I Totally Get Why You Have Issues With This Only Being Such Surface Level Right Now, Though I Do Have

I totally get why you have issues with this only being such surface level right now, though I do have the feeling that at some point we’ll get Spinner flashbacks too, like we did for Toga, Twice, Tomura and Toya so far (only those who have at least one name starting with a T get a backstory XD) that will explore that topic more.

Because with most societal issues it was like that:

At first we have Shoto saying his father trained him too much and Stain saying that some heros are in it for the wrong reasons.

And by now we have Toyas abuse flashbacks, Hawks killing Twice and Best Jeanist supporting both Endevour and Hawks after it was made public.

At the beginning we had Tomura seeming like a boring just evil villain and his team of also just evil, crazy villains,

but by now we see them as the humans they are with their very good and bad traits alike and that they have very good reason to go against society. With Toga being told to suck it all in, Twice being left on the streets until he became mentally ill, Dabi being abused, Tomura being both abused and groomed and we can make clear assumptions about Spinner and Compress, even without having flashbacks to get the full picture.

And we have not just Spinner adressing the quirkism. Yes the Quirk-KKK were obviously a very over the top version of that,

but early on we learn from Tsuyu that she got bullied for her looks and has much more typically human features than Spinner does.

Shinso gets quirk discriminated during the entrace exam even though he has an extremly strong and useful quirk.

Eri gets told she is evil because of her quirk.

Toga gets told to just ignore her own bodyly wants and needs because blood quirks are wrong and strange instead of finding a way on how to cope with it in a healthy manner.

So it isn’t just the one villain, but it is Spinner who has the stronges heteromorph appearence in combination with a weak quirk that doesn’t make up for it in the eyes of society.

And with pro heros it seems to work just like in our world: think about the many celebreties getting bullied at school and beeing called ugly when now they are considered beautiful and even if they aren’t conventionally beautiful they are an inspiration for people.

I bet at least one kid made fun of Best Jeanist neck and he is very human looking. But then you have people with extremly strong features like Gang Orca, who is about as Orca looking as Spinner is Lizard looking, but he is a pro hero so he is cool and strong, not to mention he has a really strong quirk for fighting.

I mean we have Centipeder, Hound Dog, Selkie, Nezu is an actual mouse with a quirk but none of them face on-screen discrimination because they are the cool guys, pro heros,, respectable teachers, they are “in” and they have strong quirks.

And the fact that the League does not care that Spinner looks like a Lizard and has a weak quirk compared to all of them (he is the only C-rank villain in the executives of the PLF later) says a lot about them.

We know from his one flashback panel that he pretty much spend all day locking himself in and gaming, which is understandable if you face quirkism on a daily basis, the way he looks isn’t something he can just change and it’s nothing he should have to change in the first place.

Neither should there be any need to have a strong quirk to be respected by others. We saw quirk discrimination right at the beginning against Deku, but he gets it solved by getting a quirk and doesn’t seem to think about it anymore, which is strange considering Bakugo bullied him for years because of it any the rest of his classmated made fun of him aswell.

And we have that lovely panel of the childrens book with the terms that quirk based discrimination, especially the heteromorph kind is not ok and you should not do it.

But as Spinner sais himself: mutant is getting used more and more but not in formal settinsgs, because it is downgrading.

And the "mutant exclusionist comitee” are so far the only kills Spinner had in the manga. We especially saw Toga, Dabi, Tomura killing people on multiple occations, but Spinner specifically only when he went to kill the mutant haters, which is very telling about his position in the story is.

The Leauge is compromised of those who were let down by society to the point where they snapped and Spinner is the side of them that shows the quirkism and how harmful that is.

So I totally understand your frustration of not getting more into that topic, but from his usual way of framing in storytelling (I made a post about how that was done with the Todoroki family aswell) I would say we are just not there yet and it will come up with Spinner’s background later in the story.

Something that frustrates me is the depiction of Quirkism and the death cult that hates people with Mutant Quirk.

The death cults are a caricature of bigots and hate groups that serves as nothing more than as a plot device. For me, it comes off as Hori only skimming the surface of a systemic problem while petting himself on his back. The death cult is simply a extreme manifestation or a parody of bigotry.

When people think of hate groups, they would think of people who openly hates minorities or wear weird ass garment to signify their hatred of a marginalized group. In reality, bigotry is something that can internalized even in the "best" of us.

Not every bigot is a death cult member who wears black. It can be simple as Dabi calling Spinner a "lizard" or Shouto calling that police a "mutt" despite it appearing harmless to the audience or the characters in the story.

And for me...the most dangerous villains in Spinner's story is not the death cult. The villains are the hero society. When Spinner's feeling is dismissed...I wonder how long did he have to tolerate this injustice. The people around him who overlooked his pain or minimized his experience...

