Reform or Revolution?: Society of the Spectacle in My Hero Academia

Disclaimer: Spoilers for the series up to chapter 213. This post doubles as a second defense of Stain (read my first here if you’re interested), and an examination of how the series relates to Guy Debord’s famous piece “The Society of the Spectacle”. This work by Debord is Marxist in nature so I’m telling you upfront if you don’t want to read stuff like that dip now since I know BnH is popular and many people will click on this who do not wish to read anything of that sort. Also no whining about chapter 213 in the comments you babys. Subscribe to Shonen Ronin because we made a video version of this post: https://youtu.be/B-uzeqHwFew

“The first measure of salvation is to keep watch over one’s youth and to guard against those forces that sully everything with the rage of passion.”- Epicurus

My Hero Academia has always been about how we treat each other given the inherent inequality of man. Are we going to crush those weaker than us like Bakugo at the beginning of the story or raise them up like Deku will at the end? Will everyone’s powers be used for all people’s sake or will all people serve the one strongest? The first line of the series is “All men are not created equal” and though we fans often laugh at the obviousness of that statement in a world where some are born as flamethrowers and others as overgrown snakes it is important to bear in mind that, like all great stories, My Hero Academia is at least attempting to say something profound about our ordinary frog-girlless world.

In examining the series message we will find out very interesting things such as why people who think MHA’s fights are boring are literally worst, and most importantly we will prove once again that Stain was right. This should be fun!

It’s not the fights that are dull, it’s you

My Hero Academia is no stranger to controversy(1), as is the case with most Shounen Jump series with massive worldwide acclaim. One of the series most popular criticisms via Youtuber Gigguk(2) is that the fights themselves are not very entertaining for a shounen battle manga. Youtuber Oceaniz did a great job debunking this critique(3), however I’m much more interested in why people would make such a brazenly wrong critique in the first place. And in thinking about it I came to an important realization that both plays into the origins of many of the complaints about the series as well as helping to reveal what the point of the whole series is.

Aristotle wrote that the very meaning of drama is the interweaving of character development and plot development (I always come back to the Greeks when I write about BnH I swear to ToGODshi), and that to understand and get the most out of a text you need to understand the subtle relationship between the 2 (this applies to writing drama as well). Aristole also said that the thing that would destroy that subtlety is spectacle. It’s not a stretch to say that My Hero Academia is study into the nature of good and evil, given that it’s a superhero story, and that this theme is present in near all aspects, even if it doesn’t seem so at first glance. However, one can not begin to tackle that subject without subtlety and this is where I think the works of not just Horikoshi but many Jump authors seem to clash with The West aesthetic sensibilities. Broadly speaking the general masses hate subtlety. All the western mind is ready for is spectacle. This is why shounen as a demographic and aesthetic is simultaneously both loved and despised by the west, both sides refuse to see the subtleties between genres and stories and would rather group them all together and look at surface elements rather than look deeply into them. The West speaks of Shounen series as if they were all action movies, which in itself is an insult to variety and nuance of action movies. This is partly has to do with how the human brain operates as explained in Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow”(4) but culture cannot be ignored here.

The fundamental issue here is that when one gets caught up between the ultimate battle supreme good and supreme evil the only thing they’ll have left to examine in-depth in their minds, if they ever become so inclined, is how the action of sequence plays out. This is not me saying fight analysis is bad, quite the contrary I ADORE a good fight break down(5). That said when we as a society focus more on the mechanical aspects of the fights then we step into a dangerous territory, one best exemplified by the existence of Hero Killer Stain.

A Defense of Stain Part 2: Idealistic Bongolo

The understanding of what a hero is in MHA finds it’s origins in the law. The state, those at the top of the hierarchy- not society as a whole or the motivations of people- determines one’s status. This distinction is important because the nation being a democracy does not invalidate the statement that there are powers above the collective decisions of the masses that determine hero status, and there are many ways in-universe to prove this. The significant public admiration for Stain, how students will be punished for their heroic efforts without a license, mass media manipulation both by the government and villains, the status of popular vigilantes, etc.

