Over the series’ extensive 10-year lifespan, and 100,000,000+ volumes of manga sold, “My Hero Academia” has become one of the most popular anime on earth, and continues to gain numbers to this day, as the anime is still currently airing. As someone who got into MHA about five years ago, I think it’s appropriate to call myself a seasoned fan. I’ve seen the rise of popularity, the good, the bad, and the ugly in the fandom, I’ve cosplayed a ton of characters, I have a huge collection of merchandise, I could go on. Simply, I love My Hero, and I have thoughts.
Trying to keep it simple, “My Hero Academia” is about a teenage boy, Izuku Midoriya, who is born into a world where most of the population has superpowers called quirks. Except Izuku never develops his quirk. His dreams of being a hero, at first, are crushed, but when he meets the number one hero and his lifelong idol, All Might, he gives him the opportunity of a lifetime. All Might passes down his quirk to Izuku, giving him the chance to become a hero. Now Izuku has to learn how to harness this power and use it to its full 100%, safely. Izuku gets accepted into the top hero school in Japan, UA academy. There, Izuku meets new friends and learns how to use One for All without wrecking his body.
Starting off with the manga, like most anime do. The author, Kohei Horikoshi, is one of the best mangaka, art wise, that I’ve seen. (Not biased at all …) Reading the manga, it’s amazing to be able to see his progression with art and his own style. The way his drawings become so much more detailed and heartfelt over the years. Just look at these covers from volume one vs the most recent volume published:
While the first is still incredibly detailed and impressive, you can see the progression! Also, isn’t the parallel and callback to the first volume so cute? There are over 40 volumes of manga, which for collectors can be quite daunting, as it is quite expensive, but as someone who owns almost all of the manga, I would say that it’s worth it.
Now, naturally, onto the anime. Studio Bones is the studio that animates My Hero, which has its pros and cons. More recently in the anime for episodes that should’ve been darker and more somber, there’s a bright blue sky in the background! It completely ruins the tone. Izuku’s vigilante arc was done quite well, though, at least they got that right. The anime, of course, is always on a time crunch to get the next episode out on time the next week. But let’s be honest, it’s not hard to desaturate a blue background. As much as I love the anime, I really think it was done dirty. The anime also adds and deletes different things from the manga, as every adaptation does. Nothing can be perfectly, exactly adapted from its source material, but it is something I wanted to mention. As much as I’m complaining, I really do love the My Hero anime. The voice acting is stellar and the way they portray characters and bring them to life is amazing.
Similar to the anime, My Hero has gotten four of its own movies! These are of course, bigger budgets, and have more time to get done than weekly anime. Studio Bones still animates these movies, but they’re done phenomenally well. There’s been some debate as to whether the movies are canon or not to the original manga since they add new characters and storylines, but in a more recent chapter of the My Hero manga, Horikoshi draws some of our old friends from the movie in a flashback! So it’s pretty safe to say that the events of the movies are canon, wherever they fit into the timeline.
Finally, I’m going to discuss the fandom, another hot topic that’s somehow always brought up when someone mentions My Hero. Right at its peak when MHA was getting popular, around 2019, it was everywhere. Everybody liked it, knew it, was making videos online and cosplaying, as people do when a show gets popular. Eventually things got out of hand, and some pretty notoriously insane things happened within the fandom, giving it a pretty bad name. Everything from “cringey” cosplayers singing at conventions, to people saying they were pregnant with the characters’ babies. Now, this was three, four years ago, but still to this day, people will say that the worst anime fandom is My Hero Academia. Bold take, but okay. As I stated earlier, I’ve seen a lot of the good and bad of the fandom. I can say that some of this stuff really was insane and people were right to be concerned or weirded out. But, that’s just what happens when something gets popular, is it not? I’ve heard so many people say “I just can’t watch My Hero, the fandom is too weird.” Which is sort of lame, because how are you going to let a few immature people ruin an amazing show for you? My Hero is a great show, and it’s a bummer to see it get the short end of the stick when it comes to reputation. I promise.