My Hero Academia S1E2: “What It Takes to Be a Hero”

The second and currently last commissioned episode of MHA, though more than one of you has indicated that they might order more in the future.


This episode starts with more grainy old footage of All-Might doing heroic things, and four-year-old Deku fanboying at the TV screen. This leads into a completely redundant (though thankfully brief) montage of the disappointments and humiliations he's suffered since, until we catch back up to the present with him and All-Might on the rooftop. He asks All-Might if someone like himself who lacks a quirk can become a hero like him, and All-Might turns around and...starts to think about his answer.

That's actually the last thing I expected him to do. Was all geared up for either some inspiration-but-useless platitudes, some actionable "it's a longshot but if you do X and Y" advice, or a soul-crushing "no." The fact that All-Might actually stops to consider this novel problem for a while before answering suggests that he's both smarter and more humble than he usually comes across.

However, before he can complete his thought, All-Might gets hit by a flash of crimson energy.

Deku somehow fails to notice the burst of light and cloud of smoke that just surrounded All-Might while he's looking at the floor and whining about how much it sucks to not have a quirk and yadda yadda. When he finally looks back up, the smoke has mostly cleared, and All-Might looks like this:

Somebody hit him with a de-powering ray and forced him into his unimpressive natural form? Or he just ran out of juice and needs to wait for his quirk to charge up again? Anyway, Deku freaks out, and the forgettable intro rolls. Afterward, we see that the plastic bottle that has Gooboy stuffed into it has somehow fallen into a random alley. My guess is that either it got dislodged from All-Might's pouch when Deku grabbed him during takeoff, or it fell off the edge of the building when All-Might transformed and his clothes all went slack around his much smaller frame. Either way, Katsuki, Crabbe, and Goyle come strolling along the alley, and Katsuki kicks the bottle against a nearby post, breaking it open (I guess it just had one hit point left after the falling damage). Goyle suggests going to find some "prey" to cheer Katsuki up after this afternoon, Katsuki tells him that he really can't afford to get in trouble right now, and then Goopy attacks!

So, despite having gotten away from All-Might, Goopy is still looking for a person to possess. And it seems that he can both tell what quirks people have at a glance (Katsuki did burn a random coke can in his hand a second ago, but that's not exactly what I'd call an impressive display on its own) and use those quirks while puppetting their bodies.

Why was this guy opportunistically looting stores? He seems to belong to a much higher tier of villainy, in both attitude and abilities.

Episode title card. Then we're back on the office building roof, where Deku is freaking out in disbelief that All-Might is "a fake." Seriously, Deku? Seriously? Many if not most of the hero-level quirks we've seen so far (Bowsette, Big Angry Guy, Tree Guy Who Should Be The One Named Deku, etc) have at least an element of shapeshifting to them. How does All-Might being the same way make him a "fake" if they aren't?

All-Might is understandably irritated by this kid who dragged him back to earth after being rescued now dissing him like this at an embarrassing moment. However, he keeps his cool, and just tells Deku to please not talk about this, even if it's just through unverifiable blog text. All-Might still has the same deep, manly superhero voice as before, which is lol. Also, he bleeds out the mouth a little when he first starts talking, which is less lol and more worrying.

Once Deku has calmed down and stopped being a little shit, All-Might shows him a nasty battle scar normally hidden under his shirt.

Five years ago, All-Might was wounded by a villain with the tryhard moniker of Toxic Chainsaw. Though victorious, All-Might lost a lung and much of his upper digestive tract, and only survived because of multiple in-depth surgeries and organ replacements. He's wasted away since then, and can only maintain his hero form for about three hours per day now. He's kept this knowledge away from the public, because he knows that he's seen as the perfect example of a hero in both powers and character, and that his weakness would deal a serious morale blow to other heroes and to the public's faith in them.

Admirable, but shortsighted. Was he planning to live forever before this happened? He should have tried to make himself less of a load-bearing-personality all along, not doubled down on it. I suspect there's much more selfish pride involved in how he's been handling this than he consciously realizes.

