#writing these and aspects of the new series has really been giving me villain mha inspiration

[bnha-hq]

I saw you did a list of head canons for DabiBaku and was wondering if you could write Dabi’s reaction to this scene please and thank you!

of course! Sorry it’s so late, life has been kicking my ass haha

Dabi did watch this when it was aired for a few reasons, it never hurts to get some insight into your enemies, even enemies in training and out of sheer curiosity, particularly as to how Bakugo was going

Sometimes Dabi thinks he’s the only one that realises how royally fucked up these events are but then again he doesn’t really expect the general public to realise but he hates it, all these events do is feed into his hatred for heroes and hero society in general. 

He doesn’t understand how society not only watches but cheers on these pro heroes getting children to fight for their entertainment, yeah sure they pretty it up with other goals but in the end that’s really all it is, entertainment.

He also hates the perfectionism of it all, he’s known for a while that the hero world cares a lot about how they’re perceived and yeah, they can pretty it up with bullshit about how it’s to give the public a sense of peace but he can’t help but wonder why they need rankings and award ceremonies for that, can’t they just do their job and secure the public trust that way? 

That’s only driven home by this part, Bakugo fought tooth and nail to get to that podium but he didn’t behave how they wanted him to so they cuffed him up and muzzled him like some wild animal instead of a kid who had perfectionism and strength pushed onto him from the moment he could walk

He wonders how no adult there intervened in this decision, did not one adult, one pro hero, realise how fucked up it was to get children to fight and then cuff and muzzle one for being aggressive? 

Don’t get it wrong, Dabi doesn’t actually care for the other students personally, what happens to them really doesn’t phase him, he just hates how the heroes are praised when they do shit like this and never seem to be held accountable for what they do...unless it breaks that perfect illusion

In terms of actions he doesn’t really do anything about it but the next time he sees Bakugo he makes sure to tell him how severely fucked up it is

Bakugo pushes back against his opinion but Dabi has planted the seed, he’d have Bakugo on his side in no time

#Bakudabi #bakugo #bakugo katsuki #bnha bakugo #Dabi #dabi mha #mha #my hero academia #bnha #bocu no hero academia #writing these and aspects of the new series has really been giving me villain mha inspiration

[anime-and-manga-rants]

Why I Believe Deku Fails as a Character (Part 2 of 3)

SPOILERS FOR THE MHA MANGA (OFA reveal, last completed arc, Chapter 307) 

...

Not only were we robbed of a compelling character with a mental illness — which we so desperately need in the media — but we were also robbed of anything about Deku that could make him an interesting character in other ways. 

Now, a compelling character should have a quirk (not a Quirk) that separates them from the rest of the characters (because who likes when all the characters all act the same?) and makes them more relatable. Everybody’s got something about themselves that sets them apart from their friends and families. It could be a dialogue quirk — common examples would be someone who references movies constantly or never uses contractions — or just a habit they have that nobody else has. In Deku’s case, it’s his muttering and his hero analysis notebooks.

However, one of the first rules of good writing that a writer will be taught is the phrase “show don’t tell.” And it’s good advice, for the most part. (Some things are better left told, but that rant isn’t relevant to this one, so I’ll hold back on that.) 

For Deku, his mumbling is never really shown to us. Yes, it’s shown through the word “mutter” that appears on screen whenever he’s muttering, but that’s actually telling. We don’t ever get to decide for ourselves that Deku mutters a lot. No, the show decides for us, telling us to believe he mutters often and talks too much by the way it always accompanies his muttering with the word “mutter” surrounding him on screen or in the manga panel. He certainly does talk a lot, but it’s ruined by the fact that the anime/manga constantly needs to tell us that he talks a lot. 

The reason why showing rather than telling is so important is because the audience needs to be able to figure out aspects of the plot or characters on their own. If they’re simply told everything, they aren’t going to believe it. If the author tells you that Person A hates Person B, but A never shows any animosity towards B through their dialogue or actions, the audience won’t believe it.  (Think of the tip from Billy Wilder, which tells screenwriters to make the audience add up two plus two— don’t give them four. Give them two plus two, let them do the math themselves, and they’ll love you forever.) 

This is mostly a nitpick, yes. Still, it’s a blatant example of when showing (and not telling) is necessary. In this case, the telling ruins it, and by telling, it negates the unique aspect of Deku’s characterization that would’ve helped make him a more realistic — and therefore more relatable — character.  

Which brings me to another point: what about his hero analysis notebooks? 

I mean, hell, he’s got thirteen of those things. By now, he should be able to look at a villain’s Quirk and, in the matter of a minute or two, come up with a plan to take that villain down.  

Those notebooks could’ve made Deku such a unique character— with thirteen notebooks worth of analyzing already in his repertoire, he should be able to analyze Quirks like there’s no tomorrow. And people, too. Wouldn’t it have been so interesting to see Deku be able to just look at someone and know what they’re planning, thinking, or feeling? 

