This is an interesting arc to cover.  I don’t do LiA as a public service per se to be sure, but I do like to think I can be useful to people sometimes.  The English-speaking zeitgeist on “My Villain Academia” is just as unrelentingly negative as it’s been all season (much more than the Japanese, interestingly), so if the series’ quality allows it’s nice to try and be a place where there’s some balance in the discussion.  And in terms of content, while I obviously can’t comment on what’s being cut, I can at least confirm or deny that stuff is.  And it is.

“Read the manga”.  If there was a PSA here, that’d be it – for this arc, anyway.  I find my opinion of what we’re seeing this season to be more positive than most (as usual) but there was a fair bit cut out this week.  It’s been a long time since I read MVA but I went back to confirm that my recollections were right, and they were.  Right now the anime is running through 4-5 chapters per episode, which is roughly twice its usual pace.  Bones is IMHO doing a good job under those circumstances, but you can’t trim that much content without losing some of the nuance and impact of the source material.  You just can’t.

To repeat, these are not decisions Bones is making just to piss you off.  These calls are coming from the production committee, which with a commercial behemoth like HeroAca is a complicated tangle of big-money corporations trying to protect their profits.  It’s sort of interesting that it was MVA that was chosen to be the sacrificial lamb – I could speculate on why but that’s all it would be, pure speculation.  Ideally of course the Endeavor arc would have been left for Season 6 but the movie’s promotion demanded it be moved forward.  If it were me I’d have trimmed the Joint Training arc way down instead, but oddly enough no one asked my opinion…

What I can survived the pacing is the sense of brutality.  This arc – fittingly – is probably the most bleak and savage in all of Boku no Hero Academia.  The League are what they are, and we’ve seen where their moral compass points.  But the Meta Liberation Army is a creepy and eerily realistic addition.  They have suicide bombers, sleeper cells, a self-martyred founder, media and political savvy – and their message (like Stain’s) has an obvious appeal to a large segment of the population in this mythology.  If you’re with the heroes you’d probably like to see these guys wipe as many of the other out as possible.

Of course, in this insurgent stronghold even the heroes are part of the MLA (it even sounds like a terrorist group).  The League are basically the fly voluntarily entering the spider’s web.  They have their own trump card to play, Gigantomachia, but he’s still sleeping it off – and it appears that the others have bitten off more than they can chew.  Much of the spotlight is on Toga, who’s in a tangle with the army’s Curious (Honda Takako).  Her usual tricks don’t help her because Curious has the ability to turn anything into a land mine – including the blood of the citizen soldiers Toga tries to ingest, who are only too willing to be blown up for the honor of Re-Destro and his cause.

This whole Curious-Toga battle is very skeevy and disturbing, with probably more death per-minute than any sequence in the anime so far.  Curious’ puerile interest in Toga is part of that ick factor, and so is Toga’s general freaky nature – she’s a terrifying entity, really.  Toga ends up with the upper hand when, after using the last of her blood stock to take on Ochaco’s form, she surprisingly also displays the ability to use Ochoaco’s quirk.  This leads to the demise of Curious and her entourage, and Toga herself is in dire shape and crawls off to a storage shed to collapse.  It’s worth noting that Shigaraki displays an unexpected power-up too – his quirk works on a bunch of opponents (more deadness) he doesn’t even touch.

It’s Twice who finds Toga, which he deals with in his own inimitable fashion.  MLA member Skeptic (Sugita Tomokazu) takes a keen interest in Twice, whose ability he sees as crucial to the future success of the army and the protection of Re-Destro.  Twice is and has always been a riveting character and I’m never sorry to see more of him.  But people like Skeptic and Curious are disturbing in a way that allows Horikoshi to show off his innate ability to pick at the painful scabs of real-world society.  And even in a curtailed version of My Villain Academia, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.