#bnha fandom critical

[thelittlegirlinwonderland]

what it's like being in the mha fandom

#livvytalks #anti bakugo #anti bakugou #bnha fandom critical #i literally have to hide my dislike of blasty #b/c if i don't i'll get harassed again #or more death threats #i get enough of those already #this fandom sucks

[stillness-in-green]

Chapter Thoughts — Chapter 387: Congealing

Howdy, everyone, guess who had an unusually high amount of research to do for this post? Next chapter's should be up faster, between being extra short and largely Todo-centric.

Content Note: I will be talking quite a lot about the Himura inter-family marriages below. An enormous chunk of this post is going to be dedicated to dispelling some of the most frequent misconceptions in the fandom response to the Himura situation, which I don't think is anywhere near as drastic as a lot of people are making it out to be. That's not the same as saying there's nothing wrong with it at all! However, I want to be very clear on what I believe Geten is describing before I talk about what we can gather from it.

(Spoilers: A lot of people don't have the first clue what the phrase "branch family" indicates and good lord, does it ever show.)

Hit the jump.

On Geten and the Himura

O Wow, you guys.  Wow.  Okay, so, obviously, lots to cover here, and I know I’ve said before that I try to make these posts with minimal reference to Bad Takes I’m seeing out there in the wilds of the fandom, but holy shit, people, the takes are SO INCREDIBLY BAD.  I should have known better, I guess, than to expect the fandom to be remotely reasonable about a reveal that intersects with both the MLA and the Todoroki.  So, first things first:

Please, please, please, knock it off with the inbreeding jokes and the screeching panic about Rei’s only choices being an abusive arranged marriage or a cousin-marriage.  Geten specifies in nearly every translation we have that the intermarriages within the Himura clan were between distant relatives.  And I strongly, strongly suspect that the majority of people who are making banjo jokes or fretting about the deleterious effects of inbreeding on their faves have not the faintest idea what Geten is talking about when he says “branch families” and “main family.”

As an illustrative example, let’s talk in brief about the Fujiwara clan.

The most dominant clan throughout virtually all of Japan's Heian Era (794 – 1195) was the Fujiwara clan, whose whole shtick was marrying their daughters to Emperors and then relying on the practice of raising the future Emperor in his mother’s household to take advantage of filial piety traditions—which applied even to in-laws!—to secure the loyalty of the Emperor/future Emperor to his Fujiwara father/grandfather.  Even after they fell from the heights of their influence, they still monopolized powerful positions as imperial advisors and regents all the way up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868!

That’s over a thousand years of first marrying into the imperial line and then being the only family who were even eligible to be chosen as regents for child Emperors or Empresses Regnant.  They certainly didn’t achieve that by being a single family for a thousand years!  Rather, there were branch families under the clan umbrella, four of note—

—Well, actually, it was four during the Heian Era.  Once the Kamakura period rolled around the most powerful of those four further subdivided into five.  So eight families total—

—Well, wait, those were really just the most important and chief of the families.  Actually there were five more cadet branches, too.  So thirteen families total—

—But actually, those five cadet branches were subdivided even further as well.  According to Wikipedia, the total number of subfamilies in the Fujiwara clan, families that were specifically aristocrats in the Imperial court (the kuge class) or higher—is…

Uh.  Ninety-seven.

Now, I don’t know how many of those families existed concurrently, but with numbers like that, I hardly think it matters.  All those families—and they are families, not individuals—fell under the broad umbrella of the Fujiwara clan.  So, you know, if some of them intermarry, it’s not exactly on the same level as you marrying your first cousin!  Or your second.  Or your third or fourth or fifth.

Obviously I don’t think the Himura were anywhere near that big or influential, but I hope it illustrates my point: Japanese clans that have had a few hundred years to develop can be fucking enormous.  Please banish from your mind the idea that the Himura have been marrying their direct cousins this whole time.  When Geten says they created multiple branch families, and started marrying distant relatives, the plural on "branch families" and the adjective "distant" are giving us crucial, meaningful information, not just superfluous clutter.

Truthfully, I think a lot of this panic is due to the fact that most people aren’t very into genealogy and thus have no idea how quickly you can become very distant indeed from people with whom you share a common ancestor.  I mean, how many of your third cousins can you name?  For me, that answer is zero.  Heck, I can’t even name any second cousins.  The best I could do would be to tell you of their existence in broad strokes—the son of one of my mother’s cousins, whose name I don’t remember but who I know exists; the hypothetical children one of my father’s cousins might have had at some point after the last time I heard anything about him, well over twenty years ago, at which time he was still single.

Now, it’s a little easier to look down the family tree rather than across, in this case.  To wit, you almost certainly know your cousins much better than your parents’ cousins—your children and your cousins’ children will be second cousins.  That’s probably much closer feeling, right?  But put yourself in the shoes of those kids—unless you live in the same town as your cousins, and see each other pretty frequently, your children and theirs will probably meet only a handful of times before they grow up and head off to live their own lives.  After all, look back up—how well do you remember your parents’ cousins’ children?

And, again—that’s second cousins, the outer periphery of what people who study this stuff class as “close relatives.” [1]  Geten specifying distant relatives means we’re talking farther removed even than that.  Your second cousins once removed, for example, would be either your second cousins’ children (that is, your parents’ cousins’ grandchildren) or your grandparents’ cousins’ children.  Your third cousins, meanwhile, would be your grandparents’ cousins’ grandchildren.

Have you ever met family that far removed?  Have you seen pictures?  Do you even know if they exist?  How many members of your extended family do you know of, generally, perhaps because your parents brought you along on visits a few times as a child, but you’ve long since forgotten their names or their specific relation to you?

Now, in a situation like Geten is talking about, you probably would be able to positively answer some of my questions above, because you’d be mid-level ruling class; your parents would be talking about marriage to someone (hopefully) your age in a branch family.  But that doesn’t mean you would have met them.  They’d probably live in a different part of the country entirely, your common ancestor married to some outside group before the Advent of the Exceptional.  The branch families of, for example, the Tokugawa shogunate lived in four strongholds, each a hundred or more miles distant from the next.[2]  You can track descendants of Queen Victoria through royals from England, Spain, and all three of Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

What all this boils down to is that, no, it really is not that strange for a widely spread clan to do a bit of intermarriage now and then to consolidate power.  People in power want power to stay in the family.  Duh.

However.

That all said, I am not saying the situation Geten describes is 100% fine and cool.  Obviously if it were totally normal and unremarkable, there’d be no point to even bringing it up, much less having Mr. Compress disparagingly comment on it!  But look at the timetable here.  The Himura began as village leaders a long, long time ago, and even after the land reforms, they still went on creating branch families, enabling them to maintain their wealth and pride.

