Review: BNHA, Volumes 3 and 4

[x_los]

Volume 3:

Missing Her. Mop slippers: what a concept!



"Roundness." In what SENSE??



Aisha's head-canon is that Cementoss really likes baroque architecture, but is cursed by his nature to be a brutalist.

Volume 4:

- Retrospectively, the way Todoroki dumps his whole dark backstory on Deku is extremely weird. "This is maybe our second conversation ever. Are you All Might's bastard son? I've been horrifically abused, you know."

- Shinso’s a bit meaner in the manga version of the sports day fight in a way I don’t love. It's in his internal monologue, so I can't entirely claim it's a ruse to draw Deku out.

- The translation of these early volumes is fairly uneven. I wonder if they weren’t being particularly careful with these because this wasn’t a major property yet?

- Plant hair girl, per Kaminari, has ‘such pretty, round, acorn eyes’. Sure, Ja(pa)n.

- I didn't get that Mina enjoys natto and okra because they're slimy. Aisha had to explain the joke to me. x_x

- Rereading these early arcs, you can tell they’ve retconned Endeavour significantly. His backstory and emotional journey, as presented in the season currently airing, don’t evolve very naturally out of this version of the character. The texture of their early interactions is, retrospectively, very weird. The guy who calls Shoto his greatest creation, praises him for surpassing his brothers and is very keen for Shoto to max out his firepower is not the man who got Dabi killed and still feels any kind of way about that.

Comments

[kolleh]

Yeah, Endeavour's journey from abuser to a caring dad was clearly not the original intention, and I don't think the story really managed to pull it off. Thank you for making me laugh with the summary of Deku and Todoroki's conversation.

[x_los]

Yeah, I don’t HATE where they’re going with that but I don’t love it either, in part because I resent the amount of time we give this man and his redemption. And it doesn’t hang together fully. In a weird way, the retcon itself sort of replicates domestic abusers’ trick of making victims doubt their comprehension and memory. ‘No, you’ve misunderstood me, all along I wanted what’s best for you, it never happened like that!’

[kolleh]

I'm very much not a fan of it, and it's one of the main reasons I drifted away from both the manga and the fandom.

[superborb]

Sometimes they put the mop-as-clothing on babies or pets and it is v silly too

[x_los]

Good stuff.