As you get deeper into Vigilante: Boku no Hero Academia Illegals, you recognize that diminished expectations are a powerful recurring theme. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it’s underappreciated. With battle shounen some fans want big action set pieces and soaring ideals and good vs. evil showdowns. This series starts out with Kouichi’s disappointment in his university life and builds from there. His heroism is centered on knowing what he isn’t capable of as much as what he is, and acting within the confines of those limitations. It’s not exactly glamorous but it makes for a pretty compelling personal story
“My place is surprisingly spacious” is definitely copium at work. It’s better than to say “my place is a quonset hut on top of an abandoned building”. And while one could dwell on the fact that freeloaders come into their shack and eat and drink their meager provisions without paying a Yen, Kouichi focuses on the fact that at least he has company over. For a kid who had dreams of being a hero scattered like dust in the wind, it’s a fitting outlook on life. It’s obvious he’s had a lot of practice.
The importance of that lost dream goes deeper than the event itself. Turns out Kouichi missed his entrance exam for hero high school when he was diverted by a drowning boy, who he jumped into the river to save. In the end it wasn’t a boy at all (Kouichi still doesn’t know that), and the river was knee-deep. It’s the sort of low-grade heroism that suits Kouichi – and at least the water was cold. In the end it wasn’t a boy either, but a girl named Haneyama Kazuho – now known to most as Pop☆Step. Kouichi gave Kazuho his limited edition All Might hoodie before he left – and today it’s the only release in the entire set he’s missing.
Pop’s feelings for Kouichi certainly come into clearer focus now, though she backs away from her plan to come clean (and return the hoodie) when Knuckleduster is at the shack when she comes over to do so. When they go off on patrol that night Oji-san says he has other things to do (without elaborating), leaving the pair of them on their own. This is a problem when they run into a familiar face, the hardening villain they defeated once already. He’s new and improved, thanks to an enhanced variant of Trigger that Hachisuka is field-testing for her boss, All For One.
Here again, we see Kouichi trying to manage his reality. He can’t take this villain out on his own, so he resolves to lure him away from people while Kazuho calls the cops. But because the villain is stronger and faster than before, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to avoid taking damage. The Crawler looks to be in serious trouble, but help arrives in the nick of time. Not a hero, it seems, but another vigilante – a masked figure named Stendhal (seiyuu name redacted). Stendhal stops the villain’s attacks, and everyone scatters when the police arrive on the scene.
What we see after is evidence that Stendhal is a true vigilante in the darkest sense of the word – he executes his sense of justice with no restraint. Meanwhile the middle school pair tell Kouichi and Kazuho that a legendary sempai from their school wants to speak to them. It turns out to be “Dox & Murder” guy, someone they have no interest in ever meeting again. What he wanted is unclear, but he’s also the next target on Stendhal’s list, so his role in the story is clearly far from over.
