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Entry tags:
- 365,
- bnha,
- miruko,
- misogynoir,
- spoilers
BNHA chapter 365: Miruko
Ever since the start of this arc I've been dreading what might happen to Miruko, and I need to get it off my chest, so I'm going to talk about it now despite the fact that events haven't concluded yet.
Needless to say, spoilers abound.
Being a buff brown woman myself, whenever I see one in any kind of media (a rare occurrence), I obviously feel delighted. Hence Miruko immediately becoming one of my favourites. I mean, look at her! Look how much butt she kicks! Apart from Endeavour and All Might, she's the only hero to take out a high end Nomu and she did it by tearing its head off with her thighs! And I'm a lesbian. How could I not love her?
I was disturbed to see her get maimed in her first major scene, but then she turns up again with these badass prosthetics. I became even more attached to her because she's now disabled. It means that I can draw and write fanwork about a badass disabled buff woman of color, and I have been getting a great deal of joy from that.
There are infinite able bodied cis het straight white male leads that I wouldn't give a toss about if they bit it. There's only one Miruko, so it would understandably be more upsetting to me if she died than any other given character.
So I had a sinking feeling when this latest arc started and she was facing off against Shigaraki, and as she's gotten steadily more beaten up during the fight that feeling has only gotten worse. In this latest chapter she loses her remaining arm, which compelled me to write this post.
I'm not a black woman, I don't experience misogynoir, so I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to speak on this. If I fuck up, please let me know.
Don't get me wrong: I love a character getting the shit kicked out of them, gritting their teeth through it and still rising to the top (I mean, The Raid 2 is one of my favourite movies, come on now). Especially when they're a woman who brute forces it, as Miruko is doing.
In this case, Miruko's not going to win - the heroes lost the war arc, and since she's facing Shigaraki, Deku is the one who has to win. She's not the main character, she's had two scenes with zero character development and, let's be real, you could cut Miruko out entirely and it wouldn't affect the story. In addition, in both of her fight scenes so far she's had limbs cut off, and the dialog isn't reassuring me that she's going to live.
Given all of Yoshinori's Miruko as Megan thee Stallion art, it's not a reach to say that Miruko is black-coded. So, to me, the combination of her lack of character development and the injuries she suffers implies misogynoir at work (and even if she wasn't intended to be black and Yoshinori's art didn't exist, her treatment as the only woman of color in BNHA deserves scrutiny). None of the female characters get great character development, but their deaths - and therefore their presumably gruesome injuries - have all happened off-screen (Nana, Midnight) or been stylized to the point that we're not confronted with the violence as directly (Curious).
Miruko is the only character in the whole series to face this level of injury, and for them all - the leg getting pierced and the arms getting warped/bitten off - to appear on panel in graphic detail. To my knowledge, the runner ups are Jirou's jack getting torn off and Aizawa losing an eye and cutting off his own leg. Other injuries are more stylized (Deku and All Might's blood sprays leap to mind), or are over the top enough to have less impact (Nighteye getting impaled.) Even when Bakugou is allegedly dying over there, his injuries are much more stylized - there's a lot of messy inkwork.
The 'black women are stronger and feel no pain' narrative is still a structural reality, notably in the medical field, in which it was used as justification for a history of horrific human rights abuses against black women specifically. In media, there are plenty of damaging anti-black representations and tropes, including the Strong Black Woman. When the black coded character in the manga I'm supposed to be reading "for fun" is powering on despite losing limb after limb after limb, I can't help but feel unsettled. It could have been anybody that suffered this level of injury, but it was Miruko. Why?
I don't know the answer exactly and I'm sure someone better versed in this topic could articulate it better - that, or tell me I'm making something out of nothing? But as I've been reading these panels, I feel weird, like I'm witnessing someone's satisfaction at hurting a black female body. It doesn't sit quite right with me and I think it's more constructive to interrogate that than downplay it. I will acknowledge (grudgingly, because it's such a low bar to set) that, even though she's wearing a leotard and thigh highs, she's not overly sexualized in this sequence. The violence isn't sexualized in the way that, say, some panels of Mount Lady in the war arc were.
It's just so disappointing to see a unique character like this get a special kind of fucked up, but without the payoff of getting to be the hero in the end (she is, after all, still a secondary character, in terms of panel time if not story importance). She didn't have to be maimed to show how tough she is - it's possible to show a character getting violently fucked up in other ways, as we've seen BNHA do many times already. Was it really necessary?
