I think this week’s episode of BnHA is a pretty good acid test of where you are as a fan.  If you’re unhappy with it, I think you’re pretty much locked into being either someone who dislikes this arc (and those folks certainly exist), or you’re so bitter and salty about the anime that you just want to complain under any circumstances.  I’m not saying someone who liked or loved this in the manga couldn’t be dissatisfied with this ep.  But I am having a hard time imagining it (and I have a pretty good imagination).

Last week’s episode certainly had a higher body count, but for my money this may be the darkest the series has ever gotten.  You can search high and dig deep looking for anything redemptive about these events, but I don’t think it exists.  This was just brutality on every level – physical, mental, emotional, existential.  You had two really nasty people trying to kill each other, and one of the most harrowing and tragic backstories you can imagine.  Horikoshi pulled no punches, and neither did Bones.  Apart from some very minimal censoring (which I’m glad of, frankly) this was just as it was originally portrayed.

This was also the point, I think, where Shigaraki really came into his own as a villain.  All For One and Stain always had more stature to them for me, with Shigaraki seeming a bit like a petulant teenager being given a job that was too big for him.  But that all changed here.  Although it was Re-Destro who grew massively in stature and looked large enough to crush Shigaraki with one hand, somehow by the end of the episode Shigaraki seemed to tower over him.

What seemed like a weakness before – Shigaraki’s lack of a driving purpose beyond destruction – suddenly makes him that much more terrifying.  All For One is a manipulator, with a thirst to control and dominate the world.  Stain has an ideology that he fiercely believes in, and for him villainy is a religious cause.  But Shigaraki unapologetically just wants to destroy, and now we understand why.  Decay is a perfect power for him (though by no means his only one).  Decay is destruction incarnate – total, impassive, irrefutable.  It unmakes anything – or anyone – it touches.  And that sums up the current Shigaraki as well as anything could.

I’m not saying Shigaraki is a sympathetic character because he had a brutal childhood – he’s still evil incarnate, pretty much.  But the most heartbreaking moment of that flashback (which was what it really was, as he was rediscovering his memories at the same moment we saw them play out) was when he said “Why did they protect my father?”.  Because, of course, this is the lament of countless brutalized children across the sands of time.  Why does the family circle the wagons around the father who abuses the son?  Why does no one say “enough”?  Sometimes they do – but not often enough, and not soon enough.

Horikoshi has always shown the ability to be brutal and unsparing, but this is as far as he’s ever pushed the envelope.  Poor Tenko didn’t ask for this, and the tragedy of it was shaping him even before he remembered the details.  And it’s testament to what a cold bastard All For One is that he mined this vein of existential agony and used it to his advantage.  It all starts from the decision Shimura Nana made to abandon her son, one which reverberates through the story of Boku no Hero Academia in so many ways.  The bad karma of that moment spread across time and grew in intensity, bringing despair and tragedy to all it touched.

All in all it’s a magnificent darkness, and that’s one of the reasons I love My Hero Academia.  A villain who bottles up all his stress and channels it into destructive power facing off with a man who became the personification of decay and death because of cruel fate and cruel people.  The story implications here are massive, especially with Gigantomachia arriving on the scene.  But for me that takes a back seat to the sheer audacity of what Horikoshi did here, and that Bones brought to the screen with no smoothed edges.  It brought all the darkness in this premise to the forefront.  And  it cut like steel, just as it was intended to.