Dia: Welcome to analysis roulette, I'm Dia, I use they/them pronouns.
Duck: Hi everyone, I'm Duck I use he/they pronouns.
Dia: And this week we are diving into a postmodern analysis of My Hero Academia or Boku No Hero Academia, depending on which language you prefer your anime titles.
Duck: And this is gonna be interesting because I've done very little preparatory work because Dia told me that they had a plan that involved watching too many episodes.
Dia: Yeah, so I did learn from the YuGiOh situation. But--
Duck: I do appreciate that you have learned my weaknesses and limitations.
Dia: And basically, I would have asked you to watch the first couple of episodes. But since you already have, I figured you do not need to subject yourself to watching loop anime.
Duck: That's fair, I have watched the first few episodes.
Dia: This is going to be a slightly broad look. Usually we take a specific chunk of whatever the thing is, and go into that. But because this is a very structural school of criticism, I found this virtually impossible to do coherently. So, what we're gonna do instead is I'm going to jump around and I'm just going to catch you up on context you require.
Duck: Sounds good. I'm here for storytime.
Dia: Yes. So, usually, one of us explains each thing. Do you want to give me like a baseline, your understanding of what My Hero Academia is?
Duck: In a world where everyone is superheroes, some people are not superheroes. So our protagonist, finds like a sideways way to become extra super. Because he's very sad and bullied about not being super. And then there'll be hero school about the point of the entrance exam into the superhero school I stopped watching because there was a bit of body horror that I found a little bit off putting.
Dia: So a thing you will not have found out from watching the first four or five episodes I assume you went anime rather than manga?
Duck: I did go anime rather than manga.
Dia: Yeah, from what in the first four or five episodes a thing you may not have picked up on is how much nothing in that summary comes off again.
Duck: Oh, fantastic. I am just ignorant to what this anime is really like.
Dia: No, that is the experience of watching this anime. You have accurately described the experience of watching this for the first time.
Duck: All these things are set up, and then…
Dia: The thing is, it's not that there isn't a coherent and genuinely well written and good plot, I do not mean this as a dunk on Me Hero Academia, I actually think it's very well written with areas that are to my taste, and not to my taste, but it is like coherently put together just not necessarily.
Duck: However, not along the lines that are originally set up.
Dia: It is not set up like a linear narrative, which is fair, because it's not one, but it can make it a very weird viewing experience. If you go in watching kind of shonen anime that you're kind of expecting to be like, you know, narrative.
Duck: If you thought that point B was going to relate to point A, which I had assumed, I'm excited to learn in what ways I am wrong.
Dia: It's very much like you know, when you learn about poetry in like primary school, and they tell you this is what rhyming means. And this is what like a rhyme scheme is it might be ABAB, or it might be AABB and they don't go into any more depth and then you do GCSE. And like maybe they go, Well, this one is AABB in the first verse but ABAB in the second verse.
Duck: And sometimes you go online and you're like, oh, poetry is just where you put linebreaks in.
Dia: Yeah. And then sometimes you go to university and study mediaeval Norse, and you learn about alliterative verse and you want to cry.
Duck: I frequently have this experience.
Dia: My Hero Academia is is the alliterative verse of rhyme schemes.
Duck: I kinda--
Dia: There is something happening, but it's not what you are expecting from the setup you are given in the opening line.
Duck: A challenge for us in the future, by the way is to identify the sestina of anime.
Dia: Sorry, you got me right as I was taking a sip of water.
Duck: Like something extremely highly structured, very deliberate repetition and callbacks…
Dia: Oh, you're gonna love it when I make you watch Detective Conan. What if there was a sestina composed entirely of small houses of cards that could collapse at any moment? And also, it was Sherlock Holmes fanfiction.
Duck: See, I was excited and then you said it was Sherlock Holmes and I lost my interest.
Dia: I cannot express to you how much Sherlock Holmes would have been improved if Sherlock Holmes had been a middle school detective trying to get back into his adult body.
Duck: That does sound funny.
Dia: It's incredible. It is my favourite anime. Anyway, we're not getting to the point right now. But this is sort of where I'm going with this. So yes, thank you for your summary of My Hero Academia, we're now going to get to--
Duck: Please explain to me all the ways in which I am… not necessarily wrong. But I'm stopping too early.
Dia: So. When you embark into My Hero Academia, you're taken into a future where almost everybody has a quirk which is a superpower. It's very, like familiar superhero set up. You know? Everybody has their own power. People who have particularly strong powers become pro heroes or superheroes.
This is explicitly in text based, said to be based on old comic books?
Duck: Right, with a character who's literally just dressing up as like, copyright non infringing Captain America.
Dia: Yeah. Except significantly more terrifying. We're not going to get into my beef with some of the character designs. That's not relevant to my analysis. I just don't like them. However, so, and we're introduced to our lead character. Is it Izuku Midoriya, Midoriya Izuku, whichever way round you Western, Eastern whichever way round you personally prefer. We're probably going to switch back and forth just because my inability to keep what I've been doing thus far straight in terms of Japanese versus English naming traditions.
Duck: Fair.
Dia: So just roll with this audience.
Duck: These are the two names he has and what we're going with.
Dia: Yeah, Izuku and Midoriya. So and also, crucially, Deki because Izuku is quirkless, he doesn't have a superpower. But he's a big fan of superheroes. He's wanted to be on his whole life and his best friend Katsuki Bakugo has a really great superpower, which is blowing stuff up with his sweat. This is where you're gonna start noticing that some of the superpowers are deeply weird in ways I enjoy massively. It's like when you get X Men books that are about the, like, the B list C list or D list and Z list X Men who just have like one feather coming out of their ear and how they save the day once. I love them so much.
Duck: Yep. Blowing things up, cool. With your sweat, okay, convince me.
Dia: Also canon that his sweat gives him great skin because he inherited it from his mother who uses her quirk of sweating glycerin to be a model, one of my favourite pieces of random trivia. So yes, his best friend has become his school bully. He's still in middle school, I'm not going to get into the schooling system, middle school equivalent, where he is currently in the process of applying to UA, which is the best hero school in the country. We are told, as is Katsuki, who in the first episode sort of attacks him, tells him if he wants to be a hero, he should throw himself off a roof and hope for a quirk in the next life. So you're kind of watching this going, okay, yeah, I'm familiar with this setup, the poor downtrodden, one is going to prove that people like him are just as good as anyone else and become a hero. And then by the end of Episode Two--
Duck: It’s clear that this is not actually what's happening. This is not a defence of the quirkless.
Dia: No, by the end of Episode Two, he has had a chance encounter with the number one hero because there are rankings, which all of the heroes we find out about have an assigned rank. Number one hero is All Might, discount captain America, who has some kind of not super well known strength enhancement adjacent quirk.
Duck: He's tough. He’s strong. This is his thing.
Dia: Yes, Izuku finds out that All Might has actually had some kind of sort of borderline career ending injury, which means you can only maintain his All Might form for a certain period of time or day and slips into his sort of corpse like skinny guy form he got.
Duck: He kind of, he switching back to Steve Rogers. Like pre serum Rogers, keeps reappearing at inconvenient times. Very sad.
Dia: Tragic.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: He swears Izuku to secrecy, Izuku says Do you think I can be a hero even though I'm quirkless? And All Might says no. Which is again, so not what you were expecting at this stage in the episode--
Duck: Right? He tells him just go home and live a boring life because it's never going to be cool.
Dia: It's very funny. I have at one point gotten into discourse with a friend of mine who is a trainee teacher about the degree of appropriateness of saying this? Where like, I do actually understand there is a degree to which if you're in a very dangerous position, and a child comes up to you and goes, Can I do your job? Saying there are safer job you should consider is potentially like, not as deranged as it comes across when you're seeing it from the perspective of the child. But it is still deeply funny.
Duck: It is very funny. The subversion of expectations is.
Dia: There’s some discourse, There's some discourse about like how this reflects on him morally. And I'm just saying I do see there is a both sides argument, but to me, it just comes across as deeply funny. To see this small child be like, Oh, okay.
Duck: Casually crush all of your hopes.
Dia: Cool. Unfortunately, on the way home, he sees the same villain that All Might had just saved him from attacking Katsuaki. All of the heroes are standing around doing nothing, because their quirks aren't particularly good for this situation. But Izuku remembers what it was like being attacked by this villain, and saves Katsuaki and this impresses All Might enough that he cornered him and goes, I have to pass on my quirk to someone because I can't use it anymore. And mine is a special quirk that you can pass on to other people. And I've chosen you because you've shown true heroism, and presumably not because I feel guilty about crushing your dreams and leaving you on a roof.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Sorry, I need a moment to regather myself after that.
Duck: I'm not sorry I broke your heart. Unrelatedly. Would you like to be cool now?
Dia: Yeah. So. I’ve gathered myself, I find the first couple of episodes of My Hero Academia slash the first few issues unspeakably funny. But-- sorry, you were lighting up green and I wasn't hearing noise. I got nervous. Sorry.
Duck: My connection’s a little choppy but I'm still cool.
Dia: Okay, yes. So after this, that's kind of the setup we get after this. The early adventure involved is you getting into UA school, the entrance exam, this is where you dropped out. It also means you didn't get to meet any of my personal favourites because I actually find the main character in most things, not my favourites, I think that's pretty common, which means you have to wait a while for someone interesting to show up in most media.
Duck: True.
