Roving Thoughts archives

An appreciation for My Hero Academia's Bakugo (especially in S2)

Let's start with the tweets:

@MinovskyArticle: Bakugo is extremely divisive on Twitter for a character who wins every MHA popularity poll by a landslide.

@pontifus: I think he's a good character and i also live for him getting dunked on

@cks_anime: I hate to say it, but he's more interesting than Midoriya (although I wouldn't want Bakugo as the lead/hero character).

Let's talk about Midoriya for a moment. Midoriya is a classical Shonen Jump hero protagonist; he's earnest and good and quietly heroic, a standard underdog with a heart. He has some internal qualms and concerns, but he's not riven by any particular conflicts or angst the way many other characters are. He's sort of an everyman. As a result, he's not so much bland as straightforward. He makes a good lead character, but he's not particularly fascinating by himself.

Bakugo is nothing like this, and he's such a contrast from what you'd expect in a Shonen Jump character.

To start with, he's an unapologetic asshole, and MHA doesn't give his character any cover for it; he has no tragic backstory, no inner angst. He's just an asshole, which is a refreshing change from the usual approach of attempting to 'humanize' such characters. And Bakugo's not just any asshole; he's all surly teenage anger and prickly obnoxiousness.

(By contrast, Mineta is a noxious asshole and the worst character in MHA. Were he to disappear from the story, it would only improve.)

Part of why Bakugo works as an asshole is that he's also ridiculous at the same time, and the show knows this and periodically dunks on him. His 'grenades included' hero costume is one example, as is the whole exercise of coming up with his hero name. Bakugo is an angry teenager writ large and My Hero Academia understands that angry teenagers can also be fundamentally silly. Since this is a superhero show (and a Shonen Jump story), Bakugo gets dialed up to 11 here, hyper-exaggerated surly faces and all.

Some characters are empty assholes; they're obnoxious, but either there's nothing behind it or all they have is power and they think that power alone entitles them to what they want. Bakugo is not empty in this way. Sure, he has great power and he feels that this matters, but he doesn't coast on his power alone; he has smarts and skill and tactical awareness to back it up, and beyond that Bakugo is willing to put himself through pain when necessary. To put it one way, Bakugo doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk as well, even when it hurts.

(This is part of why I don't think Bakugo is much of a bully, although he has aspects of one, especially in the first season. I think of bullies as fundamentally cowards; they dish it out but can't take it back. Bakugo can take it back, it just pisses him off (more). Another part of this is that in the second season Bakugo is willing to ignore people trash-talking him.)

One aspect of that 'even when it hurts' is that Bakugo has integrity; he wants to win honestly, to genuinely be on top. What he cares about is being the best, not having an award; being awarded a first place finish is meaningless unless it's a true, genuine achievement where he really is the most powerful, the best fighter, or whatever. Winning by default, winning because someone else lets you, all of that is empty, and Bakugo makes it completely clear that he doesn't want an empty prize.

(I think that Bakugo hates not being the most powerful, but he doesn't want to change that by making other people less powerful; if he's not the most powerful, he wants to get more powerful. This is a very Shonen Jump protagonist motivation, refracted through a prism of perpetually angry asshole.)

Then, of course, there is the fact that Bakugo gets to do genuinely cool things. Some MHA characters are ridiculous or have ridiculous powers, and some of them have modest powers or only get to use them in modest ways, but Bakugo has a big power and the show lets him use it to do cool and clever things. The explosions help.

At the same time, the world doesn't go Bakugo's way; he only rarely gets what he wants, and watching Bakugo get frustrated by this is part of the fun. For all of his power, Bakugo is more of an underdog than Midoriya is; as the protagonist, Midoriya gets genuine victories. The best Bakugo can manage is to dunk on villains sometimes. And while Bakugo gets to do cool stuff, the show does not generally present him as genuinely cool the way it does with, say, Todoroki.

The final way that Bakugo is interesting is that he is Midoriya's thematic mirror image and contrast. As I put it once, Midoriya is all morality and no power; Bakugo is all power and no morality. Together they create a clear contrast around the central question of what a hero is. Is it someone with power, or someone with morality? I'm pretty certain that Bakugo's answer is that heroes are people with power and if you don't have power you can't be a hero. My Hero Academia would be a less interesting story without this contrast and challenge that Bakugo implicitly provides.