It’s after the Advent that the marrying between the families starts.  And even this, done a handful of times and then abandoned, would not be a damning thing—as I said, those big families in power do have marriages across branches sometimes.  The real trouble is carrying out such marriages repeatedly, across many generations, within a small group.  Some research on the Habsburgs, for example, surely the most famous inbred royals in the Western hemisphere, turned this up:

From 1516 to 1700, it has been estimated that over 80% of marriages within the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty were consanguineous. In other words, they were marriages between close blood relatives. Most often, these unions took the form of marriages between first cousins, double-first cousins, and uncles/nieces.

Nowhere does Geten suggest that things with the Himura got this bad.  In fact, I would argue that the text is quite clear that the family slowly stopped intermarrying, and this is what led to their demise!  Consider the following points:

The Advent happened in modern times.  The glowing baby is delivered in what is very clearly a modern hospital; the very next panel shows a geeky dude levitating a volume of manga, which didn’t even exist in the form we know today until after WWII.  Technology stalled in the wake of the Advent, but the characters now still have cellphones and laptop computers—the Advent was modern.  My rough estimate for how long it’s been since then is a bit over 150 years.    

Because the Advent happened in modern times, the Himura family would have known about the dangers of excessive intermarriage.  This isn’t something they’ve been doing since the Stone Age and refused to change their minds about until the last twenty-five years!    

Because the Himura family would have known about the dangers of inbreeding, look at what happens: they do inter-branch marriages to “distant relatives” for about 125 years and then they stop.  Over the course of that time, the clan shrinks and wanes, for one reason that is immediately self-apparent and a few others that we can guess were probable.     The self-apparent reason is that, even though the families started out as distant relatives, the divide would get shorter with every wedding that produced children.  Thus, the pool of marriageable candidates for those children gets smaller and smaller as the families become more closely entwined.  Avenues close off, marriages become unavailable that would be illegal under Japanese law (which allows marriage between first cousins, but not between uncle and niece/aunt and nephew), or which would have too high a concern of congenital defects—which, remember, a modern family would be aware of.     We can hypothesize plenty of other reasons for the clan’s diminishment.  Once it became clear that quirks were there to stay, entire families might have broken away rather than go along with an inherently doomed endeavor.  Some marriageable candidates likely ran away or otherwise abandoned the family rather than continuing along the path the family had laid out for them.  There would probably have been otherwise acceptable candidates who became unacceptable due to developing quirks that were undesirable to the bloodline.[3]  And so on and so forth.    

Eventually, Geten says, the head family—presumably the one Rei’s from—started selling off their children to outsiders, and that was the end.  If the head family threw in the towel on preserving the bloodline, the branch families certainly weren’t going to be bound to do it anymore!  And so the remnants of the clan shattered.

So, no.  Rei’s choices were not, “Marry Enji or marry a cousin.”  Rei’s parents were looking for someone who could bring money to the family; by that point in time, I don’t think they would have let her marry within the family even if she’d wanted to!

By the same token, Dabi and Geten are not cousins—not in the way people have been using the word, at least, to mean “someone I am imagining to be as close to me as, like, my first cousin, ew.”  While the repeated intermarriage would indeed have reduced the distance quickly as the generations passed, if the common ancestor (that is, the family founder) was from, say, eight generations ago, two and a half centuries prior to the point at which the intermarriage began, and there were at least five or six branches of family at the start,[4] it would have taken more than just one or two generations before the only options available to wed were close relatives!

And, to reiterate, that’s exactly what we saw happen—the Himura kept it up for a few generations, shrinking all the while, but fragmenting for good four or five generations after the Advent.  I would guess that, while Geten would have been more closely related to any children Rei had borne via intermarriage, Dabi and Geten are third or fourth cousins at best.  The Himura were in denial about the new state of the world; they weren’t idiots that managed to forget everything history has ever demonstrated about what happens when you keep marrying off first cousins in a closed environment.

That all said, what else have we got this chapter??  Because make no mistake, the fact that I’m pushing back against reductive cousin-marriage takes in no way means that I wish to shy away from examining the darker implications here!

O I love how ambivalent about all this Geten is.  Given that Rei was married to an outsider over twenty years ago, if the branch families scattered around that time, Geten must have been very young, so he’d have been profoundly impacted by it.  This is especially apparent given the harshness of the language he uses to describe the event: the families don’t merely admit defeat and grudgingly set to integrating; they “scatter.”  The main line doesn’t just start marrying outsiders; they start “selling their children.”

This suggests incredibly bitter feelings in the family, and no wonder!  I imagine there were a lot of people, especially in the branch families or among younger members, who’d hated the clan’s insularity, and they would have left the moment they had an excuse to!  Conversely, though, there would also have been people who’d been indoctrinated into the clan’s worldview all their lives, people who’d quashed their doubts or discomfort down long ago, who would be clinging to sunk cost fallacies with all their strength because change would be terrifying to them.  Those people, I think, would be particularly likely to have complete breakdowns (or meltdowns) when the main family surrendered.

Whatever happened, it must have been quite dramatic, given the way Geten talks about Re-Destro having found him.  Counter to a couple of, just, woefully awful takes I’ve seen around, Re-Destro did not buy Geten; it doesn’t even sound like he found him via any official channel.  It was the main family members who were being “sold off,” remember; the branch families, which Geten explicitly associates himself with, were “scattered.”  It sounds, then, like Geten was basically an orphan, and not one living in any kind of facility or home.  He clearly had family, but whether he bolted on his own, was abandoned,[5] or whatever, that family’s no longer in the picture.  This despite the fact that, again, he would have been a very, very young child at the time.

On a similar note, because of that youth, it’s also probable that his view on the family tragedy is colored at least in part by whatever Re-Destro’s reaction to it was when he got Geten’s story upon taking him in.

Re-Destro, of course, is all for radical quirk acceptance, but he’s deeply entangled with issues of bloodline himself.  Although he uses some pretty flowery language to talk about his inherited blood from Destro, he also views that duty as a huge burdensome responsibility from which he is deliriously happy to be freed by Shigaraki.  So we might suppose that he himself is pretty cold on chaining children to bloodline purity politics, especially in absence of a Worthy Cause.  And rejecting the glorious future of everyone using their quirks to become who they were meant to be is the very opposite of a worthy cause!

O  Gee, I wonder what Spinner would have thought about this.  What a shame we didn’t have a three-month period where the League and the MLA were living together to explore oh wait.

O  Congratulations to everyone who ever ventured to suggest that the Todoroki microaggressions against heteromorphs might stem from Rei, with her old money, traditionalist family, rather than New Money Endeavor, who went whole scenes being mad at Hawks and never called him anything dehumanizing even in his own mind.  Guess there was something to Natsuo not bringing up his mouse-eared girlfriend in the hospital scene after all!