Dia: But yeah, so we then move into him getting into UA, the adventures he has there, and the emergence of the bad guys. So we first meet them in kind of a random isolated attack directed at All Might that the kids get caught in. We subsequently see them targeting this class in specific and that they are actually sort of, they're not ring-led but shadow guided from supported by an ancient enemy of All Might’s, who was called All for One, which is the name of his quirk, it's the counterpart to All Might’s quirk One for All. And the idea is, there's a sort of history to these two quirks, one has been passed from person to person, the other one has been, is owned by the original owner, but he's immortal because of his ability to take other people's books for himself. So you see, there's this kind of, you know, balance it up, Izuku has now inherited this ancient enemy.
Duck: Luck Izuku.
Dia: Again, seems good for you, I guess. And I'm not going to get into the actual details of any further plot until it's relevant to our points. So I've just given you kind of a setup of like the first series or so of the anime, the first couple of dozen issues of the manga situation.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: What you might notice I didn't mention in there is any degree of like social context, despite this being a thing that's introduced very early.
Duck: Right. What's going on with this with these quirks?
Dia: So yeah, we are going to loop back to that. But this is just sort of the baseline set up that I think you're gonna need to understand my future points, because now we're going to very briefly introduce the concept of postmodern literature.
Duck: Please, I have even less knowledge of postmodern literature than I have of regular literature.
Dia: So kind of like when you did post structuralism, post modernism is very much like, to some extent defined by what it's not.
Duck: Of course, makes sense.
Dia: Which is obviously modern literature, except that it's not there's a lot of overlap between the two. Modernism, it's kind of hard to define. There’s kind of much like structuralism we talked about, they're sort of philosophical and artistic and kind of everything from political to architectural to philosophical, I already said that one, elements to it. Within literature, what you see kind of associated within modernism is this idea of grand narratives, and this idea that you can epitomise a search for metaphorical, metaphysical, even, truths through the single emblematic story of a guy, sometimes the guy is a woman--
Duck: Right.
Dia: But it's fundamentally a guy. So you might think of something like Heart of Darkness, or Gatsby, where you have this main character who you’re following as they encounter someone else's grand narrative, and a character who, the, through their story inspires the narrator of the story to understand some great hidden truth about humanity. It's, a lot of it is sort of rejecting the earliest versions of gritty realism in favour of sort of epicism.
Duck: Right, I mean, so it's--
Dia: Not getting into the weeds of the concept of modernism. But that's sort of the baseline I’m going with.
Duck: I'm just just making sure I've got this sort of straight in my head. So we're not kind of trying to do realism, we are doing that thing where you sort of deliberately heighten the stakes, and the themes.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because the themes and the themes and motifs or the story you are trying to tell. So you will not, you're not trying to maintain things on like a regular human scale, necessarily.
Dia: Yeah, and sort of--
Duck: You're instead going, what if we're telling the story of a guy trying to, you know, balance his job with his wife, and we're doing this through Superman?
Dia: Yeah. And I could do days on modernism in early comic books, but we're not going to because we're talking about post modernism, and also comic books.
Duck: Let's just assume that they are corrected by understanding even if a very basic form of correct move on to postmodernism.
Dia: So postmodernism, we're not going to get into the weeds of the timing, there’s amount of overlap, but it's very much a reaction to modernism. So it's not exclusively just stuff that happened after modernism. It's in response to it. It's in dialogue with it. It's a school of literature that's very abstract in way it is still highly thematic. But I think you’d struggle to find a school of literature which isn't… I did look up some definitions to help me explain some a lot of things were like postmodern literature has themes. And I'm like, as opposed to what?
Duck: Right, as opposed to all of that literature which isn't about anything, and was written by accident.
Dia: You know how sometimes you pick up a book and it's about nothing?
Duck: Right.
Dia: But yes, so postmodern literature is much less about this kind of big grand narrative idea, you tend to get a lot of sort of diorama-y literature where you're moving from scene to scene, you get a lot of metafiction a lot of intertextual stuff, you get a lot of unreliable narration, it's, the idea is that it is much more consumed with the act of reading than the act of storytelling.
Duck: Yeah, I think I, I certainly recognise that the sort of diorama style where you have, you know, little, little vignettes. And there's not so much a theme as a mood.
Dia: Yeah, that's not the only type of sort of postmodern that you get, but if you look at sort of modernist literature, you might say something like, Ulysses, The Wasteland is, even if it's very abstract and metaphorical, it’s abstract and metaphorical in the sense that it is a description of this day, this place this guy.
Duck: Yeah, it’s a quite concrete, tends to be quite concrete kinds of abstraction.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Which is a weird thing to say, but you get me.
Dia: Yeah. Whereas sort of post modernism is much more likely to give you kind of your Rashomon approach. It's much more likely to give you a sort of Lemony Snicket esque narrator, you're gonna have more of the little signposts you hang on literature to say this is being literary.
Duck: Almost more self conscious about what it's doing.
Dia: Yeah. And so one of the things that, so a couple of things that are very common: sense of like playfulness with the literature? So this is the thing with not just having self aware, often unreliable narration, but also in terms of having like, quite black, self aware comedy. There's a sense of sort of an irony is common, a sense of playfulness and idea that you are, by writing a story, you're engaging in a dialogue, and that dialogue is… not necessarily fun. But a game you're playing with the reader. It takes two to tango school of literature, as opposed to this is my story and you are consuming it school of literature.
Duck: Yeah. Yeah. I am setting out not necessarily even to tell a story but to have, to provoke a response from you the reader.
Dia: Yeah, this is this is where you start to get like stuff like, well, not the very earliest, but a lot of stuff like magic realism. I read a lot of really interesting stuff this week about how the first jukebox musicals are debatably postmodernist that I want to write an essay on because it's fascinating.
It's, it's engaging with form. And also, it's, in the same way, it's meta fictional, it's intertextual. So that means pretty much it's referring to its own nature as a story and also referring to other stories. You’re maybe catching my emphasis on that last bit, and how it factors into my thoughts about My Hero Academia.
Duck: Right, I can definitely see that My Hero Academia is starting from a position of, assuming that you the reader understand this genre, and therefore understand when the genre is being sent up, subverted any of these things.
Dia: Yeah. And My Hero Academia is not light-handed with its intertextual references.
Duck: Wearing them on its sleeve.
Dia: Yeah. You may remember when you read the, when you watched, sorry, the first few episodes, did you notice any of the place names?
Duck: No. Or if I did, I did not remember noticing.
Dia: It's a bit harder for English language readers to pick up on. But the place names all have something in common.
Duck: Are they all like Gotham and things?
Dia: It's, it's slightly weirder than that. So like, you may notice that like there's a major conflict in Hosu. But that doesn't take place in the first one. There's a place called Aldera, a place called Musutafu. This, this might not be immediately obvious listening to anyone listening just because I am not naturally a Japanese speaker. But these are all places from Star Wars.
Duck: I also don't, clearlyI don't know enough about Star Wars either.
Dia: Okay, Hoth, Mustafar… Erm, there’s just quite a few of them.
Duck: I have heard of Hoth I think.
Dia: Naboo exists.
Duck: Okay.
Dia: I find this unspeakably funny, just because it's never referenced or brought up again.
Duck: Right. It's not it's not like a plot point that these places are Star Wars names, it is just a funny little thing they've thrown in, that also places have Star Wars names.
Dia: Yeah, so this is just my example of wearing your intertextuality on your sleeves.
Duck: Right. Not being like I am, I am a serious piece of literature that has never been affected by any other piece of literature.
Dia: Like not, yes, this is not the grand epic of Midoriya Izuku, this is, look! The places have Star Wars names!
Duck: Right.
Dia: It's, I love that. And obviously, this is a universe where, when humanity developed superpowers, and we know roughly when it's happened, it's only a few generations back, there was a glowing baby. And then, super people started being born. People developed superpowers, society descended into chaos. And then people went, Hey, you remember comic books? That seems like a great idea for policing this new world we’re in.
Duck: Let us consciously emulate the comic book.
Dia: This is, in my humble opinion, one of the most iconic approaches to meta fictional narrative in history is the canon backstory of this universe is…
Duck: Rebuilding society.
Dia: Society was collapsing. So we rebuilt it based on Batman.
Duck: Right. I have looked at the world--
Dia: Well, not Batman, everyone but Batman.
Duck: I have looked at the world, I have seen that it is in shambles. And what I'm going to do about this is create Professor X's Academy.
Dia: It’s incredible.
Duck: I do like that.
Dia: I love it so much.
Duck: I don't think it's a good idea. I don't want to encourage this in real life. But as a setting, that is amazing.
Dia: I don't know man. I think at this point in society, I would rather live in Gotham.
Duck: To be honest, you know, if everyone developed superpowers, we can revisit this question.
Dia: I mean, again, Batman was the worst choice of example.
Duck: He does not have superpowers.
Dia: It’s just that's the first thing that comes into my brain.
Duck: No, no, actually, Batman has the most crucial superpower which is he has the power of being the protagonist.
Dia: He does. Also huge amounts of--
Duck: He's also very rich.
Dia: You can do a lot with that.
Duck: You can do a lot with money.
Dia:Yeah.
Duck: But I think his actual like metaphysical superpower is that of protagonism.
Dia: I think met his metaphysical superpower is being the opposite of Superman.
Duck: No, but--
Dia: Someone was like we need to come up with another superhero character to eb a protagonist.
Duck: Now we're back in Jung because it's not like the opposite, like the reverse but the opposite like the shadow.
Dia: Yeah, he's the opposite in the sense of we need to catch the kids who haven't been interested in this Superman character we came up with, what would other kids like?
Duck: Right! What's the reverse marketing? Well, instead of all the colours, he wears black, and it’s cool.
