I said last week that, however this story of the Todoroki family progresses, it all but had to be through means besides the standard shonen approach to conflict resolution. There are a lot of things that can be effectively resolved through cool super-power fights, but crawling out of the impact crater of familial abuse and sifting through the emotional rubble just isn’t one of them. Yet this is still an adaptation of a Shonen Jump manga, and the demands of the genre mean we can’t really get a 13-episode saga of the Todorokis going to both individual and group therapy to sort out and communicate their feelings as it would be necessary in real life. So in a season already light on high-stakes action, MHA tries to split the difference this episode. The results are a bit messy on the narrative side of things, as “The Unforgiven” ends up feeling like two very different episodes…