But it doesn't matter...because he's a 'villain'...

This is a perfect example of framing done right in writing.

We are first shown that Shoto got abused, but not enough to see the full picture. For all we know at the beginning Endevour seemed to just have trained with Shoto too much, but because Shoto does want to become a hero it doesn’t show as horrible as the actuality of it is.

Then we see him noticing his bad behaviour and wanting to better himself. We see through Natsuo that there is more to it, than just overtraining Shoto, but again we don’t get a clear picture of what that means.

We see him after that in a light of a man who is trying to better himself and does want to be worthy of the title of Hero No. 1. And then we get the real hit of the Toya backstory. Dabi was heavily forshaddowed to be Toya and so was Endevour being more abusive than we already knew.

But we couldn’t fanthom how bad it would be, because we saw his victims starting to cope with it in a going forward and forgiving manner, especially Fuyumi. And since Shoto so far doesn’t even notice himself that he is a victim of abuse we didn’t see how bad Endevour really was.

And then we get this.

If we got this at the beginning we would have just straight up hated Endevour with no nuiance whatsoever, he wouldn’t be seen as a layered character and just as a horrible abuser (which he was to all of his family) and the focus would just be on this one family, instead of the overall picture that the No. 2 Hero can just get away with this.

Because of this excellent done framing we get to see that bigger picture while simultaniously getting important backstory for multiple characters and seeing Endevour just as what he is: an abuser who still hasn’t learned that he can’t seem to grasp that not everything is about him.

Watch me! They have been watching for years and it was a very different picture than what the public and the readers saw and now we finally get the full story.

bnha manga: *tries to make us feel sympathy for enji*

also bnha manga:

"Our song", aka the song my fiance and I refear to as our song in terms of relationship we first heard together and loved is literally about school shootings, because we never paid attentention to the lyrics but the beat was so awesome and english isn't our first language so beat first, lyrics second and it took us a while to catch on back them.

As someone who does not pay attention to lyrics in songs, I am always afraid someone who does pay attention is going to come along and see my music and be like “why are you listening to songs about kicking orphans and diverting funds from public libraries?” Like, I dunno! That’s news to me! The beat was fresh and the vibes were funky! I lose all knowledge of human language when the drum goes bop bop. I am as surprised and alarmed as you are.

I didn’t get you wrong, that was mostly me gushing over the realisticly slow writing of a charcter arc, because I am so used to seeing arcs that are just magically resolved and everything is learned in a minute and this is more grounded of a way an actual human being would react to: too much news at the same time and inconsistent information on top of being involved in the whole society.

Which is also as you said probably the last issue to be resolved, because it takes a lot of time to unlearn all that you were told is true and good, even though it isn’t.

Yeah the image of Deku alongside Hawks is strange, considering their points are very contridicting. With Deku legit wanting to save EVERYONE and Hakws deciding who is worth saving and who isn’t and specifically killing when his version of “saving” isn’t wanted.

To me it seems strange that Deku would work with Hawks if he had seen the video evidence. BUT the hero comission probaly did their very best to get rid of the twice kill video asap. Because even right now it would be off if Deku would be working with a guy who pulled a sword through a man, while he was both running away and with his back to him.

So I’d say he probably knows that Hawks “had” to kill someone from the bs from the official panel, but not what actually happend.

But I do think killing is not on Hawks agenda now, because that would lead to bad press for him and the comission and is more reseved to the LoV, specifically Dabi (and in theory Tomura, who’d definitly kill him for Twice) when it comes to that point, so he can justify it in front of the world again.

Okay but really, this here? This seems like such a weird development for Izuku considering the new direction his character is headed.

And I’m mostly not even talking about Endeavor this time; because as troublesome as it is that heroes keep helping him instead of holding him accountable for any of the things he’s done, we’ve no reason to think he’d do anything that bad right now besides maybe not go along with Deku’s villain saving plan. Plus they have already worked together before so this isn’t surprising.

No; I’m talking about Deku, who is trying to reason with/save notorious villain Shigaraki and specifically not kill him, working with notorious villain killer Hawks, a man who in all possibility (and if he has his quirk back by then) would go for the kill against Shigaraki without hesitation.

(Or possibly worse, threaten Shigaraki’s life to surrender and go to jail for life & then immediately going for the kill when he refuses; thus allowing his fans to claim “see, he doesn’t want to be saved so he needs to die” as though not responding to threats against your life is equivalent to not wanting to better yourself.)

That’s just seems like supremely bad planning on his part, and really highlights to me how he still doesn’t really seem to think heroes and the society they represent can do any wrong. I guess in retrospect that major character flaw of his, the toxic hero worship, hasn’t really been addressed at all yet, has it?

