Viewer Log: My Hero Academia ep 99

 Izuku unleashes his new power.

Last time on My Hero Academia, Izuku and his team got a chance to strut their stuff. While the non-main characters of class 1A fought the background characters of 1B, Izuku faced off against that dick Monoma. Having gotten tips from Shinzo as to what things press Izuku’s buttons, he started bad mouthing Bakugo and blame him for All Might’s retirement. This was a ploy to get Izuku to say something and potentially get caught in Shinzo’s brainwashing. Izuku got pissed, and suddenly his power began to pulse. His body released black whips that rampaged about, destroying the field as well as throwing Izuku around. Uraraka leaped on her friend to try to calm him down, but it doesn’t work. Shinzo, wanting to help Izuku and fight him for real, asks Izuku to fight him already. Izuku agrees, triggering Brainwashing. When he’s in a trance, he’s greeted by one of the previous One For All wielders, the 5^th. He informs Izuku that remnants of the powers of the previous users reside in OFA and are beginning to manifest in him. He warns Izuku that he needs to keep his calm if he wants to use his new powers right. Izuku returns to the waking world by being slapped by Uraraka. While the rampage is over, the fight continues… because. Let’s see the battle continue, shall we?

 

As a reminder, this match is Izuku Midoriya (One-For-All based super strength), Ochako Uraraka (make things float with a five-finger touch), Mina Ashido (shoots acid), and Minoru Mineta (rapidly grows super sticky balls from his head) vs. Neito Monoma (copy’s quirks with a touch for a limited time), Nirengeki Shoda (if he can strike a target he can make the point of contact experience a second, stronger impact), Reiko Yanagi (essentially telekinesis), and Yui Kodai (alter the size of non-living objects) with Hitoshi Shinzo (Brainwash people if they answer him).

 

After a quick recap of the situation, we join the teachers watching the fight from up close and Aizawa electing to wait to watch the match continue. Vlad is skeptical, but Aizawa wants to see what happens. He swears that if it happens again, he’ll shut Izuku down and bring him to the infirmary himself. But until then, this is a test and everyone wants to see how they’ll stack up against each other.

 

Impressive fight face.

Izuku gets pulled over by Shinzo’s sharp tug, making him lose the scarf. Uraraka is extremely confused as to how that happened when she knows her green-haired partner has literal super strength. Izuku says he won’t use his power if he’s not sure he can control it. She says they should fall back, but Izuku knows they’ll lose if he retreats. He’s going to fight Shinzo and the others will face off against the rest. Ashido and Mineta are holding their own against the others, Mineta actually leaping into the path of a flying object to protect her. He mentally explains that, while he did spread his sticky balls around the field to be used as traps, because he’s unaffected by them, they double as highly springy trampolines for him. Allowing the little bastard to rocket around the field at high speed with relative ease. He then immediately ruins it by purposely hitting Ashido’s boob. She whips him around and throws him at his balls, turning the little pervert into a living projectile, bouncing around everyone at high speed.

 

The students watching from 1A are impressed with their classmates fighting style, while the 1B kids point out that because the girls on their team are range combat types, Shoda is having to do most of the work, making their numbers advantage kind of moot.

 

Doing Gunhead proud.

Uraraka blocks an attack by that dick Monoma. He mentally reiterates that he knows he’s not ‘protagonist’ material, and how he doesn’t resent his power because of it. He’s copied OFA and goes to Izuku. Uraraka gets in the way, tackling him to the ground with her martial arts. She tells him that Monoma was obviously bluffing, so he should get back. Monoma, on the other hand, reveals that he did take the power, but it’s not activating right. He dubs it a ‘Blank.’ This gets explained later, I believe, but a weakness of Monoma’s power is that if the ability he’s copying is based off build up or stored energy, while he has the power, he doesn’t have the reserve. So, while he copied One For All, he’s got it at it’s most base level, where it was just a power that could be transferred and increase in power. Wah wah waahhh.

 

Shinzo tries to save Monoma, but Izuku grabs the scarf when it’s thrown that way and, thanks to Uraraka’s zero gravity, flies up and tackles Shinzo. This knocks his mask off, too. They begin fighting.

 

Gotta love upgrades.

Aizawa flashes back to helping Shinzo practicing with the capture cloth. Initially, he had a lot of trouble with it, and asks Aizawa if it’s even possible for him to master something that it took Aizawa six years to. Aizawa says that he can, since he has tutelage, and gives him the encouraging words that he doesn’t help hopeless cases. Shinzo easily whips the scarf around, wrapping some pipes in it and ripping them down to fall on Izuku. Izuku, initially hesitant, realizes his quirk isn’t rampaging anymore and believes it’s due to the 5^th’s words. He’s able to manifest his black whips and grab the pipes in midair. Kid is a quick study. Though saying he needs “to control (his) heart” makes him sound like a Kingdom Hearts character.

 

The teachers prepare to stop Izuku, but All Might stops them, telling them that he thinks something is different.

