Katsuki Bakugo: Crushed by Expectation

morally questionable characters are a weird thing on one hand they do to their morality often end up being characters that we as allegedly morally upstanding people should condemn and dislike on the other hand it's quite often these very characters that end up being extremely popular it's not uncommon to see the number one popularity spot for any given series be dominated not by the protagonist but by an antihero such is the case with my hero academia's very own kutsuki Bach ago an explosive bully whose first defining actions in the show include telling Deku the protagonist to kill himself due to his disability being his lack of super powers in a superhuman society this should by this description at least be a character that is unanimously hated yet baccarat finds himself consistently at the top of popularity polls this has however only really been the case ever since the manga reached a specific moment in the story what moment is that and how did it turn a bully into an all-time favorite let's talk about it if there is a single word that should define Katsuki Bach ago then it would have to be expectation from a very young age Bach ago was constantly confronted with it once his superpower or quirk manifested at the age of four the people around him began praising and grooming him as the obvious next great hero his quirk allows him to secrete nitroglycerin like sweat from his hands and then detonated at will this is a deceptively simple power with an incredible amount of potential and flexibility so it's easy to see why both the adults and Bakr Gogh's life as well as his peers start to envy and praise the child for having been born with such an obviously opie power and as he grew older bathing in that reverence and praise all the while developing his quirk and step by step tapping into its full potential he began to believe them that he was the greatest that there was no one more amazing than him and then he would with basically no real competition be able to surpass and follow up on the legacy of the current number one superhero in the world the invincible all might the consequences of this upbringing should have been obvious from the start a child that is constantly built-up and complemented not for its actions but simply for its innate abilities and attributes will naturally develop a certain sense of innate superiority since it cannot attribute the praise to anything else this reached a concerning extreme level once he began connecting the dots and came to the conclusion that a hero's worth or a person's worth in general was strictly tied to their ambition and more importantly to their ability to win and achieve that ambition so he of course begins to hate and bully deku since he's the embodiment of barkos idea of a person with no worth since he literally has no power and in a lesser story this is where his character synopsis would most likely end baccarat is a bully that who learns to stand up to him eventually defeats him in one-on-one the end and there would still be no trace of that one moment that explains barkos popularity but of course this is my hero academia and Kohei horikoshi we are dealing with so as always there is more than initially meets the eye let's go deeper the difference between every angry anime boy ever and this blonde ball of boom is that while writing baka go horikoshi absolutely considered two double-edged nature of compliments when someone comes up to you and tells you hey you're really great they're not one but two messages you receive from that statement there is the obvious compliment of hey you are great of course and that is what a healthy mind will mostly concentrate on but there is a second aspect that you can hear out of it one there is a perfect latch on point for many anxieties every time someone says you are great they are in a way also saying with how great you are it would be really bad if you [ __ ] up praise and expectations always create pressure pressure to excel to achieve to win and that is where Baco begins to stumble you see his bullying of deku is as much a defense mechanism as it is an expression of his life philosophy because as lacking as deck who is in power he is overflowing with ambition no matter the obstacle he is always looking forward and trying to grow so Baca go has to keep pushing him down has to keep dragging him through the mud because as long as deku the no power loser remains at the bottom Baca goes believed that his strength will always carry him to victory while dec whose innate powerlessness will always leave him the dirt can survive of course Deku still doesn't give up continues to try and even attempts to befriend and help Baca go all in the pursuit of the exact same goal all might spot at the top this in turn causes Baca go to lash out against him even more violently as he sees this act of ambition and friendliness as deku trying to escape his predetermined place in the hierarchy however this struggle of his remains rather subconscious throughout his childhood and middle school years his worldview rarely gets challenged since he is the strongest smartest and overall best kid at school and deku is the weakest but then multiple smaller incidents caused this worldview of his to crumble rapidly baka go gets caught by a villain and has to be saved first