My Hero Academia / Tropes A to H

Tropes A to H | Tropes I to Z

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My Hero Academia provides examples of the following tropes:

#-B

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Technology in this world is a bit more advanced than our own; hologram projectors are small and cheap enough to be handed out with magazines à la CD-ROM demos and in an omake, Mt. Lady mentions 8K television.^note 8K TVs do exist, but are very, very expensive. The most powerful TVs affordable for consumers are 4K. This is eventually subverted as culturally, it's played straight, but only because Midoriya notes at one point that when Quirks first appeared, human culture was thrown into such an uproar that culture and technology regressed. He says that if Quirks hadn't appeared, humans would be taking interstellar holidays at that point in history. It's also confirmed to have been at least eight or nine generations since Quirks first developed, which is an unspecified amount of time in the future from the present day.
• Abuse Discretion Shot: While it's made clear early on that Endeavor is physically abusing his family, he is never shown at the moment when he is hitting his children. Instead, we are mostly shown the aftermath of those moments, such as Toya struggling on the floor, or Natsuo and Fuyumi huddled together listening in to the screaming.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Endeavor only sees Shoto as a tool to surpass All Might and nothing more, as shown by the way he doesn't even refer to Shoto as a person, but "it". In a flashback, he put Shoto through Training from Hell, which caused the child to vomit, and isolated him from his other children. Ironically, Shoto's burn mark didn't come from his father, but from his mother, though Shoto still pins the blame on his father for driving his mother to that level of mental instability. After All Might retires, however, he starts to realize how badly he has treated his family and is trying to make amends. Worse, Shoto may not even be the worst victim of Endeavor's children. He's treated his second son, Natsuo, like a failure, and doesn't seem to care much about his only daughter, Fuyumi. And then there's his oldest son, Toya, who was his original successor, but it's implied his much stronger Fire Quirk came with his mother's weakness to hot temperatures (her Quirk is Ice) and when forced to learn a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, it's believed Toya died. Later on, however, Dabi reveals he's actually Toya, who then unleashes the details of his past on television to destroy Endeavor's reputation.
  • Subverted with Rei Todoroki. She was a kind woman who encouraged Shoto to pursue his own dreams but snapped due to a combination of the frustration for being used and the fact her children were beginning to look like Endeavor, which resulted in her dumping boiling water on Shoto's face in a Moment of Weakness. It's implied that she was physically and/or mentally abused by Endeavor as well, given his intense treatment of Shoto and her fear of her own husband. She gets better later on after being hospitalized and isolated from Endeavor, and Shoto reconciles with her after the Sports Festival when he begins to realize that he wasn't the cause of her mental break.
  • Zigzagged with Mitsuki Bakugo. Her response to getting her son, Katsuki, back after he is rescued from villains is to repeatedly hit him in the head and tell him it's his own fault for being too weak. However, other than that instance and being rough with him, it's made clear that she's otherwise a loving parent. The combination of his general natural skill (including a powerful Quirk) he got a ton of praise as a kid, leading to a huge ego to go along with a short temper, it's implied she's just strict or, trying to be strict, to curb his explosive tendencies (which, seeing as he's a reflection of her temper-wise, obviously doesn't work). It's also a bit slapstick, so it's uncertain if it's even physical abuse.
  • Overhaul pretends to be Eri's father just for the sake of corralling her more easily. He makes her think she's a weapon being used and born to destroy people. He drains her blood to use its properties to make Quirk nullifying bullets. When she runs out of blood to give, he uses his Quirk to break her down and reset her back to normal. Given what's seen of people who have been broken down, it cannot have been a nice experience at all, and he confirms later that his broken and reformed victims still feel the pain of being split apart. Mirio is completely horrified when he learns about it.
  • Eri's mother didn't want anything with her after Eri's developing Quirk accidentally erased her father from existence. As such, Eri's mother left her in the care of her grandfather, the former Boss of the Shie Hassaikai, after telling Eri that she's cursed.
  • Shigaraki's father, Kotaro, would harshly punish him when the former played heroes due to the latter's abandonment issues of his mother, Nana Shimura, left him in foster care due to hero work. Kotaro would even lock Shigaraki outside of the house in the backyard. Shigaraki's mother and maternal grandparents were genuinely kind to him but they were too meek to stand up to Kotaro. When Kotaro discovered that his children had entered his office and saw his picture of his mother and him as a young boy, he angrily confronted them. Hana, who was scared, lied to her father by saying that it was all Shigaraki's (back then as Tenko's) idea. This caused Kotaro to physically hit Shigaraki in front of the entire family while no one did anything to stop him. After his wife and her parents confronted him, Kotaro began to question himself on his behavior toward his son. However, when Shigaraki's Quirk finally appeared and accidentally killed his dog, sister, mother, and grandparents, Kotaro tried to defend himself from his son by using a garden tool and hitting the boy. But it was then that Shigaraki had enough of his father's strict and abusive rules, to which Shigaraki responded by killing his father. Shigaraki even said that he enjoyed doing it.
• Academy of Adventure: U.A., a school that trains those who wish to be superheroes. Not only that, but they have a Hero Support course for Gadgeteer Geniuses, a Hero Management course for those who work behind the scenes managing and advertising heroes, and a General Education course for those who don't make it into the hero course or are expelled from it.
• Accidental Celebrity:
  • While the Sports Festival is indeed supposed to promote young heroes to the various agencies, in Izuku's case he fails to gather any hero's attention (as he only received one internship offer) and instead becomes famous to the public as the "bone breaker kid". This comes up a few times over the course of the manga, such as Gentle Criminal calling him that upon recognizing him.
  • Implied to be the case with Mirio during his first Sports Festival, as his Permation quirk resulted in him flashing the public on national television.
  • The "Can't You See" kid, a random bystander who encouraged everyone to support Endeavor on live TV while he was fighting the High End Nomu, is mentioned to become an internet sensation immediately afterwards.
• Accomplice by Inaction:
  • In the aftermath of the Hideout Raid Arc, Aizawa states that were it not for All Might's retirement, he would not just have expelled Midoriya, Kirishima, Ida, Yaoyorozu, and Todoroki for their actions during said raid, but every single student in Class 1-A, save those who were Locked Out of the Loop, simply for knowing about it and doing nothing to stop it.