Dia: Yeah. Anyway, aside from Batman--
Duck: Yeah, who was--.
Dia: It’s very rare that I--
Duck: Mr Superhero not appearing in this show.
Dia: Yeah. So this is a thing, right. So this is a universe that is sort of, to its very core, meta textual. And this is something that I personally find really interesting because My Hero Academia has a very weird approach to themes. So I brought this up when you give me your summary, which is it seems like it sets up a lot of very obvious, I don't want to say trite, but like, kinda after-school specially themes, right? It's like it goes, Oh, this is the one kid who's not as special as everyone else but he's going to be the specialest! Or everybody underestimates you, but you're going to be the best! And like those things are, we're told that he does become the best we're told this very early on, like, this is the story of how I became the number one hero type situation. But those aren't like plot points that come up with any degree of frequency. We’re kind of just told them, that’s A, and then we move on to B, C, D and E plots. And we don't revisit point A.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This is a thing that My Hero Academia does a lot. So, like, my personal favourite example of this is Shinsou Hitoshi, who is one of my favourite characters. You won't have met him he shows up in the sports tournament arc because of course there's a sports tournament arc.
Duck: Of course, we are school anime.
Dia: Yeah, this is still school anime, of course they're gonna have a beating the shit out of each other section.
Duck: It will be an officially sanctioned one to break up the unofficial unsanctioned.
Dia: Hey, to be fair, there are hero licences. So some of this is technically sanctioned. Anyway, yeah, so there is a tournament arc, because of course there’s the tournament arc, all of the kids are made to compete in it, despite the fact that they've just recovered from some pretty significant trauma of like, being attacked by supervillains. And having that teacher beaten up in front of them and nearly dying.
Duck: Walk it off.
Dia: Apparently, they need to continue with the televised school sports tournament. Because they don't want to look like the school is in any way weakened by one of the teachers nearly dying, two have the teachers nearly dying. Sorry.
Duck: That does sound like a thing a school would do in regards to its sports day.
Dia: Yeah. I mean, at least with the concrete thing, they closed the schools physically.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Even if they relocated them to zoom like at least they were like not putting children there.
Duck: They didn't say just come in every morning and just you know, hold the ceiling up.
Dia: Hope you don't die. Yeah. You know, when the nursery school had to have all the asbestos taken out of it, we moved to another building.
Duck: Right. But the school in My Hero Academia would not do that.
Dia: No, they just press on and think of England. So, the school sports tournament. They're all competing. And they find out right before the school sports tournament, but because they've had this villain attack, all of the other classes are veering to get them, especially the Gen Ed course, a kid in the Gen Ed course, which is general education. They're the people who are at this school, but they're not training to be heroes or work with heroes in any way. It's just normal classes.
Duck: Just the cannon fodder.
Dia: Yes, the kids from the Gen Ed course. At least one of them that meet tried to get into the hero track and couldn't because the hero exam, which is the point where you dropped out is very physical, you have to fight robots. And not everyone can fight robots with their superpowers. Some people have superpowers that are good for fighting human people.
Duck: Or even not fighting at all.
Dia: Yeah, one of these is Shinsou Hitoshi. So this is a kid who, he didn't get past the entrance exam, because his superpower is brainwashing. He shows up to say, well, actually, if I win the sports tournament, I can get into the hero class that way. So everybody who wants to be in the, in the hero classes is going to be aiming to beat you all up at the sports tournament to get scouted.
Duck: Uhuh.
Dia: Extremely normal way to conduct a school.
Duck: Extremely.
Dia: Yeah. And so he makes it through rounds one, two, I'm not gonna get into the weeds. Round three is one to one duels, because of course it is. And Shinsou gets paired up with our lead character Izuku. And what happens is, this is actually used in a very utilitarian sense. Shinsou brainwashes him. And this is how Midoriya slash Izuku, again, I'm just going to use names interchangeably, I'm sorry, is able to break out of his brainwashing because of the ghosts of the previous owners of his quirk are able to snap him out of it, which should have been impossible.
Duck: Oh, the creator has watched avatar.
Dia: Yeah. So this is done in a very like, utilitarian way to help us find out about these residues of the Quirk and it leads us into a lot more learning about his quirk One for All. But I'm just going to ignore that very important plot beat to focus on how this affects the kid who he beats, Shinsou. This is something of a fan favourite, like, he was very much like a one-- not one off, but like background character. He pretty much shows up, explains: this society sucks for me, because I have a quirk that inherently frightens other people, right? It's brainwashing. It makes people feel like they've lost their autonomy. People can't really talk to me, because the way my work-- quirk works, is if I ask a question, and someone answers it, I can control them.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Everyone thinks of me as a villain to be.
Duck: Right, my quirk is inherently evil.
Dia: Yeah, or at least--
Duck: Yeah, like the rules of story say that anyone with a quirk like mine must become a villain.
Dia: Yeah. And because we live in a society that is based on comic books, that means everyone must assume that I am villainous. Inherently.
Duck: Right, we have, we have chosen a poetic model for our society, which is that of the comic book, which is a choice we have accepted as part of the setting, we're just gonna go with it. But under that poetic model, that thing we are emulating, a quirk like brainwashing? Clearly codes villainous.
Dia: Yeah.
V: And then you've set up a society where if you have a quirk that codes villainous. That just means you are coded villainous as a person.
Dia: Exactly. And so he shows up, he explains all of this and says, I want to be a hero. It's what I want. It's not he doesn't really give a reasoning, which I find fascinating. Because it'd be very easy to be like, I'm a good person. And I want to prove that people like me aren't villains. It's very much left understated, in fact, once he's defeated, Izuku comes over to have a bit of a one to one chat with him and he just goes, I can't help what I want. I want to be a superhero. I can't help that.
Duck: That's very good. I love this kid.
Dia: I love him! He is my favourite character despite the fact that he is in literally like, I cannot stress enough he does reappear later. But in the context of his introduction, he does very much show off, go, here are my intentions. Here is my tragic backstory. Oh, shit, I lost, and then vanishes.
Duck: Again, huge mood.
Dia: I cannot stress enough how much he just… disappears.
Duck: We've all had an embarrassing social situation and decided to simply never return.
Dia: But can I just point out narratively how unfair it is that he is up against the kid with the haunted quirk that no one could possibly know about? Like he actually had every right to think he was going to nail that tournament and get his wish.
Duck: Oh, absolutely. What he's suffering from there actually is a lack of protagonism.
Dia: Yeah, he's just not the protagonist. And there are several fanfics setting this to right.
Duck: I'm happy for this child and his vindication in fanfic.
Dia: And he does ultimately get trained by their teacher who’s one of my other favourite characters, Aizawa-sensei, who I just think is one of the most fun characters he has the ability to turn off other people's quirks which I just think is neat.
Duck: That’s very fun as a superpower.
Dia: And he has design I think is fun. And eventually he starts training Shinsou because, pretty much because they're both fan favourites as far as like, I'm sure this was narratively planned because they have a lot like visually in common design wise but I also do think that the fact that they are both fan favourite characters and this was a popular headcanon wasn't Not a thing.
Duck: That's just good writing when you're doing this kind of serial fiction.
Dia: Yeah, this is not a comic which is afraid of the audience correctly interpreting foreshadowing which I for one appreciate.
Duck: Oh, no, you guessed where I was going. I must now have an unearned twist.
Dia: Exactly like, no the twists are earnt. Some of them are stupid but they’re earnt. So yeah, I've skipped us over to the, to Shinsou’s episode and the sports tournament partly because this is kind of emblematic of the point I'm making is, there is this thing that happens a lot where somebody walks on screen, trauma dumps and then waltzes off to stage left. And--
Duck: Along with having one embarrassing social situation and never returning, and extreme first year of university vibe.
Dia: I know, right, I so feel for these kids. They're like 14, 15. I'm like yeah, you know what, that is what I was like at 15. I would just appear, share facts about myself.
Duck: I felt I'm making friends. I just gotta tell them all about like tragic backstory.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Do awkward finger guns never return.
Dia: Yeah. It is a big mood. My point being the sports tournament is actually a high point for this because the sports tournament is also where fan favourite main character Todoroki reveals his personal damage and like, he's kind of just been like the weird cool dude. You know, a lot of animes have like the cool guy in the class.
Duck: Yep.
Dia: They're like one who like just looks at people. Derogatorily.
Duck: Right. He's unflappable.
Dia: Yeah, he's unflappable. He has a cool character design. He has a facial scar.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: All of these are signs: cool anime character. He also has the best quirk I'm sorry, he has half hot cough cold which is he's like a bilateral chimera. And one side of him has like fire powers, and the other half has ice powers.
Duck: The left hand indeed does not know what the right hand is doing.
Dia: He's extremely cool. And he is the son of the number two hero Endeavour who is a fire basedsuperhero Human Torch style.
Duck: Does he have a whole thing about being second best?
Dia: He absolutely does. How did you predict that?
Duck: Haha.
Dia: So what we find out in the sports tournament arc, if that kind of Todoroki’s parents, Endeavor and, and I’ve forgotten his mother's name, Rei. That was it. What are in something called a quirk marriage, which is where somebody has sought out a partner who has a desirable quirk for some reason--
Duck: Oh, it’s when you’re doing eugenics to yourselves.
Dia: Yep. It's absolutely eugenics. Because he basically Endeavour can only handle his upper heat, his upper heat limit for a certain period of time, and he wanted his children to not have that weakness so they could become greater heroes than him. And usurp All Might from the top spot as number one.
