I think Ojiro almost comes with one of the surprisingly better anecdotes despite it being from a student who's regularly mocked for his forgettable normalcy; Deku raging for the sake of his friends has been a recurring trend ever since the Sports Festival and that was a formative moment for him, so much so that it was brought up again in the Joint Training Arc. You'd think that it being such a pivotal point would've made Ojiro kind of more of a presence, but even that feels like it's being approached a bit backwards right now. The framing is all off because it reads more as if it's there to remind Deku (and by extension the audience) about the event, despite it being a moment that Ojiro internalized enough that he relates to what Deku is feeling. Generally it comes across as a large consequence of the way Deku is written here, because this doesn't feel like a conversation that elucidates how much Deku matters to them, it feels like he's being listed off bullet points, so in context of the chapter itself, it feels more like "here's a did you know gaming fact: I was really moved by that". Tokoyami's is especially funny; "yeah I never thought about using Dark Shadow in this defensive way until you made that innocuous comment circa 270 chapters ago". Like, get outta here man, lmao.
The point isn't really lost of why they're doing this because I'm sure everyone "gets" that Deku was important to 1-A, and that from his perspective, there's probably a lot of unspoken memories there. But as the audience it's hard to feel particularly emotionally moved by what's being said here because it needs to rely on telling over showing, as well as the fact that the investment in 1-A's side cast has to be assumed at this junction because they didn't get as much glamor in the past. When you've already resigned to the fact that the protagonist is probably not going to be swayed by words in the last chapter it becomes self-evident that a proper conversation isn't really gonna happen until the leading protagonists/deuteragonists get involved, though I guess that's also why having the cliffhanger with Tsuyu feels all the more funny. It was only days ago when someone here brought up the fact that the anime filler episodes feel like they jockey for her disproportionate popularity compared to what she does in the manga, so there's a sense of irony of having her of all people get the big wham moment at the end despite us obviously knowing Deku has to square up against Bakugo/Iida/Ochaco.