  • In the same episode, Tsuyu had a lot of regrets when realizing her usual Brutal Honesty about the situation (going so far as to compare the students on the mission to villains) was too harsh, and doing nothing at all hurt even worse. She avoids them until she finds the courage to tearfully apologize and set things straight.
  • In the Internship Arc, Midoriya and Mirio, while out on patrol, happen upon Eri, a young girl in bandages, at which point Overhaul, the yakuza boss their hero agency is investigating, comes to retrieve her, saying that she's his daughter. Midoriya realizes that something's up, as does Mirio, but they follow Sir Nighteye's orders not to interfere, albeit reluctantly in Midoriya's case, letting Overhaul leave with Eri. It later turns out that Overhaul has been submitting Eri to horrific abuse, using her body to create bullets capable of destroying people's Quirks. Midoriya and Mirio are both horrified over what they allowed to happen and swear to save Eri.
• Action Girl: Despite the cast focusing primarily on males, women have as much a chance to not only be born with strong quirks as men but to be action heroines/villainesses as well.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • The anime generally spends more time on fights and occasionally adapts volume extras and omakes from the manga, such as Mt. Lady and Midnight's Cat Fight.
  • In the anime, All Might's fight with Nomu takes a few minutes, consisting of All Might throwing the Nomu up and down and destroying the ground and the ceiling with his punches.
  • Due to working with tight deadlines in Shonen Jump, a lot of fights that aren't very noteworthy in the U.A. Sports Festival Arc get little or no attention in the manga, with some being skipped entirely. This is particularly egregious in the case of Yaoyorozu's ill-fated bout with Tokoyami, which actually messes her up a bit emotionally, and Horikoshi chose to reduce it to a flashback. Season 2 of the anime wasn't tied down by such limitations and needed to fill up its allotted time, so all the minimized fights get the attention they truly deserve.
  • The Field Training Arc in the manga focuses primarily on Midoriya, Ida, and Todoroki's internships, leaving the others to cameos. The anime, however, devotes an entire episode to the internships of Uraraka, Bakugo, Kirishima, and Tetsutetsu, Yaoyorozu and Kendo, Jiro, and Tsuyu, showing events that were only referenced in manga such as Tsuyu stopping a group of stowaways, and Uraraka's training under Gunhead.
  • In the Final Exams Arc, each student vs. teacher match goes one team at a time while the others wait and prepare strategies, unlike in the manga where all ten fights are ongoing at the same time. This gives the earlier matches a bigger disadvantage, but it does allow the anime to focus on each match instead of flipping around like the manga does. Thus, fights that happen offscreen in the manga, such as Ida/Ojiro vs. Power Loader, are shown. As a result, Midoriya doesn't watch the others after his match; instead, he is joined by Uraraka. Also, the anime devotes a bit more time to show how the students prepare for the written exam.
  • The Forest Training Camp Arc has a few pages of Todoroki, Ida, Bakugo, and Midoriya fighting against some of Pixie-Bob's rock creatures. The anime adaptation has a four-minute long sequence of the fight, showcasing each member of Class 1-A using their Quirks to fight them.
  • Episodes 54 and 55 expand upon the Provisional Hero License Exam Arc by showing what students other than Midoriya and Bakugo are doing while Class 1-A are separated: Todoroki battles a group of ninjas, of which the manga only shows the aftermath, whereas Yaoyorozu, Jiro, Tsuyu, and Shoji get an anime-exclusive sequence where they deal with a coordinated attack by an all-girls school and Yaoyorozu, in particular, gets the chance to shine.
• Adopting the Abused: Eri was horribly abused by the villain Overhaul as part of his plan to create bullets embedded with her Quirk factor to depower superheroes and put the yakuza back on the map. By the end of the arc, Eri is taken in by U.A. for her protection and given a loving and safe environment where she's not exploited or ostracized for her powerful but highly dangerous Quirk. She's also supervised by Aizawa so she can practice using her Quirk to heal small animals while he uses his Quirk to turn her powers off if she loses control.
• Adventures in Comaland: In the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, Midoriya is seen comatose, and All Might can feel he's talking to his predecessors in a Dream Sequence where he still cannot appear completely, half of his body being shrouded in a dark mist.
• After the End: When Quirks first appeared, it resulted in a Class 1 collapse of society. The flashbacks imply civilization was roughly modern day level before this. This only ended when heroes rose to end the chaos that resulted, and modern day is at least 100 years after that with society having rebuilt, as All For One is a first generation Quirk user.
• An Aesop:
  • The U.A. Sports Festival gives a rather interesting and unconventional one: if you're in a competition, it's important to give it your all even if you have a massive advantage over the rest of the contenders. There are two reasons for this: the first is that if you underestimate your enemies it becomes easier for them to completely sweep you off your feet, as shown by Monoma and Bakugo both suffering humiliating defeats at the hands of others because they disregarded them as a threat. Monoma learns nothing from the experience, but Bakugo learns to judge others by their own merits, and as such secures a win from Uraraka after she lays a pretty devastating trap for him. The second is that if you don't give it your all, you're insulting your competitors and disrespecting their efforts. Todoroki holds back on his devastating potential and half of his Quirk, which results in a lot of people coming to dislike him. Despite having his own reasons to do so, Midoriya eventually reaches out to him and convinces him that the Quirk passed down by his parents (especially his father) is his own.
  • Later on in the series, which again relates to Todoroki, there is a much more contentious and realistic one: when an abusive family member decides on their own to become a kinder person (whether the change is genuine or not), the people closest to them will have their own opinions on how they feel about the change, and it's important to acknowledge the validity of each of them. When Endeavor starts to mellow out and take steps towards being a better husband and father to his wife and children, each member has differing reactions, from This Is Unforgivable! (Natsuo) to Turn the Other Cheek (Fuyumi, and Rei to an extent), to Forgiven, but Not Forgotten (Shoto). All of them are considered valid reactions.
  • The final saga of the manga heavily relies on the Aesop that everyone in society has a responsibility and a role to play in its improvement.
  • Chapters 377 and 378 make a case for the rehabilitation and care of criminals. As Naomasa mentions, "a crime is a crime, but it's not always a lost cause". Being willing to give Gentle, La Brava, and Lady Nagant a second chance turns out to be crucial during the final fight.
• Anchored Teleportation: All For One can summon and send individuals to any location, so long as someone he has formed a connection with is at the end point.
