#I love the mentor/idol being a father figure to the main hero trope so much

[bisexualmultifandommess]

The way Shanks hugs Luffy and puts his hand in his hair after he saved him in the live action is so cute 😭 he looks so relieved that his kid is okay

[darkcircles4lyfe]

Death to All Might, Rebirth to Yagi Toshinori

So about All Might. I’ve been extremely wary of talking about what could happen to him because straight up saying “I don’t think he’s gonna die” is asking the universe to spite me. Plus it also feels like a room full of people turning to stare at me as if I said the Sun isn’t a star. Man has death flags everywhere, I know. 

But, okay, *Bill Nye voice* consider the following:

Mr. Yagi here, if he overheard everything, just received the final nail in the coffin on his career. His time as the symbol of peace is not only over, it was in fact partially responsible for the current state of things, since he once did so much on his own that his absence now makes heroes and civilians alike ill-prepared to cope. I think it was very apt for that one guy to be wearing an All Might shirt--he was acting as a mouthpiece for the latent societal problems embedded in All Might’s legacy. 

We know already that he’s been feeling useless. I love this scene and although I’m not gonna talk about it right this second, remember what Aizawa says about just “being here” being enough:

And we know from conversations with Inko that Toshinori is also reframed his purpose around looking after Izuku. But in the end, Izuku rejected his help, and it was his classmates instead who were able to save him. Now the very progress of humanity is rejecting him too. You may me wondering how on Earth I don’t see the logical conclusion of all this being his death. Hold on. It actually has a lot to do with the fact that we’re all expecting it. Nighteye himself saw it, and despite any contrary convictions anyone might have, the plot doesn’t seem to be veering away from that end. All Might Is Gonna Die, says absolutely everything. 

It’s occurring to me that I have previous experience with this kind of plotline that probably little to no one else in this fandom shares, being that I’ve read a certain book series in which the main character is told in no uncertain terms that he will die (no, I’m not talking about hp). The series in question is T*e Und*rland Chronicl*s (censoring so it doesn’t get put in their side of tumblr) and I’m sorry but I’m about to go on a shameless tangent about it and spoil the ending for you.

So in this series there is a prophecy in every book, each one having something to do with war and conflict, and so far all of them have been right. In the last book [mc] finds out that it’s prophesied that he will be killed. Lots of the things in the prophecies are convoluted and metaphorical, but no, this one literally says “when the [mc’s title] has been killed.” He spends the whole book coming to terms with this, and he gives into it, only to find himself waking up in the hospital instead. “Wow, plot twist. /s” you may be thinking, and yeah sure, the mc in a kids book survived, big shocker. But it doesn't end there. After the war, there are peace talks, but they escalate until the two sides are on the verge of declaring war again. And [mc], bless him, has just been caught in the middle of all of this the entire time. He’s sick as shit of fighting, of watching the suffering and death of people he cares about. He draws his sword against both of them angrily, gives a speech saying he won’t take a side, and then promptly breaks his sword across his knee: “There. [mc’s title in the prophecies] is dead. I killed him.” He’s giving a huge middle finger to everyone there, to the man who wrote the prophecies, to the entire fucked up culture of it all. And so something that was taken literally turns out to be metaphorical. That is, if you still believe in the prophecies at all.

Hopefully you’re catching my drift here. What I’m saying is, even though this other series has nothing to do with bnha, it goes to show sometimes it’s the most absolute certainties that are red herrings, and a “death” can consequently be a symbolic one. In All Might’s case, it could be the death of hero society and a rejection of his own past. In other words, character development for Toshinori himself that reflects on the way the world is changing, too. Also there’s the fact that the mc from that other series I’m trying not to name has an honorary title, and I’m imagining that role he occupied “dying” could correspond to something that amounts to, “All Might is dead. I (Yagi Toshinori) killed him.” 

