Mineta: Why he sucks

In the world of My Hero Academia, no other character has been torn a new one by the fandom as much as the purple pervert, Minoru Mineta. While he does exist to reinforce and inform the audience of how unhealthy the motivation can be to become a hero - popularity, riches, and even just a need to feel fulfilled or accepted - Mineta takes it to a nauseating extreme.

He is an uncomfortably relatable reminder of the more grating aspects of high school: he’s the pervy classmate you see waiting outside the girls’ locker room; he’s the guy who constantly thirsts for sexual validation despite being nowhere close to the proper head-space to have a healthy physical relationship with any self-respecting partner; and he is constantly getting away with antics that would unarguably get him placed on the sex offender registry in almost any developed nation. Despite being tied up, threatened with severe punishment, strangled by his teacher, and otherwise being bitch slapped by karma’s cold hands, he never suffers any true consequences for his behavior. In behavioral therapy, the term punishment is used to describe any consequence or stimulus meant to decrease the likelihood of a target behavior from occurring again in the future. And nothing so far seems to be an effective punishment, as Mineta’s lewd and downright depraved actions are a constant source of embarrassment and annoyance for his classmates and the fanbase as a whole respectively.



From hitching a ride on Momo’s ass during the UA Sports Festival to tricking the girls into wearing revealing cheerleader outfits in the same event, Mineta will seemingly stop at nothing to debase himself as well as others in his endless quest for sexual gratification.

Despite his usefulness in trapping or incapacitating enemies and their weapons along with his surprising aptitude at infiltration due to his small size and climbing skill, Mineta’s more likable moments are completely eclipsed by his inability to control himself. Like a coked-up cheetah on Viagra, Mineta has next to no control over his sexual drive. And while this may be due to his teenage hormones raging through his tiny body, it is simply inexcusable when similarly impulsive and academically gifted students like Bakugo are able to control their impulses and curb their obsessions enough to think things through and not constantly be at the mercy of their non-heroic fixations.

However, a lot of the hate thrown Mineta’s way also comes down to age of introduction.



Unlike similarly pervy characters in shonen anime and manga, like Master Roshi of Dragon Ball, Jiraiya of Naruto, and Miroku from Inuyasha, Mineta was introduced to the world in a time where perverted anime characters had begun to lose their popularity. In the era of the MeToo movement and where organizations like The Boy Scouts of America have gone bankrupt due to sexual assault charges and lawsuits, many younger and older fans of My Hero Academia find Mineta’s actions to be comparable to those of real-life sex offenders. As times change, so do the standards of comedy and how it is integrated into storytelling. This is an age where more and more people identify with and align themselves with the victims of sexual harassment and rape. Yes. Rape. Mineta’s actions all but cross that line. While he doesn’t have any desire to cause explicit physical harm to others for violent reasons, his actions leave it clear to the audience that he doesn’t seem to care if he makes the targets of his obsession feeling violated and exposed. Given that the objects of his twisted and perverted view are often teenage girls barely older than sixteen, even in a world where most people have superhuman abilities, the feeling of vulnerability from sexual predators is still present. Perhaps even more so. There are even jouralists like Taneo Tokuda who are able to generate camera lenses all over his body and print pictures from a node in his chest. In world where humans can do that, fear of sexual exposure and exploitation would be more than just acceptable, it would be expected. Especially when fear of repercussions and one’s own morality would be the only real barriers to such heinous crimes.

Even though Mineta indulges in the company of his peers and manages to score in the top ten of his classmates academically, his depraved behavior is often the only thing that comes to mind when he is brought up by the fandom. The very existence of this blog is proof enough of that. His more compassionate side such as visiting Deku in the hospital with his classmates and his attempts to strategize and fight back to surprising success during the USJ incident in the first season are all but forgotten due to his profoundly unsettling behavior. Even his room was completely ignored during the dorm room contest when the students began boarding at UA High following All Might’s final fight with All For One. If even the thought of his room is enough to disturb his peers, then Mineta has certainly succeeded in securing his reputation and ostracizing himself socially. Even the similarly horny Denki Kaminari has his limits. And the comical Hanta Cero describes him as “such a little scumbag.”



However, if you take away Mineta’s perverted behavior, the only real flaw left to him is his cowardice. And if one is to look at such behavior objectively, it’s actually fairly relatable. Mineta is very scared and nervous. He lives in a world where humans can unleash punches with an explosive yield over 24 times stronger than the most powerful nuclear devices ever detonated. For him to not be afraid would be at the height of obliviousness and willful ignorance. Even Eijiro Kirishima’s idol, Crimson Riot spells it out in flashback that if you showed him a person unafraid of death, then he’d show you an idiot. Mineta’s cowardice is actually fairly reasonable in a world where people can raise all hell at a moment’s notice by using themselves as human weapons.

This is not to justify his actions as a sexual hound dog. Rather, it’s a brief rationalization for Mineta being essentially a stand-in for how any normal high school kid would approach having to fight a small army of what basically amounts to thugs, thieves, and serial killers. You imagine how you’d realistically respond to being in a room full of Jeffery Dahmer clones with superpowers and having to escape without killing in self-defense. That’s basically what Mineta had to do. Again, this is not a justification for his sexually devious and inappropriate behavior. It’s merely a rationalization of his second-most criticized personality trait.

Take away his sexually predatory and exploitative behavior, and you merely have a very scared and agile teenage boy with severe dwarfism and a purple orb faux-hawk hairstyle. Not so scary?

That being said, very little can justify Mineta’s behavior. Though his perverted actions do make him perfect comic fodder. One particularly memorable scene was when he announces that he wet his pants during the initial training/hazing ritual at the UA summer training camp. Mineta’s presence may be obnoxious for the most part, but nothing makes it feel oh-so worth it like him either getting chewed out by a kid, thrown through the air, or threatened and even strangled by Aizawa’s carbon fiber and alloy scarf.

Mineta’s continued presence on the show irks many. Personally, I feel that he could be improved without him losing his trademark horny behavior by being given a proper character arc. It’s not that his desires for sex or sexual validation or gratification are wrong - because they are a normal part of being a teenage boy - but he needs to be given a chance to change and grow up. Being a poon hound is not an inherently destructive thing, but Mineta’s status as the most hated facet of the series definitely is rooted and cemented by his unethical sexual misconduct.

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submitted by: loboverde2018

wonderfully put, my friend!! thank you for taking the time to write this up!!