Renkaza / Akaren Fanfic Requests. Click In Bio!!

Sorry for not being on in, like, forever. Life’s just gotten in the way.

Anyways, that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. What I really wanted to focus on is something I’ve been thinking a lot on lately, and that’s the idea of asshole characters.

Obviously asshole characters come in all shapes and sizes. Each have their own motivations for being an asshole and/or unfriendly individual. Katsuki, Shota, and Hitoshi are asshole characters themselves, but why is it that I dislike them so much?

At first I thought I didn’t like asshole characters in general. However, I then remembered that there are several characters people would classify as assholes/unfriendly individuals that are characters I adore. Lysithea from Fire Emblem 2 Houses and Natsuki from Doki Doki Literature Club are characters who are rough around the edges and aren’t nice to people immediately. The reasons behind their behavior aren’t too far off from why Shota and Hitoshi act the way they do, that being trauma, so why am I able to look past their behavior and not that of Shota and Hitoshi? With Katsuki, it’s obvious, but the other two had me scratching my head for a bit.

The answer, outside of the fact that Lysithea and Natsuki are multi-layered characters written far better than Shota and Hitoshi, is that the girls are REACTIVE assholes while Hitoshi and Shota are ACTIVE assholes.

What do I mean by that? Well both Lysithea and Natsuki for the most part keep to themselves. Something that someone does ends up causing them to snap. For Lysithea, it’s when she feels that her time is being wasted after someone approaches her about something irrelevant. For Natsuki, it’s a defensive mechanism triggered by a perceived attack on her character. Now, is that an excuse for their behavior? No. There are better ways to defend yourself and to get people to stop talking to you, but it’s at least understandable that they’d snap due to their traumas.

Katsuki, Hitoshi, and Shota aren’t like that. When they’re an asshole, it isn’t because they’re provoked into being one by someone else’s actions, but because they’re the ones doing the provoking. Katsuki’s rude and aggressive to everyone around him, choosing to make the life of another boy absolutely miserable without any provocation. Hitoshi decides to mock 1-A and issue his “challenge” not because anyone approached him, but because he himself is looking for trouble. Yeah, Katsuki gave off a shitty first impression, but Hitoshi already was planning on challenging 1-A from the beginning. Shota’s the one who controls his teaching style and is a position of authority. Rather than do his job, he’d rather tear someone down.

Am I supposed to sympathize with these so-called heroes? I for the life of me can’t seem to do so. Meanwhile, with characters like Lysithea and Natsuki, I can because they don’t mean to be an asshole, it’s just that they want to be left alone.

Now, am I saying reactive assholes are better characters than proactive assholes? No. Proactive assholes can have great character development. The problem is that proactive assholes are tougher to warm up to, especially when they’re meant to characters the audience is meant to root for. MHA’s writing does nothing TO make people want to root for these guys. They’re just assholes who wanna throw their weight around and never receive punishment for it/are called out for it. Hell, MHA seems to think these characters ARE in the right for being the way they are and/or doesn’t take the fact that they are assholes seriously (looking at you Katsuki).

Anyways, I thought I’d write this up to really explain more of my thought process and why Katsuki, Hitoshi, and Shota bother me so much whereas I find myself adoring characters such as Lysithea and Natsuki.

Small and big 🤐

Jiro and his wife 💎

This is Kaori, she’s the Hidden Wood (Kobayashi clan) village doctor and the first wife to the clan leader Jiro Kobayashi. Her personality is quite timid but she is very stubborn when she wants to. Her work with medicine and herbs is unmatched to anyone, her passione to help people comes off as healing to the point the marking on her forehead appeared after her patients are properly nursed back to health.

But due to her patients being healed from even the most life threatening condition she was seen as a witch in her old village and was treated so poorly that she was banished from the village. When she stumbled upon the Hidden Wood village she healed an injured bear and it guided her into the village. The elders saw that she was no threat and had them tended to an injured Jiro. Once nursed back to health they fell in love and got married. He gifted her that hair pin she wears.

Jiro also has two other wives, after marrying Kaori he marries Tenshi who was a fellow hashira that he met through his sister Akira and lastly the women he was formerly engaged to named Ares. Who unfortunately got married by Tengen after Jiro called it off due to a family crisis.

Going back to review MHA, I don't really understand the participation of at least 20 teenagers in the cast if they're not going to do anything

I mean, Aoyama is justifiable as well as Uraraka, Kirishima, Iida and Yaoyorozu

The rest are like they're in the background and suddenly in the last arc everyone perfectly understands the protagonist and his motivations, when at most they interacted with him at USJ, it feels like Hori read "Class 1-A as a Family" in AO3 and continued the story from there.

