#bowajohn

ANON, I AM KISSING YOU ON THE MOUTH AND I'M VENMO-ING YOU THE 1K FOR THIS ASK.

Going over this ask (anon, I want to bite you /VERY positive) and it will be split up into sections to really go over everything in as much detail as I can. 

Starting off on the first question “can you explain a little more what makes Bowa+LJ compelling to you”

The main thing I find compelling about them is they’re a “two sides of the same coin” type of pairing and there’s a few ways that we can see that starting off with how they’re written. 

Looking at Bowa first, she’s a female character written like a male character. She doesn’t hold herself in a way that most female characters (not just in TBHX but in story writing as a whole) typically do. We see that she’s friends with men, she has hobbies that are typically attributed to men, and she’s BUILT. Hell (aside from Queen) her parallel is Dragon Boy and those two really are the same people in different fonts. Unlike in most shows, she’s not doing this to be “not like other girls” she’s doing this more as a survival mechanism. Take her line, “I don't want to become just the youngest female agent. I want to become a loved, respected hero!” This is one of the most explicit ways of her saying in canon that she doesn’t want to be known for her gender, she wants to be known for her accomplishments. 

Despite that, she is just one person and can’t exactly end misogyny as a concept by herself. In the end, even though she spent so much trying to put the label of “woman” behind her, it continued to define her because *Joker voice* society. We can even see how the title of “woman” followed her around everywhere. She only really managed to reach the top 10 because of Queen’s speech. When she became X, she wasn’t known as the 14th X, she was known as the 2nd female X. Not even that, she wasn’t even just known as X, she was known as Ms. X when it was entirely unnecessary to add that honorific since X is just a letter and completely gender neutral. Everything about her life draws so much unnecessary attention to her gender which is stifling and suffocating to her. 

Now we have Johnny. *Johnny is written more like a female character. His main inner-conflict is that people reduce him to just being cute and infantilize him and this is because he became a hero when he was 9. This man is pushing 30, he’s the second oldest hero in the top 10, yet his behavior when he’s on the clock is a lot more immature and I think the car scene is a great example of that. He’s very emotional, prone to outbursts, and a professional yapper. But it makes sense that he turned out this way. While the other heroes in the top 10 had issues with being manipulated into becoming a hero and their current rankings, they all still made choices to become heroes at some point or another, except for Johnny. Johnny became a hero as a kid against his will. All he really did was have an outburst when his father died and suddenly he’s on front page news. He never really got to grow up and because of that, he’s pretty socially stunted. 

Since he’s a main character we can see how he acts off camera and how it affects him on a much more personal level than Bowa and what we see is that Johnny is depressed. He doesn’t like how the public views him since all he really does is “just smile” and it’s one of the things that is stopping him from growing up and putting up a happy face constantly also seems to be the main thing stopping him from properly grieving his father’s death. 

* I do know about the theory that Johnny was originally supposed to be a female character. Going off of what I mentioned above really points to that. The fact that he’s friends with only other female heroes in a way that isn’t seen from anywhere else. The biggest thing that people bring up is the old poster for the show where it seems like he has boobs/generally more feminine appearance really does point to the fact that he was supposed to be a woman before the show came out. But irregardless, the show is out and he is a man written like a woman. 

Sorry for the potato quality, here is the original image if you want to see it in better quality. 

Then you have their aesthetics. Bowa’s color scheme is purple and Johnny’s flower motif is a sunflower, a yellow flower. Since I’m a battle hardened tumblrina, I know what color theory is and that yellow and purple are complimentary colors. This really does play into the idea of opposites and I am also a big sucker for pairings that have complimentary colors. 

When it comes to their hero outfits, they’re also opposites of each other. 

Bowa’s design has so many sharp edges/points in her design and mostly uses dark colors. It’s also made to emphasize her muscles (biceps, triceps, abs, etc), and this overall feeling that she’s dangerous. It’s really screams “do NOT fuck with me.” 

However, when it comes to Johnny, his hero design is the opposite of that. Even though he’s taking inspiration from Ah Sheng’s time as a hero, I also think it’s safe to say that his managers continued to force this onto Johnny to maintain this image of being this cute young hero and it just never changed even though he’s now 28. He really does look like he’s ready to give anyone a hug. 

*ETA: The other part of their characters that I really like is that Johnny canonically gets along well with the female cast AND he gets inspired by them. His closest friends are Queen and Cyan, he was also inspired by Queen's speech, the person he bonded with the most during the Ruins Incident was Loli, and it was Queen and Cyan that made him want to get stronger. He doesn't really let the fact that he's a man get in the way of forming relationships nor does he let the fact that his friends are women change the way he treats them.

