My Hero Academia 224-225 Mini-Review: Interviewing a Psycho

My Hero Academia, Chapter 224: Resurrection Festival; Chapter 225: Interview With A Vampire

Another mini-review, because I've been really slacking on these. Chapter 224 basically sets up the fight between Shigaraki's Villain Alliance and Neo-Destro's Liberation Army. We get a fun bit of argument between Twice and the other villains about whether they should save Giran the broker guy, and some set-up like how they don't have a lot of high end Noumu to spare. Shigaraki's plan is essentially to have Gigantomakhia track them while they're fighting the Liberation Army, and have both their enemies tire each other out, then defeat whoever's left. It's a weird plan that has so much potential of backfiring, but it's honestly such a "yeah, sure, why not" plan that I can't dislike it.

The huge revelation, I guess, is that the weird-faced hero Slip And Slide from the Todoroki/Bakugou incident is actually a member of the Libertation army, which is interesting since I never actually considered that any heroes would subscribe to Neo-Destro's nonsense.  

And then we get the fight, and honestly, this chapter was utterly enjoyable just to look at the background of the genuine random crowd-fillers of random people using wacky powers -- it was why the UAJ arc or whatever when Shigaraki brought a gigantic crowd of supervillains was so fun. Also, villain-against-villain also means that the villains we care about can actually unleash their brutal quirks, leading to some awesome disintegration shots of Shigaraki ripping random people to dust. 

Chapter 225 focuses on a small part of this villain war. Lots of great splash pages, we get a little accurate analysis by Neo-Destro that the Villain Alliance isn't in their full strength. Most of the chapter surrounds Toga's fight with Curious, a super-popular writer who is highly interested in Toga's story, and we do get a lot of fun random abilities from the small cabal of superhumans under Curious's employ. Curious has the ability to make anything she touches into an explosive, Yoshigake Kira style (sans bubble), and there was a fun bit where Toga tries to drink the blood of the Army's soldiers, only to have them explode in her body.

Some pretty amazing expressions from Toga as Curious talks about how she wants to know just why Toga, who had a perfect life, would throw away her "normal" life, punctuated with some interesting flashbacks to her... wearing a 'mask' and laughing alongside random normal students? Again, we get a Kira-esque answer, with Toga noting that this is what she wants from a normal life, this is what her twisted, fractured psyche thinks of a normal life. It's a motivation that I've seen used before, but it's not one that I thought would apply to crazy psychotic maniac like Toga. Again, always nice to see some of the secondary characters get thrust into the spotlight.