• The Alcatraz: Tartarus, the maximum security prison for the worst criminals. It's so heavily defended that the Big Bad remarks a frontal assault would be 'quite difficult'.
• All Genes Are Codominant: Quirk inheritance sort of works this way. A child of parents with Quirks can get a Quirk that's a combination of both (such as Bakugo, whose mother secretes glycerin and whose father secretes nitric acid, thus, explosion powers for him, and Todoroki, whose father had fire powers and whose mother had ice powers, thus, he gets both). Other times, the child can get one or neither of the parents' Quirks. There are also rare mutations where a child has a completely different Quirk from their family.
• All There in the Manual: The bonus pages for the manga volumes sometimes reveal interesting details about characters or the setting, especially in the character profile pages. One page also explains how the law against unlicensed Quirk usage is enforced and says that people generally don't get in trouble unless they cause harm to others. For example, Inko Midoriya could use her telekinetic Quirk to retrieve her cell phone without too many people complaining.
• Alone with the Psycho: This happens with Midoriya just before the training camp kicks off when he encounters Shigaraki at the mall. He's only saved due to the timely arrival of Uraraka.
• Alternate Catchphrase Inflection: All Might always heralds his arrival with an uplifting and triumphant "I am here!". When he shows up at USJ to rescue 1-A from the League of Villains, he still says it, but in a low, intimidating tone because he's angry with the League for attacking his students.
• Alternate Universe: The second popularity poll shows its participants in fantasy clothing, which was later expanded into an RPG Mechanics 'Verse through merchandise. This scenario is given a better look in the third ED of the anime, which shows all the characters adventuring in that world.
• Always in Class One: With only two classes of new students in the Hero Department, it was roughly a 50-50 shot. Despite this, everyone important still ended up being placed in Class 1-A. Putting all the strong Quirked kids in the same class makes sense, since their teacher can erase them if they get out of hand, and Class 1-A is being targeted since Midoriya is in it, so everyone in the class ends up being roped into importance. However, this still stands for him, since there's no reason Aizawa's class couldn't have been Class 1-B instead. This becomes a plot point in the endgame, as All For One was so fixated on 1-A that 1-B slipped under his radar. As such, Monoma is a major part of their plan to trap him, as All For One never bothered to give 1-B much thought and thus his Quirk wasn't factored into his plan.
• Ambiguous Time Period: It's hard to tell when exactly the series takes place, other than it being in the future. Though the level of technological advancement shown seems to place the setting 20 Minutes into the Future, it's been stated that most scientific research slowed down in order to focus more on the study of Quirks, meaning that the actual year could be centuries ahead of ours.
• Ambiguously Human: Several characters, ranging from major to background ones, are this thanks to the diversity of Quirks. This was deconstructed in the past, as the definition of "human" became very loose and humanity in general devolved into chaos, halting progress considerably.
• Anger Born of Worry: Upon finding out that Deku is in a coma after the Paranormal Liberation War arc, Bakugo's immediate response is declaring that he'll "Kill him if he dies"
• Animal Motif:
  • Certain people possess quirks that not only make them various types of beastly, but grant them abilities and traits that matches what they might represent.
    • Mirko, for example, has a Rabbit quirk so, while she just has rabbit features such as ears and possibly a tail, most of her speed, jumping, and kicking power come from her legs. Her symbol and moveset all derive from "Luna", based on the Moon Rabbit folklore.
    • Gang Orca's Orcanis quirk makes him close to an anthropomorphic Orca and grants him sonar abilities. He is also more effective in water than on land.
  • Other heroes and teams, on the other hand, don't have animal-centric quirks, but they do setup their theme based on certain animals.
    • The Wild Wild Pussycats all have cat names as their aliases and cat-style outfits, but their quirks are unique from any feline.
• Animation Bump: Basically, if you see Yutaka Nakamura's name listed on an episode ahead of time, you can expect this to happen. Examples included:
  • The finale of the fight between Midoriya and Todoroki gets a rather noticeable animation quality hike. It's rather breathtaking.
  • Bakugo blasting off to escape the League of Villains and take Kirishima's hand has a large spike in quality – if not for the fact that such movements are impossible, it could be mistaken for Rotoscoping.
  • Midoriya and Bakugo's fight in Season 3 really ramped up the animation to the same level as Midoriya vs. Todoroki.
  • Perhaps not Nakamura, but most, if not all, of Mirio's fighting scenes. It's usually in the standard slow-motion illustrated style, but even then the tiniest details are included, to the point that you can see Eri both flinch and widen her eyes in shock when he uses his Quirk to kick through her and she doesn't get hit.
  • When Midoriya uses Eri's Quirk to his advantage to go One For All: Infinite 100% against Overhaul. The result is absolutely stunning to watch.
  • Endeavor vs. Hood, especially the climax of the fight where Endeavor heads to the sky to use a Plus Ultra Prominence Burn.
• Animesque: Inverted. This is an anime that emulates Western superhero tropes.
• Anti-Hero: Deconstructed. Heroes are supposed to be beacons of hope for society, so even if someone is strong and capable of defeating villains, there will be issues if a huge jerkass becomes a hero. It's understandable that Endeavor has a large hatedom and only a select few of the characters believe in Bakugo's intent to become a hero.
• Anti-Regeneration: Endeavor defeats a Nomu with a "Super Regeneration" Quirk by making his flames hot enough to turn blue and carbonize the head off.
• Anti-Villain: Several major villains possess redeeming qualities and/or noble goals, to varying degrees. Prominent examples include "Hero Killer" Stain, Gentle Criminal and La Brava, and Tenko Shimura.
• Anyone Can Die: As shown in the Internship and Paranormal Liberation War Arcs, as rare as it is, even long-standing pro heroes (as well as recurring villains) can't escape death.
• Apathetic Teacher: Even while Midoriya is being attacked by Bakugo and surrounded by a Circle of Shame, his middle school teacher did nothing to try and stop the bullying in the first chapter. This is implied to be specific discrimination and turning a blind eye because he's Quirkless. Later arcs retroactively make them worse than what might have been intended, as Quirk usage would later be depicted as heavily regulated in Japan, to the point of needing to get a specific license. As such, the fact that no staff member at Aldera bothered to punish Bakugo for using his Quirk to essentially intimidate Midoriya comes as bizarre.