That Bakugo is an interesting character doesn't make him an appealing one, because he still is an unrelenting asshole that respects very little (and certainly not you or me). That's part of why he would make a terrible lead character. Assholes are tolerable only in relatively small doses.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: First season Bakugo versus second season Bakugo

I'll be honest: early in My Hero Academia, Bakugo is a lot more obnoxious and a lot less interesting than he is later on. It's not quite as simple as the first season versus the second season, because Bakugo starts to show his coolness in the big hero versus villain fight at the end of the first season (cf), but Bakugo mostly becomes interesting over the second series.

The early Bakugo is not an attractive character or person. Given how he treated Midoriya, he was a knife edge away from being an unrecognized villain, enough that you might reasonably wonder why he was admitted to UA High School (or at least why the school doesn't have a way to exclude people even if they score high on the admissions test).

One pivotal moment where Kemono Friends shows its quiet excellence

Today I want to talk about the spear-point moment in Kemono Friends. There will necessarily be spoilers and what I write may not convince you, because by nature spear-points rely on the weight of story that's come before them for their power.

Spear-points are often active and loud, like last year's spear-point in Thunderbolt Fantasy, but they don't have to be. Sometimes a spear-point is a quieter moment that would not otherwise work without the weight of the spear the story has put behind it; everything has been built up to allow this moment to exist and to convince.

For most of its run, Kemono Friends was all about the cheerful adventures of Kaban and the Friends in Japari Park. Sure, there was some danger from things like the Ceruleans and the environment, but it was the danger of a kid's show; it was there to create tension and have our characters solve problems, such as in episode 9. Then, at the end of episode 11, Kaban sacrifices herself to draw a giant Cerulean away from the incapacitated Serval, ending up being swallowed by it. This was quite something, as was the effects on people watching. Although this was an extremely powerful moment (and one fully earned by the show's work to build up to it), it's not the big spear-point. The spear-point is what happens the next episode, when Kaban basically comes back from the dead.

Bringing people back from the dead is very hard to do well. To truly sell it, the story must make it not merely excusable but inevitable, the logical and emotional consequence at the tip of the spear that was built piece by piece as the story progressed. The logical steps of Kemono Friends' spear are straightforward (I've put them in a sidebar), but what that really means is that they're woven deep into the subtle worldbuilding of the entire setting; they're straightforward because they're foundational. Kemono Friends didn't surprise us with anything that went into Kaban's return because by the time we got there we already knew the pieces; we'd been shown them before bit by bit as part of previous events. As far as logic went at the spear-point of Kaban's return, it was inevitable.

But logic by itself isn't enough; returning from the dead needs effort and emotion too, to give significance and weight to such a momentous thing. So the final episode of Kemono Friends opens with an epic, climactic running fight against the giant Cerulean, one that sees all of the Friends we've met over the course of the series show up to help out with their own abilities (for good reasons that go back to that subtle worldbuilding). On the surface it's an attempt to rescue Kaban from the Cerulean and defeat it, but it also makes us feel that all of these Friends working together so hard and caring so much about Kaban deserve more than to be left with nothing. They and especially Serval have earned having Kaban come back. And so it comes to pass, with not a dry eye in the house.

(It also helps that we the audience wanted Kaban to come back, so that Kemono Friends could finish as the cheerful and good-natured show that it had been all the way through up until then. Kaban's return is firmly centered in the show's genre.)

Kaban's return from the lost is not a big explosive moment; it's not epic in the way Shang's fight was last year, or shocking in the way Kaban's sacrifice was. Instead, it's quietly, intensely emotional. It's Serval embracing Kaban, crying as she repeats what she said in the first episode, "I won't eat you!" It's a miracle that is perfectly logical and completely earned, at the tip of a meticulously crafted spear that stretches all the way back to the start of the show.

Kemono Friends makes it all look easy, when it's anything but.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: The logic chain in question

Friends are created from ordinary animals (or pieces of animals), and when swallowed by a Cerulean, they are stripped of their Friend nature and reduced back to their original animal form. Kaban is a Friend, and when she was swallowed by the Cerulean she was reduced to a glowing ball which would condense to her original form. But Kaban is a human and the original form of a human is still a human, so when the ball evaporated to reveal her animal form, it was still Kaban.

I won't call Kaban's nature a mystery of Kemono Friends because it was always pretty obvious what she was to the viewers. But it was the central pivot around which all of the series revolved, and if we had any doubt about what she was, this ended them; Kaban is a human Friend (and we know her origins). To quote the Professor, "They [humans] truly are a mysterious species."