Episode 12 (Vigilantes)

Goodbye to Dad is the twelfth episode of the My Hero Academia: Vigilantes anime.

Summary#

Thanks to the blackout caused by Teruo, Narufest, and the debut performance of FeatherHATS, has been postponed as the present staff and Heroes keep watch over the guests. Over the phone, Eraser Head tells Midnight that he fought and captured the Villain responsible for the outage. He then says that he's unable to attend since he's waiting for the Police to apprehend Teruo, and believes that the event might be cancelled outright due to the ruckus.

Midnight relays the information to Makoto, adding that the transformers in the neighborhood will take a while to fix, and the backup generators at the department store won't be enough to keep the show going. The Hero then says that she and her colleagues can't do much within their legal power besides call off the event officially and evacuate the crowd. Captain Celebrity then flies in while carrying two civilians in his arms, which gives Makoto a stroke of inspiration on how to keep Narufest alive.

After gathering the staff together, Makoto sends her boss to gather more generators from the store and asks Present Mic to keep the crowd occupied while they try and get the power back up. Unfortunately, for the aforementioned legal reasons, the Hero has to stay on standby with the others to prioritize civilian safety. Koichi then slides up in costume as The Crawler, with Pop☆Step's street performance microphone and encouraging his teammate to fill Present Mic's role in maintaining the audience's attention, since she has experience doing that both during her live performances, and in evacuating civilians during Instant Villain attacks.

With the girl accepting the job, Makoto hands Pop an earpiece so she can get live updates on reversing the blackout and tells the aspiring idol that she has to hold the stage for about half an hour at most. With the FeatherHATS, Makoto, The Crawler, and Present Mic rooting for her, Pop steps up on stage to address the attendees at Narufest.

Meanwhile, Knuckleduster is still hot on the tail of the fleeing Kuin, before he gets a call from the Naruhata Disaster Medical Center. As they take the fight from the open street into the winding alleyways of Naruhata, the hospital staff member tells the man that there's a major change in his wife's condition. Knuckleduster apologizes for the noise and tells the woman that their patient's family will be with them soon, as Knuckleduster hops down and keeps pursuing the Villain on foot.

Back on stage, Pop tells the crowd about the details regarding the blackout, while also introducing herself to her first localized audience outside of her hardcore supporters and passerby. While she's still incredibly nervous and stumbles her words a bit, Pop succeeds in keeping the audience calm and attentive, and with the help of Ichimoku, Jube, and the rest of her loyal fanbase, she directs any patrons who need to use the bathroom or are feeling ill to the surrounding department store staff.

Pop then caps off her announcement with an intermittent performance featuring one of her songs, keeping the civilians lively and entertained. Miu tells her sister Yu that she feels a little jealous because Pop manages to steal the show despite her singing talent, but she can't help but admit that she looks cute.

On the street, Teruo begins to cry out upon hearing Pop's voice from above, and Eraser Head notices something on the Villain's back. One of Kuin's worker bees appears to be sucking Trigger from the Villain back into its specialized abdomen, before flying off and narrowly missing Eraser Head swatting it away with his Capturing Weapon.

By this time, an exhausted Kuin is cornered into a dead end by Knuckleduster. Not willing to surrender, Kuin manages to summon a few of her bees out in the open, which proceed to pump her own supply of Trigger into her neck. As she starts to keel over and convulse, Knuckleduster easily picks up what his daughter-turned-Villain is pulling and knows the downsides when it comes to how it interacts with the Queen Bee Quirk. The Quirk forms a new, unique hive mind between the host human's brain and the parasitic bees incubating in her eye. However, since Trigger weakens a user's cognitive function, a Queen Bee user's hive mind deteriorates as well, allowing parts of the unaffected host's personality to leak out and take back control of their body.

