#OP THI S IS SO FUCKING FUNNY

[pennysword]

An Ode to My Hero Academia

Okay, like every anime fan, I've fallen into the My Hero Academia hole and can't get up... and that's not a bad thing.

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't on the fanwagon when My Hero Academia landed on American shores in 2016. I was two years out of college and the only thing I cared about was finding a nine-to-five that paid my bills and kept my mom from telling me to do something with my life. I was also deep in the pit of post college depression, wherein I'd moved away from all my friends and thought myself too socially awkward and weird to be able to make new ones. That's something a lot of us deal with, I think, especially when we're forced out of our comfort zones.

I am a shojo romantic at heart. Most shonen don't really hook me emotionally the way shojos do. And if it does hook me, it's set in a world so fantastical and so bizarre that my interest wanes before long and I would forget the plot all together. When I did delve back into manga or anime (decreasingly so once I got my first adult job at twenty-three), I wanted to wrap myself in the blanket of the tropes that were comfortable to me: a wallflower female lead with surprising feistiness and sense of justice, a beautiful male lead like prince from a fairy tale, a second lead who would do anything for your affection. These stories were mostly set in the real world, even if they didn't make sense sometimes, I could make excuses because I loved the idea of shojo so much more than disliking the flaws.

While a lot of my friends watch anime religiously, I'm more of a casual fan (which is really a nightmare to otakus, who expect you to know every single canon, fanon, and side canon that has ever existed). I remember my first encounter with the show was equally as casual. My friend explained to me it's general concept while waiting in line for my badge at ACEN 2017. “It's about superheroes! There's this girl who is literally a frog! An ostentatious personification of America! When people cosplay this other character they wear a green zentai suit because she's supposed to be invisible and that's funny!”

Fresh off the tails of One Punch Man, which came out in 2015, I thought it was the same concept and I rolled my eyes. I knew that anime followed trends, like most things in the world: one year psychic-mecha anime was what everyone wanted to do and the next, post apocalyptic themes were all the rage. So I thought My Hero Academia was just another One Punch Man, a self-referential, satirical comedy about heroes who knew how ridiculous their own genre was. I'd seen it once and wasn't really interested in seeing it again.

My second encounter with My Hero was a bit more personal. It was 2019 and I was taking my eight-year-old cousin to her first anime convention ever. Her family has always been a little more conservative, being Jehovah's Witnesses and living in one of the most right wing cities in Mid Michigan... and I was thrilled when she confessed to me that she enjoyed shonen-ai, that her mom had bought her a complete set of Sailor Moon manga, and that she wanted to borrow my own personal manga collection for reading. There was only a four month turn around, but I made her a janky cosplay and drove her to Kalamazoo for one day of their local convention, Dokidokon, wherein she pointed out someone cosplaying her favorite character, Shoto Todoroki from My Hero Academia.

At this point I had the base knowledge that my friend had given me at ACEN two years prior, but I just couldn't follow what my cousin was saying. After she shyly asked for a picture with the cosplayer, she explained to me why she shipped this character with that character and why that other character was a jerk... I couldn't understand any of it. And I realized that I had missed something much more important than hopping on the fanwagon of one of the greatest anime of its time... I'd missed an opportunity to connect further with my little cousin, someone who was just beginning to sprout seeds of her own ideas and her own interests, separate from her religiously zealous mother and her perpetually aloof father. I had missed a chance to truly enjoy her happiness, to witness her excitement when she saw her favorite characters pop out of the television screen and manifest themselves before her, alive and in the flesh... and just as heroic as their two dimensional counterparts.

That fall, I watched the first episode of My Hero Academia on my morning elliptical workout and my life was changed.

