The Camera Does Not Do These Colored Pencils Justice !! Huge Thanks To My Bff For Letting Me Use Them

fly !

My Hero Academia is ending after 10 years this month

Thank you for 2 years of great manga 🤘🤘

I remember that Hori referred to Hawks (and Ochako) being a 'light of hope' in 2021. It's also interesting that it was Hawks who commented on Ofa and how it connects people's hearts. Do you have any thoughts on this?

I think that arc was very dark for Hawks specifically and the anime's rendition of it is very dark. However these chapters... in 323-325 it is a bit different. It's where I think Hori was honest and where I do think Hawks and especially Ochako are at their brightest, narratively. So, uh, to go back to my writing for Graduation Day, I remember debating whether to analyze this scene because I thought it was relevant. I eventually decided that six thousand words is enough and to spare y'all, but let's get into it because I think it confirms my thesis that vulnerability is needed for connection in BNHA.

Ochako's first panels in 324 have her saying, admitting actually, that she cannot reassure people. She acknowledges they're all scared and worried.

This was the best thing she could have done.

The deification of heroes was something that led to the system they have now. Somewhere in the glitz and hero rankings people forgot these are regular people.

We see this repeatedly as an issue of identities - why Toshinori seems a shell of himself outside of All Might, most of Enji's issues boil down to him not knowing how to be Enji versus Endeavor and screwing his family up for it, and Hawks is...well, everything about Hawks is about being a Hero rather than a person, which is why Horikoshi had him kill someone literally named "humanity".

Ochako doesn't allow this to go on. She makes it clear they're all scared, they're all people who want safety, comfort, and want to be clean from mud and dirt, same as any other. It's why she's one of the Savior Kids; she's geared to try and humanize the other side. It's why she's paired with Toga. See below, as she thinks of Toga while giving a speech.

Essentially she reached the people in that crowd by reminding them who Deku is - a kid with way too much on his shoulders, a person just like them. Not a symbol, not a quirk, like AFO is treating him as. A boy. Or "regular high school kid" - yeah, I should have put this in Graduation Day, lol.

Symbols aren't meant to be fragile or have to come out from the rain. Deku does because he's a person.

So what about Hawks?

This isn't the last time Keigo is going make metaphors about One for All. Remember the line so many people read in bad faith about him comparing Endeavor "linking" people together too? He was talking about connection, pure and simple, realizing that much of his own motivations and Inasa's are connected through Endeavor, or their perceptions of him.

Truly, it's just him remarking that seeing society as holistic, as a whole rather than a part, is the key to solving their issue.

I think the emphasis on showing your soul, ugliness and cracks and all is one of the keys to reaching the villains. Something that doesn't position them as moral superiors, which is where Keigo failed drastically with Jin. He didn't give him a good choice at all. He also wasn't willing to be fully vulnerable with him. But I also think there's another dimension to this. More and more I think Horikoshi is actually criticizing individualism and the idea of "the great man". In his depicting of bystander system that has become an issue from society delegating acts of kindness and heroism to an actual career, I think he's critiquing the idea that one person can shoulder that burden.

It shouldn't be a person but a village, so to speak. It says a lot that the characters we know as villains are both seeking connection but also saying, in the depths of despair, that their individual will can change the world.

I still interpret this scene as Dabi deep in denial. Uh oh, he actually FELT something, time to double down and reiterate he doesn't give an actual fuck when truth is he DOES, he just doesn't want to. Otherwise he has to FEEL.

Anyway, the emphasis on the single person and single convinction is another one of those clues I think Horikoshi is leaving us about the "Great Man theory".

The great man theory is a 19th-century approach to the study of history according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes: highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect.

I remember balking when I read this. Maybe it's because here in the West, there's little uhh agreement over Napoleon being heroic. Maybe it's because my history teachers were unsual but I've never really seen anyone seriously consider Napoleon heroic. There always seemed to be agreement he was a power-mad tyrant who took advantage of the Revolution to enact a military coup and then actual progress made by the Jacobins. So the fact chapter 3 of BNHA has Mic quoting him as a great hero was always weird. At the time of my first read through, I wrote it off as maybe Japan doesn't take this approach to Napoleon and the Revolution. One person's tyrant is another's hero, you know? But more and more I think Horikoshi has been debunking Great Man Theory with his manga. First off the premise of Great Man is usual that the Great Man is born, that his Greatness is congenital. That there's a natural aptitude for greatness, like superior intellect, etc. BNHA is absolutely refuting that, has from the first page. In fact the characters who get into the trap of believing they are born "anything" are shown to be trapped or not in a good way (see Redestro, or see Tomura and Keigo believing they are born to destroy/have dirty wings respectively). So much of who Deku has become is supposed to change this idea of biological predisposition to greatness.

Even Dabi, who has struggled against the circumstances of his birth, falls into the trap of believing some people are born with everything and are born to everything, essentially internalizing the worst of his father's own beliefs.

