Boku no Hero Academia 6th Season

It's no secret to my friends that I have liked this show and have been a fan for a while. This is a show that I've pretty much grown with out of high school and into college, so trust me when I say that this season is a true a return to form. After two seasons of inconsistency and arcs that may have felt tedious at best we have reached a season that I think not only meets some earlier entries but can exceed them. This is a return to the emotions, the themes, and the moments of the early MHA that I watched duringmy last few years in high school. What I think MHA had been missing for a while was introspection, the intricate and deeper moments that made up a lot of the earlier seasons. Whether it was All Might's final stand and realizing that he was passing on his will to his successor or Deku and Bakugo's fight embroiled in the complicated childhood trauma shared between them. While we saw flashes of that in the fourth and fifth season, I really don't think that other than Endeavor's moment in the fourth season we get that deep, even relatable introspection for a character. But we do here, not only is both halves of the season filled with reflection and introspection from multiple characters, but there are character moments that have been building up for seasons now that finally hit their stride and it's amazing to see. There's actual internal conflict for Deku that results in possibly one of my favorite episodes of the season yet. There's so much I can talk about, but I do not want to spoil the plot or any other intracies. Instead I want to let anyone who reads this, MHA is back, it's back and it's finally as good as it was before.

We continue where we left off in the last season, with the raid on the Nomu hospital. But then so much shit happens during the battle, the whole series is basically different by the time the battle. It is one bombshell, after another during the hospital raid. The sheer number of plot twists and drops this season is amazing. Look, I won’t pretend that the plot is the best thing in the world or anything. But the way it is executed in this anime makes all the difference. And how the hospital raid arc ended was probably a huge shock to anime onlies. I absolutely lovethis new grittier style the anime went with for the 2nd half. About the characters, We separate out a bit from our usual Class A characters in My Hero Academia Season 6. Only the essential characters from Class A get the spotlight. In this season, the spotlight mainly goes to Dabi, Shigaraki, All for One, Endeavor, Todoroki, and Deku. Between the first and second halves, Deku’s character development skyrockets. Hawks too is such a standout this season. Then, of course, we have the whole Todoroki family backstory bomb. The character writing in this season was definitely better than in the previous seasons. Even side characters that appear for only a few episodes, like Lady Nagant, get some excellent character writing. The current situation in MHA has brought attention to the moral grayness of hero society, which has quietly lurked in the series for ages. That grayness has finally become front-and-center, impossible to ignore. Nowhere is that complicated reality more apparent than in the previously unsulliable protagonist, Izuku Midoriya. The tone of My Hero Academia and Deku himself has completely transformed. Someone who hasn’t checked in since the early seasons might find the series and its central character unrecognizable. The second part of the season which is my favorite has focused on the fallout from the huge battle in the first part. Not only were heroes unable to mitigate the destruction and loss of life, but mega-antagonist All For One orchestrated a mass jailbreak on the same day. Villains are now on the loose all across Japan, plunging the country into a state of violence, lawlessness, and chaos. Worse still, there is simply not enough manpower to address the direness of the situation. and that’s before a ton of heroes began resigning, simply because they’re human beings who can only take so much pressure. Neither the show nor the other pro heroes judge those who have resigned. Understandably, public sentiment toward heroes is at an all-time low. Many citizens are even trying to take protection into their own hands with vigilante justice. In doing so, they often just make a bad situation worse with their lack of expertise and add more collateral damage. And in the middle of all of this, there’s our boy Izuku. As the current holder of One For All, Deku is the person All For One is after. And he’s currently reading like a mirror to how dark the world of MHA has become. In order to try to protect people, Izuku left UA and is working with All Might and an elite squadron of heroes. However, the pressure of believing he’s the cause of the current dire situation is exacerbated by All For One’s sardonic willingness to kill whoever is getting to Izuku. What happens when you place a ton of pressure on yourself, and then start blaming and judging yourself harshly? Yup—depression, withdrawal, isolation, twisting of your inner monologue. Deku’s “I’m fine” attitude has taken a grim turn. He doesn’t care about taking care of himself. He has started to distance himself from all his allies, even All Might. As long as he gets to All For One, he doesn’t care how people see him. He even now sees his friends in opposition to his goals. To sum up, the anime has taken a huge step in almost every aspect from animation and plot and character development.

