What Happened To My Hero Academia?
By Vidhi Gupta
*Contains Heavy Spoilers From Anime and Manga*
My Hero Academia is probably one of the most famous anime right now. My Hero Academia, Black Clover and Jujutsu Kaisen are considered as ‘The New Big Three’, only for how popular they are, comparing them to Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. While I do understand that, I feel that owing to recent arcs, my faith in the show’s development, especially its character developments has drastically gone down. Like in any school setting, there exists Deku’s class which, including him, has 18 students. All the children in the class have exceptionally diverse quirks, however, their use and portrayal in the anime can hardly be satisfactory. I think my only complaint with the show is that they overpowered an already overpowered protagonist. It became no different from a typical Shonen troupe of one character (the protagonist) getting all the power.
The thing I liked about Deku initially was that he never gave up on his dream, no matter how much he suffered. All he wanted to hear was ‘You can become a hero’, something people around him could not tell him. Of course, following a typical shonen trope, Deku’s journey begins when he inherits All Might’s quirk. In the earlier seasons, Deku was learning to harness this quirk and trains to use it to its full potential. However, the use of the quirk results in his arms breaking, quite severely too. Now I can see Deku being courageous and reckless once, maybe twice. But it became a pattern with him in almost every fight. After a point, I didn’t want to see Deku breaking his arms again and again. I wanted to see… some development.
And did I get some developments? The next thing I know, Deku upgrades from not breaking his arms to getting seven f**king new quirks parceled to him. That, my friends, was the day I lost all interest in the show. The main villain of the show is All For One, who can have multiple quirks. It is, in essence, the exact opposite of One For All. Now, the reason All For One is a villain is because he steals the quirks of other innocent people to make himself stronger. Then, how does that differentiate our hero and villain, when both of them have multiple quirks? That is the only reason why I like the fight ‘One For All vs All For One’ because he fought All For One with only one quirk and managed to get him captured. The only difference between him and All For One is that while All For One steals his quirks, One For All contains pieces of its previous holders’ quirks as well. Deku doesn’t steal his quirks, he inherits them along with One For All. Even then, Deku getting multiple made him so overpowered that I could no longer differentiate between MHA and any other typical Shonen troupes. The one thing that set MHA apart was taken from him only to make up for the gap Deku had with his classmates, to make him ‘special’. Unlike him, they had spent years cultivating their quirks. Bakugou and the Todoroki family drama are what is keeping me hooked to this show. Unfortunately, Deku was no longer the reason. Yet the stupidest thing was that Deku trained for months and months to get into UA, his dream High School, and when he did, he left it. He just left, to ‘save’ the others, to fight alone (I call that Deku ‘Feral Deku) which made the whole show extremely dark.
When talking about MHA, there is one arc in particular that was extremely well done. The thought, the ideology and the execution aimed to give other characters some development as well. The Stain arc was one I had never seen before. It gave the show the darkness and edginess that made it different or rather balanced it with the High School troupe of the show. Stain’s ideology was not wrong as well. His aim was for heroes to be selfless and not expect a reward in return. However, it was very realistically portrayed that not every hero could be as selfless as All Might or Deku. While Stain was not wrong, his methods could be called questionable. He did not differentiate between the work of good heroes and bad ones (though I am no judge of morality, this is just my opinion). Stain in the end, does end up paralyzing himself due to his quirk and the end of arc brought in the question of accountability. For once, in a show I saw children being reprimanded for their reckless decisions, especially Iida’s and appreciated the realistic touch given to it. That’s why, after the Stain arc, when you see Deku getting seven new quirks which overpowers him to no extent, the show lost what was different about it. It became like a regular Shonen troupe where the protagonists like Ichigo or Naruto or Goku, get too much power. The story itself became more about the villains than about the heroes. The whole question of how Deku becomes the №1 Hero gets spoiled for us, because you know that an overpowered character can naturally win any fight. There is no surprise left, only predictable struggle left.
All in all, my journey with this show has been nothing short of a rollercoaster and I hope in the future the manga does redeem itself, however slim that possibility might seem. My once favorite show plummeted from that pedestal quite quickly but even then, I would want people to watch at least the first four seasons. Not to mention I am eagerly awaiting for the day ‘Stars and Stripes vs Shigaraki’ is animated for that is one fight that I would love to watch, no matter what is going on in the show. Deku may have disappointed me but Bakugo has my hopes and I will wait for the day the show ends along with the disaster of Deku’s many (seven was it?) quirks.
