‘My Hero Academia’ Carried the Shonen Anime Torch to a Triumphant Finish

When I first came across My Hero Academia, it was entirely by happenstance in Weekly Shonen Jump 2014 Issue 42. Back when the magazine was still being published in the States, it operated much like the Shonen Jump app, featuring new chapters of the company’s big series alongside up-and-comers to give them some shine.

At the time (and arguably forever), the “big three” were Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece, all published alongside each other. While My Hero Academia never aspired to usher in a new era for a supposed shonen big three, it quickly became the torchbearer for a new generation of manga when Bleach and Naruto ended, because no other series felt like it’d fit the bill to fill that giant chasm.

But for all I knew at the time, the series was quaint, and its crybaby hero was pretty wimpy. Every time he was tasked with digging in deep and using his powers to do mundane things like throw a baseball really far, it would backfire and harm him—a pressure that, in retrospect, perfectly embodies the high hopes fans placed on a creator who finally broke big, going from being a diehard One Piece fan to seeing his work alongside Eiichiro Oda’s in the same magazine.

Kohei Horikoshi, years before becoming a mangaka and starting My Hero Academia, sent in some One Piece fan art that he drew to the SBS. I love Oda’s response to it all pic.twitter.com/bhe6NvsY8l

— Skippy (@SkippyTheRobot) April 18, 2018

Still, fans in the west trusted My Hero Academia to be the first of a new generation of series that drank from the same well as past greats and had to carry that water forward long before there were clear battle lines about who those inheritors would be.

Now, a decade later, My Hero Academia‘s manga and anime have come to an end. While manga readers were clowning on the series as the butt of anime jokes, with its one too many tournament arc seasons early on making it feel like a series never quite ready to break out of familiar shonen starting blocks—and whose ending was one where its hero “peaked in high school” —the manga and the anime both actually showcase a triumphant ending worth celebrating. An ending in which, like its hero, the series stuck to its guns, inherited quirks from its shonen forebears, and forged its own brilliant path for newer series to follow in its wake.

My Hero Academia, created by Kohei Horikoshi and animated by Studio Bones, arrived at the height of Marvel’s superhero fandom and asked: what if anime had its own universe that was just as vast and all-encompassing?

In it, the world, which could’ve been light-years ahead in space travel, moved in a different direction when metahumans began to spring up on Earth. Instead of simply calling them superpowers, they were cleverly called quirks. And a great majority of people had them, which led to a golden age of superhero organizations and formal schools to raise generations of heroes. Enter Izuku Midoriya: a quirkless high schooler who dreams of one day becoming a hero. He gets his chance when All Might, their universe’s Superman, imparts his power, One For All, to him and trains him to become the world’s greatest hero.

At first glance, My Hero Academia stood out as a series with a clear reverence for western superhero comics and the promise of something worthwhile to see unfold as another shonen tale. But rather than cosplaying as legally distinct comic-book icons, My Hero Academia sought to elevate the comic-book mythos to the next level with surprisingly deep world-building that neither comics nor manga dared to interrogate.

In this diverse cast—a staple of shonen that often has too many cool designs for creators to know what to do with narratively—everyone got to play and weren’t just seat-fillers. The poignant themes both celebrated and interrogated the revelry and corruption of populist heroism, all while supplying villains who weren’t blanket evil without a cause, like its one-punch colleagues.

My Hero Academia had its own “Zabuza arc” early on—echoing Naruto’s universally celebrated thematic anchor—through the Spawn‑inspired villain Stain. His sharp critique, that superheroes were drifting into influencer culture rather than embodying the genuine article, became the series’ first major hurdle and a challenge it grappled with until its final moments.

Whereas Marvel often undercuts villains with incisive critiques by turning them murder‑happy, obfuscating their point, and resetting the status quo with a hollow “we’ve got to do better,” My Hero Academia refused that shortcut. Its world evolved not only through the perseverance of its heroes but also because of its villains who forced society to confront uncomfortable truths—shoving an unignorable plank into its eye and shifting focus away from the celebrity of herodom toward community service, counseling programs, and support for children stigmatized by villainous quirks.

While My Hero Academia also fell into the pitfalls of all shonen with one too many back-to-back tournament arcs—putting its world-building on the back burner for a round robin of its popular characters for a couple of seasons—it came back around before it got too tired to present the build-up toward anime’s first Avengers-level finale. Season eight was the Avengers: Endgame to season seven’s Infinity War. There, Midoriya and friends would square off against villains all orchestrated by All For One, a villain who served as the antithesis of the show’s whole core theme. With production house Bones behind it, it pulled out all the stops with awe-inspiring sakuga that weren’t just flourishes but also an emotional catharsis for hard-earned victories.

Unbeknownst to viewers over the years, they were watching a new kind of myth-making with anime’s own Superman: a hero embodying kindness and grace as the ultimate superpower, giving chase and a second chance to those who hide that they want to be saved but can’t say it. Whenever the fanfare of Yûki Hayashi’s “You Say Run” would play, it would trigger misty eyes from audiences from around the world who caught themselves getting choked up as its heroes persevered and won the day.