If you told me nearly seven years ago when My Hero Academia first aired that it would end up dropping into a secondary popularity tier among anime fans, below something like Attack on Titan or even Bleach, I would’ve told you to leave me the hell alone because I didn’t like anime and didn’t care at all about My Hero Academia. But, if you told me the same thing four years ago when I first watched mha, I would’ve called you an overly cynical edgelord; an embittered asshole desperately tearing down earnestly crafted pop media pieces as some pretentious measure to justify their supercilious ass taste.Of course, this anime snob in my head turned out to be largely true. That isn’t to say My Hero Academia has lost its cultural weight entirely, as it continues to enjoy endless success in Japan with a cavalcade of spin-offs, financially successful filler movies, merchandise tie-ins, and 85 million copies sold to boot. I’ve probably seen at least a dozen random civilians (mostly kids) wearing heroaca t-shirts out in the wild since the pandemic and I live in the fucking boonies. This, among anything else, speaks to mha’s continued resonance among audiences over the years. However, among the anime fandom at large “acamania” has ostensibly waned substantially since I finished season 3 in the Summer of 2019. Let alone before I became interested in anime which I thankfully never had to experience. And it isn’t hard to tell why if you’ve had eyes on the anime fandom as a whole over the last few mha releases. After a series of middling adaptations of arcs that were controversial even during their initial publication, it’s no wonder that My Hero Academia couldn’t retain its luster forever. Frankly, it exposes one of the key flaws in the “seasonal” model of anime production that’s become dubiously more popular over the last half decade. If the material no longer resonates with its core audience due to recurrent weak seasons, then fandom passion will rapidly dwindle. Anime fans are probably more forgiving than they should be when it comes to art, but it becomes quickly apparent when they stop giving a fuck about something. I honestly couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the biggest English-speaking anime content creator, when asked by another major content creator if it was worth catching up to heroaca from episode 89, straight bold-faced said fucking “no.” Again, don’t blame him. Season 5 was straight garbo I didn’t even consider because I never planned on watching the anime or touching the property ever again after season 4. The only reason I returned to mha after the labyrinthine, drawn-out slog that was the Overhaul arc, was because a friend of mine in early 2021 showed me a picture of Deku when images of the Dark Hero Arc were leaked online. And as jaded as I was, it seemed like they were finally picking back up the thematic thrill line Stain left spiraled on the ground, and I liked Stain. So, seven months later, during a standard biannual weeb library trip while I had some time to kill, I impulsively grabbed the volume from where the Pro Hero Arc began and started reading. I discovered two things: 1. Horikoshi’s art is genuinely amazing, some of the best talent Jump has at the moment. And 2. despite the Joint Training arc being one of the most dull, anemic, and tedious fucking things I’ve ever read, Horikoshi can actually write a story with interesting ideas and decent characters. The MVA Arc is awesome and even though the producers of season 5 did their best to pound that arc into the ground, I felt like it was going to be impossible to adapt it well anyway outside of a few amazing sakuga moments (which didn’t materialize at the frequency I expected). I came back to season 6 specifically because there were key moments of the war arc that, if adapted well, were going to be as cool, engaging, or emotional as they were in the manga. Any adaptation worth their salt tries to do this, and with a studio that has the man power and prestige to excel, especially without a filler movie this year, I expected just that. Unfortunately, that isn’t what I got. I don’t want to sound like an uncompromising pontifical manga fanboy here, but the My Hero Academia TV show will never look as good as it did pre-season 4. When the flashbacks in your shonen anime are at a consistently higher visual echelon than the show you’re currently watching that’s a fucking problem. Whenever there was content from seasons one or two, I was thinking “damn, this season generally looks aight, but this shit seems excellent,” and I just shouldn’t. I remember—like the naïve young lad I was, being so excited to witness a scene from the anime where a character bifurcates a huge woodland complex with his quirk, only to be sorely disappointed when it was truncated into a single still frame. I can’t even begin to tell you the migraines I got with all of the panning shots with speed lines over blobby ass crowds “running around.” There are some decent cuts, but there’s this consistent impression of absolutely amateurish direction and utilization of talent. Seiji Mizushima, the director of Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), said in a relatively recent interview that the key role of a director in anime is to distribute the resources properly and efficiently to both meet deadlines and create a well-made product. Despite not making a filler movie, this show doesn’t fucking have that. Cuts that