I propse a slightly different version:

Just because I do think that Endevour wouldn’t kill Dabi, but also wouldn’t be any use if it came to a physical fight with him, considering what happen last time. And Hawks would go for the kill and his favourite hero having a different opinion about that would be a blast to read. “What do you mean, you don’t want to kill your firstborn?”

Shoto in the background gets ready to take down Hawks.

I figured out how to uphold the shounen required fight scenes while also having natsuo non violently talk dabi down:

Shouto calls natsuo over to talk to Dabi. The two have a good heart to heart while Shouto beats the shit out of enji and hawks.

Like this? Yeah, I'd enjoy that

That dis-arm-ing discussion

Just a quick reminder of what actually happend in TFATWS Episde 4 before you jump to conclusions. The following thing happend:

-Ayo and Bucky made a deal, Bucky has 8 hours until they have to hand over Zemo, they both agreed to said deal. -Walker invites himself over and demands Zemo. He’s willing to talk about it and puts the shield down. -Right then one of the Dora Milaje throws a spear towards Walker, who they have no buisness with in the first place and that could have killed Walker. -Ayo rightfully demands Zemo back. -Walker demands they disarm and talk about this, Sam a little more sensible interveens. -Walker starts the whole discussion about who’s jurisdiction this is and Ayo says the Dora Milaje have jurisdiction whereever they are. -Walker with his very offputting way does this ment to be friendly hand to shoulder move and is still talking about having a rough start when Ayo attacks him. And not just slightly push him back or take his hand of, she straight up attacks him and throws him around. -The fight between Walker, Hoskins and the Dora Milaje starts and the other 3 do not inverveen at the beginning. -Bucky only gets involved after Sam asks him to and then he uses his vibranium arm to stop the spear that Ayo was about to put into Walker. She either tried to kill or seriously injure him in a fight she started with him. -Bucky uses his flesh arm to stop Ayo from attacking him and asks her to talk about this.

-Hoskins gets his ass beaten by the DM and Sam only gets in after one of them tries to spear Hoskins and Sam not once attacks the DM, only defends himself against her attacks.

-Zemo being smart uses this to get away.

-One DM traps Walker and stops him from fighting.

-Bucky and Ayos fight consists only of him blocking with his vibranium arm against her vibranium weapon and using no super strenght to attack her. And then she disables his arm. My thoughts about it are under the cut:

-The eascalation did come from Ayo and the DM, who attacked Walker twice! He was being an ass as usual, but it did not deserve such a strong attack and definitly not the first speer throw at the beginning, when they only came to take Zemo and had nothing to do with Walker whatsoever (they didn’t even know that Walker wanted Zemo too).

-Also they tried to either kill or seriously injure both Walker and Hoskins (who only got involved after they attacked Walker). -All of them are not in their actual countries jurisdiction, which Walker already saw in Episode 2, but apperently no one told the Dora Milaje.

-Walker is still an ass, who acts like he’s in charage and thinks that people should listen to him, which does not help any situation he’s in.

-Buckys arm can be used as a weapon to attack people, but aside from being very hard to destroy we have seen no evidence that it is stronger than his flesh arm.

-Not telling Bucky about the arm is understandable to a degree, but it shows nonetheless that they have no trust in him about this information.

-There are a lot of practical reasons for the arm to be detachable, but if that was the sole reason it was detachable they could have just told him.

-The fact that Bucky did not know about it just shows that they did install it as a failswitch to stop him if needs be. -This happend AFTER they broke his coding. So either they weren’t sure it worked, were afraid someone might control him again with something else (but then who stops any other person from being mind conrolled with super powers) or they simply do not trust Bucky himself. -Bucky definitly thinks that they do not trust him and that Ayo, who he has a history with does not trust him, because she disabled the arm.

- Bucky has a history of not having control over his body, which Ayo knew very well about. The history of those two is literally Ayo training with Bucky to break his control, meaning he trusts her with complete control over his body. And Ayo took control over his body in a moment where it was not necessairy whatsoever.

-Ayo was the one that told Bucky he was free and she was the one that showed he technically wasn’t by controlling part of his body when she could.

-Bucky did not use his arm as a weapon in this fight even once, he only used it as a defense against the vibranium spears, so Ayo had to reason to disarm him like that. Once the Walker situation was handled (a situation Ayo escalated) she could have just stopped attacking and Bucky would have stopped, he did not want to fight her.

-Ayo literally had no reason to disarm him in this situation. There is no discussion necessairy about taking his weapon away because he never used it as one against her in the first place. -He didn’t even use his super strenght against her, he made it clear he did not want to fight her and she kept attacking.