I’m mostly being facetious about this, but you can check here if you want my thoughts on who in the Todofam uses animal insults, who doesn’t, and some analysis as to why. I'd add two observations in light of new information:

First, Natsuo's girlfriend isn't at the shelter with him and the others, despite having a far better justification for being with him than the Masegaki kids have to be hanging around Fuyumi. It's a small absence, but noticeable in the context of the Himura being specifically described as heteromorphobic by Compress.

Second, while a lot of people say that heteromorph discrimination is a recent retcon, it's got a lot of early evidence. In that same vein, it's notable that Rei brings up bloodlines and obligation to them all the way back in Chapter 39—Shouto's Sports Festival flashback—where she reassures baby Shouto that he isn't a slave to his blood as the two of them watch All Might on TV talking about quirks being passed on from parent to child.

It's a little obscured by both Shouto's fears of coming to resemble his father and All Might's (frankly pretty contradictory) claims about what his, "I am here!" catchphrase is meant to indicate, but even back then, Rei's comfort is phrased in terms of being free from obligation to one's blood. If Horikoshi already knew what the Himuras' deal was even back then, one can easily imagine that he already knew the sorts of people the Himura were rejecting.

   

On the Todofam Reunion:

I love all the information packed into Geten and Compress scene, but I do wish it felt less arbitrary.  Indeed, it’s the second scene we’ve gotten of the incredibly specific “captured villains sit in their cells and randomly, with no apparent prompting, talk about something relevant to the Todoroki situation” scenario. But then, this whole confrontation in the Todofam is wildly arbitrary.  Which is frustrating!  The family had that great scene in the hospital where they all talked about stopping Touya together and then did absolutely nothing to actually make that happen, and it really does not reflect well on either them or this whole scene.

Consider:

Dabi is only in this location, confronting Endeavor, because of spill-over effect from other villain actions (Spinner, Kurogiri).  This was not planned in advance because the villains didn’t plan for being split up.  Likewise, Endeavor confirms this chapter that he was trying to lure Touya away from the fighting at the Villa, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have intentionally led Touya towards one of the evacuation routes if he’d known there was a stalled box in the danger zone.  (Why exactly didn't one of the people at police HQ tip him off about that?)    

There are many, many other transports Rei and the kids could have gotten onto; they’re on this specific one rather than any others by total freak coincidence, not active choice.    

The transport only stops where it does because of outside villain interference (Skeptic, and, as of next chapter, AFO’s spies).  This interference was obviously not intended to stop the transport in the specific location it did because Skeptic was already interfering with them long before Dabi was warped in, and the AFO spies ought to value their own lives too much to willingly try to get themselves killed in a blue flame inferno.  (More on them next week, because my god, does their scene in 388 annoy the hell out of me.)

So, taken all together, the Todofam’s vow in the hospital has amounted to absolutely nothing, and the fact that they’re being reunited now is a result of villain actions at best, random chance at worst.  At no point have any of them been seen to make an effort at facilitating a full family action.  While, yes, it is the case that the rest of the family are civilians, why even talk about “dealing with Touya as a family” if they’re going to do nothing of the sort?  When did “deal with Touya as a family” become “allow the planners of this combat to move us all to different locations, leaving only Shouto—who knows the least about Touya of anyone in the family!—to try and talk down the brother who resents him more than anyone?”

It's just another point where Team Hero talks big but takes no action to back that talk up.    

On Enji and Touya:

O  The, “Watch me!”/”I don’t want to watch you die!” exchange is good stuff—all that telling people to watch him, and now Enji’s on the other side of that.  Even better is that ludicrously delightful panel of the two of them with hands and flame-hands entwined, Enji’s arms wide open as Touya comes in[6] for a landing.  As ever, Dabi’s dancing imagery is on-fucking-point.  Good work getting your dad to dance with you in hell, Dabs.

O  As to Enji’s actions here, I’m torn.  On the one hand, it’s extremely telling that Endeavor leaps straight to, “Guess we’ll die together, then,” when he fails to talk Dabi down, and that’s emblematic of the flaws of the hero mentality, which is so drastically bad at dealing with nuanced situations in which they or their society have failed.

On the other hand, Enji does try to talk to Touya here and gets nowhere, not necessarily because he’s saying the wrong things (though you could argue that he is) but because Dabi’s frying his own brain.  This is uncomfortably reminiscent of Spinner’s mental decay, and, as others have said, I’m Very Not Here for the villains being so damaged mentally that they can’t even articulate their own grievances, allowing heroes to get the last word by default even though their “solutions” are wildly insufficient and ultimately in support of the demonstrably failing status quo.

Anyway, Enji is obviously taking the wrong tack here, but I can’t help but feel like the writing has put him in a no-win situation by stripping Touya’s ability to reason from him, rendering him unable to even attempt to respond to Enji’s attempts at engagement. Enji’s still ultimately to blame for this, of course, thanks to all his many, many failures to engage with Touya at literally any point prior to this, but it’s just an ongoing disappointment to me that we continue to be deprived of a proper intellectual back-and-forth about this society’s ultimate worth because, at all times, either the heroes are unwilling to engage or the villains have been rendered unable to.

O  Travel times in this series continue to be unbelievably whack.  Endeavor has gotten 800 meters from the Villa ruins? 800 meters? That's less than half a mile! AFO is most of the way to U.A. by now! All Might has driven even farther, going all the way from the police HQ, which is probably in Tokyo near Central Hospital, past Kamino and every other active battlefront, to far enough out from U.A. to intercept AFO's flight path. That's well over a hundred miles, traveled in a matter of minutes![7] But Endeavor, even on injured legs, couldn't make it one single mile?? And Dabi couldn't have caught up to him if he was moving that slow?

God save me from these arbitrary fucking travel times!    

Stray Notes:

O  The “land reforms,” not “the agricultural revolution,” jfc C.Cook. There's a pretty huge difference between a family sustaining their power through an agricultural upheaval in 1947 vs. 10,000 BC!

O  Why is it so cold in there??  Get Mr. Compress a jacket!!! Also, like, Geten doesn’t seem terribly bothered, as one might expect from an ice quirk user, but it’s a bit inconsistent with his wearing a full-length parka during his fights, seeing as the parka would suggest he is, in fact, not totally immune to sustained chills!

That being the case, why is it so cold in there?  I wouldn’t think it’s actually just that cold in the prison, since there’s obviously a cold mist drifting into Mr. C’s cell, rather than being ambient in both of them.  Does Geten just generate it?  His whole thing up to now has been that he controls ice but can’t create it from nothing, so if it is coming from him, that would be—well, not quite a retcon, but certainly a swerve.

