Why Bakugo isn't just a turbo douchebag but also a shit character
l’ve been reading BNHA for about 3 years now and liking it for the most part except for one loud, obnoxious, sweaty turd by the name of Bakugo that sort of ruins my enjoyment everytime he appears on panel. More accurately it’s the way the narrative treats him that rubs me the wrong way so l thought l’d explain why here, l’m bored and it might create a funny shitstorm who knows.
First of all let me preface this long winded wall of text by saying that even if his overwhelming popularity doesn’t necessarily surprise me, l still find it pretty funny that despite the constant claims of caring about the poor downtrodden victims of the world and other displays of affected compassion so prevalent on this website your average Tumblr fangirl is hopelessly in love with a character who bullied his universe equivalent of a disabled kid for years, topped it off by telling him to kill himself, and showed exactly zero remorse about it at this point of the narrative. Good ol Sigmund would have had a field day with this phenomenon, l think he called it the return of the repressed.
Anyway as previously stated l’m not surprised he’s popular, genius asshole rival types tend to be very well received by fandoms and Bakugo fits that trend. What surprised me though is the seemingly very commonly held opinion that even if you might dislike Bakugo as a person, you can’t deny he’s a brilliantly written, fascinating character! Well yes, yes l can, and that’s what l’m going to do right now because the idea Bakugo is well written is utterly baffling to me and l’m a bit tired of reading dumbshit “To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Bakugo Katsuki” drivel everytime l click on a BNHA thread on some random site. Here we go.
Contrary to a commonly parroted opinion, he doesn’t suffer any serious consequence for his actions
One of the most commonly held opinions about Bakugo, and why he’s supposedly so well written is that he doesn’t get a free pass for his behavior and gets accordingly treated by the people around him. This is complete nonsense.
l think everybody would agree, even his most staunch defenders, that the worst thing he’s done is bullying Deku for the best part of a decade and inciting him to commit suicide. Just to make it clear, a few weeks ago here in France we had another case of teen suicide in the news. 14 year old girl, good student, top grades in her class, a bit socially awkward and introverted, jumped out of her bedroom window and died after a year of hardcore bullying from real life Bakugos and Bakugettes. This stuff is serious, kids do kill themselves over it. lt shouldn’t be treated flippantly, so obviously BNHA does portray it responsibly right? Yeah right.
To this day, l don’t think a single character has commented on let alone condemned Bakugo’s treatment of Deku. Let’s start with the victim himself. Another popular opinion among the fandom is that Deku actually resents Bakugo and this is a refreshing, realistic take. Too bad it’s just empty words that don’t translate into actions. Deku supposedly both admires and hates Bakugo, but leaving aside the fact admiration and hatred are incompatible feelings, he never shows any sort of hostility towards Bakugo. Worse, he bends over backwards to help Bakugo everytime Bakugo is in trouble, puts Bakugo alongside his three closest friends in a mental image, and despite supposedly both hating him and wanting to surpass him, shows great reluctance to fight him when provoked until he understands it benefits Bakugo.
l know the obvious rebuttal is it’s a core part of Deku’s character, this self sacrificial madness that made him the successor of All Might in the first place, but the result is the same: Bakugo doesn’t suffer any negative consequence for his past treatment of Deku and his continuing hostility is met with praise, respect, empathy and a zealous desire to help him.
So Deku’s Deku, whatever, surely other characters have an issue with Bakugo’s past and present behavior. What about Deku’s closest friends? l don’t think llda has ever said anything. Todoroki doesn’t seem to give a shit, despite being a victim of domestic abuse. Ochako maybe? She has a crush on Deku, it probably pisses her off to see him getting treated like garbage. Nope, she off handedly mentions it and then she shows concern about Bakugo and praises him. Other students then? Kirishima is shown in his flashback attempting to fight off bullies, but it apparently doesn’t stop him from being surgically attached to Bakugo’s nutsack now. Ok, so no one among the students seems to give a fuck but surely the teachers would acknowledge there’s a serious problem here and try to adress it. Woops guess not, Aizawa acts like a sort of caricature of the “you both should talk it out!” inept teacher and both him and All Might would rather focus on praising his ambition. More on that failure to acknowledge Bakugo’s critical flaws in the next section, because it’s even shittier writing.
