Anime Spotlight #19: My Hero Academia

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Quirky Animeister

https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/G6NQ5DWZ6/my-hero-academia

Last week's episode of Death Battle pitted Deku (My Hero Academia) against Asta (Black Clover), and the titular series in this week's Anime Spotlight is enjoying its sixth season (streaming now on Crunchyroll), so I thought I'd take the opportunity to update a review I've had sitting around offline. That being My Hero Academia. Just like with my Made In Abyss review and a few others, I will be giving my opinion on every season of the show, as well as both movies, because the motto of the day is to "go beyond; Plus Ultra!"
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Despite my initial misgivings about the art style, this is one of my favorite modern shonen series. It’s your basic underdog setup with a normal high school boy in a world full of people with super powers (termed “Quirks” in the series to keep with the whole “different is special” line we were all feeding each other while Trump authorized child concentration camps on the Mexican border) who wants to be the greatest hero in the world. Midorya (alias: Deku--Japanese shorthand for both "good-for-nothing" and "can do anything") gets the opportunity he’s been waiting for when his idol, All-Might, passes his power (an overpowered amplifcation Quirk called One-For-All) to him. The bulk of the series focuses on Deku and his fellow heroes-in-training learning to use their Quirks in your typical shonen arc situations like gaining entry (Bleach had the Soul Society, MHA has Ultra Academy High School), rescue missions (point again to Bleach’s Soul Society and Arrancar arcs), fighting tournaments (the Dragon Ball franchise has many examples of this), and training camps (again see Bleach and Dragon Ball for examples), each of which is usually interrupted by an engaging trial by fire battle against the League Of Villains. This all sounds very predictable and mechanical, but My Hero has some real heart to it, and manages to cram what would be hours of boring filler and exposition in any other shonen into a single look, line, or episode without making the series feel thin or dismissive of who its characters are. The linchpin of the series’ success is (I might get tired of saying this eventually) the main protagonist. Deku isn’t your basic, knuckle-headed, battle-thirsty, morality-blinded hero whose solution to everything is “yell louder, punch harder” (though ironically, his power involves yelling “[insert American State or City here] Smash!” and punching things really hard--until he switches to kicking things really hard). As a Quirkless child, his obsession with becoming a hero led him to study every known hero and villain, analyzing everything from Quirk strengths and weaknesses to individual fighting styles. Essentially, Deku is the shonen world’s answer to Batman, except that he could probably also punch out the Hulk if he wanted to. Spoilers, but Deku pretty much did that already when he pushed One-For-All to one million percent power (because math works) and dusted a Hulk-like supervillain with a single punch, so, yeah. My Hero Academia is worth investing your time in if you like shonen series (and even if you don’t, give it a try) because it’s awesome and damned near perfect. For the first three seasons.

My Hero Academia: Two Heroes is a canon, feature-length film that takes place between the second and third seasons. It focuses on All-Might (voiced by Piccolo and Vegeta dub actor Chris Sabat, who is also the voice of Yami in Black Clover) and Deku (the titular Two Heroes) and their relationships with members of the Shield family, who work as Supporters (usually Quirkless people and tech experts who design costumes and Quirk-augmenting accessories) for heroes. They and the main cast of the series receive invitations to a festival on I-Island, a high-security, mobile island used for research and development and extracurricular hero training. But as often happens when MHA's cast are enjoying down-time, a group of villains infiltrate the island to steal a Quirk-enhancing MacGuffin. The many twists work well, the action is plentiful and varied--the latter helped by the multiple villains and large supporting cast--with visuals that match or exceed the quality of the series, and the dynamic between Deku and Melissa Shields (friendship bordering on a propriety-repressed youth romance) is one of the film's highlights. I still ship Deku X Uravity, though.

Then, after three seasons of setup and thrilling battles, the golden era of MHA ends with All-Might finally defeating the villainous mastermind that ended his career, and passing the torch to Deku and a flame-powered "hero" named Endeavor (who went all Friday Night Lights crazy and used eugenics, physical abuse, and psychological trauma to render his cold-Quirked wife into a catatonic state and mold their son into a "perfect" hero with equal control over both of their Quirks). Endeavor does get a chance to redeem himself and earn his spot as the new "Number One Hero," but when mangaka write screwed-up father characters, there are some things that fans just can't forgive.