Does he naturally generate it but do so very slowly, not in sufficient amounts to use for his preferred Ballistic Iceberg fighting style?  If it’s coming from him automatically, can he turn it off?  Presumably not, since if he could and isn’t, that would suggest he’s doing this with a goal in mind, something you have to think his jailers would have Opinions about.

So if he can’t turn it off, and this just happens in anyplace he sits long enough, is the parka to protect other people from his chill, rather than to protect him from the cold of the ice he uses?  Recall that there wasn’t ice caked on his chair during e.g. the MLA dinner scene.  What a fascinating idea, and one that speaks to the need for support items like Detnerat makes!

Well, whatever the case, I certainly hope he’s about to use his ice to decisively break them out of there!  Because haha, why wouldn’t he be able to do that if he ambiently creates cold just by sitting there and the prison can’t even be arsed to crank the temperature up??  Surely no one thinks that those restraints on his hands are sufficient to stop him from using his ice?  I haven’t forgotten that he definitively does not need to touch ice in order to control it, and it can’t be that hard to find a fire suppression sprinkler system line or the plumbing connected to whatever the toilet situation is for prisoners or something!!

(Sigh.)

O  Unexpectedly good of the heroes to let Mr. Compress keep his prosthetic.  And a bed, no less!  I wonder where Geten’s bed is.  (My god, these jail conditions are so inhuman.  Get them a damn futon, at least.)

O  That hint that Mr. C has been talking to the cops and heroes—Geten asking about the conversation—I wonder if anything will come of that?  Because it would be incredibly lame for Horikoshi to promise us we’d see Mr. C again only for this to be his final appearance, doing nothing but weighing in with disgruntled expressions on Geten’s out-of-nowhere backstory drop.  It’s a pretty shit final scene for Geten, too, dropping backstory exposition for no reason save to layer in some justification for the ice powers Dabi is about to exhibit.

--------------------- FOOTNOTES ---------------------

[1] The cut-off between close and distant relatives is made here because, once you get further out than second cousins, there’s little to no difference in the impact of shared blood on the child of two such distant relatives and that experienced by any random person in the general population.

[2] I eyeballed this on a map, so it’s not exact, but it’ll do as a ballpark.  Two of them looked a little closer together than a hundred miles, but that’s also a straight overland route from Point A to Point B, which the roads probably wouldn’t have been.  Incidentally, traveling a hundred miles in a time before cars would have taken at least five days if you weren’t a military messenger in a hurry and trading out horses at multiple stops.

[3] Given that the characters in-universe still don’t know the origin of quirks, there’s no way to completely guarantee desirable quirks, or even to perfectly guard against the dreaded heteromorphic quirks.  Eventually, the Himura would get a kid whose ice quirk is tied to the fact that they were born looking like a snowman, or they'd crop up a polar bear heteromorph or something.  And whoops, there goes another viable bloodline.

[4] A very reasonable and indeed conservative estimate. Remember that Geten says “the few remaining families” scattered after the main family gave up; the plural indicates that there were still at least two branch family holdouts even after all the waning and shrinking.  In turn, those being the remainder means there must have been more previously.  Losing only two over the course of over a century of mandated intermarriage throughout the chaos of the Advent is possibly undershooting quite a bit!          I talked about the Fujiwara earlier, but for an anime example of how ridiculous the branch family situation can get, look at Kakegurui: we’re at ten and counting branch families under the control of the main line, and if we read the kanji of that main line's name literally, there could be ninety more in the wings.

[5] I lean towards some form of abandonment because it makes the Dabi foiling tastier if Touya left his family by choice when he became Dabi, whereas Geten was left alone through no choice of his own. Abandonment also provides more meaningful context on Geten’s attachment to RD and his determination to be useful and strong for him.

[6] Crotch-first.

[7] Maybe he gave Lady Nagant a ride and that’s how she got in range to start taking potshots at Shigaraki at U.A.? It'd be nice to have any kind of explanation for that particular feat, though it would mean All Might didn't leave Tokyo until after Kurogiri was freed, cutting into his travel time even more. But heck, what's a few minutes matter when your car can drive eight hundred miles an hour, right? Christ.

#bnha #bnha 387 #chapter thoughts #geten #himura family circumstances #todotalk #bnha culture gap #bnha fandom critical

[masterdizzi]

The MHA fandom is so annoying. The moment anyone brings up the sexualization of minors, people defend the hell out of it and harrass whoever brought it up, just like this guy here.

This makes me wonder why people like this hate Mineta. They are no different from him, lol.

The brawlstars community had a meltdown over a character who was supposedly a minor being drawn in a suggestive fashion, yet this fandom actively antagonizes people who rant about that sorta stuff?

Yeah, it's Hori's fault for drawing them like that, but the fandom should know better. You can say "it's just an anime thing" but I've watched anime with sane fandoms

#mha critical #bnha critical #bnha fandom critical #mha fandom critical

[epickiya722]

Okay, seeing people saying Horikoshi's writing sucks now and whatnot made me realize that maybe this is his breaking point. I'm not joking.

Look, writing in general is not going to be top tier all the time. People, stop expecting it to be.

Especially, when during the eight years of creating a series, you get death threats, complaints, and all this other drama to the point that it will reflect on your writing because guess what? Your health is broken down.

I bet Horikoshi does feel super stressed nowadays and try to hold it together. I'm just saying, he probably didn't expect BNHA to be as successful as it is so this is new to him. BNHA is his longest story. He has done other works, but they're not acknowledged like BNHA is because they don't even run a whole year.

This is a guess, but maybe he's adjusting to having a huge series like BNHA. People don't just adjust to having a successful series in a snap, especially when their previous works don't be as acknowledged and whatnot. His previous work Barrage came out 2 years before BNHA was introduced. Barrage, like his other works, ran for a year. Just a year. Some of them just being one-shots. He didn't have to work with a lot because at the time, he probably had didn't feel he shouldn't work with a lot. When BNHA started, Horikoshi probably felt like "yeah, I want to take this on. I want to work with a lot more. I have a lot more confidence and I'm more comfortable".

BNHA has a lot of themes, a lot of characters and huge plot, okay? Yeah, this isn't nothing new. Stop acting like BNHA is the only series out there with a lot going on with it.

It is a lot to handle and because so, some details will be forgotten and things probably won't make sense. And there are some things I don’t like myself that happens, but give credit where credit is due. Horikoshi does have some good points with this series that are often overlooked because PEOPLE ARE THE WORSE. For goodness sake, the man draws hands like it's nothing and we all have had that phase of drawing characters with their arms behind their back because we're shit at drawing hands. And let's be honest, Dabi didn't even need a backstory before he got a huge fanbase. One look at him and girls were all over that.