by Deku then by Almighty he enters high school and finds himself outclassed both physically and intellectually by no less than two people and as the final and greatest challenge to his philosophy Deku not only enters the same prestigious hero high school as him he also suddenly develops a quirk one that is powerful enough that it will in time give him the ability to compete which combined with his unending ambition turns him into a serious threat to Bach ago he also now has to deal with a very concerning thought that Deku had been quietly enduring the abuse for years while hiding his quirk knowing that he could beat baka go at any time suddenly he begins to question himself had he been do we cling all along this thought of course is crushed once Deku spills the beans on how his power is something he got from someone recently and while that alleviates that specific worry it doesn't do much to restore Paco's broken perception of himself since shortly prior to this revelation Baku go had lost to Deku for the very first time granted it was a loss due to technicality and rules since Baco still defeated Deku physically but the difficulty and eventual technical defeat in this test confirmed barkos greatest fears that a weakling like Deku can catch up which in turn means that Baku could also lose and sink to the bottom as these fears eat on Baku go for many events in the series going forward we slowly inch closer to the moment I mentioned he wins the sports festival only because his opponents is holding back something he did not do with deku he ends up spending his internship doing menial tasks while Deku is out there getting authentic combat experience and evolving his quirk even going as far as to copy Paco's movement and then at the end of the term he manages to pass the midterm exam only by partially accepting decos new power and then having to be saved by him this all of course creates a great miasma of insecurities within young Bok ago he feels like his position in the world is at risk and loses his grasp of his self-worth and perception and then as summer arrives he is torn down completely as he is kidnapped at the hands of shigaraki and the Vanguard action squad he once again finds himself in a situation where he's in need of rescuing a situation mind you in which Deku has not really found himself in so far towards the end of this arc two very crucial things happen firstly baka go now aware of both the presence of a man who can pass and reallocate quirks and all mites decreasing power figures out how Deku squirt came to be that was passed on to him by all might and second almighty uses up the last bits of set power to defeat the boss of the villains in a fight that is a result of the rescue operation being essentially forced by circumstance to retire as baka tries to process these events his mind becomes occupied and clouded which then in a final act of humiliation costs him his provisional license exam while almost all of his classmates including Deku pass and get their license this as the final nail in the coffin causes baka go to seek out Deku and drag him out to ground beta where he intends to vent his feelings and finally settle things with a fight now we are approaching it the moment I was speaking of it's important to quickly remember that up to this point many of the more psychological aspects of Bach ago that I have mentioned here have been very understated and barely noticeable throughout the story considering he's our deuteragonist we get surprisingly little insight into who years up to this point besides his angry over-the-top demeanor it would still be possible to just see him as an angry uncooperative but at least powerful bully and in a single moment horikoshi lifts the curtain and let's see the real tragedy of this moment is one thing above all else brilliant in just a few short sentences baku go opens up his entire character and struggle both explicitly saying what he feels and implicitly revealing a completely different emotionality to what was expected of him he completely reverses his own self-image now seeing himself as a weakling who brought down his idol whereas Deku was now the progeny chosen by all might and capable of achieving great things in short Baku go had disappointed all expectations he and his environment had placed on himself and here we have it again expectations Deku and all might are both shocked at this outburst because they did not expect it but here's the thing they should have anyone who has even a fleeting idea of who Baku is as a person should have been able to see this coming of course someone who is always out to prove his superiority and sole ability would feel guilt over being too weak and that weakness indirectly leading to the downfall of his idol it's the realistic reaction in this situation the characters were in the show simply did not expect him to do so since he had up to this point not shown such thought and concern but it's not just Deku and all might that should have seen it coming and who were clouded by their expectations in Baku go throughout his entire story there was another party deeply involved in the misunderstanding and over expecting of Katsuki baka go you me us in short the audience when Bakugan reveals the nature of his struggles we are asked taken aback as Deku is but not just because it's a well