My Hero Academia: Vigilantes

Episode 12

While this finale felt a lot less bombastic than I was expecting it to, I've come around to that probably being the whole point. We finally put an end to our first real villain of Vigilantes with the entire thing being framed as a fairly intense squabble between a father and daughter. It was messy, intense, and gorgeously animated. If Knuckleduster was supposed to be a sendoff to twisted and broken antiheroes like the Punisher, then it makes sense that things would be this insane.

You can tell that Knuckleduster doesn't see himself as a hero. He doesn't even see himself as a good father. He is putting himself and his daughter's body at risk for the sake of getting through to her, which is interesting because there was arguably nothing stopping him from just turning all of this information over to the heroes and letting them deal with it. I still think it's weird that the show never framed the vigilante angle as something where our main cast was doing the stuff that other heroes couldn't. But this episode recontextualizes the vigilante angle as something more personal. Knuckleduster didn't want the heroes to get involved because this was the outcome that he wanted.

Jason Marnocha is killing it in the acting department. Not only do we hear the difference in his voice from when he was a father to how he is now. It highlights just how different and broken he is from the whole experience, but his speech about how he'll do everything he can to make things right was super poignant. I also like the fact that you can't completely blame the bees for the situation. The last time these two saw each other was from a massive falling out, so while the daughter is being controlled, a lot of the emotions and bitterness are still her own. The show skirts the line a little bit with whether or not she wants to kill her dad, and while I don't think his daughter was in complete control, given some of the dialogue, it's clear that a good amount of those attacks felt personal. I mean, Knuckleduster isn't exactly sane either, and he knows it—so maybe these two needed to break each other physically as much as they already feel broken mentally. This wasn't the way I was expecting this arc to wrap up, but it managed to sell me on it in the end.

My only real complaint is that it feels weird that Koichi and Pop had nothing to do with taking down this villain. I like a lot of the symbolic storytelling going on, like how Pop is putting on a performance when Knuckleduster's daughter ran away from home because she wanted to perform music, which is something that he never approved of. That also recontextualizes a lot of the scenes where Knuckleduster is bickering and being nice to Pop because he probably saw a lot of his daughter in her. I doubt this is the last we're going to see of the drug responsible for most of the incidents throughout the season, given the way this episode ends. But it's so weird that our main character was barely even shown in this episode. It still feels like the show is trying to juggle a bunch of characters that technically have their own stories, but it's weirdly very selective about how it wants to overlap them—and this doesn't feel like a minor complaint. Still, I'm curious what the follow-up is going to be now that Knuckleduster's mission is done. What will be next for him, and considering he was the one most passionate about getting this drug off the street, how is Koichi going to pick up the mantle moving forward?

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