 

Shinzo backs up and grabs his mask, telling Izuku to stop trying to trick him, if the early rampage was a trick. Izuku loses his focus, the whips dissipating and he now feels numb inside. Izuku believes that he can’t control the enhanced version of Blackwhip with only 20% of OFA. Guess it’s going in the “emergency use” pile like OFA’s superstrength feature initially was. Shinzo runs off while Izuku recovers. He resolves to sticking to use his power at 8% and chases after Shinzo.

 

He remembers his team resolving to stopping Izuku himself, and apologizes for having to abandon Monoma, but resolves to not let it end like this. Meanwhile, Uraraka is floating a captured Monoma to the cage. He’s trying to resist, but she’s too quick for Poltergeist to be much use against her. She thinks that it’s been about five minutes, so he’s nearly out of power, but he reveals that he’s increased his limit to ten minutes. She’s not talking to him in case he has brainwashing too. He explains that, while he can only use one quirk at a time, if he used an effect that changes an object, the change remains even if he uses a different quirk. He mentions specifically that changing the size of things is particularly useful, as he’s floated into 1A’s cage. She shuts the cage on him, implying that when he ends an effect it’ll be the end for Izuku. She rushes to try to help him, but is reminded that he asked her to help the others out and not worry about him. She runs back toward the others.

 

As Shinzo is leaping away, Izuku begins to catch up. But, at the last second, Monoma releases the effect he’d been holding, double impact. Izuku, who’d been hit in the face earlier by the guy, gets rocked a second time and drops. I feel like using an ability once captured is cheating but moving on. Izuku starts dropping. He prepares to grab Izuku. The tide is turning against Mineta and Ashido. Izuku, though, powers back up and charges Shinzo. And, at the same time, Uraraka takes out the 1B girls, allowing Ashido to slip up to Shoda and attack him directly as well. Nice teamwork.

 

Izuku tackle and pins him. He’s frustrated because he wanted to show off how much he improved to Izuku. He compares his progress to crawling while everyone else is leaping forward. He, Shoda, and Yanagi join Monoma in the cage, while Kodai is stuck to a pillar, naming 1A the winners of the final match.

 

Midnight mc’s the final results, with Jiro and Hagakure holding up a sign praising her unbiased commentary behind her. It ended up being 3 wins, 1 loss and 1 draw in favor of Class 1A. Shinzo expresses frustration to Aizawa at not being able to face Izuku properly. He asks if the test was also his test if he was ready to transfer into the hero course. Aizawa tells him it was, and tells him to rejoin his team so they can critique him.

 

Solid work by everyone here.

Aizawa asks what was happening to Izuku. Izuku tells the truth, he doesn’t know what happened and he’s trying to figure it out. I feel like that’s really dodging the question on how a strongman suddenly started doing something other than be a brawler, but what are you going to do? Uraraka gets complimented for so valiantly leaping to save Izuku, with Ashido somewhat sinisterly teasing her friend for “hugging him real hard.” She goes bright red, kind of proving to everyone that Ashido hit the nail on the head. Aizawa is impressed with her reacting more or less on instinct and compliments her for her growth. Shinzo admits that he was at least working in part on Uraraka’s orders, and the other was from a selfish desire to stop Izuku to fight him for real. He starts babbling about how he was working so hard just to keep up, to which Aizawa strangles him a little to shut him up and tell him that that’s all anyone asked of him. He tells Shinzo that he did well enough to get a passing grade. Shinzo says that he’s not satisfied with just passing, and Aizawa tells him to move forward with a “plus ultra” mentality.

 

This was a solid end to Izuku and Shinzo’s fight. Sure, I wish they could have had a true one on one battle, but that’s not going to happen again until another tournament arc. While those are frequent in shonen anime, they aren’t THAT frequent. Even Dragon Ball went a few years between tournaments and that was like half the original premise. And the fight went about as well as could be expected with Shinzo having a new weapon to use in his capture scarf, and Izuku being pretty stunned by his new power. Shinzo obviously isn’t going to be able to beat Izuku in a head-to-head fight, their powers are incompatible for that kind of fight, so unless he can sneak up on him and trick him into responding to him, he’s basically a normal dude vs. a tank. No one expects him to win, but he did a damn good job. I still think Monoma cheated with that last hit, but that’s just me. I liked that Uraraka chose to do as Izuku asked rather than ignore it to help him because of her own worries. That shows a level of trust that I like, and it obviously paid off as her team was seconds away from getting caught. Her and Izuku stood a much worse chance against the four-remaining class Bers than four on four. I do think it was odd that everyone just kind of breezed over Izuku having multiple powers. In this world, that kind of set up seems to be non-existent outside of AFO and those he’s manipulated. Sure, you might have someone like Todoroki, but manipulating Fire and Ice are both elemental based powers. He’s in the same spectrum. While Izuku has been a strongman, (ie, superhuman strength, endurance, and agility) this whole time. Sure, energy sparks of him when he uses his power, but that’s hardly indicative of making them into manipulatable whips. Just weird they let it drop like that. I laughed at the continued “Uraraka likes Izuku, and everyone knows it except him” joke, as that’s the kind of shonen joke that never gets old to me. And I hope Shinzo gets to transfer. We’ll find out next time. Have a good night!

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