Visualist x 100!! - My Hero Academia Season Three: Special(?)

That question mark in the title is deliberate because to be honest there’s nothing special about this episode. Random filler would be a better episode description and while that isn’t great news it still could have clawed itself to the status of at least entertaining filler. Tragically, that is not the case and the resulting mess has left both Kapodaco and me decidedly underwhelmed.

Kapodaco:

Let’s get a few things out of the way right now, this episode is all of these things:

Filler, an advertisement, unnecessary, fan service, random.

Even with all of this in mind, I genuinely would not mind an incredibly random and out of place episode that has nothing to do with what came before if it was in any way good or fun. After all, with as monotonous as the series has been of late, it’s pretty amusing to see that even the anime itself is so bored of itself that it decided to take a quick detour.

Unfortunately, the ensuing content could not only escape the soulless and meandering negative tie-ins attributed to the tags listed above, but it ultimately showcased very, very little of what this series can offer in terms of writing prowess or energetic fun.

The six most popular characters—or perhaps just the mangaka’s favorites—(hence “fan service”) are tasked with playing Clue because it’s “special training.” That’s all this episode is. I see very little value in how this will prepare them all with being heroes and very little value outside of putting this into the Mystery genre as to why I’m supposed to care about sudden “Whodunnit?” content. The extent of fun things we got to see in this episode is Bakugo getting angry/irritated and blowing things up.

What makes this even worse is that sprinkled in the beginning and ending segments of this episode are little tidbits of All Might’s past as a pro hero, putting extra effort to showcasing his sidekick while in America, David Shield. The end of this episode proudly proclaims that All Might and Midoriya are going to visit I-Island to visit Shield and his daughter… only to then announce that this will all become available “in the movie.” The movie. Oh. So this was the most popular heroes playing Clue and building up to an actually-interesting premise that won’t be featured in the main series, but a spin-off movie. Thanks.

It’s pretty difficult to not outright tell this episode to fuck itself, but I suppose if they wanted to produce a random episode that diverges from the main plot to sell a product, at least they did it here and not the episode before All Might loses all ability to go super. I’d be a lot more angry if the placement of this filler content was in-between actually riveting content, but even on its own, it’s still pretty inherently disruptive and shallow.

Karandi:

Am I allowed to copy and paste Kapodaco’s rant? Seriously, I’d really like to.

I actually enjoy Clue (or Cluedo) and locked room mysteries are inherently fun. So why can’t My Hero Academia, a show produced by Bones and in season one and two really nailing the fun tone, manage to make a one off episode with this premise entertaining?

And it really isn’t entertaining. Even if I overlook the fact that we end with a blatant plug for a movie and the fact that we disrupted what little flow the exam arc had, this episode in and of itself is not fun. Each character does exactly what you would expect from them giving the single more one note performances ever. It was like someone gave these characters to the hands of writers who had read their profile and never watched a single episode of the show.

Midoriya mutters and puts things together, Iida is overly procedural, Bakugou is a bit of a hot-headed jerk and the other three are there because people like them. Seriously, they don’t contribute anything. Todoroki in particular could have been erased from every single scene without a single line needing to be rewritten and that is a horrendous misuse of his character.

I won’t belabour it any further. This is a waste of twenty minutes of your life. It isn’t fun. It doesn’t contribute to the characters in any meaningful way. And unless you were clueless about the movie coming out it doesn’t really tell you anything new about the franchise. All and all, watch literally anything else.