Heroes win a war, but the villains win a battle that could change everything.
Last time on My Hero Academia Izuku
faced off against Overhaul. The villain had proven too powerful for Izuku or
Sir Nighteye to defeat, but was ultimately brought down by Eri. Seeing everyone
fight so hard to save her helped give that little girl hope, which triggered
her Quirk, Rewind, which separated Overhaul from his subordinate Nemoto,
greatly weakening him. Izuku got her away for Overhaul, but the villain grabbed
another subordinate and merged with him, becoming a colossal beast. And, Eri’s Rewind
proved to be too potent for her to control and began to damage Izuku. Deciding
to kill two birds with one stone, Izuku battled Overhaul with Eri on his back,
hoping that breaking his body by using One For All at 100% would be enough to
keep Eri’s power from destroying him, and that the power output would be enough
to put Overhaul down. Izuku was able to do just that, pancaking the villain
into the ground. Enough recap, let’s get to it.
We sure Izuku doesn't have a quirk for incredible
aim?
We open with the final few minutes
of Izuku’s fight with Overhaul. I’m not sure this was said last time, but Izuku
notes that Overhaul has to take a second to recover himself each time Izuku
breaks one of his limbs. His solution, then, is to hit Overhaul so hard it
overwhelms him and knocks him out in one shot. He does just that, slamming the behemoth
into the ground.
We then cut over to Aizawa and
Kurono in the most underground Hassaikai room. Kurono hears the rumbling and is
surprised at the thought that maybe Overhaul lost the battle above. He plans on
continuing their work regardless, and pulls a knife on the still slowed Aizawa.
I assume they were going to experiment with the body, but I’m not certain. Doesn’t
matter, though, because Kurono’s arm gets skewered by a swordfish bill, curtesy
of Amajiki. He’s lugging the limp body of Togata as well, and has several cops
as escort. He tells the villain to surrender and that he knows how Kurono’s
power works, so there isn’t much use in resisting. Kurono complies. A moment
later Tsu hops over and tells Amajiki about Izuku fighting with Overhaul.
Topside, Izuku has landed on the
ground and Overhaul looks like he’s out cold. High fives all around… until
Izuku starts seizing up again because Eri’s power is starting to overwhelm him.
He drops to his knees and both of them look scared. The still conscious
Overhaul remembers a conversation he’d had with the boss as a child, a time
when he attacked another kid because said kid called the Yakuza “villains.” …
kay. The boss basically tells him that he’s a loyal boy but he needs to do
better. Upon awakening, Overhaul does the exact opposite and tries to crush
Izuku and Eri. Which actually may have saved their lives. His oversized monster
arm seems to absorb a good chunk of Eri’s energy, which separates Overhaul and Katsukame.
As the now normal Overhaul flies backward, Uraraka leaps up and uses her
Gunhead martial arts to get him on the ground. You go, girl. Ryukyu climbs out
of the hole and ask Uraraka for an assessment. She explains that she got Nighteye
to an ambulance but came back around to see the fight. She notes that things
went well, all things considering, but something is clearly wrong with Izuku.
Eri’s power is going out of
control, and is clearly destroying Izuku’s body. She can’t restrain her powers.
She remembers all of Overhauls verbal abuse, which is clearly not helping the
situation. She tries to stop, but can’t. Thankfully, Aizawa is awake, and has Tsu
point his head towards them. He disables Eri’s power. She and Izuku drop, though
he has enough freedom of movement to grab her head so it doesn’t hit the
pavement. Good hero, Izuku.
Kirishima, the most physically hurt of the raid.
Ryukyu as the best hero standing
coordinates the clean up effort. She orders the others around to retrain the
Shie Hassaikai and to capture the League of Villains if they can. We get a
quick summary of the arrests of the other Eight Bullets, and even find the comatose
Boss. Everyone seems to have gotten out of alive, which seems insane, but can’t
complain. Izuku hands over to the EMTs, telling them that Eri has a fever after
using her powers. Izuku tries to talk Nighteye as he’s put into an ambulance.
Nighteye doesn’t know how or why Izuku was able to change the future he
foresaw, but believes that he somehow made his wish to see a future where they
save Eri a reality. Izuku breaks him out of his thoughts by telling him that All
Might has resolved to live, but he’s scared to meet with Nighteye, so that’s
why he hasn’t said so to him. Nighteye needs to live so All Might can talk to
him again. He doesn’t get a response from Nighteye before they load him into
the car. Left with just Ryukyu for the moment, the Dragon hero thanks Izuku for
all he did. This isn’t the time for celebrating, but she wanted him to know
that his efforts made things a whole lot easier.
