How Shipping Ruined Uraraka

you know there comes a time where we all need to admit that being in a ship was the worst thing to ever happen to a character like sure sometimes the art of pushing two characters together can be a fun exercise and fluff but more often than not it just ends with someone getting screwed as the potential of a character is torn out and wasted reducing them to being just a love interest with what little they are given always finding a way of really being about him anime has done this terribly for years and I can think of no better example of this in modern anime than Ocho uraka from my hero Academia can my story not have anything to do with midoriya for five minutes I don't know ask the author being shipped with Deku ruined uraka as a character like I cannot understate how dirty they did my girl starting the series as just a fountain of bubbly energy and cotton candy ochiko rapidly grew to become one of the most popular character in the show as she proved she was more than just a pretty face and deku's tagalong that beneath the veneer of the Girl Next Door she was a Fierce and determined fighter with slightly questionable motivations however as the series went on everything that made Ocho great was stripped away from her going from main girl to Gone Girl as a show forced her more and more into the background with what little she did get being devoted to you guessed it crushing on Deku it's honestly tragic how far she's Fallen but it's Insidious how my hero likes to pretend that it's better than it is when all it's really doing is making ochiko the love interest with extra steps this Trope has always been a personal pet peeve of mine for years and what it's been doing to ochiko has been maddening but despite some moments of hope it's only gotten worse as time has gone on and now is as good a time as any to discuss it everyone I'm gonna do my best are you sure about that I miss this character so much so my hero Academia or Boku no hero Academia is a Japanese manga Mega hit created by kohei horikoshi telling the story of a Japan where everyone has superpowers but the protagonist has the best one connections being groomed to be the world's number one hero by the current one all might izaku midoriya is reward for his suicidal Antics by being granted all might's powers making the formerly powerless kid into a Powerhouse and getting him into his dream School UA the Sky High of Japan but I've already wasted too much time talking about this kid so let's get back to the real reason we're here and I'm not gonna let anyone get in my way I'm a failure after all that hard work are you okay uraraka is so incredibly solid early on in this show then it makes me mad in hindsight introduce saving Deku from looking like an idiot she was just an immediate breath of fresh air mostly because she was the first kid Deku met who didn't bully him because yeah forgot to mention this Deku is technically disabled by this world's standards being born without superpowers everyone picked on him for daring to dream of being a hero since clearly no one here has ever heard of Batman and no one Rich has ever tried but don't you go without knowing any of that shows up makes everything better just by being there they both are taking the entrance exam for UA a school with more money than God as they can afford to throw billion dollar robots at teenagers during the test Deku and by the way his hero name is Deku and I'm probably just gonna call him that for the rest of the video Deku uses his Quirk for the first time also superpowers are called quirks in this universe it was a PR move by the government Just Go With It Deku uses the court he got from all might for the first time to save ochiko he went out on a limb ruined his without going to slap him to safety with her anti-gravity Quirk now yeah at first ochiko was set up to be just the dames on distress for deku's benefits he just got his powers didn't know how to use them and he needed a random stranger to make him stop caring about his own well-being typical hero stuff however the thing that made Ocho work so well is that at first you're not really expecting too much from her Shonen an anime sucks at romance but it is even worse at riding women especially when it's a Shonen battle series as a demographic for this genre are typically aimed at young men meaning that the women in the story aren't really given the same chance as shine unless they happen to also be the author's fetish come on guys let's not pretend so saying that the bar is low for female characters here would be an understatement tips on these kittens I'll groom them myself has she always been like this cotton worse lately she's at the age to take a mate I beg your party Ocho is introduced as this happy Genki girl and you're kind of just expecting her to stay that way especially after the costume Department dressed her like a twitch streamer nochiko proved that she was going to be more than that something my hero excelled at early on was making sure that every character felt like the hero of Their Own Story sure Deku is a main one he's gonna get most of the attention a UA was filled with people with their own goals and Ambitions and yes a lot of future Sidekicks here but everyone here was growing they had reached a point where the story was telling us that this was the limit of who they are and no one exemplified this better than ochiko despite wanting to specialize in civilian rescue her Quirk proved to be lethal when she used it in combat there was a versatility to her powers that made her an asset in any situation she found herself in and she was constantly finding new ways to use them on top of being a badass she was just a great person to be around forming a three Amigo situation with Deco and Ida they were first real friends in years and in only a few episodes they had become a tight-knit group their relationship felt genuine without feeling forced and quickly had a massive impact on each of the members like midoriya probably wouldn't have even used the name Deku if it wasn't for Ocho saying that it sounded cool for linguistic Reasons I'm going to put on the screen and not explain this allowed Deku to flip the script on what was originally a demeaning