• Arc Villain: All For One and Tomura Shigaraki are the most prominent villains in the series, but some story arcs have their own antagonists:
  • The Entrance Exam, Quirk Apprehension Test, and Battle Trial Arcs all share Bakugo as this, despite not exactly being a villain, while the Sludge Villain counts only for the first chapter.
  • The USJ Arc gives us Tomura Shigaraki, the leader of the League of Villains, with the USJ Nomu acting as The Heavy.
  • The U.A. Sports Festival Arc has Shoto Todoroki, but only because of Endeavor being present to trigger him.
  • The Hero Killer Arc gives us the titular Hero Killer: Stain.
  • For the Final Exams Arc, it's technically U.A. and its teacher staff. Justified with this being a school setting, although some of them did go a bit too far.
  • For the Forest Training Camp Arc, there's the Vanguard Action Squad of the League of Villains, though Muscular in particular due to his story with Kota's parents.
  • For the Hideout Raid Arc, it's All For One, the mastermind behind the League of Villains.
  • For the Provisional Hero License Exam Arc, there's Gang Orca, who served as the main obstacle in the actual exam, and Inasa Yoarashi, the closest thing the arc had to an actual antagonist.
  • The Internship Arc gives us Overhaul, leader of the Shie Hassaikai.
  • The U.A. Cultural Festival Arc introduces Gentle Criminal and La Brava.
  • The Pro Hero Arc has the High-End Nomu, Hood.
  • The Joint Training Arc has Monoma, who isn't exactly a villain, but is the only one antagonistic towards Class 1-A.
  • The Meta Liberation Army Arc has the titular Meta Liberation Army, led by Re-Destro.
  • For the Endeavor Agency Arc there's Ending who's plan is to be killed by Endeavor.
  • For long Paranormal Liberation War Arc there's Paranormal Liberation Front, combination of Meta Liberation Army and League of Villains, though it's Shigaraki who takes the spotlight the most.
  • The Dark Hero Arc has Lady Nagant.
  • For the Star and Stripe Arc it's Shigaraki, who's body has been taken over by All For One.
  • The U.A. Traitor Arc has a Class 1-A member Yuga Aoyama.
  • The Final War arc has All For One and remains from Paranormal Liberation Front with Shigaraki, Dabi and Toga taking major roles.
• Arc Words:
  • Plus Ultra, U.A.'s motto.
  • "[X]: the Origin", whenever the narrative focuses on a particular U.A. student and their starting point in becoming a true hero. So far, this has been the case for Midoriya, Todoroki, and Bakugo. Endeavor also eventually gets his own "Starting Line" in Chapter 167. A darker example of this is given to Shigaraki during the Meta Liberation Army Arc. In fact, he actually gets two "Origin" chapters, one for him as Tenko Shimura where it shows the horrific circumstances surrounding his childhood and subsequent grooming by All For One, and one for him as Tomura Shigaraki where he finally begins to come into his own as the heir to All For One's criminal legacy.
    • In relation to that, a handful of Heroes and Villains occasionally tell themselves to remember their "Origin" or "where they started from", reminding themselves why they do what they do, and what is their end goal.
  • "Watch me" becomes a verbal motif for Endeavor, as it's used in scenes where he (or somebody related to him) wants them to witness their performance as a hero. At first it was used in egotistical contexts, but as time goes on Endeavor increasingly uses it to take full responsibility for his actions and become a true hero.
  • "This is the story of how I became the world's greatest hero": Midoriya's opening lines in Chapter 1, and utilized as this for the opening moments throughout the anime. Chapter 324 creates a Meaningful Echo to these words, changing this to "This is the story of how we all became the world's greatest heroes." It doubles as a heartwarming moment.
  • The Title Drop is used now and then (with "My" in My Hero Academia sometimes replaced with "Your", "Our", etc.) to emphasize that the hero school characters enroll in is not only a place to learn and grow to become a hero, but a home to connect with others. This plays an important part in the story when Uraraka stands up for a weary Midoriya, convincing a group of angry protesting evacuees that U.A. High is his home.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Ida is consumed by vengeful rage and hunts down Stain for crippling his brother, he vows to exact retribution upon the Hero Killer. Stain's response? He points at the injured hero behind him and says:
  Stain: Save that guy first.
• Arrested for Heroism:
  • Due to the highly regulated nature of Quirk usage, it's entirely possible to be arrested for using your Quirk to save someone's life or even to defend yourself from an attacking villain. Even heroes in training aren't exempt from this rule, since their teachers have to give them express permission to do so lest they face the legal consequences. The only other exception is if the students earn a provisional hero license to act independently, as Class 1-A and 1-B attempt to do after the Hideout Raid Arc. This leads to The Greatest Story Never Told after the Field Training Arc, since the police would legally have to punish Midoriya, Todoroki, and Ida for stopping Stain, even after they stopped him from murdering a pro hero. They were safe because there were no witnesses and agreed to let Endeavor take credit. Then after the Hideout Raid Arc, Aizawa threatens his entire class with expulsion when Midoriya, Ida, Todoroki, Kirishima, and Yaoyorozu interfered in an official hero operation to rescue Bakugo from the League of Villains. They were all safe because everyone was focused on All Might's retirement following his battle against All For One (they had to rebuild trust with the faculty, though). It gets to the point that Aizawa knowingly allows Midoriya to participate in a dangerous investigation because otherwise, he thinks Midoriya might go into the unofficial channels to be a Hero and eventually get himself arrested. If he's participating legally, at least he can do the right thing in the right way.
  • Turns out this happened to the villain Gentle. As a student, he tried to help someone and ended up interfering, since the hero bounced off one of the elastic air barriers Gentle created, and failed to get to the victim before he fell. His parents drowned in lawsuits and he would end up being kicked out after being expelled.
• Arrogant God vs. Raging Monster: All Might is renowned as the most powerful and charismatic hero in Japan, if not the world, to the point that everyone is absolutely convinced that things will be all right with him around. Even as his power wanes from his injury and giving One For All to Midoriya, virtually nothing can truly stop him aside from his time limit. The first thing shown in the story to give him a challenge is the mindless Nomu, a monstrous being engineered to fight him through a combination of Super-Strength and Super-Speed to match him blow-for-blow as well as a Healing Factor and shock absorption to No-Sell his attacks. Even then, All Might manages to win a hard-fought brawl that ends with the Nomu being punted out of a massive training facility the size of an amusement park.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Pro Hero Kamui Woods attempts to apprehend a villain for "assault, robbery, and illegal use of powers during rush hour traffic."