We then cut to the police
transporting Overhaul and the 10 other Shie Hassaikai members to a prison
hospital for treatment. Overhaul is completely restrained and they have his
Quirk destroying bullets. Then the League of Villains attack. Shigaraki, whom
is sitting atop the truck they’re using above Dabi and Compress, asks if the
point of Shogi is to capture the king, to which Dabi confirms that’s a part of
it but it’s not that simple. Weird that Dabi knows about Shogi… Anyway, Compress
is on the phone with Toga, whom let them know about the results of the fight
and where they were most likely going to send Overhaul. Spinner, who is driving
the truck, wonders if attacking police really fits into Stain’s ideology for
the perfect world, but Shigaraki basically tells him, “don’t worry about that.”
Dabi opens up on the cops, trying to incinerate them, but his flame is blocked
by a hero in the lead car, the Sand Hero Snatch.
BAD GUYS HAVE THE BULLETS!!!
This is SOOO bad.
Shigaraki tries to attack Snatch,
but his powers don’t affect Sand, which Snatch uses to grab him. But then it’s
revealed the attack was just to distract him long enough to throw a marble that
expands into debris to crash the car. Dabi and Compress capture, possibly kill,
Snatch in a marble as Shigaraki goes over to Overhaul. He decided that he’s not
going to kill Overhaul, despite how much he hates the other villain, as he thought
of something much worse. He steals the box of Quirk destroying bullets, Mr.
Compress severs one of his arms a payback for the arm Overhaul destroyed, and
Shigaraki disintegrates the other. Shigaraki laughs manically as he explains
that he, in one fell swoop, stole everything of value from Overhaul and left
him crippled and unable to do anything but watch from the sidelines. Overhaul breaks
out in hives and screams when the reality sets in.
Does the bloody scream make this walk away creepier
or cooler?
Oh, I’m not sure if I or the show have
explained this well yet, so here’s another quick bit of Quirk mechanics. A lot of
powers only work through certain parts of the body. Overhaul is like Uraraka or
Shigaraki, their hands are the trigger point for their power. In all three
cases, it doesn’t matter if they touch something with any other point of their
body, their powers are within their hands. Uraraka actually has even more stringent
activation requirements, as she needs to touch something with these small pads
on the tips of each of her fingers. So, yeah, Shigaraki crippled Overhaul and
more or less rendered him powerless with that move. Dude is a sadist.
We learn that most of the heroes and
police on the scene of the raid were drained by Katsukame, so the clean up was
left mostly to heroes that weren’t part of the raid. One notes that somehow,
impossibly, only three civilians were hurt despite the destruction, all with
minor injuries. They note that this all did happen on a weekday, but that that
is still a weirdly small number. Nejire, whom is still helping with cleanup,
tells them that it was all thanks to Deku, as he kept Overhaul in the air, and did
the crazy impossible calculating to aim Overhaul at the big hole in the center
of the street when he sent him back to the ground.
Izuku was taken to the hospital,
and we learn that he received only very minor injuries, obviously thanks to Eri’s
rewind. Aizawa joins him and has Izuku follow him as he explains what happened
to everyone. Of the students, Kirishima
was the most banged up, being encased in bandages currently, but expected to
make a full recovery. Amajiki has a few cracked bones and other minor injuries
but will be fine. Fatgum is in a similar boat. Rock Lock (hooray, they finally
used his right name) didn’t have any vital organs damaged from his stabbing so
he should be fine too. There’s a pretty sweet moment when his wife and son come
into his room, grab onto him and she sobs tears of joy into his chest.
He goes on to explain that Eri’s
still feverish, sleeping fitfully, and is currently being kept in quarantine for
everyone’s safety. They need to make sure that there’s minimal contact with her
until they figure out how her power works, given that if she were set off
again, people would start getting de-aged to nothing around her again. The only
off switch they have right now is Aizawa’s eyes, so he’ll be sticking around with
her for a bit. Teaching her how to use her power is apparently going to be a
difficult task, as she only seems to affect living things. Why is this
important? Well, Aizawa was using it to explain to Izuku and us why they aren’t
trying to use Eri to save Nighteye’s life.
