#And you're welcome to discuss this; I'm expressing my feelings over some of my fav characters here

[rights-for-redshirts]

What really frustrates me these days.

There's a few "strong" female characters in BNHA, and in fiction in general. And don't get me wrong, I love Uraraka and Momo and Jirou and Mina with all my heart. Fanfiction about them? Love it. Fanart? Comics? Ships? You name it. They are my children and I would die for their happiness.

But ... as characters, I ... can't bring myself to like their concepts. And that's because ... even while they have strong quirks. And usually aren't that bad at fighting. (Ochaco's knife stealing moves are so. Cool.) None of them have any meaningful agency, drive or ambition to change something (and therefore rarely any influence on the actual plot, but that's not even the point here).

Look at the males: we've got

Midoriya, the visionary, who wants to become no.1 to make for a better world as well as save everybody and keeps raising the philosophical question of what it means to be a hero. Meaningful motivation, as well as what drives the show.

We've got Todoroki, who has Daddy IssuesTM and is struggling to find his own purpose away from that. Meaningful struggle.

Bakugou, who is a bundle of complicated volatile emotions wrapped up in nitro and spiky gelled hair, who undergoes a shitton of character development and I don't think I even need to point out how complicated he is under all of that violent behaviour. Motivation: pretty sure those are inferiority complexes caused by your messed up society. Meaningful and terrifying.

We've got Iida, who is more of a side character but stil has this whole responsibility: rules vs morals thing going on as well as his deep relationship with his brother

Now for the females:

Ochako, motivation: Money for her parents. Nice. Cute. Completely irrelevant. Or at least that's how it's treated in the show itself, since I'm pretty sure there are a lot more issues buried beneath that than what we're shown.

Asui, motivation: idk? Saving people, I think? Which would be cool if they actually explored it and dedicated some time to, but ... sure let' just ignore that because it's NEVER FUCKING RELEVANT to the plot. Her internship was cool, I guess.

Yaoyorozu, motivation: ... does that ever actually come up? The most character development I've seen from her was her confidence crisis in the finals, aside from that ... nothing comes to mind. She's really cool and I love her as a person. And she joins on adventures more easily, like the rescue attempt at Kamino. But she doesn't take the initiative either, at least as long as the guys are around (the tracker on the Nomou duringthe training camp was extremely cool, I admit it). In the end, she is more of a commodity for the "leaders" of 1A than an actual player.

So ... all of that has probably been said already, and by someone better with words than me at 1am. But I needed to get this off my chest -

It doesn't matter how strong a female character is. Or how weak, for that matter. What does matter is the impact they're having on the story, and what kind of impact that is. A female Gojo who never impacts the plot is a weak fucking female character. A quirkless female Midoriya throwing a book into the sludge villain's eye full well knowing she has no way to defend herself afterwards, but doing it anyways because it's the right thing to do and saving Bakugous life in the process as well as kickstarting three other events like receiving OFA, is an extremely strong female character; not because she's powerful, but because her actions drive the plot, because she has impact.

And seeing how the girls in BNHA are always, always treated as an afterthought - not when it comes to their own personal little arcs, but how every single one of them ends up being an irrelevant filler in the grand scheme of things - quite honestly, that's ... pretty painful.