My Hero Academia 222 Review: Handyman - Year One

My Hero Academia, Chapter 222: Shigaraki Tomura: Distortion

It's... it's mostly a slow-paced, backstory moment, and while it mostly does more to fill up holes of what Shigaraki's backstory has been established as in previous chapters, it's definitely a well-paced, well-written one as Shigaraki has a neat little flashback to when All For One found him. Apparently, the hands are the remains of his family members, recovered by the Doctor and given to Shigaraki as a kid. There's some really effective art shading in that scene where Doctor shows up and Shigaraki's fractured memories has flashes to her family (including a cute widdle dog). 

Shigaraki tells Doctor that when he wears 'everyone', he feels utterly sick and wants to throw up, but also feels calm -- something that we have seen in the past. And so in a pretty cool two-page spread, we get Shigaraki's actual motivation, which honestly seems pretty damn earnest -- if fucked up. It's not just to destroy society, or some weird video game metaphor (we dropped that gimmick pretty quickly, huh) -- he just wants to destroy everything since it pisses him off, even if it won't heal the hole in his heart. Although he does at least say that he'll be considerate of the desires of his comrades -- he won't destroy what Toga likes, and wants to let the Doctor see 'everything from heaven to hell'.

We get some prominent panels showing Spinner's face when Shigaraki says this, though, so maybe we're going to get some infighting among Shigaraki's group? The Doctor tells Shigaraki that while he intends to cooperate, they still have to win the trust of Gigantomakhia, making the giant brute submit to him. Dabi then buggers off to find new members (complete with new High-End Noumus supplied by the Doctor!), not really caring of what Shigaraki's motivation is. I think based on the timeline, this is when he fought Endeavour and Hawks? 

Also, we get the revelation that the black ink teleportation goop isn't the Doctor's quirks, but rather one of the Noumus -- this weird lizard with an exposed brain, two legs ending in shoes, and weird-ass Frankenstein bolts that lets the Doctor control his quirk. And he's called "John-chan". 

We then cut to Shigaraki fighting Gigantomakhia, declaring that he is a king, and we get... more Spinner focus? And a panel of... some dude's scarf? All the while the narration (and it's not obvious who's saying this) talks about how this is the destruction of the league of villains, while zooming in on Destro Junior's face. It's... it's definitely an interesting chapter, and I do love getting into Shigaraki's motivations, but I really do think that we need to get some revelation to what Spinner's whole deal is.