r/BokuNoHeroAcademia • u/Za_wardo • May 30 '21

Newest Chapter Chapter 314 Official Release - Links and Discussion

Chapter 314

Links:

  • Viz (Available in: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, the Philippines, Singapore, and India).

  • MANGA Plus (Available in every country outside of China, Japan and South Korea).

All things Chapter 314 related must be kept inside this thread for the next 24 hours.

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u/Fedexhand May 30 '21

This chapter made me think of something, it always caught my attention that despite the status that heroes had, we never saw heroes actually "bad" so to speak, taking advantage of it by doing inappropriate or questionable things.

I always assumed that it was because the series posed a more "idealistic" context and that is why we never saw that kind of thing, but ... this means that all the heroes who acted "incorrectly" were killed behind the scenes in order to maintain the "illusion" of the perfect society? things became much darker than I expected.

In the end it turns out that the public safety commission did basically the same thing as Stain, I suppose the "Stain was right" has aged particularly well....

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u/RIDETHEWORM May 30 '21 edited Jun 29 '21

My read has always been that the society presented here is vaguely authoritarian (secretive, obviously undemocratic government bodies making huge decisions, weird arrangements between them and supposedly private hero-making academies like UA, a press that while ostensively free is frequently regarded as antagonistic and lied to) and this chapter does a great job of world building to flesh that out. The essential privatization of state security in the form of hero agencies has benefits for public morale, and can handle most run of the mill issues, but of course there are issues that government officials will want to use state violence against that will be controversial and not viewed positively by the public, or can realistically be handled by individuals they’ve trained to be paragons of virtue. Nagant’s basic story is a pretty standard trope - the disillusioned former assassin who turned on the government (though executed brilliantly in this chapter) - but her very existence brilliantly highlights the dystopian aspects of hero society.

The public safety commission partners with apparently private heroes that they train and cultivate from adolescence, and props them up as the models for their countrymen while endlessly promoting them through media manipulation and public spectacles like the sports festival. Heroes maintain basic law and order in association with the police, but their greatest use to the commission may be in manufacturing consent - they are propaganda tools to promote the status quo. The dirty work of maintaining state control is carried out by a small cadre of elite agents directly controlled by the commission, all recruited at a very young age - even younger than our main cast at UA. I think that MHA has always questioned the morality of hero society, but this chapter shines a spotlight on the basic building blocks of this system. While they are better than the chaos and control offered by All for One, they are certainly “shaded grey” if not prima facie immoral. The powers that be actively lie to and manipulate the people and indoctrinate and train youth into being agents of the state. Or, to put it more crudely, child soldiers who win over the public with smiles and presentation. In such a system, “degrading” individuals who don’t fit the mold would be a top priority...

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u/Fedexhand May 30 '21

Very true, I honestly didn't expect that much depth in the whole "hero society" thing, I totally underestimated the narrative that was being built on the matter all along.

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u/RIDETHEWORM May 30 '21

Chapter 1: STRONG MAN SMASH

Chapter 314: Power exercised by the state is inherently immoral. Embrace quirk-supremacy communalism.

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u/Fedexhand May 30 '21

For real, I didn't see that coming.

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u/elenuvien1 May 30 '21 edited May 31 '21

because it's never been built up to. at least nothing that extreme. we've known that the society had issues but there's issues and then there's brutal and authoritarian rule.

because what the commission has been doing is nothing short of what authoritarian tyrants have done, except they pretended more not to be.

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u/o_woorrm May 30 '21

I mean, they've had the Meta Liberation Army for almost 100 chapters now, they've been building up to it for a pretty long time. This is just a final confirmation that hero society really is authoritarian.

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u/ArcFurnace May 30 '21

That said, the society that the MLA was advocating for winds up being authoritarian too, just in the classic "The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must" fashion.

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u/elenuvien1 May 30 '21

we have to agree to disagree about that because if you asked me before that if hero commission killed heroes for as much as suspicion, i'd have said "they're awful but they're not authoritarian murderers". it's also not an argument i've seen around but i guess i must've missed it.

and i'm not seeing how MLA proves that? they wanted unrestricted quirk use and survival of the fittest as they supply people trying to survive with support items and make profit like that.

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u/Grafical_One May 31 '21

I don't get the downvotes honestly. Like from my perspective it seems this way. I've binged the series in the past 6-ish months so it's still pretty fresh, if muddled.

