The final battle of My Hero Academia took a strange turn when the man responsible for sending UA’s floating fortress crashing to the ground was stopped–by nothing less than a barrage of memes.
The villain known as Skeptic is considered a master hacker, and he was able to break into UA’s systems using his satellite in orbit. With the school currently floating above the ground to prevent Shigaraki’s Decay from spreading, Skeptic was able to shut down the security and send the school plummeting towards the Earth, right at the same time that My Hero Academia’s Kurogiri was freed and Shigaraki gained access to his Quirks due to Toga’s Twice clones stopping Aizawa and Monoma from erasing them. Things were looking pretty bad as UA started to crash, but then La Brava interfered.
La Brava Brings A Wild Shift in My Hero Academia’s Tone
La Brava, a character who hasn’t been seen since her introductory arc in My Hero Academia alongside Gentle Criminal, is known to be an excellent computer hacker and programmer. She hacks into Skeptic’s satellite and starts doing all kinds of damage to his equipment. She announces to him that she was responsible for a previous attack on his company, wherein she replaced all the ads on their website with a fictional equivalent of Hello Kitty. This time, she’s begun to flood his computer systems with images of the “Da Pump” Dance, what appears to be a gif of a dancing anime character modeled on the old meme known as Caramelldansen. While his computers were in disarray, La Brava was able to get their location, and a team of heroes from Shiketsu High School bust in to arrest Skeptic and put a stop to his interference.
Things were looking quite grim just a few chapters ago, as the heroes simultaneously had to deal with an onslaught of Twice clones, Kurogiri teleporting different villains around to their preferred battlefields, including taking Dabi to Endeavor, and a freshly unleashed Shigaraki, still disgustingly draped in his own shed skin. It was arguably the darkest the manga has gotten since the end of the Paranormal Liberation War arc, and yet now that bleak tone has been utterly annihilated by La Brava’s silliness. It’s not too uncommon for manga to break up tension with out-of-place jokes that would never be seen in a Western series. After all, “manga” as a word in Japanese has a similar root to “comic” in English, in that both are inherently derived from comedy. There’s even a different word, “gekiga,” used specifically for serious dramatic comics. Still, it’s an odd choice, especially since Skeptic himself was one of the lesser threats, and the real dangers like Shigaraki are absolutely still active.
With Skeptic now out of the way and UA no longer falling, hopefully My Hero Academia‘s focus can return to the real confrontations going on across the various battlefields.
New chapters of My Hero Academia are typically released on Sundays, via Viz’s Shonen Jump app.