All this is important because it establishes 2 important aspects of MHA as a story. 1 is that though different in important ways, mainly quirks, MHA’s work is a parallel universe of our own, unlike many series it takes influence from (by the author’s admission in multiple interviews) like Naruto or One Piece. It is commenting on our world. Secondly, the action in the series is relatively realistic compared to most comics. And how realistic the shows action is matters because it determines the modus operandi of the government employed heroes. A Heroes job is take care of the situation as quickly as possible with as little damage as possible. A wrestler is not a hero.

Or at least that is what should be the case. There is 1 slight problem with this assessment, however. It is reflected in the complaint by some of the audience of the story, the fights are “boring”. People want to be entertained. If humans could find a way to make mopping floors a show somehow, they’d do it without question. A job can’t just be a job for them, especially in a society where, as Tazerlad points out in his wonderful video of why people become heroes in MHA(6), heroism is one of the few jobs you can express your individuality with your quirk or you can see someone else do so and live vicariously through them. Human ego simply would not allow such a void to go unfilled, despite the unforseen consequences.

My Hero Academia’s world has become THE scariest of example of a society of spectacle I personally have seen. Where I think it has shows’s like Black Mirror beat(7) is just how much it makes sense given the world we’re presented. Spectacle is any kind of complying visual display, and in a world where everyone has superpowers one would think that wouldn’t be hard to come by. Therefore what Guy Debord argued is true for own society is 10x’s more true for MHA’s world: understanding spectacle is critical for understanding society. In the same way that after the industrial revolution images and appearances began to govern our world , after the quirk awakening the images and appreances of heroes shaped the collective psyche’s of the in-universe masses.

Debord argued that the more we recognize our own existence in the terms set forth by the spectacle, the more less we understand our own existence and desires. In My Hero Academia’s case this situation is exacerbated by the banning of public quirk use which either feeds into the motivation to become a villain or the deification of heroes as they become archetypes in Jungian terms. In hero society, heroism is not about saving, but about being save, an important difference. People become depend on heroes and collapse into hysteria if they think they’ll fail, virtually begging the gods that the hero will somehow pull through and cheat death. Logically speaking if the situation is that serious the people should be preparing to band together to deal with the threat, much like a nation in war. But the spectacle uses the symbol of the hero as a substitute for the genuine article; real hope, real togetherness, true assurance in the fact we’ll be ok because we have each other. Instead we’ll be ok because we have All Might, or Endeavor, or the pro heroes generally. Consequently, heroism degrades further. People become complacent with not even just “being saved” but “appearing saved”.

In-universe the material conditions are such that society has developed on a course where spectacle has overtaken values due to people becoming culturally sedated to criminal activity being dealt with in a relatively flashy matter. The people in bnh live in a hyper-reality where they feel not only that they’re not in danger when heroes are around (symbols of peace, the symbol has overtaken the real) but that is the protectors job to entertain them while they’re being saved! It makes perfect sense why this happened, nobody wants to live in fear all the time, but humans as a collective can generally only go from one extreme to the other. We are either lollygagging or collectively losing our shit as a rule of thumb. This is no matter to Stain of course because he cares more about the sanctity of the hero profession, because otherwise it will lose its effectiveness. And to an extent he isn’t wrong. He DOES bring the crime rate down. Objectively speaking this distorted view of reality is not safe or healthy for anyone even if I can understand why it came about. It’s quite easy to see how virtually any means to counteract such thinking, such as reminding people of the very real danger they are in (heroes and civilians alike) can be justified. This, by the by, is also why Stain cares so much about Creed. It keeps you from falling into the society of spectacle, grounds you in material reality in a way that the post-modern condition disassociate us from.

Stain is one of the few characters in this fucked up society who understands at the core who he is and what he truly wants. He doesn’t buy into the spectacle. Stain detests the idea that saving people is a competition that can be won, like even many real life people reading the series think. He curses the idea of seeing people as merely means to an end. Stain killed people who saw others as means to an end, and act which saw people as means to an end itself. And this is why he’s Horikoshi’s favorite villain, because that’s the mentality Horikoshi wants the hero of his story to adopt, only with means that themselves determine the end result.