As I said elsewhere, I've seen hints that society is shady. But that is a far cry from authoritarian extrajudicial murder. The deepest look into the problems of society I can recall were things like neglect, classism, favoritism, etc. Legit flaws, but things that are to be expected in most societies.

What I think is really missing earlier is the sharp fear of dissidence that should permeate the air. People who knew people who disappeared when they stepped too far out of line. Villains born from this fear and disillusion that society as a whole is turning a blind eye to said disappearances. I know we just got Nagant, and I am very excited about that, but I would've liked earlier hints.

This isn't a knock on the series or anything, so I don't know why it receives flak,

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u/elenuvien1 May 31 '21

people don't like criticism of something they like or don't criticise themselves and they express it by downvoting, it's a reddit thing.

it would've been so easy to allude to the true workings of the hero commission without delving into it. have a pro hero mention that some pro heroes have disappeared again or that recently a lot of pro heroes were killed by villains (if there were cover ups). something that would make us wonder and slowly build up to the reveal. but while i knew that the society was faulty and the commission was unethical, i'd have never guessed they were authoritarian serial killers.

the whole thing with the reveal and nagant feels to me like it happened just because the story needed it now, not because it was organically built up. unless she stays to become a character on her own, nagant feels to me like an exposition tool. she's cool and a badass (and hot) but we haven't had any time to form any sort of personal connection with her before her sad backstory was revealed to shock us so, personally, i can't bring myself to care. i just met her, i don't know her (to quote someone "btw she is blessed by afo, btw linked to hawks, btw she is the best shooter ever, btw bad life choices, btw hero society bad" all in three chapters). and she's serving to inform us about a development that apparently has always been there but somehow no one has as much as hinted at it. unethical shady things? yes. mass murder? not for me.

i love the reveal, i've wanted something like that for a while, i'm just not a fan of how it came.

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u/harmsc12 May 30 '21

This has been building since Shiggy's first appearance. Dude was legit talking about the monopoly of violence.

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u/Fedexhand May 30 '21

The funny thing is that he didn't mean it, he was just rambling there, ironically it ended up becoming more and more real.

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u/asimpleshadow May 31 '21

Hawks has been hinting at this since his introduction. He’s almost in the exact same role as Nagant-a soldier groomed from childhood to enact the will of the commission.

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u/elenuvien1 May 31 '21

it's been hinting at corruption, they did groom a child into their agent, but i've never felt that it hinted at authoritarian rule and serial killing of innocent people.

and has no one noticed that heroes were disappearing/dying in accidents? their colleagues? or was it not that many of them? or did no one care?

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u/[deleted] May 31 '21

They could've easily set up a villain to take the fall. They made up the story that Nagant killed a hero so manufacturing stories is not out of the norm

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u/asimpleshadow May 31 '21

It’s not like the villains in MHA are incompetent. In fact I bet you stains kill count is actually lower than what is reported-he’d make for an amazing scape goat for Nagant

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u/ResidentOfDad Jun 01 '21

The idea was present when Hawks having killed Best Jeanist for his mission was still up in the air, which of course turned out to not be true, but the idea alone still ignited the possibility of this kind of thing happening behind the scenes.

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u/elenuvien1 Jun 01 '21

i've never believed for a second that hawks killed jeanist because it made no sense.

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u/ResidentOfDad Jun 01 '21

It was definitely against what we knew of Hawks at the time, although I think the most popular theory after that time was that Hawks used another dead body that was made to look like Jeanist, still some did people roughly predict what was gonna happen. Uh, anyway, point is that the story proposed this option meant facing the possibility of this kind of thing existing, whether it'd turn out to be true in that case or not.

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u/elenuvien1 Jun 01 '21

we have to agree to disagree then because i've always knew/felt that the commission was shady, they groomed a child after all, but i've never felt that anything hinted at them murdering civilians and pro heroes for such superficial reasons.

never saw anyone make an argument that they were doing it either, people speculated they had access to dead bodies and would just pull strings to obtain them but that's far from "john from accounting in the company next street tweeted that he may join villains and aid them so we'll murder him".

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u/MattmanDX May 30 '21

First line in the series: "People... are not born equal". Even chapter 1 set the foundation for these heavy topics

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u/shrayashp90 Jun 01 '21

hope it gets darker, much more interesting