Duck: A normal thing to want and to base your marriage around.
Dia: Exactly. So within about two minutes of that reveal, we find out that his wife Rei at some point after the birth of Todoroki, had a psychotic break, mistook her infant son for her dirtbag husband and poured boiling water directly onto his face.
Duck: Jesus Christ.
Dia: And that's how he got his scar.
Duck: That's, that is a tragic backstory.
Dia: It’s a tragic backstory.
Duck: Full tragic marks. Tragedy.
Dia: Yeah. Rei is now in a institution of some kind, I don’t think we have many details and Shouto Todoroki, that’s, you know, the classmate, the cool guy is out of-- I don't want to say petty because the situation deserves more than pettiness. But I feel like the vibe is petty, like the, the attitude has petty energy, despite the absolute legitimateness of the complaint. I don't know if there's a word for that emotion, is refusing to use his fire powers, because he wants to prove that he can be the best with just his mum's powers. This seems to me a very interesting way to rebel because it is achieving the same goal that Endeavour wants just--
Duck: Right but in a way that will annoy him.
Dia: In a way that will annoy him. Yeah, it is also, in a way I can't quite put into words. I've got this in my notes with like a lot of lines pointing to other words in the sentence. It's very emotionally real, as the response of a traumatised child who doesn't actually dare be fully disobedient.
Duck: Right. It's very much I am still doing the thing I have been told to do that I will not get in trouble for and it's just stylistic rebellion.
Dia: Yeah, it's it's aesthetic rebellion. It’s very weird.
Duck: Which I fully support.
Dia: Yes, I support this kid no matter what he does not gonna lie, Todoroki deserves better. My campaign slogan. I'm not the only one I'm pretty sure it's an AO3 tag. Yeah, so we find all of this out after Izuku has like, like overheard Endeavour yelling at Shouto Todoroki in the like, changing rooms at the sports festival. Izuku has been knocked out, Todoroki ends up playing Bakugou, Bakugo and Todoroki have that big fight and Bakugo basically is going off the charts feral because he's insulted that someone is fighting him at half power. A lot of people hate him. I think he is the funniest character. He is so believable as a shithead 15 year old.
Duck: Oh yeah, like getting extremely insulted that somebody isn't taking you seriously enough to like kill you properly.
Dia: He is at all times the I am confused when we are not about me bird meme. Like. I'm sorry. What are you talking about? You have damage from your past? You are looking at me therefore I'm the only thing that matters.
Duck: Right. Why are we not talking about my past? And my day?
Dia: He's very funny. But Izuku pretty much yells like both of your superpowers are yours, Todoroki use your fire! And Todoroki does use his fire, he does actually not win, it is a very very weird vignette. And this is all within-- so like the Shinso stuff, the Todoroki stuff the fight after Todoroki stuff. This is all within the span of about like 40 pages max of manga, maybe an hour of anime screen time. This is so much information to take on about the world building of this universe.
Duck: Right. There's a lot happening here.
Dia: And then they just go straight on with the next bit of narrative.
Duck: Right, we don't need to dwell on any of this. We don't need to dwell on the fact there's a whole eugenics subculture.
Dia: No, no, no, we don't need to think about that. Like literally I went to the-- as I usually do I use-- I have the Wikipedia page open in front of me so I can double check like names and order of events as we go. If I scroll down to the summary. The sentences go like this: due to the information that the League of villains possesses about the inner workings of UA the faculty began to suspect there may be a traitor at the school. After participating in a sports festival Izuku and his classmates Shouto Todoroki and Tenya Iida confront the villain Stain and defeat him. Do you notice how none of this is in that summary? Because none of it is relevant to the plot.
Duck: It's just also happening.
Dia: It is a six word aside. After participating in a sports festival.
Duck: Right, a sports festival is the correct summary for all the events we have just covered.
Dia: Oh my god and like don't get me wrong. It's not like they then move on to completely unrelated like weird it's time to have an action scene now, no the villain Stain stuff is also deeply involved in the moral world building. Like the villain Stain is a villain who kills heroes he perceived as being heroes for like, reasons other than genuine heroism.
Duck: Oh, he's he's doing some sort of ideological weeding.
Dia: Yeah, he's like, Oh, what's his face? Taskmaster? Is that the one I'm thinking of? There's like a variety of Comic Book Villains with this kind of gimmick. He's weeding out superheroes he thinks of as being superheroes for insufficient reasons.
Duck: Right, right. You're just not, we're going to do a series of highly contrived tests. Where only through true altruism can you survive and return to harrowing and everyone else must suffer?
Dia: Yeah, except he doesn't do tests. He just shows up and murders them, he seems to have some kind of prior criterion that we know nothing about.
Duck: Respect the efficiency.
Dia: Yeah, I mean, fair enough. And from that, we go straight into meeting more villains, including, and this is where we're gonna get in back into my thematic points. Two more fan favourites. It's also I think it's around here, we find out that the League of villains is what they're called, which I just want to reference because I think it's adorable. [in a scary voice] The League of villains.
Duck: [also in a scary voice] The League of villains, the Brotherhood of villains, if you will.
Dia: You know, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. I don't know if you ever saw that post that used to be like--
Duck: I always forget it’s the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, because that's just…
Dia: I've always liked the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, because I had pointed out to me, I think this is on Tumblr, it might have been on some fan forum in the 2000s. Like, it sounds ridiculous that they're called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and they're like, No, we're for a good cause. But to be fair, if someone asked me to join the Brotherhood of Evil queers, I would be so down.
Duck: Right, I think, what do you remember that they are fundamentally an anarchist activist group? It’s suddenly makes perfect sense that that's what they call themselves.
Dia: Of course they do. Of sodding course they do.
Duck: It’s also adorable.
Dia: I also always get the impression that Magneto doesn't like the name.
Duck: I think, well, here's why I think this is why I forget it because I think in the films he just calls it the Brotherhood.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Which I do think is what he would do. He'd be like, Okay, I can't make them but I do not have to say it.
Dia: No one can make me identify as a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants you losers. Anyway yes so we meet we find out that the League of villains is called the League of villains, we've already met a few of them in the villains skirmish with the school I mentioned earlier, including Shigaraki who's got like a cool hands all over him design and the power to turn anything to dust by touching it.
Duck: That’s horrible.
Dia: Which I understand is clearly very inconvenient in life, but it's also such a cool superpower.
B And also just reverse Midas.
Dia: I know right, like, it's cool. I really like it just on an aesthetic level. I feel like, again, it would be very inconvenient. And I understand why this is also, it's interesting that we meet him first and then we get the Shinsou bit where he's like, Hey, do you have any idea how much it sucks to have a superpower that makes everyone think you're doomed to be evil forever? It doesn't like make--
Duck: We’ve already been introduced to the idea of superpowers as unwanted destiny.
Dia: Yeah, and up to this point, I think all of the villains we've met have had gross and or creepy powers. So we've had like, dust guy, we've had sludge villain guy who drowned some kids, we've had stain,
Duck: To be fair, that is slightly villainous. Like I'm not saying the sludge itself is necessarily villainous, but at the point you use your sludge to drown kids. You have committed to the villain lifestyle.
Dia: Yeah, absolutely. But like all of the villains we've met so far have in fact had fairly villainy TM superpowers. I think the next couple we meet though, are some more of the League of villains, which has a variety of superpower guys. There's a lizardy guy, there's a magic guy. I can't actually remember the order they're introduced or if they're all at once or not offhand.
There's one who I personally adore which is the like, teenage girl like bouncy excited one who can shapeshift by drinking people's blood. Another blood superpower, it's surprisingly popular.
Duck: It’s delicious and nutritious.
Dia: A guy called Dabi, who has blue fire powers and also burn scars all over him. I think this issue had been, the manga had been out for about 10 minutes before the first people guessing that he was one of Endeavour’s other children were around?
Duck: That seems like a reasonable guess based on the information we've had so far.
Dia: Genuinely, I would say 10 to 15 minutes this was when the universe before people were going I got it, I know. But yes, Dabi has burn scars all over him and blue, blue fire very, very hot superpowers. And it's interesting because Dabi is the first character we meet who has a not incredibly villainous superpower, and yet he's a villain. And he has the same power as the hero we've just found out like, a couple of hours ago in screen time is a dirtbag. This is what I mean when I say it's not that it's not--- it's not that it's bringing up themes and then dropping them. It's bringing up themes and then throwing them at you like rotten fruit.
Duck: Right, it's not like forgetting it has themes. It's just hitting you with a theme in the same manner as being hit with a snowball like it.
Dia: It's deeply devoted to feeding your theme.
Duck: Right, but then it ends up doing what sounds like a very disjointed. Look, there's a theme here moving on.
Dia: Yeah, this is kind of where I'm getting to, I'm making the transition, I'm going to be jumping between the two I'm making the transition from meta textual to inter textual and vice versa. This is kind of where I'm getting into the meta textual, it's so self referential, it feels like you're kind of in a world where you're just expected to take all of this information on board in a way that feels weirdly true to how real life social understandings come to exist in your brain.
Duck: Interesting, go on.
Dia: Well, it's just it's this very weird thing, but it feels in a strange way, much more socially real than say X Men from which I would say it does borrow heavily. Just in terms of like the stylistic nature of a world of superpowers, it's much more X Men than it is DC metahumans, Marvel inhumans, whatever.
Duck: Sure.
Dia: It feels like it could be like a distant future the everybody has the X gene. Now X Men fanfic, you know what I mean?