All the while, My Hero Academia even made the traditionally non-canon spectacle of movies canon within its own universe, making things feel more realized as a far-reaching, interconnected story rather than disjointed one-offs without any sense of cohesion.

Metatextually, My Hero Academia struck a chord with fans of the English dub thanks to Christopher Sabat—best known as the voice of Dragon Ball Z’s Vegeta—portraying All Might. It was a casting choice that immediately drew attention, continuing Sabat’s tradition of lending his voice to mentor figures in other shonen works like Black Clover. Alongside him, a roster of Funimation‑era veterans—Caitlin Glass, Monica Rial, Justin Cook, Mike McFarland, Colleen Clinkenbeard, and Patrick Seitz—were woven into the cast, giving longtime fans a sense of familiarity and prestige.

At the same time, the series carved out space for newer talents such as Justin Briner, Clifford Chapin, David Matranga, Zeno Robinson, and Anairis Quinones, allowing them to shine and establish themselves as the voices of a new generation of anime.

Even when the series felt like it’d dipped a bit into another trapping by making Midoriya too overpowered, it didn’t turn him into progeny of legends like Naruto Uzumaki, a child of prophecy like One Piece’s Monkey D. Luffy, or a petri dish of every extraordinary supernatural being like Bleach’s Ichigo Kurosaki. My Hero Academia instead stuck to its thematic guns. It continued to forge a path forward as a series that both celebrated heroism and interrogated the populism it proliferated, leading to villains. And it did so brilliantly from start to finish. 

All threads converge on Izuku Midoriya, aka Deku. Beginning as a Rock Lee–like figure stripped of advantage, he inherits All Might’s gift yet must endure every stumble and scar before earning the mantle of the world’s greatest hero, just as his pilot narration foretold. Still, the series, like Deku, was mocked in the manga sphere for not fitting the type of hero that fandoms have come to expect. Memes portray him as a past-his-prime loser working at McDonald’s, a claim that feels patently false when set against the series’ tight ending.

Even when given the gift to become a hero again, thanks to his classmates, he never treated his life as a teacher as a demerit. From the beginning, Midoriya was a character who, despite not being born with a quirk, cherished the quirks of others even when they thought they were useless. He saw them as beautiful and helped them realize the full potential of their gifts.

For over a decade, fans have watched Deku—once a cruel nickname for “useless,” reclaimed as a rallying cry of “you can do it”—struggle to inhabit a destiny far larger than himself. From the archetypal “guy in the chair” to an unshakable emblem of perseverance, his journey culminated in a final, selfless dash to console a friend, embodying the spirit of never giving up. In growing before the eyes of anime and manga fans, he became not only a hero within his world but an inspiration in ours—proof that kindness and effort, however small, matter. And through him, My Hero Academia distilled everything that makes shonen timeless.

Throughout its run, the series never grew complacent or flattened its themes into a one‑size‑fits‑all approach. Truly reprehensible figures like Endeavor—the new number one hero, cruel to his family in his relentless pursuit of greatness—were dragged through the mud before taking his first steps toward redemption. Even Bakugo, who seemed irredeemable from the start after telling Midoriya he’d be better off jumping off the roof than chasing hero work, received thoughtful development across eight seasons, ultimately surpassing the titular hero in popularity.

That achievement reflects Horikoshi’s commitment to building characters beyond a simple rule‑of‑cool factor, shaping them into larger‑than‑life yet deeply relatable figures fans genuinely want to root for. When redemption arcs arrive, the series forces its characters through a true reckoning—holding them accountable rather than offering a “forgive everyone” resolution a la Naruto.

My Hero Academia was as much a celebration as it was a deconstruction of superheroes—never mean‑spirited or edgy like The Boys or Invincible, yet never toothless either. The series could turn bleak without collapsing into outright dourness, always keeping the flames of hope alive even as its world grew more perilous than its innocuous beginnings suggested. Its finale brought everything full circle: the revelation that Deku’s borrowed power, granted for the courage of a true hero, was finite, yet his spirit remained boundless.

He continued to be a force for good, inspiring the next generation not through spectacle but as a teacher—lifting others as he had once been lifted, and doing so unconditionally. Perhaps fittingly, the final episode of such a pivotal anime character coincided with the moment real‑life superheroes like John Cena stepped away from wrestling, underscoring the story’s resonance in honoring its heroes while passing the torch.

In an era where many anime lose their luster by chasing spectacle and awe in action without laying the narrative groundwork that makes those clashes truly cathartic, My Hero Academia stood apart. It understood the assignment and executed its themes better than most, carrying the heavy burden of where shonen storytelling could go next without buckling under the pressure or sanding down its edges to be safer. And the world is all the better for how My Hero Academia went plus ultra, carrying the shonen torch into a new generation of anime.

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