#The moral and practical logic of a world of ninjas should not be applied to a world of heroes

[justatalkingface]

Hey! I've been reblogging some of your stuff and throwing my two cents in what I think. So I come here with a simple question...

What're your thoughts on Shota Aizawa?

Because for me, he's no different than the teachers in Aldera when it comes to handling Izuku. He's also a flatout hypocrite by getting onto All Might for favoring Izuku when he does the same with Hitoshi.

And I'm not even mentioning how he uses his trauma to justify his bs teaching ways

...Hahahahaha! So, you have no way of knowing this, but I've basically been preparing for this moment, to make this rant, for the longest time. More than probably any other character in this series, I've thought about Aizawa, tried to put into words what bugged me about him, scoured the internet for opinions to broaden my understanding, to find the right words. Quite a few posts have been yours, actually.

The short answer is that, simply, I hate him. Once I got past his Kakashi Aura from my first impression, I didn't like him, but fandom hype for Dadzawa, as well as the fact that usually comes with horrifying levels of bashing for people like All Might (ironically, perhaps the most unsung hero in the setting, seeing how few people seem to like his character) curdled it deep into loathing. Still, I'm going to be try to be objective as I talk.

The long answer is more complicated, and very, very long, but still overwhelmingly negative. For me, part of it is that Aizawa is easily the winner of the title of being The Favored Mouthpiece. This is a mixed blessing for him, to say the least; on the positive side, this fact has done a lot for his positive reception and total screen time, the the narrative bends over backwards to agree with what he says, time and time again. On the negative... for all that I'm aware that he's just lines on paper, on deeply visceral level I have sympathetic disgust for all the times he's been used like a puppet to parrot one agenda or another, and it muddles the water on who his character actually is. Honestly, it's been going on for so long, and it's still going on, I wonder if I should just... accept these random outbursts as part of his actual characterization.

At a fundamental level, I've had this question burning inside of me for a long time now: does this man even want to be a teacher? No, this is a serious question: he is effectively working two jobs, and managing it terribly (unlike every other UA teacher, who are all heroes for no apparent reason, and especially Present Mic who somehow has three jobs and still is full of energy. Does that man ever sleep?). He seems to hate the daylight. He seems to hate being clean. He seems to hate children. He hates, if not teaching, then teaching people that don't vibe on his level. He hates being on a schedule. He hates following authority. Really the only part of being teacher he does probably like is the actual paycheck.

So, again, why is he a teacher? I know he likes taking someone under his wing, but that use of a singular pronoun was very specific: he wants one person, one that fills whatever bizarre and unknown criteria, to teach (I'm still not sure what made him look at about five minutes of Shinso and say, 'This, this is the child I shall give all my skills, all my knowledge, and even my physics defying combat weapon.' Like, do they have to be his mini-me? Bear the soul of Grumpy Cat? I really don't know), an apprentice, not students plural. From what I gleaned from the Vigilante manga (which I should probably reread at some point), it's that desire, but misunderstood, combined with nostalgia, loneliness (his friends were already at UA) and peer pressure, that motivated him to start teaching at UA.

I don't really need to say it, but those are terrible reasons to become a teacher, and probably help explain why he's so bad at it.

Before I get into that, I want to address one thing: I've seen, online, that Aizawa's role as homeroom teacher is something completely different in Japan than it is for anywhere English speaking. So these various comments and what not say is, in Japan, these home room teachers aren't actually supposed to teach. They're supposed to be... something like councilors, I believe: they stay with the children and help guide them, and so on, and that's why he's a better teacher than we think he is. I've never actually seen anyone counter that argument, just agree, and I've had this response waiting for a long time now: when do you see Aizawa do that?

I know the Final Exam arc is supposed to show us that, yes, Aizawa is perceptive and does notice things about his students, and does care, but that's shit. His inner monologue tells us about Momo and her lack of self confidence. The implication of that, that he's only dealing with this now, means he's been sitting on this for... how long? However long he noticed that, I guess? So, from a time period ranging between the first day of class, and just before they prepared for the test, Aizawa noticed Momo had confidence issues and apparently did nothing until that test, probably because he wanted to be 'efficient' and deal with two things at once. Why do extra work and deal with a student's issues, when you can do it while they struggle to pass their final exams? Wow. A+ job there, teach.