On the other hand, while we don't get to see how Bowa behaves off camera as much as Johnny, I think it's safe to assume that she spends more of her time with men and prefers it that way. We see in her introduction that she's part of a podcast group with two other men. Not only that but the fact that she's interested in sports/goes to the gym often can also point to the fact that she's around men more often (see Loli's arc wherein the times we see inside the gym, it's full of men and women are discouraged from getting stronger there). Not to mention, if her relationship with Queen is any indication of how she is with women, it seems like she would keep her distance from them. Once again, I appreciate that isn't done in a "not like other girls" sense and it comes from the fact that before Queen made her speech, there just weren't a lot of female heroes, so she wouldn't have another woman to talk to. Then the moment there was another female hero, she was forced to compete with them because *Joker voice* society.

This is another reason why I think they'd along.

Now to go to the next part “Like what parts of their personalities work well together” is to first bring up how they’re still part of the same coin. 

I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with this idea that they would really understand each other. They’ve both been massively screwed over by how hero society viewed/treated them and want to be viewed in different ways. I think it would be easy and I really do think that they would get along in a way that seems strange on the surface but then when you see them, they start to make sense. They both have experiences handling and working through the things that’s holding the other one back from blossoming in their lives.

To go back to “what makes Bowa+LJ compelling to you” I want to mention a mental image I had of them one time.

One of the first things that I thought of when it came to these two comes from Johnny’s line when Cyan and Queen saved him in the Ruins Incident. He mentioned that he wanted to be stronger to support these two and then I was mentally flashbanged with this image of Johnny learning how to use a tricep press with Bowa giving support next to him. 

My headcanon for Bowa is that after her fight with Queen and the Fear finally left her body, she had a moment where she asked herself “now why the hell did I do that?” then proceeded to quit being a hero to do something like working as a trainer or something. Using this headcanon of mine, I thought to myself “what if these two met, didn’t know their hero identities, and then the media blew out of proportion?” 

There’s a lot to think about with them. It’s very fun. 

Lastly, I also need to point out that there are two meta reasons as to why I started shipping them. The first meta reason comes from rewatching TADC. During the holidays, I got to spend more time with my sibling and we binged TADC together. It’ll be too long to explain the context behind this exact scene but there’s a line from one of the characters in the show, you’ve probably heard it, who says, very frustrated, “I want the ability to have sex!” and this kinda sparked a conversation between us. The conversation being: can Johnny have sex? 

So far, my money is on no and my reasoning for this goes back to Ghostblade. While not specified which disorders he has, Ghostblade canonically has affective disorder which mostly manifested itself in his muteness. He’s been selectively mute until he was about 19 when his FOMO account had gotten popular and his Trust stopped him from talking. The thing is, he didn’t even realize that he was mute for about 2 years because he had no reason to talk exactly. He only realized that he was mute because he finally had a reason (Nuonuo in his case) to talk and I think this can be translated to Johnny, especially since they’re parallels to each other. 

It doesn’t seem like Johnny has really interacted with people that much. From the little bit of what we see about his life off camera, before he met Queen and Cyan, all he did was spend all his time inside vegging out and only talked to his managing team and Big Johnny. Now that he has befriended Cyan and Queen, he clearly sees them as friends and nothing else. Going off of this, I don’t think he’s ever had time nor an interest in pursuing a romantic relationship with anyone and I think that, like Ghostblade, having a moment that he wants to do something that’s not PG/kid friendly, he realizes that he can’t. Since it was never an issue before, he was never able to nip it in the bud but now it is since there’s someone in his life that he would want to do something more adult with (not even just sex, but even things like saving money for retirement or drinking alcohol), he physically can’t do it which I think holds a lot of potential for conflict in any romantic relationships. 

The other meta reason is that a few months ago, I rewatched TBHX. When I finished my rewatch, I didn’t do much but listen to the OST and rewatch that scene of Johnny and Ghostblade in the car throughout December. This is because I really hate the holiday seasons, it stresses me out so much and having something else to fixate on helps to get through it and that’s when the idea for this ship hit me. Bowa is my favorite character in the show so I think about her constantly and since I had been thinking about Johnny a lot recently because of the car scene, I had a thought “what if I shipped them? Jk jk… unless?” and pretty much fixated on them to stop thinking of the horrors and pretty much thought of everything mentioned above. I got really attached and remembered “hey, I have a tumblr account and free will. Why don’t I let bisexual Zuko tell people to ship them?”