Visualist x100!! – My Hero Academia Season Three: Episode Nine

In spite of the huge cliffhanger adorned at the end of this episode, I don’t have too much to say about its entirety. Karandi will assume the position of lead analyst for this week as I try to catch up with the pace of my current Summer of Manga. Cue commentary!

Karandi

I ended up having to watch this episode twice because the first time left me kind of exasperated at the heroes. They busted in all big and tough and talking down to the villains about underestimating them, and then the tables went and got turned on them. So who really did the underestimating?

The second watch through doesn’t totally remove this impression but I can see where the heroes are coming from. As All Might points out, they worked hard with the police to identify the villains and their hideouts and come up with a plan, including using that really painful press conference. From the information they had they really had attempted to deal with the threat in a responsible manner including having the second strongest hero waiting on stand-by, just in case.

The turning point of the fight was kind of beyond their ability to predict and the threat didn’t come from any of the identified villains. That said, both All Might and Gran Torrino were aware of the possibility of All For One being involved but I’m not sure how many other members of the rescue know about his existence. This creates a bit of a problem going forward. Because either they knew and just underestimated, or All Might withheld critical information leading to yet another embarrassing loss and failure for the heroes.

Curious as to where they go with that next week.

As to the rest of the episode, it is pretty good. Bakugou gets to shout a lot, though gets cut off once again before he gets to do anything which I’m sure will upset him greatly, the other kids actually do stay out of the fight and are slightly traumatized by what they see, the heroes all do their hero thing and then lots of stuff blows up.

Part of me feels that because it was the heroes involved, I wasn’t quite as emotionally invested in the outcome of this fight and part of me always suspected that Bakugou wasn’t going to be rescued that quickly so there wasn’t a lot of shock this round. Still, it is a solid episode and there are lots of great individual moments, as well as some interesting developments thematically as this show continues to explore the nature of villains and heroes.

Kapodaco

Good that Karandi essentially wrapped up the episode without me having to say much. I don’t have a lot to add, regardless.

It was a decent episode. Pretty straightforward with what one can expect, though not quite as heavy as the last episode was. A basic continuation that still manages to hold anyone’s attention, even if the sudden turn of events at the end felt like it was too easily predictable. My only question is, if All For One was capable of doing all this now, why didn’t he do it before? Seems a little too convenient for the situation, hyping up the drama for the sake of it.

What’s to happen next? Hard to say. This is supposedly the Big Boss of the League of Villains, and with more than fifteen episodes left, they can’t possibly be intending to have a long, DBZ-esque fight that lasts that long… right?

(To see all posts concerning this collab, check out my Collabs page!)