nickname from that guy who told him to kill himself Deku had massive amounts of growth by going to this new school but it never felt like he was the only one changing enochiko and Deku didn't even have really explicit romantic Vibes at this point Deku he's a teenage boy so he was gonna blush but they were friends they kicked ass together and even proved that they could survive separately but it's in the sports festival uraka really comes into her own let's do our best in the sports festival Baraka what happened to your face this is where we finally get to see what makes this girl tick she's broke Ocho who comes off as the sweetest nicest person in the class only became a hero to get that bread but it's not as bad as it sounds you see unlike most of the other rich kids at this school Ocho comes from a relatively low income family her parents construction business has been through some rough years leaving them in a not great financial situation so to support them Ocho decided that she was going to use her Quirk to help her family business but when they shot that idea down she was forced to be a good daughter in a different way striving to become a successful profitable hero as this isn't a Spider-Man situation these Heroes make bank so little raka is doing all this so that she can take care of her parents which is a much nicer way of saying she's only in it for the money this provides such a unique scruple to her character as she's super nice she's amazing she's a cinnamon roll but she's only being a hero for money she wants it for a good cause that immediately sets her apart from the more traditionally heroic members of her class which makes her interesting it gives her a different set of beliefs and reasons for being here taking her Beyond just the standard nice girl heroine cliche the song with problems and struggles that are holy her own it sets her apart from the self-sacrifice bullshit that Deku is on being able to recognize later how dangerous his mentality is and just hero culture in general when others hear about the sports festival they're just like oh yeah cool we can have like this great time really like practice show ourselves off but for her she is dedicated she wants this as the event serves as marketing to other hero agencies and it's really her first chance of secure a solid internship which should turn into a job opportunity after she graduates and while other people are like oh yeah I'm gonna be number one Ocho is the most motivated character in this Arc she wants this more than anyone outside of maybe dietzuko and the story kept breaking the traditional role she was supposed to fit into normally in these type of situations being the main Hero's Future Baby Mama in a tournament Mark she would be set up to fail she'd be forced to fight the main Heroes villain lose horribly all so that the hero can be motivated to fight in the finals but instead the focus was kept where it should be on her Ocho makes it through the polymeries to the tournament but through those early sections she starts to realize that she might be over relying on Deku for help as to our friends and they've continually worked together since they got to this school but he's been the one doing most of the planning that's let them win so watching Eda trying to operate independently of Deku motivates her to try and do the same to stay on her own two feet and it's crazy to see happen and they didn't go through with it but it seemed like the show was aware of the dependent love interest rope it was working to subvert that to make her her own character who could get her own wins and it does this by pitting ochko against deku's main rival bakugou now bakugou love him or hate him when it comes to combat he is King and he is the character that everyone expected Deku to fight so for her to be up against him in the first round yeah no everyone just expected her to lose no one in this Stadium had money on ochiko but despite that despite the odds being so obviously stacked against her she still wanted to go in on her own refusing deku's offer of help as he tried to give her strategies and tips on how to fight his idiot instead choosing to fight by herself to use her own plans and ideas to prove her own worth she lost yeah sadly this wasn't that kind of anime yet however in spite of not getting the win she still proved herself Ocho went up against bakugou and while the audience saw a poor girl going up against a sociopath she actually put up one hell of a fight being aggressive taking bakugou's blast using him to damage Arena to set up her own trap of flying debris it didn't work but this is the fight that solidified uraka as a competitor that she wasn't just some victim in deku's story and proving to the audience and to us the real audience that she was more than people's preconceived notions of her yeah she's a cute girl and give one of the most dangerous kids at the school a decent run for his money ochiko did all this on her own and she was just a compelling character in her own right she had her own struggles and motivations and there was so much room in the story for her to keep growing while Deca was doing the same except that's not what fucking happened she peaked here the story only just started and it is all downhill from here see my hero Academia has many issues of one of the most annoying is that it very much pulls a bait and switch over who you think is gonna be important versus who actually was initially we were led to believe that the story was going to focus on the friend group of Deku Ida and uraka except no what actually ends up happening is that they are only important early on having quick story arcs that show just how great they could be only to reveal this show has too many characters and that these initial arcs were actually just their 15 minutes of fame they're still around and given brief instances to remind us that they've gone through this development tapping into some interesting ideas but they're only brief moments as my hero replaces Three Amigos with the Three Musketeers and everyone else is fighting for scraps with uluraka being the character that this hurts the most as she just proved that she wasn't just the sidelined anime heroine going for the