On Shoto... just... just no. Come back to me, someone, anyone, when Aizawa even acknowledges that that mess is made out of red flags: the fact he doesn't use half of his goddamn Quirk until Izuku beats some self reflection into him. The fact he unsubtly hates his father. The fact he doesn't seem to know how to be a normal person. The burn scar on his face when he's heat resistant. Anything. Anything. I don't expect him to look at the kid and magically realized he's abused, but there's enough there that if he's a good teacher, or councilor, or whatever, he should probably be low key probing for information on his situation, see if there's something wrong in the most general of senses, because there's clearly something wrong there.

Literally anything about Izuku or Bakugou, though I'm putting a pin on discussing that mess until later.

See, the problem with saying that Aizawa is supposed to be the class's... councilor or something, instead of a teacher, brings up the fact that he's a shit councilor. Even if it's true (I'm not Japanese, I have no idea), this doesn't make his character better, this just brings up different problems instead.

Alright, so now that that's out of the way... now I need to point out that Aizawa is a Kakashi clone, and that's a good deal of the reason he's so popular; he rode off Naruto nostalgia. Let's list off how many traits he blatantly got from him. It's more than you think!

Aizawa is like Kakashi in that: he's a teacher that doesn't want to teach, his students include the Great Hope of the setting and his 'rival', he's traumatized from a friend dying when he was young, he deals with his heavy PTSD with unhealthy coping mechanisms, he has an eye based power that turns his eyes red, he loses an eye, he takes on an apprentice that reminds him of himself and gives him his signature technique/equipment, his dead best friend is alive, his dead best friend is the enemy, his dead best friend has been heavily experimented on, his dead best friend has warping powers, his friend group consists of people more cheerful than him who respect his skills, his best friend is overwhelmingly cheery in a way that balances with his low key behavior.

...When you list it out like this, it starts to get a little nuts, doesn't it? I wonder, sometimes, how much actual thought went into the character Eraserhead, and how much was Hori just... copying the copy ninja.

Here's the problem with that though, beyond the laziness of it all: Kakashi is a ninja. He is a mercenary, a child soldier, has killed more people than we have names for in all of MHA. He lives in a military village, under a military dictatorship, and is expected to kill. The teaching system he's part of is largely involuntary, though he avoids in in part because he's so good that everyone looks the other way when he ducks out of it. These students are also ten. There is just... just so much there, so much that is utterly alien to how MHA works, that putting a copy in is... flawed, to say the least.

That's why the Bell Test Quirk Apprehension Test is so bad: Hori put that in, as a blatant echo of Kakashi testing Team Seven, without thinking once of the differences in the setting.

He's in a school, and his job is being a teacher. His literal, actual ass job is to teach students (or 'help guide them', either way). This is something he chose to do, of his own volition. Kakashi trying to ditch his potential students is him trying to avoid an unwanted burden and him avoiding poking at this massive issues with teammates and responsible and everyone he knows and loves dying around him. And when he's forced to take some on? He tries his best to teach them, and he does: think about the first Battle of the End. The way Naruto and Sasuke fought each other. Think about how Naruto used to fight. Where did he learn to throw a punch like that? Kakashi. He may show up late, but the man did his work off screen.

Aizawa trying not to teach his students is literally a man too fucking lazy to do his own job. We all know Hori retconned it with 'he just wanted them to get a taste of death' via expulsion (which, apparently in Japanese culture is something that would set them back in their prospects for life) but it's so nonsensical that it's hard to take it seriously that he just... does this. Was planning to do this the first day, because they were excited about being heros, like that deserved a taste of death (They aren't in the military, you ass, they're in high school). Is allowed to do this. That he did this to an entire class for some reason but not Bakugou, when Bakugou exists.

Which means it's time to wade into the mess that is Aizawa and Izuku and Bakugou. Let's start with Bakugou, first, since I already started.

Blatantly, obviously, Bakugou has plot armor in how people react to him, or don't, as the case may be, and one of the worst victims of it is Eraserhead. The fact that Mr. 'Taste of death' and 'Expels entire classes' doesn't at least punt Bakugou into detention, or more likely a 'taste of death' to threaten the other students (because that's how you teach your class of high schoolers! By fear!), after he actively attacks Izuku, is just... mind boggling. The way he constantly refuses to acknowledge which of them is the aggressor, which of them is the first to throw a punch, which one is constantly threatening the other....

