And I'm pretty sure this Bakugo kid enrolled in the hero school by mistake or something? Like maybe he intended to hit up the villain school down the street.

An emotionally unstable bully prone to violent outbursts who seems completely disinterested in saving people should maybe look into a different career option.

Ochako is still a precious perfect angel child though.

And Deku is adorable.

Oh wow.

I really hope this flashback isn't supposed to make him at all sympathetic? Because it's... sort of making him seem worse.

Like he's mad because someone was nice to him one time?

Other than him the show is great though.

Man, can't believe you called the plot twist where this turns out to be the villain school

I was joking about the villain school but I honestly wouldn't be surprised.

i love bakugou but he's an... acquired taste for sure...

i'm glad you're enjoying the show though! ochako is the most perfect

Honestly I'm just not sure why he's trying to be a hero. He mostly just bullies people using his power. It seems like he'd enjoy villainy a lot more.

Yeah. I have seen literally nothing that redeems him as a character, a hero, or a human being. Isn’t anyone worried that he’s like seconds away from being a serial killer and has been this way for ten years?

Does this school not have a therapist?

Yes! It really needs a school counselor. Not just for him either. A lot of these kids need help.

Holy damn Ice kid! That was awesome!

Also: Is that one guy just a bird?

And is the principal a groundhog or something?

Ugh, Deku. Don't go after him. Let the jerk go he's so not worth your time.

I swear Deku is a straight up saint for putting up with this bratty bully for so long.

The principal is a bearcatmouse...thing. Nobody's really sure.

Good to know. I wonder if he's an animal with a quirk or a human who turned into an animal because of a quirk.

the first one

Oh neat!

Is the bird guy the same way?

Nah, he just...looks like that.

Horikoshi does diagrams and extras and stuff in the back pages of the manga because it bothers him when there's blank pages in something you pay for?

and the diagram for the bird guy indicates he's...not actually very bird like. his beak is made of flesh.

Weird.

Cool, but weird.

also bakugou's desire to be a hero makes sense if you kind of look at it sideways

he's a shithead, but he's the kind of shithead that wants to be praised

But if he's going to have a terrible reason for wanting to be a hero, the least he could do is attempt to act one sometimes. He has blatantly acted like a villain so far. And he seems to enjoy it.

It would seem less awful if he didn't just use his quirk to push around people weaker than himself and somehow still believe those are the actions of a future hero.

He does get some development but it’s a ways in the future. I don’t really like him, but I can understand why some people do.

Is there at least a reason why he's like this? Some sort of past trauma or something?

I gotta speak up here because Bakugou is absolutely my jam

Bakugou is like this because of big-fish-in-small-pond syndrome

He lucked into an incredibly powerful quirk, and people absolutely fawned over him his whole life for it, and it's completely fucked him up because it's given him a completely warped sense of self-worth

(Also, you eventually see that his mother is exactly like him, aka incredibly coarse and aggressive - she loves him, but he definitely has not experienced a lot of softness or obvious empathy in his life)

Like, overconfidence I can absolutely get, but he’s downright unnecessarily cruel

I can definitely see how that would lead to over confidence.

(I forget if it's canon or fanon that his mother was one of those lady gang members in Japanese culture, but let's just say even if it's fanon, she would fit right in with them)

That’s what I can’t get behind with him

But with Deku especially, you eventually realize why he's so aggressive and harsh with Deku

Tohru Honda's mother was a lady gangster and she turned out to be a wonderful person.

Which is because Bakugou got so convinced of how strong and awesome he was, from everyone around him over-inflating his ego from four years old on, that he reads Deku completely wrong in every possible sense

He sees himself, a guy with an incredible quirk, and he sees Deku, someone quirkless who is treated as unfortunate and helpless at best, worthless at worst, by society

And he sees Deku trying to help him, trying to stand on the same level as him

And he reads it as mockery

I mean what bothers me is less that he thinks he's hot shit, and more that he seems to think heroism involves beating up on those weaker than you.

He thinks Deku doesn't respect him at all, or that he's trying to actively insult Bakugou by saying "you're no better than I am"

Kid needs someone to sit him down and define the words hero and villain to him.

Yeah, I wonder if he knows the definition of the word hero at all

I just don't think the word hero means what he thinks it means.

That's the thing - Bakugou is definitely trying to be a hero. But he's placing the emphasis on 'what a hero has to do' in the wrong place.

Or, rather, in only one place, when it needs to be several.

So being a hero= being the strongest

Deku looks at All Might, and he sees a hero who saves everyone, so Deku focuses on saving people.

Bakugou looks at All Might, and he sees a hero who can overcome any odds to win, so Bakugou focuses on being strong enough to overcome anything.

The irony is that both parts are necessary, but neither part works on its own.

Deku is an object lesson in how weak people can't save the people they want to save, and Bakugou is an object lesson that being strong isn't the only thing you need to be a hero.

Okay that makes sense. But someone still needs to talk to him about his blatant villain tendencies before it's too late.

