Major spoilers for My Hero Academia

First of all, I don't mean to claim that My Hero Academia had the best ending of any anime, ever. That's generally undecided among anime fans, with some saying it's Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and others saying it's Your Lie in April. While I'm inclined to side with the latter, I present My Hero Academia as a contender.

To recap the first of eight seasons, Midoriya Izuku is a high school boy without a Quirk (or, super power, though not all Quirks are super) who dreams of becoming a super hero. He idolises All Might, who is basically Superman to their world. A villain does something in public, All Might swoops in, saves the day, smiles, and encourages the public. He's everybody's favourite person. His classmate, Bakugou Katsuki, is a bully whose Quirk lets him create explosions. Bakugou has a big ego, and at one point in middle school, tells Midoriya the best thing he could do would be to jump off the roof of the school. Oof.

During a chance encounter in the first episode, Bakugou is attacked by a giant slime monster, and All Might doesn't arrive. Nobody knows what to do. Midoriya happens upon the scene, and despite having no power, he rushes in to help, with no plan, only the will to be a hero. All Might does show up and saves both of them, and whisks Midoriya off to safety. It's then revealed that All Might was grievously injured and can only do hero work a few hours a day. Midoriya asks if he could be a hero without a Quirk, and All Might not only tells him that he can, but also that he was not born with his power, it can in fact be passed, and so he does exactly that. He gives Midoriya his power, and now Midoriya possesses the strongest super power (or at least, one of them), and is then enrolled in a high school geared around heroics.

Through the rest of the season, we meet several other hero students. There's a girl who can make other things float, and it makes her sick. There's also a guy who can use both fire and ice freely, but because the fire came from his father, who he resents, he's reluctant to use it at first. (He later overcomes this.) Various other students have other powers. One girl is part frog, can crawl on walls, and has a 20m prehensile tongue. Another girl is permanently invisible — all you see is her clothes. Her hero outfit is literally just gloves and shoes, so she's basically naked, except you can't see her. (This is not explicit.) There's a guy with super speed. There's a guy whose hair grows sticky balls he can use to trap or annoy people. There's a guy who can turn his skin to stone. Floaty girl, Uraraka Ochaco, seems to have a crush on, or at the very least highly admires Midoriya, and seems to be the obvious love interest; however, the show never explores romance as the characters are constantly fighting for their lives against the villains, who are equally as interesting, and many of them are sympathetic characters.

In the fifth season, we learn that the main villain, Shigaraki Tomura, had a very tragic back story in which he accidentally murdered his entire family when his Quirk developed, which lets him vapourise any matter he comes in contact with with all five fingers of either hand. He kills his dog, his sister, his grandparents, and his mother before realising it's him doing it (he thinks it's a villain he's running from). His abusive father hits him, and he intentionally kills his father. During a fight, Midoriya catches a glimpse of this back story, and sets out to free the "child within". Author Horikoshi is a big Star Wars nerd, so the connection to Star Wars is pretty obvious (Luke wanting to save Vader).

Throughout the series, Bakugou goes from being an antagonist to a bit more sympathetic as we learn why he's a bully. He spends the next seven seasons after the first atoning for his past mistakes, and the ship emerges as an icon in the LGBTQ+ community. But again, the series isn't romantic at all. And of course, Japan is a very conservative country, and very anti-LGBTQ+. It's unknown if Horikoshi even planned for the ship to be so polarising. I'd say probably not.

By the end of the series, there is no romance whatsoever. The book series ended a year or two before the animated series. The LGBTQ+ community in the fandom took Midoriya not claiming a female partner as a silent acceptance of their ship, and they ran with it. Anti-LGBTQ+ protesters began making death threats to the author, saying that by not ending the series with Midoriya and Uraraka (or any other girl) getting together, he was condoning the gay relationship with Bakugou. Horikoshi released a Japanese-exclusive chapter featuring the classmates meeting up, and Midoriya and Uraraka sharing a moment that ended in a handshake. Not a hug, not a kiss. But, the bigots felt they won, and redoubled their efforts to harass the LGBTQ+ community, pushing the narrative that M+F relationships are the only valid ones, and so on and so forth. The author kowtowing to bigotry ended the series on a sour note, and people began to walk away. (And let's be honest, the bigots were never really fans.)

But then the series got a third ending. And while it was only six minutes long, it may have saved the series's legacy.

So let's go back to child Shigaraki, for two reasons. First and foremost, Midoriya was never able to save him. It ended with Shigaraki demanding Midoriya pass along a message to his best friend, telling him he never turned and stayed villain. (Kind of a mirror to Return of the Jedi's "Tell your sister you were right.") But child Shigaraki was a mirror to Midoriya in many ways. They dressed the same, and they both wanted to be heroes. They both needed a hero to save them. One got one, the other did not.

