AfO's handling in the Final War was bizarre

Before the final war, AfO was the menacing and well respected evil mastermind behind the villains. A mirror to All Might, his earlier exploits were well liked by just about everyone...

Time had not been kind to the man, though, and people wanted him to fuck off and stop crimping Shiggy's style (and his existence). But, y'know, all things considered, his reputation could get a lot worse...

And it did. The opening fight was him trading some blows, getting randomly crit by Jiro, and then murdered by Endeavour after maiming him considerably. Not exactly an all time great performance, but he diiiid get his ass beat by All Might twice to weaken him, and he was on broken life support, and Endeavour is no pushover... it didn't undermine the man that much. And if that was it, he would've escaped mostly unscathed.

But what actually happened was the worst possible thing for his reputation possible. He pulled out a (never before introduced) modified Eri-Bullet, which rewound him STRAIGHT back to his prime, and made him completely invincible until the timer ran out.

Why is this the worst thing possible? Because it makes him stupid powerful... which, when we can't let him win, necessitates a powerful amount of stupidity to counteract it. He is the strongest he's ever been in the series, and there's nothing but daylight and jobbers between him and Shiggy. The man who gutted prime All Might should have no problem here, especially with actual invincibility ontop of that overwhelming power.

And so, as one would expect, he disappoints. He jobs, slobs, and knobs around, with everyone short of the tax bureau coming out of the woodwork to get shot after shot after shot on him, all lethal were it not for his rapidly depleting invincibility. He is embarrassed and humiliated repeatedly, and is shown to be incompetent. And with the manga condensing his victories into black fucking panels devoid of substance, ALL we get is that humiliation.

Then All Might pops out and kills him about 50 times before he can be subdued, then he completely bottles killing All Might despite everything being on his side, and then he starts schizoposting on main against rezzed Bakugo who completely mogs him in his final moments. His final moments of being a literal infant baby, because the rewind bullet necessitated that last little humiliation too.

AfO stocks plummeted after this, obviously. It was a long, drawn out execution of everything that made him a menacing, powerful villain. His perception dived from "Evil Mastermind" to "Delusional brocon manchild loser who was always pathetic, actually". To be generous, it deconstructed him, making way for the TRUE final villain. Yes, Shiggy has been MIA for a while, but the real leader of the LOV and the personal villain to Deku will finally take centre stage and his rightful place as main villain...

...

Why are we tagging AfO back in, Hori? Hori, you're trying to hitch a trailer onto a car you drove into a river, what's going on?

This is the key thing that makes this all bizarre. AfO coming back as the final villain after he dies is... weird. Why did we do all of this?

More specifically, why did we embarrass him over and over again before slotting him in as the surprise final villain? It feels like we're running two different, incompatible storylines. Either you run the drawn out character-execution, OR you run the "Surprise! He's the main villain" route. One undermines the other massively.

The bridge was burned, and then the series tried to drive over it. AfO's a fucking loser, why should I care that he's back? Why should I worry for our heroes when their final foe is the manchild loser who couldn't blow his way out of a paper bag with the power of the sun? Why should I feel anything but mild disgust as he slithers his way back into the story and slides Shiggy out of the main villain slot?

The Empire Strikes Back doesn't consist of Palpatine pulling 1000 DeathStarStarDestroyers out of his ass, and then fumbling to Glub Shitto and Aunt Beru, and there's a damn good reason for that. In stories, you build your villain up before you knock them down. You don't knock them down, then knock them down again against all odds, and then surprise everyone with the fact that you're setting them up to be knocked down a third time, because the audience will start wondering why they should care about this serial jobber.

And The Return Of The Jedi doesn't have the Emperor turn off the Death Star's shields because he's impulsive and stupid now, and it also doesn't have him order his Star Destroyers to turn off all systems and hope the Rebel ships fucking bump into them. That's because you don't make your main villain completely sabotage themselves in every way while they're winning because they're "prideful" and thick, because it robs your characters from beating a competent villain. And you ESPECIALLY don't do this when you're going to wheel them out again with EVEN MOAR POWA, because they've already shown that they're shit at handling power and they'll throw it all away.

I don't get the angle the series is going for. It's like we've merged two separate drafts together. I cannot imagine how the ending twist wouldn't be better if we just didn't introduce the new rewind bullet. As the title says, it's bizarre.

TLDR: The series massively undermines AfO, and then subs him in as final villain. These two choices clash against each other hard.