I mentioned before that one of the reasons I have a difficult time connecting with the shonen genre is the fantastical worlds that I cannot relate to. For instance, I can apply logic to the world of Naruto in my head, but it never seems real like it could be real to me. I always find myself questioning social structure, in-world history, and the story's depiction of the human condition. There's always a nagging voice in my head that refutes all of these pretend worlds in shonen... but My Hero is set in a world not unlike our own. In fact, aside from his green hair, the main character seemed like someone I might have known in middle school: a small, meek nerd type who is always scribbling something in his journal, always knew more than he was letting on... someone you wanted as a friend, whether you realized it or not. Izuku Midoriya as a character is as close to the shojo trope of a wallflower main lead as you could get. When we meet him, he's quirkless and is often bullied for by his childhood frienemy, Katsuki Bakugou. He's kinda squirrely, kinda spazzy, but feels like a grounded character because his golden heart is his most defining attribute. Midoriya has no illusions about what he is. He knows he's weak. He knows that people look down on him. But he is just… good. His goodness is infallible and his goodness rings true in everything he does, including when he risks his life to save said bully in episode two.

Conversely, while Midoriya is full of impressionistic verve, Bakugou turns the tables on the typical second lead shonen stereotype because he's not some edgelord that wants revenge for his slaughtered family. He actually has both parents at home and lives in a nice house and neighborhood. He doesn't have some kind of revenge fantasy playing in his head on his journey to become the best hero... he's just a fucking dick. A dick with a chip on his shoulder because his whole life people have told him that he's the better than his peers... and when Midoriya proves to Bakugou that natural talent isn't everything, he must grapple with the idea that world wasn't everything he thought it was.

Midoriya doesn't automatically become a cool kid after attaining his quirk from his idol, All Might, either. He doesn't stop being socially awkward. Midoriya still nerds out when it comes to All Might and he still takes copious notes on every hero he encounters, his classmates or otherwise. Midoriya has a goal but he doesn't have a grand plan. There's no shortcut to the end, only day after day of hard work and determination and figuring shit out on his own. Since he is the protagonist, we see the reasoning behind everything he does and this fact grounds the world of My Hero Academia for me. We see Midoriya fail and win and fail again, but we never stop rooting for him because we know he is smarter and more capable than his awkwardness allows him to show the world.

We follow Midoriya during some of the darkest times of his life, including when he learns that he would never develop a quirk. What hurt him more than the doctor delivering this news was his mother's fervent apologies rather than words of encouragement. Because even without a quirk, Midoriya could have done anything he wanted to, had he had the support of his family. In shonen anime the parents are usually convenient plot devices or they are dead. In My Hero, though, Midoriya has a close and communicative relationship with his mother. One of the more powerful scenes involving Inko Midoriya is when she refuses to let Midoriya go back to his dream school despite his protests. She explains that, first and foremost, she is his mother and her duty is to keep him safe. When I see this scene I always choke up because this is how humans act and I don't think I've seen it in another shonen before. I hear the common argument, “Well, he's training to become a hero. He's gonna get hurt.” as a justification of why Inko should be fine with Midoriya's broken bones. And while logistically that may be true, we know that most parents wouldn't feel that way. It makes sense as a narrative, given what we know about Midoriya and Inko's relationship.

Something I also love about this series is that every character has a fail stop, a logical reason why they aren't as OP as possible: if Todoroki uses his right side too much he gets frostbite and if he abuses his left he gets burned. If Ururaka overexerts her Zero Gravity, she gets motion sickness. Even All Might, Midoriya's mentor and the strongest hero in the world™, cannot be in his hero form for more than three hours a day. Every character must learn to recognize and live with their shortcomings, because even heroes need to find their place in the universe... and rely on those who fill the empty spaces around them. Because this show, despite it's taglines and ultimate moves, thrives on the logic of balance, of give and take accepting that no one can go at it completely alone, I realized that it was nothing like the aforementioned anime. It was so much more.

Like my friend told me three years ago, on a surface My Hero Academia is about superheroes. It's about capes and costumes and training montages and redemption arcs and all the things that we nerds love... But beneath the surface, My Hero Academia is about recognizing your own power. Izuku Midoriya isn't a hero because he inherited All Might's quirk. He's a hero because, to the very marrow in his bones, he does what is right. Izuku strives to be better than his own self doubt and the world telling him he's not good enough, even though most times he ends up crying his eyes out. He embodies the will to succeed that we all have within us when we find our passions, whether it be beginning your fitness journey with some anime on the elliptical, bagging that nine-to-five job, or something more substantial, like training, despite the odds, to become a hero who saves people with a smile on his face.