Can you help me understand? Why's MHA so bad with discrimination? It's embarrassing how bad it is!
Sorry about sitting on this ask for months but I wanted to get everything in order cause this is a long one!
MHA fence sitting on injustices
My hero tries so very cutely so solve injustices in it's media and does it poorly by having it either happen offscreen or barely addressing it to actually try fixing later. (More under read more)
Things ended so perfectly for the mutants, and all because Shoji told the mutants fighting injustice that they should...stop. Oh shoji, we should talk about his character and the treatment of him and hor Hori just skims the issues with mutant treatment.
A little background, Shoji here literally has no character, it's so bad to the point Hori didn't know how to design his room with the excuse of "Oh I don't have many worldy desires."
what kid talks like this? He doesn't even have training gear or extra mask, or any hero posers- pretty easy to say that hori just didn't have anything planned for a while. Which fair, he had a whole cast of students from two classes, and pro and teachers so...fine right? What was weird is the lack of characterization for several seasons with this character.
So it turns out he wears the mask cause he was heavily scarred and attacked by a mod of adult prejudices as his backstory, didn't want to talk about it nor mention it till it was relevant for him to fight for the side of injustice! He mentions kids being murdered for having mutant DNA! And at first Hori is making a good point here that prejudice is real, there are people who murder, belittle, and treat very real people horribly for the ways they look.
(They also apparently talk about this once and...that's it? as a POC person it's never just ONCE, X-men brings it up very well that fence sitting is not acceptable if you care about the lives of mutants, you can't be passive on injustice!)
This is a very sympathetic and relatable bit of characterization- so its embarrassing that Horikoshi uses it to justify said prejudices...Oho I can't wait to explain this one!
Setting writing back 30 years.
At some point in the future Shoji, again the character who barely gets to express himself as a character? Fights spinner, a character similar to him as that he's a mutant and gets very little screentime and engagement in the show/manga. Spinner is told multiple times he's useless and stupid and even one of his allies in Dabi calls him what the MHA mutant KKK call him. A lizard.
"But Dabi's a villain." I'd probably hear people say- Yeah...so were the KKK, doesn't mean you can't be prejudice, and Dabi here shares said prejudice attitude towards mutants that many of our heroes do.
His brother calls the chief of police a mutt after they break some major laws that could of gotten them killed, and later he even sees that this officer (even tho we don't stan pigs here!) was helping them and he even states he thinks he should apologize...guess the did that offscreen, like they do everything.
Shinso calls Ojiro a monkey and yet people ship them, idk how much they look cute together I wouldn't ship anyone with a person calling me outside my name. Now do I think they're full on prejudice? No but they shouldn't also get to let this slide because people like them. (Would of been nice to let Ojiro beat Shinso in a spar as recompense.) but Hori loves letting most of it slide, no one calls out Shinso, Dabi or his brother and tells them to chill. Even Deku gets in on some fence sitting.
This tall woman's getting attacked by heavily armed citizens with support weapons in her introduction- Deku jumps in and tells them to calm down, with them walking away saying the below. Like she can change that.
Now this is a great way to show that prejudice is wrong and that Deku doesn't jive with that shit. I would of had Deku break their support gear, and tell them to find shelter instead of taking matters into their own hands and attacking indiscriminately.
But Deku lets them walk away with deadly weapons that can kill. And when the tall woman tells him that she was trying to find safety and that she was scared by these jackasses, Deku doesn't sympathize with her- he says this!
This poorly worded drivel reads exactly how it does on the page, it comes across as justification for the public attacking innocent mutants based on looks instead of telling them that they were in the wrong? She even gets turned away from many other shelters denying mutants!
I'm aware that many villains attacking heroes at this point ARE mutants but, she's unarmed, begging them to stop, and a guy lines up a killshot before blaming her for how she looks; then our hero goes "Well we're all scared!" Thanks!
That's like me telling X-men's nightcrawler who was about to be murdered by racist. "Well both sides were scared." This is the ultimate fence sitting! Not to mention it's established early on that mutants aren't allowed in certain shops and get slurs and rocks thrown at them; people assume the worst of them and there are even times where some are confused for villains and attacked like Gang orca.
But if you're an attractive enough mutant like Hawks and Miruko you can get away with being a mutant- it's the equivalent of Hollywood saying they'll hire more black people and only hiring the light skinned black individuals. Which could be an interesting discussion to have; The fertilization of mutant quirks, desirable ones vs ones that people show hate towards. Obviously people don't show the same type of prejudices towards Hawks and Miruko vs Shoji and Orca.
This all culminates into the MHA war arc in which many out of pocket things happen, like Hori uses the black lives matter movement and ROCK LOCK- THE ONLY BLACK HERO IN MHA (there's not even any black students and background heroes.) And the mutants turn to him and say things like "we aren't looters" WHAT!? And even worst
"You would never understand." A black person would never understand prejudice? Even if MHA was an idealize world, it's based off our own world and rock lock again is the only one, and them turning to him and saying this comes off as tone deaf. Like why rock lock? How many heroes have glue, tape and adhesive powers that could of had this scene? Not saying I don't want Rock lock, I'm saying having a black person be told they don't get prejudice based on how they look is....idiotic.
And it just gets worse! Shoji finally gets screentime to tell people to stop fighting against injustice.
He finally gets something and it's to tell spinner to stop fighting mutants getting slaughtered, to stop letting heroes and the police sit on their hands and do nothing- everyone knows that if you wanna be good second class citizens and get equality, you have to wait patiently and quietly till people deem you good enough to EARN it.
He does talk about the cycle of violence, but the problem is....hori never has a person like Todoroki or Deku turn towards regular people and tell them that THEY should be ashamed of how they treat mutants as well.
It's so easy to turn towards marginalized people radicalized into fighting against prejudice, but man is it on so hard to turn to the people being shitty and not saying a damn thing! My hero does this so poorly, the people who hurt mutants never have to address their prejudices and they never get called out, or are made to change out of kindness- they just get away with it.
And it ends again as we see at the beginning of this post- offscreen! Shoji brings peace to many mutant locations and we're just supposed to be fine with no one putting in effort but the mutants themselves.
It's the biggest fence sitting the series does, completely putting the onus of change on the mutants! It's a shame too, cause MHA had potential! But it'll end up as a series that just barely involves itself in the struggle and many mutant characters barely get to grow and prove anything.
Thank you for reading all the way if you did.
