r/CharacterRant • u/MetroidsSuffering • Jul 06 '24
[My Hero Academia spoilers] My Hero Academia's attempt at villain sympathy is so much worse than Naruto's because there's no real ideologies or world at all in My Hero Academy. Spoiler
Naruto's sympathizing with mass murderers like Pain or Obito was pretty bad. Obviously, it's a series aimed at children so you would expect a pro-social message and I'm willing to forgive children's series for wanting to kind of redeem villains (people are too hard on Steven Universe, you can't end a kid's show with executions), but Naruto went way too far with it. There were not enough negative consequences for the villains compared to their actions and they are talked about far too fondly... And Pain's ideology is really stupid too so it's hard to have much sympathy for him compared to Obito or Sasuke.
But the thing is... They had an ideology... They had beliefs. They believed that Naruto's horrifically violent world was too broken to remain in the status quo and that they needed to control it through their own personal violence to ensure a more relative peace.
This is where we get to My Hero Academia in that it doesn't.... Really have a world at all.
Like, there are places and named institutions and some political figures but like... None of that is really relevant to the story. For a comparison to Naruto, Sasuke's whole family getting killed is very relevant to Naruto's world as showing an example of how horrible that world is.
So the villains in MHA are just incredibly unsympathetic because they have no real ideology.
A large part of the ending of MHA is the idea that Tenko/Shigaraki desired to be a "hero to villains" and that this was somehow admirable. But this is REALLY not admirable as basically all the real villains in MHA are pathetic, violent losers and Tenko wanted to inspire them by like... Killing random civilians.
Spinner in the most recent chapter says that Tenko inspired him that he could be part of something bigger... The something bigger being the death of billions of people for no real goal... And like... I don't know, man.
The closest real world parallel to the League of Villains is probably like ISIS, where they didn't really care about anything except killing random people... But most terror groups or violent regimes have SOME goal other than mass murder. It's usually a goal with extremely stupid reasoning or a goal they tell themselves just to feel better about their bloodlust... But there is a goal.
But because there's no real world in MHA, there is no possible ideology that the League of Villains can hate. Re-Destro getting mad about quirk restrictions is like... Something I guess? But we have no real idea about much of anything in the world.
There's like... Anti-mutant discrimination and too much protecting of the images of heroes and a lot of child abuse in MHA. So they could have gone there I guess. But the League of Villains just wants to kill billions of people instead of doing terror attacks and assassinations to try to accomplish these goals.
Outside of a very very very few things, there's just nothing ideological in the series. All for One himself has no ideology whatsoever and he is the cause of most of everything in the series.
So the villains in the series aren't really sympathetic at all because they have nothing they're actually fighting for other than revenge or bloodlust, they're just sad violent freaks. Being a "hero to villains" is actually really bad when all the villains are like this.
(It's also very weird that the main cause of villainy in the series appears to be child abuse and there seems to have been no attempt whatsoever from the heroes to pass more strict child protection laws... Also doesn't seem to have been any attempt pass civil rights laws to better protect people with mutant quirks... But that would involve the government existing basically at all in MHA)
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u/Deus3nity Jul 06 '24
The whole point of Naruto villans is that they have a point.
The system is rotten and only perpetuates war because it's reliant in it to sustain it.
Nagato and Obito are no worse than the people who serve the villages. People who have killed innocent people, including children.
This is a story about grey morality and you can't even see it.
If they don't take that chance, Naruto is willing to put them down.
They do, though.
Through the entirety of MHA and Vigilantes manga we have seen that people with specific quirks are discriminated and ostracized, as they are seen as dangerous or monsters.
Biggest example is Toga.
Toga had a quirk that pushed her to drink blood, and this specific quirk gave her cravings for blood.
This quirk goes against societal norms, and it leads to Toga being hated by everyone. Instead of helping her deal with the problem, the people treated her as a villain.
Then there is the Hero society, we're people like Endeavor is the number two hero, while people like the Crawler had to become a hero in another country to avoid persecution for being a Vigilante and saving people
The world is run on quirks and how people perceive them, and it leads to villans being "heroes" because their quirks are flashy and don't look that dangerous, yet people that could and wanted to be heroes are set on a path to villany.
They did have a goal: chaos. The chaos was the way to destroy the quirk system.
Only the truly good people would be heroes in the chaos. And the "Heroes" that aren't would show their true colors
The league is much like the akatsuki: the consequences of the system in place. They exist because they are what the system created.
You say the government isn't important, but everything we see is an institution that pushes this system forward, we see how the government is.
No. The closest parallel to the league is HAMAS.
Their goal is for people like them to stop being oppressed by the systems in place, even if they have to kill innocents.