The Patreon Letter - 2nd June, 2018

Hi everyone, Em writing today. I've been kicking around some thoughts about My Hero Academia lately, and decided here was a perfectly good place to put them. Please enjoy. There will be some thematic spoilers up through season 2, but nothing plot-specific if you're particularly sensitive. So, let's begin.

Having recently finished My Hero Academia season 2, I was thinking about what exactly made it so special to me. Superheroes aren't exactly a genre I love, having had my ups and downs with cape comics for the last decade. I dip my toe in, something awful happens to characters I love or a beloved writer gets screwed over, and I bounce out again. This isn't uncommon, but it's frustrating as you'd think writing these characters shouldn't exactly be rocket science by now.

So I was resistant to My Hero Academia for a long time. Shonen tropes and superhero tropes in one show? How could that be anything but the final form of young masculine garbage? Everyone lost their minds over it, but I remember when everyone lost their minds over Attack on Titan, and we all remember how that adventure turned out.

But finally giving it a chance, and watching the first two seasons, I am struck by just how well pulling those two tropes together manages to create a world that sidesteps some of the trickier parts of superhero fiction and replaces them with an earnestness that you rarely see expressed in the capes genre when dealing with legacy characters. All Might is in many ways just anime Superman, but the way the world reacts to him and the way it lets you buy into that is more profound that Superman has been outside of one or two comics in literal decades. 

When All Might says everything is okay because he is here, you believe. You're Midoriya and Todoroki as kids watching someone become an ethos to believe in, filling their hearts to bursting. 

One of the most profound ways in which this show manages to become something better than its influences is during the tournament arc in season 2. There are your usual hijinks of mismatches and impressive fights, but the emotional core of the arc is Midoriya's showdown with Todoroki. Todoroki has fire and ice abilities, but has repressed his fire side because it's a quirk he got from his abusive father. Midoriya realizes that Todoroki is aspiring to become the best out of spite, and that it's eating him up inside, and takes it upon himself to push them both to their absolute limit to force Todoroki to confront the power within in him loathes. 

By doing so, he makes Todoroki confront what he is and realize that it's not the end of the world or some great shame to be his best self, even if it is built out of such negative origins. Todoroki, realizing that his fire isn't evil, that he's not evil, is put on the road to healing the trauma he was carrying around. He even acknowledges this, though he wonders why Midoriya would push himself so far in getting Todoroki to this point. It cost him the match and a large amount of pain and even the full use of his hand potentially permanently—why go so far when it isn't necessary?

The answer the show gives is that to leap in when you don't have to, when you are urged only by your gut need to assist and nothing else, is the very essence of heroism. And within that, a simple but profound statement about effort and drive (superpowered or not) becomes the core thesis of the show. 

It's easy in superhero fiction to write a world in which the privileged few are enshrined with the ability to act, and thus they must act in every situation. It's the sort of objectivist nightmare that plagues modern Superman and Batman movies, though it creeps up in the message of The Incredibles and Civil War, among others. Heroes must act because they are heroes, and their actions are right and good because nobody else can make them, thus the definition of a right act folds in on itself as a triumph of the individual over the people, of one man's will over the inertia of society. 

My Hero Academia, by contrast, offers a vision of a world where everyone has powers. There's nothing special about this fact, and more useful or powerful abilities don't necessarily translate into being given a greater authority to act. There are powerful people who enact very little change (Gran Torino), or people with marginally useful powers who are standouts of the impulse to become a hero (Froppy, or the support class students). 

Instead, the extent to which someone is fit to be a hero stems from the intentions and drive that pushes them. Midoriya isn't a hero because he's the newest recipient of All For One, destined to be superpowered beyond all other people. I imagine even in the future when he's at the height of his powers, he will not be the strongest hero by such a measure. He's a hero because when he was just a kid he leapt into danger to save Bakugo from a slime monster. 

He's a hero because he literally tore his body apart to show Todoroki that quirks don't make the hero, the hero uses the quirks to help shape the world into its best self. 

He's a hero because being a hero is acting when nobody asks for it, and there may be no actual gain from it, but it's still the right thing to do. And in a world where Hero is a career people can pursue and the world needs as much as it needs Accountants and Electricians, the kernel of heroism that arises from a person's need to help and better those around them still means more than any cape or superpower. My Hero Academia works because it remembers that distinction, and celebrates the heroic over Heroism as a culture, a thing we could all benefit to remember and carry with us as much as young Deku did every day watching All Might help people and wishing to one day be able to do the same.

Until next time,

Em