I think Rock Lock is such a great character for older fans of My Hero Academia.
Like, we go into it thinking “okay, he’s the stereotypical dude who dismisses the protags as just kids but will come to respect them later in the arc, okay then.”
And yeah sure that happens, BUT My Hero Academia puts such a great spin on it by revealing he’s a recent father and that affects how he sees the kid heroes. And then you get the gut punch when you realize in a way he was right at the start and this probably was a mission over the head of the high school interns involved in it. Like, everyone’s been predicting for weeks that Kirishima’s probably going to have some severe issues to deal with after this arc, Tamaki’s probably going to be a wreck over both Kirishima and Mirio, we don’t know if Mirio’s quirk is gone for good or not and what the lasting effects on him will be, and we know Midoriya’s stressed and worried as hell for Eri and everything else going on.
So as older fans, we kind of appreciate his POV more, instead of just explaining it hits us like a truck.
Plus his points about UA using and misusing popularity are good ones. It brings me back to the first internship arc, right after the sports festival. Look at how super imbalanced that chart was for Bakugou and Shouto, both in the thousands of offers. While Aizawa claims it’s unusually imbalanced, even before the scores came out the class was discussing how the sports festival had in some ways made them celebrities and Aizawa admits that it’s unusual for first years to get offers, implying it’s a pretty new thing (and since we see Class B involved in some internships, it may be a new program altogether to include the first years). These kids are freshmen who really haven’t been there all that long, we just accept it as normal because they’re the protagonists. Think about how much trouble Gran Torino, Manual, and maybe Endeavor got in for their interns so easily running off on them and getting into it with Hero Killer Stain.
Aizawa also admits that said offers “can be rescinded if their interest in you dies down before graduation.” While that could also relate to just not working with you well and pushing you to find somewhere else, it also implies the popularity contest aspect once again.
Finally, I think it relates well to Bakugou’s arc of going from a big fish in a small pond to realizing he’s just one of many people with cool quirks at UA. Some kids at UA probably get built up too much via the popularity system and crash when entering the real world of heroics (in a way, Kaachan’s luck to be going through that earlier and in a more controlled environment). While his classmates and the teachers don’t much treat Bakugou as hot shit, he still had the second most internship offers (easily explained as being less than Shouto’s since Shouto gets a boost by being seen as the no. 2 hero’s son) and is seen as the winner of the Sports Festival and therefore to the public, one of the most promising heroes of the class. Meanwhile if you asked Class A he’d probably fall behind Midoriya who didn’t get any offers (and probably several other students who also got way, way less offers than him). Hell, Sero jokes about how Bakugou got chained up at the end of the festival which probably hurt his numbers and yet Bakugou still got over 3000 offers to work with various heroes. They barely know this kid, at all, but his first place win was enough to net him that despite his later outburst (and as if to make more of a point, both he and Todoroki, the top kids from the festival, failed the license exams). The celeb angle overtook other angles in that case.
Rock Lock’s got some interesting points, all right. Hope he sticks around, could probably be a good influence on the cast and the plot.
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
