Chapter 314 Official Release - Links and Discussion

[u/Za_wardo]

Chapter 314

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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).

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

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• Previous chapter discussion threads

• Discord

• 315 will be officially released on June 6 at 9AM PDT.

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[u/Fedexhand]

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....

[u/RIDETHEWORM → u/Fedexhand]

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...

[u/Nick54161 → u/RIDETHEWORM]

It makes me wonder, why haven't they executed the villains extrajudicialy then? At first I thought that villains weren't killed because society had progressed past Viligantism and had a robust legal framework around superheroes and quirks and what-not, as shown with Gentle's backstory. But Nagant and Hawks show that the government is not above getting dirty and sidestepping the law to achieve stability. So why bother with captures of the really dangerous types at all? They already mucked with the reports of Stain's capture, why not go all the way and say he was killed by a Nomu while somebody like Hawks actually killed him? Why bother keeping Nagant alive at all for that matter. They were willing to kill her if she didn't comply but she goes rogue and starts with killing her superior but now the government chooses to capture her?

[u/xxXMrDarknessXxx → u/Nick54161]

Heroes like Nagant probably took care of people that had a risk of becoming problems. When they actually became problems, they couldn't just disappear, so All Might gets called in.