Boku no Hero Academia 57 Review: Villain Alliance

Boku no Hero Academia, Chapter 57: Hero Killer Stain, the Aftermath

It's more of a cooldown chapter to show what's happened after the whole Hero Killer incident, and it appears that it's spilled out to the media after the events of last chapter. We see that, as noted, Endeavour was given credit due to all the legalities involved, and we see various forms of media report the awesomeness of Hero Killer Stain and just how deadly he is – apparently the biggest killing spree after All Might’s debut.

Shigaraki, meanwhile, is just pissed that the Noumus are relegated as the secondary villains of the piece, despite being all ‘by tomorrow they’ll forget all about you’ back when the Stain battle began.

We get to see a bit of the other heroes in their respective internship place things. Poor Bakugou is apparently subject to being combed down by this weird ‘Best Jeanist’ dude (his hair of course blows back up) which is like the worst hero ever. His freaking shirt is a jeans. Is his hero power jeans too? Jeez. “Red Riot” Kirishima and Tetsutetsutetsutetsu are just hanging out dealing with SOS’s. Poor Momo, like Bakugou, is kind of being used as advertisement models… which is something she’s relatively bummed out by and is probably one of the things that Stain hates about the commercialized heroes and whatnot.

Uraraka calls Midoriya and get teased by Gunhead over some ‘heart thumping’ comment while Midoriya totally freaks out over having a phone call with a girl. Shit, man, that face. We get a bit of Iida, whose brachial plexus is damaged – which is IRL a pretty severe injury, and judging by Iida’s description the damage to his brachial plexus is honestly quite minimal. Basically it’s only his fingers that are difficult to move. Iida notes that it could be healed, but he resolves that until he grows properly (he notes he should’ve contacted Manual before engaging Stain) he will leave his arm like that as penance.

We get a pretty nice moment of Midoriya going all ‘I could tell him more… but he already gets it’ and the two have a nice bonding moment and the art looks all serious as Todoroki seems to notice something… and promptly apologizes for having some kind of a ‘hand curse’ where people around him get their hands fucked up. Okay, Todoroki, I actually laughed out loud at that joke.

We then cut away to Gran Tourino on a call to All Might (or ‘Toshinori’, his real name) and apparently Gran Tourino’s pay is cut and his right to teach is revoked… though it’s not clear if he’s not handling Midoriya anymore and if Manual and Endeavour are hit by the same punishment. We see a bit of a nice running gag as All Might is all subservient and scared and kowtow-kowtow while talking to Gran Tourino… though apparently All Might has been rude towards Gran Tourino by ‘forgetting’ him? We also note that Gran Tourino had a promise with All Might’s predecessor, a certain person called Shimura.

Gran Tourino then tells All Might how even he trembled in the presence of Stain the Hero Killer, and he attributes it to Stain’s sheer strength of ideology and his intense fixation, something that Gran Tourino compares to All Might’s own notion of symbol of justice. Gran Tourino says it’s all about charisma, and how it will eventually spread as word of the Hero Killer himself also spreads… and eventually become kind of like a recruiting beacon for the Villain Alliance if this charismatic ideology is spread.

Gran Tourino then notes that the man who killed All Might’s predecessor Shimura, as well as the one who dealt All Might his grievous wound is still alive and on the move, something that All Might refuses to believe. And he’s been orchestrating all this with Stain just to get what’s basically a propaganda tool to recruit as many troops as he can. Gran Tourino calls this mysterious person ‘All For One’, which is weird because, y’know, it’s reverse of ‘One For All’. Gran Tourino implores All Might to tell Midoriya everything about One For All, but naturally we don’t hear anything about it in this chapter.

We then cut away to some seedy characters in an underground lair, a dude with an eyepatch and a street gangster looking dude with a funny rabbit-eared iPhone casing and a handgun-shaped cigarette. Apparently eyepatch man is some kind of black market dealer, and iPhone gangster is showing a video about the Hero Killer on his phone. Not sure if these two will be super important down the road but it sure does illustrate just how far-reaching the Hero Killer’s influence reaches.

Apparently Hero Killer Stain’s real name is Akaguro Chizome, and we now learn his real backstory. He’s someone who aimed to be a hero after being inspired by All Might, but apparently there’s no real big tragedy or big treachery by a hero like every reader assumed there was (or at least none that the prose reveals to us) and he simply just dropped out of a hero high school due to being disillusioned with the heroes there. And then he pulled some kind of Rorschach act with soapbox speeches and street oratory, before deciding that there are no ‘power in his words’. He then went all Batman and perfected his body and martial arts, and around that time his parents died – apparently not because of him. We get another reaffirmation of Stain’s motivation to purge the world of fake heroes.

But while Stain’s goal was merely to eradicate the fake heroes, mr. gangster man notes how ‘the agents of malice that used to be scattered’ are gathering together to the organization that Stain was said to be part of… the Villain Alliance. Just like Gran Tourino feared. And gangster man is apparently one of these agents of malice. The last page is particularly chilling as we see a couple of the villains who I assume will be prominent later on. We see a cute psycho schoolgirl who’s just giggling while some poor dude just exploded in blood behind her. We see this super-muscular monster dude with spikes on his back. We see some stitches dude who has stitched some darker skin to his entire lower jaw, neck, ears and under his eyes. We see some kind of dude with lizard skin cosplaying as Stain. We see this dude with a firefighter costume and a gas mask. And finally we see Shigaraki.

So yeah, while on the surface just a talky talky chapter it’s awesome in building up for future arcs. We did get a bit of a closure on the Iida and Stain fronts, but we definitely get a lot of buildups. There’s the mystery about One For All and whatever All Might is hiding from Midoriya, we’ve got the mysterious chessmaster All For One, we’ve got the Villain Alliance all gathering… yeah, My Hero Academia is definitely going to shape up as one of my favourite mangas of all time. It’s pretty great.