story to sideline her and devoting what little time she has left to shipping her with diakku like it doesn't start immediately The Arc after the sports vessel has everyone in class going to internships everyone is giving hints that they are evolving as people let's go fresh off of getting a cathartic cry and after talking with her parents decides to expand her Horizons by interning with a crime-fighting hero rather than a rescue themed one having realized from the villain Invasion and her match against bakugou that outside of her Quirk she is lacking in combat skills so she's putting the work in increasing her skill set and keeping an open mind that she isn't just gonna be a rescue hero after all it's cool to see it feels like everything that she went through was important and was gonna have payoff later down the road except it doesn't or at least not anything meaningful and she is just given steadily less and less to do and this Arc is just kind of the start of that as it centers around Deku trying to save Eda from getting killed by the hero killer you see stain hates modern hero Society he sees all these Heroes as a bunch of sellouts and only the pure morally altruistic Paragons deserve to be heroes basically unless you're all might he thinks you suck and this is fascinating because this is kind of everything that urake is she's in the hero business for money but she's doing it for an altruistic reason this conflict isn't really ever brought up as she's not really involved she isn't used as an example to disprove stain's ideology instead what happens is that he meets the perfect hero that lives up to his anti-sell out standards but he could have also just met the imperfect one as well she could have showed the hero killer that just because some Heroes fight for money doesn't automatically make them any less heroic than the ones that do but that is never brought up or used instead it becomes a guy's trip where Todoroki replaces her which isn't bad on its own but in hindsight it increasingly becomes obvious that the story was giving uraka less and less to do with the ideas and beliefs that she held early on not mattering whatsoever well the question of who is she gonna be getting replaced with who does she want to be with hey not right now I'm picking about azuku midoriya like this scene is honestly the perfect summation of this entire ship and she's busy risking her life doing her own thing and her having a crush derails everything going on in the scene see Pierre Laval over here asuaraka if she has a crush she blush now every scene has to be about it now personally I can take or leave these two together they can be a couple they can be friends one isn't an objectively better outcome over the other in my mind but how the crush is handled does make me hate every second of it as it taints the goofy metal chemistry that they had early on instead just making uraka a blushing Nest who on their first instance Alone Together panics runs away leaving Deku to get jumped by eczema and this isn't even a case where her feelings add more depth to her character instead she's acting out a Trope the anime has been doing since the beginning of time and making it even worse is that we never get enough time to actually have her do anything with it as she it's a minimal Screen Time Deku doesn't even know so all the development for this ship is being put on her rather than the both of them coming together or fighting with their feelings leaving the whole Affair one-sided as Deku clearly has better things to do and uraka apparently doesn't it's all a massive downgrade and not helping any of this is that everything that she does always has to find a way of rapping back to Deku someone right so do I her Nemesis is himacho telka see toga party over here is cray-cray she's a serial killer with a blood fetish who can turn into others by drinking their blood there's a lot more Nuance here but I assure you you don't need to know any of it a member of the league of villains she is singled out as being uraka's main antagonist which is a bit of a stretch to say as they have shockingly little to do with each other the initial idea is that toga is a dark reflection of uraka while the raka draws inspiration from her Crush toga is psychotic and actually wants to become them treating her desire for murder as a deranged Crush there could be something here about making oraca question her Inspirations about how much of herself does she want to let others influence in the validity of the idea that she is just copying from others rather than developing on her own that she might just be trapped falling deku's example well the show doesn't do anything with that no instead we're left with the parallel of how they both have a crush on jakku they could have given uraka anyone to fight with and the villain they gave her only increase the focus on uraka having feelings for this guy like this is what I'm talking about when I say that uraka being shit with Deku is the worst thing that ever happened to her everything that made her interesting her family her goal for wealth and her possibly changing those ideals all of it get ignored to draw more attention to the fact that she is being shipped with someone else and there is only one moment that gave me hope one instance where I thought this show was going to Apollo 180 and reveal that this has all been a part of its master plan of recontextualizing shown in tropes seeing the provisional exam Arc after Deku got caught naked with a girl who was actually toga uraka has a massive realization this buzz in my chest what am I doing she realizes that she is in the middle of the test that could make or break her hero career instead of focusing on that she's sweating over her relationship with Deku while everyone else here is fighting for their lives and she decides no that has this has gone too far she can't be doing any of this she's got feelings for him maybe something will happen later on but right now her crush is jeopardizing her career and her growth having this massive realization she decides to put a pin in this whole Deku situation that uracan used to prioritize herself in her dreams which is perfect I cannot tell you how pumped this scene made me I thought