My Hero Academia Doesn’t Deserve the Hype

By Kenneth Lopez

My Hero Academia is Japanese Manga that debuted in 2014 in the magazine, Weekly Shonen Jump. The story about a young boy who wanted to become the world’s greatest hero received an anime adaptation in 2016 has been soaring in popularity ever since. It is especially popular here in North America; with millions of fans young and old drawing fan art, cosplaying as their favorite characters and making countless amvs of their favorite moments in show or their favorite ships.

But despite this popularity, I (and a minority of people) do not feel this show is worth the hype and has a lot of problems that either no one has picked up or are being ignored.

The first problem I have with it is how similar it to other shonen (especially Naruto). You’ve got your underdog main character who has no superpowers (and in the future, might be revealed to have parents who were really important people and might be related to royalty)and lives in a world where everyone has a super power. He later gets a power to make himself feel better and gets respect from a high ranking member in his society. You have rival character foil for our mainlead. You have an expanded cast of characters who are all colorful and likable. And there’s a tournament arc later on.

Now this isn't just a problem with My Hero, it highlights more of the problem with the shonen genre and how oversaturated it is. Any idea you could come up with has already been done in another story. So the only way to make your story stand on its own comes down to two things: the writing and the characters. And My Hero Academia struggles with both.

Let’s begin with the characters, starting with the secondary characters. My Hero Academia has a huge cast of characters, a majority of them being pretty bland having no personality; only being defined by a certain trope. Uruaka is your standard romantic interest who doesn't stand on her own and is only there to cheer our protagonists on. The frog girl is…..uh….has frog powers I guess. The weird pervert midget is a pervert. That weird French guy is…..iritating and shouldn’t exist. I'm pretty sure you’ve noticed at this point that I’ve only referred to ¼ characters I listed by their first name and everyone else buy their defined trope, and that’s a major issue. If you are going to write a story where there's a huge cast, you have to give them some sort of personality to make them standout (like Naruto). If you struggle with writing for more than 5 or 6 characters, don’t write a story with a large amount of characters. 

But that doesn’t mean the main cast is any good either. Though Izuku is one of the more relatable characters, I do question why he didn’t physically train himself to become a hero. In My Hero Academia, you need a quirk to become a hero and he wasn’t born with one. But you know who else is a superhero but doesn’t have a superpower, Batman! He was born with no superpowers but that didn’t stop him from becoming the badass hero that defends gotham. What this does is this gives unintentionally gives off the impression that Izuku is spoiled, which is not the case. In fact, why was he still holding onto that dream into his teenage years (when the show takes place). Realistically, after his dreams of becoming a hero had been squandered as a kid, he probably would’ve given it up as time went by and moved on. But he didn’t, he still held on to that dream, but yet did nothing to move closer to that goal. He didn’t learn any fighting moves, he didn’t train himself to become stronger, nothing! I mean, he did write down notes about heroes and their powers but they do nothing in the long run.

Bakugo is rival character of this show and his is unapologetically a complete bully. He has bullied Izuku since childhood (A/N: despite Izuku being bullied by Bakugo, he still looks up to him for some reason) and even told him to kill himself in the first episode. He’s an egotistical maniac who only wants to become a hero to be the best and not help others. And his temper is on another level, to the point of almost being a psychopath. It’s astonishing that he was able to enter the hero academy, and it’s more astonishing that this character is well beloved and attracts so many fangirls.

Todoroki is a Zuko clone, plain and simple. He has an abusive father, he got a scar in his childhood, he’s an outright rip off from Zuko from Avatar The Last Airbender. But well Zuku’s an actual well written character, Todoroki is not.

The only character in the main cast I sort of like is Ida. I really liked his character arc about avenging his brother and taking his hero name to honor his brother. Other than that, there’s not much to say about him.

Moving onto the writing, I absolutely hate the story structure and this leads to believe the author has no idea what he’s doing. To explain myself, I’ll go over the plot of Season 2.

The season begins with a tournament arc which isn’t that good but the season really picks up steam when we’re introducing the Stain, who injures Ida’s brother. After a less than impressive fight, Stain is defeated but not before exposing certain heroes and inspiring others to become villains. Now what do you think could come next after this very impactful arc? Our hero’s more on their guard as the attack from dangerous villains becoming more likely. The story picking up speed. But no. Instead, we just get more hero exams. Yes, that very dark story that could impact the world of My Hero is never added upon and is brushed aside to focus on more tensionless fights. This happens in Season 3 to my knowledge (considering I stopped watching mid way through Season 2). It opens with an intense arc with earth shattering events and the arc after that is just another tournament arc. 

This is not how you write an interesting story! Take a look at Saint Seiya: the show begins with tournament arc but that's quickly scrapped when one of the Saints steals the prize. And after they defeated the villians and things seem like they’re gonna die down, our hero’s are ambushed again by another dangerous enemy and prize is stolen once again. That’s how you write a gripping and interesting story, you make the next arc more intense than the last. You don’t go from gripping plot to tensionless fluff to gripping plot! This gives off the impression that My Hero Academia doesn’t have a story and is just making up stuff as it’s going along.

There are more problems I have with shows like how the fights are uncreative and are over dramatic scuffles. Or how the author tries to flesh out bland background characters later into the story instead of doing it after they’re introduced. Or Izuku gains 6 more powers later on in the manga but I’m sure you don't want to be here for days.

Though My Hero Academia is popular, it’s quality isn’t equal to that. Sure the animation is fantastic, but that doesn’t fix the bland cast of characters, poorly written main leads, terrible story structure, and relying too much on it’s inspirations instead of carving out its own identity. At the time of writing this, the Season 4 is already out and I am not sure if it’s good or not. But what I can say is that there are more shonen anime out there that are worth more of your time than My Hero Academia.