Not a cat

[Image Description: A map of the fictional planet Osmos V, a planet comprised of mostly land with a scattering of inland seas, the two largest of which could each fit all of the smaller seas with room to spare. The topography of the planet is shown with colors ranging from dark green to red-orange with large areas of green denoting low-lying regions and warmer colors showing higher and higher elevations. Around most bodies of water are patches denoting areas that receive regular rainfall, with brighter shades denoting rain and dark denoting heavy rain- red for northern hemisphere summer, blue for northern hemisphere winter, and raspberry where the two overlap. All together, the rainfall zones take up at maybe 20% of the map. /End description]

Hey! Look! Osmos V has precipitation maps now! So, ya know, if you were ever wondering 'but just how dry is this desert planet'... Pretty fucking dry. If it ain't a shade of red or blue, it's fucking dry.

Mad Ben's world? Everyone else is struggling but Kevin and Manny are sat there in the sunshine like nothing's up playing fucking Go Fish.

Help my friend Mohammed. He's a young man in uni who has lost family,friends,housing,his beloved deaf cat,has narrowly survived being massacred & still remains kind & determined amidst the genocide inflicted upon Palestine by the occupation.

This is Mohammed's cousin Arkan, who is taking care of his immediate family & trying to get the funds to resume his med school studies. He's an incredibly kind man & a very close friend of Mohammed's.

This is the husband of Mohammed's sister who is trying to keep his own little ones alive amidst hell. Please help.

Cowardly move by Horikoshi to not allow blond tintin to wipe the floor with Bakugou and Shouto.

For Bakugou, he needed to reality check in that he needed to learn that there is value in life besides victory. I would argue part of the reason Bakugou's growth is so slow is because he never loses as people learn more from their failures than their successes.

For Shouto, it would be interesting to see how he would handle an opponent immune to large displays of power. Fighting Mirio requires a level of precision that Shouto just didn't have at this point. It could have given him the motivation to work on more pinpoint attacks before the Endeavor Agency Arc.

On another note, this little interaction shows how stuck Aizawa gets on first impressions. Izuku isn't the only Class 1A student Aizawa doesn't understand. He also just doesn't get Shouto. He assumed Shouto's goal was to be number one hero. Yet, since the sports festival, Shouto has never expressed a desire to be number one. Shouto's goals at this point were to understand who he wants to be outside of his father's designs, work on cooperating with others, and compete with his friends to be the best hero he can be. Shouto also wasn't that calm about failing the licensing exam. He was clearly upset with the results but was understanding of why he failed. He just didn't throw a tantrum in the middle of the night like Bakugou.

Assuming Mirio started working with Sir Nighteye at the beginning of his second year, then Mirio's had been doing his work study a year and a half. The Overhaul Arc takes place in the beginning of UA's second term. And the earliest time hero students typically took the provisional license exam was before their second year, so that is the earliest Mirio could have started.

If Sir Nighteye had Mirio intern with him after his first sports festival, he might have had this scheme to make Mirio the One for All successor for the past two years or so. This timeline seems accurate since Nedzu made his offer to have Mirio be the successor before All Might met Izuku.

All Might chose Izuku around 15-16 months prior to this point in the timeline (10 months training and then half the school year). So All Might started training Izuku around the same time Sir Nighteye began working intensively with Mirio beyond a brief internship.

This timeline adds a few layers to Sir Nighteye's frustration with All Might. Also, what's interesting is that despite his concerns with All Might maintaining his legacy, Sir Nighteye also waited until the last minute. Sir Nighteye wanted a readymade successor that could take over as symbol immediately. He knew about the prophesy concerning All Might's death for the past 6 years. But based on the most probable timeline, Sir Nighteye waited 3-4 years before starting his attempted successor scheme.

Nedzu's analysis of what All Might was looking for was rather surface level. On the other hand, All Might probably gave him zero guidance for what he was looking for in a successor.

Always smiling and making a space where others can laugh isn't all there is to All Might's ideals. All Might was a change to the system as it existed when he was young. He had a vision for something new and implemented it. He had the spirit of self-sacrifice from a young age and attempted to save everyone that he could reach.

Mirio lacks vision. Despite his flighty demeanor, Mirio has grounded realistic goals that fit neatly within the existing system. He did not believe it was possible to save everyone. He had no critique of the status quo. Izuku, without meaning to do so, challenged All Might's views on heroism when they first met. Mirio on the other hand was a safe pick that no one would oppose because he would change nothing.

This is the first time Izuku had his mask on after declaring that Deku means "you can do it!" in the Battle Trials. This immediately precedes Izuku's first time he failed to save someone in front of him.

And Mirio was the one who put on Izuku's mask - creating a barrier between Izuku and Eri and preventing the save.

Eri still felt a moment of safety here because she felt that Izuku had gentle hands even though Mirio prevented face to face communication. Mirio on the other hand refused to make any contact with her during this exchange. Beyond that, he never even looked at her. Generally, when a BNHA character has a costume with a visor that covers the eyes it usually means one of two things: (1) they are hiding their true intentions or (2) they aren't seeing the people right in front of them who need help.

The former applies to Hawks and Aoyama. The latter is for characters like Mirio or Iida. Iida became so focused on his revenge he didn't see another hero in peril right in front of him. Mirio was so preoccupied with doing things correctly for Sir Nighteye that he didn't even look at the suffering child before his eyes.

Overhaul: Don't presume to know what's normal...for other people's households.

Mirio (ignoring the girl covered in bandages): Indeed, there are all types.

Despite all the flack Izuku's character gets concerning any commentary he has made about the Hellish Todoroki Family, this statement from Mirio is closer to abuse apologia than anything Izuku has ever said.