that this was the moment where we would finally see uraraka get this bag and be her best self again bet you hugged him real hard didn't ya so that was a fucking lie yeah you can just forget that scene ever happened she's vaguely better about being around him but he is very much still the focus of her life also she was inspired to do this by Deku who did the same thing not five seconds earlier [Music] together let inherently wrong with uraka being inspired by Deco he's the main character that's gonna happen but in the absence of her being given a chance to do anything else it becomes frustrating when her character just can never not be about him and even when she is given an opportunity to do something with Deku it never happens she's instead glued to the sidelines like she's a part of the overhaul Arc and she is on the literal Sidelines for most of it the hero's raid Yakuza base all the men go underground to have badass fights Hiroshima proves he's awesome Sun eater despite just kidding here wins a 3v1 mirio proves he's the goat Deku still the main character with the adults also being here and all being dudes but where the girls you ask well you see uraka froppy the other one and that Dragon Lady are stuck on crowd control with it taking all four of them to fight one dumb meat head off screen but the only thing that they actually end up doing is making a skylight like I get this show has a lot of characters and not everyone is gonna get a ton of screen time but when the division of screen time is stacked like this I start to get suspicious uraka is forced into the background of this Arc even when she has a massive incentive to be a part of it night eye I hear what the power to see into the future tells her that Deku is going to die fighting overall and all she is allowed to do by the story is to float the bleeding man top side to get a better view of how wrong he was Purina degu could change the future because this is all about him ochiko is told Point Blank that Deku is fucked and she just sits back and watches the events play out with the story inventing an excuse that the previous villain sucked out her stamina so she has to stay on the bench but you know that if the situation was reversed Deku would have dug deep had an anime moment and left into action but instead we get sidelined with a micro fight and this pattern is what uraka falls into for the rest of the sea series she is not the hero of Her Own Story anymore she is just deku's love interest and emotional support and anything that she does could have happened without the development that she gets for example remember when uraka wanted to become a hero for money well after watching Knight I die and how everyone else got choked up over it she has an epiphany heroics is a hard job and it takes a massive physical and emotional toll one that is often under notice as people expect Heroes to save the day but aren't looking to help them when they're down this inspires ochiko to change her goals to be a hero who saves people and later on to be a hero who looks after other Heroes however everything about her coming to this conclusion is a mess as a narrative through line of night eye's death to her having this realization is cut up and leapfrogged by other character beats we never actually see uraka trying to save naidai's life we're never given a sense of Doom as she realizes she can't help him and is unable to do so when she tries instead she exists solely to get night eye top side that his fatalistic beliefs are proven Wrong by Deku then he dies and then all might has a moment then mirio has a moment then shigaraki has his own giant moment Deku is still here and it's only a while later in a flashback do we see uraka talk about feeling like a failure for being unable to save the man again an event we never see nor is it heavily present in her thoughts at the time Bliss leaves her Arc feeling piecemeal and less important than the others in the story just like how her putting a pin on her crush on Deku feels irrelevant as we get tiny moments where uraka seems like she's going to be given a chance to be in the story only for it to be a merely drowned out by other character moments and events in theory her wanting to help Heroes is fine in practice though this goal of helping Heroes to lighten their burden is applied almost exclusively to Deku she's never there to comfort alyama or Todoroki or even Ida when stuff starts going bad she's not here comforting her friends or feeling a new goal that she gave herself what happens instead is that her concerns for her fellow heroes are applied exclusively to Deku muddling the idea and leaving her out of focus again until it's convenient for his story leaving her to feel like the love interest with extra steps one who fulfills an identical role to the emotional supports of the past who appear when the hero's in their darkest hour before disappearing as soon as the job is finished my hero tailors her Arc to fit this purpose but doesn't provide enough adequate opportunities to make it feel meaningful and giving what little she does have to feel like a farce and just to clarify there is nothing wrong with playing a supportive role of helping people instead of being the fighter but this show places action and spectacle over everything and this leaves her with nowhere to shine as her assigned role is made to feel less important than the guys who hit hard so while it may seem nice on paper to validate ochiko's role in the story as someone who looks after her friends in distress her exclusively looking after Deku ruins what she's doing and makes me roll my eyes as everything she does could have happened if she was just in love with him rendering said development to feel tacked on and desperately tried to pretend that she's not just the love interest when the story itself tells us that yes she is she isn't given the time to apply the lessons she learns to any other facet of her life because that would reveal that she doesn't have one even when she does do things it doesn't really give her her do rendering her on the story less impactful than it should be for example Deku became Spider-Man he has multiple quirks now and nothing he does with them is more interesting than