My Hero Academia, Chapter 226: Blood of Love; Chapter 227: Sleepy
I missed last week's chapter of Boku no Hero Academia. Oops! I'll review both of them together here, then. I've been slowly catching up to the third season of the anime, and it's pretty fantastic -- I've basically had my love for this series pretty much rekindled heavily by the anime.
Chapter 226, "Blood of Love", is a continuation of the Toga mini-arc, and it seems like these chapters of the Villain Alliance fighting against Neo-Destro's Liberation Army or whatever is going to feature proper power-up upgrades for each and every member of the Villain Alliance... and it's kind of predictable, considering the previous arc was sort of a "spotlight every important character once" in Class 1A, but it's definitely neat to have these parallels, to have the cast of villains not just basically be a bunch of mini-bosses like your Akatsukis and your Arrancars. By actually making a set of villains be proper characters, it honestly makes me care a lot more about these bad guys. Maybe not root for them since they're still pretty much psychopaths, but flesh them out more than just "oh, Toga is the yandere one".
We start off 226 with a bunch of neat flashbacks to Toga's past, about how apparently she used to go by a different name, and she apparently killed some dude called Saitou and drinking his blood up and we get this completely fucked-up face with the widest grin you'll ever see, with eyes that are both in ecstasy as well as crying at the same time.
And in addition to seeing a bunch of cool-looking villains in the background, we get the face-off between Toga and Curious, and Curious goes into this long rant about how she's going to spin Toga's life story into what's basically a martyr's story, talking about how she's oppressed by how society is simply unable to understand the tragic story of how her quirk made her addicted to blood and be drawn to blood, even at a young age with animals and birds and shit, and talks about how Toga's been forced to hide her true self, her true desires, because her love for blood is something that'll never be accepted by society...
And... and frankly, I kind of get where Toga's coming from. Maybe with a more positive support system, she could fit in society while just killing like small animals and not murdering people and shit. But, y'know, she's still a murderer. The prose goes into some pretty neat writing, though, discussing how what's normal for Toga isn't society's "normal", and how she's forced to living the life as she does now because of that aspect of society... and what's basically Magneto's Mutant Supremacy manifest is what they're trying to advocate for.
We then get some action scenes, and Toga tries her best to escape as Curious and her minions whack her around with superpowers. Toga's mind, though, thinks about how she doesn't want to be a "sob story", she doesn't want to be considered "unfortunate", and goes on a bit of a mental train about how she smiles when she's happy, and she sucks the blood of people she loves, and in her mind it's the same with how normal people kiss. Except, y'know, with more death.
And then Toga runs around, transforming into Uraraka, while Curious talks about how she (and us, the readers), know about how Toga's quirk only lets her change her appearance and nothing else. And as she's about to be killed by a rampaging Curious, she screams while her thought goes to Uraraka, wanting to be "like" her... and then suddenly she ends up activating Uraraka's ability, sending Curious way into the sky.
It's definitely a power-up of sorts, and as Toga zips around the battlefield and touches everyone, sending a bunch of mooks flying into the sky, we get a speculation from Curious on just how Toga is able to do that. Was it simply because her quirk evolved? Or is it just an aspect of Toga's quirk that she hasn't revealed yet -- that she has to learn the specifics of the quirks of the people she copies?
Whatever the case, though, as Toga goes into a bit of her mission statement about living normally and falling in love, she shows off just how dangerous gravity manipulation can be as she drops Curious and a lot of her minions onto the ground and sploots them into bloodstains. Yeah, very fortunate that Uraraka's such a friendly, happy person, huh? Her quirk's definitely very freaking dangerous!
Toga's probably one of the more one-dimensional characters among the Villain Alliance, with most of her scenes hinging on her yandere-ness and not much else, so it's definitely great to give her a fair amount of backstory. Chapter 227 basically opens up with Toga hiding in a random shed and passing out. Meanwhile, Neo-Destro gives this huge monologue about how forcing society to conform even though a vast majority of society's now unique thanks to the introduction of quirks makes conforming pretty difficult to do.
Neo-Destro's secretary, this dude with weird hair, talks about how the footage with Curious can't be used anymore thanks to how heroic it ended up causing Toga to come off, and we get a bit of a... bizarre scene with him trash-talking poor Giren.
We then cut back to the Villain Alliance, where we establish that it's going to take 1 hour and 20 minutes until Gigantomakhia wakes up, which is pretty crazy. Meanwhile, the Liberation Army's being riled up by them using Curious's death as basically a rallying message. Everyone charges at Shigaraki... and he gets so sleepy, and we get a monologue about how he "sees things moving that shouldn't be moving" and his perception is all out of whack whenever he's sleepy.
And we get a flashback of little nShigaraki being shown the picture of Nana Shimura by his elder sister, talking about how Tenko could be a hero... and then we cut to the present day and Shigaraki just disintegrates a gigantic crowd all on his own. What the shit!
It's a pretty badass scene, don't get me wrong, with Shigaraki causing a street's worth of random mooks to crumble into dust, and Spinner basically confirms that Shigaraki's decay jumps around to people he doesn't touch... so that's his true power? It's a bit off, though -- Toga got a whole flashback and a bit of a dig into her backstory to unlock her true power, and she had to face off against what's essentially a boss. Shigaraki gets a bit sleepy and gets a fragmented flashback? And then we move away to Dabi? Although I guess we could get more out of Shigaraki in subsequent chapters or something, I dunno.
Anyway, next up, is Dabi, fighting some dude with two big-ass giant hands, and apparently it's going to be a fire-vs-ice bit as Dabi faces off against faceless Captain Cold? I honestly just personally want the series to just tell us already if Dabi has any sort of connection to Endeavour or anything, because there's so many people speculating out there on whether Dabi is really Endeavour's kid, or if it's all just a red herring or whatever... at this point I just want a proper, conclusive answer, whatever that may be.
Overall, though, definitely a pair of pretty solid chapters. This whole arc is going to feel better when viewed in tankobon or as part of the anime, because it's admittedly pretty slowly paced, but it's definitely been entertaining for sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment