solid then what would be the point of even writing a story just drop all your notes and facts into a wiki and be done with it no storytelling is not checking checkboxes it's not going through a list of possible things people could criticize and just making quick fixes a core component of storytelling is to order the facts to arrange them and have them connect in ways that create emotion and excitement not just in the pragmatic long term but also in the more emotional short term rushing to get to a cool moment to then retroactively shove in all the riding necessary to support that moment mostly doesn't work because by that point its time has passed the damage is done and the story has shown its hand it's called preparation for a reason not postpartum early mha understood this and that's why it stuck to the three-piece structure we discussed however with the knowledge of the series finalistic intentions the shift in style during villain hunt makes a lot of sense the story threw away its more deliberate consequence-oriented structure in favor of an insanely fast pace that catapulted the story from one cool moment to the next ignoring annoying weight of things like build-up or consequence this is why the story becomes overly reliant on flashbacks which hint at quieter scenes of preparation without actually having to fully commit to any of them this is why character arcs are tied up within single pages while previously established narrative concepts are hand-waved into non-existence why the more complex villain is replaced by a one note caricature because mha wants to end and it wants to do so bombastically but this strategy proves to be ultimately destructive to the series core identity and general coherence which is becoming increasingly evident in the current final arc it explicitly being the final battle immediately makes a few things impossible quiet arcs that explore class a in their relationships and flesh them out a little more are just not happening anymore as we're now in the final confrontation equally impossible are now arcs that focus and showcase the post-war world meaning those 37 chapters we got is all we are ever going to get of a landscape that should have functioned as a visualization of the paradigm shift shiharaki will also likely not reclaim his position again and if he does it can only be very short-lived the underlying threat of the liberation army and the political machinations the plight of mutants and actually good focus on foreign heroics and many many other possibilities are just gone all we have left is one giant war with a bunch of action figures that can now only flesh out the world and those action figures through flashbacks don't get me wrong this final war has been really cool in places monoma and shoto's moments have been absolute highlights for example but it is also this arc that gave us what i consider to be the ultimate example of mha's new far less satisfying writing style jiro versus all for one that matchup should already by itself raise a few eyebrows i am by no means a power scaler but when the guitar girl tangos with the devil it does make me feel a little odd beyond just a boring math [ __ ] though lies a much more fundamental problem why is it jiro specifically that gets to fight all for one here what is the point here how does this line up with preparation deliberation and consequence it is entirely too early to speak of consequence for this fight at the time i'm writing this so let's ignore that for now maybe i'll put some text on the screen how did the story prepare for this moment and how did it deliberately justify this specific match up well it didn't jiro has barely existed since culture festival and she hasn't been set up to really do anything besides just exist in the background this is how the series treats a lot of side characters they're like sports athletes sitting on a bench ready to be rotated into the spotlight and then benched again this habit does have distinct advantages i spent many of my first mha videos talking about that it allows the cast to dynamically shift around the members that need the spotlight right now while also by implication teasing that all characters will have the depth of someone like kirishima thus generating engagement excitement and attention however time has not been kind to this style this arrangement can only work if the individual members rotate into relevance at a fairly even rhythm to make sure that differences and importance are kept as low as possible some characters will obviously always be more central than others that's kind of just how stories work but to get the most out of this relevance carousel you're gonna want to spread relevance out as evenly as you can this in turn also means that the maximum number of characters it can be used for is limited as you would otherwise create an extremely erratic story that switches focus way too quickly nha runs into both of these issues as its massive cast could even at maximum commitment to the structure not rotate fast enough to spread relevance out evenly but we will never know that because mha randomly gives up on this structure before picking it up again making for very disjointedly paced spotlights for most of the side characters jiro is a great example of this her last rotation into the spotlight was during culture festival after which she disappeared and didn't really do much until she pops back up for this fight against potato head these two rotations vary so wildly in their tone and severity that she just feels insanely out of place here the connective tissue between stage concert and fighting satan just isn't there which leads to scenario where jiro's intervention comes across as unbelievable and frankly unengaging what is the point and why should i care if the series itself didn't care to actually prepare itself for this moment but okay fine this is all just models and concepts and those are inherently only made up [ __ ] that we use in order to make sense of stuff maybe the series ignored the structural promises and rules it established prior in order to give jiro here a great moment something to truly establish her as a memorable goat right at the end fair enough she does get to it all for one around a bit and it is cool that she gets to do something except this isn't a giro moment nothing that happens here needed it to be jiro nothing in the scene is specific to her hell even the speech and characterization that she displays are overly generic i gotta save my friends platitudes no this moment has despite her presence in it nothing to do with jiro specifically instead it is a stand-in for the entirety of class a a sort of amorphous look they're still relevant that ultimately only confirms how unfortunately they were integrated into the story you could swap in any side character into the scene and have very little changes nothing about this moment has any sort of deliberate setup for it to have to be zero this entire sequence is just a checkbox being ticked a make class a do something note buried within a manuscript given hasty and clumsy form it doesn't teach us anything new about giro specifically it doesn't pay off any part of a personal journey and doesn't interact with all for one as a character in the slightest it is only a class a did something moment this highlights how the final arc embellishes the issues of mha's new writing style specifically in regards to its characters this page here is so insanely goofy because half of these characters have never expressed or performed a unique opinion or action in the entire series class a had enormous potential but instead of having that potential be explored step by step each of them have been teleported to the end of their journey here on the final battlefield and we are just supposed to take that seriously