One day I might get mad and talk about fanon nagisa
did i say one day i mean right now
Okay, so Tumblr doesn’t have this issue (much), but take a fucking look at Ao3 and it’ll become obvious pretty quickly that a lot of fans infantilize Nagisa. I won’t be including examples in this post because I’m not about to just go off and bash random authors, but hmngh. Why.
It’s not even an issue that’s exclusive to AssClass; it tends to happen at least once in every anime fandom I’ve ever seen and still frequently in other media, but Nagisa’s particularly susceptible to this because he’s already portrayed as quiet and effeminate and polite in canon. Which sucks, because his character as portrayed by the source material isn’t a pushover or naive, but lately, people have seemed to associate being 1) nonviolent and 2) altruistic with naivety (when I say nonviolent, I’m referring to his more passive approach to dealing with bullying, which is likely a result of dealing with domestic abuse for his entire life). Actually, forget the parentheses; the effeminacy and passive approach to being threatened are both a result of his abusive mother, which turns the entire thing into infantilizing abuse victims, which is ALSO a rampant issue within fandom and even real life, which is another issue that I’d fucking love to talk about one day but I digress.
Nagisa has been shown in canon to be able to stand up to bullies (the midterm exam arc), as well as to Karma, but apparently that backbone doesn’t translate well to the fanbase’s idea of him, because half the time when I see him in a fic, there’s none of that inner resolve or cleverness to be seen. He turns into a passive vessel for plot instead of an interesting character. And often, he isn’t even a vessel for plot! He’s a vessel for glorifying Karma.
And THAT. That’s a thing. A lot of the time when I see this happen, it’s in a Karmagisa fic. I’m fine with Karmagisa. It’s the top tagged ship on this blog. But there’s a concerning fanon dynamic between them in which Nagisa only exists to make Karma look competent or romantic or both while reducing Nagisa to the “female” empty love interest, and THAT’S just symptomatic of heteronormativity and the brainrotting fetishization/stereotyping of m/m relationships. In canon, Karma and Nagisa are friends, and later onesided rivals once Karma starts getting his inferiority complex about Nagisa being able to commit murder. The latter bit, Karma’s respect for and even fear of Nagisa, never seems to show up, shunted aside in exchange for the same yaoi trope we’ve all seen over and over about the wilting daisy POV character and the edgy hot love interest, plastered onto two fourteen year old boys.
Just. Can we maybe appreciate that Nagisa is his own character with an interesting personality, and not turn him into another Midoriya? Please?
