I doubt Wednesday is impressed by your tricks, Mr. Thorpe (for @apis-mellifera-disease)

i didn't know abt hori liking the avengers movies but i'm not surprised. what i mean with "by design" is that wheter he noticed or not he's so inspired by american comics that he ended up adopting the most overarching trope of mainstream properties: even if the heroes are vigilantes and the villains sympatetic the villains are always wrong and the heroes are (or at least try to be) in the side of the law. but question: can we say bnha villains are leftifts when their ideologies are so hollow?

 oh, yes, i definitely agree with that! for your question, i think asking whether any ostensibly villain in a centrist/liberal narrative is really leftist is going to just be a resounding ‘no.’ and that’s because the creators never really understand nor are they really sympathetic to leftist causes. let’s take erik killmonger, who actually does espouse a specific ideology—even while he promotes armed liberation for the black diaspora, rightfully remarking upon the global presence & violence of antiblackness, he regularly assaults black women on screen (including killing his gf) and proudly speaks of his exploits in the (imperialistic) US military. (and of course the movie can’t decide what it actually wants to say about imperialism, bcs killmonger working in the military = bad & villainous, but everett ross being an actual... cia(??) operative = good white ally.)

so the thing about these narratives is that they fake you out on some level. we start out with a premise that will find a lot of sympathy among general (or sometimes specifically leftist) audiences, whether it be liberation from antiblackness, justice for xmen, or opposition to institutional violence from pro heroes. the problem is, stories crafted by non-leftists can never really follow through to the logical conclusion of that premise: injustice must be swiftly confronted and the system must be dismantled, violently if necessary. but that position is completely anathema to most viewers, and it’s most certainly anathema to the execs who green-light these “creative” pursuits. that’s why the narrative ‘good guys’ (t’challa, charles xavier, izuku & co) are moderates who will push for change at a pace that’s palatable to liberals and even conservatives. the real life counterparts to their efforts also wind up being mostly toothless, which is not coincidental. capitalists that run these enterprises know that ‘change within the system’ doesn’t work irl; that’s why they push for it in the stories they churn out, because if they can convincingly sell to you that change outside the system is bad, what more do you have left?

they accomplish this task by writing these ‘well-intentioned extremists.’ starting with a premise that most people are sympathetic with, they then push that premise into the realm of absurdity: “killmonger and magneto want to give people ways to fight their oppression asap? well, they’re also basically genocidal maniacs who have no empathy for anyone or anything beyond their ideology! don’t you see that this is the natural conclusion of changing things too fast? you don’t want to be like that, do you? :) ” alternately: “people like shigaraki and stain actually make excellent observations about hero society and flaws that canonically exist, but they’re also murderous maniacs who are just using ideology as an excuse! perhaps those people who say blue lives don’t matter just secretly want a reason to kill, huh? makes u think.” the choice to make these characters irrational and murderous is a deliberate one; the creators choose to take this route, rather than giving those characters a revolutionary politics that’s conscientious, thoughtful, and rooted in empathy, because then their ideas would actually be sympathetic. capitalists want to avoid that at all costs!

so to finally answer your question: are they leftists? no. they’re a boogeyman of leftists. they’re leftists as characterized by people who fear leftists. and if you look at the kind of rhetoric used by anti-leftists, you’ll see that this is true, because they touch upon the exact same points: “change too fast will just make people oppose you!” & “wanting to kill billionaires makes you just as bad as hitler (i.e. a genocidal maniac)!” & just refer to the entire black book of communism, which consists of fabrications, exaggerations, and twisted truths for the purpose of making communist efforts seem as murderous as possible. where can you look in our society that doesn’t seem to view leftists, to some degree, as villainous, whether as entitled children who want things handed to us on a silver platter or as a red army prepared to send any random person (and their friends and family and children!!) to the gulags?

so, yes—we might reject the politics of bnha villains if we judge them strictly through canonically-provided information, but at the same time we can (and probably should) expand our frame of reference to include the creator themselves, their intentions, and their biases. if we consider all this, then i think it’s easier to understand why there are leftists who enjoy and joke about the lov (or idk! maybe it’s just my dumb ass! i don’t think leftists care about bnha actually :( ). anyways, it’s less about what the bnha villains actually are than what they represent, and what characters like killmonger or magneto or poison ivy also represent: fear of the left being sold as propaganda which makes us out to be scary, cruel, ruthless villains.