Education and Transformation: From Heroes as Spectacle to Heroism as an Artform

Stain admired All Might’s utter selflessness. But of course All Might is partly responsible for this. It was his idea that the world needed a symbol, even if the thought came from a good place and someone would have done it even accidentally anyway eventually (I don’t fully subscribe to the great man theory of history after all). He had no idea the evil he’d create by destroying the nuance better hero, vigilante, and villain. He had no idea how well this new lack of nuance would be exploited by All for One, how it’d paved the way for Endeavor’s crimes, or how docile it would make the masses. Indeed in many ways it was the masses themselves who borne All Might out of their own collective unconscious. The masses crave the spectacle, the clear-cut battle between good and evil, because it gives them a type of Freedom. The freedom not to choose. The freedom not to think. I’m not a religious man (quite the opposite in fact) but there is a reason Lucifer means “Lightbringer”

However, an error only becomes a mistake when one refuses to correct it. There is a reason Stain’s message was so easily co-opted. Shigaraki has a point. A society of mere images makes everything seem romantic, in the philosophical sense. But the world as whole is not romantic. It’s filled with chaos bought about by people- both powerful and powerless- each with their own agenda’s and biases. And no hero or even a group of hero’s can change that. But the key is not to kill all Might and be an iconoclast but rather to now use his mistake to do good, because turning the bad to the good is also the job of a hero.

This is why Deku is the perfect protagonist for this series. He’s not the traditional hero who will shine alone at the top as a symbol. He won’t be someone to look up to but someone to work with together to improve the world, as SocraTetris pointed out in his video on the series(8). In addition, as of chapter 213 it is revealed that he will wield multiple powers, a natural extension of his hero obsessed personality which analyses different types of heroes and they’re styles. Giving him traits of multiple diverse people is a masterclass on the authors part as it allows more opportunities narratively to understand different types of people in more depth, strengthening the themes pluralism societal interconnection.

Debord encouraged the use of détournement, “which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle”(9) however I believe the work of another Marxist can be used here not only to examine why détournement alone has been ineffective but also how the spectacle can be redirected towards the good of society again and even become something more. I’m of course referring to Walter Benjamin and his work “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”(10). I would argue that Debord’s work can be contrasted with Benjamin’s, whose work in turn lines up more with the intentions of Horikoshi in writing MHA. In other words, mechanical reproduction of images can be used to work against the society of spectacle, and instead put power in each persons hands. Or to quote All Might: You can be a hero.

One for All has shifted story wise from being a gift from All Might to Deku so that he can achieve his dream of being a hero to a responsibility to others & society. It has moved from being a means to an end to an end in itself. From power that was all for singular person(the first user, Deku, Etc.) to a singular collection of powers to be put to use for every person. The story of the greatest hero isn’t the story of one person but the story of us all. In that way, OfA is beginning to become more like art in function then the spectacle which it itself helped create and is now used by AfO for his own ends. AfO is not too different from All Might in light of all this, he could be seen as the revolution to All Might’s reform, which leaves us only one pressing question; Which will you support, given the choice is more grey than some might hope?

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Art by Midorynn, Kadeart, and Karita-Chan. Give me money so I can give them money: https://liberapay.com/MisanthropyReport/

Sources:

1. “Endeavour: Atoning for the past” by Oceaniz (the best part about this masterpiece is it links my 2 other favorite Endeavour videos too, so hat’s 3 birds 1 stone~)-https://youtu.be/QtXN_hxdj-s
2. “My Hero Academia’s Fights Are Actually Dull” by Gigguk (very trash)-https://youtu.be/D3jjVsm99Ec
3. “A Defense of My Hero Academia’s Fights” by Oceaniz-https://youtu.be/7Hl3w-Zd5hM
4. Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” Summary-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXVBL7UDOk4
5. “Why I love Giorno vs Bruno” by TooTsunNotEnoughDere-https://youtu.be/uVBVHPGe39M
6. “Why be a Hero in Boku No Hero Academia?” by Tazerlad-https://youtu.be/VY3ps8Bi_T0
7. “The Philosphy of Black Mirror” by Wisecrack- https://youtu.be/R50b5aoYgkM
8. “A Better Society: The Philosophy of My Hero Academia Season 3” by SocraTetris
9. (Yes I used Wikipedia sue me damnit)- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement
10. “The Theorist Handbook: The Function of Art ” By Nightmare Masterclass-https://youtu.be/H_mMkYbqEd0