As previously mentioned, she's had no character development. Sure, we're all very attached to her, but we have zero context for why she's doing this other than a sentence about her disdain for agencies and a few sentences about how she wants to have no regrets when she dies. Her death wouldn't carry much meaning beyond someone cool and hot dying to show how hard the villain is. I could try to link it to the 'no-agencies' thing, but again, there's so little to work with there that the mental gymnastics aren't worth the effort. Also [sarcastically], killing off 100% of your WoC characters may be satisfying for some, but doesn't really do it for me.
I was actually on board with Bakugou getting killed. I thought it was a brave and surprising move for Hori to kill off a fan favourite, and it would carry a better kind of emotional weight for me because of all the character development he's gotten and how deeply entwined his story is with Deku's. I could only imagine Deku's reaction when he finally showed up, and honestly, I was looking forward to seeing how it would affect him. But now, if Miruko dies so that Bakugou can have his plot armor? It will sting.
Part of the reason I like BNHA so much is that many of its storylines emphasize the importance of not sacrificing yourself, to instead choose connection and life.
All Might's character arc has been about how important it is to not destroy himself, so he can properly mentor Deku. His first appearance and the reveal of his true form shows how much he's suffered from sacrificing himself, and paints it as horrific, not heroic. One of the most important moments of the show for me was when Inko told him not to die for Deku, but to live for him - and to see All Might actually take that message to heart.
We had a whole arc about Deku learning not to isolate himself and finally rely on others, in which the whole class came to bring him back. We've had Endeavour suffering and doing the hard work of making amends for his shitty parenting, when so many bad dads in media throw their hands up and say, "sorry pal, I've been a bad dad. Guess I'll die!"
(We've had a slew of generational trauma movies this year with parents admitting their mistakes and trying to do better, so to me, the sacrifice no longer reads as heroic: it reads as a meta excuse for fathers to avoid doing the hard work of parenting their children. But that's a whole other topic.)
So it feels jarring that, in these last few chapters, there's a shift towards the heroes having to give up their lives for the next generation. Duty, sacrifice, yadda yadda, all that. Look, I get it, they are fighting the big bad, but pals, I've seen that before and I am tired of it. It would be more moving, to me, if the heroes doubled down their efforts to live, because furious and enraged at the thought that their future with these kids might be taken away from them. Not because of the moral obligation of martyrdom, but because they deserve to have the adults be there for them. And I fully believe it's possible for Horikoshi to conclude this manga in a satisfying way, showing how much the heroes struggled, without killing off any more characters.
I'm hesitant about posting this more publicly, because BNHA isn't resolved yet and everything I say might end up being wrong. I'm also worried about being accused of overreacting or reaching for the misogynoir section, or taking it too seriously. Is it even my place to talk about misogynoir? On the other hand, I can't be the only person thinking this, surely. I'm considering posting these thoughts somewhere more people will see them because, apart from anything else I spent a long ass time writing this when I should've been doing other things.
Needless to say, spoilers abound.
Being a buff brown woman myself, whenever I see one in any kind of media (a rare occurrence), I obviously feel delighted. Hence Miruko immediately becoming one of my favourites. I mean, look at her! Look how much butt she kicks! Apart from Endeavour and All Might, she's the only hero to take out a high end Nomu and she did it by tearing its head off with her thighs! And I'm a lesbian. How could I not love her?
I was disturbed to see her get maimed in her first major scene, but then she turns up again with these badass prosthetics. I became even more attached to her because she's now disabled. It means that I can draw and write fanwork about a badass disabled buff woman of color, and I have been getting a great deal of joy from that.
There are infinite able bodied cis het straight white male leads that I wouldn't give a toss about if they bit it. There's only one Miruko, so it would understandably be more upsetting to me if she died than any other given character.
So I had a sinking feeling when this latest arc started and she was facing off against Shigaraki, and as she's gotten steadily more beaten up during the fight that feeling has only gotten worse. In this latest chapter she loses her remaining arm, which compelled me to write this post.
I'm not a black woman, I don't experience misogynoir, so I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to speak on this. If I fuck up, please let me know.
Don't get me wrong: I love a character getting the shit kicked out of them, gritting their teeth through it and still rising to the top (I mean, The Raid 2 is one of my favourite movies, come on now). Especially when they're a woman who brute forces it, as Miruko is doing.
In this case, Miruko's not going to win - the heroes lost the war arc, and since she's facing Shigaraki, Deku is the one who has to win. She's not the main character, she's had two scenes with zero character development and, let's be real, you could cut Miruko out entirely and it wouldn't affect the story. In addition, in both of her fight scenes so far she's had limbs cut off, and the dialog isn't reassuring me that she's going to live.