In this case, I think we can all get behind this
spoiler.
Izuku is brought into an operating
theater where Centipeder, Bubblegirl, All Might and a few others are waiting.
The doctor explains that there’s too much damage for him to repair and he’s even
too far gone for Recovery Girl’s talents. So… they’re there to say goodbye. All
Might and Izuku go in to speak with him. Nighteye is weak but conscious. All
Might apologizes for all that happened between them, but Nighteye says it’s not
necessary. He just wanted All Might to keep living, to be happy, so he can let go
of the past if All Might has decided to do just that. Nighteye has thought
about how Izuku changed his vision, and has come to the conclusion that, maybe,
all of the heroes and others working together, hoping and acting to make that future
where they save Eri somehow culminated into Izuku in that moment and let him
Smash the future, as he said before. I don’t know, sounds crazy to me, but the
proof is in the pudding. Nighteye only has one regret… and he comes stumbling
in a moment later. Mirio Togata begs his mentor to not give up, to keep on
living. He’s not ready for him to go. Nighteye apologizes for failing Togata,
but he doesn’t want to hear that, he wants Nighteye to live. Nighteye mentally
apologizes to Togata for his initial thought process. When they first met,
Nighteye only saw Togata as a potential vessel for OFA. A person that checks all
the boxes for what an All Might successor to be. But, as they worked together,
bonded, and all that, he realized that Mirio Togata was his pride and joy. He uses
Foresight on Togata, and for the firsts time in years peeks into the far
future. He says that Togata will be the finest hero the world has ever seen. He
advises him, Izuku and his sidekicks to smile, as they need to balance out the
sorrow in the world with joy and laughter. He passes with a smile on his face.
Well, that ending really kicks you
in the teeth, don’t it? Now, did Overhaul definitely deserve to have his dreams
crushed, his work stolen and his powers taken away? Yes, absolutely, but there
was still something about that shriek of terror and the realization that he
went from immensely powerful to someone less capable even than Izuku before the
start of the series was chilling. I dream about superpowers constantly, and can
say the thought of being given them only for them to be taken away would scare
me to the bone. And, obviously, it’s extremely bad that Shigaraki now has multiple
chances to destroy someone’s power and possibly be able to produce more if they
can replicate Eri’s cells. Definitely a bad to worse situation. So… instant
healing is always a tricky subject to add to a sci-fi fantasy series. While it
does help to get a hero back in gear after a potentially life destroying injury,
the second you can replicate the effect endlessly it kills all tension in any
scene going forward. That said, I think they found a good means of limiting Eri
so that she didn’t just instant heal Nighteye. Making it so that she couldn’t
control her power is very believable given her age and seclusion, so it doesn’t
take much hoop jumping to explain why she didn’t just fix Nighteye. They also
establish in an episode or two that her power is based on stockpiling. That
horn of hers gathers energy and that energy is burned when she uses rewind. She
was able to heal Izuku so fast and efficiently because she had basically a two-
or three-year stockpile to work with. She mostly burned through that, though, so
Togata isn’t getting his power back anytime soon, either. (Don’t worry, Nighteye
isn’t proven wrong with his prediction). And that leads us nicely into Nighteye’s
passing. I do love that he got a chance to speak with All Might again and that they
were able to part on much better terms this time around. And the fact that All
Might had wanted to mend the bridge before but was too scared to at least made
it seem like they weren’t just doing it because he was dying. I liked the
speech that he gave just before he died. Despite being a stereotypical humorless
looking Japanese Businessman, humor was important to Nighteye, something he learned
from his old master, so the idea his last bit of wisdom was to smile to help
others felt very right. And I really liked that he ended up breaking his rule
to see Togata’s future. Let’s him die tragically, but also witness what his
student will become. When Togata gets back on the hero horse, I’m sure he’ll be
smiling all the wider because he thinks Sir Nighteye is glimpsing that moment.
He’s a good kid. Well, with that, we’ve finished the Shie Hassaikai arc of My
Hero Academia, one of the best arcs I’ve seen for this series and for anime
overall. It had a lot of highs, no real lows, and a victory tempered by a tragic
loss. Solid story telling right there. Next time, we’ll get into something a little
more lighthearted and catch up with what Bakugo and Todoroki are doing in their
remedial course work. Have a good night.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51824598
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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