#but izu*cha reads to me like the token het ship for the main character that Hori doesn’t want to write but has to

[seagreenstardust]

I’m gonna say something that’s probably not going to be well received in certain circles so let me start by saying this: I believe, with only a few rare exceptions, that you should be able to ship whatever speaks to you the most. And just because I don’t ship something doesn’t mean it’s wrong for anyone else to ship it, and the same for things I do ship, no one else has to ship it too. Who you do or don’t ship will never be a reason I pass judgment on you, ever. Live your best life.

That being said, I want to talk about Horikoshi and straight ships.

(And bakudeku.)

Here’s the thing: Hori has written straight ships into MHA and he’s done it so masterfully that it’s made me ship them without even realizing it. I don’t know if we can call them canon because as far as I know no ship is actually canon yet, but what is canon is the care Hori put into building these relationships.

Kirimina. Hori wrote in a backstory that parallels bkdk that I just adore. There is something about Kiri looking up to Mina and being so inspired by her bravery that it shapes the hero he becomes that is such good content. They’ve had multiple mid-battle moments of protecting and helping each other. I ship Kirimina so hard because of the canon Hori gave us.

I am a low key Denki/Hitoshi shipper but season six kinda hit me in the face with whatever we’re calling Kyouka/Denki these days and now I guess I’m a multi-shipper???? That is how hard Hori hit me with the Kyouka/Denki feels. And he did it the same way as Kirimina, because we have years of content of Kyouka teasing Denki mercilessly, plus the cultural festival band, so when they’re separated in Season 6 and Denki has this intense moment of realization that she’s who he needs to be brave for and it actually works??? I’m a goner.

Heck, I ship todomomo too you guys though I can’t blame Hori for that one, that’s just me being me. The point is that I ship it because the characters Hori gave me struck a chord inside.

But there is one straight ship Hori never once made me ship.

Every time izu*cha showed up I just kinda endured it? It just wasn’t for me. I didn’t see two kids with chemistry, I saw two kids who didn’t know who they were or what they wanted fumbling their way through a will they/won’t they without either of them seeming all that invested in it.

In six seasons and nearly 400 chapters and multiple times revisiting the story I have never once felt any inclination to ship izu*cha

Hori can write straight ships. Hori made me ship his secondary straight ships nearly effortlessly. So if izu*cha was meant to be canon why have I never once felt the chemistry?

You know who has the chemistry? Bakudeku. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t thinking about Katsuki as a possible love interest for Izuku the first time I watched the entire story. I honestly wasn’t paying much attention to him at all, he was everything I didn’t like on the surface so I more or less ignored him despite Izuku holding onto him for dear life. Katsuki never once colored my opinion of izu*cha, they did that all on their own.

It wasn’t until after my first watch through, when I was hungry for more and trolling around tumblr, that I realized people shipped Katsuki and Izuku and it was literally like something out of alignment popped into place in my head.

Oh. Duh. That’s the ship.

I went from zero to a million in a handful of seconds because the chemistry was there, the backstory was there, and boy are Izuku and Katsuki loud about how obsessed they are with each other. Just like Kirimina, just like Denki and Kyouka, Hori planted the seeds throughout the entire series so that when it was brought to my attention everything about the narrative and character development supported it.

And I have to take a moment to explain my dislike of Katsuki at first: I honestly fell for the surface-level interpretation of his character and then kinda wrote him off without much more thought. Which is insane to think about because you can’t really understand MHA without Katsuki, he is so integral to the story as a whole that any version of it without him is skewed so far out of alignment that it’s not even the same story anymore. But I just saw angry boy who yells for no reason and put Katsuki in a box and left it at that.

It wasn’t until I was willing to give his character a second look that I started understanding him, and more importantly, his relationship with Izuku. And it helped that when bkdk was presented to me as a ship that my brain understood immediately why it worked. The canon source material supports bkdk at every possible moment.

I really don’t think it does the same for izu*cha.

#bkdk #bakudeku #I’m being very deliberate about not including actual ship names for the one ship I’m arguing against here #because the shippers for that ship deserve to have their tag filled with positivity and I am not trying to rain on anyone’s parade #mainly I’m just word vomiting something I’ve been thinking a lot about while tumblr lurking #and I guess you could say that Hori doesn’t actually know how to write a solid romance and mistakes his way into it three separate times #but izu*cha reads to me like the token het ship for the main character that Hori doesn’t want to write but has to #there’s no care being put into it except how it highlights the other ships for the two characters #anyway #good for you if you made it this far in to my rambling #or maybe I’m sorry is the better thing to say 😂