Two anime-goers walk into an internet space and watch the latest episode of My Hero Academia and publish their thoughts for the world to see on each other’s blogs every week. Now that we’re up to speed, this is the latest edition of just that; please enjoy whatever concessions you chose to bring here. Just don’t make a mess. We’ll do that for you.
Karandi
Alright, while we’re still taking an exam I actually found this part of it a little interesting. We’re no long just watching our would be heroes beating people up but actually demonstrating that they are competent in emergency situations. It seems more like the work an actual hero should be doing and a significantly more useful thing to test for under the circumstances. It also hasn’t been given a strict cap for numbers to pass but rather the characters are getting points deducted when they make poor choices in the field which again feels like a more genuine form of examination for future heroes.
Conceptually at least, this episode works better for me. From a character point of view though it is all much the same with them all frantically wondering how to pass, messages about team-work and what have you and an annoying moment with Mineta and others harassing Midoriya before the test about the ‘naked’ girl from the first test. During that scene I just kept wondering if there wasn’t something better we could be focused on and the answer later on would be yes. The class split into groups during the rescue operation and while we get a few glimpses of their efforts it was actually a chance for some of the less combat focused characters to have a shining moment and it was utterly buried.
I should probably mention that the episode decided to give some time to Uraraka who is trying not to think about Midoriya but the task at hand. I’m normally all for Uraraka/Midoriya moments, but here is felt kind of forced in and didn’t really fit. Not to mention, it didn’t accomplish anything that we couldn’t have got with one look and yet the episode came back to it again and again.
Of course though we apparently can’t have an exam in a shounen that doesn’t require fighting of some sort, so as the kids are out in the field helping the trained victims one of the pro-heroes, Gang Orca, shows up with his gang to play the villain so now the kids will have to fight while rescuing and that’s more or less where the episode ends. Don’t expect a resolution to this next week though, because the preview kind of shows us we’re in for a filler week.
Honestly, this whole exam arc is remaining one of the low points of this series for me, but I definitely had more fun this week than in the previous couple of episodes.
Kapodaco
I am on the opposite end of the quality spectrum, though not by much.
I think this episode felt like it was going through the motions and little more. How are the students going to be judged for this contest? The people on the field are just going to wing it based on whether they feel safe or secure or not. That is way too subjective for me, and it shows with the short interaction between two hurt pedestrians and Bakugo, who essentially told them to get lost, and they ended up taking it as some deeper context for analyzing the situation. Funny as that may be, it’s super transparent that Bakugo can pass this while still being an asshole because plot armor. It’s dumb.
Though that means little now as I’m under the assumption that everyone will pass after last episode’s “controversial” ending (perhaps only to Karandi and I). The heroes are going off and doing their thing as the civilians tell them how to do their jobs (that’s convenient). As the episode progressed, I felt a mummed enthusiasm for what I was watching, but never really any more or less. As stated before, it felt as though the show was going through the motions, doing everything it needed to do to tell the characters’ stories and progress the test. Nothing exciting, nothing boring. It was there. Fine.
I’m intrigued by the “Todoroki has his father’s eyes” comment. I wonder when they’ll expand on that. Ochaco confronting, once again, her feelings for Midoriya are, as agreed with my fellow collaborator, forced here. It comes out of nowhere after the initial pestering by his classmates about how they saw him being draped upon by a naked woman, which I understand why they’d be freaking out, but after that it’s never brought up again. That breath of relief was spent on Mineta antics, a short Ochaco reflection, and Todoroki’s eyes, as well as a random conversation from another school’s student proclaiming they want a good relationship with U.A.’s student body. Wonder when they plan to expand on any of these…
Eh. I almost thought about putting that and nothing more, because that’s about the extent of how I feel about this episode. Hard to talk about anything because very little stood out today. It was eh. I expect the next episode to be eh. I expect everything to be eh until this testing period is over. Wow, now I know how the exam supervisor feels.
(To see all posts concerning this collab, check out my Collabs page!)
The Visualist's Veranda 
Reblogged this on 100WordAnime and commented:
Kapodaco and I watch heroic teens rescue fake civilian victims for the sake of passing an exam. Check out our post over on Kapodaco’s blog to see what we thought of My Hero Academia’s most recent offering.
I too, was underwhelmed by this episode, but I like it a lot conceptually. The idea of testing these up-and-coming heroes on actually saving lives and how they should be acting in emergency situations isn’t something I remember seeing elsewhere (aside from comic books, that is).
Regarding the Bakugo complaint, I thought the scene served as an interesting extra layer on top of the emergency situation test. To maximize effective life-saving and minimize time wasted, a hero should have a good eye for those who don’t need any more help or certain kind of attention that should be allocated to those more severely injured and in-need of aid. Bakugo, while brash and not the traditional kind of upstanding hero one may expect, is quite perceptive. I think he was the perfect choice to illustrate this sort of issue.
So while you could see it as *convenient* he happened upon the test civilians that he would be able to manage while still being himself, I choose to believe he went out of his way to look for those kind of individuals, because he probably thought no one else would even think of them, never mind actually be able to discern the whiners from the wounded.