What is My Hero Academia's biggest flaw? It's the way the series treats its female characters. I explore the sexualization and characterization of the women of MHA, like Ochako Uraraka and Momo Yaoyorozu in comparison to characters like Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki.
#MyHeroAcademia #BokuNoHeroAcademia #Uraraka
Thanks for watching!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ladyineia
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/ladyineia
MyAnimeList: https://myanimelist.net/animelist/Ineia
Watch My Hero Academia, AKA Boku no Hero Academia, here: https://www.crunchyroll.com/my-hero-academia
Watch My Hero Academia Season 6 Episode 1 here: https://www.crunchyroll.com/my-hero-academia/episode-114-a-quiet-beginning-871044
00:00 - Introduction
04:16 - Part One: The Male Gaze
05:20 - "Fanservice," Huh?
08:30 - Mt. Lady, Her Butt, and the Story
11:02 - Bubble Girl Why
14:12 - I Don't Care for Midnight
16:13 - Meaningful "Realism" (CW for sexual assault and rape)
18:35 - Oh, sweet Momo
22:09 - The Worst Character in MHA
28:35 - Part Two: Underdevelopment
28:49 - Uraraka Deserves Better (And I Can't Pronounce Her Name, I Know and I'm Sorry)
31:21 - Mina Deserves Better
31:53 - NEIJIRE DESERVES BETTER
33:04 - Anime Only Issues
33:51 - Too Plotty for the Ladies
36:15 - Conclusion
37:56 - Chit Chat
39:04 - Secret Meme Ending
Reading on the male gaze:
- Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," which introduced the idea of male gaze in film: https://www.asu.edu/courses/fms504/total-readings/mulvey-visualpleasure.pdf.
- I highly recommend all of John Berger's BBC documentary series Ways of Seeing, but especially episode 2 on the female nude: https://youtu.be/m1GI8mNU5Sg. I also recommend the book version of Ways of Seeing, also by Berger.
- Judith Mayne's 1981 essay "The Woman at the Keyhole: Women's Cinema and Feminist Criticism": https://www.jstor.org/stable/487935.
- bell hooks' "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators" from her book Black Looks: Race and Representation:
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/cogn21s12/reading/hooks-oppositional-gaze.pdf.
- Tania Modleski's book The Women who Knew Too Much about Hitchcock's films. I don't have a link for the whole book, but you can read a preview on Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Women_who_Knew_Too_Much/8O3WqD-w1QEC?hl=en.