Granted, it's unclear whether this was Mirio's actual opinion given he was just trying to say whatever to avoid conflict. But as Nighteye said two chapters ago, actions are what matter. And the first time Mirio is shown out in the field, he failed to act to save Eri and actively prevented Izuku from doing so.

Mirio: Didn't you notice that sudden bloodlust? - That's our cue to use the seven year old as bait to save our own skin obviously.

All jokes aside, despite anything said by Izuku to the contrary, Mirio and Mirio alone was responsible for this failure to save. The narrative established this even if Izuku did not recognize that. Izuku himself loses nothing this arc and completes the save. The person who failed to save someone in his reach lost his quirk as a consequence.

And Izuku's first response to Mirio telling him to be a professional hero trainee and ignore someone who needed saving was to take off his hero mask and reveal his own face again. Izuku was looking at the situation with his eyes unobstructed. Mirio's vision was completely obscured by his visor; his belief in Sir Nighteye's grand plan was so strong that he prioritized that over the people in front of him.

Nighteye's perspective towards handling feelings of regret and how to respond to them is reasonable and healthy. But the problem is that even after learning about Eri's part in Overhaul's plan, Nighteye still believed Mirio made the right call.

Even Mirio himself realized by this meeting at Nighteye's Agency that he was in the wrong for not trying to save Eri in his first confrontation with Overhaul.

Nighteye's core problem can be summed up as this - "perfect is the enemy of good". Nighteye was reluctant to act until he was sure of something. That prevented him from executing all saves where he did not have perfect information - which in a first responder adjacent field like hero work is going to include most people in need of saving.

After seeing Mina leap into action in an emergency, Kirishima felt discouraged but still had UA listed as his first choice for high school. He hadn't given up his hero dream yet.

It was only after Kirishima heard about another middle schooler jumping into action to save a classmate even without a quirk that he crossed out UA. Some people think of this moment as Kirishima being inspired by Izuku. But at least at first, this interpretation isn't supported by the text.

When it was just Mina beating him to the punch, he could chock it up to Mina being an ideal hero for modern society anyway. He could justify it by thinking "well not being faster than someone like her doesn't mean I'm not hero material too."

But then, a presumably quirkless kid had the guts to save someone when Kirishima could not. There were no excuses to make after knowing that. It forced Kirishima to reckon with the fact that he was weak in spirit. As much as Kirishima declared that quirks don't matter, in truth they did matter to him. Izuku going against the grain during the sludge incident demonstrated to Kirishima how complacent he was in his own assigned role and he felt ashamed.

Kirishima's view of Izuku (while not knowing it was about Izuku) was similar to Izuku's feelings about Mirio. It was not inspiration: it was discouragement. They felt they couldn't measure up to Izuku or Mirio either in spirit or in talent and almost gave up on their dreams as a result.

On another note, here are several other reasons Kirishima and Bakugou became fast friends. Kirishima thought of the moment in Bakugou's life that Bakugou was most ashamed of (until Kamino) as manly. Kirishima and Bakugou both felt insecure about people who embody this idea of a strong heroic spirit because at some level they both knew they lacked this trait in themselves early on in the series.

Mirio as a character represents the status quo itself. Even part of his own name can be read as conformity. Yes, he had some surface level similarities with All Might, but he lacked the drive to go beyond what already existed.

Early Mirio exhibited some of the same flaws as their hero society overall: to keep things running smoothly, he was willing to ignore the pain of the person in front of him. He crushed those who couldn't quite make the cut over inspiring others to act. In that moment where he abandoned Eri, he was the same as that old woman who left Tenko alone on the street. Perhaps he was a bit worse than her in that unlike Mirio, that random old woman didn't stop anyone else from trying to save child Tenko.

The purpose of Mirio's character arc was partially for him to overcome his conformist instincts and to take real risks to save people in need.

The Shie Hassaikai boss appeared in flashbacks throughout this arc criticizing Overhaul for abandoning his humanity for disregarding others to fulfill some higher goal. In a way, this arc punished Mirio similarly for detaching himself from his emotions to the extent he would ignore a child in danger to fulfill some kind higher goal.

The main question this series of panels asks the reader is "why would this situation be different if Eri was or wasn't Overhaul's daughter?" Why was Mirio, the stand in for acting within conformity of society's expectations early on in this arc, willing to look away if the villain was asserting the role of her father?

It looks like Horikoshi was critiquing Japan's laissez faire attitude towards domestic matters in this arc. Overhaul was able to get away with killing Eri repeatedly and nearly created a tool to control their society by taking on a role in public that most people would not question. The violence ignored by society festered in a way that eventually would have spread to everything else unless "a hero" finally stepped up.

As an aside, the moment Overhaul abandoned the false mask of "Eri's Father" was also the moment he removed his gloves. Hands in particular are symbolically important in BNHA. There are multiple scenes where removing gloves precedes genuine connection via the reaching out of hands. This scene is clearly NOT one of those. "Take the gloves off" is also an expression in English originally from boxing that means to escalate a fight. In universe, Overhaul removing his gloves indicated he was about to activate his quirk, but it's also there to show that Overhaul was about to raise the stakes of this fight.

I think it's particularly funny that being a werewolf made the MC of Big Wolf on Campus made the character insatiably hungry for...chicken.

And I do remember the ep where the MC had lost control of his instincts because his inner wolf wanted to put on weight for the coming winter and was attacking people during the night who were patrons of the new fired chicken fast food joint specifically to rob them of their chicken.

Like sir, are you sure yer a werewolf and not a werecoyote?