SHOULD look amazing were uninspiring at best, and other way less important scenes received tender love and care without proper justification. I don’t need every anime to be this Mob Psycho-esque perfectly crafted masterpiece where everything is drawn on one’s. I just want the good shit to look good, and for the rest of it to not flounder around as a poorly composited and shittily art directed mess. I do want to mention that the whole season isn’t terrible visually. In fact, there’s some segments that look pretty solid or are at the very least visually engaging. It’s just, as both a viewer of prior seasons and aS a MaNgA rEaDeR, I expected more from the available staff. It doesn’t hurt that I find the ost horribly melodramatic at times, and it completely rips me out of scenes I would normally give a shit about. It makes emotional moments so manipulative that it’s almost lame? There are pages of the manga, same arcs mind you, where I was feeling sincerely emotional, because Horikoshi’s art and paneling can be that legitimately powerful. The main reason I’m giving this show a 5 is because the material is still commendable with some flaws. The War Arc is a great action piece with lots of moving parts, fun twists, and legitimate narrative consequences (sort of, with one major asspull). I think Horikoshi learned from his mistakes during his previous action arcs and tried to pace this one in a way that felt more balanced and thus more riveting overall. Though, the Dark Hero Arc is rockier, and I can understand why this would be the point the manga fans start having issues again, because I kind of feel like I was lied to. This arc FEELS rushed, as if there were storyboards created for two or three extra chapters that got stolen by his editor and thrown into the recycling bin. The intention of the arc and what I think Horikoshi wanted to do with Deku was probably cucked by both hackneyed editorial incompetence, and publication cowardice, because whenever My Hero does anything edgy or cool it’s a whole ass issue. From my understanding, a lot of this has to do with the fact that whenever villainy is depicted in Jump as too sympathetic, a lot Jump’s associative partners like video game companies get kind of pissy. Sure, Chainsaw Man does exist, but Fujimoto is shielded by reinforced concrete thanks to his editor, and mha is trying to reach far broader of an audience than Chainsaw Man ever dreamed of having. Additionally, it doesn’t lean into the appeal of mha in Japan at all. A lot of casual Japanese audiences just kind of want a high school super hero power fantasy manga, and not the comparatively interesting meta-commentary that Horikoshi wants to write. This tension leads to things like the MVA arc getting screwed in season 5, and Dark Hero getting screwed during its publication. Of all the times to not have fucking filler, WHY NOW? This ultimately amounts to the emotional beats of the arc containing little impact, and the overall plot evolving in less imaginative ways. It’s a shame too, I was looking forward to seeing Deku, comprehensively burdened by his own ideals, hitting ideological walls and self-destructing despite his insane power increase. The arc ends up being underwhelming to watch because of its aforementioned problems despite its own potential. Recently, I got sick with both the flu and COVID in the same week, and while I was in my various fever states straining to hold my body together after having it internally beaten with a leather belt, mha was the only show I could actually pay attention to since everything else was “too thinky for me.” Even so, I pondered to myself, “Am I too old for shonen anime adaptations?” I know I’m not too old for shonen, because I like earnest camp affair like Fist of the North Star, and shows like Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter are among my favorites. Hell, I LIKE the My Hero Academia manga as a whole despite the constant issues that’s plagued its narrative pacing in the last two years. But, when I was half-awake—half-dead, watching—gobsmacked, Bakugo garrulously repeating exposition the audience should already know in the midst of a fight between Deku and Shiguraki that mostly amounted to speed line infused panning shots; only to then have one of the most important and cathartic emotional climaxes of the series be depicted as a FUCKING STILL FRAME, I considered that maybe for shonen anime, I was. Have a nice day.

This season of MHA is one of the best. With very little filler and very intentional thrilling sequences, this anime is the epitome of shonen. The character development of all characters really gets put to the test in this season, and all of the positives and negatives that occur feel really heavy and important. Usually, it's easy to like other characters besides the main character in any anime, and that's especially true of MHA, but in this season, Deku really shines. That's not to say the cohesiveness of Class 1-A isn't also put on display! This season really has everything covered! The writers of this showdo a very good job at humanizing the villains, making much of the conflicts in this series very stressful. It also becomes clear in this season (if it wasn't clear before) that this series takes place in a dark and scary world, not a happy and positive one. It's a dark and gritty anime that really displays that David and Goliath type of victory.

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