apparently this further emphasizes the move forward be cool don't worry about anything else attitude we discovered in the earlier sections who cares that this moment isn't earned it's cool whoa she hit him yes sir at this point the very idea of the original structure has completely fallen apart nothing needs preparation or deliberation anymore it just needs a cool moment any conflict with plea established facts and promises can just be flashbacked away what is kind of interesting here is how much this emphasizes cliffhangers cliffhangers are a perfectly good and normal tool for any periodical series you want to get people to keep coming back every week and so they are a fairly natural convention of many mediums but as mha has progressed they seem to have become an oddly important focal point for the series nowadays every other chapter will end with some shocking sudden change to the action which will then be hastily explained away in the first few pages of the next chapter muriel is here more in for next week yeah he just kind of got his quirk back anyway whoa deku exploded to the next chapter he just saved everyone don't worry about it oh my god tudoroki has a new power find out in the next issue yeah you just trained very hard off screen okay please stop asking some of these will have pre-established logic to them some won't but they all put the focus squarely on the wow factor of the moment with only very little space and thought being given to what these moments are actually supposed to achieve beyond being cool and pragmatically serving the race towards the end through this mha also falls into a habit of just straight up lying to the reader and not in satisfying ways any fact can at any point be replaced with an alternative fact no matter how little sense it makes narratively or thematically if it serves a cool moment or a crazy cliffhanger traitor reveal ends on showing invisible girl lol idiot she was looking at the traitor duh hawk's back is gone lol idiot he's fine hawks pulls a sword on best genius and everything points to him being dead lawl idiot they have a hospital that can induce a death-like state that has never been introduced and also hawks just pulled out a sword for shits and giggles kurogiri is in the shot of all the prison villains that are being set up for a breakout la mao idiot he's just at the hospital all along wow you're so stupid for believing me this has massive ripple effects throughout the entire story when you stop properly relying on build-up and payoff when your story becomes intensely reactive to its own nonsense as opposed to deliberate and conscious every aspect of it eventually suffers the narrative tightness that created a conflict that was more about social issues than good versus evil collapses into a much less interesting let's punch the bad guy type scuffle character arcs that had years to marinate and could have become shown in hallmarks are now entirely subservient to just doing cool [ __ ] logic be damned in some cases the series even goes out of its way to flatten its established narrative depth in order to allow for simple more superficially cool moments toga's story is for a long time at least about having to cope with a quirk that gives her socially unacceptable tendencies and trying to reconcile the reality of that with her desire to nonetheless participate in normal society whoops no never mind now she just believes that she is inherently entitled to killing people and anyone who wants to stop her is a meanie weenie but hey that cliffhanger is pretty cool though right [Music] so here we are summer 2022 mha is embroiled in the midst of its finale and despite the end of 2022 date looking less and less likely the intention is still clearly there the story wants to end so where does that leave us do we just accept that this is what the manga is now and try to enjoy it for what it is do we vehemently hold out hope do we just ignore the issues personally i am just so disappointed no matter how much one may insist that actually mha isn't ending and it's just a marketing tactic or that actually all of these rushed and otherwise botched plotlines will totally be picked up again before the series ends or that actually none of these issues are real it's normal for a series to focus less on structure and more on bombast as it goes on no matter how many times all of that can come up i could not help but be deeply truly disappointed my hero academia was a story that stood out because it felt sincere and a part of that sincerity to me came from how diligently it ordered its story and characters around deliberate and well-prepared scenarios it was a story that was willing to have its own events matter by having them produce lasting consequences and have those consequences themselves be preparation for the next events it didn't reinvent the wheel but damn wasn't good at cycling and because it was so good at this structure it oozed potential what character would get the spotlight what incidental detail was actually building towards an interesting development what story was it going to tell next it was exciting because paying attention meant that you could maybe foresee what the next thing would be it was engaging because the series respected that attention you gave it and held itself to fairly consistent rules regarding what promises it made and how it paid them off but now all of that is gone events happen seemingly at random with very little connective writing between them and what came before plot threads that were built up for so long i was in high school when they started have their conclusions rushed to completion to make space for the next big thing the next cool moments characters plot twists even the entire message of the show have become complete slaves to the series's forward momentum and for what to reach the ending faster i cannot know what led to the shifting gears and i don't think i need to what i do know is that villain hunt and the subsequent shift in structure have done irreparable damage to the series in my opinion if mha were to go on to maybe three more years it could grow and expand to the point where this period in its run would not leave too bad of a scar but that isn't happening fellas it's time to face the music this is the end we are barreling towards the ending and this new style is sticking around villain hunt may have been the first crack in the armor but as you can tell from how little it actually featured in this video it has since been dwarfed by the avalanche of issues that resulted from this structural change and so this will be mha's legacy a series broken not by one arc but by its own sudden inexplicable desire to end itself mayur academia was a story that once built towards a bright future towards stories and characters full of potential it is now a story that builds towards nothing but the next firework the next cliffhanger and ultimately its own non-existence and that is just so [ __ ] sad [Music] thank you all so much for watching and a special thank you to all of our patrons without you videos like these especially of this size would be entirely impossible so absolutely a round of applause to you and a very special thank you to carthaire fiction ape mr game ceni courage alex elliot brady iron camel jameson tate joshua ludenther paracha peroscoco project iceman that's just ash mr meander and geo i very much hope you enjoyed and i will go sleep because this video has taken so much time out of my life i will see you next time take care and be safe and stay well friends bye

Channel: Oceaniz

Views: 937,611

Keywords: Oceaniz, anime, MHA, BNHA, HeroAca, Criticism, Bad, Bones, Season 6, Villain Hunt, War Arc, Endeavor, Hawks, Bakugo, Deku

Id: Sujd79KV7hA

Length: 78min 43sec (4723 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022