And here’s another thing: we also have to ask ourselves what good a dead Toshinori is to Izuku, narratively speaking. Yes, Izuku has spent his whole life idolizing even the more toxic parts of All Might, and his idealized vision of his hero does need to “die.” But how about Toshinori as a father figure?  Izuku regretting that his last interaction with Toshinori was to reject his help may drive home the fact that he shouldn’t go off on his own, but at this point it’s kinda redundant. If anything it would negate some of the progress that was just made because it’d make him extra paranoid about losing other people too. To be honest, the whole “Uncle Ben” trope, the mentor/father figure who dies and gives the mc a reason to do better, is so tired. Experiencing the death of a loved one really doesn’t deserve to be romanticized like that. I might as well admit that I’m speaking from experience, and let me tell you, losing someone you love suddenly, when you weren’t around, and with unfinished business--it makes you paranoid as hell that it will happen again. It literally gives me nightmares. Y’all, I cannot stress enough that trauma does not equal character development. Granted, just because I know this doesn’t mean Horikoshi does, but in general he does seem to lead his characters toward healing.

Okay, back to the present. Toshinori is turning away from UA. He likely feels useless and rejected. We can infer that what happens next will involve Stain, and we have a couple of extra clues to go with it: Stain considers All Might a true hero, and has stated that he would let All Might kill him. And since Horikoshi loves his parallels, we also have this fight between Endeavor and this random villain who admires him so much that he wants to die by Endeavor’s hand:

This suggests a confrontation in which Stain challenges All Might to live up to himself as he once was, so that as a hero he can vanquish Stain and symbolically overcome society's perversion of that role. But based on what All Might has learned about the system he upheld, Stain is wrong. All Might is not a “true hero” in the sense that the societal issues Stain witnessed exist not in spite of All Might, but (in part) because of him, because he took too much of the responsibility for himself.

Stain probably had no idea about the personal cost of All Might’s lonely burden until after the fact. Maybe he’s seeing it now. So then perhaps the confrontation would be more about Stain claiming he’s just as fake as the rest. Either way, Toshinori has the opportunity to denounce himself and be rid of “All Might,”  to stop living in his own shadow. Nighteye’s vision has been defied before, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the combination of society shifting + Toshinori’s own conviction is enough to do it again and work fate in his favor.

He is not All Might. He is Yagi Toshinori: quirkless, worn down, and directionless except for his dedication to Izuku. If he survives his interaction with Stain, he can resolve his imperfect mentorship by confessing about his shortcomings and simply supporting Izuku as a part of his family, not as his teacher (as Aizawa said, just “being there”). And that’s how you really get character development, for both of them. I mean, shit, imagine Toshinori straight up telling Izuku to stop calling him All Might.

[pennysword]

An Ode to My Hero Academia

Okay, like every anime fan, I've fallen into the My Hero Academia hole and can't get up... and that's not a bad thing.

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't on the fanwagon when My Hero Academia landed on American shores in 2016. I was two years out of college and the only thing I cared about was finding a nine-to-five that paid my bills and kept my mom from telling me to do something with my life. I was also deep in the pit of post college depression, wherein I'd moved away from all my friends and thought myself too socially awkward and weird to be able to make new ones. That's something a lot of us deal with, I think, especially when we're forced out of our comfort zones.

I am a shojo romantic at heart. Most shonen don't really hook me emotionally the way shojos do. And if it does hook me, it's set in a world so fantastical and so bizarre that my interest wanes before long and I would forget the plot all together. When I did delve back into manga or anime (decreasingly so once I got my first adult job at twenty-three), I wanted to wrap myself in the blanket of the tropes that were comfortable to me: a wallflower female lead with surprising feistiness and sense of justice, a beautiful male lead like prince from a fairy tale, a second lead who would do anything for your affection. These stories were mostly set in the real world, even if they didn't make sense sometimes, I could make excuses because I loved the idea of shojo so much more than disliking the flaws.

