(cont)
This is not what Japanese "superhero" stories are like.
I've actually been reading a bunch of them lately. BHA, OPM, Ratman, Zannen Jokanbu Black General-san, etc. And in general, reading/watching a bunch of Japanese media. I've come to the uncomfortable realization that the Japanese don't seem to want or enjoy moral catharsis in their stories in the same way that Westerners do. That is, their stories aren't about punishing the bad guy, and their heroes are rarely concerned with justice, with the exception of their main characters. The tropes of Japanese capeshit are different; their heroes are commercialized, made a part of the economy or culture and glossed over. There is no glory, no vicarious agency. "Hero" just becomes another type of salaryman or pop star, replete with office politics and jealously jockeying for position in the public consciousness. And the corporate or economic construct that the heroes are a part of is rarely actually heroic; the writers seem to be aware that the status quo that the heroes are defending is fundamentally flawed, and that it corrupts the initially pure intentions of those that enter it.
It is hard not to see projections about the state of Japanese society, which (memetically, at least; I haven't lived there) seems to want to deny individuality, and whose economic and social structures grind people down relentlessly. The worlds of Japanese capeshit are depressing places, where thousands can die for no good reason, and heroes (and the organizations that employ them, and the governments that fund them) don't really care. Like, under my definition, the To Aru no … series can be considered capeshit. In that show, a character kills ten thousand high school girls (painfully, relishing drawing out their pain) under the orders of basically a city council. The only people who care are the two protagonists who put a stop to it. In a Western superhero story, that guy would be a completely irredeemable villain; you don't show that kind of shit onscreen without the character getting some Biblical-level comeuppance. In Japan? He's treated sympathetically, and later becomes a third protagonist. The heroes aren't really treated as having changed much; the city council is still in power, still doing shit like that.
BHA is less depressing than that (note; I don't have access to most of the manga, so I'm only really caught up to where the anime is right now; don't know if it gets a lot darker later on, but being a Japanese work, I'd count on it), but you still get flashes of that underlying inhumanity and cruelty inherent in most Japanese fiction. For example, Todoroki's father basically forced his mother into marriage, and forced her to bear his children, out of his own pride and envy of All Might. Todoroki might hate him, sure, but (so far) he hasn't been given any comeuppance, and I doubt he will be, given that the story doesn't seem to be concerned with this… let's be honest, what was described is hard to treat as anything but decades-long rape and abuse. By a hero that continues to be well-regarded by the general public. In fact, the biggest "upsetting" thing that happened to him was being forced to take credit for the capture of Stain while knowing it wasn't actually his doing.
How fucking terrible for him.
After reading so much of it, and comparing it to Western stories with similar aesthetic elements but wildly differing thematic ones, I've come to the conclusion that Japanese capeshit and Western capeshit have differences similar to, say, JRPGs and CRPGs. They are tonally different in the same way that those two genres are mechanically different. BHA is a good example of Japanese capeshit. It's good for its genre; the powers are interesting, the characters are compelling, the main character does grow and change over the course of the series. But it's now good Western capeshit; the world is depressing as fuck and it's not getting better, and the majority of characters and society it shows are morally repugnant, more interested in selfishly hoarding power or protection of arbitrary rules than doing what is morally right. There is a sense that the story's universe is going downhill, and the characters have very little agency to stop it.