Given all of Yoshinori's Miruko as Megan thee Stallion art, it's not a reach to say that Miruko is black-coded. So, to me, the combination of her lack of character development and the injuries she suffers implies misogynoir at work (and even if she wasn't intended to be black and Yoshinori's art didn't exist, her treatment as the only woman of color in BNHA deserves scrutiny). None of the female characters get great character development, but their deaths - and therefore their presumably gruesome injuries - have all happened off-screen (Nana, Midnight) or been stylized to the point that we're not confronted with the violence as directly (Curious).
Miruko is the only character in the whole series to face this level of injury, and for them all - the leg getting pierced and the arms getting warped/bitten off - to appear on panel in graphic detail. To my knowledge, the runner ups are Jirou's jack getting torn off and Aizawa losing an eye and cutting off his own leg. Other injuries are more stylized (Deku and All Might's blood sprays leap to mind), or are over the top enough to have less impact (Nighteye getting impaled.) Even when Bakugou is allegedly dying over there, his injuries are much more stylized - there's a lot of messy inkwork.
The 'black women are stronger and feel no pain' narrative is still a structural reality, notably in the medical field, in which it was used as justification for a history of horrific human rights abuses against black women specifically. In media, there are plenty of damaging anti-black representations and tropes, including the Strong Black Woman. When the black coded character in the manga I'm supposed to be reading "for fun" is powering on despite losing limb after limb after limb, I can't help but feel unsettled. It could have been anybody that suffered this level of injury, but it was Miruko. Why?
I don't know the answer exactly and I'm sure someone better versed in this topic could articulate it better - that, or tell me I'm making something out of nothing? But as I've been reading these panels, I feel weird, like I'm witnessing someone's satisfaction at hurting a black female body. It doesn't sit quite right with me and I think it's more constructive to interrogate that than downplay it. I will acknowledge (grudgingly, because it's such a low bar to set) that, even though she's wearing a leotard and thigh highs, she's not overly sexualized in this sequence. The violence isn't sexualized in the way that, say, some panels of Mount Lady in the war arc were.
It's just so disappointing to see a unique character like this get a special kind of fucked up, but without the payoff of getting to be the hero in the end (she is, after all, still a secondary character, in terms of panel time if not story importance). She didn't have to be maimed to show how tough she is - it's possible to show a character getting violently fucked up in other ways, as we've seen BNHA do many times already. Was it really necessary?
As previously mentioned, she's had no character development. Sure, we're all very attached to her, but we have zero context for why she's doing this other than a sentence about her disdain for agencies and a few sentences about how she wants to have no regrets when she dies. Her death wouldn't carry much meaning beyond someone cool and hot dying to show how hard the villain is. I could try to link it to the 'no-agencies' thing, but again, there's so little to work with there that the mental gymnastics aren't worth the effort. Also [sarcastically], killing off 100% of your WoC characters may be satisfying for some, but doesn't really do it for me.
I was actually on board with Bakugou getting killed. I thought it was a brave and surprising move for Hori to kill off a fan favourite, and it would carry a better kind of emotional weight for me because of all the character development he's gotten and how deeply entwined his story is with Deku's. I could only imagine Deku's reaction when he finally showed up, and honestly, I was looking forward to seeing how it would affect him. But now, if Miruko dies so that Bakugou can have his plot armor? It will sting.
Part of the reason I like BNHA so much is that many of its storylines emphasize the importance of not sacrificing yourself, to instead choose connection and life.
All Might's character arc has been about how important it is to not destroy himself, so he can properly mentor Deku. His first appearance and the reveal of his true form shows how much he's suffered from sacrificing himself, and paints it as horrific, not heroic. One of the most important moments of the show for me was when Inko told him not to die for Deku, but to live for him - and to see All Might actually take that message to heart.
We had a whole arc about Deku learning not to isolate himself and finally rely on others, in which the whole class came to bring him back. We've had Endeavour suffering and doing the hard work of making amends for his shitty parenting, when so many bad dads in media throw their hands up and say, "sorry pal, I've been a bad dad. Guess I'll die!"
(We've had a slew of generational trauma movies this year with parents admitting their mistakes and trying to do better, so to me, the sacrifice no longer reads as heroic: it reads as a meta excuse for fathers to avoid doing the hard work of parenting their children. But that's a whole other topic.)
So it feels jarring that, in these last few chapters, there's a shift towards the heroes having to give up their lives for the next generation. Duty, sacrifice, yadda yadda, all that. Look, I get it, they are fighting the big bad, but pals, I've seen that before and I am tired of it. It would be more moving, to me, if the heroes doubled down their efforts to live, because furious and enraged at the thought that their future with these kids might be taken away from them. Not because of the moral obligation of martyrdom, but because they deserve to have the adults be there for them. And I fully believe it's possible for Horikoshi to conclude this manga in a satisfying way, showing how much the heroes struggled, without killing off any more characters.