While a lot of my friends watch anime religiously, I'm more of a casual fan (which is really a nightmare to otakus, who expect you to know every single canon, fanon, and side canon that has ever existed). I remember my first encounter with the show was equally as casual. My friend explained to me it's general concept while waiting in line for my badge at ACEN 2017. “It's about superheroes! There's this girl who is literally a frog! An ostentatious personification of America! When people cosplay this other character they wear a green zentai suit because she's supposed to be invisible and that's funny!”

Fresh off the tails of One Punch Man, which came out in 2015, I thought it was the same concept and I rolled my eyes. I knew that anime followed trends, like most things in the world: one year psychic-mecha anime was what everyone wanted to do and the next, post apocalyptic themes were all the rage. So I thought My Hero Academia was just another One Punch Man, a self-referential, satirical comedy about heroes who knew how ridiculous their own genre was. I'd seen it once and wasn't really interested in seeing it again.

My second encounter with My Hero was a bit more personal. It was 2019 and I was taking my eight-year-old cousin to her first anime convention ever. Her family has always been a little more conservative, being Jehovah's Witnesses and living in one of the most right wing cities in Mid Michigan... and I was thrilled when she confessed to me that she enjoyed shonen-ai, that her mom had bought her a complete set of Sailor Moon manga, and that she wanted to borrow my own personal manga collection for reading. There was only a four month turn around, but I made her a janky cosplay and drove her to Kalamazoo for one day of their local convention, Dokidokon, wherein she pointed out someone cosplaying her favorite character, Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia.

At this point I had the base knowledge that my friend had given me at ACEN two years prior, but I just couldn't follow what my cousin was saying. After she shyly asked for a picture with the cosplayer, she explained to me why she shipped this character with that character and why that other character was a jerk... I couldn't understand any of it. And I realized that I had missed something much more important than hopping on the fanwagon of one of the greatest anime of its time... I'd missed an opportunity to connect further with my little cousin, someone who was just beginning to sprout seeds of her own ideas and her own interests, separate from her religiously zealous mother and her perpetually aloof father. I had missed a chance to truly enjoy her happiness, to witness her excitement when she saw her favorite characters pop out of the television screen and manifest themselves before her, alive and in the flesh... and just as heroic as their two dimensional counterparts.

That fall, I watched the first episode of My Hero Academia on my morning elliptical workout and my life was changed.

I mentioned before that one of the reasons I have a difficult time connecting with the shonen genre is the fantastical worlds that I cannot relate to. For instance, I can apply logic to the world of Naruto in my head, but it never seems real like it could be real to me. I always find myself questioning social structure, in-world history, and the story's depiction of the human condition. There's always a nagging voice in my head that refutes all of these pretend worlds in shonen... but My Hero is set in a world not unlike our own. In fact, aside from his green hair, the main character seemed like someone I might have known in middle school: a small, meek nerd type who is always scribbling something in his journal, always knew more than he was letting on... someone you wanted as a friend, whether you realized it or not. Izuku Midoriya as a character is as close to the shojo trope of a wallflower main lead as you could get. When we meet him, he's quirkless and is often bullied for by his childhood frienemy, Katsuki Bakugou. He's kinda squirrely, kinda spazzy, but feels like a grounded character because his golden heart is his most defining attribute. Midoriya has no illusions about what he is. He knows he's weak. He knows that people look down on him. But he is just… good. His goodness is infallible and his goodness rings true in everything he does, including when he risks his life to save said bully in episode two.

Conversely, while Midoriya is full of impressionistic verve, Bakugou turns the tables on the typical second lead shonen stereotype because he's not some edgelord that wants revenge for his slaughtered family. He actually has both parents at home and lives in a nice house and neighborhood. He doesn't have some kind of revenge fantasy playing in his head on his journey to become the best hero... he's just a fucking dick. A dick with a chip on his shoulder because his whole life people have told him that he's the better than his peers... and when Midoriya proves to Bakugou that natural talent isn't everything, he must grapple with the idea that world wasn't everything he thought it was.

