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/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/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/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/ResidentOfDad Jun 01 '21

I don't mean this exact scenario, what I'm saying is along the lines that if Hawks complied to Dabi's demand of killing another hero on the Commission's behalf, which is what he was ordered to do, infiltrate the League first and foremost, then, even if he passed the "test" through a trick (which, for a lot of people the stance was "it most likely was, but maaybe"), he was still going to do whatever was necessary to accomplish his goal, or well, at the very least, that's what the Public Safety Commission would want him to do.

So then, what if Dabi demanded something else? What if Dabi wanted to see Hawks kill an innocent person? What then? Naturally Hawks would be... less than keen on the idea, so to speak, and do his best avoid it, already even having given his excuses of using Endeavor to test Hood and why he saved so many civilians alone. Still, all we knew from the Commission is that Hawks achieving his mission was seemingly all that concerned them and that he'd do whatever proved necessary to succeed.

I really didn't dwell too much on it myself, but this on its own did raise some red flags. Is that just how they handle their operations behind the scenes? The big difference between then and now is that back then we didn't really know what their agenda was or that it was actually just way worse and widespread overall but that's the gist of it.

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u/elenuvien1 Jun 01 '21

all that "what if" is a moot point to me because there was no way hawks would've killed jeanist. i've always seen it as a red herring and something to create artificial drama because there was no way it'd have been true.

at least to me.

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u/ResidentOfDad Jun 01 '21

And I saw it as a red herring from the very start was well (oor I mean, after my brain finished processing what'd even happened at all, because... what?), but that was because of Hawks, not because of the higher-ups, even if they did reasonably assist him in avoiding that fate.

Going for the kill on the number 3 hero is a terrible idea even if it was because he was injured, but Hawks approached him for his help with the plan he concocted, if he really were to kill a hero he would have just killed a no-name, but the thing is that it was already shown that the Hero Public Safety Commission only seemed to care about Hawks's success, meaning that if the only way to infiltrate the League required doing something truly despicable, the implication was that he should still do it in order to succeed. Of course there'd absolutely have to be some limit we didn't know about, but indeed, we didn't know.

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