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i honestly really do appreciate the way aizawa is received by the people around him in the bnha world. 

aizawa is a weird guy. everything about him is abnormal. even in the context of the bnha world where everyone is weird, aizawa’s still very different. he’s someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks a lot differently than other people, to the point where many people don’t understand his thought processes at all. he’s a literal person who runs everything in his life through a filter of what he considers to be logic and doesn’t seem to understand things as well that he doesn’t think are logical. 

he’s someone who owns many copies of the same outfit, who prefers to only eat energy jelly packs, who just can’t seem to understand the stock others’ put into their daily appearances, who is most comfortable in his sleeping bag on the floor. he’s someone who obviously looks and acts and thinks very very differently than everyone around him–and it is very, very easy to tell. aizawa makes no attempts to try to fool people into thinking that he’s similar to them. in fact, he doesn’t actually seem to realize why other people might care about that sort of thing.

aizawa is a successful adult character whose every trait sets him apart from others, even other adult pro hero teachers. 

and all those other adult pro hero teachers happily accept him.

yeah, there’s some teasing occasionally (in one of the light novels: “i bet you suck in bed aizawa” “actually i sleep in a sleeping bag”) but all of aizawa’s coworkers genuinely love him and he’s never like… a mockery or anything. even with the teasing, aizawa is incredibly well liked and no one actually gives aizawa shit over him being different from everyone else and they’re all willing to die for him. even at the beginning of the series, when a reporter went after aizawa for his appearance (mocked? i’d say mocked) aizawa didn’t give much of a shit but he did have to tell his best friend to not very badly injure said reporter and the other media.

there’s just something about the way that aizawa’s treated that’s very comforting.

aizawa is very very easy to read as autistic. like i said before, any character can be headcanoned as autistic, but with aizawa in particular, you can read every single thing he does as autistic. 

the whole logic thing is a huge example of this–a lot of autistic people connect with a worldview of rationality and logic because it’s something that basically has a right or wrong answer. yes that’s logical. no that’s not logical. it’s easy for us to understand. and a lot of good portrayals of autistic characters use that a lot. bones, a show that i’m a huge fan of, has an autistic woman main character and through all the seasons of the show, it’s very clear that she views the world through a lens of logic and rationality. it’s her thing. and she reminds me so, so much of aizawa because logic and rationality is also aizawa’s thing, and like her, he’s portrayed as ‘fundamentally different’ but not lesser and still very well loved by colleagues.

i really like the way he’s treated in canon. everyone does have the initial reaction of thinking he’s strange and cold, but once people get to know him even a little bit, they immediately go in the opposite direction. every single person in bnha who has spent more than a few minutes talking to aizawa immediately likes him and people very easily get attached to him. he’s different socially, but he still has a lot of friends–not to mention more than a class worth of kids who’d follow him no matter what he says.

so i guess what i’m saying here is that aizawa as a character makes me happy. he’s refreshing to see. he’s a character who’s ‘weird’ and looks and acts nothing like other characters do or ‘should’ do, but he’s not humiliated and ostracized for it. 

no, instead of being mocked for it, we are instead given a successful main adult mentor character who is one of the best at what he does and has an entire group of friends willing to back him with whatever (dude literally has a best friend who took 0 seconds of hesitation to tell him that sure, he’d love to defy the government with him). 

it’d be really easy to make aizawa into the butt of a joke, to constantly mock him for the way he acts and appears, but every time he has been mocked in canon–once by the reporter with his appearance and then during the press conference–it’s portrayed as negative and horrible and not deserved at all. ESPECIALLY during the press conference–when aizawa was being zeroed in on and taking the blame for everything, the media and people mocking him there were rightfully demonized and the villains of that scenario. 

aizawa isn’t treated badly, but he’s also still clearly different from other people, and that’s something that’s nice to see. he’s successful, very well liked, extremely well respected, and seen as a parental and authority figure–while still retaining all the traits what make him ‘strange’ in the first place. aizawa is very easily read as autistic and seeing someone who can be read so easily as autistic portrayed as one of the most respected people in the series is comforting.

it’s 1 in the morning and idk if this makes any sense but tldr, this is why autistic aizawa is very important to me.