As someone who does write as a hobby, I can tell you that when I get into my story, I do go overboard. I create a lot of characters and sometimes I have to jot down details to remember them and try to fit them in a plot. That comes from excitement.

Excitement Horikoshi and other mangakas, authors and artists probably felt when they finally get their work recognized enough to be big. Excitement that, over the years, become stress because "fans" do nothing but criticize, criticize and bitch and send death threats and call people slurs and names.

Horikoshi probably had bigger plans for BNHA, he probably had other plans for some of the characters and wanted to go a different route with some relationships but decided maybe it's high time to hang it up because "fans" only can seem to complain.

It's what a lot of you do nowadays with any series. You hold way too many expectations for a series and not go into it with an open-mind and decide to enjoy it for how it is and that you have entertainment so you won't be bored with yourselves.

Keep in mind, BNHA is also an anime and we all would be lucky if BONES didn't decide to give it a rushed ending like many other animes in the past have (Blue Exorcist, Rosario + Vampire, etc). So with an anime in the works, Horikoshi is also occupied with that.

I'm not saying he's the best guy or anything. Not saying everything he has going for BNHA is good. Again, there are some things that make me go "WHY?"

What I'm saying is, this fandom and other fandoms need to start looking at the creators like they're actual damn people. They're not gods and they're not perfect. They're fucking people.

They work on something and want to share it with the world, but oh my goodness what a shocker! People want it to be perfect! They want it to cater to them only because they're entitled.

If a story sucks, it sucks. If it's good, it's good. We can have our opinions. It's fine.

However, I think everyone needs to be reminded that time, energy, and money goes into big projects and can affect the health of someone.

It's like how people always want to ask fanfic writers "when are you going to update"? First, stop asking that. Second, uh... THEY'RE PEOPLE, TOO. They have families, jobs, days were they have to take a mental health break.

I honestly just hope once BNHA ends, Horikoshi just step away for a while and take a break. For anybody who does creative works, take a break and get yourself together.

It is unfair that people can't seem to enjoy anything anymore before criticizing about "problematic characters" or "this doesn't make sense". Just shut up! For goodness sake, there has never been a story or anything without its flaws! It happens but that doesn't mean to nitpick about it ALL THE DAMN TIME!

Have you ever thought that maybe people create things that make them happy and want to share those things because that they want other people to be happy?!

#fandoms nowadays fucking suck #because 99% of the people do #stop looking at stories to criticize them #start looking at them as just entertainment and something someone eagerly wanted to share #i swear i'm a pinch away from losing it #bnha #mha #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #just kiya's thoughts #bnha fandom #bnha fandom criticism #bnha fandom critical

[nutzgunray-lvt]

Feels bad man. I have literally only found ONE fic that didn't do this.

#all might defense squad #yagi toshinori defense squad #mha fic critical #mha fandom critical #bnha fandom critical

[swallowtail-ageha]

Hey actually if you compare disability and the real life struggle and discrimination that disabled people face to green kid not having powers you should log off and talk to actual disabled people

#i didnt get called the r slur by my teacher for my memory problems only for yall to say that not having superpowers is the exact same thing #bnha critical #bnha fandom critical

[ignoringmyhyperfixation]

not you liking and defending dabi a literal criminal and mass murderer, who actively tries to kill his innocent younger brother and still simultaneously are shitting on endeavor. like newsflash both suck ass but atleast endeavor has the heart to change and realize his mistakes and is contantly trying to pay for the pain he caused without looking for forgiveness. what does dabi do on the other hand? except for just smelling like a burnt chicken nugget

Don't be shy, come off anon <3

People are allowed to like and dislike characters regardless of what they've done, you know that right? Also I've never defended Dabi in a way that implies I agree with his decisions, which I apply to Endeavor as well. I love both of them actually, as characters. I love to hate Endeavor, he's a piece of shit but I like how he was written. Same with Dabi, he's done horrible shit but I fucking love his character.

Besides, Endeavor finally realizing his mistakes after multiple decades doesn't erase the trauma he caused or how much of an asshole he has been and still is. And someone like Dabi is too far gone to care about anything that isn't on his one-track mind.

It's called literary comprehension, fully understanding the media you're in and recognizing the characters and content you're consuming ✨ I love all kinds of characters while also hating all kinds of characters. Most of the time, I can recognize when they're well written (despite how much they piss me off) and still hate them, as a person.

You don't have to like certain characters, that's your decision. I don't like quite a few characters that people love, because they're not my type of character. But I can recognize why they would.

#endeavor #enji todoroki #dabi #touya todoroki #bnha fandom critical #curious anons

[pinkypastal]

Fandom please...

#meme #fandom #fandom critical #bnha #genshin impact #childe #tartaglia #batfam #Jason todd #fandom discourse #my art #doctor who #eleventh doctor #raiden shogun #Steven universe #raiden ei #talia al ghul

[bicheetopuff]

Can y’all stop making Deku pregnant for like five minutes?

#I can’t open tumblr or instagram without seeing deku pregnant or with a kid that it’s implied he gave birth to #I’m not even mad #but give the man a break😭 #like pls I’m just asking yall to calm tf down #he’s just a buff little guy that wants to be a hero #let him beat the ‘submissive and breedable’ allegations #bakudeku #bnha #bkdk #midoriya izuku #puff speaks #fandom critical #I guess #like I said I ain’t even mad

[mikeellee]

You know if you ever need a proof on how this fandom along with creator don't like Izu, the main character, just remember this:

People are creating HC about baby TENKO being too kind, an angel on earth...based on a throw away line "he played with X and Y" note we don't ever saw them, nor their names nor get any context.

Meanwhile, Izu stood up for a kid who was being bully by BK who was using his quirk and ..gets absolutely nothing aside backstabbing.

I know many people can add more and there is more proof but like "TENKO is an angel, he carries for outcast" is fanon at best, Izu literally did that chap 1 and ...radio silence here.

@bibibbon @palesweetscherryblossom @doodlegirl1998

#hori is a bad writer #a really bad one #izuku deserves better #mha critical #anti bakugou #bnha critical #anti katsuki bakugou #bk is a bully and a cancer in the story #this fandom in large endorse this #also i love baby tenko but yall need to cool down on “he was kind” #we dont get context here #i do think he may have been bullied but never noticed.

[thelittlegirlinwonderland]

I think what I hate most about dabihawks is how many people just think it’s canon or universally liked. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve been reading a fic and just stumbled across it. A lot of the time it is untagged, too! That defeats the whole purpose of tags and why we have them. I have every version of the ship name blocked on every platform and yet it is still there. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean everyone ships it. I didn’t even hate the ship at first, I just didn’t get why it’s so popular. Now, I absolutely hate it.

