My Hero Academia

The Burden of a Borrowed Power

I honestly can’t pinpoint the exact moment I got tired of superheroes. Somewhere between the twentieth Marvel movie and the tenth franchise reboot, a cape stopped feeling magical and started feeling like a warning label for impending corporate synergy. The beats were always the same. The giant CGI climax was waiting. So when *My Hero Academia* showed up in 2016—an anime about teenagers learning to be costumed heroes—I instinctively recoiled. It sounded like one more loud, shiny machine built to sell the same old feeling back to me.



I was wrong, at least mostly. Over 170 episodes, finally bringing its eighth season to a close, Kohei Horikoshi’s series managed something a lot of Western superhero giants have forgotten: it made power feel burdensome. The setup is simple enough. In a world where 80 percent of people are born with a "Quirk"—which might mean explosive combat ability or just having an absurdly brick-shaped head—Izuku "Deku" Midoriya arrives with nothing. When All Might passes him a world-breaking power, the show never frames it as uncomplicated wish fulfillment. It’s a bodily hazard. In those early arcs, every big punch comes with the ugly crunch of his own bones giving way. The sound design makes you recoil. You don’t pump your fist. You flinch.

Horikoshi has talked openly about Sam Raimi’s 2002 *Spider-Man* as a key influence, especially the sense that Peter Parker stayed stubbornly human inside the costume. You can feel that all over this show. (He even said he first tried to write a brash, Luffy-like lead before realizing, "There's no Luffy in me.") What he landed on instead was a painfully nervous kid trying to function inside a society that has turned heroism into procedure, branding, and bureaucracy. *My Hero Academia* keeps circling back to how administratively exhausting it is to save people.



A huge amount of that emotional architecture lives in Daiki Yamashita’s voice work. What he’s doing with Deku goes way beyond standard anime yelling. Yamashita reportedly had to eat enormous meals just to handle the physical demands of recording, but the real brilliance isn’t in the volume. It’s in the muttering. When Deku hunches over his notebook, Yamashita lets the voice collapse into this frantic, breathy hum. It sounds like a kid trying, with all he has, to reason himself into deserving a place in the world.

The show isn’t immune to bloat, though. Not even close. The middle stretch buckles under an ensemble so huge that some characters vanish for what feels like years. The pacing can resemble a traffic pileup: long patches of explanation, then a sudden violent burst of action. More than once I’ve found myself rolling my eyes while characters narrate themes the animation had already communicated perfectly well.



Then it delivers something like All Might versus All For One in season three and reminds you why you stuck around. The sequence peels away the polished superhero sheen. All Might’s impossible musculature literally steams off him, leaving a skeletal man coughing blood and trying to keep the world upright for one last second. The camera stays low, refusing to mythologize him. He isn’t framed as a god. He’s framed as a wrecked fighter still throwing punches on pure will. The hush before the last blow lands feels less like comic-book spectacle than two already-broken boxers refusing to fall.

By the time season eight forces these students to face the cracked society they’re inheriting, the show has stopped arguing for bigger punches and started arguing for empathy. Its villains aren’t distant aliens or faceless tyrants. They’re abused people, discarded people, young people who got dropped through the gaps of a culture obsessed with tidy heroic stories. *My Hero Academia* keeps asking what remains when the figures you worship fail you. Whether that earnestness works for you is another matter, but I can’t deny how bruised and human the series feels when it’s at its best.