The obvious conclusion here is that Aizawa likes Bakugou, for whatever reason, but... I don't think it's true. The thing is if he liked Bakugou, you'd think he'd... spend time with him. Try and train him. Something. But no, by and by large he acts like Bakugou doesn't exist, right until Hori needs someone to compliment him for the readers, or someone to defend him after he does something bad, yet again, and then all of a sudden he's singing his praises. This is where the downsides of being The Favored Mouthpiece comes in: every time he's complimented Bakugou, every time he's said that this mess of a child is going to be a great hero, every time he cries desperately that he, 'Still needs to be Number One!' or whatever the hell that bullshit was? That was Hori. That was always Hori. Aizawa basically isn't allowed to exist near Bakugou without Hori running interference for him.

Izuku, on the other hand, is half the opposite, half Aizawa's own biases coming in. Part of it is Hori needs Izuku to feel stressed to pump up the tension, make cliffhangers, and get Jump selling; Izuku can't have a normal school life, he needs a heart pounding one. In most shonen school settings, this is easy to accomplish because they're generally hell holes that put their students in life and death situations on the regular, and live in hierarchies based off power levels. UA, though? It's a normal, or at least "normal" school, if exceptional, in the "real" world, plus some super powers. There are standards, is the thing; they can't and won't send their students off to maybe die because of they're a secret society or whatever. They have accountability (to some extent) to the general public, in other words.

So where does Izuku's cliffhanger filled school life come from? Well, Tomura and the Tomura-ettes, for one, but for all the other times... Hori turned to his teacher.

Let me say this again, because I want to emphasis this: part of the reason Aizawa exists as he does, is so that Izuku can feel threatened at school by his teacher. Why? Because Izuku's suffering sells.

Meanwhile, though Izuku does get pulled into Bakugou's plot armor sometimes, and suffers for it (more), but as a person and a character, I think Aizawa unironically disliked Izuku from the start. He grows out of it, to some extent, but....

Let's backtrack a second, back to the Quirk Test. Izuku, at this point, is ripped. Even without his Quirk, he was throwing around fridges and working all day and night to prep for UA. He was at the peak of realistic human fitness, instead of whatever increasing soft cap we have for heroes is.

Toru is invisible. Sure, she's in shape, since she passed the exam, but Izuku clearly focused on his body in a way most of the other students aren't, and she has no Quirk that'd help her pass the test (a test that, as many have pointed out, Aizawa would have failed). She's a nice girl, sure, but there's no way she could have out performed Izuku in raw physical ability, even before the ball throw which was one of the best of that category, and far beyond whatever she could have done.

Yet Izuku was the one at the bottom, not Toru. Why? Well, you could blame Hori, and that's technically true, but the thing is, unlike Bakugou, Aizawa acts like he doesn't like Izuku. He blames him for everything, he refuses to do anything as he breaks his bones constantly, he calls him Problem Child, and anyone who thinks that's affectionate, and that Izuku should as such, and that it's a cute little nickname needs to consider that through the lenses of Izuku's low self esteem, much less from a teacher who constantly threatens his students.

Aizawa sabotaged Izuku's scores. He did it because, you're right: he's just like the teachers at Aldera, if more restrained, and for different reasons. Not because Izuku is Quirkless (though he would if Izuku was, because the man honestly is Quirkist), but because he has the wrong Quirk. Because Izuku had the audacity to come to a school to learn about how to use his Quirk, instead of practicing it illegally, or inside his own house where, at that power level, one wrong move could accidently his house. Because he apparently didn't read the files that said Izuku got it a month ago, or didn't care. Or maybe it's just he looked at Izuku, and realized that having him learn to control that was just... too much work?

At the end of the day, which reason he did it doesn't even matter. What matters is he did. The same way he plays constant mind games with his students for shits and giggles, in ways that should undermine their faith in him, the same way he paired a bully with his victim so they could 'work it out', the same way he puts minimal effort into so much of the work he does, and it's why I loathe him as a teacher.

Aizawa is a good hero, but the moment Nezu let him into a school was a mistake.