please stan spinner

Hi! Very much enjoying your analysis, especially with Vigilantes :) Do you have any thoughts about my favorite character Sir Nighteye?

(This is me reacting to that introductory Bubble Girl scene and then to everything else.)

Thank you very much! I'm glad you're enjoying the Vigilantes rereads!

Sir Nighteye!!!  I love him!!!

Well, it must be said that my ardor has cooled somewhat in the wake of BNHA’s wretched ending, and especially the parts of the ending involving All Might being totes right and correct about everything, which does sadly drag down a lot of my feelings about everything connected to him.  Even in my days of Maximum Nighteye Love, I liked him in the knowledge that he believed a lot of things about All Might that I didn’t believe myself.  And that Bubble Girl scene is an exemplar of the kind of scene you have to train yourself to read past if you want to like a lot of the characters in this comic or indeed the comic itself.[1]

1: I’m speaking here less of awful things Horikoshi doesn’t want to grapple with the severity of lest it undercut the emotional arcs he wants to write and more of his gross sense of humor surrounding the objectification of women: the unspoken but nonetheless quite canon fact of Hagakure running around with no clothes on for the bulk of the series, the constant jokes about Mount Lady’s ass, the unseriousness with which Mineta’s actions are treated, and so on.

But that’s the sum total of my objections to the man, who I otherwise adore.

I love his design, the lanky businessman look and how it contrasts with All Might, his gimmicky throwing stamps, and the fact that he’s absolutely fucking shredded under the business suit.  I love his strict personality that masks how deeply his care runs for the people he’s close to.  I love his expressions, his body language, how his quirk activation makes his eyes change, the whole nine yards.

I also love how fraught his relationships are and the picture they paint of what his life is like.  His fractured bond with All Might is compelling, which is great from the perspective of a tragedy-appreciating reader like myself, but still so terribly sad.  His interaction with fellow Heroes suggests that he’s not super popular with his peers because they don’t really get what it’s like to live with the quirk he has.  His sidekicks respect him, but don’t seem terribly close to him on a personal level.

All in all, then, a fairly lonely portrait!  Except that then there’s Mirio - certainly Nighteye’s mentorship with Mirio began with him using the kid just to prove a point, but it so clearly developed, thanks to the strength of Mirio’s character, into something mutually rewarding and full of affection and respect.  Just like he is for Tamaki, Mirio is the sun in Nighteye’s life, and Mirio’s boundless admiration for Sir informs his heroism in ways that I in turn regard with far, far more admiration than I do the way All Might’s heroism informs Deku’s.

Mirio, remember, is capable of actually conversing with the people he fights!  He asks questions about his opponents’ motivations, about why they’re doing what they’re doing, and gives every impression of listening sincerely to the answers he gets, even if he doesn’t always understand them – we see him do it with Shigaraki, with Nemoto about Overhaul, and to a lesser extent even with Overhaul himself.  I sure as hell don’t think he learned that at U.A. and given that it’s something I think Heroes should be doing across the board, and that we see Nighteye himself engaging Overhaul in a similar conversation, albeit one more about Overhaul's actions than his motivations, I have nothing but respect for the kind of heroism we can assume Nighteye’s been teaching.

That said, I don’t think his author or his series respect him all that much, unfortunately.  To get more serious for a bit, Sasaki Mirai is exactly the kind of character whose way of doing things is distrusted by the hot-headed ethos shounen comics so often favor.  I’ve talked about this some before, both in passing and in a big way over in the essay about BNHA and Ur-Fascism, but Nighteye and Monoma are the characters who get treated the worst by BNHA as a result of its ideas about the absolute virtue of Unthinking Heroism.  Monoma just gets smacked down by the narrative for being too calculating, without his staking out a whole ideological stance on it, but Nighteye is a lot more explicit.

“You’re not so special as to be able to save who you want, when you want. (…) This world is not so accommodating that you can act the Hero because you feel like it.”  At the time I first read the Shie Hassaikai arc, back in my first read through BNHA, I was thoroughly enjoying BNHA’s gradual dissection of All Might’s Pillar ideology and how Deku was having to navigate said ideology.  These days, of course, I know that plotline goes less than nowhere, and I’m actively scornful of Midoriya Izuku.  On both counts, then, I love having someone around to tell Deku that his way of thinking is arrogant and that he’s a lot less capable than he thinks he is.

Deku never really comes around to Nighteye’s way of thinking – his meticulousness, his foresight, his thoughtful and thorough planning – and indeed, Nighteye dies recanting his belief that fate can’t be changed just because you want it to be.  In real life, though, I think someone with Nighteye’s methodology would be far more admirable, more likely to be successful in their endeavors, and able to save more people in the long run than someone who jumps in without thinking like Deku.