#livvyrants #anti dabihawks #anti hotwings #this is klance all over again #i hate this ship #bnha fandom critical

[stillness-in-green]

Pair O' Geten Asks

Congrats on your newly discovered Geten Appreciation, anon! I too like Geten a lot and feel that he, like the rest of the MLA, was Robbed.  He really would have made an interesting foil to Dabi and I have only conspiracy theories about Editor Meddling to explain why we didn’t get that.  The Rei-like appearance?  The opposed power set?  The father figure to whom he’s incredibly loyal?  The focus on a powerful quirk as more important than anything?  Come on; why write all that if it’s only going to matter for one (1) fight that doesn’t even come to a conclusive end and before we even have a bunch of concrete information on Dabi’s childhood relationship with his father?

Also, Geten and Dabi trying to run a regiment together would have been hilarious and it is but one of many things we were cheated out of seeing by that bedamned three-month timeskip on the villain side.

As well, Geten’s interesting to me for the same reason that Mustard is: they’re the only two young villains for whom we just don’t get much angle on student parallels, rescue arcs, and/or sympathetic portrayals.  Geten at least has far clearer motivations than Mustard, but it’s really frustrating to see the both of them basically written out of the story when they both seem far too young to be deemed Not Worth Saving.  (I mean, I obviously don’t think anyone should be declared off-limits for saving no matter how old or how far gone they are, but it’s particularly egregious when it comes to the younger villains.)

As to his loyalty to Re-Destro, I'll fold some discussion of that into my answer to this other ask, answered below the jump:

(CW: discussions of child abuse and cult dynamics)

Ohhhhh my god, anon.  Thank you for coming to me with this so I can assure you that, yes, Re-Destro absolutely does have genuine affection for Geten and his intentions absolutely do not come from a place of malice.

The thing with the way people headcanon RD and Geten’s relationship is, I think, pretty straightforward: Toxic Blorbo Anxiety.  Modern fandom, especially on tumblr, has really co-opted a lot of social justice rhetoric to make what once would have been dead-ass basic character/ship flame wars sound more justified and meaningful; as a consequence, altogether too many people have this idea that one’s taste in fiction (characters, relationships, themes, whatever) is a direct measure of one’s moral character.  Ergo, it’s no longer okay to just like a character with significant flaws—you have to find some kind of reason why that character’s flaws aren’t actually their fault.

People who hate Geten have zero problems writing him off as a toxic ableist eugenicist.  People who like Geten—well, some people are perfectly capable of liking Geten while acknowledging that he’s a violent little shit who espouses quirk supremacist ideals that go considerably farther than the ideals professed by anyone else around him, even the people higher up the chain of command.  For the “my taste in characters mirrors my moral character” folks, however, liking Geten means an immediate need to find a likely character to offload all of Geten’s moral failings onto.

Re-Destro is the only character for whom Geten has any demonstrated feelings whatsoever; this makes him the only available scapegoat.

And it’s ridiculous!  It is pulled literally out of thin air.  As you said, the databook is explicit that Re-Destro gave Geten “lots of affection,” but you see echoes of it in the canon as well.  There’s the flashback Geten has to RD smiling and patting him on the shoulders and entrusting him with an Important Task, as well as the implication that Geten cares about RD so much that Re-Destro burning himself caused Geten’s quirk evolution.  Re-Destro himself gets this beat, indicating trust and high regard, just after Giran gets sassy with him about the MLA losing their number advantage to the Sad Man’s Parade:

Yes, absolutely, Geten is fucked up from being raised in a cult.  Re-Destro was raised in the very same cult, however, and with a lot more fuckery about his ancestors and identity loaded down on him to boot.  Geten at least can just be Geten, you know?  The very best version of Geten that he knows how to be!

Of course, an ideal version of Geten would, among other changes, probably be going to school.  Now, Geten’s schooling is not RD’s responsibility—so far as we know, he isn’t Geten’s actual legal guardian.  Nonetheless, I’m sure he could make Geten do it if he really wanted to press the issue, and it’s no credit to him that he hasn’t.

Still, before I condemn RD for that, I’d want to know what RD’s own schooling situation was, or what the MLA approach is to school in general.  One of the things that defines cults, after all, is limiting members’ access to outside information, which is why they’re all such proponents for homeschooling.  I would be shocked if Re-Destro himself wasn’t homeschooled for at least his younger years, and therefore lacks a full frame of reference for why that’s a problem.

Speaking of RD’s frame of reference for things, and getting back to your actual question about ReDadstro, while I don’t read RD and Geten’s relationship as explicitly having familial vibes, I do think they’re close enough that a lot of people in-universe probably look at them and wonder.  The main reason for that is that, well, look at Re-Destro’s whole scenario!  He’s the scion of Yotsubashi Chikara, a blood-descendant of the leader of the original Meta Liberation Army, and, oh, does the story never let him or us forget it.  His authority over the group is entirely rooted in that ancestry; he and they all believe that it must be Destro, no one else, who brings Liberation to Japan.

That all being the case, then, why on earth doesn’t Re-Destro have any kids?

Seriously, the guy’s got to be over 40, and if the lineage is that important—and it is; Skeptic says explicitly that he wants to recruit Twice so that the MLA never has to fear a repeat of Destro’s loss—why hasn’t RD secured the bloodline for the future yet?  Even if he’s fairly confident in his and his followers’ ability to ring the bells of liberation in his lifetime, you’d think some contingency plans would be in order!

I also think it’s fairly telling that a guy whose authority is so rooted in family doesn’t seem to have any of his own—not just kids, but siblings, a spouse, parents, grandparents, anybody.  While it could simply be a function of his limited screen time, we have at least some idea of what the family situation is for most of the other major villains.  AFO, Shigaraki and the rest of the League, Gentle Criminal, Overhaul—for all of them, we can point to at least one thing and say, “That’s the situation,” even if it’s as simple as e.g. the implication of Spinner becoming a hikikomori or Overhaul being an orphan.  It seems to me that if there was a family line in charge of the MLA, we would have seen at least one other member at some point.  That we never do[1] suggests pretty strongly that Re-Destro is the only Yotsubashi around at the current time.

My headcanon, then, is that Re-Destro, a man so psychologically burdened by the needs of being the Great Destro’s successor that he saw an omni-nihilist like Shigaraki as freedom delivered on divine wings, doesn’t have children because he doesn’t want them.  Or, more accurately, because whether or not he, Yotsubashi Rikiya, might want children, he’s unwilling to have them so long as there’s any chance his burden could become theirs.