composed and written scene but because we go through the exact same thought process as Deku how could I not have seen this it all at once seemed so obvious and predictable but somehow we completely neglected to think about the possibility of Varro going through this struggle and there is a good reason why ever since Baku go appeared on screen for the first time we immediately created certain expectations regarding him he seemed like a stereotypical angry rival with an overpowered ability and that is the precise moment our knowledge of human emotion and internal cause-and-effect simply stopped applying to backrow because we have undoubtedly seen characters of this type before we almost instantaneously stopped thinking of them as a person and more as a predictable pattern of narrative tropes and as he stays seemingly relatively unchanged for a large portion of the show we feel validated in our initial assessment as he continues to act according to our expectations so bak ago struggle doesn't just revolve around his relationship with and perception of MHA swirled it in a very meta way also revolves around our relationship to and perception of him and so in a fantastic bit of writing by having Baku finally burst out and surprised us it is almost as if horikoshi is pointing his finger at us and saying hey this is a real person with real emotions yet you neglected him and his emotions because you prematurely projected your own experience and expectation onto him as a fictional character and didn't treat him as real and this is the result this is the moment that solidifies Baku go as a fan favorite and it does so by being the exact point the exact moment were baka go the two-dimensional fictional character becomes Kazuki a confused and hurt high schooler a three-dimensional authentic person this impact is only further amplified by some key phrases for example all might after Baca and de whose fight says this I apologize sometimes I forget that your children kind of a throwaway line at first but when looked at under a meta-narrative lens this is clearly another nod by horikoshi to us and our behavior towards Baca go or really most Shonen anime characters since you are used to seeing these people punch each other through buildings or shoot fire from their hands while bleeding we constantly forget this very crucial detail they are kids baka go is 15 it when the fan community judges him it seems like they're talking about a fully grown adult he is over-the-top and stubborn like many teenagers and he has a hard time conveying and understanding his emotions like most teenage boys this ignorance of context can also be seen in the way fans talk about baka go before this moment that he should hurry up and become calmer or just grow up and make peace with Deku these demands ignore the fact that up to this moment we have only been following baka go for roughly four months a miniscule amount of time compared to the 15 years he had had to build up his values and ideas so of course a deconstruction of those would have to happen slowly and step by step yet many of the fans ignored these obvious conclusions precisely because they were not considering baka go as someone with realistic emotions and once this moment has been reached there is no turning back baku go is sick of being subjected to all those unrealistic and ungrounded expectations when all might once again praises his strength boggsville responds with no you know I'm weak too I always wanted to being as strong as possible because he does not want to be praised and hailed as strong anymore he wants to be understood which means acknowledging his more vulnerable sides this enhances the moments gravitas significantly since it truly feels like a monumental iOpener so in essence horikoshi uses bak ago on one hand to build a deep layered character and worthy rival to our protagonist and on the other hand he takes the opportunity to in a clever bit of meta narrative commentary criticized the complacent and prejudiced way we look and interact with fictional characters in a cynical and jaded post modernist era of fiction and media and that is what hits so hard the expectations that crush bak ago are not just expectations that exist in universe but also exist within us the readers and viewers therefore his struggle and outburst immediately feel more real since it at least subconsciously has elements that reside in the real world not the fictional one after considering all of this I believe it is easy to see why this moment launched back ago to the popularity he has now it simultaneously works as a beautiful introspective to his character and also plays off our own subconscious prejudices and expectations to create a moment of oh [ __ ] why did I not see this coming that truly sticks with you because suddenly we realize what Bach ago is he is no Sasuke eternally brooding and edgy he's no stereotypical bully only present to give the protagonist a foil Katsuki bak ago is none of those things Katsuki bak ago is just hurt and as always thanks for watching and take care

Channel: Oceaniz

Views: 352,487

Keywords: Katsuki Bakugo, Bakugo, Bakugou, MHA, BNHA, Anime, My Hero Academia, My Hero, Boku no Hero Academia, HeroAca, Character, Manga, Analysis, Psychology, Bully

Id: DFrE5EEiqyo

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018