I'm hesitant about posting this more publicly, because BNHA isn't resolved yet and everything I say might end up being wrong. I'm also worried about being accused of overreacting or reaching for the misogynoir section, or taking it too seriously. Is it even my place to talk about misogynoir? On the other hand, I can't be the only person thinking this, surely. I'm considering posting these thoughts somewhere more people will see them because, apart from anything else I spent a long ass time writing this when I should've been doing other things.
no subject
At the beginning of this arc when I saw her flying in, disabled but completely undeterred from fighting the villains, it felt really inspiring. It made me feel like all those injuries and violence against her in the previous arc meant something, it showed strength and determination when she bounced back with those prosthetics ready to fight again. She had her low point, now she's back at a high point. There wasn't particular character development, but at the very least she was cool and inspiring.
But then this.... it's just re-doing the same thing as the previous arc, but worse. Her possible resolutions are either dying (sacrificing herself for Bakugo and the other heroes, furthering that self-sacrifice message you outlined that was countered in the beginning of the story), or just doing the same thing over again where she loses more limbs but comes back strong later.... which okay but we already did that? We got the picture already. To be anything different I feel like we'd need a proper backstory/character arc which this feels like a resolution for... and there is just none.
It also feels like SO little dignity in this chapter. On one hand a person could be like "No this is empowering, bc it's showing how strong she is always getting up even after losing limbs! Women should be allowed to fight and be messy! Being so dedicated she's willing to tear herself apart to fight!" but looking at the actual drawings and the story context it's like... there's not really a build up that makes a reader particularly cheer for her. Even something like the Jirou losing her earjack, at least she was going through a "I've gained the confidence to fight harder!" arc and we had time to get emotionally invested in her throughout the story, so the injury hit like "Oh shit this kid who just gained her confidence lost half her quirk" so it increases investment.
This further violence towards Miruko doesn't really increase investment at this point... we haven't learned anything new about her, she's not fulfilling a role that couldn't be fulfilled by any other combat-oriented pro-hero, it really just feels like an excuse to look at a black woman being torn apart. When she bounces around armless it doesn't feel like a powerful moment that was built to, it just feels like Horikoshi wanted to draw a girl with no arms going feral. It's really just making her body and the ways it's torn apart the only interesting thing about her, and it makes me feel like she just doesn't get to keep her dignity like literally all other characters in this arc have.
I also have hopes that maybe future chapters will recontextualize or something good will come out of this arc with her (for example last arc when she lost her limbs I did despair a bit, but her triumphant return as a disabled hero was a compelling direction to go!), maybe we'll finally get a chapter flashing back to her childhood or something (Hell even Edgeshot/Jeanist at least got a panel implying something about their history/relationship that at least gave hints of complexity and depth, would it kill Horikoshi to give us a panel of backstory on why Miruko is so gung ho on violence?), maybe the arc will end and Eri will reverse all her injuries, maybe she'll just die entirely like Edgeshot, perhaps even offscreen like Nemuri, with no narrative weight or significance beyond telling the reader "wowee that shigaraki sure is a powerful big baddie"
(Sorry for the negativity I'm also somewhat bitter about this direction so I'm sort of spilling it all over your comments section XD who knows maybe Horikoshi will surprise us with a twist that makes it all necessary and meaningful, but after Nemuri's death and Nagant's death(?) I really don't feel confident in his treatment of women, much less one that he literally just treats as a body to toss around and show brutality on)
no subject
And it's genuinely so miserable because what is there to look forward to? Mt. Lady getting put in a neck brace? Mina getting upstaged by Kirishima? Midnight dying (temporarily repressed that and had to edit it back in), Ryukyu accomplishing nothing but getting beaten up by Shigaraki? Miruko getting maimed? Then Lady Nagant getting blown to bits. Then Star getting disintegrated. Then Miruko getting maimed again?? What's the point, and what other female character is he going to do dirty next? It's genuinely so depressing to think about and it's so grim. Ochako and Mina still might get moments fighting Toga and Machia respectively, but after all this it's so hard to be optimistic about that.
I am expecting him to kill Miruko at this point, but even if he doesn't, or if Eri rewinds time and restores her limbs, the damage has been done. And if he does job her, I'm expecting it to be in some awful, dehumanizing way. It all makes me want to chew the furniture because, like you, I thought it was a really cool moment when she came back with her prosthetics and jumped into action. What a letdown.
otoh I've had this 'shonen for lesbians' webcomic idea kicking around in my head for awhile and I'm going to start it by the end of the year if it kills me. And I stg, after this chapter, I'm going to put a buff bunny girl in there out of spite.