Not only is Endeavor an inadequate stand-in for All-Might, but the main villains from Season 4 onward don't match up to the Darth Vader-esque supervillain, All-For-One (the figurehead of the League Of Villains, who can take other people's Quirks for himself or give them to other villains). He was the peak when it came to evil in the series. Not even the fourth season's villain, Overhaul (a mafia boss who can deconstruct and re-form anything and anyone he touches, often with graphic--for the series--body horror results) can hope to equal his gravitas and writing quality. The suspense and mystery are still good, Deku's big brother chemistry with Eri (a girl whom Overhaul kidnapped and used as a blood bank for Quirk-suppression ammunition) is sweet, and the fights between Deku and Overhaul are spectacular.

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising is set after Season Three or Four, in the aftermath of All-For-One's defeat. The focal members of the League of Villains have unleashed a new villain called Nine, and Endeavor and a bird-powered hero named Hawks fail to stop them. Good setup, and Nine has sympathetic motivations despite his "survival of the fittest" philosophy. Unfortunately, the plot from there is that Deku and his class are invited to an island for training, where they befriend some local children and are forced to defend a dangerous MacGuffin from Nine and his team of villains. Where have I heard this before? They even do the All-For-One connection from Two Heroes by having Nine be an All-For-One weilder with multiple Quirks (nine of them, duh). The beats are just Two Heroes again, but with the "gain the jerky kids' trust" trope in place of Deku and Melissa's much sweeter and more thematically rich exchanges, and the final double-team punch features Deku teaming up with his rival, Bakugo, instead of All-Might. This was meant to be the My Hero Academia finale, but it and the series did so well that it reminded Toho, animation Studio Bones, and author Kohei Horikoshi how much they like money. In hindsight, the one-off feature of the One For All Quirk that was written to make Heroes Rising into a "here we go again" nostalgia sequel for its much better predecessor, the status quo reset that the film ends with (amnesia!), and the fact that said reset makes no sense with how the series itself resumes (Bakugo still remembers that Deku has All-Might's Quirk when the fifth season starts), all make Heroes Rising feel like a short filler arc. Granted, we haven't seen Melissa Shields since Two Heroes, either (probably because Deku X Uravity is a cuter ship with more development and comedy potential), but that film at least felt like it mattered, rather than just being "what worked before, but with the index finger crooked slightly different." Also, didn't Marvel use the "Heroes Rising" branding for some web shorts a few years back? Don't mess with The Mouse, Japan!

 

Season five...is a training season. The students from Class 1A and their rivals in Class 1B fight each other in ridiculous, "practically aplicable" competitions (sort of like if Daniel-san thought he was learning karate, but instead of the tournament, he's competing in a charity carwash at the end of The Karate Kid). We get some cool, new information about how One For All works (that will actually matter in the series' bright future), and there are hints that a new villain group might be emerging. I even enjoyed the parts where the former members of the League Of Villains just hang out as people, and we get sympathetic backstories for a few of them (Twice--think anime Deadpool, but with cloning powers and even more psychological damage because his life is a Twilight Zone episode--and Shigaraki--who has a literal touch of death--are the most tragic). But to start a new season so long after the previous one, and with three parallel plot threads at minimum (the training tournament, the villains' hanging out and training, and Hawks--Endeavor's sidekick from the beginning of Heroes Rising--going undercover in the new villain group, plus the individual villain-focused episodes and whatever else I forgot to mention), and spend so much time on the heroes-in-training doing basically nothing plot-significant? My brain was ready to check out. I get that the world of MHA has changed with the power vacuum left behind by All-Might and All-For-One, and there needs to be a thematic representation of that change (putting focus on the next generation, the global politics at play when binary definitions of morality get called into question, giving the villains their own Academia moment, etc.). I appreciate the writing behind the fifth season, and that it is building to something. But why did the presentation of that have to be so Quirk-damned boring?