• Art Evolution: Season 1 has rather noticeably thin outlines around characters that leave them looking papery at times. By Season 2, however, the outlines are thicker and more on par with what is seen in the manga.
• Artistic License – Education: Aizawa's infamous (especially In-Universe) act of expelling an entire class because they weren't taking the Quirk Appreciation Test as seriously as he wanted them to, in their first day. While it's eventually revealed that he only got them officially expelled for a few days to Scare 'Em Straight and re-enlisted them right afterward, the fact still stands that Aizawa performed this action with zero red tape getting in the way and even now by the "current day" of the series, the administration of U.A. has not put any measures in place to prevent him from doing it again. Vigilantes implies that Aizawa sought out specific permission to do this. It's because he watched a friend die while on an internship in school and now wants to forcefully remove any student who doesn't seem to understand that they aren't invincible before they get hurt. The fact that he's allowed to do this at all is still pretty strange.
• Artistic License – Law: When All For One is locked in Tartarus, it is mentioned he wasn't given a trial and will not be getting one in the future and is talked about like it's a good thing.^note Granted, All For One is a Card-Carrying Villain who gleefully performs mass murder, human experimentation, and levels cities with a huge smile on his face, it's unlikely that any jury or judge would rule him not guilty anyway.
• Ascended Meme: Deku's shoes garnered popularity with the fandom after receiving a vote in the popularity poll. Later, Kota insisted on getting shoes that were red like Deku's.
• As You Know:
  • The recap at the start of the anime's second season is framed as a letter to Gran Torino but includes details about the mechanics of One For All that are both closely guarded secrets and information Gran Torino is already well aware of.
  • The Season 3 premiere has Aizawa and Vlad King recount the Quirks of Class 1-A, although this is information that both of them should already know, or at least be familiar with, given that they're both homeroom teachers. This is justified a bit since Vlad King is reviewing the Quirks for the class he doesn't teach to make sure he's got his info straight, and it's implied Aizawa did the same with Class 1-B beforehand.
• Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Sometimes, characters have distinguishing features that aren't effects of their Quirks. For example, somebody like Ashido having pink skin because of acid pigments counts as a Quirk side effect, so she's not an example of this, but somebody like Todoroki having red and white hair which is perfectly split in the middle is pretty much a big coincidence (not forgetting that there was a higher chance of him being born with only one of his parents' Quirks instead of both like he did, furthering the coincidence).
• Asshole Victim:
  • Played straight when the sludge villain attempts to hijack Bakugo's body, but since Bakugo had already spent the entire chapter up to that point being an unlikable Jerkass, it's more satisfying than horrifying.
  • Played for Laughs when Kota shoves resident pervert Mineta off the hot spring wall when he wanted to peek on the naked girls.
  • Played gruesomely straight when Shigaraki subjects Overhaul to a Fate Worse than Death where he severs his arms and strips him of his Quirk.
  • Invoked in Chapter 290, Dabi publicly exposes Endeavor's history of domestic abuse for the sake of creating the ultimate Hero. While there is a dosage of Laser-Guided Karma to this, it's painted in a more tragic light than usual, because Endeavor saw the error of his ways and was actively trying to make amends for them during the last couple of arcs..
• Author Appeal: Horikoshi really likes drawing hands— a lot of major characters have attention drawn to their hands either through their Quirks (such as Uraraka's hands having pads on their fingertips that are the catalyst for her anti-gravity Quirk, or Tsuyu's hands having odd proportions compared to the rest of her body) or their costumes (Hagakure's costume is literally a pair of hands, and Shigaraki's main defining trait is being covered in desiccated hands). His Author Avatar in Shonen Jump is even a pair of disembodied gloves.
• Award-Bait Song :Might+U from the 2nd movie, a vocal version of "You Say Run."
• Awesome Mc Cool Name: Hero names are intentionally designed to be this way. Their purpose for being "cool" is to give people a sense of hope to cling to and to tell the world they are kept safe by badasses while for villains they're Names to Run Away from Really Fast. This is zigzagged when it comes to hero students as you have Ingenium, Red Riot, and Dynamight together with the likes of Grape Juice, Cellophane, and Deku. Regarding Midoriya's, some of his classmates initially expressed concerns with it due to its rather demeaning meaning.
• Bad Guy Bar: The original base of the League of Villains is one of those, with Kurogiri acting as the bartender.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The end of the Forest Training Camp Arc sees the League of Villains get what they wanted (Bakugo) and manage to get away even though a few are beaten and captured, including the villain who killed Kota's parents.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: The main recurring villain has Touch of Death powers and the Hero Killer paralyzes people by licking their blood. And then there's The Man Behind the Man, who can just downright steal Quirks. That said, there are points in the story where societal ostracization of these "bad" powers helps factor into why these people eventually became villains. For instance, Toga's Quirk of being able to turn into anyone whose blood she drinks gave her a biological urge to ingest it when she could. As a kid, she clearly had a few screws loose but she wasn't actively murderous at that point, and any psychological assistance she received amounted to telling her to repress her urges for the appearance of normality. This contradiction of her urges being a fundamental part of who she is, and that society would find said behavior wildly inappropriate caused her to eventually snap as she now views killing people and drinking their blood as her own twisted way of showing affection.
• Bad Powers, Good People: A good chunk of the hero population have Quirks that could be easily associated with villainy and have an appearance to match, but are firmly on the side of good:
  • Class 1-A has a guy that controls a Living Shadow (Tokoyami) and a girl who can generate Hollywood Acid (Ashido). Neither of them are evil, and this is not even counting the teacher with black hole powers who works solely on disaster relief. Even their homeroom teacher, who is fairly antisocial and can erase Quirks by looking at their users, dedicates himself to stopping the more powerfully Quirked villains.
  • Hitoshi Shinso has a Quirk, referred to as "Brainwashing," that lets him take total control over anyone who responds to him verbally. Nearly everyone he's ever known remarks how the power is perfect for a villain, but he desires above all else to be a hero.
• Badass Adorable: The art style makes it quite easy for all characters to be seen as cute, and since basically everyone is a badass, a lot of characters can be seen as this. Midoriya, Tsuyu, and Uraraka deserve special mention.