Midoriya doesn't automatically become a cool kid after attaining his quirk from his idol, All Might, either. He doesn't stop being socially awkward. Midoriya still nerds out when it comes to All Might and he still takes copious notes on every hero he encounters, his classmates or otherwise. Midoriya has a goal but he doesn't have a grand plan. There's no shortcut to the end, only day after day of hard work and determination and figuring shit out on his own. Since he is the protagonist, we see the reasoning behind everything he does and this fact grounds the world of My Hero Academia for me. We see Midoriya fail and win and fail again, but we never stop rooting for him because we know he is smarter and more capable than his awkwardness allows him to show the world.

We follow Midoriya during some of the darkest times of his life, including when he learns that he would never develop a quirk. What hurt him more than the doctor delivering this news was his mother's fervent apologies rather than words of encouragement. Because even without a quirk, Midoriya could have done anything he wanted to, had he had the support of his family. In shonen anime the parents are usually convenient plot devices or they are dead. In My Hero, though, Midoriya has a close and communicative relationship with his mother. One of the more powerful scenes involving Inko Midoriya is when she refuses to let Midoriya go back to his dream school despite his protests. She explains that, first and foremost, she is his mother and her duty is to keep him safe. When I see this scene I always choke up because this is how humans act and I don't think I've seen it in another shonen before. I hear the common argument, “Well, he's training to become a hero. He's gonna get hurt.” as a justification of why Inko should be fine with Midoriya's broken bones. And while logistically that may be true, we know that most parents wouldn't feel that way. It makes sense as a narrative, given what we know about Midoriya and Inko's relationship.

Something I also love about this series is that every character has a fail stop, a logical reason why they aren't as OP as possible: if Todoroki uses his right side too much he gets frostbite and if he abuses his left he gets burned. If Ururaka overexerts her Zero Gravity, she gets motion sickness. Even All Might, Midoriya's mentor and the strongest hero in the world™, cannot be in his hero form for more than three hours a day. Every character must learn to recognize and live with their shortcomings, because even heroes need to find their place in the universe... and rely on those who fill the empty spaces around them. Because this show, despite it's taglines and ultimate moves, thrives on the logic of balance, of give and take accepting that no one can go at it completely alone, I realized that it was nothing like the aforementioned anime. It was so much more.

Like my friend told me three years ago, on a surface My Hero Academia is about superheroes. It's about capes and costumes and training montages and redemption arcs and all the things that we nerds love... But beneath the surface, My Hero Academia is about recognizing your own power. Izuku Midoriya isn't a hero because he inherited All Might's quirk. He's a hero because, to the very marrow in his bones, he does what is right. Izuku strives to be better than his own self doubt and the world telling him he's not good enough, even though most times he ends up crying his eyes out. He embodies the will to succeed that we all have within us when we find our passions, whether it be beginning your fitness journey with some anime on the elliptical, bagging that nine-to-five job, or something more substantial, like training, despite the odds, to become a hero who saves people with a smile on his face.

[lethesomething]

Midoriya and his many parents

Not a Dream Daddy post.

 I've mentioned this briefly in Aizawa's profile, but BnHA is just chock full of father figures. There's a big emphasis on mentors and fatherhood, more so than in a lot of other manga and anime I follow. Now, the idea of the 'sensei' is fairly classic, the old master who teaches the young hero their secret technique and all that. But the young heroes in BnHA, with their high stakes environment, do have a lot of them.

 This is especially true for Midoriya.

 Inko Midoriya

Surely I'm not the only one who thinks it's super interesting that we have not seen Midoriya's biological father? Like… he wasn't even on the couch watching the Sports Festival.

Considering his mother appears to be a house wife in a fairly nice apartment, I think it's safe to assume that he at least exists. Maybe he's a salaryman with a lot of overtime, more likely he's working overseas. Whatever the case, he's very much an absent dad.  Now, absentee parents aren't that much of a deal in anime. The '16-year old living alone in Tokyo' is a bit of a trope, after all, but here, with the emphasis on several characters parents, it feels like a statement. This is the manga in which we know the entire family set-up of Tsuyu, and the names and appearance of Jirou's parents. Much as I love Jirou, she's a side character. For the main character to have a blank space like that, is a Thing. It means that growing up, Izuku had one parental figure, and that parental figure was his mother.