Duck: Yeah, I mean, X Men, compared to sort of other superhero sort of, worldbuilding states has built the idea that there's loads of mutants, anyone could be in a mutant, there will always be, there will always be another mutant. And also, there will always be more mutants than there were yesterday, as opposed to something like you know, nothing about Superman says that there will be an ever increasing number of Superman.
Dia: If anything, Superman is an endangered species.
Duck: Whereas X-Men has, X Men kind of has built in that sooner or later, the mutants will outnumber the normal people. That is, in fact, a major premise of why no one will be, sort of politically they do not have any friends.
Dia: Yeah, and this is the thing is like this isn't unusual in kind of any kind of superpower shonen manga and anime like it's very much the preferred form of superpower is everyone has a unique one that's very much just like within the genre the favourite version of superpowers or magic powers. It's not big on this sort of magic school. This is how magic works. Variety.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Obviously that's a massive generalisation to make about genre please don't email us.
Duck: Yes, we are not saying this is a universal statement. We are describing a theme and the data trends.
Dia: I've already told you that my favourite animator Detective Conan, if you think like, I don't have some obscure stuff backed up in my brain. My second favourite anime is Tokyo-- My second favourite anime is Tokyo ESP, which maybe four people have ever seen.
Duck: I liked the one with the cooking school and also the one with the tank s.
Dia: Oh, Girls Und Panzer is so good. Anyway, my point being, it's very interesting to compare this approach to giving us the social world of My Hero Academia to something like X Men, or for that matter, Tokyo ESP. Where X Men, while X Men approaches a lot of sociological, socio political issues. It kind of puts them all through the same lens, right? It's, these are the mutants, they've always been around, but we're seeing more and more of them lately, and we're scared. And you can map that on to whatever social issue you as an author want to write about feel capable of writing about it.
Duck: Right, it is very flexible in terms of any ethnic group, religious group minoritized, sexuality, anything really.
Dia: Yeah. And you can do some really interesting things--
Duck: You can make the X Men into it into a metaphor about, you know, communist witch hunts at universities.
Dia: Yeah. And like one of-- and X Men does do some really interesting things with us. One of my favourite X Men issues ever is an issue of all new all different X Men, where a queer kid with visible mutation runs away from school to go on a date and basically has a horrible time. Let's not get into it. And two of the X Men, one of whom is queer, and one of whom has a visible mutation go after him. And neither of them can get through to him on their own. And they have to work together to say, hey, we can't, neither of us can 100% understand where you're coming from, but we both understand some of it.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And we're both here to support you no matter what. It's one of my favourite X Men comics ever. It's really underrated. Partly because no one likes Northstar. Because I don't know, there's only room for one cool Canadian X Men, X man, whatever. What is the singular of X Men?
Duck: It’s definitely X-Man.
Dia: Is it actually X-Man?
Duck: X-Man.
Dia: A unit of X-men. X Men does a lot of really interesting stuff with this, but it is all through the lens of being a mutant. Whereas My Hero Academia takes place in a world where everybody developed superpowers. But we didn't like put away the social problems that existed before that. We just have a new world now, which has the same number of problems in it. Possibly more.
Duck: We have reskinned some of them.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: We haven't actually solved anything.
Dia: So I mentioned the League of villains. One of the villains we actually meet later on is somebody called magnate who is a transgender woman in the league of villains, which is just a very interesting to me.
Duck: Yes, I mean, that's a rich scenario for interpretation.
Dia: Yeah, like, I'm not gonna go too much into the details of characters, this is more just an example. Like, if you search, I don't recommend you do this. If you go on to the My Hero Academia wiki and look for trans people. There are multiple, there are two characters who are listed in the category of transgender. It's not really discussed, it's more just they are drawn in a way that sort of implies…
Duck: Gestures.
Dia: Yeah, they're both sort of drawn with very masculine figures and are referred to as female.
Duck: Yeah, I mean, in a graphic medium short of outright saying so that's sort of how you do that.
Dia: Yeah. We don't know that much about them. One of them's a hero, one of them’s a villain,, they show up at about the same time. The point being. Social issues from the real world come up. And social issues from the real world that are actually very specifically Japanese come up that are like really misunderstood by the fandom at large. I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but a lot of the stuff with Endeavour and his family is based around Japanese social norms that oh my god have led to some really bad fan discourse.
Duck: I do not love fan discourse. I have to say it is not my favourite part of fandom.
Dia: This is the thing is I personally don't like the Endeavour storyline because I just don't. I don't love storylines about redemption of shitty parents, which put the shitty parents' feelings front and centre.
Duck: Sure, I understand this opinion.
Dia: I think they're valid and worth telling and interesting. They're just not for me.
Duck: All valid.
Dia: Yeah, so I personally do not like the storyline. That does not mean that several of the detractors of this storyline are not off their rockers. Look, look, look. I'm not saying this, this anime or manga are perfect, I am, I'm not even saying that there isn't a huge amount of abuse apologism going on. I just feel like if you are a like, you know 20 Something Westerner reading this going, Hey, this seems like a bad family. And the like readers from Japan are going yeah, it's talking about a very specific social issue we have here when you go, No, it's just about bad stuff. I just feel like you're missing something.
Duck: Right and that point, you're sort of willfully missing something, it’s not a good look.
Dia: It's weird. Like, I know, I'm missing something. It doesn't make me any less uncomfortable with the thing I'm reading. But I'm sort of aware I'm missing something.
Duck: Right, enjoyment though is different from belief that there could be more depth to the interpretation.
Dia: Yeah, I did actually have the next like a couple more story arcs, bookmarks to like walk you through, but I am aware that I am going like, slowly, because I keep making myself laugh.
Duck: We are looking like we might run long. Yes.
Dia: But so I'll rattle you through a couple more points just sort of quick fire rather than going into in depth. One of the next arcs we get is an arc about a Yakuza who are developing a bullet that takes away people's quirks because they think that the new quirk society is like bad for organised crime, which is, again, wild.
Duck: As motivations go that one is very funny.
Dia: It is so funny. And it's also combined really horribly with like a small child being used to create these bullets. It's like it ricochets from very funny concept to really troubling execution so fast.
Duck: Right, that's gone from funny to disturbing.
Dia: It is so fast. The next one we get is the like, the next arc we get is like a sort of X Men arc which is why I wanted to make sure I referenced it, which is there's a whole group that are super anti people with like animal rights heteromorphic quirks. That's the phrase. Like, so people who have like animal body parts and things like that as part of their work. They actually get defeated by shigaraki, the leader of the League of villains so there's like inter-villain social Justice drama, I don't even know what's happening anymore.
Duck: Internecine beef between-- this is a an interesting question are they like self appointed villains or is it are they made villains have they achieved villainy.
Dia: This is the thing is like the ones we meet who are plot important seem to have very much self identified themselves as villains in kind of a I don't want to say reclaimed because that's not the word I'm looking for. But I don't know another word for what they're doing. Which is--
Duck: Embraced perhaps.
Dia: Yeah, um. Like embraced but in a I am attacking you way.
Duck: Yeah,
Dia: It’s the lol limewire approach to villainy.
Duck: You bring that up with, you know, sludge attacks.
Dia: Yeah. Like the ones we meet are kind of loud and proud villains. I don't think that implies-- I don't think it's implied that that is the norm. I think it's implied that the norm is villainy just means like someone using their Quirk for destructive things.
Duck: Right.
Dia: That's just not what we're talking about in these guys.
Duck: Right. We're dealing with the flamboyantly villainous.
Dia: Yeah. And this is where I'm looping us back to the sort of last plot point that I'm discussing. This isn't the last point in the entire… obviously, it's still ongoing loads of stuff is happening. But the one we're talking, the last talk we were talking about because I just think it draws things neatly into a circle is Dabi. The villain with the fire quirkI mentioned earlie.
Duck: The one with the blue fire and the burnt hands.
Dia: Yeah goes on national TV, to announce that he is Endeavour's son, and that he became a villain because of his dad's abuse.
Duck: So now we’ve got some interesting contrasts between him and his presumably half brother.
Dia: Full brother.
Duck: Full brother?
Dia: Yeah, yeah, they are all children of the same woman in this quirk marriage. It's that the three previous, the, so Todoroki has three older siblings, all of whom did not get the quirk the dad wanted. If at first you don't succeed.
Duck: And were therefore removed from the--
Dia: Plot.
Duck: The family unit in some way, yes.
Dia: I mean, we did see a picture of two of his older siblings and we actually do meet his older sister at one point I don't remember if we meet the brother or not, he might just be forgettable.
Duck: That's still an interesting contrast between I have, I have been rejected by my abusive father and have therefore embraced villainy. And I have been placed under excessive expectations by my abusive father, and have therefore embraced, still doing what he wants, but in a way he wouldn't like.
Dia: Yeah. And so a little plot development happened while all the other stuff I was ricketing you through happeneDia: All Might, the number one hero has been forced to retire because he used the very last of his superpower.
Duck: And is not therefore all mighty.
Dia: He is not particularly all or might.
Duck: He’s just a guy.
Dia: Yeah, which means that Endeavour is the number one hero and therefore has 100% achieved his goal at this point.
Duck: But not in the way he wanted to do it.
Dia: Yeah. This is why I thought this was a neat place to end our like, our, the bit of My Hero Academia that we're covering is there's like a whole little drama happening in that corner. There's a whole little drama happening in that corner. I didn't even get into Hawks and he's one of my favourite characters.
Duck: To be fair, it's a big anime, this I have gleaned, is that there's there's a lot of it and it roams widely. So we can't really cover that much.
