Boku no Hero Academia, Chapter 214: Our Rebellious War
Huh, it really struck me how truncated the past dozen or so chapters of My Hero Academia has been now that it's back to full length. With the past couple of mini-arcs being focused on combat and fighting scenes, it really struck me how much more I have to talk about in this chapter compared to the previous ones (oh, yeah, so-and-so fights so-and-so; someone's quirk gets revealed). Not to put down the previous chapters or anything, because I bet when read as a whole entity or binge-watched it's probably not as bad, but that is indeed the pacing problem with giving out a couple of pages per week.
We get a bit of an extension of the previous chapter's Aizawa moment when he tells the Vlad and All Might to let the fight continue because both of his favourite students, Shinsou and Midoriya, are still fighting to win. And it's an interesting bit where Midoriya initially refuses to fight Shinsou while activating his potentially-unstable quirk, fully intending to fight Shinsou and Monoma quirkless, wanting to still get victory despite his shortcomings. Pretty responsible, actually, even if he does end up using Black Whip later on.
We actually get to see Ashido and Mineta show off some improvements of their quirks. I've been slowly watching the third season of the anime, and at this moment I'm around the point where they're training the limits of their quirks in summer camp... and it is actually pretty neat. Ashido's acid abilities now have improved to actually launching acid blasts when previously it's more localized, while Mineta shows off a surprisingly interesting usage of his bouncing-ball quirks by lobbing them all over the place and setting up personal trampolines to actually bounce around similar to Gran Tourino. And also use a huge bouncing shield to block an attack from the twin-impact Saiyan-scouter kid.
And it would genuinely be impressive, because so far all of Mineta's huge moments in the series have either been in support of other heroes (Midoriya and Tsuyu during the USJ arc) or by using his balls as traps or as subterfuge (during the final exam). This is a genuinely badass moment... which, of course, he capitalizes by 'accidentally' slamming his face into Ashido's boobs. It's... it's actually kind of funny, and he at least gets immediately punished by being used as a projectile. The line between whether Mineta's lewdness is offensive or hilarious is a very, very fine line, but this one's actually kind of funny.
Interestingly, we get a genuinely neat moment from Monoma where he monologues about how he's basically accepted that he's always going to be a second-rate character, and there's definitely a hint of potential darkness when he notes that he's "happy to be the guy that opposes the main guy". Actual translations differ on this line, and I'm actually interested to see if this is hinting for something bigger for Monoma. Is he going to be an actual villain or anti-villain or something? Or is this something leading to more depth revolving around the character? Monoma's a character that has been little more than a running gag (who I honestly didn't realize was a proper character in the manga until, like, the summer camp arc). Interestingly, he apparently managed to sort of copy One For All, but it's either an actual feint, or he can't utilize the strength. It's not made clear, and I'm actually curious what it means.
Midoriya jumps to grab Shinsou's tentacle-bandage things and Uraraka basically uses Midoriya himself as a weapon in lieu of Midoriya using his own quirk(s). We get a fun little badass montage of Aizawa teaching Shinsou about the importance or practice and mastering things, and we get a pretty badass moment of Shinsou pulling down a bunch of pipes with his tentacles... and in response to this, Midoriya... uses Black Whip. Of course. It's clearly just a small part of what Black Whip is, I think, but he's definitely got it under control and I'm kind of bummed that it happened so quickly. Of course, it's just the cliffhanger and the story might surprise us in some way, but I really don't like the idea of Midoriya just getting all these extra quirks without putting in the hard work. While the rest of the chapter is pretty good, I am still kind of ambivalent on Midoriya apparently being able to utilize Black Whip almost safely without any repercussions from the previous chapter other than fighting quirkless for like all of a minute. We'll see.
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