That’s about his most serious offence, but even on a more innocuous level, his terrible personality doesn’t really impact him in any significant way. His classmates essentially adopt a “awww, that’s our Bakugooo!” attitude when dealing with him, he’s treated like a joke but he’s still accepted, and even someone like Kaminari follows him around for no conceivable reason despite the fact he gets copiously shit on everytime he tries to communicate with him. Must be a masochist.
So that was a pretty comprehensive summary of what’s wrong with the idea characters react accordingly to Bakugo, but this isn’t the worst part of his characterization. What really propels Bakugo into shithouse character category is something else, and that’s what we’re going to see now.
The narrative utterly fails to acknowledge his fatal character flaws and uses blatant false equivalences to justify his role
l remember when we got an insight into Bakugo’s motivation back during his fight against All Might. Before reading it l thought “ok, maybe his character will get more interesting, maybe he does have a noble reason to be a hero and he just goes about it in a terrible way”. Turns out he wants to be a hero because he really liked how All Might kicked the shit out of everyone he fought. That’s it. That’s his backstory.
l understand that for some people, this is a good thing. The fact the narrative doesn’t try to justify his actions with a maudlin backstory is indeed a positive in theory. Of course it ultimately doesn’t matter because he ends up being portrayed as someone to be pitied anyway, l’ll have more on that later, but let’s focus on his core character for now and why it’s a spectacular clusterfuck.
Bakugo is absurdly self centered, has a might equals right worldview, very little empathy, a hair trigger temper, a loud, foul mouth and his default answer to most interaction is violence, either verbal or physical. He wants to become a hero because he identifies heroes with winners and wants to prove to the world he’s the biggest winner of all.
lt doesn’t take a nuclear physics degree to understand he’s a terrible fit for the job. So obviously this must be repeatedly stressed by the narrative, especially by the people in charge of his education, right? Haha good one, sorry but no can’t do that’d be good writing!
To make myself understood: to my knowledge, no one has seriously questioned his character yet despite numerous chances to do so. And no, l don’t think Best Jeanist giving him a haircut counts. Worse, he’s being blatantly protected from obvious criticism and most of the comments about him from his teachers and peers praise how serious he is in his ambition. Which, ok, l get it, could be interpreted as people going “well he’s really motivated so we’ll just have to focus on that and deal with details later”. Problem is the “details” aren’t details at all, they’re radical issues and “later” never comes.
Let’s take an example. Bakugo got targeted by the villains because they saw him act like a cartoonishly crazy clod on live tv. The results were him giving terrible publicity to his school and ultimately endangering his classmates and pro heroes. So how does the narrative treat the situation? Is he being chastised for his embarassing public display? Of course not. The only guy who mentions it is some journalist asshole who’s clearly supposed to be the bad guy and it makes Aizawa angry that his precious Kacchan is being questioned, again parroting the “he really wants to be a hero!” mantra. Being ambitious is apparently enough to be forgiven when you fuck up horribly, no one ever talks about the incident again except in another scene l’ll deal with later.
lt’s not the only instance obviously and you quickly notice a trend. Bakugo can act like a batshit lunatic on live tv and no one bats an eyelid but Deku gets lectured about his lack of charisma and humor because pro heroes need to have a good public image, especially if they want to succeed All Might. Stain is engaged in a crusade against “fake heroes” whose motivations are selfish but the target of his ire is Iida while Bakugo conveniently avoids interacting with him. Endeavor is portrayed as a very lacking n°1 hero due to his mindset which is very similar to Bakugo’s but he’s never compared to him, instead it’s Todoroki who gets the parallels in seriously forced ways.
All of this is bad in itself, but the absolute worst part of his characterization is the way the narrative routinely insists on using false equivalences to maintain his role as the main rival.
Deku and Bakugo are obviously supposed to represent the two sides of All Might. Deku represents insane selflessness while Bakugo is strength and ambition. The idea is Deku must get stronger and more ambitious while Bakugo must get more selfless. lt’s pretty simple. The problem with that is, if Deku has made serious progress in terms of fighting ability, Bakugo has yet to do anything remotely on the same level in terms of selflessness. Actually, he’s consistently been a terrible wannabe hero, but he’s never treated as such. lnstead he gets equal praise and status as Deku as one of the class leaders and Deku gets lectured alongside him by All Might, as if he needed to be told to get inspiration from Bakugo.