Dia: It roams widely, there's prequels. There's midquels, there's a lot going on. There's differences between the anime and the manga. There's a lot happening.
Duck: There’s a lot of it and I have to edit this down to like 90 minutes, so we can't cover all of it.
Dia: Yeah, don't worry, I'm getting to my, I'm getting to the end. I've edited it down to the parts that are relevant to my point. Though having referenced Hawks, I am going to very briefly bring up how entertaining I find his backstory. This is another one of those like, show up and dump your backstory and exit stage left pursued by trauma.Hawks is, I think when we were introduced to him, he's the number three hero, he's like, extremely cool. He's very popular as a cosplay. He's got like a little flight Jacket and Big Red Wings that you can turn into-- he can control his feathers and use them to spy but also use them as weapons. It's a very fun superpower.
Duck: That is very cool.
Dia: It's a really rad superpower. You're like, wow, this guy seems like carbon designed to be--
Duck: Cosplayed as.
Dia: --a cool superhero. And then you find out in universe he genuinely is. Because what happened is, he was the son of like a two bit thief who was like a shitty dad and his mum was like sort of just either drunk or just like checked out not entirely clear. And he had like a generally pretty rubbish life. He was a big fan of Endeavour. Until one day he like saved some people in a car crash or something. And the-- I keep wanting to say HSBC, that's a bank.
Duck: It's fine. They're probably not in this anime.
Dia: Yeah. What are they called? They're not HSPC The this is why I'm thinking it's going to go down quite a lot. Once we edit out all of my findings in my notes. I used paper notes this time. I usually don't, I'm regretting that decision.
Duck: Paper notes seem like a great idea until you realise you can't control it.
Dia: Yeah. HSP-- HPSC.
Duck: Okay. To be fair, that's confusable.
Dia: I know I keep wanting to say HSBC, which is a bank, the H P S C, which is the Hero Public Safety Mission. Spotted this kid using his very cool like fun looking, like powerful quirk to save people. And went Hey, he would be a great choice to be a hero when he's a grown up and rather be like, let's remove--
Duck: He’d be marketable.
Dia: Yeah, he seems marketable. And rather than be like, Hey, kid, do you want to get out of your awful home life and like maybe go to school, get a good foster parent, something like that they, as far as we're told, they just kind of kidnapped him and put him into like, Superhero Training when he's like 10.
Duck: Guys, what do we do, guys? We've been down the child soldier route before we know it is a bad idea.
Dia: Again, like it's not that this isn't delved into it's just that it does have the same energy that a lot of the character backstories have where it is. It does have this slight, like, and that's me vibe about it.
Duck: And now that I've explained to you that I am the bird kids from Maximum Ride.
Dia: Literally, literally the kids from Maximum Ride.
Duck: Later!
Dia: Yeah. And he's also-- also not the point but very funny to me. We’re introduced to him when he’s sent to spy on the League of villains like oh, yeah, he won't be conspicuous.
Duck: He doesn't stand out.
Dia: You know, the guy--
Duck: No distinguishing features.
Dia: The guy who is the number three hero with the giant red wings. You know that guy?
Duck: The number three hero. No memorable features, he will, he will blend.
Dia: To be fair, he doesn't go in disguise. He actually just sort of rocks up when Dabi is recruiting
and goes, Hey, actually, the society in which I'm instrumental sucks. And it's, it's very weird because it's not like it’s not obvious that he’s spying, but also, it feels obvious that he should have some major issues with the society that he lives in.
Duck: On account of the whole child soldier deal.
Dia: Yeah, yeah. But it's like it's not-- it's not it's not not gone into it's just not gone into that much.
Duck: You know, you just I'm just saying you should, you should endeavour to raise your children like individually and collectively, in a way where if they turn up to a self declared group of villains and say, Hey, I'd like to defect. It doesn't seem immediately plausible based on how you've treated them that they would want to do that.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: You should try not to be a trauma dump tragic backstory.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: This has been child rearing advice with analysis reliance.
Dia: You're welcome parents. I'm so sorry for how much I swore during this. You know, whenever you look up any podcast, the biggest complaint in interviews is always that they swear too much. I can't stop myself. Okay, that was Hawks diversion corner.
Duck: Hawks diversion corner.
Dia: It was important to me that you knew that.
Duck: I mean he sounds great.
Dia: He is great. He's another fan favourite Dabihawks is one of the most popular ships in terms of content, as far as I can tell, I did not run numbers on this because life's too short. But it's one of the ones you hear about a lot. And you totally understand why, like, come on.
Duck: These are matching tragedies.
Dia: Matching tragedies, and like it ends badly which we love.
Duck: The ends badly.
Dia: Yeah, I mean, look, man, I do not. I do not ship Professor X and Magneto because I want them to have a happy ending, you know?
Duck: No.
Dia: [dramatically] I want things to burn. And Dabi will burn things for me.
Duck: That's like his superpower.
Dia: It's his whole deal. So yeah, I’ve like rattled through to some of the plot points that I think are relevant to my idea that this is a very, very postmodern story. I don't think, obviously, these are randomly selected. But like, this is what I think really works. Because it's a story about stories in that not in the, not-- when you say something in the story about stories normally, you mean it's like a very self aware story, maybe has a narrator. This is a story set in a universe where people looked at Spider Man and Superman and X Men and went yeah, that's what we should base society on.
Duck: Right. They literally said we have, we have been forced to have a revolution. Basically, like in terms of societal upheaval, a revolution is happening to us. We get to decide where to steer it. We are steering it at Spider Man.
Dia: Yeah. And I like there's a there's an old there's an old Anime News Network interview with the author of My Hero Academia. Kohei Horikoshi. And he does actually talk about what his main inspirations were. And he does obviously, there are other anime and manga that are cited. So like Naruto is the main one he cites as an influence on art style. But he was he's also in various places mentioned Kamen Rider and Dragon Ball and a couple of others, like very shonen anime that you can see going into DNA of this. But the things he mentions as American influences are Spider Man, Star Wars and X-Men. Those are the three I've seen the most often. So I think we can safely assume that when this society was rebuilt, based on comic books.
Duck: Those were their sources.
Dia: Those were the comics. Yeah, those were the source texts of this universe. Which means this is a universe with identifiable source texts from our universe, which I think is the most postmodern thing I've ever encountered.
Duck: I just need a, I just need a moment to enjoy that, that is a thing we can say about really any setting, like just, I just need a moment to bask in there being a setting that has been built additively from our universe, plus, like a conscious attempt to emulate fictional properties.
Dia: I know, isn't it fun?
Duck: It's good, actually, you know what it reminds me of?
Dia: Yeah?
Duck: There is a subset of like fairly well read nerd. Fairly well read like lefty liberal type nerd, who genuinely like their their ultimate political project is to create Star Trek post-scarcity or um--
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Or Ian Banks’ culture post scarcity. But literally, yeah, kind of post scarcity societies that they have seen in media.
Dia: Yeah!
Duck: That's the political project.
Dia: There's actually--
Duck: It’s that but for X-Men. Excellent.
Dia: This is, this is extremely geeky of me. But I actually went to an exhibition at the science museum this year, which is about this exactly. Which is
Duck: Is it still running?
Dia: I think it is it's really good. And it's specifically about like how ideas not just designs and like, machines, but also social and cultural ideas from science fiction have been imported into the real world.
Duck: This does sound really cool.
Dia: It’s really good. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Sorry to listeners, because this will presumably go out well after that exhibit is closed.
Duck: Sorry, folks!
Dia: But I recommend it highly. But like this is the thing is like there is a whole world of thought in the modern world that if we were like this story, whether that's an actual fictional narrative or a story, we tell ourselves about what the past used to be like, or whatever, the world would be better, we can just base it on this clear narrative thing.
Duck: Yes. Oh, it's the future looking version of the like, statue avatar guys?
Dia: Yes!
Duck: Where society would be fixed if we just returned to doing marble sculptures.
Dia: Exactly. And, but this is the thing, right? Okay. So the two comic books that he cites a lot, probably partially that is, Spider Man and X Men. And the thing is, I think he can see how this universe would be built using Spider Man, X Men and like, maybe Kamen Rider as exemplars, like the Pro Hero system is kids who, in theory, as far as I can tell kids who want to be heroes are kids who really want to do good in the world, they want to use their skills for good they want to, with their power, be responsible. Laying it on with a trowel here.
Duck: A phrase you have never heard before because we just came up with it.
Dia: A phrase you have never heard before. Are put into institutions where they learn at the hands of people who know how to use their powers. They study together, they train together, they apply for licencing in a professional capacity, it is set up like a career, but it's set up like the narrative arc of a superhero as well.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: But the thing that's interesting about Spider Man and X man is their lives fucking suck.
Duck: Right. The only reason you go to Professor X’s school for mutants is that you can't go to any other schools. And one of the reasons that you only go in those circumstances is that you are guaranteed to be at absolute best constantly picketed and harassed.
Dia: Yeah! Like--
Duck: You're going to be involved in several apocalyptic scenarios before the end of your first week, but at best constantly harassed for being a mutant.
Dia: Yeah, like this thing you and I have talked just like, because these are the things we talked about--
Duck: Because we’re nerds.
Dia: Before about how professor X, the thing with X Men is like, yes, it is awful to put children in the home base of a bunch of superheroes, because they're at risk. But the reason they're there is the other way around. The superheroes are there to protect the children who are already at risk.
Duck: Right. Yes, you're not putting the children in the superhero camp. You are building a superhero camp around the school where the vulnerable children are.
Dia: Yes, that’s much better phrasing.
