Boku no Hero Academia 178 Review: Gentle is BADASS

Boku no Hero Academia, Chapter 178

Holy shit, this chapter's actually pretty damn awesome. Sure, we did spend around the first half just being a montage of how everyone's preparing and/or are excited for the school festival, and we get to see some minor 1B character muck around a little, but then we get to the amazing scene as Midoriya does his jump and in-the-moment strategizing of remembering how Gentle does his air bubble things, quickly predicting just where Gentle will do his air bubbles, allowing him to use one of Gentle's rubber bubbles as a platform to ricochet one of his finger blasts. It's awesome. I'm not as well-versed in the description of action scenes as I would like to be, so trust me when I say that it's pretty fucking awesome. 

And, of course, Midoriya has the villains subdued, knocking both of them down... and then we get a brief flashback to La Brava (Love-Lover?) and her backstory. She was bullied and unaccepted and branded a stalker, and it's even implied that she was suicidal, but Gentle uplifted her spirits and accepted her without question, which is why she's so in love with him. Her quirk, as it turns out, is called "Love", and she can give power-ups to those that she loves, which ends up in a pretty goddamn badass scene as Gentle just quickly overpowers Midoriya and does a cool karate neck-chop.

And you'd think that this is the end of the fight, with La Brava and Gentle's combined power being strong enough to defeat Midoriya... but not yet! He's still standing, about to do another flick at Gentle. My god this fight is so thrilling, in that I genuinely have no idea who's going to win and we're getting some of the genuinely best art Boku no Hero Academia's had in quite some time. Good stuff.