(As a questionably relevant side note, there are accounts of people who have experienced traumatic things such as abusive households who have told stories of how they can look at people and instantly know what they’re thinking. It’s a defense mechanism to prevent themselves from provoking someone, because they knew if they accidentally provoked their past abuser, they would face the consequences. See? It could all tie together.)   

And if that seems like it could make Deku overpowered, it really doesn’t have to. There isn’t a single overpowered power you can give to a character that will, without fail, make them overpowered. At least, not at first. We just need a character to earn their overpowered-ness, because we love a character who earns their strength over time. You just have to give the power drawbacks in whichever way makes sense and actually impacts the character. 

Deku with All For One’s Quirk, one of the most overpowered Quirks in the anime/manga to date? Using multiple Quirks at the same time makes him pass out from exhaustion. Using too many at once could give him permanent brain damage like what you see with the Nomu. Having a villainous Quirk like AFO makes his bullying even worse as a child, leading to permanent self-esteem issues that keep him from ever wanting to use his Quirk to begin with. (Last one courtesy of Shinsou’s backstory!) 

Deku with seven Quirks courtesy of One For All, the other most overpowered Quirk in the anime/manga? Same thing as the first two examples in the paragraph above. Or the burden of having to carry out the wills of the eight users that preceded him, all of whom have differing opinions on Deku’s best course of action for any given battle. The previous users never had to so readily accept him as their successor. Why not have them reject Deku for deeming him too soft to do what’s best, or any other reason? 

Deku with Overhaul’s Quirk? Uh-oh, looks like he accidentally killed a classmate the first time he used it, and now he’s forever afraid of it. But, uh-oh, if he wants to be a hero, he has to use it. Or what if the Quirk only works on organic matter, meaning it’ll only work on people or plants? That would kinda suck. 

See? No power is automatically overpowered unless you make it that way. 

Maybe Deku can analyze anything if given enough time, but he can’t exactly sneak off in the middle of a fight to come up with the best strategy. This could be quite reasonable, considering Deku would have been able to think long and hard before writing anything down in his hero notebooks. And all his training could culminate in the main climax of the series, where Deku creates and executes the perfect plan in a matter of seconds thanks to his analyzing skills. 

Or what about All For One, the big bad of the series? (You can argue it’s Shigaraki too, but in the recent chapters, it’s made obvious that AFO is actually controlling him. Therefore, AFO’s the guy Deku should ultimately be putting a stop to. He is essentially Deku’s fated enemy in terms of Quirk backstory, after all.) 

What if AFO turned out to be the one person Deku couldn’t analyze, couldn’t read at all, because his face is so disfigured that it’s impossible to tell what emotions he’s experiencing through facial expressions? What if AFO was such a masterful manipulator that Deku couldn’t read the tone of his voice because AFO purposefully kept it unchanging? 

The extreme fear that Deku could experience just by being unable to tell what AFO was thinking could make AFO into such an intimidating villain. He’d be the one villain that Deku just might not be able to best, and the audience would fear for him, like they’re supposed to do. 

And, at least for me, I haven’t been fearing much for Deku. As of Chapter 307, it looks like he’ll be fighting Muscular again. But where exactly are the stakes of this fight? Sure, it’s a good way of showing how far Deku has leveled up after the time skip, but we already know he’s going to win. I mean, he beat the guy in season 3. He better win, or what the hell, right? It would’ve been much more impactful to have him lose against Muscular the first time and come back again in Chapter 307 to kick his ass. 

It’s just... Deku always seems to win. His first major loss that comes to mind is his fight with Todoroki, but the loss only proved how good of a person Deku was. His second fight against Bakugou couldn’t even be considered training— Deku had nothing to lose. And what about Deku’s arms? Again, as of Chapter 307, it looks like he can still use them perfectly fine despite absolutely destroying them in his fight against Shiggy. What was it that doctor said? If he keeps abusing them the way he has, he’ll paralyze himself? Sure, he said two or three more times, but Deku was abusing the hell out of them again and again just to make Shiggy take any damage with his regeneration Quirk. Doesn’t seem like his arms are even slightly stiff at the moment. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

I don’t know. It just seems like nothing goes wrong for Deku unless it doesn’t have any truly negative effect on him. His fight against Shigaraki is an exception, I suppose, but it was also the fault of every other hero who failed to stop Shigaraki from freeing AFO and the villains from all of those prisons. Whenever it’s just Deku, it seems like he never really loses when it would actually mean something if he did. 

This is another flaw of Deku’s characterization, but it ties into my second point about Deku’s analyzing skills, too. 

Creating a foil for Deku in AFO by making AFO unreadable would help give the conflict some oomph, if you know what I mean. Because, currently, AFO is really only Deku’s foil because of his Quirk and because he wants to take OFA. If Deku was portrayed as a master analyzer... 