And thus we get to Geten.  If Rikiya might have wanted children in other circumstance, it’s not so surprising that he’d have a streak of paternal instinct that came out with Geten, especially when Geten was younger.  Here’s someone who’s powerful but never going to be in any danger of inheriting all of Rikiya’s burdens, someone whose loyalty is to Rikiya personally, rather than to Destro’s blood.[2]  Of course Rikiya’s fond of him!  He’s not entirely free when he’s around Geten, but at the very least, Geten transparently doesn’t care about the MLA’s glorious history.

I have to think that everyone around them Feels Some Sorta Way about this, especially those shadowy figures we saw telling young Rikiya all about his “inheritance,” but the downside of raising a six-year-old to be the supreme leader of your underground army is that there’s only so much open pushback you can offer once the six-year-old turns forty.  If RD wants to maintain a close relationship with Geten, there’s not really anyone who can put their foot down about it beyond a certain amount of pointed-but-respectful questioning.

As for what Geten thinks of this state of affairs, the way I conceive of them, Geten is painfully aware that Re-Destro is heavily burdened, and Geten wants to relieve as much of that burden as he can.  However, one of the reasons RD might find Geten comparatively relaxing is that Geten doesn’t occupy a specific place in the MLA’s organizational structure.  That might be because Geten lacks the temperament for leadership, but it might also be because RD likes that Geten is a bit sideways of the power structure that defines so much of the rest of Rikiya’s life.  Geten’s closeness to the Grand Commander might be enviable to others in the MLA, but it doesn’t seem to come with any particular authority; Geten probably wishes that RD would give him more to do![3]

Hence, I assume, his single-minded fervor about living up to Re-Destro’s trust and eliminating the people in Re-Destro’s way and so forth.  If it’s somewhat rare for Re-Destro to give Geten actual tasks to fulfill, all the more reason for Geten to pounce so vigorously on what opportunities do arise.

In summary, while Re-Destro and Geten’s relationship has some pretty huge red flags in it—the lack of schooling, the way RD being Geten’s patron rather than giving him a real position keeps Geten dependent on RD’s favor, the way Geten is singled out as having this relationship with RD, the disconnect between the values they extol— in the context they live in, I think it’s pretty wholesome!  That is, they’re both pretty fucked up by the cult upbringing, in ways neither of them is fully capable of even recognizing, but I think they both mean well by each other, and their lives are stabler and happier for each other's presences than if they were still both MLA but weren't aquainted.

Could it be better?  Sure!  But there’s a nigh-unbridgeable canyon between, “Based on what we know about the characters’ circumstances, this relationship has some concerning elements,” and, “Re-Destro is physically abusive, thinks Geten is only valuable as a weapon, and has groomed Geten himself to believe that.”

The far side of that canyon must be in Narnia, because stepping through a magic doorway to another world where BNHA is a completely different story is the only way anyone’s going to be able to produce canon evidence for the Re-Destro As Abusive Groomer claim.  As Shigaraki and All For One prove, however, there’s no villain in this story that can’t be rendered more cloyingly, simplistically sympathetic by cramming a bunch of physical abuse into fanfic where none exists canonically.

Thanks for the asks, anons! Please go forth and continue loving Geten freely. And Re-Destro also, because god knows he needs more love.

---

[1] The closest we get is the family portraits the League find in the obviously-intended-to-be-Re-Destro’s-summer-home they ransack in the live drama reading from that LOV stage event back in 2021.  No word on whether Horikoshi had any input whatsoever on that script, however.

[2] The tell here is the consistency of Geten’s motivations.  He never connects Re-Destro’s authority to Destro Classic like Skeptic and Trumpet do, nor does his loyalty change to Shigaraki post-Deika as you might expect if quirk supremacy were really the only thing Geten used to measure worth.

[3] It’s very telling that when we’re being introduced to the heads of the MLA, getting their real names and day jobs, Geten isn’t included in the lineup; he remains an unnamed parka troll with bad table manners.  He does get a proper rank in the PLF, of course, but by that point Re-Destro has ceded control to Shigaraki, so RD no longer has to worry so much about how he defines or doesn’t define the relationship or what people might think of it.

#bnha #geten #yotsubashi rikiya #re-destro #meta liberation army #bnha fandom critical #cw: child abuse #(discussed) #honestly when you've seen one fandomized take on a Bad Dad you've seen them all #as if the author is afraid that if Bad Dad isn't shown beating his kids every day then the reader might not figure out he's abusive #or the assumption that being bad in one way means he must be bad in all the other ways too #e.g. the fics where Shimura Kotarou is not merely violent but also homophobic #save me #and also spare me #salt in the tags #stillness answers

[sapphic-agent]

(Back on my Bakugou hating shit lolz)

The wildest thing I've ever heard from a Bakugou stan was comparing him to SA victims.

...Let me explain.

So there was a Tweet or Tumblr post floating around some years ago of Bakugou being attacked by the Sludge Villain with the caption, "I don't think he ever recovered from this." It was reposted on Instagram and people (rightfully) called out that Izuku went through the same thing and he didn't get nearly the care that Bakugou got both in-universe and by the fandom.

And of course, this stan was all, "That's like saying "what about men" when women talk about SA!!" And I?? No, Brenda, it's not.

Idk what it is with people and comparing traumatic experiences to SA. Stop that.

But even disregarding that for a minute, do you know how awful it is that the minority kid gets overlooked while the majority kid (who's a bigot no less) gets pandered to? It "had" to happen that way in-universe, but the fandom mirroring it is disappointing, yet unsurprising.

Not to mention that Izuku was way closer to dying. I don't like to compare trauma, but come on. The kid was unconscious, if All Might had been even a minute late he might have died. And he would have died alone, no one around to save him. No one even around to witness it. He would have died thinking that he really was worth nothing.

After Bakugou had told him to throw himself off of a roof.

Mind you, none of the things above are things that were never addressed. For Bakugou it was, even if indirectly. His issue with that situation was being seen as weak and part of his "arc" was coming to terms with that. Izuku'w trauma has been wholly unaddressed at every turn.

But sure, Bakugou's the one who never recovered

#anti bakugou katsuki #mha critical #bnha critical #anti mha fandom #anti bakugou stans #izuku deserves better #tw sa mention

[epickiya722]

DO YOU TRULY HATE FOR YOUR OWN REASONS OR AS A TREND?

You know these days it feels like people choose to hate on Bakugou because everyone else is. It's a trend. I mean, BNHA has been running for 8 years and I seen more hate on him than any other character in these series. Including Mineta who is well Mineta, Overhaul who experimented on a child, AFO is the root of all this disaster, Dabi, Hawks, Shigaraki, Endeavor, All Might, etc. (Every character in this damn series is hated at this point. Even the damn Luminescent Baby, I bet someone hates the baby for being a baby.)