Taking place some time after the fifth season's fourteenth episode ("Off to Endeavor's Agency!"), MHA: World Heroes Mission sees the professional and trainee heroes combine forces against a doomsday cult called Humarise. The cult is a unique threat in the franchise because most of its members are Quirkless, with their scale, networking, and vast resources (not to mention the brainwashed Quirk users among their ranks) being the source of their threat level. Humarise have ascribed to an as-yet-unsubstantiated theory that, as Quirked genes continue to mix, the results will be too powerful to control, and they will destroy the world. And because religious cult philosophy and conspiracy theories make total sense, what better way to stop overpowered Quirks from destroying the world than to saturate the world with lethal doses of a drug that makes Quirks overpowered and uncontrollable? This is kind of a commentary on population control and ethnic purity philosophies, and would have been a good thematic backdrop for the cult to target Todoroki (Endeavor's hot-and-cold eugenics experiment of a son) and Deku (whose whole arc is learning to control his overpowered legacy Quirk before it destroys his body) specifically. But instead, we get the derivative, "wrong man, wrong briefcase" odd-couple-learning-to-trust-eachother trope salad featured in numerous 80s and 90s action movies, with Deku trying to save a "shady courier with a heart of gold" trope from a Quirked Humarise assassin (totally underutilized, well-designed, and my favorite character in the movie aside from the courier's ninja-bird sidekick--I'm a sucker for cute birds and badass female archers, what can I say?) after he comes into possession of a MacGuffin briefcase.

As safe and by-the-numbers as this is, Deku, the courier, and the bird playing off of each other is my favorite part of the movie. The fights look as good as ever, but suffer from the same problems as Made In Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul: they drag on for way too long because someone has to transform or clone themselves, or the hero keeps trying the same attack again and again even though it didn't work the first twelve times. But in the end, Deku says, "you thought Deku would save the day, but it was me, Dio! ORA! ORA! MUDA! MUDA! UNITED ZA WARUDO SAMASHHUU!!!", the courier who betrayed him several times is now another character who's friends with Deku and we'll probably never see again, the cult gets arrested, and their Quirk Trigger bombs get deactivated offscreen. It was good to see this third film go in a different direction (using Humarise as a testing ground for fan reactions to gage how well the show's new villain organization could be received, and not having Deku do a double-team Finisher for a third time), but there was so much that World Heroes Mission could have done, that the fifth season's second half (and the sixth season so far) did much better.

The recent sixth season is a true return to form for the series so far. Hawks has ingratiated himself into the new villain organization (in keeping with the fuzzy morality theme introduced last season, the "Paranormal Liberation Front" accepts "fine people on both sides" who are tired of the rigidness of society, and so do not bat an eye at heroes joining their ranks). The PLF is gearing up for a violent demonstration, and Hawks leaks the information to the Heroes' Association. What follows (the dub is only at its seventh episode) is a Season Four-style storming of a PLF facility, but with the sinister stench of All-For-One's influence looming in the background, an army of multi-Quirked body horror genetic experiments (imagine a Jigsaw killer trap, but it's a creature design from the Alien franchise, crossed with Mother Brain from the Metroid games. And there are over a dozen of them. You're welcome! Sleep well!) called Nomu, every hero and villain getting some screen time, if not dialogue, and beautifully animated action scenes. It's like the first three seasons turned to eleven, then given the Plus Ultra treatment, and topped with fifty states, Washington, D.C., and all the island territories worth of Smash because good measure just isn't anime enough. There is still thematic weight and palpable stakes to all of this (being a season-long role reversal of the first three seasons' party-crashing finales, for one thing), but with the previous season having painstakingly laid the foundational writing, the viewer can now just ride the edge of their seat of choice as bodies collide, the scenery evaporates, and everything else explodes. So far, the sixth season is well-animated, strategic chaos, and I AM HERE! for it.

I hope you have been here for it, too. In case the call to action at the beginning didn't work, here's another One For All of you: be a Hero to this blog by putting something Quirky in the comments section, and a Supporter by giving those social media buttons a stately Smash.

Work has been chaotic lately, with the seasonal change in human resources and hours (I am putting the finishing touches on this post after unexpectedly choosing money over sleep for two days of open-to-close shifts in the deli, with a high probability of a third such shift tomorrow, plus training a replacement for the closing shift that I have been covering because a grown man would rather watch Scooby-Doo than Scooby-Do His Job). But Stay Tuned, because next week, I will have the third part of my "What If GOKU Was NEVER BORN?" re-write, as well as another issue of Zenescope - Omnibusted that comes with some web-fresh content. Good night, wish me luck and good humor, and

Animeister,

Quirked Out.