And give the woman credit: she did amazing. It is not easy to raise a child practically by yourself. Certainly not a child that is considered an outcast by society. The amount of love Midoriya receives from his mother is heart-warming, their relationship is one of the better ones portrayed in shounen and as a result, Midoriya is a kid with an incredible amount of mental fortitude, capable of handling some pretty devastating circumstances. His mother has been a supporting pillar in his early childhood, which, remember, was pretty rough on account of all the bullying. As such she has shaped a lot of his personality. She’s equipped him with confidence, with an unshakable belief in himself. However, she is very much not a hero.

Her love is one of katsudon and hugs and kind words and worried tears. She wants him safe, above all else. She's never going to teach him hand-to-hand and going by her advice alone will not make him into the hero he desperately wants to be. Him quite literally leaving the warm nest she made for him to learn how to fight evil people is a big part of him growing up.

 All Might

Maybe that's why Izuku puts so much of his hopes and dreams on All Might. Here's his ultimate hero taking an interest in little old him. It's a fairy tale. A manga trope. And I really believe that he sees an alternate father figure in All Might once he gets closer to him. They have their wax on, wax off moment on the beach, with All Might encouraging him to get stronger. This is the trope. The sensei, mister Miyagi thing where the kid gets prepped to receive the ultimate technique (in the form of a lock of... hair, whatever). But unlike traditional masters, and unlike his biological father, All Might sticks around. He is a presence in his life. He cares for Midoriya and his continued success in a way that, at this point, no other male figure does.

Dad Might gives Midoriya a whole bunch of very important advice, but it's good to note that this isn't a rough or distant sort of male mentorship. All Might quite literally opens himself up to Midoriya. He shows him his weaker side. The skeletal side. The broken side. Because All Might, let’s not forget, is a friggin mess.

I mean, I know he's going through a lot, but this man is Such a Dork. It’s definitely endearing and it is also one of his best traits as a character. However: as a person, he's really not very well equipped to be raising a teenager. He lacks, in a way, the stability and level-headedness that comes with the position of a teacher. He cares too much. About everything. All the time. And he nurtures that side of Midoriya, when Midoriya already has plenty of that.

He can't help but admire Midoriya's selflessness. Can't help but praise the very foundation upon which his own heroics are based: helping people. When he saves Todoroki. When he saves Bakugou, All Might is there to tell Midoriya that what he did is all right.

And this is certainly important for Midoriya to hear, but at this point it’s also not the only thing he needs to hear. 

 Aizawa Shouta

Luckily Midoriya also gets a more traditional teacher figure. It's interesting to note that, despite being the younger of the two, and despite the fact that he sometimes teaches from an honest to god sleeping bag, Aizawa is a much more stable mentor and general Adulting Adult. He still cares about his students, but he's also much more likely to Act as a Teacher.

Because Aizawa immediately picks up on Izuku's self-mutilation. He watched the entrance exam, he knows that Izuku's quirk is, at this point, extremely flawed. That Izuku doesn't have control over it. He explains it in a pretty standoffish way, and certainly this early in the show it comes across as cruel, but he's not wrong. Izuku is breaking bones every single time he uses his quirk at this point in time. If he does anything with his quirk, he'll be a casualty. Him using only a single finger is framed as a feat of intelligence, but it is also INSANE. 'Oh you only broke one finger, you have nine attacks left'. That is NOT a good plan. Don't do that. For fuck's sake. I hope we all realize that what Midoriya is doing is Not Healthy. He is eating away at himself, destroying his own body over and over again.

When Aizawa tells Midoriya to get a grip on his powers he's not just being an ass. He's being a responsible adult, a teacher that cares about the general well-being of the students assigned to him.

Manga spoilers under the cut.