Worse though, and that to me is the absolute worst scene in the manga and the one thing that cemented Bakugo as a horribly written character, before their rematch Deku validates his awful personality and shit behavior. For the first time in the story, Bakugo shows some self reflection. He asks himself “if All Might chose you does it mean my way to look at him was wrong?” The obvious answer being “uh yeah actually you fucking idiot because you want to be a hero without giving a shit about helping people and your worldview made you abuse your power to fuck with someone weaker than you for years” but no, Deku falls over himself to reassure him that “no one said you were wrong!”
And there you have it. No one said he was wrong. Being motivated by self aggrandizement and actively attempting to destroy the life of a person already in a position of weakness is an equally valid path to heroism as being willing to give your life for the sake of strangers. This is the message Bakugo embodies. l personally find it baffingly absurd.
On a certain whiny edgelord ninja and why despite their differences the way the narrative treats them is remarkably similar
This is getting tiring so let’s conclude with a controversial topic, the comparison between Bakugo and good old Sasuke Uchiha. Now before you man the pitchforks, l know they’re very different characters. Their backstories, personalities, ambitions, and most importantly character arcs are completely different. As an aside, there’s a particular subgroup of idiots in this fandom that seems convinced BNHA is some sort of bold deconstruction of the battle shonen genre, often citing the fact Bakugo didn’t join the villains unlike Sasuke as an example of subverting tropes. So l just wanted to make it clear that the rival joining the villains isn’t a common shonen trope and Kishimoto actually wrote Sasuke as a subversion of the “former antagonist becomes friends with the protag” cliché. Bakugo’s character arc is a trope played completely straight. He’s basically a kindergarden bully version of Vegeta.
Anyway, the reason l mentioned Saucy is because, again, a popular argumentation in favor of Bakugo is to claim unlike Sasuke we’re not supposed to feel sorry for him and he gets properly called out for his actions, and l’ll conclude by showing why it’s bullshit by talking about his rematch with Deku again.
This sequence acts as a sort of closure to the first part of Bakugo’s arc. Events from the first 100 chapters find their conclusion here, and it was a golden opportunity for Bakugo’s character to be seriously challenged and maybe for him to realize something crucially needed to be a hero. Unfortunately and contrary to all claims about Bakugo owning up to the logical consequences of his actions, Kouhei’s genius idea was to portray Bakugo as a victim in need of saving.
Let’s be very clear here: the only result of a hundred chapters of Bakugo being an overall terrible human being and humongous failure as a fledgling hero is him throwing a toddler’s tantrum in the middle of the night and PEOPLE ACTUALLY HUMORING HIS BULLSHIT.
l’ve already talked about Deku validating his terrible worldview before but l think the one thing l probably find the most repulsive is the idea Bakugo is indirectly compared to the other characters Deku tried to help, which include a kid who suffered from domestic abuse, an orphan, and a literally tortured little girl. His shitty worldview comes crashing down and his idiotic behavior had actual negative consequences for everyone around him, so obviously the proper response is to go “nuuuuu kacchan don'tbe sad plz :(” and make sure he gets everything he wants. A reassurance there’s nothing wrong with his mindset, a fight, a pep talk from All Might, a pacifier and a blanket.
And that is basically why l find Bakugo poorly written. Just like Sasuke, his awful behavior never gets him in serious trouble, and if it does, he’s never held accountable for it and the narrative instead focuses on his “suffering” and how to alleviate it. His insanely abrasive personality doesn’t stop him from getting friends and being generally accepted by everyone, and his fatal character flaws are ignored to disproportionately focus on his qualities and praise him for it. The only clear difference between Sasuke and Bakugo narrative treatment wise is that Bakugo doesn’t have drooling addlebrained in universe fangirls, which doesn’t stop the fandom from desperately wanting him to fuck the heroine in some sort of bootleg version of SasuSaku.
tl;dr: Bakugo is a shit person and a shit character
Thank you for your time.
I have zero opinions on the matter of Sasuke; I’ve never gotten into Naruto.
But everything here about Bakugo is absolutely true and should be said.