Anyway, part of his reason for explaining all this to Deku is to show him that being a superhero is not nearly as much fun as it might look, and that there's a reason that only people with very formidable quirks can do it. If Deku wants to help protect people from villains, he should go into a support role. Heroes need mundane cops to herd people away from danger, arrest beaten villains, and handle the many low-powered troublemakers so that the heroes can concentrate on more dire threats. Those might not get as much media attention, but they're a valuable part of the heroes' system, and outnumber the actual heroes many times over.

Good advice. Harsh, but helpful and honest. All-Might may be a flawed individual, but he's still a pretty damned good one on balance. Deku kinda tears up at being told this, which I suppose is to be expected. All-Might then descends the stairs into the building's top floor so he can get on the elevator, leaving Deku to sulk for as long as he needs to before heading home himself. However, before he can descend far, All-Might notices that his bottle of Goopy is missing, and Deku sees smoke rising from behind some nearby buildings.

Cut to ground zero, where Goopy is thrashing around in the middle of a burning, collapsing alleyway in the shopping district, and people are running for their lives.

Not sure what's going on here, exactly? I thought Goopy wanted to keep a low profile?

Oh, I see. As the heroic trio we saw at the start of the previous episode arrive on the seen, we see that Katsuki is still struggling from within Goopy's mass, using explosive fire blasts to keep him out of his orifices. He's losing ground, since the fire and shockwaves only seem to be temporarily dispersing part of Goopy's mass, but it's still buying him a lot of time. And, if his quirk is indeed responsible for the scenic destruction, then Katsuki really is impressively powerful. Goopy is thrilled about this; he thinks that with a host like Katsuki at his disposal, he can potentially get revenge on All-Might.

Death Arms, Backdraft, and Treeboi are surprisingly ineffective here. I'd have thought that Backdraft with his waterbending quirk would be perfect for this situation, but apparently not. Maybe I misunderstood his power set? His costume has a fire hydrant motif, and he weaves ribbons of what looks like either water or concentrated air (which, as we've seen, is VERY effective against Goopy), but maybe it's something else. Anyway, with Katsuki's fireblasts going off all over the place, it's hard for them to get close, and they can't just pelt the villain with ranged attacks without also hitting the struggling civilian in his grasp.

All-Might hurries to the scene, but he's still in his withered natural form, and he can't move very fast. Probably trying to recharge a few minutes worth of quirk power for the battle itself. Bowsette also closes in, but it turns out her giant form isn't actually adjustable, and there's not enough room for her to use it in that alleyway.

Backdraft works to contain the flames (it IS water, then. Can he just not spray it with enough pressure to hurt Goopy?) and Treeboi and Death Arms do their best to evacuate civilians from the burning area, but nobody can take the offensive. They just try to keep the situation contained and call for a hero with a more suitable quirk to be sent over ASAP.

All-Might finally reaches the scene, and sees that the situation is due to his own inattentiveness. He hangs his head and self-recriminates while trying to muster the strength for another transformation. And, shortly thereafter, Deku reaches the scene as well, and similarly self-recriminates for (likely) having been the cause of All-Might dropping the bottle. That shame and regret intensifies massively when he sees that there's a kid around his own age being slowly killed by Goopy. Deku feels both weak and ashamed upon hearing that the victim has been struggling for several minutes whereas Deku was dying in just seconds, and even MORE guilty for having caused such prolonged suffering. Several other onlookers talk about how Goopy was seen fleeing All-Might just a couple of hours ago, which leads to everyone panicking over what the hell happened to the hero if he was here chasing this monster just that recently. That makes both Deku AND All-Might feel even worse.

This continues for much longer than it needed to to get the point across. It was a fairly potent scene, for a show like this one, but then it just keeps cutting back and forth between Deku and All-Might berating themselves in the same words over and over again for several minutes, and by the end I was just tapping my toes waiting for the story to continue. Definitely padding for length and spending as little money on it as possible. Then, finally, Deku sprints out past the police and heroes and races toward Goopy and his victim, weaving around the fires and debris as he charges like a madman. He has no idea what he's going to do, or how. He didn't even know he was going to advance until he was doing it, with nary a thought as to why.