This isn't to say he doesn't begrudgingly admire Izuku. He does. He keeps him in the class because of his conviction, because of his intelligence. His Potential. He probably recognizes something heroic in him, just like everyone else does. But someone has to tell this kid to stop from literally breaking himself and that is something All Might can't really do at this point. The man himself has been overdoing it all his life. He is missing Vital Organs and he still can't, like, take it easy.  Even when given a literal time limit on his heroics, he will get distracted by saving people. So that role of scolding Midoriya and reigning him in goes to people like Aizawa and Recovery Girl. But they still can't teach him how to get Better at it.

Gran Torino

Enter Weird Grandpa Gran Torino. The old timer is rather well-placed for this, because he knows All Might better than most, and in a less… fan like way than most. He's capable of seeing All Might's flaws. He knows Yagi is terrible at self-care. He knows that Yagi is a man who decided to be a symbol. Who has pushed aside his own needs for the greater good for decades. Gran Torino recognizes this compulsion in Midoriya. He can see Midoriya's will to be like All Might as the potentially bad situation it is. And he noticed that all the way from his couch in front of the tv screen, watching the Sports Festival.

Most importantly, he shows Midoriya that he needs to let go of a lot of his admiration for his hero, if he's going to succeed him.

Which is something literally no one else would be able to teach him.

 Yagi Toshinori

One of the better qualities of BnHA is that even the older characters, like the big Idol Hero Dude, gain some character development. All Might goes through a lot of stuff in the series, and all in all he seems to take it in his stride that he's losing power. But on a very personal level, he's also getting better. At least at the whole teaching/mentor business. There comes a point when he stops pushing himself to be everything to everyone, and basically retires to be a teacher to Deku and his class. That point is one of my favourite scenes, because it so encapsulates the relationship between All Might and Deku.

It comes after the raid on the League's hideout.Bakugou has been saved, the whole friggin world has seen All Might shrink to his skeletal form and Midoriya meets him late at night on the beach where they first trained. Symbolic stuff. And the first thing All Might does is punch him for breaking the rules. Again. He scolds him and this is one of the first times he’s actually angry at Midoriya. For going above and beyond, for putting himself in harm's way. Again.

And then the Dad Might instinct kicks in, because holy jeebus is he proud. He can't help it. This is where Yagi decides to focus on *his kid*. Where he finally fully takes up the 'mentor' mantle.

And it's so bittersweet, because as with everything between these two, that beginning is also an end. One for All has finally transitioned fully.

And can we just… respect how well Yagi deals with this? He's had some time to process, but look at him. Depending on your point of view, this kid now has his power. Or is the reason he no longer has it. And he is gracious. Supporting. Comforting.

 The team

They say it takes a village to raise a child, and the great thing about UA, for characters such as Midoriya, is that it has a lot of good, decent people, who team up to provide some kind of personal growth. And it's so very cute when they do that! They actually do the whole good cop/bad cop thing.

For Yagi, personal growth, heroism, selflessness, bravery, is and always will be more important than rules. Yagi's affection is one of warmth, of understanding. Even when his two most trusted pupils are beating each other senseless, he's the one that pleads for leniency. Aizawa's job, meanwhile, is to provide authority. They are complementary, they have to be. Aizawa acts like this even if he can't enforce it. Even if he doesn't particularly like doing it. He knows it needs to happen, cause otherwise they'll never learn.

He's being Responsible.

But please note, because this is super important, that Aizawa doesn't even start yelling until he knows that all wounds have been at least disinfected. There’s a first aid kit on the table in the previous screenshot. Those kids already have bandaids on their face. The first thing either of those two adults do, is make sure everyone is all right.

Cause that's the thing I absolutely love about these two. Midoriya may have left the safe nest of his mother, he's very much still being cared for. His new guardians are a bit rougher around the edges but they absolutely have his best interest at heart. Yagi may be more prone to hugs than Aizawa, but this is something they both have in common, and something that makes them work together despite their clashing personalities. They care.

More BnHA character stuff.