Duck: Because they will they will be vulnerable children. If you don't, only then you won't have superheroes in the way.
Dia: Like the government is building robots to kill children. Professor X is not the problem.
Duck: Right? Right.
Dia: I will die on this hill.
Duck: We have not put the children near the danger. Yeah, could put the defenders near the children. This is a meaningful difference.
Dia: Like don’t get me wrong, like, I have said Magneto never did anything wrong in his life on many occasions and meant it. But there is a school of like, fanthought, which is like, Oh, well, Magneto is right. And if they just let Magneto destroy the government, then nothing would be bad. And really, Professor X is the one who's making teenagers fight his battles. And you're just like…
Duck: This is bad reading I would think.
Dia: jSorry. Sorry. Sorry. What do you think Professor X is doing here? Do you think he's just like, bodily throwing children at robots? Like do you think that's the situation.
Duck: Professor X actually invented the fastball special?
Dia: Like they are throwing a grown adult mad at robots who signed up for this. But yeah, like this is the thing like the X-Men’s lives fucking suck. Spider-Man’s life also sucks. And very specifically Spider Man's life sucks whether or not he has support from other superheroes like, when he like goes mask off in public. It's him to get ramifications from that, when he tries to save the world. He usually loses a loved one like his life is awful.
Duck: Right, and crucially, his life is awful because he feels that responsibility to do something.
Dia: Yeah. And this is--
Duck: Spider-Man’s life could be like, Fair to middling, given the pre existing issues of poverty and oppression. If he just was like, Well, I also I can stick to walls. But this doesn't seem urgent compared to just getting on with finishing high school.
Dia: Or if he just stuck with the WrestleMania gig.
Duck: Right, he could have made a whole range of choices, where his superpower would be irrelevant to mildly positive.
Dia: Exactly.
Duck: Instead he feels the responsibility to be a Hero about it and that directly makes his lifesuck.
Dia: So like the thing with the X Men, not all mutants are X Men. And that isn't just because not all mutants, that isn't just because-- ha, not all mutants-- that isn’t just because not all of them have the right superpowers.
Duck: What you mean is not all mutants are split between Professor X and Magneto’s philosophies, a lot of them are just like out there living their lives been lightly mutated.
Dia: And it's not even the case that all powerful mutants are X Men or Brotherhood. There are plenty of powerful mutants who are just like vibing. there are plenty of non powerful mutants who are X-Men or brotherhood and have seen their powers to cool uses.
Duck: And we love them the most because it's like you are you are you have some feathers, that's your whole superpower, but you are working so hard with it.
Dia: And when they get days in the limelight, or they are the greatest greatest days.
Duck: But yes, it is a choice they've made to go and be a superhero about it.
Dia: Yeah, and this is the thing is like so you can kind of see from those the DNA of this society is Spider Man and X Men, you can see how the DNA of this society is not for example, in Superman.
Duck: No, what Superman is, is a standout individual. Part of the thing about being Superman is that no one else could be Superman.
Dia: And also part of the thing about Superman is that he… I don't know how to phrase this without making it sound like a negative thing. He doesn't have this sort of burning need to do good that Spider-Man has. He doesn't have this sort of righteous need to do good that the X Men have. It's a very-- The only word coming to my brain is Midwest. Like it's a very sort of, you know what I mean? It's like a very kind of calm, polite, no, I'm gonna do good things because that's the right thing to do. I'm not saying he's never angry or righteous, obviously. I just mean, like, the underlying drive of Superman feels very like, Well, no, obviously, I'm going to do the right thing. That's just what I do. Because I'm a nice person. Do you know what I mean like, I get the impression that Superman's motivation for saving lives isn't on like a really deep fundamental level that different frpm Clark Kent's inclination to hold doors open for people.
Duck: Right, I feel like there's a there's a combination of…
Dia: And that doesn't mean it's lesser or less like, or that he has less willpower or something. I just mean like, he chooses to be a good person, because he wants to be.
Duck: Right, but in a way where he thinks of all his even even his most spectacular savings of the day. He also thinks of them as about equivalent to picking up the spider instead of squashing it and putting it outside.
Dia: Yeah. And like you see this with a lot of DC heroes.
Duck: A sort of, anyone would do this. This is just the decent thing to do. I'm not being a hero. I'm just doing the decent thing.
Dia: Yeah. And if you compare other DC heroes who have had like, because like, okay, apart from the krypton thing, some of Clark Kent’s charm is that he's just kind of had this really nice, easy life and chooses to be a good person.
Duck:But there's no, yes, lack of a tragic-- The most tragic bit is, you know, he was orphaned and adopted. But he was orphaned and adopted as a tiny bab.
Dia: By good people who love him.
Duck: Right. So his experience is just of having been raised by good people who love him. And that is nice.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: But it's still a compelling story. You don't need to have a tragedy for a compelling story.
Dia: If anything I think it's compelling for a different reason, which is there, a lot of people really don't like these character, and I'm not here to tell those people they're wrong, obviously. But like I do, I really love characters who are just nice. Like, I love it. Like characters who just like wants to be good and don't struggle with that I think are good characters sometimes.
Duck: Right, not everyone has to be like, tempted.
Dia: Yeah, I think it's a good narrative device when they are I just think it's also a good narrative device when they're not. And this is a thing you see a lot with DC. One of the things I think DC very rarely does that Marvel does all the time is the heaping of misery upon characters, not because DC characters have easier lives but because their lives affect them in a different way narratively to what Marvel likes to do, like if you look at something like we talked about Shazam.
Duck: In a lot of stories, just laden with ladles of tragedy. Like pea soup.
Dia: Oh my God, everything that could go and like we just looked at a couple of the a couple of different origin stories and the movie like there are versions where he's like horribly abused by his uncle, where his parents entire inheritance is stolen. There are plenty of versions where he's a homeless street kid. There are also versions where he's a clueless, rich kid. Backstories change a lot in DC.
Duck: But there is a common thread of we have just heaped the misery upon this kid.
Dia: Yeah. And one of the things that I really like about Captain Marvel slash Shazam as a character is that one of his most common catchphrases has been “do good and good will follow” and I've always really liked how simple it is because I think it sums up to me what I like about that kind of character, which is that to them it really is that simple.
Duck: Yeah/
Dia: Like this is what I like Superman and Captain Marvel slash Shazam, and Wonder Woman, and to some extent Batman, like Batman is the gritty dark DC character but at the same time
I'm like, he's someone who has this very iron core of I'm choosing to be a good person, I want to be the person I know if I crossed these lines, I won't be able to come back. So I am not crossing them. Like there is a simplicity to the superheroism of the sort of main DC characters that I find really appealing.
Duck: Yeah. He’s sort of--
Dia: However--
Duck: Sorry.
Dia: Sorry, go on.
Duck: He's sort of often treated as the sort of the morally grey one but he does actually have a very rigid code that is more restrictive even than he necessarily thinks is morally necessary because he is sort of building himself a guardrail against possible slippery slopes.
Dia: And it's like it's also why I have so little time for people who like are anti Batman's no kill rule I'm just because I-- it just seems incredibly juvenile to me.
Duck: Right, especially when you consider that he is an American superhero is so easy to sort of understand Batman's no killing thing not as a because there should never be a death penalty. Because, you know, in American context, that's a more radical statement than in ours. But as a I do not extrajudicially kill people.
Dia: Like I'm sorry, do you want random billionaires who cage fight to think they have the right to kill people? Because like, that's how you by Mark Zuckerberg.
Duck: Right, it's a personal rule against me doing extra judicial vigilante killings, which is a different thing to a universal moral rule that no one should ever die.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: And I think that nuance tends to drop out of discourse.
Dia: And it's also like just sort of even if it was a rule that no one should ever die I think that's an okay rule for people to have.
Duck: Right! I am not, to be clear opposed to the let’s not kill people rule
Dia: Yeah, I just like.
Duck: Society may have grown beyond the need for the death penalty. But
Dia: This is the like, I just I even like I think there are it's much more complicated than he personally is just not willing to kill people. But also even if it was that simple, I'm okay with that.
Duck: Right, I would not object to him having a not doing murders because murder is bad.
Dia: Anyway--
Duck: And not believing in the difference between like executions and murderers.
Dia: Anyway, we have gotten very far off track with this.
Duck: Off track and maybe cutting the whole… provoke everyone in the on the internet with death penalty discourse section.
Dia: Yes. Yeah, maybe might be a good idea. We'll see. It depends how much of me umming and ahhing you cut earlier, and how we’re doing for time.
Duck: Whether I need to leave in the death penalty discourse for time.
Dia: Well, now you're gonna have to leave it in because that was funny. Anyway, my point being, you can see how the DNA of superheroes in this universe is built on Spider Man and X Men and not on Superman and Wonder Woman.
Duck: Sure. you can say it's coming from Marvel rather than DC.
Dia: Yeah. But you can also say it’s not coming from Daredevil. You know what I mean?
Duck: That's fair. Yeah,
Dia: Dike spider man and X-Men
Duck: Are quite specific properties that the the people of the universe have picked to build their society upon.
Dia: Yeah. And this is the thing we the, the anime opens with. And I think it's not actually the opening of the manga, but it's very close. A reference to the phrase, not all men are created equal. And I learned this very young because I was quirkless , and everyone else had a quirk.
Duck: Mmhmm.
Dia: We're rolling back to wearing your themes on your sleeve. We are opening with the world is not fair. And very specifically, the world is not fair. And this is about America.
Duck: Yes, yes.
Dia: Exclusively.
