My Hero Academia Season 6

Episode 128

Ha! You fools! You thought the action was over? That we were going to ease into a quieter story about picking up the pieces in the wake of this show's largest conflict? Maybe settle in for some depressing but important character moments to set up whatever story comes next among so much destruction? That's exactly what the villains wanted you to think! Mwahahahahahahaaaaaaaa!

Evil cackling aside, this episode's main battle makes a lot of sense, narratively speaking, even if it's unconventional. Anyone who's watched shonen battle series knows that if the big bad isn't defeated at the end of an arc, they nonetheless scamper off into the shadows and quietly rebuild, conveniently giving our heroes enough time to recover and possibly fit in a training are or two. But AFO isn't that nice, and since he lost most of the Liberation Army, it's only logical that he'd bolster his ranks by busting open the prison where his original body – and a collection of the country's most powerful villains – is waiting.

The battle itself is pretty cool, mostly because we get to see how deadly Shigaraki/All For One (Henceforth referred to as Y'all For One) is when he's not facing the dozen strongest characters in the show all at once. Even in a compromised state, he tears through Tartarus like a hot knife through butter. It's also pretty fun to see some returning faces, from one-offs like Muscular to some of the most influential villains in the whole story like Stain. We even get our first in-universe glimpse of the purple lady from the new OP! But what grabbed my attention the most is what the anonymous guard at Tartarus says right before the attack happens.

It makes sense that the kind of guy who'd want to work at a prison for supervillains would have a pretty dehumanizing view of his prisoners. Yet after getting so much focus on the inherent – even sympathetic – humanity of the story's villains in recent seasons, it's like getting splashed with cold water to see somebody insist that villains are “fundamentally different” from everyone else. It expresses an all too common simplification of crime and violence, insisting that criminals are criminals because they're criminals; it's just in their nature to be at odds with society at large, so there's nothing to be done but locking them up to keep them from bothering “normal” people. I can't be certain of what the series might be trying to say by elucidating such a philosophy from a guy who immediately gets clocked out and is never heard from again. Maybe it's just to put into words the implied prejudices that have surrounded so many of the show's villains, to make that conflict more concrete in viewers' minds. Either way, it caught my attention, and I'm familiar enough with MHA's storytelling to think it'll be important later.

What's important right now is that Y'all For One has effectively undone any positive gains the heroes might have made in the previous battle. Now the top heroes are largely incapacitated, the entire country is shaken by the devastation of this war, and countless new and old threats are out on the streets with nobody to stop them. It's an extra punch to the solar plexus that makes catching up with everyone in the hospital that much more demoralizing. The kids may have made it out alive, with most of them relatively unscathed, but once they leave there will be a far harsher world waiting for them. It's depressing, but also intriguing and uncharted territory for MHA at-large. For the first time, this isn't a world that loves and unilaterally trusts heroes – and I'm excited to see how the series will explore this new status quo.

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My Hero Academia is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.