“Everyone is a potato. Everyone is a potato.”
Tamaki Amajiki Quotes
1 quote from My Hero Academia, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
One of the three strongest students in the school and unable to look at strangers. The series places both facts in one body and never reconciles them, which is the point.
Played for laughs, and it is funny, but watch what it actually is: a coping technique, deployed under load, by someone who has clearly used it many times before. He is not overcoming the anxiety. He is running a workaround, and the workaround is slightly pathetic and entirely effective, which is a combination fiction rarely allows. The genre's standard move with a frightened character is to stage a moment where the fear breaks and they emerge unencumbered. He gets no such scene. He remains, at the end of his arc, a person who cannot look at strangers and who is nevertheless one of the three strongest students in the school. Placing those two facts in the same body without reconciling them is the interesting choice. Competence is not presented as the reward for fixing yourself; it is presented as something you can have while still being visibly unfixed.