Think about it— All For One, the master manipulator with AFO, up against Izuku Midoriya, the master analyzer with OFA.

This is the fancy-schmancy dichotomy that we could’ve gotten. The heightened tension that would’ve made Deku’s story so much more interesting to read/watch, that would’ve made me wait for each new chapter on the edge of my seat. 

But, once again, Deku’s potential to be an interesting character is wasted. 

Horikoshi could have made him interesting with his muttering if he hadn’t shoved it down the audience’s throat. 

And while he had set up for Deku to be a master strategist, he didn’t follow through, making Deku seem pretty stupid for having so much experience in analyzing and yet having so little to show for it. Because Horikoshi does try to show it, but only when it doesn’t matter, like when Deku analyzes the fights for the sports festival up in the stands. Why not have him do it when it matters, like when he fights against villains at the USJ or when he fights Shigaraki in the more recent chapters? 

Not to mention the fact that he missed a fantastic opportunity to make All For One more of a villain. (Because All For One is kind of a sucky villain at the moment, considering it just seems like he’s a villain because he wants to be. Sure, there’s a little snippet of why AFO does what he does, but it’s subpar at best.) 

Honestly, I just wish Horikoshi had done a better job with Deku like he did with Bakugou. But he didn’t, unfortunately, and that’s what makes Deku fall so flat. 

#bnha #boku no hero academia #mha #my hero academia #mha analysis #bnha analysis #deku #mha deku #bakugou katsuki #bnha shinsou #shinso #my hero manga

[tubbotums]

((What do you think warrants a retelling of RWBY? Is it just a fun world, or is the story actually misguided?))

Oh boy, grab your popcorn and get ready to listen for a while. Gonna put this under a cut so people who don’t feel like reading it can skip.

Do I love RWBY? Yes, I 100%. This show has done so much to change my life and has quite literally changed me as a person. It’s put me on the career path of wanting to make my own animated show, tell stories etc. It’s allowed me to meet new friends, and had it not been for the show I wouldn’t even be here typing this. When the new episodes are coming out, every Saturday I wake up at like 10:50 in the morning and wait on both my laptop and phone app so I can watch the episode at exactly 11 when it drops. Most of the time I have to wait, but regardless you see the point. My drawer has RWBY merch, my desks have figures and plushes, hell even my backpack is a RWBY one and I wear a sweatshirt that’s RWBY related basically everyday.

However, in my opinion, the show is heavily flawed from a production standpoint.

RWBY is a very inventive show, I’ll give it that. It tries to do so much with so little, and I applaud it for that. What Rooster Teeth has created is a unique world with lovable characters that have inspired so many. It’s hard to believe that this company that made this show were making Halo parodies in 2007 and still are. RWBY is probably at this point their most popular show, and the most popular web series as of now (discounting live action stuff like Content Cop or whatever). Hell, Warner Bros. Japan went to RT wanting to dub it  and air it there so people could experience it in Japanese. It’s wonderful to see this show blossom and grow. But it has one thing holding it back from truly being great in my opinion.

It’s being produced by Rooster Teeth.

Like I said before, I applaud Rooster Teeth for doing what they’ve done with this show and for all the hard work they’ve done with it. I love their content and the people responsible for bringing the show to life. But for what it wants to do, Rooster Teeth is far too small of a company to produce it and don’t have the necessary people to make it what it can truly be. It’s a show that has so much untapped potential, and I keep waiting for it to tap into it and show me what it can really be. But I get nothing, and waiting every episode after every episode gets tiresome.

RWBY likes to take from a lot of different things for inspiration, but I feel like it’s too scattered and all over the place from it’s inspiration to make logical sense. I hear Final Fantasy (which I see in the character designs, weapons and dust as a concept), but then I see Game of Thrones, Gurren Lagann, and other things that don’t even remotely cover the genre that RWBY is in. I’ve brought this up to people before and have been told that it’s “Monty’s true vision” and that “I just don’t understand it and shouldn’t question it”. God bless Monty Oum, he was a great animator and a wonderful man who I would love to meet and pick apart at his brain. But the man couldn’t tell a story, which was why he brought on Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross, the lead writers of the show.

But before I get into M&K (who I both met and are lovely people), I want to touch up on the show’s inspiration. Monty wanted to create a show that revolved around his fight scenes, you know the stuff that you saw in Dead Fantasy or Red vs Blue Seasons 8-10. He didn’t care about the story and wanted to show off his fights and creative, lovable characters. If that’s what the show was going to be, I wouldn’t watch and I wouldn’t care as much as I do to write this. In my unpopular opinion, the show needs to stray away from Monty’s original ideas and gather more from outside sources that are doing the genre right. Shows like Hunter X Hunter, My Hero Academia, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sailor Moon and more that I can’t even list off the top of my head. These shows tackles themes present in RWBY and do it leaps and bounds better than what the show does. It’s frustrating to watch Gon Freeces or Izuku Midoriya get character development and progression that changes them and the path of the story but see Ruby Rose become a side character with no development since the beginning of the show. I’ll also add this in, if you want to take out My Hero from this list you can since RWBY started airing before MHA first published, and it has it beat by a few months I think? But I think the point still stands.