• Badass Teacher: According to Midoriya, all of the teachers at U.A. are active or former pro heroes, including the #1 hero in the world, All Might.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • After Izuku finishes the entrance exam, he later gets a response from U.A. in the mail. It's set up like a dramatic letter reading until he rips the envelope in half and a holographic disk falls out instead, which plays a recording of All Might hamming it up while informing Izuku he passed the exam and is accepted.
  • Chapter 343. It looks like Aoyama has chickened out and double-crossed the heroes once again... then he turns around and knocks back All For One with his laser, revealing that he was completely on the hero's side the whole time. This twist is so abrupt that it catches All For One completely off guard, as he was unable to detect lying from Aoyama's parents earlier.
  • Chapter 370 opens with a flashback of a young mutant Quirk user being persecuted by a vicious mob who called him a monster while declaring that no matter how far society progressed, they'd never accept those with mutant Quirks. At first, we're lead to believe this was Spinner's past, revealing how he ended up becoming a villain. Towards the end of the chapter, however, the flashback is shown again, this time revealing that it was actually Shoji's past.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: If you were to just watch the two ending themes for Season 2 of the anime, you would get a pretty inaccurate picture of what the series is about:
  • The first ending simply shows all the girls in Class 1-A hanging out together, making you think it's a slice-of-life story instead of an action-adventure story about superheroes.
  • The second ending shows all the characters in a Heroic Fantasy setting, fighting monsters with swords and magic. At face value, it has nothing to do with a story about superpowered heroes in a modern-day setting. The designs came from the art for the second popularity poll and the second piece of side art drawing all the characters in fantasy outfits. A story in the School Briefs light novels takes place in that setting.
• Bathos: Invoked by Bakugo in Chapter 98 when he makes Kaminari short-circuit himself after the class found out that because of Midoriya and co.'s actions and the rest of the class knowing about but doing nothing to stop them, all but three of the class would have been expelled if the situation didn't look so dire.
• Batman Gambit:
  • The heroes' plan to take down All For One once and for all consists of having Aoyama tell him he's got Midoriya in an isolated area away from any help. They then just sit back and wait, counting on All For One being too sadistic, petty, and self-assured to be able to resist appearing himself, revealing the apparent betrayal to emotionally crush Midoriya, and then go straight to overkill by summoning the rest of the League so they can have Monoma use Kurogiri's Dark Gate to warp everyone in and start the Final Battle on their terms. This works flawlessly and All For One falls for it exactly as predicted.
  • The entire planning for the Final Battle hinges on one factor: allowing All For One to think his plans are going perfectly so they can make a huge plan to defeat the League in one masterstroke. As All For One is so egotistical that he genuinely believes winning is a formality at this point, he falls for it hook, line, and sinker because that's just how it's "natural" for things to go.
• Batman Grabs a Gun: While they will kill if absolutely needed, heroes as a whole will generally only do so as a last resort if there's no other choice and prioritize capturing a villain first. All For One is such a gigantic threat who's proven Beyond Redemption and impossible to truly keep contained that the heroes' endgame notably jumps straight to having Endeavor and Hawks flat out kill him as a first resort. Even Midoriya and All Might are entirely on board with this plan.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: While there are exceptions to this throughout the series, most of the female characters and heroines only end up with either scratches or minor injuries, or otherwise unscathed, while the males suffer near-fatal injuries or are outright killed. The Internship Arc is the biggest example of this. While all of the male heroes go up against enemies that leave them bloody and severely injured, the heroines all go up against an enemy that simply drains their energy, and doesn't sustain any serious harm.
• Big Bad: Tomura Shigaraki and All For One are the two biggest contenders for the series as a whole.
  • All For One is the founder of the League of Villains and Shigaraki's Evil Mentor, giving him resources and molding him into his successor. Even after All Might defeats and incarcerates him at the end of the "U.A. Beginnings" Saga, his presence is felt even in arcs he doesn't physically appear in. He capitalizes on his presence once again to reclaim his position of main antagonist following the Paranormal Liberation War, where an ensuing power struggle between himself and Shigaraki plays out for the story's final arcs. Towards the tail end of the Final Battle, it's a struggle he ends up losing without even realizing it.
  • Shigaraki is the public leader of the League of Villains, who is being molded to take All For One's place as the top villain. After his mentor is defeated, Shigaraki ascends full-time to the Big Bad position, defeating his rival Overhaul and forming the Paranormal Liberation Front. It's eventually revealed that at some point in time All For One passed down his own Quirk to Shigaraki, All For One himself retaining a copy, making Shigaraki even more powerful. Shigaraki states to the remnants of All For One's consciousness that he doesn't want to become All For One, he wants to be better than All For One. He makes good on this promise once he destroys All For One's vestige, rejecting his master's dream of stealing One For All and establishing himself as the ultimate villain, out to bring down the global society of heroes no matter the cost.
• Big Bad Duumvirate:
  • All For One and Shigaraki are in one for the series as a whole, Shigaraki publicly leading the League of Villains while All For One mentors him from the shadows.
  • At the end of the Meta Liberation Army Arc, Tomura Shigaraki, leader of the League of Villains, defeats Re-Destro, the Grand Commander of the Meta Liberation Army, who abdicates in favor of Shigaraki becoming the new Grand Commander. The merger between the League of Villains and the Meta Liberation army is named the Paranormal Liberation Front, which seeks to declare war against the heroes.
• Big Good: Deconstructed:
  • All Might filled this role to the entire world, citizens felt safe with him, heroes looked up to him and villains feared him. Understandably, his retirement causes a general state of disturbance, insecurity, and a rise in crime rates, even worse because the aforementioned Endeavor became the top hero.
  • This is further deconstructed when Midoriya finally takes on the role of leading efforts against All For One after the Paranormal Liberation War. It's simply too much strain for him to take, considering he's only 16 years old and even All Might was growing weary and tired of fulfilling the job. Fortunately, Class 1-A fight tooth and nail to force him to let them help him, which alleviates a fair amount of stress and allows him to give himself breaks when he needs them. Afterward, a far healthier example plays out where Midoriya still fulfills this role but has an established support network of friends and allies who will be elevated to becoming the greatest generation of heroes alongside him.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The motto of U.A. High School, "Plus Ultra", means "Further Beyond" in Latin. It comes from the phrase "Non Plus Ultra",^note Nothing Further Beyond which is supposedly inscribed on the legendary Pillars of Hercules that marked the western edge of the known world in Europe for centuries. Plus Ultra is also the motto of Spain, especially the Spanish Crown.
