#oboro deserved better than to be his narrative crutch

[justatalkingface]

I'm really starting to spiral this rabbit hole but here it goes.

Did Aizawa really care about Oboro? Or was his death used as a prop to justify why his teaching methods are helpful?

Because let's look at Mic. It's implied through the MHA canon that Mic was friends with Oboro first. Aizawa only knew him for a year. Yet...Mic never made Oboro's death his entire personality.

In fact, he was willing to placate someone who didn't really know Oboro like he did.

And what's even worse, he became the same teacher that let Sensoji off with a slap on the wrist despite the fact he bullied the three of them.

He let Bakugou openly bully Midoriya because of "potential".

I'm going to be honest: Oboro, as the Kurogiri origin story, was some lazy, copy-pasted crap on Hori's part. It's the Obito origin story's beats, but half-assed and kind of lazy. Honestly, it feels so forced at times I wonder when he even decided to do it? Because if Kurogiri was planned as Oboro from the beginning the entire process wouldn't have been executed as badly as it was, and he probably would have made it a bigger, more dramatic thing, rather than a one chapter flashback.

Before that point, I'm not even sure Oboro was a character, at best he was just a name for someone Eraserhead had lost (and I think Kurogiri started talking a lot less after his first couple of appearances... probably because his personality didn't agree with the Oboro concept, so he was made a silent, compliant minion rather than an active person in his own right.) It honestly feels like Kakashi Eraserhead was so popular that Hori ended up scrambling to develop a background for him, before just copying more ninja things.

But that's on the meta-end. On the character end...

Well, his character is absolutely a prop to try and explain away Eraserhead's methods, the same way it was retconned so that he didn't actually expel anyone. That doesn't mean Eraserhead didn't care about him, but...

*shrug* Granted, it's been awhile since I read the spin off, where I'm pretty sure this all was, but... Aizawa wasn't Oboro's friend as much Present Mic was, sure. But. Just because Eraserhead wasn't as open about valuing his friendship, or that he wasn't friends as long, doesn't mean Oboro wasn't important to him. The thing is that Aizawa was a withdrawn, somewhat depressed loner; in all honesty that's exactly the kind of person who probably value's their one or two friends that much more because that's all they have, that these few people are the only ones who actually valued them.

Thing is, because of how withdrawn people like that are, to really convey that right to an audience, you need to go the extra mile to set that up, and I'm not sure Hori really did that.

All of that said, though? Eraserhead became the kind of person that would have kicked out Aizawa, and I don't think Hori really gets how much inherent hypocrisy is baked into Eraserhead. The before/after of him don't really mesh well, and the only way to try and justify it is he just... got worse. Like, constantly. He took the wrong lessons from Oboro's death, and just never stopped getting the wrong lesson after that.