Deku and the manga containing him are driven by emotional reasoning that reserves heroism and its attempts to save people purely for those whom Deku can personally empathize with.  I believe quite strongly that personal empathy has no business being a defining factor in how government employees, law enforcement, et. al. treat criminals.  Personal empathy will lie to you.  Disgust should not be the basis for morality and it damn sure shouldn’t be the basis for the law.

Now, I’m not saying there should be no empathy involved in these things, or that every interaction should be driven by some utilitarian mindset focused on results.  Nighteye has a rational mindset focused on the best possible results, and this mindset is, crucially, anchored by a firm, clear morality based on the belief that saving people is a good and proper thing to do!  That moral center is incredibly important to make sure he doesn’t lose sight of the individual in pursuit of the big picture!  But Nighteye manages to balance both big picture planning and a mindfulness for individuals without – at least so far as I can recall – displaying the judgmentalness that is so overwhelmingly common in the other Heroes of the series.  And even if the manga doesn’t admire him for that, I sure do.

Also too, in the long run, even if the story had Nighteye recant and purported to vindicate its main character’s morality, I don’t think the story actually succeeded at proving Nighteye wrong?  You don’t have to look any farther than the results of the Shie Hassaikai raid compared to the second war.  The attack Nighteye planned ended with the albino abuse victim rescued, all of the yakuza arrested alive and in one piece, and with the only hero-side death being Sir Nighteye himself.  The attack Deku noticeably abstained from planning for at all ended with the albino abuse victim as well as several villains and heroic allies (in that Stain and Gigantomachia were fighting alongside Heroes in the end) dead.

(I'm aware that I'm being willfully obtuse with that summary.  Deku is the person who ultimately saved Eri and defeated Overhaul, after all, and he did so after Nighteye believed the whole plan had hit a Fate Dead End!  The second war, meanwhile, was planned out, just not by Deku himself.  All the same, it was Nighteye’s plan that put Deku in the raid to begin with, and his plan was, ultimately successful!  Nighteye passed away in a hospital bed perfectly at peace with the results.  Deku, by contrast, followed every order he was given and every personal impulse he felt, making no plans of his own, and it ended with him lying in a hospital bed haunted by his own failures and having to swallow All Might’s transparent sophistry if he was to feel any peace at all.  I maintain that the difference in the end results is crystal clear.)

Honestly, Nighteye is a better character than the story deserved, in the end.  I wish we could have had a version of BNHA that acknowledged the critical importance of his methodology while also taking it farther than he himself would have because he was limited by his belief in All Might as a Pillar, which I do think was unsustainable and needed to be replaced by a stronger, more wide-reaching foundation.  The story we have purported to give us the stronger foundation, but it only did so because it thinks Heroes deserve better than the immense strain of being pillars, not because it thinks pillars are ineffectual, and certainly not because it thinks Nighteye’s methodical and stoic approach balancing the need to save with the ability to save is the correct one.  A better story would have incorporated what Nighteye was right about, building on it even as it laid out why it was important for society to surpass All Might, not just replace him.

The fact that we don't have that story isn't Nighteye's fault, though, and so it doesn't detract from my feelings about the guy overmuch. As ever, I'm a lot more forgiving of flaws in BNHA's characters than I am flaws in BNHA's narrative, and if Nighteye and BNHA have some overlap in the flawed ways they view All Might's heroism, well, I'm a lot more willing to forgive the former than I am the latter.

(If only because I like All Might a lot better being shipped with Nighteye than I do him having a thematically ruinous mech battle with AFO.)

Thanks for the ask!

Good news; 2 more Advisors (Galvanize and Scarecrow) have names, Zoden aka Amplivolt XD (he takes after Ectoplasm/Earphone Jack) and the latter......from what I can find might be Takaya Kamigumo? Bad news: somehow Hose Face didn't make the cut?

(Apologies in advance for using this ask as a springboard to vent a little bit about things in the databook I like a lot less than canon MLA advisor names.)

I saw! A chat friend purchased a digital copy of the databook and shared all the pages we thought might be relevant. For any interested followers who haven't seen already, we got names(-ish) for these two:

Above is Vice Commander Zouden (増電副 隊長 Zouden fuku-taicho), with the zou meaning “increase, add,” and the den being the same “electricity” in Kaminari Denki’s name. I assume Zouden is either his surname or, less probably, his given name, not his codename. It doesn't match the MLA's codename patterns at all, but very much does match Horikoshi's tendency to explain peoples' quirks and/or personalities via the kanji of their real names.

Below is Kanigumo Takaie (可児雲 隆家), with a rather rare three-kanji family name! As a point of comparison, of the characters on Wikipedia's list of BNHA characters (an extensive if not fully comprehensive list which includes movie OCs, anime-original characters, and a handful of the Vigilantes cast), less than a tenth of those whose names contain kanji have three-kanji family names![1]

1: Twice has BNHA's longest family name, with Bubaigawara being written with four kanji, which I'm given to understand is quite rare irl.

