My Hero Academia 212 Review: Zangetsu

Boku no Hero Academia, Chapter 212: Whereabouts Of My Soul

Huh, that's an... interesting revelation, for sure. I'm not sure what to make of it. A good chunk of the chapter is just the funky bald guy in Midoriya's soul talking to him. He basically gives the revelation that, hey, the vestiges of the previous users of One For All has left their 'cores' within the One For Al Quirk, and the black shadow-claw things that Midoriya unleashed last chapter (which felt like an eternity ago!) was actually his quirk, Black Whip. And thanks to One For All growing and evolving, apparently Midoriya will be able to tap into the quirks of his predecessors. 

It's... it's interesting since Midoriya just learning to handle different percentages of raw strength is going to get old at some point, but at the same time I really wished that My Hero Academia would be able to avoid a facet I severely dislike about shonen manga -- that the protagonist gets an impressively versatile and multi-formed ability while everyone else only gets one or two superpowers. I'm confident enough in the writer that maybe this would be balanced out somewhat by the implication that it's going to require Midoriya to have absolute focus in his emotions to control One For All, but at the same time... I dunno. It basically gives Midoriya eight new potential quirks. And yes, All For One does have far more than that, but it just kinda feels like a shonen manga trope that could've been avoided, y'know? 

Still, with my own personal beefs towards the genre removed, it's a neat enough revelation of a power-up for the main character, which is pretty neat.

The rest of the battle is a pretty well-drawn set of pages of the battle resuming, and after a couple of shorter, far less content-filled chapters of MHA, it's refreshing to see it hop back to full length. We also get to see the teachers arriving on the sidelines of the battlefield, with All Might telling the others to let the battle go on for a while since Midoriya seems to have a handle on controlling his quirk. Overall, a neat chapter. It's definitely going to work a lot better when I can read the entire arc in a single sitting, though -- reading these piecemeal is definitely hurting the pacing something fierce.