The fourth season actually introduced a very similar character. We meet a little girl, Eri, who is being tortured by the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) (though, they're called something else) because her Quirk, similar to Shigaraki's, can unmake a person. It's called "Rewind" and it's a more gradual process than Shigaraki's "Decay," but the villains want to use Eri's blood to make bullets that erase Quirks, so only they have them. So they torture Eri to bleed her out. Keep in mind, this is a 7 year old. They're basically trying to make her into a villain, in a sense.

At this point it becomes relevant that Midoriya's inherited Quirk has a huge downside. He has super strength, but it breaks his body the more he uses it. He can hit hard, but he'll break his hand knocking you out. And he's willing to do this to save his friends, and he's constantly being told that he may fight his last fight before he gets his hero license.

Through a chance encounter, Midoriya encounters Eri, and ultimately saves her from the villains. But when he learns what her power is, he realises she is now his ultimate partner, as he can deal extraordinary damage ("infinite percent!") and she can "rewind" the damage he does, in real time. With Eri riding on his back (think Hugh and Diana from the recent game Pragmata), he becomes the most powerful Quirk user in the world. However — and this is hugely important, because the villains have been abusing her to exploit her power — he kneels down and asks her for her consent to use her power along with his. Of course she agrees, they defeat the main villain of the season (not Shigaraki, he gets his much later), and the school does a festival which culminates in the class putting on a rock concert for the community.

Here's the concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgwUenaQqlM

During the concert, Eri smiles for what is probably the first time in her life. (3:30 in the video linked above.) There's a LOT more going on; despite the long post, I am really just scratching the surface of this show. In the books, there wasn't even a song. It was covered, but there were no lyrics given. It was just "they put on a show". In the show, however, they actually did a song. Not only that, they got American singer Chrissy Costanza (now of the band Against the Current) to sing the song. They released a music video for the song (linked above). The song is a big deal among fans, and if the show got canceled after the fourth season, this would have been it, the villains are the villains, but this little girl who could have become a villain, was saved and we got a cool rock show at the end. But it didn't.

So it's the following, fifth season, in which we learn Shigaraki's back story, and we get Midoriya's commitment to save child Shigaraki. Except, he's already done that, but the show doesn't acknowledge it. Saving one little girl was the highlight of the previous season, but Eri's not a threat, she gets adopted by the teacher and everybody loves her, good for her, there's not that much more to her story. She still shows up, and it's always a good time when she does, but there's just not that much to do with her.

The new ending doesn't solve the problem with the biogts who infiltrated the fandom and made everybody mad. But, it does shift the entire focus of the show from the villain Midoriya defeated, to the girl Midoriya saved. The new ending has Eri, now a teenager herself, play a cover of the song in public. Midoriya, his former classmates and teachers, and others are invited to a surprise pop-up event, they don't really know what's going on, but then Eri shows up with a couple other teenagers, and they blast out a cover of that song. Again, the production company got an American singer, Myka Morton, to perform the cover for the anime's 10th anniversary.

Here's the video of a much older Eri performing the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa3tnlMebHI

Here is the full song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSFWpB3Mf3c

(Note that if you use any legitimate streaming service, like Apple Music or Spotify, you can also find the songs up there.)

So in the end, it doesn't matter who you shipped Midoriya with. I always thought that said more about the person doing the shipping than the actual characters. For a girl, I shipped him with Asui, the frog girl, because they both have green hair, and green is my favourite colour. For a guy, I shipped him with Todoroki, the fire and ice guy, because of how he convinces him that the fire is part of him and not his father, and for him to realise his full potential. I never had a problem with either the Bakugou or Uraraka shippers. I think both ships are fine, but they're also kinda obvious? Relationships aren't always with the ones you expect to get together. Quite often, couples have a funny story about how they met. "Destined" love doesn't happen much outside of classic Disney movies, and even not so much in modern ones. Usually, the prince turns out to be a jerk and the princess learns value in friendship or family or something like that. What matters is the people Midoriya saved, because that's what it was about. Oh, and if you ship anyone, consider Eri and Kota. Kota was a little boy in the second or third season who hated heroes because they were never around when bad things happened to those around him. Midoriya saves him and becomes his hero, and while he's never really seen with Eri, he does show up at her pop-up concert. Is he there because Midoriya is there? Or is there something more? It's left open, because My Hero Academia was never about romance, it was about doing your best.

Usually shounen series — that is to say, series aimed at young boys that feature heroic young men — don't really end well. The big bad is defeated. The good guys won. That happened here, too, but My Hero Academia absolutely stuck the landing. For me, saving Eri when she could have been saved, as well as the empathy for Shigaraki, is the definition of the series. And while Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood was a genre-defining shounen series that stuck the landing ~15 years before, and Your Lie in April might have the best ending of any anime ever, My Hero Academia did pretty well with what they had to work with.

My Hero Academia is partially streaming on Netflix. They don't have all of it. Crunchyroll should have the whole thing, if you want to watch it legally. If not, well, I think you know where to go (makes cat noises in Japanese).

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Curious if anyone here watched it and what you thought of it.