Duck: The world. The world, which is not fair, is America. And it is not fair in these following ways.
Dia: The world, which is not fair, has based itself upon the central mythos of American existence.
Duck: Yeah. Which is an interesting set of choices to make when you find yourself in societal upheaval.
Dia: And this is not a universe that remade itself based on Superman. It's also not a real universe that remade itself based on Naruto, or Dragonball, it's a universe that remade itself based on Spider Man and X Men, which are the results of a couple of guys, like they have very overlapping early creative teams. Both of them were created well basically by a bunch of Jewish American comic book artists who wanted there to be more relatable superheroes.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: They come from very similar sources. And like I said, with the Star Wars stuff my academia is littered with references to Western canon inverted commas because this is Western canon expanded to include comic books. The main character’s superpower and Nemesis are called All for one on one for all.
Duck: Which is not subtle.
Dia: The places are named after Star Wars places, we open with American independence dot jpg.
Duck: Right. The specifically the myth of American independence.
Dia: This is a universe based on American culture. And I think this is me making a political point maybe a little bit sorry, but that’s not not relevant to the world we live in today, the way that societies across the globe are shaped around American narratives and myths.
Duck: Right I mean, you can't, because of where Hollywood is, and the status that English has as sort of the global lingua franca, which is itself a result of colonialism. But that's not the point. Between those two things. Everyone is aware of American culture, everyone gets American blockbusters, everyone is able to watch them pretty much. And they get translated into every language because Hollywood publishes everywhere. You can't not notice the MCU.
Dia: Yeah, and this the thing is, like Horikoshi has talked about the themes he focuses on, like, it's not like he's never discussed this topic. And he said, a lot like, he's interested in what makes heroes and talked about his emphasis on that being in like, friendship, determination, the idea that anyone can be a hero through having these virtues. And I do think that is a theme that is explored extensively, but it's a theme that’s explored extensively through narrative and not through worldbuilding, and the themes the world building set up are the flaws that are slipping through the cracks of a society built upon a myth and a story.
Duck: Yeah, it's all of the, um, the points where human behaviour does not match the broad strokes superhero myth.
Dia: Endeavour wants to have this story where his power conquers the above power, he can't determination and hard work and friendship his way through that. He has to do awful things to achieve his goal. And he does and he does. Shinsou is a character who exists in a world that is built upon a narrative where people like him are monsters.
Duck: Right, and everything in his life is based on either being that or reacting against that.
Dia: Yeah, there's no opt out. He can't just not be the bad guy character archetype because he is. That's the character that he is.
Duck: Yeah, he can, he can, sort of, very consciously and deliberately and with advertising, almost, he can subvert his archetype, but he will always be subverting his archetype and not just being a greengrocer.
Dia: Yeah, and this is why I'm going to leave us back to the first couple of episodes, the ones you have seen. One of the very first things we see from Katsuki, who it's been a while since I mentioned him, You do remember him blowing up stuff with his hands and his sweat.
Duck: Oh, nitroglycerine sweat.
Dia: Who I empathise with deeply on this horrendously hot day.
Duck: I hope it’s not explosive, but honestly…
Dia: We would be in trouble if my sweat….
Duck: I will not be that surprised because it is that hot.
Dia: It's so hot. One of the very first things we learned about this kid, okay, so we see him being kind of a bully in childhood and then we cut to present day he's in middle school he's applying to become a hero. He finds out that the kid with no superpowers is becoming a hero. And he threat-- he blows up his belongings, he announced suicide baits him. And specifically what he says is, I'm going to be a great hero, and great heroes have to have great backstories and I've decided that my backstory is that I was the first person from this shitty middle school to go to the best hero school in the country.
Duck: And therefore you can't come.
Dia: And therefore you cannot have what you want.
Duck: You can’t ruin my story.
Dia: To the extent that I will assault and threaten you and encourage you to kill yourself.
Duck: My backstory can encompass me basically murdering you, but cannot encompass being one of two first people to go to the cool school.
Dia: Yeah, because you can't have two superheroes with the same backstory. I mean, even the X Men eventually got different backstories.
Duck: Okay, but double act, I'm just saying be a double act. You can have a double x that has the same backstory.
Dia: Yeah but like one of them. That's the thing is the childhood clearly shows they were supposed to be a double act, but one of them didn't get a quirk.
Duck: Right.
Dia: And then that's the rules of the universe say, Well, now I have to be a superhero on my own. And I have to have the backstory planned for myself otherwise I can't have the narrative I planned for myself because we live in a universe based on narratives.
Duck: Right. We are constrained by narrative.
Dia: This is the thing with the Endeavour family, the Todoroki family, it's the thing with Bakugo, it’s even the thing with Hawks. They didn't see a kid and go, Hey, that's marketable. They saw the kid and went, Hey, that's fitting within the narrative that we have for superheroes that we have based our universe around.
Duck: Right. Not we can market this as a superhero. But we recognise this as a superhero based on the rules that we've internalised and what a hero is.
Dia: Exactly. And this is the thing with Stain is he's killing off superheroes he perceives as unworthy.
Duck: Based on that mysterious internal rubrics.
Dia: But. It's a job!
Duck: Right!
Dia: This is the thing is it's treated as a narrative.
Duck: they’re not freelancers.
Dia: But it's…
Duck: I mean, I guess they’re freelancers but they're not spiderman doing this in secret.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: There’s an official public ranking of superheroes. There's a school, there's a licence.
Dia: Why are you being a serial killer about it? Start a blog. Like that came from deep within I'm sorry.
Duck: That was heartfelt.
Dia: This is-- the guy who says that, like Yakuza aren't respected anymore, because there are quirks and therefore there are superheroes and therefore everyone cares about superheroes and villainy. These are all people who have bought into the idea that the universe is constructed on narrative, because it is.
Duck: Right, which is, because it is a piece of fiction and it almost knows that.
Dia: And that is, I said, again, I said, I'm saying a third time, that is the most po-- the most postmodern thing I've ever heard in my life. I'm just gonna say that whole sentence again. I've said it before I'm saying it again. That is the most postmodern thing I've ever heard in my life.
Duck: I buy it. Yeah. Okay. I’m sold, you know, you've convinced me.
Dia: Thank you. Maybe the paper notes was a good idea.
Duck: So, in conclusion.
Dia: I think I’ve redeemed myself from The Elder Scrolls.
Duck: We’ve learned that post modernism real and watch My Hero Academia to learn why.
Dia: Yes, and we've also learned that, a lot there are a lot of contenders for the role of defining postmodern text. I would nominate My Hero Academia as the one that should replace them on all university courses.
Duck: I support this. If only because I'm a troll.
Dia: Yes, I also think you should go and not necessarily watch, maybe read some like summaries of My Hero Academia, so I can send you some fanfiction links because oh my god, some of these pairings are so good. This is the problem with a well constructed on narrative is it gives you opportunities to really subvert the narrative.
Duck: Some of the narratives really have the juice.
Dia: You know when there's a narrative, and it's like, writing-y?
Duck: It does please me when that happens.
Dia: It’s so writing-y.
Duck: Should we roll some dice?
Dia: Let's roll some dice. Oh, hang on, have I taken out postmodern, no, sorry. You are gonna need to roll a 17 sided dice. I think that's normal to own.
Duck: Fortunately, I have the internet. I have rolled a 2.
Dia: Oh, psychoanalytic.
Duck: Oh, let's get Freudian.
Dia: Actually Freudian as a separate thing. This is non Freudian, psychoanalytic?
Duck: I'm not I'm not sure how clearly we delineated these.
Dia: So I think we decided to divide psychoanalysis into specifically Jungian, specifically Freudian meaning the, the, you know that kind of Freudian and then psychoanalytic meaning the rest of it, this is Freudian without sex.
Duck: Right, this is this is not, we're doing with we're doing formalised therapeutic psychology, but not the Oedipus stuff.
Dia: Yeah, the Oedipus stuff has its own category, because we thought we'd like to try both of them on for size.
Duck: I think we were probably right on that. How many works do we have?
Dia: Before we do that we need to decide whether or not My Hero Academia is going back in the bag.
Duck: I feel like you have more to say about My Hero Academia, and I am willing for more to be said
Dia: I definitely have more to say I skipped so much stuff.
Duck: Yeah, put it back in. Why not?
Dia: There are a whole like arcs and entire characters I didn't throw in. Okay, cool. So let's have a 101 sided die, please.
Duck: Ooh, and interestingly high number 85.
Dia: Ooh! Lightlark!
Duck: So I have I know very little about this. We had like a conversation or two about this. But from what we discussed, I think this is going to be a fascinating experience.
Dia: Oh God, we both have to read it now.
Duck: That is the downside of this experience that we're going to have, but I don't know. Maybe I'm speaking too soon. Maybe I'm gonna fall in love with this.
Dia: [plaintively] Oh God.
Duck: We are doing psychoanalysis of a Tiktok favourite and how can this possibly go wrong?
Dia: Well, thank you for listening. I hope you learned something about post modernism. I really hope you learned something about My Hero Academia, and come back next time to find out whether or not we accidentally fell in love with TikTok’s most hated book.
Duck: See ya!
Dia: Bye!
[exit music]
Duck: You've been listening to Analysis Roulette, a podcast applying a randomly selected mode of analysis to a randomly selected creative work, just to see what happens. Your hosts have been Dia and Duck. You can find us on Spotify or on YouTube, and if you'd like to get in touch you can send us an email at analysisroulette@gmail.com. And remember, if you like our show, share it with your friends, and if you don't like our show, share it with your enemies. Thanks.