My Hero Academia: Vigilantes ‒ Episode 13

Aside from foreshadowing and a follow-up on unresolved plot beats, this is probably one of the more passive finales I’ve ever watched. A good chunk of it probably feels that way because Koichi, our main character, barely had anything to do with this episode outside of getting dragged around and being made to sing on stage. This episode is a good summation of the roles our main characters play throughout the season. Pop did her own thing and was able to grow her presence as an idol to the point where she is arguably more official now. Knuckleduster was able to resolve his storyline regarding his wife and his daughter. But Koichi is just there. He gets told to go places and gets dragged around by situations that are way outside of his depth. We even have to have the narcissist hero tell him to his face that he might potentially be making more problems than resolving them, which is a shame because I feel like the show doesn’t necessarily do a great job of establishing that Captain Celebrity is wrong.

It’s not that Koichi didn’t go through any character development throughout this season, but he didn’t have a significant impact on everything going on. I know Knuckleduster mentioned early on that he was using Koichi and Pop to draw out his daughter. We know Pop is drawn to Koichi because of her affection for him, but outside of that one episode where Koichi saved Makoto and performed a huge act of heroism, I’m struggling to remember what he did. I worry that the show didn’t fully establish the impact that their vigilante activities had on the community or how it all tied into the bee quirk user. Koichi even says himself at the end of this episode that the time they all spent together wasn’t that long and that things are just getting started. The point is that this is all setup for the next season where Koichi will be able to take center stage now that Knuckleduster’s character arc is over (even though he’s going to come back at some point in the future), but that does sort of make things feel a little underwhelming, like this was more of a prelude to a much larger story rather than a solid self-contained one on its own.

As for the things resolved, I got a little choked up about the scene in the hospital with Knuckleduster and his daughter. Knuckleduster has this warm presence to him as he’s trying to comfort his daughter, and how they’re going to be okay, although they are probably some of the most broken people in the entire series. Knuckleduster just lost his wife and only managed to catch her in her final moments to assure her that he had found their daughter. There’s a good chance that their daughter might have permanent physical damage to her body, given everything that happened to her. It’s a happy ending, but I want to put a big asterisk there because it will take a while for them to have any semblance of a normal life. That’s the story I want to see more of, and I hope we get more of that in season two.

Vigilante is a tricky show because it has so many good character moments and a lot of likable ideas sprinkled throughout, but it feels like the show didn’t know how to juggle all of them. This is an issue that the main series had as well, but at least that had a more straightforward overarching goal, and a protagonist that I at least found compelling to follow. Here, despite having a much smaller cast and a tighter setting, it still managed to feel all over the place. I hope the next season will be stronger with all the teases about quirk experiments and a new villain.

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AJ also streams regularly on Twitch as the indie Vtuber Bolts The Mechanic where they talk about and play retro media!