Why My Hero Academia’s Anime Needs To Explain Mineta’s Deku Love Confession

The recently-released Chapter 231 of the My Hero Academia manga was the subject of fervent online discussion when it featured what appeared to be a confession of love from Mineta to Deku. However, the speech took up just one page and there wasn’t any immediate reaction or follow-up, causing some confusion about the sudden development and whether it was really a romantic confession at all. When this scene is translated into anime form, it should be done with greater clarity to avoid this kind of misunderstanding in the wider fanbase.

Mineta’s speech takes place as the rest of Class 1-A is confronting Deku, trying to dissuade him from his efforts to take on All For One and the League of Villains by himself. Mineta tells Deku that “I fell for you“, which many fans read as a confession of romantic love. Because of the My Hero Academia anime’s seasonal schedule, this moment probably won’t be animated for years to come. While the anime is generally faithful to the manga, there have been minor changes, and changing or adding dialogue certainly wouldn’t be unheard of.

As written, there is some ambiguity about what Mineta actually means in this scene. In many cases, the Japanese language is ambiguous between romantic and platonic love, and the phrase that Mineta uses is an example of this. Japanese readers largely didn’t interpret the speech as a confession of love, whereas Western fans, reading Viz’s English translation that uses the phrase “fell for you“, saw it as clearly romantic. A similar ambiguous phrase caused controversy when Netflix’s re-dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion changed a character’s “love” to “like” in another situation that Western fans had seen as a confession of love. The anime should try to avoid this controversy by making it clear whether Mineta’s comments are romantic or not.

This confusion is especially potent because anime – especially mainstream action anime like My Hero Academia – rarely features LGBTQ+ representation. Even anime like Yuri on Ice or Banana Fish that are generally agreed to be about gay relationships tend to operate more through symbolism and implication than discussing sexuality plainly. A commercially huge series like My Hero Academia could have difficulty depicting openly gay characters, but if the anime were to do so it would have a huge impact.

How viewers interpret the scene also could have a big effect on how they view the character of Mineta. The widely disliked hero is in the vein of “pervert” characters like Master Roshi from Dragon Ball of Happosai from Ranma 1/2, but in a modern environment, Mineta’s sexual obsession with his classmates and frequent attempts to spy on them don’t seem funny or endearing.  If he really is bisexual or gay, it would add another dimension to Mineta’s character. Perhaps Mineta’s treatment of girls, while not excusable, was rooted in a desire to hide his sexuality.

These factors make it crucial that the My Hero Academia anime avoids the ambiguity that is present in the manga. If Mineta’s dialogue is really intended to be a love confession, it should be expanded so that viewers can really understand how Mineta feels and what Deku’s reaction is to it. If not, the dialogue should be written and translated in such a way as to avoid confusion. Queer representation is too important to be lost in translation.

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