  • Bakugo's proposed hero name, "King Explosion Murder", just sounds overly violent in English. In Japanese, it's roughly pronounced "baku-satsu-ou", making it a pun on his name.
  • Episode 14 of Season 5 becomes way cooler if you have basic knowledge of Chinese/Japanese characters. The screen focuses on a few characters and you will get a more complete understanding of how Hawks managed to send a message to Endeavor.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: Chitose Kizuki, a high-ranking member of the villainous Meta Liberation Army, is also shown to be the executive director of Shueisha, Inc.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Internship Arc ends with the Shie Hassaikai defeated and arrested, and Eri successfully rescued. However, many of the heroes suffered injuries during the mission, and while most will recover, Mirio has permanently lost his Quirk, Sir Nighteye dies of his wounds in the hospital, and Snatch is killed when the League of Villains attacks the convoy to steal the Quirk-destroying bullets.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: Or very light grey, at least. The villains may be cruel, sadistic individuals thriving on bloodshed and chaos, but the hero community as a whole is not exactly spotless either. Many villains detest heroes because some of them are glory seekers, while some others lash out because they were ignored for being too small or low at the totem pole to be noticed. Twice in particular is a tragic example of this, where society made him an outcast, but the hero's offer for help feels like a condescending oversimplification of Twice's life problems.
• Black Market: Although never directly dealt with, the reality of a black market is constantly mentioned in the setting. Giran is mentioned to be an arms dealer for it, Overhaul's plans included going to the black market to sell a new kind of serum to villains and in Chapter 219, it's revealed Detnerat is releasing their support items in the black market, with them being used to collecting data on heroes and villains while also self-destructing when the villains are defeated.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • As a child, Midoriya obsessively watched a "YoTube" video of All Might's debut as a hero, in which he saved over a hundred people from a bus crash.
  • Midoriya's hero notebook is branded "Kukuyo Campos", rather than Kokuyo Campus.
  • When Gran Torino's microwave breaks, the replacement he orders arrives in a box from "Omozan," rather than Amazon.
  • While some of Class 1-A deliberate what to do for their class's activity in the cultural festival, Todoroki pulls up a video on Yap!Tube, a website that, aside from the spelling and color (blue) of the logo, is formatted exactly like YouTube.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The anime adaptation, as a whole, is much more prone to showcase the gruesomeness of injuries and battles than the manga. Whereas the manga often censors the worst and goriest injuries, the anime shows them fully, no matter how bad, and will also show the blood spread by them, which is something that very rarely happens in the manga. Midoriya's injuries are a common cause of this. In the manga, it usually shows his body bruising and darkening. The anime, however, showcases his body being outright maimed by said injuries.
• Blunt "No": In Chapter 162, Midoriya offers a recently Quirkless Mirio One For All, feeling he deserves it more than him, but Mirio bluntly refuses before Midoriya can finish talking.
• Boarding School: After Bakugo is kidnapped and rescued, U.A. becomes this to better keep an eye on its students.
• Body Motifs: Hands:
  • A central imagery of the series is how heroes would extend their hand to offer their help, and how those in need of help would reach out and take that hand. It's explicitly mentioned that One for All would not exist if the heroes did not offer their help to the First Wielder.
  • On the villainous side, Shigaraki wears a lot of preserved hands and his power allows him to decay anything he touches. All for One's power is activated through hands, he keeps a lot of minions and pawns in his figurative hand, and he's commonly depicted trying to grasp something with his hand to assert control over it.
• Body Horror: Some Quirks alter their user in truly bizarre and disturbing ways, though thanks to how ubiquitous Quirks are, this isn't usually a problem for them. This leads to cases of Unusually Uninteresting Sight fairly often. For example, Seiji Shishikura has the Meatball Quirk, first seen in Chapter 106. This allows him to control raw human flesh, including his own. His main combat style is to detach his limbs into flying globs of flesh, and the moment they touch his enemy, he's free to warp and compress their body until they're a sentient globe of misshapen flesh that retains the ability to feel pain. Fortunately, dealing enough damage to Seiji will break the Meat Prison.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Inverted, as it's the heroes' side doing it. They apprehended a weakened All For One after his devastating final fight with All Might, and locked him up in Tartarus, a place for criminals for whom "death is not enough a punishment". Sure, lock up the S-tier villain, who's both a top-tier Person of Mass Destruction and The Chessmaster, instead of eliminating his threat for good, just for the sake of inflicting Fate Worse than Death... What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Later, All For One (controlling Tomura's body) breaks open Tartarus as well as six other prisons in one night, covering his tracks and plunging Japan into chaos.
• Book Ends:
  • All Might starts off the series by defeating a villain despite suffering from his debilitating injury, subtly staggering from his exhaustion as he raises his fist in victory to reassure the onlookers. His last act as a hero is to defeat All For One with the last dregs of his strength and force himself into his muscular state to again raise his fist as a symbol of victory, even though he can barely stand up straight by this point.
  • The first action of the League of Villains is the USJ Incident, where Kurogiri brings in multiple villains, catching the heroes by surprise, before spreading the hero students across the building. The Final Battle begins with Monoma copying Kurogiri's Warp to bring in the heroes to the battlefield, before spreading the villains across all of Japan.
  • Midoriya's first antagonistic opponent during the beginning chapters before the League of Villains was introduced was Bakugo, his childhood friend who constantly bullied him throughout their middle school years over his dream of becoming a hero out of his Inferiority Superiority Complex, having recognized long ago that Midoriya did possess the inherent qualities of a true hero, but unwilling to accept that he was "lesser" than a "Quirkless nobody". Midoriya's ultimate opponent towards the manga's conclusion is All For One, whose overarching goal primarily revolves around successfully stealing One For All from Midoriya by breaking his Heroic Willpower however he can, in order to maximize his chances of success during the inevitable battle of wills that results when he attempts to absorb the Quirk. To this end, he ostracizes Midoriya gradually away from his allies, mocks him constantly as a Sketchy Successor with glee whenever he speaks to him, and does whatever he can to demoralize Midoriya past the breaking point mentally and physically, coming off as an overgrown bully preying upon his target's weakness for his own satisfaction. Fittingly, what helps snap Midoriya out of his mind games is Bakugo recognizing the similarities with Midoriya's past treatment and lack of inherent self-worth, and sincerely apologizing to him for his past actions as the culmination of his Character Development throughout the story, even calling him Izuku.
