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'...

Also AFO is currently not using his own body to steal OFA back, he’s using Tomuras body that was enhances by Ojiko to specifically hold more quriks, so letting AFO take the qurik might result in Tomura dying and Deku losing the quirk, while AFO being still alive and fine at best and Deku losing the qurik and Tomura staying alive and being able to use it with AFO taking the wheel at worst.

And Muscular is not a joke as a fighter, he killed experiences pro heros before, Deku himself thought he was going to die in that fight and he as mentioned wrecked his arm to stand a chance and I doubt that he’d do whatever AFO wanted him to, instead of fight the guy. And no matter what AFO said, most villains tend to have their own agenda and if AFO lets them go, they probably just went back to going what they wanted do/did before they got arrested anyways. Just because he broke them out doesn’t mean they’ll take any commands from him and he’s not the kind of guy to do teamwork as we’ve already established.

You know it’s things like this why I say I can’t take AFO seriously as an endgame threat. Not only did he lose one army, he then gained another (much smaller but debatably more dangerous) army, only to then apparently tell them to screw off and do crime stuff.

Like, you bald fool, you are fighting against a country and you have maybe 3 or 4 men and some Nomu. You had more men & Nomu at the end of the Jaku battle, wherein you ran away from around 12 heroes. Why do you keep throwing away your resources? Do you even have an endgame plan, and if so, what could that plan possibly be that would be better than either the PLF or the prison escapees?

I thinks it’s way more of a work in progress to get there for Deku, because he grew up with the system, was part of the system and his number 1 hero All Might did not have the personal issues of the system the way the current no 1-3 have (abuse children, kill their antagonists, try to suffocate people etc.)

So right now he is in the stage where he sees that no empathy for.villains isn’t the right way to go, so he’s starting to get behind that and learing that villains are humans too and that they have motives.

And I think that could lead to him discovering the issues of hero society and how the top 3 are wrong in what they are doing, but for him to do a complete 180 right now would be too early for a realistic character development.

Endevour is as you mentioned not the number 1 issue for Deku, because the information from Shoto is far less grave than the one from Dabi and he still didn’t get the full on backstory the readers got and only what Dabi said there and maybe the video (if Deku watched it). And to really get to the point of just believing everything the guy who attacked multiple of your friends and classmates, helped to abduct one and recently tried to kill your friend/ his little brother in front of you it would take more time.

And Shoto himself is too deep in to see himself as a victim, so that might play into what he told Deku and why Deku does believe in Endevour wanting to better himself.

We don’t know right now what he thinks of Hawks, but we also don’t know if he has seen the video of Twice murder. And they have no history together so he might just still see him as the number 2 hero.

That leaves Best Jeanist who he also had little interaction with, the most recent one where he helped them survive and I am not sure if Deku might have just thought that he’d only suffocate Spinner and Tomura long enough for them to pass out (ignoring long term physical damage right now) or if he was contious at that point.

But for none of them we know for certain that he saw them at their worst or heard them say things show this. We as the readers can see their issues, but Deku doesn’t neccessairy have the same.

Thinking about it, I really dig the fact that his want to be a hero has such a bad side for him (like most of the world) failing to see the issues the hero society has.

And that is something he will have to work through to get there with a ton of bad realisation of the fact that Stain’s stand on heros is not that wrong. The first interaction between them was through Ida, Deku’s friend and ended with Stain saving Deku, so there is a step stone to build on but everything he learned in UA after that contridicts this by showing time and again how society views heros, which lead to how Deku views heros.

Considering “saving people” is deeply linked to: if society wasn’t this flawed and bad we would not need to save so many people it is a matter of time for him to be confronted with it but this panel seems to show that he is not there yet and still has a lot to learn before he can save anyone. (Yes I am quoting ATLA, it worked too well with Aang breaking the wheel of just more death and all).

Also this is not even a actual translation yet and the full chapter isn’t out, so maybe there is some twist to it, we shall see.

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

I think his planning here is mostly based on the escapees causing chaos all over the country and the heros being to preoccupied with them (and on top of that with the chaos Dabi caused) to actually search for him right now. And AFO isn’t that much of a teamplayer, he uses people like chess pieces and throws them away if he doesn’t need them (he even left Maschia behind one of his own most loyal). But it does say a lof about him. Tomura is a real leader and a pretty good one when it comes to being compassinate with the LoV who support each other. That is a huge strenght on the battlefield something AFO doesn’t seem to understand, considering he left both Compress and Toga behind as a punishment for Tomura, because as I said: he doesn’t see people, he sees chess pieces and they can be replaced.

That being said: it does make him way easier to fight if you mange to find and outnumber him. But it does rely on enough strong fighers to find him, fight him and him not knowing about it. Since he took the search quirk he has a huge advantage on sneek attacks, you’d need an unknown attacker, strong enough to take him on for him to get a supprise attack now. 

Overall I think it is mostly his own issue regarding himself and viewing others as both chess pieces and below him. He’s underestimating the strenght a strong group has, because he is incredibly powerful ans doesn’t rely on them. That is in stark contrast with both Tomura and Deku who value their friends and teammates and know to use resources to become stronger in a fight. But AFO lacks the understanding of use in loyalty, which is funny considering he has Maschia, but I doubt that AFO sees him as anthing more than a guard dog.

You know it’s things like this why I say I can’t take AFO seriously as an endgame threat. Not only did he lose one army, he then gained another (much smaller but debatably more dangerous) army, only to then apparently tell them to screw off and do crime stuff.

Like, you bald fool, you are fighting against a country and you have maybe 3 or 4 men and some Nomu. You had more men & Nomu at the end of the Jaku battle, wherein you ran away from around 12 heroes. Why do you keep throwing away your resources? Do you even have an endgame plan, and if so, what could that plan possibly be that would be better than either the PLF or the prison escapees?

@owlsinathens At this point it doesn’t matter anymore. I see a squid, I see 8 legs, I see a Greyjoy.

Chainmail Octopus Headpiece by Vanessa Walilko, made by connecting over 12,000 rings by hand