The messed up part is, he's part of a generation of kids that are pretty much the product of mistakes of previous generations. Every child in this series is failed by an adult in some way. But the most hated is an actual child.

A child who in the span of MONTHS has been put through traumatic experiences that it is unreal. Truth be told, it's his karma for how he treated Midoriya during their younger years, yeah. But even compared to Midoriya, the protagonist, he's the series' punching bag.

I don't know if it's been established through Bakugou's point of view, but he probably believes he is the punching bag. He knows he has done wrong and oh, how he is paying for it.

But of all the characters, he has gotten the worse of that karma. It's not like he gotten it years later, he got it immediately he became a high school student. He got it once he was away from the environment that was enabling his behavior.

Has been teased, restrained, muzzled, viewed as villain, kidnapped, stabbed, burned, kicked around, became very insecure and unsure of himself (so he even treats himself as a punching bag sometimes), publicly embarrassed, and now he lost his life (I doubt he's perma-dead, it just seems... odd).

And with all that, it's like how can you hate a character that has been broken down so many times? A character that has known defeat more times than anyone else? A character who is battered and bruised to the point it's horrific?

When Bakugou messes up, oh he pays for it. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Bakugou haters should be loving it what's going on right now. And yet some will still say "he hasn't been punished enough". HOW? The kid isn't breathing right now! For some chapters now he's been nothing but a toy for AFO!Shigaraki to play with.

At this point, I really do think people hate on him just because they can. They don't care for the karma he's receiving. They don't care that he is currently on the list of "no longer with us". They don't care that a child sat back and thought to himself "You know what, I am a terrible human being and I need to do something about that like now".

There are ADULTS in this series who have been bullshit adults for YEARS and either has yet to get what they deserved, got it but it wasn't as much as compared to Bakugou, or just getting it.

Overhaul experimented on Eri. An adult who wanted to create a drug to disable people. The most he got was beaten by Midoriya, lost his arms by the LOV, and tossed in jail. Oh, and he's free now. That's it, that's all. Nothing much else.

Endeavor, has put his family through it for years and he's just getting his karma. Just getting it now. And it's unclear as to what could possibly happen to him after this war.

AFO is literally WINNING right now and we're not even sure how he's going to be beaten.

Hell, the Doctor is just imprisoned.

That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

But Bakugou? It's a repeated cycle. Over and over and over, we're seeing him getting beat, humiliated, self-doubting himself. And that last image of him from the recent chapter? It's one of the most devastating shots I have seen yet of him. In a way, the image is almost taunting anyone who like Bakugou. A reminder that no matter how far Bakugou will progress, he will still be thrown 10 steps back.

So, really, do you hate Bakugou because of how he's written? Do you hate Bakugou because he reminds you of someone in your life or even yourself?

Or do you just hate him because everyone else does? "Oh I gotta hate him, too!"

It's why I can't stand anti-Bakugou's. Even if I was somehow on the more neutral side, I would still distant myself from that side of the fandom. It's simply not healthy to join in on something for the sake of wanting to "be apart of the crowd". I get it if you hate Bakugou because "oh he's a jerk" or "yeah I hate how he's written". But if you hate him because everyone else does, why?! You're pretty much ruining the experience for yourself. How? But not enjoying or hating this series from your view. Don't do it because someone else is. Do it for you. Feel for yourself.

PS: this is not in invitation to come into my inbox with the Bakugou hate because trust me, YOU won't like it. I have memes and I have jokes and you'll hate me for it. Don't want you to, but I will do it. I just voice my opinion and call it a day. All the debates and trolling is just so unneeded for me.

#bnha #mha #bnha fandom critical #bnha fandom criticism #bnha fandom #bnha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #bakugou katsuki #katsuki bakugou #boku no hero academia #my hero academia #just kiya's thoughts #bakugo katsuki #katsuki bakugo

[venting-corner]

Continuing with All Might appreciation, I made memes :)

#all might deserves better #all might #all might love #mha fandom critical #mha #bnha #anti aizawa shota #anti shota aizawa #anti bakugo katsuki #only slightly

[musicfeedsmysoul12]

I'm going to toss this out: I read a lot of Anti Bakugou fics and I always end up stumbling upon All Might Bashing or Eraserhead Bashing with it. Both of these always get me mad. Not because I love them (and I do), I do acknowledge they fucked up a lot in canon. All Might less so then Aizawa (and I have OPINIONS on why people always make All Might out to be this Quirkist bigot) but still.

My issue comes when the consequences start and Bakugou gets off with a slap on the wrist compared to Aizawa or All Might. It doesn't make sense.

Bakugou is not some six-year-old child being led around by adults. He's a teenager who was exposed to the real world. In canon we know he wants to keep his record clean so he can go to UA, we know he's aware he could have killed Izuku if he didn't dodge. We know Bakugou bullied other children and not just Izuku.

Bakugou is fully at fault for his own actions. There's this one fic I read where it's pointed out that like in our world, statistics and gofundmes for discriminated people would be common, and as Quirkless people are discriminated against, they would be part of this. So the argument: I was told it was okay because he's Quirkless falls apart because Bakugou isn't stupid. He isn't.

Did Aizawa fuck up with Bakugou and Izuku? Yes. Did All Might fuck up? Yes. But Bakugou is the only one truly responsible for his own actions.

People like to say Aizawa’s trauma is no excuse but then Bakugou’s trauma is an excuse. All Might telling Izuku he can't be a hero without a Quirk is somehow worse then Bakugou saying Izuku should kill himself because of him being Quirkless.

So… yeah. Sorry, bit of a rant but I was thinking on it. I can easily fix or adjust Aizawa and All Might to be better characters without sacrificing so much of their canon selves. Yet with Bakugou? You literally have to make things up. ‘Hes abused.’ not canon. ‘He was called a villain by society!’ only as a teenager when he was acting like one. Everyone else has only praised him. ‘He wanted to protect Izuku’ how? By getting Izuku to jump off a roof?

Bakugou can be redeemed and changed. I do think that. It's just canon isn't doing it and people in fanfics always just let him get away with a slap on the wrist. ‘Anger management’ okay yes but what else? ‘Therapy’ what else? ‘Going to 1B’ WHAT ELSE.

Redemption is something you have to work for, not get handed to you on a silver platter. And Bakugou hasn't worked for it yet. As well, I've always firmly believed that the victims should never have to be their abuser's friends. And the idea Izuku HAS to be Bakugou’s friend for redemption to occur is just plain wrong.

#bnha #MHA critical #bakugou critical #anti bakugou #fandom critical