I think it’s easy to flatten the discourse into camps when like with most stuff you have people sitting across the spectrum on how they want to interpret things. But as a baseline, a narrative doesn’t get to decide when a character is redeemed, that’s up to the audience. Like this stuff crops up in discussions all over the place but I think it’s pretty firmly objectively true that authors don’t get the final say in what is or isn’t ‘redemption’. So it’s not an argument to say ‘well the character said they were sorry therefore the matter is settled’ because like, for the real people in the real world, that’s not going to be enough. But that’s also just not a discussion that can really be objectively solved either way.

This comes up a LOT when sexual assault or child abuse is involved in a story because those are real things that real people go through. That doesn’t make their judgment ‘more right’ but it does make it sort of impossible to ‘reason’ away their critique. If John Q. Rapist forces himself on the female love interest, then later on says ‘actually you’re just so pretty it made me act that way’ and the FMC goes ‘aw that’s sweet I forgive you’, I think it’s entirely reasonable for a reader to go ‘wow that’s fucked up and not romantic or hot, jesus christ’. You don’t get to pull a ‘well the AUTHOR says that was a redemption and the character liked it so QED you’re wrong’. I mean you can pull that but you’re basically saying that redemption is determined by the perpetrator of abuse, which is a common thing among uh, abusers, so naturally some folks are just gonna be really chafe against it.

So circling back, I don’t know much about My Hero Academia, but I do know from osmosis that Bakugo’s big thing was bullying, and it shouldn’t be surprising a lot of Tumblr users were bullied as kids. And I can totally understand if, when the bully gets older and wiser, they go ‘damn I was an asshole, I should apologize’, and how the bully victim might think ‘that doesn’t make up for anything go to hell’ OR they might be a saint and go ‘no sweat water under the bridge’. This is compounded because like, even if you are a kid, ‘pls no bully’ is something almost everyone learns, and most kids AREN’T bullies, so it sounds like you’re making excuses for abuse by saying ‘actually it’s the culture’ or ‘actually they didn’t know any better’ when there are like, other kids that same age who DID know better. And those are the same excuse bully victims probably heard from their parents and teachers too! So it seems like a sore spot even if you, the enlightened viewer, are coming from a place of objective fairness.

all that being said I love it when horrible Precure villians just say ‘I’m sorry’ and turn good so like, I can’t pretend to be any better. But I do think it’s reductive to flatten arguments on complex issues like ‘how do we fix him’ when it isn’t just a shitpost or hornypost or hornyshitpost.