But he has to have noticed that All Might doesn’t kick the people he’s saving when they’re down and laugh at them for being weak

They're two halves of what needs to exist for a functional whole.

Bakugo’s most likely reaction to someone in trouble seems to me to be to mock them for being powerless and unable to save themselves

I don't want to get into spoilers, but while Deku may be the protagonist, Bakugou's growth gets plenty of focus in the series, too. And honestly, his character has thus far grown and changed way more than Deku's.

Like maybe I’m reading him wrong and I’m only 8 eps in, but still

Yeah I think it's the cruelty that bothers me more than the competitive streak or desire to be the strongest.

Yeah, if you're early in, you won't have seen much shifting yet.

It's hard to get behind a character who is actively and willfully cruel with no reason for it.

But Bakugou gets his come-to-Jesus moment.

Yeah, so far the only justification I’ve seen for his lunatic levels of cruelty is someone was nice to him once

Well that's good. I'll hold out hope for him.

And that is reading way closer to dangerously unbalanced sociopath than anything

The thing is, people rarely re-evaluate their own worldview until they're given a reason. Bakugou's reason is getting transferred into a school where he's not necessarily the most amazing person there, after being treated as THE MOST AMAZING his whole life.

Suddenly, he has to wake the fuck up.

Again - he doesn't read that as Deku having been nice to him. Hero society treats being quirkless as being helpless, pitiable, and likewise treated Bakugou as SUPER COOL AND AMAZING for his quirk.

His cruelty and apparent enjoyment of it are just turning me way off of him, but it’s good to know he doesn’t just stay there

Like, misreading intentions or not, bullying the weak seems to be a thing he actively enjoys

Yeah it would help if he didn't seem to enjoy it so much.

So Bakugou, who thinks he's amazing, saw someone supposedly worthless acting like Bakugou needed his help, and he thought Deku was saying "you're low enough that you need my help, and I'm worthless".

(Personally, I think a lot of Bakugou's aggression towards Deku is an indictment of hero society and how it's taught people to view the quirkless, and Bakugou is what happens when you raise a kid with fucked up values of "no quirk means you're worthless, great quirk means you're the best".)

I just wonder how he turns around. It seems like he needs someone he respects to talk to him, but how can he respect anyone when his reaction to a weaker person is to dismiss them out of hand and his reaction to a stronger person is violent hatred?

Well, sans spoilers, I'd say that he first starts turning around when he's confronted with the idea that maybe he's not the best after all, and that if that belief he's been nurturing all his life is wrong, what else needs to be re-evaluated?

There's no instantaneous personality overhaul, but then it wouldn't feel realistic if there was

Admittedly part of my reaction to the character comes from being a nerd who was aggressively bullied for most of my childhood, which makes it difficult to sympathize with the bully in this case. But I am interested to see what could turn him around.

I mean, I was viciously bullied myself from first through eighth grade, so I feel you

But there's a ton of subtlety in Bakugou's actions, and his character growth is honestly some of the best I've ever seen in media, in my opinion

When I was a kid being bullied by other kids, I probably wouldn't have had sympathy for Bakugou

As long as I’m not in for Sasuke Part 2 Electric Boogaloo I’m down

I do love a good redemption arc.

Because damned if his redemption arc didn’t come a good ten years after I’d gotten tired of Naruto in general

But now that I'm an adult, I look at him and I see a kid who's been fucked up by a lot of things, who's finally been dragged out of his old mindset and is starting to grow into someone who might not be such a little shit

I mean I’ve met enough people who like his character that there has to be something there besides what I’ve seen so far

Well, Bakugou's growth as a person starts to kick off in season one, so they at least start it early

But it's pretty gradual until right around where things currently are now in season three, at which point it starts popping off like a fireworks finale

Not everyone can pull off the Sephiroth sized task of being a villain everyone loves simply because of how unapologetically and devotedly awful they are until the very end

Yeah the flashback we just watched did him no favors, but it's still pretty early.

There's a lot of time to turn things around.

Well, in any case, no one - including myself - can blame you for not liking who Bakugou currently is, because he's definitely a grade A asshole to start

But there's definitely way more to his character than that, and I assure you the series gets to it :|b

I am looking forward to it. Overall this series is very good so far.

I'm hoping to see more of the glasses kid too. He's hilarious.

Iida is so good

Like, Bakugou is my favorite just for the way the series tells his story, the complexity of it and the amazing growth we get

But I've got a lot of favorites

Iida and Kirishima are so good

Kirishima is just about the best boy

Iida is the sort of character that I think would be entertaining doing anything. I could watch an episode about him and Deku going to the corner store for snacks and I bet it would be hilarious.

Kirishima is the anti-Bakugou in terms of wholesome sweet boy

You will also eventually meet Tamaki and Sir Nighteye, who are also favorites, but I don't think they'll show up until s4 at least and that's not even out yet

I swear there is no way I'm getting through a whole season of this without making an Ochaco journal.