Now for Miles and Kerry, who I both love so much, there’s a lot of controversy around them. A lot of people, especially on this site, hate them and want different writers for the show. I’ve heard names like Lindsay Jones (voice actress for Ruby) and Mica Burton (a RT employee) as people who “should” be writing the show. Here’s the big issue with that:

Neither one has produced a show before and has written a script. Know who has? Miles Luna, who wrote three seasons of Red vs Blue. 

Yes, both are still amateurs and not professionals. They’ve been doing this for about a little more than half a decade, which isn’t a lot of time in the content production world. But this leads to another problem: Amateurs are writing this show. I don’t doubt the effort both of them put into making this show. They have A LOT to deal with, considering what happened with Monty, the show’s sudden boom in popularity, and much much more. But the fact that more experienced script writers aren’t writing a show this big is an issue, and you see it all the time in the show. They like to go with this “tell don’t show” approach, which doesn’t allow us to see the world and make it feel alive. We have to trust everything the characters say instead of actually getting to see it ourselves. We don’t see the racism Blake talks about except for a sign in a background shot that shows up on screen for two seconds. TWO SECONDS of seeing this one “No Faunus” sign is more signs of racism than we ever got from 4 and a half volumes and almost 20 minutes of exposition on it. There’s also just some really bad characters in the show as well, just really poorly written. I think my best examples are almost every villain, especially Adam and Cinder. I think both are just really shitty in every aspect and don’t add anything unique? If Adam wasn’t abusive and crazy, his cause would be more sympathetic and the White Fang would feel more like a Civil Rights group like they should be instead of a terrorist group like they’re portrayed to be. Cinder’s whole deal is just “I want power”, and the big question is why. We have no explanation as to why she sides with Salem and what her motives are. She’s just a puppet for the big baddie and that’s not right considering Cinder was the main antagonist for three volumes and will have just as big of a role going forth. A backstory can really help with this, but until we get one she’s a mediocre, borderline shitty villain in my books.

If the show was handled by, lets say Studio Madhouse, or Studio Bones, and if those don’t really sound familiar lets even throw in Toei, the show would be a lot better handled. Shows like My Hero, Hunter X Hunter, One Punch Man Season 1, Fullmetal Alchemist, Miraculous Ladybug and more have come from them and have done phenomenal. The writing, worlds, characters, all written in this just amazing way that I can see RWBY being written in. I can see RWBY having this expansive, almost unexplored world that we the viewers and the characters are going to explore together. But Rooster Teeth can’t provide that simply because they don’t have the money to. That’s no knock against them either, it’s just a fact. A RWBY fight will never look as good as Midoriya vs Todoroki or Meruem vs Netero, and that’s because the budget and time isn’t there. I just want to see this show thrive and become something special like these other shows, because I know it can be that. I know it can be tightly written with a power system that makes sense and a world that’s rich and vast, with different people having different motives that makes us really question who is right and who is wrong.

Aside from all that, what do I think the show does write? It creates really likable characters that almost everyone can relate to. All of Team RWBY is really likable, same with JNPR. The cast as a whole is colorful, and they’re the main reason I come back to watch the show week after week. The music is also pretty good? But tbh I wish there was more variety in the soundtrack as well. But aside from the characters and music I can’t think of much else.

So, with all that being said, I want to rewrite RWBY to fix these issues and tell my own version of the story, the version I’d like to see. A lot of people in this fandom might not agree with me on the ideas I have and my opinions, but quite frankly I’ve gotten tired of hearing people tell me that my ideas about the show are lesser because it doesn’t align with their views or Monty’s views (which are basically the same thing). I’m doing this because of my immense love for the show and because I want to see it be better. Please don’t take these words as anything harmful and as an endorsement to not watch the show. If you haven’t, I’m actually begging you to go watch RWBY. It’s a fun adventure, but it’s just very flawed and something I as an objective viewer who pays Rooster Teeth for early access to episodes cannot overlook. I’ve done it for far too long thanks to people and I’m sick of it. This retelling also is going to help me as a writer in making a long running story, and while most of the outline is made thanks to the show, there are still going to be a lot of differences from the canon counterpart. 

So please, go watch RWBY if you haven’t so you can see what I’m talking about, and to also let yourself be immersed into a wonderful world with wonderful characters. I love this show with a passion, and this retelling is being done because I want to see it do better is all, like I know it’s capable of.

#bigmusecollective #ask box