There are many reasons why Vigilante: Boku no Hero Academia Illegals works. Prominent among them, I think, is that despite the name being in the title, you’d never slip and think you were watching (or reading) HeroAca. Illegals has a very distinct and dynamic energy all its own. Despite familiar faces like Eraser and even Tsukauchi (so far) showing up, this is a different animal. An imitation of a series except not as good because it’s not by the original author is never going to excite anybody, but that’s what a lot of spinoff manga are. Happily, not this one.
Eraser – and Erasure – are the most important Boku no Hero Academia crossover in these early chapters. He and Knuckleduster get into a fight straight off – to be fair to Aizawa, it’s Knuckleduster who starts it. As they do battle the salaryman with the hero figures in his briefcase bolts, which Pop quite correctly takes to be very suspicious. She takes off after him and beckons Kouichi to follow, which comes as rather a shock to him. But he does, leaving the hero and the vigilante bereft of an audience.
Eraser does what Eraser does – gets a read on his opponent’s quirk and proceeds to nullify it. Except he doesn’t, which is initially puzzling (and painful). But the truth is obvious enough – Knuckle has no quirk, or at least not one that he’s leveraging in their fight. He’s just a tough dude with big muscles and brass knuckles. Eraserhead takes a pragmatic approach here – if the man isn’t using a quirk to do bad things, he has no reason to arrest him. That doesn’t mean he’s above suspicion, but the prudent course for now is to defer any confrontation.
Knuckleduster then makes short work of the three Trigger-boosted zaku who’ve showed up for revenge against Mr. Nice Guy. But the good guys have a bigger problem on their hands – literally. The salaryman is a Trigger user, the figures are dispensers (and we’re not talking Pez), and his quirk seems to combine giantism and hardening in a very powerful way. This leads to major problems for Pop, and then Kouichi who’s waded in after her. She finds herself falling from a great distance, and with nothing to push off of her quirk is no good to her. Kouichi intervenes, using “Slide and Glide” to climb a building (it can, apparently) and giving himself up so Pop can “Leap”.
Fortunately Kouichi has been paying attention to his lessons, and manages to find a soft garbage heap to break his fall. As for Knuckleduster, he truly is formidable quirk or no – even a giant like this can be subdued by a normal human if that human knows his weaknesses (and is strong enough – and has a real hero backing him up). Another lesson master has been teaching student? “Shinsetsu-man” isn’t going to work as a hero name, even for an unlicensed hero – villains will just laugh. So the next time he’s out on patrol it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, and Kouichi is “The Crawler” – but the two middle schoolers whose fight he’s trying to break up unfortunately hear it as something quite different.
Those two middle-schoolers are certainly irksome, but Knuckle’s notion to beat the crap out of them seems like a very bad idea on so many levels. “It makes me feel better” isn’t going to hold up as a justification, either. On the other hand Knuckleduster does once more taken down a villain – again of the “instant” variety – when there are no licensed heroes around to do so, or even police (though if they heard “The Cruller” was around they’d probably get there in a flash).
A new nickname (the kinks still need to be worked out there for sure), new partners, body armor to allow him to go full speed – it seems Kouichi is now a full-on vigilante whether he wants to be or not. Everything these three do is mired in shades of legal grey – fittingly, as it mostly seems to happen in the grey areas of the city, where the light – and heroes – don’t quite reach. Are they the “heroes” hero society needs, or the ones it deserves?
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