As Tamao Oguro begins to resurface in her hijacked body, she remembers the last time she saw her parents before being turned into a Villain. She had a huge argument with her father about her pursuits in music and a concert she wanted to go to that day with some people he doesn't approve of, saying that the man has no say in her life since he's barely a part of it. After her mother told her to apologize to her father, she storms out of their home and into the night with tears in her eyes. As Tamao cried while leaning on a vending machine, she was then approached by a sinister-looking schoolgirl in a purple, bee-themed bomber jacket, who was the previous host of Queen Bee looking for its next victim.

Tamao, now with elongated nails and reddish-purple skin, screams at her father for all the nagging he does and tells him to shut up. Knuckleduster encourages his daughter to let it all out, since they've always had problems talking things out, with most of it being fueled by him preferring to yell at her over listening to her problems. As he pulls out his Taser Knuckle, the high schooler rushes in and brandishes her newly transformed claws.

With a quick pump of Trigger from the bee that extracted its supply from the mutated Teruo, the Villain gains access to the bio-electricity from Electric Eel and punctures the Vigilante in the chest while electrocuting him. Knuckleduster plummets to the ground and begins to fade out consciousness, noting how even as a Villain, she still has the smarts and style of his little girl. While the criminal seemingly takes the victory as she walks away and curses out her dad, the recoil of the electric shock has severely burnt her right arm. As a few cockroaches begins to scuttle around the downed man's hand, Knuckleduster's fingers begin to twitch around his Taser Knuckle's trigger.

Back at the department store, Makoto tells Pop that the power is fixed and Narufest is back on, which the idol cheerfully relays to the crowd. With that, the rest of FeatherHATS mobilize on stage and kick off their debut performance with their rock remix of the Marukane Department Store jingle, instantly wowing the crowd and reigniting the energy of the event.

A battered Kuin then walks near an open street to see the start of the concert, and before she can use this opportunity to crash it with her bees, a conscious Knuckleduster walks up from behind to stop her. The Villain tells him to give up and asks how he's still alive, and Knuckleduster, stringing and pulling a cord out of his chest, tells the girl not to bother harassing the people performing at the event, as his daughter will have her own stage with her own spotlight one day. The man tells his daughter not to falter on her dreams due to some mistakes she made and promises to help the girl reach that.

Kuin once again tells Knuckleduster to stop playing the "dad card" by telling her this stuff, which Knuckleduster spits at as he tells his daughter to stop listening to the bees nesting in her head. Realizing he won't quit, Kuin turns back to Knuckleduster and brandishes her sharpened nails and a small swarm of bees, as she plans to take out Knuckleduster and squeeze out the last remaining worth of Tamao's body before moving on to another host. The Villain goes on the offensive and engages with Knuckleduster, while using her Bomb Bees and newly acquired electricity.

The man believes at this rate, Kuin's next attack will irreparably damage Tamao's body due to the immense amount of stress being dumped on it. As he looks into the resentment etched on the criminal's face, Knuckleduster recognizes it as the same on his daughter gave her before she left, and realizes that he drove her away with his behavior and was too cowardly to run after her. This time, Knuckleduster doesn't waver and refuses to keep pushing his daughter away emotionally, and with some well-timed blocks and parrying, the man takes out Kuin with a simple technique that he knows most opponents will fall to, no matter what type of person they are: a strong and swift punch to the stomach, and a finisher with a right hook to the chest using his taser.

As Kuin struggles to get off the ground due to the damage and the sudden arrythmia from the electricity, Knuckleduster warns the Villain that if she doesn't try and save her body, it'll shut down permanently and take her along with it. The Villain tries to stabilize her heart by pooling the electricity she acquired from Teruo into her good arm, but Knuckleduster stomps on it and says he's not going to let her do that. Kuin then starts choking and losing consciousness, as the worker bees begin flooding out of her eye socket and into the air out of instinct, since their host's body is starting to become uninhabitable.

With the workers no longer a threat to him, Knuckleduster then takes a pair of tweezers and digs into his decrepit daughter's eye socket, pulling out the true mastermind behind the parasitic Quirk: a queen bee with an elongated, crudely swollen abdomen. He then tosses it in the road as well as a gas canister with a timed explosive attached to it, which releases a synthetic pheromone that attracts the worker bees and swiftly blows them up along with their queen. With the true Villain of the conflict dealt with, he then moves on to his battered daughter.

