Mello and Bakugo: What Rivalry Cannot Fix

Mello and Bakugo invest a rivalry with questions that a competitive result cannot necessarily answer. Wanting to win can make a problem actionable without making victory the right solution.

NTV shows Mello rejecting cooperation with Near. My Hero Academia’s episode 61 synopsis describes Bakugo confronting Deku while suffering guilt over All Might’s loss of power.

Recognition and responsibility differ

Mello’s refusal raises a question about recognition: what value can a shared achievement have if the participants’ relative standing remains unsettled? Reading the refusal this way does not establish a complete explanation of his motives. It identifies the problem created when cooperation would leave a contest unresolved.

Bakugo’s confrontation has a different pressure behind it. Guilt concerns responsibility for an event, not simply standing in a ranking. Greater strength cannot by itself establish that a past event was or was not someone’s fault. A contest offers a result that is easier to obtain than an answer to that moral question.

Why fighting the rival feels relevant

A rivalry provides a familiar procedure: oppose the other person, expend effort, obtain an outcome. That procedure can be attractive when the underlying distress has no comparably clear test. The existence of a measurable result can create the appearance that the important question has become measurable too.

The comparison should therefore resist calling both characters merely insecure. The pressures are distinct. One reading concerns the visibility of an individual contribution; the other concerns guilt attached to a loss. Flattening them into the same emotional label would erase the reason their competitive actions require different judgments.

A result can leave the question intact

The objection to this reading is that rivalry can produce understanding as well as ranking. A confrontation can create an occasion for truths that would otherwise remain unspoken. Competition need not be emotionally empty or incapable of changing a relationship.

But that possibility depends on something beyond the score. Recognition requires an account of what someone contributed. Responsibility requires an account of what caused an event and what choices were available. Neither account follows automatically from who proves stronger. Mello and Bakugo are worth comparing where competition threatens to substitute a visible outcome for the less manageable answer each situation demands.

Sources and scope

NTV official anime synopses; Official anime reference. The Japanese official summaries establish the limited scene facts used here. The argument is our reading of those facts, not an English dialogue transcription or a claim about every adaptation.