The only difference between Harry and Deku is that Harry has a horrible upbringing and Deku has a nice mom.
There’s such a massive categorical difference in themes and tone between the “classic” British story of a seemingly poor boy victimized by the dirty vulgar poors who learns he’s actually a pure blooded aristocrat fancy lad and gets whisked away on a shopping trip to eat tasty treats and buy fun consumer goods with the family fortune, before coasting through everything as a special meathead rich boy who does sportsball good, then wins on a technicality because he is literally the magic chosen one who doesn’t even have to get his hands dirty he just wins for being a good little fancy lad with the right genes, versus a kind of lib story about a kid with the diegetic equivalent of a learning disability overcoming it with hard work and a scholarship, who has to fight tooth and nail to keep up, and who ultimately plays second fiddle to his rival as part of a collective group effort.
Like the “normal kid -> somehow powers? -> weird school time -> involved in some kind of conflict in some fashion” is such a generic plot progression that if you tried hard enough you could probably map it to hundreds of series across a ton of genres, not to mention how “normal kid goes to magic school and is actually super awesome and the hero and stuff” is like an entire genre in and of itself, like half of them isekais too lmao. Little Witch Academia does it and is meaningfully better than either story, Witch Hat Atelier does at least some of it and is better still from the volumes I’ve read. Fucking I’m in Love With the Villainess does it and is both an isekai and even more lib than BNHA although it gets a whole lot of bonus points for not just being queer but openly talking about LGBT issues and doing the only “this is explicitly a trans allegory” story that I’ve ever seen done well, although it loses a whole bunch again because Rae Taylor is the actual worst.
While we’re on lgbt issues, MHA introduces a trans character as a villain and then kills them, they are the first named character in the show to die.
It’s been so long since I watched the early seasons that I’d completely memory holed that part.
Tbh I really can’t believe I’m defending BNHA, because I do not like it and it’s such a flawed story with incoherent themes and bad pacing (I mean like half the story is drawn out shonen tournament arc bullshit which has always been bad in every series to ever do it, most of which is even lower stakes and is just the class doing war game exercises) or bad worldbuilding ideas (like the “no quirk use without a hero license” thing that IIRC the author later regretted and sort of retconned in the notes that accompany the volumes) and other series do its whole thing better, but it is absolutely not as bad as Harry Potter either thematically or in terms of actual quality.
There’s such a massive categorical difference in themes and tone between the “classic” British story of a seemingly poor boy victimized by the dirty vulgar poors who learns he’s actually a pure blooded aristocrat fancy lad and gets whisked away on a shopping trip to eat tasty treats and buy fun consumer goods with the family fortune, before coasting through everything as a special meathead rich boy who does sportsball good, then wins on a technicality because he is literally the magic chosen one who doesn’t even have to get his hands dirty he just wins for being a good little fancy lad with the right genes, versus a kind of lib story about a kid with the diegetic equivalent of a learning disability overcoming it with hard work and a scholarship, who has to fight tooth and nail to keep up, and who ultimately plays second fiddle to his rival as part of a collective group effort.
Like the “normal kid -> somehow powers? -> weird school time -> involved in some kind of conflict in some fashion” is such a generic plot progression that if you tried hard enough you could probably map it to hundreds of series across a ton of genres, not to mention how “normal kid goes to magic school and is actually super awesome and the hero and stuff” is like an entire genre in and of itself, like half of them isekais too lmao. Little Witch Academia does it and is meaningfully better than either story, Witch Hat Atelier does at least some of it and is better still from the volumes I’ve read. Fucking I’m in Love With the Villainess does it and is both an isekai and even more lib than BNHA although it gets a whole lot of bonus points for not just being queer but openly talking about LGBT issues and doing the only “this is explicitly a trans allegory” story that I’ve ever seen done well, although it loses a whole bunch again because Rae Taylor is the actual worst.
this conversation inspired me https://hexbear.net/post/6593791?scrollToComments=false
While we’re on lgbt issues, MHA introduces a trans character as a villain and then kills them, they are the first named character in the show to die.
It’s been so long since I watched the early seasons that I’d completely memory holed that part.
Tbh I really can’t believe I’m defending BNHA, because I do not like it and it’s such a flawed story with incoherent themes and bad pacing (I mean like half the story is drawn out shonen tournament arc bullshit which has always been bad in every series to ever do it, most of which is even lower stakes and is just the class doing war game exercises) or bad worldbuilding ideas (like the “no quirk use without a hero license” thing that IIRC the author later regretted and sort of retconned in the notes that accompany the volumes) and other series do its whole thing better, but it is absolutely not as bad as Harry Potter either thematically or in terms of actual quality.