schnickledooger replied to your post: boku no hero academia liveblog part 2! part one...
I remember the provincial license arc to be so stupid and boring and full of stereotypical shonen trope moments ugh. Not excusing Horikoshi for his blatant sexism, but at least the next few arcs after this there is so much actual amazing writing and plot happening, there isn’t time for petty jealous Uraraka or crazy stalker toga moments. I feel like saying, ‘yes, horikoshi, we get, we know she likes Deku. Let her have some self control over her emotions now’.
right????????? ughhhhhh. i would honestly rather watch them melodrama over fcking. dodgeball logistics. for two hours than deal with all this nope.
there’s this rock-and-hard-place situation with a lot of media where i start dreading seeing female characters at all, because being erased from the narrative is so much better than being continually degraded by it.
like i love momo and ochako and tsuyu and to a lesser extent the other girls and i’m glad they’re there and distinct from one another and like. actual people.
but their constant presence and the fact that they’re developed enough to relate to pretty easily means all the gender issues in the story are constantly rising into your face like E-cup boobs full of helium and, like. horikoshi’s sexism is just at that level where you can normally overlook in the name of getting by in life, except he won’t. let it. go.
it’s like he thinks as long as he performatively condemns The Sexy via Izuku, it’s a virtue that will raise his net approval. for all i know with his target demographic it actually does. but from here it’s the narrative equivalent of getting asked out on a date every third time you speak to a guy who you would otherwise consider a friend. -_-
based on your recommendation i will try to get through this and see these Next Arcs where he is too busy to produce this volume of crap and shove it through my eyeballs like i’ve been mistaken for a toilet.
...really the fact that this arc kicks off with a weak meta joke meant to lampshade how much of a letdown it is in terms of drama should have been a warning. but i like cooldown arcs in between the big crests, it helps the characters believably have functioning personalities instead of all being catastrophes held together with repression and scotch tape (cough batman).
but because this arc was gone into with this ‘oh this is a bad lame thing people might complain about ahaha’ attitude, it lacks conviction.
...i think horikoshi’s besetting sin as a writer might actually be the way he’s evidently convinced himself that if he thinks it’s bad to do something he can make it fine by lampshading that it is dumb or bad and then not fully committing to it even as he goes ahead.