what he did with one but they're here and going out of control forcing uraka to LEAP into action she gives him a hug and tells Shinzo to actually save him which could have been a whole thing here where rock is trying to reach down to rescue Deku still would have been her focusing on him but it would have been her win she would have played a massive pivotal role in saving the day but what instead happens is that way more emphasis is put on shinzo's actions and character and his relationship with Deku rendering her involvement to be less impactful and more like she just gave an assist with the scene following it just being one massive info dump before returning to shipping fuel which is frustrating nothing about this scene is bad on its own but it fits into this bad pattern of limiting uraka's role in the story till it either involves helping Deku having shipping fuel or people making fun of her for crushing on him she is made to be an accessory to his character and that is a massive disservice this isn't the worst example we've ever seen watch any old Shonen and you will find worse but for a show like my hero to be doing this it stings as so much of the show early on was brilliant depicting his story through the lens of an old Shonen hero passing the torch to the Next Generation re-contextualizing suddenly the old Shonen archetypes that were Staples of the genre taking the idea of the bitter rival obsessed with surpassing the hero and just showing the links a man like that would go to achieve it after realizing that he never could even deku's own chronic hero syndrome takes a toll on his body we see that there are long-term repercussions to his actions till they just stop caring about that things that stories from the past would do would just have that extra bit of thought put into them create a show that felt like an evolution of the genre rather than one just inspired by it so for uraka to fall into the same stock love interest Trope and to fall into relevancy after taking the ACT extra time to show us how great that she could be going to get sent to shipping jail it pisses me off nothing this show has done since the term in Arc has enhanced uraka as a character in fact you could honestly probably cut her out and the only thing that would change is that she wouldn't be here to name Deku there are ideas there are moments that work but all of it is always getting stuck back on shipping that they're gonna date they have moments that they blush they have chemistry and I'm just no none of that matters unless uraka is really her own character and at this point I think I'd prefer the show stopped lying to me and just made her the token love interest so much sleep loss for this there's something really sad about how much of uraka is just uses set up other moments that aren't about her when toga tries a knife her in the war Arc this isn't some long-weight rivalry it's more about the tragedy of toga's warped psyche after losing twice I feel like she lives in a world that rejects her for being born as she was for having a quirk that wasn't socially acceptable of being isolated and suppressed by your parents with even the supposed Heroes refusing to help people like her instead killing them something uraka accidentally agrees with when she proclaims that she wants to save as many people as possible which toga takes to exclude her and the other villains setting her off to go engage in even more heinous acts of villain when truly she just wants to live in a world that would save and accept her this scene is all about toga not uraraka as she lacks a context of toga's situation like we do as an audience it's only in hindsight off screen does she rethink what happened wanting to save the villains which brings her to the same conclusion as Deku because of course it does as he is now in a similar position as he now wants to save shigaraki because no body count is ever too high for Redemption the lack of focus and wasted character potential is a problem my hero has always had the cast is just too damn big with the Lion's Share going to the fan favorites and totoroki's Dad but when the totality of o'raka's character is being grafted onto deku's only worrying about him only appearing when he is relevant to the story leaving her with a complete lack of focus all of this is because she is his designated love interest so she must fulfill this supportive role in the story with all the developments she gets servicing that end goal as what made her stand as a character in the beginning became less important than how she could help the shipping is very much at the heart of this problem there's so much that could have been done with uraka but at the end of the day the story always made it about her just wanting the D while Deku was far more invested in exploring his relationship with bakugou leaving her as an accessory her friendships are all underexplored even her villain is obsessed with the D and even if it tried to give her a better rationale than most all they really ended up accomplishing was making her the love interest with extra steps and I hate that also you all can stop typing about the megaphone I'm caught up to the manga the speech is fine but I'm a salty bastard and you can't give me one nice thing and expect me to forget all the bad ones that led up to it my hero did uraka dirty it made her an accessory to Deku and as just the sad reality I wish it was done better maybe they'll do something crazy by the end of the series but I do not have hope she's not here because of some hero fantasy she's more grounded than any of us thank you all for watching this has been sarcastic chorus yes I am finally talking about my hero yes I do regret it but please let me know any other ships you want me to talk about in the series I have some video ideas but I'd really love to get your guys's input should I do one massive video where I just give my thoughts on every ship could be fun could be maddening but you guys let me know in the comments thank you all for watching please have a good one

Channel: Sarcastic Chorus

Views: 844,866

Keywords: my hero academia, bokunoheroacademia, uraraka

Id: U8oUSv01YpE

Length: 31min 7sec (1867 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023