Endless List Of My Hero Academia Ships: Tenya Iida X Ochako Uraraka (OTP)

Endless List of My Hero Academia Ships: ↪ Tenya Iida x Ochako Uraraka (OTP)

“For the cavalry thing… I said I’d rather team up with friends but… if I’m being truly honest with myself, I realize I may’ve just been counting on you to pull through again. That’s why when Iida said he was challenging you I grew a little ashamed of myself.”

@khonaker I finally did The Race but this looks odd to me so I’m going to ink one of your other prompts instead!

A race between the two fastest 1-a students who will win?

It depends on the time of day I suppose~

Where Hori went wrong with Bakugou

So, a day or two ago I saw an old reddit post quoting Hori explaining why he started to change Bakugou's character.

(I did't save it, because, 1, I don't really do that, and 2, even if I did... I don't actually attach things to my rants? I'm far too lazy to put the work in to try and do that. So.... My source is that I made it the F@#& up, I guess?)

The gist of it was that when Bakugou lost, he cried, right? That was... apparently a moment Hori realized he could have more depth? And basically, because of that realization, he decided he could give Bakugou more any development, and presumably from that point on decided to make him a more important character.

Alright, I... *sigh*

*deep breath*

Alright. Let's start with this:

Bakugou cried because he lost... and this was Hori's great sympathetic, 'I can fix him' moment? I just... I just... what? Why???

*recalls All Might going out of his way to comfort Bakugou and cheer him up, despite the murder attempt he had done a few minutes ago*

...Was he self-inserting in All Might at that moment then?

....

*deeper breath*

Alright.

So there's that. And beyond that... this is connected to something I mentioned before... I'm not sure Hori really knows how to make bad guys with sympathetic traits?

Like, he can make bad guys. And he can give characters sympathetic traits. But when he tries to do them both at the same time, it's like he can't balance the elements right, because he keeps ignoring a point:

Sympathetic character traits do not make a sympathetic character. But Hori seems to assume they do? So he always ends up making a bad guy, who does bad things, and acts in bad ways, but will have random moments where they act radically different for no apparent reason, and are often treated by people around them like they're not acting in horrifying ways all the time.

Because, like, if I spent my life, like... going out murdering people, but when I got home at the end of the day I was... really nice to my pet hamster Fluffles, or something, that's a sympathetic trait. But that doesn't make me a sympathetic person, because... you know, I'm still a serial killer, Fluffles or not.

The problem isn't that he tried to develop Bakugou, or that he wanted to give him traits against his current characterization, because, well, people are complicated. Everyone is complicated, everyone has depths to them.

The problem is he saw 1 (One) sympathetic trait (or, rather, 'sympathetic', because that moment was literally him just throwing a fit over losing, but OK, Hori, you do you), and instead of either, A, using that trait as a launching point to meaningfully change Bakugou's behavior, or B, keep Bakugou as the same character despite this extra information we received, with other characters acting the same way in response to him since they didn't have that information....

He made a radical third option: where Bakugou wouldn't change his behavior, and yet everyone changed how they treated him as if he had changed, and this is the point where things started to go to shit.

Because there were already concerning things with how Bakugou was being treated before this point, true, but it was.... contained. Manageable. His presence in the story made sense, if was over hyped, and how people treated him was somewhat in line with his actual behavior.

After this point? That started to change, and by the time we hit the Sports Festival, Bakugou was a 'new man' who somehow acted almost exactly the same as he did before, which was a theme that would continue to repeat for the rest of the series.

I have thoughts on what Iida's reaction to Midoriya's letter would be

I swear I get sad if I wake up and one is on the floor