It's a somewhat odd name, though, at least to my eye, and even accounting for the general oddness of BNHA's name schemes. For starters, the kanji in Takaie mean “prosperous house/family” – quite strange, given that Takaie is his given name, not his family name! 家 ie is not at particularly common in names regardless, but it's still far more likely to be found in surnames than in given names.[See Sidebar] In fact, I assumed, back when the table of contents leaked and my chat group and I were trying to figure out who on earth 可児雲隆家 was, that the 家 ie indicated an affiliation name of some kind, like a gang name or an ideological group like the CRC! It's not off-limits as a kanji for a given name, of course, but it's certainly unusual.

Meanwhile, Kanigumo is a slurry of kanji meaning, respectively, “can, approval, passable” (used in words to indicate e.g. a proposal passing or being in a state of approvability), “baby, child (of),” and “cloud”.  Looking just at the kanji in the context of how Horikoshi names characters, it makes very little intuitive sense to me as Scarecrow’s name. Indeed, one guess I saw made circa the leaks was that it was Hose Face's name, given that he has some sort of gas quirk, which would align with the presence of the “cloud” kanji.

That's looking just at the kanji, however. As it turns out, Horikoshi's punnery is there; it’s just not found in the kanji this time! Kanigumo, when written with the kanji 蟹蜘, means “crab spider” (not to be confused with spider crabs!), a common name typically referring to spiders in the family Thomisidae. They're non-web-spinning, ambush types with strong front legs and good camouflage techniques.  Scarecrow, appropriately, has those strong front legs (in that he has the big top-mounted pair of spider legs and no apparent additional limbs beyond the bipedal human body plan) and is never seen to produce silk,[2] though his ability to camouflage is uncertain.

2: Notably, most crab spiders can produce silk; they just use it for stuff like safety lines rather than for spinning webs. Dare I say, having a safety line might explain why Kanigumo was completely fine after Koda knocked him off the roof of a tall building.

Compared to Zouden's name kanji, it's striking how non-relevant basically everything in Scarecrow's name is other than the basic phonetic reading of his given name! To me, at least, so grain of salt for my non-fluency and all.

Rambling about the meaning and oddness of the name aside, though, it is a rather fortuitous entry for me, in that it’s very obviously a real name, not a code name, and the code name it was looking like he might have is nowhere in evidence!  That is to say, I'm pleased that I both got a real name out of it while not having my fan name of Scarecrow jossed and especially not having Scarecrow jossed in favor of the truly terrible Disgustas.

...

All that said, I must admit that I'm loath to treat anything in the new databook as hard canon because let me tell you, while I appreciate the new advisor names, it also came with some real hot nonsense. 

For starters, it included the original-to-the-anime misconception that Rikiya is Destro’s literal blood son, which makes me want to weep tears of blood for all that I’m no less willing to face Horikoshi and walk backwards into hell than I am Studio Bones.  It’s hysterical to me that the data book says this and the picture it uses from the manga to illustrate the statement is exactly the picture that makes it impossible for the statement to be true – the one of Rikiya as a very young child being confronted by a bunch of adult silhouettes who tell him that the MLA has been in hiding for multiple generations.  For all the reasons I laid out in the walk-backwards-into-hell post, that timeline just doesn’t work, quite on top of the way literally nothing in the manga itself nor the previous databook even suggested that it could be the case.

That’s all to say, it’s worth keeping in mind that Horikoshi helps compile these books, but he doesn’t write them.

As to other data book complaints, man, I remember quipping to my chat group friends that we were all so worried about what Horikoshi might do to the Villains on the way out the door that we weren’t even thinking about the sparkling array of options for new sexism.  I’m thinking here of the execrable reveal that Nana was the ignorant wife who knew absolutely nothing about her husband’s involvement with a secret group aiming to take down All For One right up until said husband was killed.  Also the nonsensical, dehumanizing ghost story about AFO and Yoichi’s mother from which AFO took the Shigaraki name – dehumanizing because it turns her into a story just like the Mother of Quirks, and in particular because it’s so lurid about it, and nonsensical because I just don’t believe a story like that would still be circulating years later, much less that a ghost story about a lonely dead prostitute would appeal to AFO at all absent the magic handwave of, “He’s her son and so it just Mysteriously Resonates with him.”

I probably had other quibbles and kvetches (the Ignorant Wife Nana reveal was not the only thing I hated in the Secret History of the OFA Bearers section, for one), but that’s probably enough off-topic venting for this post.  Thanks for the ask, @shockersalvage!

(P.S. It is weird that Galvanize/Taser Face/the dude who wiped out ignominiously in his very first speaking appearance got a name but Hose Face, with multiple speaking scenes and the murder of a named Heroic character under his belt - one who was (nominally) important to the 1-A kids, no less! - is still nameless. It's even weirder that we didn't get Geten's real name now that there's no need to hide the Himura connection, to whatever extent it would be apparent in the family name of a kid from a branch clan. What the hell.)