At the time of posting this, there’s been a recent drama regarding a youtuber named Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast put together an insane amount of his own money to pay for the treatment of 1000 people with curable blindness. The short version is that the lens of their eyes are too clouded to see through, but a fairly quick surgery is available to treat this condition and replace the lens with an artificial one.

In response, a great number of people were in an uproar because Mr. Beast profited from this project (potentially – none of us know how much Mr. Beast spent on this program outside the cost of the treatments or how much he made from the video he posted on YouTube. He might not have broken even). The criticisms people had towards Mr. Beast included:

  • Why not treat 1001 people?
  • Why monetize the video?
  • Why not give all his money to this project?
  • Why is he going to foreign countries and making some fancy expensive travel trip out of this?
  • Why not funnel this money into a government program to treat blindness?
  • Why put up a video at all? Why not treat blindness in secret instead of collecting fame, money, and clout in response to people watching this video?

There were other complaints, but these were the main ones. And to anyone who has seen the second season of My Hero Academia, they were all too familiar. They were roughly the same complaints made by the “Hero Killer” Stain.

In the world of My Hero Academia, professional heroes make a living by gathering crowd support. Well-liked and famous heroes sell merch, they pose for advertisements, and in many ways operate like celebrities and professional sports players. Some people do the job because they just want to protect people, or because they want to make a career out of helping people. But some only do it for the fortune and fame.

During the “Hero Killer” arc of the anime/manga, Stain goes on a rampage, hunting down heroes whom he believes are doing the job for the wrong reasons and either killing them, or giving them career-ending injuries. And his arguments for doing so line up entirely with most of the people who have criticized Mr. Beast. “Why collect fortune and fame for helping people? Why not do it for free? Why can’t you have purely unselfish motivations for doing these things?”

I’ve always had my issues with the ways people react to Stain’s character, and I’m not sure if the problem is bad writing or a dumb audience. On the one hand, Stain is written in such a way that we can understand his point of view. At the time that his character is introduced, we also learn that a professional hero named Endeavor, the #2 hero in Japan, has put his own wife in a hospital in a fit of rage (and she’s still in a psychiatric ward by the time the story starts) and he also abused his children until he got a kid born with the perfect mix of his and his wife’s powers. Endeavor is the sort of professional hero who wouldn’t be out of place in The Boys among the Seven, standing next to Homelander.

The funny thing is, we never actually see any evidence in either the anime or manga to suggest that Stain knows about Endeavor’s treatment of his family. There’s some suggestion that he knows Endeavor is a glory hunter who wants to be the #1 hero for its own sake, and that alone is reason enough for Stain to hate him, but he might be just as unaware of Endeavor’s home situation as the general public. The problem here, which might be a problem with the writing, is that by introducing Endeavor’s abuse at the same time as the “Hero Killer” arc, it gives the audience the impression that Stain was trying to rid the world of heroes who do bad things behind the scenes like Endeavor. But if you actually listen to Stain’s rhetoric, that wasn’t his goal at all. He was trying to get rid of heroes who have ulterior motives for doing heroic things. His entire philosophy was to get rid of people like Mr. Beast, who do charitable things like healing the blind, because he “might” only be in it for the fortune and fame.

The keyword there is “might,” because we also see that Stain doesn’t have perfect knowledge of heroes’ motives. We see this with the character Lida, who initially tries to fight Stain for revenge after Stain permanently injured his older brother. However, upon confronting Stain and receiving a verbal dressing down from the villain, Lida realizes that Stain is right about him, and has a genuine epiphany during the fight. However, this doesn’t convince Stain to stop trying to kill him, not because Stain believes Lida deserves to be killed anyway as punishment for trying to fight him to get revenge, but because Stain can’t comprehend that Lida had a genuine change of heart. Stain knows as much about the motivations of heroes as the people complaining on twitter know about Mr. Beast’s.

But there’s a possibility that this isn’t bad writing, and it’s the real reason I wanted to discuss this issue on a writer’s blog. Stain’s views are entirely childish. There’s a good video by Exclamation Point which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUY9FeO1gos, which talks about why the professional hero model of MHA actually works as well as it does, and why Stain’s views on hero society are just not reasonable. Stain isn’t right for the wrong reasons or wrong for the right reasons; he’s just plain wrong.

However, Stain goes about his actions in a way that seems convincing, and he’s charismatic enough (in his own 90s action hero way) to convince even some of the audience of the series to agree with him, at least in part. Later on, we see Stain merchandise sold at a shopping mall, with excited kids who feel inspired by the serial killer trying on their own Stain masks. And new villains get inspired by the hero killer as well, and it may have been the intent of the creators to make a villain that was supposed to become an in-universe symbol like Che Guevara. This is where I wonder if the problem might be a “dumb audience” for falling into the same trap as the people in-universe who support Stain. The characters have an excuse; they don’t know what the audience knows, and are going along with a popular fad in their own world. The audience probably should know better, and this is a frustration for many writers. There are even people who believe that MHA lost its touch after the “Hero Killer” arc, shifting focus away from what could have been an animated version of The Boys to focus on the real theme at the heart of MHA: that not all men are created equal, combined with an overall love of humanity even if we aren’t all born with the same abilities.

Wanting your audience to recognize which characters are morally right and which characters are wrong is like an itch on the bottom of your foot while you’re wearing snow boots: you can’t scratch it, you can’t take your boot off easily to get to it, and it just seems to grow more and more annoying the longer you try to ignore it. And this brings me back to Exclamation Point’s video, which also explores the issue of how the public responds to celebrities and what responsibilities exist between a public figure and their audience. The video also explores the importance of merchandise in allowing people to live vicariously through their favorite celebrities, and how this keeps jealousy of said heroes who usually have larger-than-life abilities from destroying society.

This is one of the reasons why I’ve created this blog, and why I’m currently looking at ways to expand into new ways of connecting with my audience. I believe that the best way to prevent readers from interpreting things the wrong way it to make sure they have some way of talking to the creator. This allows a celebrity to explain his actual positions and make it clear whether a character espousing some personal philosophy was meant to be taken seriously or interpreted as a villain. And this can work both ways; imagine if Che Guevara were still alive and ran a YouTube channel, wherein his audience could hear his frankly murderous rhetoric today. Lots of people who support him in real life would not want to wear his T-shirts if they heard his opinions on black people, or on how it was acceptable to sentence someone to death by firing squad without any proof of wrongdoing.

Of course, holding the audience’s hand while they go through the story has its own problems. For starters, it deprives the audience of the ability to figure these things out for themselves, and sometimes you have to let them do that even if there’s a chance they’ll get it wrong.

I have another problem with Heroes of Janaan. The character of Ephorah has been described by some of my readers as a villain protagonist, a poorly-written whiny embodiment of people that exist in real life, and an understandable,  flawed but sympathetic anti-hero, all from different perspectives. And this was my intent; she was supposed to be up to the audience’s interpretation. She was based partly off people I’ve met in real life, the attitudes they have and where they come from, but if you were to ask me whether she’s a hero or a villain, the answer is that there is no answer. At most, she’s a warning to people who hold similar attitudes on how they can backfire entirely, or how they can make you easily manipulated by anyone who feeds these poisonous beliefs.

So in sum, Stain’s a manchild, don’t get mad at Mr. Beast for making money off his videos where he cures blindness, and you can’t entirely control your audience’s ability to understand