The story isn't kind to people who give us this rhetoric - that depending on others is wrong, or weakness. It's why Deku had his arc, after all.

Which brings us to my second point - the story isn't the triumph of individuals against evil. It's about people coming together. That's why Ochako and Keigo had their moments of realization in 323-325.

It's not about one person. It's about people.

Lastly, and this is conjecture, but there's a curiosity to the Great Man theory from a cultural standpoint. Now each culture has its Great Man to some extent. I've spoken about how All For One is likely trying to emulate Oda Nobunaga with his Demon Lord talk. But the emphasis on individual actions over collective ones, the commercialization of heroism, and the idea of competition breeding innovations/results are distinctively Western Capitalist ones. And in...a clumsy way, I think Horikoshi has been hinting at this being part of his own criticism.

Did you ever notice how the Japanese anime has them say "Hero/Hiro"? It's an imported word. Japanese has other words that mean hero, like yusha or eiyu, which have different meanings that all relate to the English hero as either a brave person (yusha) or a person of greatness/importance (eiyu). Why then use hiro, a foreign word as the title for this career?

Because the hero system is canonically imported. And so perhaps are the ideals it brought with it.

I have mentioned before that in literature, sharing a meal is symbolically an act of communion, usually for the purpose of making peace or coming to a mutual understanding.

At a symbolic level, this scene is Hawks and Endeavor trying to understand each other and their respective ideals. It's a peace offering and request for cooperation on Hawks' part. The strange thing is despite Endeavor's overbearing nature, he let Hawks choose the food and the location of their meal. As much as Hawks said he wants to sit back and take a supporting role, Hawks was the one taking all of the initiative and Endeavor was letting him lead with only moderate complaining.

And this meal did lead to an understanding between these two. It's only because of the understanding they reached here that Endeavor was able to understand Hawks' later message warning of the PLF. It wasn't a perfect understanding: they finished their meal together, but the restaurant was shattered before they could pay the bill. Hawks still kept his face and hands covered by his costume. He was still not being forthright about his intentions. He planned on using Endeavor as bait for the noumu without informing him. And Hawks was not being honest about why he wanted to direct Endeavor's Number One Hero career. Hawks phrased it in terms of not wanting to work hard, but it was in truth about his personal admiration of Endeavor and a systemic critique about the fragility of the existing system that needs heroes on alert at all times.

all eyes on u

Wiping my feet, putting on indoor slippers from my backpack: So, so. I can't stop staring at the Miruko and Hawks art. The OFFICIAL one, where they're wearing highschool uniforms because WE STAN BIRDIE-BUNNY FRIENDSHIPS. Just. Let Miruko adopt a dumb bird, please. When she saw this cheeky ass bird child, she thought he was funny but she did not at all expect to adopt a baby bird as a little sibling-ish person thing. He's a mess but she'd kill for him. Thanks, Bellamy-senpai!!

Rumi is a genuinely cool and popular upperclassman who thinks it’s absolutely hilarious that the new kid Takami seems very cool on the surface but is actually just, like, a complete disaster in reality. He has absolutely minimal practice interacting with people past uncomfortably canny surface level social signaling and pretending like his inability to smile is because he’s too cool to do so, and is way too enthusiastic about using pop culture references for someone who seems to have accidentally wiped the ‘childhood media’ folder from the hard drive of his brain. He is most honest when he’s being an asshole, which is hilarious because he pulls it off with exactly enough shit-eating gravitas that nobody ever calls him on it, so she thinks they’re going to bond over that... but it turns out that once she cracks him open like a walnut, he’s stupidly easy to bait into feeling bad with some crocodile tears. At least he is when he’s not emotionally manipulating Rumi’s class rep into begging some extra credit for Rumi off of their teacher because he’s just so worried that she lost points because he made her help him with some family stuff, and he’d feel so bad if it was his fault that her grade suffered -

She wrestles him into the dirt after school for that, because fuck you, ‘Hawks,’ don’t project the bug he has up his ass about getting a single B onto her. She’s not the one that got raised in a test tube or whatever, she can damn well fight her own fights without any little freshman rats sneaking around behind her back!

It’s more ride-or-die than she expected him to be, though, and before she knows it she’s more than ready to return the favor. She graduates before him, and it’s a happy occasion as any until she realizes that she’s probably his only genuine friend in the whole school that knows him beyond his stupid facade of superficial idol-like popularity. It’s not the whole reason that she registers herself under her own agency (because like fuck is she going to sidekick for anybody!), but it doesn’t hurt that doing so means she’s technically legal to send internship request forms to high school students.

I refuse to spend more time on this, his jacket is so ugly

todoroki family brunch: fuyumi doing the catering like the older sister she is, natsuo suicide baiting their father 30min into this brunch, rei is on the balcony tanning, shoto has no idea what’s going on, and dabi feeds hawks a concoction of all alcoholic beverages that were on the table, just to see what happens with someone whose quirk probably makes them a lightweight, happy sunday.

Hawks done felled 😔😔

Might colour this in later

it’s just not the same now, is it?