He reaches them, throws his backpack at Goopy, and starts clawing as much slime away from Katsuki's face as he can. It makes basically no difference at all, but he keeps on doing it. Even when he recognizes the victim as Katsuki, and even when Katsuki is extremely unenthusiastic to recognize him in turn. Goopy is just sort of bemused and at most mildly irritated at the attempted interloper. When he finally makes to swat Deku away though, All-Might transforms and lunges himself, interposing himself and easily tanking the blow.

All-Might says that he was being a hypocrite, warning Deku about the lethality of heroing and then standing back out of fear for his life himself. Then, he retaliates against Goopy with a "Detroit Smash" that creates an updraft cyclone so powerful that Goopy is torn into a cloud of droplets and dispersed into the atmosphere.

Katsuki doesn't get thrown a hundred feet in the air himself and die in the landing. Somehow. A miracle that seems all the more miraculous once it turns out that that updraft was so powerful it actually fucked up the local air pressure dynamics and triggered a sudden rainstorm.

All-Might must have very, very precise aim with that airbending hax.

So, Deku gets told off by the local heroes for risking himself for no reason like that, while Katsuki is lauded as the heroic young boy who used his great quirk to fend off a really monstrous villain for ten minutes until All-Might could arrive. Unfortunate, but...well, it's not actually wrong, on either count. Katsuki is hardly smug about this, though. In fact, he looks absolutely miserable and enraged even while local heroes are giving him apprenticeship offers.

I'm guessing the problem is that "requires rescue" is simply NOT what he wanted as the start to his public career, no matter how much of a badass it made him look like. Having Deku even TRY to rescue him, even ineffectually, just adds insult to injury.

Later that afternoon, while Deku acknowledges that it really is time he just faced reality and stopped obsessing over heroes, he's approached by Katsuki. Katsuki just kinda babbles pitifully at him about how he's not a hero, he'll never be a hero, he wasn't ever asking for his help, etc etc. Then he...practically RUNS away almost as if he's afraid of Deku.

Deku just kinda semi-smirks at this. Katsuki is breaking down, and for really silly and pathetic reasons, which must be satisfying for Deku to see. Just moments later, Deku is then approached by All-Might again, with an apology.

Looking at the biographies of the greatest and most laudable heroes, All-Might says, there's a recurring pattern. During their youths, all of them had incidents where they saw someone in danger and came to the rescue - successfully or otherwise - before they even realized what they were doing. That deep-seated, reflexive prosociality and selflessness is rare, and it's the core of proper heroism.

Deku might not have a quirk, but he is exactly the right type of person. For all that his longtime fantasies of being a superhero were about power, fame, and recognition, he's actually a much better person than just that when push comes to shove.

Deku narrates to us that THIS was what he wanted his mother to say, all those years ago. Which is...obvious? And also sort of childish, given her knowledge at the time? This feels like it's trying to be a big lynchpin moment that the rest of the episode hangs on, but it's too obvious, simplistic, and self-centered to really work as such.

Also, before the episode closes, an older Deku's voiceover explains that he did, in fact, become the world's most admired hero when he grew up.

And that's the end.


It's...okay. The show's statements about what heroism actually is, and its harsh satire of society's fetishization of the aesthetics of those virtues while being blind to their substance, are pretty good. All-Might is a pretty memorable and likable example of the paragon superhero played straight that still has room for plenty of nuance. But other than that, it's pretty generic shonen. Generic underdog main character. Generic bully/rival character. Generic City of Capes that isn't quiiiiite absurd enough for the enjoyable WTF factor to outshine the questionable worldbuilding and politics the way that One Punch Man, The Tick, or Empowered do. It's got some unusually good aspects, but also a lot of so-so ones.

So, based on these two episodes I'd say that it's a fine show, but not a particularly memorable one.