Bakugo has continuity and importance until he is kidnapped and from there he seems like an extra character (because he has no evolution, the mini-endeavour of the group)

Horikoshi, you should have made AFO take out his quirk, because seriously, it is incomprehensible what he is doing here

I have a question, in a certain part of the fandom when it comes to criticizing characters like Bakugou, Endeavor, etc., an answer that is repeated a lot is that those who criticize don't understand the cultural context of Japan and therefore we don't understand the way in which Horikoshi wrote. But is this really true? I don't deny that there are aspects of Japanese culture in the manga but many actions of the characters feel very Westernized for the cultural issue to be an impediment in understanding the manga, more than anything when the idea of ​​the heroes and everything written by Horikoshi feels a direct reference to US comics, not just a comic but directly movies like the MCU.

For understanding any character or the world of BNHA generally, of course some knowledge of Japanese culture would help shed light on some of the narrative choices and themes. This was written by a Japanese man with an intended audience of Japanese manga readers.

And it's true that Japan overall does tend to have a more laissez faire attitude towards bullying and domestic violence.

However, BNHA also clearly depicted these actions as horrific early on in the manga. Beyond that, BNHA is a manga where that argument is weaker than usual because it is so heavily inspired by American culture and American media specifically.

If an author spells out how horrific bullying, systemic discrimination, and domestic abuse are in his work, it's not too much to ask for the characters who were the victims to get the panel time to demonstrate how they were affected by these actions. The atonement doesn't carry much weight without an understanding of the result of the wrongdoing in the first place.

What a good consequence should look like and how atonement should occur is going to be tied up in cultural norms. But there's no cultural excuse for sidelining the victims because the author feared it would make the atoning characters unpopular. Objectively bad writing decisions are bad writing decisions regardless of culture.

yuck!

no offense but if ur into this shit proudly n publicly, shoo shoo 😭 stop interacting with me if you are into this or that stupid d¥kebreaking bs!! yuck!!

You've mentioned that you hc Reigen as ace, can you elaborate?

I agree w/ that but can't sort my thoughts out well enough to make a coherent analysis ;w;

Yeah, that's the vibe he gives me. No concrete "evidence" and I don't care all that much about the sexual orientations of fictional characters, but I guess for me, the headcanon comes down to three things:

1) Reigen is super disinterested in other people being attracted to each other. I feel like there are several small examples of this, but first one that comes to mind is that case with the esper who can astral project and uses it to stalk his neighbor. When they discover this, Reigen has such a non-reaction. I've seen a lot of people bring up these panels

which, yeah, but when they find the culprit, Reigen also doesn't express much of an opinion. It's just "it's a stalker, stalking is bad and illegal, this is a job for the police." No more introspection from him, he immediately moves on, it doesn't interest him. Mob is the one doing all the reacting.

2) Reigen never resorts to flirting despite how he's known for bullshitting his way through anything else to complete a job. Like, no matter how horny Studio Bones is for the guy, they can't change this. He could deliberately capitalize on the fact that a considerable amount of his income comes from massaging middle-aged ladies who find him attractive, but he doesn't. It's accidental. It does not even seem like something Reigen thinks about.

3) Reigen's a self-conscious person, yet doesn't act like it bothers him that he's seemingly never been in a relationship before. He explicitly has a crisis over being lonely in the confession arc, but it's about friends and connections and doing something meaningful with his life. Romantic relationships don't factor into it, even though it easily could, considering it has great thematic relevance for Mob who spends the entire story being in love. Not that you can't fall in love with someone if you're ace, this goes a little bit into aro territory I guess, but either way.. it just gives me that vibe. The indifference. I mean, even in chapter 99 when Mob point-blank asks Reigen for advice about Tsubomi, Reigen first asks Serizawa, then looks it up on his phone, exactly like he would with any other topic he doesn't know jack shit about.

Also, at the end of the scene, he muses about what's important in a relationship, and his conclusions just.. don't sound like he's talking about romance? To me?

I don't know, that entire scene gives me flashbacks to being younger and not yet knowing what asexuality (or aromanticism) is and having to navigate conversations like that without giving away that you fundamentally can't relate to this thing everyone else is so preoccupied with.

Them's my takes, I don't have much else to say about it.

so. when tim showed cock and balls. piper hid her face, lochlan covered his ears, and saxon was the only person in the room that fell dead silent. then it cut to a shot of the three wise monkeys statue. and once again, in the face of her own family being sexually inappropriate, victoria just laughed it off. soo really great tv happening! this family is nauseating!!