This season of Boku no Hero Academia has been such a timeline jumble that it’s impossible to talk about any stand-alone episode like this in a vacuum.  It was a good one – another good one, I’d say.  But why was it here, and not in the same place in the narrative as the manga?  I thought I might have a better idea after watching it, but frankly I still don’t know.  I understand why the Endeavor arc was moved, given the premise of the third movie (which trounced the opening weekend box office performance of the first two).  Moving this ep here I don’t get – though maybe something in the third movie would explain it.

What I can say is that this is a very important chain of events in terms of the larger plot.  And this episode handled it beautifully, which isn’t much of a surprise.  One of the pleasures of the spinoff series Vigilantes (anime when?) is that it’s gone much deeper into Aizawa-sensei’s past.  In fact there’s an arc which deals specifically with Aizawa, Present Mic, and their friend Oboro Shirokumo (Ono Kenshou), who makes hist first anime appearance in this episode. Eraserhead is a very interesting character and always has been, and I always enjoy seeing him in the spotlight.

The gist of the matter is that the captured League of Villains member Kurogiri has been determined to be much more than he seems.  Kurogiri was once Oboro, in fact – and the implication here is that all of the Nomu are former human beings.  That’s full of implications in so many ways, but specifically here it brings Eraser and Mic into the mix, as the three of them were inseparable as Yuuei students.  Until, that is, Oboro died in a building collapse while on work study – a sudden and seemingly pointless death which has clearly impacted Aizawa every day for the rest of his life.

This incident brings Aizawa-sensei’s behavior into clearer focus to be sure.  Oboro was someone he admired and loved – someone who was outgoing and positive in ways he could never be.  But he raged at Oboro for dying too young – for honoring his own life too little.  And that, with the benefit of hindsight, was clearly a prime mover in Aizawa’s mentoring style with his students.  Right down to his expulsion gambit – his way of making wayward students taste “death”, while able to give them another chance to live.

It was pretty cold for Gran Torino and Tsukachi-san to call in Present Mic and Eraser to try and get Kurogiri to talk – though perhaps it shows the seriousness of the current environment and their own desperation.  For Eraser it’s motivation enough to try and keep Oboro’s family from being called in and having to face this horror, but it’s also a chance for him to try and exorcise his own demons.  Clearly, something of Oboro remains inside Kurogiri – but the programming runs deep.  This is just the tip of the iceberg for this thread, but it does tell us a lot about Aizawa and the sort of man he is.

And now, at last, we come to the long-deferred Meta Liberation Arc – the infamous “My Villain Academia”.  It’s a divisive arc among manga fans to be sure, but one that seems to brook very little ambivalence and I’ve looked forward to seeing how new audiences would receive it.  We’re going to see something we’ve rarely seen from this adaptation – an arc’s pacing dramatically changed from the source material.  There’s no other possibility – there are only six episodes left, and with the anime’s usual adaptation rate MVA could easily have taken almost an entire 12-episode cour.

This is going to be a new challenge for the anime staff.  And if it proves too steep a hill to climb it will be hard to deny the charge of self-sabotage, given that the Joint Training arc could easily have lost an episode or two, there was a completely original filler episode in the middle of the Endeavor Agency arc, and this Shirakumo episode could have been left where it was.  Which would have had it leading off Season 6, as it happens, and perhaps that was the reason for this change – maybe it wasn’t seen an a season-opening episode.  In any event I suspect the BnHA audience – an unforgiving lot if ever one existed – is going to view this version of MVA with a jaundiced eye.