The chemical attractant, along with the Taser Knuckle and a routine order of painkillers, was part of a package deal he made during a regular visit with Giran. When commissioning his new weapon, he asked the broker to outfit the taser with an AED, which he used to jumpstart his heart following his electrocution by Kuin, and is now planning to do the same to revive his daughter. Giran asked what he planned on doing with a device like that, and Knuckleduster simply said that sometimes people stop hearts, and other times they start them. The broker agrees to the deal and warns him that his drug usage will kill him down the line if he doesn't cut back on it.

Knuckleduster wastes no time outfitting Tamao with the defibrillator cords and shocking her, before delivering chest compressions and praying that his daughter pulls through so she can take her home to see her mother again.

Eventually, Teruo gets chained up by the Police. Noticing the Instant Villain whimpering as he's watching the FeatherHATS performance from below, Eraser Head asks the officers to leave Teruo here for a few minutes so he can catch the rest of the show. As it finishes, and both performers and audience members celebrate, Naomasa comes by to question Eraser Head.

The Hero says he doesn't think Teruo is an Instant Villain, as the situation feels more unique than a simple Trigger bender. Eraser Head then tells the detective about the bee he spotted on the Villain, which Naomasa takes great interest in since it lines up with similar sightings made in regard to the cause of the Instant Villain outbreak from earlier.

Passing the two is a scarred man wearing a ponytail and a police jumpsuit, the same Trigger dealer who first approached Soga and his friends with the drug. As the man quietly cheers about all the data he's gathered with his Trigger experiments, he notices one of Kuin's bees flying away, having somehow escaped the explosion set off by Knuckleduster. In a flash, the man coats his body in mysterious, glowing energy and speeds off, returning back in an instant with the modified arthropod in a jar. He then walks off, remarking on how the many have now been reduced to one.

Characters in Order of Appearance#

Midnight Teruo Unagisawa Eraser Head Makoto Tsukauchi Captain Celebrity Present Mic Mad Hatters East Naruhata High Dance Squad Miu Yu Pop☆Step Koichi Haimawari Kuin Hachisuka Knuckleduster Mrs. Oguro (Mentioned) Ichimoku Samazu Jube Namimaru Tamao Oguro Giran Naomasa Tsukauchi The Scarred Man

Quirks#

• Electric Eel
• Flight
• Slide and Glide
• Beams From His Eyes
• Meganetic Blaster
• Leap
• Queen Bee
• Bomb Bees
• Overclock

Locations#

• Naruhata
• Marukane Department Store

Battles & Events#

• Naruhata Festival
• First Narufest (Ended)
• Knuckleduster vs. Kuin Hachisuka (Ended)

Anime & Manga Differences#

• In the manga, Eraser Head references the injured civilians when reporting on the Villain incident to Midnight, which is not mentioned in the anime since no civilians were harmed there.
• When Koichi returns to bring Pop her microphone, in the manga he emerges from the concertgoers, while in the anime he appears after sliding up the Marukane Store's walls to the performers.
• Pop's performance is extended in the anime.
• Tamao's flashback, including her argument with her parents, and her meeting the Queen Bee's previous host, is expanded on in the anime.
• The previous host's face is clearly shown in the anime, while in the manga its in shadow, save for a simplified drawing of her expression.
• After being electrocuted by Kuin, the anime removes Knuckleduster smiling, proud of his daughter's creative and clever thinking when he collapses to the ground.
• The anime lingers on Knuckleduster's comatose body after being shocked by Kuin.
• In the manga, Knuckleduster contacts Giran via cell phone, while in the anime he meets him in person at a bar.
• The flashback is also cut up into segments in the anime.
• The FeatherHATS' performance is extended in the anime.
• The anime also includes a video from the Marukane manager giving a short speech, while it is just heard in the manga.
• The anime extends the fight between Knuckleduster and Kuin.
• In the anime, Knuckleduster does not perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on Tamao as in the manga.