I like recurring villains in a superhero setting. They make things more interesting, and give the superheroes something to fight on an even ground. However, I’m not really sure if we’d want this particular guy as a recurring villain. He was a bad villain to start with, and I know only a couple of people who actually like him.

Anyway… Maverick’s profile in Hero TV Fan vol. 2 lists his status as “missing”. The way we see it, this could mean a few things:

1. Lunatic torched him so thoroughly nothing was left.
2. Ouroboros covered it all up. (Lunatic torching him up anyway is still a possibility even with the cover-up.)
3. Lunatic did the cover-up and took Maverick for questioning (no immediate torching took place – though this deviates from what we see in the final episode).
4. He pretended he lobotomized himself and somehow survived and escaped.
   (╬ ಠ益ಠ)

Option number one seems somewhat possible. Option number three is very unlikely, Lunatic sets things on fire first and doesn’t bother to ask questions – but Maverick was involved in all the faking going on in Hero TV and in what happened to Mr. Legend. Option number four is too far out, but when dealing with trolls it’s best to list all possibilities.

We’d be willing to bet our merch shopping money on the second option and Ouroboros involvement in this, even though a quick check with Official Hero Book 2 doesn’t mention Maverick being missing, it just talks about him being “judged” by Lunatic (this clearly involves torching). If we stick to the cover-up option, it would be easy since the press of Sternbild doesn’t seem very inquisitive. This could just be that the majority of the press is a part of Apollon Media – in other words under Maverick’s control. The big companies seem to direct the entire city, so for example the smaller newspapers might not survive for long before getting driven out of business or getting bought out by Apollon Media.

So if Ouroboros covered it all up, why did they do it? It was confirmed that the “certain organization” Maverick worked with was Ouroboros, and he obviously knew a lot about what was going on behind the scenes. By this point he was already a self-inflicted vegetable so he couldn’t talk and reveal their secrets – unless there was a possibility of somehow getting the memories out of his jumbled brain. Was it just a precaution to keep everything hushed and in secrecy? Maybe it’s standard Ouroboros policy to cover up every incident that might affect them? Maverick was one of the most powerful men – if not even the most powerful man – in Sternbild, and he was clearly afraid of Ouroboros and what they would do when the truth of what he’d been doing was revealed.

We don’t think it’d be worth bringing Maverick back as a character in any of the continuations. Definitely not if the intention for bringing him back would be redeeming him. He didn’t show remorse for any of his deeds before he “maveried” himself. (The Japanese fans turned the memory alteration into a verb, 「マベる」 maberu. I remember even seeing the staff&cast use it in interviews.) Redeeming someone who doesn’t see the error of his ways is pointless, and although Nishida says that Maverick wasn’t a completely wicked man we think he’s a smarter writer than that. It’s possible that whatever happened to him will be referenced or mentioned if the Ouroboros storyline continues, since it’s such an integral part of the setting.

There’s just too little information of Ouroboros to make bigger predictions or deeper speculah, so we’d love to learn more about it in the movies or even in one of the manga serializations. Right now Ouroboros speculah is kinda boring since we have already talked about every option so many times.

Hey, still feels Goodman to speculate a little bit for a change.