  • During the USJ arc, in Shigaraki's first appearance, he gets shot through the hands by Snipe during his escape with Kurogiri. He ends up getting shot in the hand again in the Final War arc, only this time he got the entire limb shot off by Lady Nagant (who, for bonus irony, is stated to be Snipe's better when it comes to sniping).
  • Toshinori Yagi met Nana Shimura as a Quirkless teenager, wielding a length of pipe to stop some low-powered villains. More than forty years later, he's once more a Quirkless person, wielding metal to fight a villain, but this time the villain is All for One and his "pipe" is a set of Powered Armor.
  • The story itself begins in the city of Musutafu, where Izuku lives. The last two battles of the Final War (All Might vs All for One and Izuku vs Shigaraki) take place in the ruins of the same city.
• Boring, but Practical: For society as a whole, while most people have a Quirk, not all are meant to be a pro hero. Quirks like Zoom, Squirmy Fingers, and Attraction of Small Objects are useless in a fight, but greatly help daily life and less violent professions. Even being Quirkless means having no dangerous powers such as Decay and Rewind.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman:
  • At the end of the U.A. Sports Festival, All Might suggests to Tokoyami to improve his physical conditioning since the latter was defeated by Bakugo when he broke through Dark Shadow and grappled Tokoyami to the ground.
  • Quirk Extension training is covered in the Forest Training Camp Arc; essentially, pushing your Quirk to a comfortable limit, and then beyond that. As they are physical abilities, a comparison is made between Quirk Extension and strength training, as muscles have to tear themselves and then repair before they are strengthened.
• Brains and Brawn: All Might's relationship with his ex-sidekick, Sir Nighteye. All Might was the brawn while Nighteye, with his intellect, investigative skills, and precognition Quirk, made him effective as the brains. This is all the more impressive given that All Might is no slouch in the brains department himself:
  All Might: His physical abilities aren't all that impressive, but that brain of his was just the thing to help me out.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In Chapter 124, Yaoyorozu offers the aside that Mirio succinctly explained the last week and a half of the manga in three panels.
  • Present Mic explains to viewers that Gang Orca is actually forcing himself to talk harshly to the supplementary classes students.
  • During the U.A. Cultural Festival Arc, Mineta complains that his character design prevents him from properly holding a guitar since he's drawn with much shorter limbs than anyone else.
  • In Chapter 320, Bakugo calls out Midoriya for running himself ragged trying to help everyone, while calling attention to the Art Shift that his character design has taken over the course of the arc:
    Bakugo: Looks like you're even drawn differently than the rest of us these days!!
• Breather Episode:
  • After the intense Hideout Raid Arc, we get a slice-of-life mini-arc beginning in Chapter 98, where the characters move into their dorms and decide to see each room and vote for the best one. This is invoked in-universe, as the characters feel the tension in the air and are trying to disband it.
  • The chapters following the end of the Internship Arc such as Nighteye's death and Mirio's loss of his Quirk focus on Bakugo, Todoroki, and Yoarashi as they take supplementary classes, which are quite lighthearted and fun, with Gang Orca playing a comical Large Ham.
• Brick Joke: During Kirishima and Tetsutetsu's match, the viewers remarked how it would be great to have them both as sidekicks. Sure enough, they became sidekicks of the same hero during the internship period.
• Bridal Carry: After KOing Present Mic during the final exam by overwhelming him with bugs, Koji carries his smaller partner Jiro through the escape gate this way, presumably just because he's a faster runner than her and she was injured (her eardrums had been ruptured by Present Mic's sonic attacks).
• Broad Strokes: In the manga, the Final Exams Arc has all of the students facing the teachers at the same time and Recovery Girl situated in a temporary first aid tent. In the anime, the adaptation messes around with the sequence of events to the advantage of its format. The final exams take place in the order of one through ten, with the most climactic fight (with Midoriya and Bakugo vs. All Might) obviously at the end. Recovery Girl is also situated in a more upscale location to monitor the events and perform first aid, and instead of being out on the field, Midoriya and Uraraka are watching the tests to observe, learn, and strategize from what their classmates fail/succeed at doing, and are here together because their training partners won't communicate with them (allowing for some light Ship Tease). It's also a lot more like the Battle Trial Arc in this respect. Functionally, the story is still the same, just modified to be more convenient for a different format.
• Burn Scars, Burning Powers:
  • Shoto Todoroki, who can use fire as part of his Quirk, carries a burn scar across his face thanks to his mother scalding his face with boiling water during a mental break.
  • Dabi is also shown to have an even worse scar to the point where staples are used to keep his face together. His scars came about due to overexerting his Quirk.
  • Endeavor picks up one after his battle with All For One and the Nomu. Shoto doesn’t pass up the opportunity to rub it in.
• But Now I Must Go: After the Paranormal Liberation War which destroyed most of the hero society, Izuku suddenly drops out of U.A High to embark on a solo quest.
• Bystander Syndrome:
  • This is legally enforced. Someone with the perfect Quirk for a situation will be unable to help if they lack a hero license. This lines up with the fact that Good Samaritan laws do not exist in real-life Japan, which is where the story takes place.
  • After disintegrating his entire family, Tenko/Tomura runs through the streets of his hometown, and nobody is willing to help him because they're under the assumption a hero will come and help him. All For One appears instead.
  • In a broader sense, this is the chief issue behind society as a whole. All Might becomes so good at his job that everybody in turn relies on him to keep things safe, even fellow pro heroes. When he eventually retires thanks to using up the last of his One For All embers in his final battle against All For One, there's nobody to fill the gap. This peaks after the Paranormal Liberation War, where the devastation tips everything over the edge. People's mounting frustrations through the years even before All Might retired makes everybody turn on the heroes that are left, ignoring how their own prejudices and fascination with the material side of the hero industry make them just as complicit in society's failings.

C-E

• Caged Inside a Monster: The Sludge Villain trapped both Midoriya and Bakugo before attempting to enter and take control of their bodies, even using Bakugo as a Human Shield when confronted by heroes.
• Call-Back: Horikoshi is so fond of these it's too much work to list them all. What is listed are just a few examples:
  • Chapter 4 is titled "The Starting Line". Chapter 11 is titled "Bakugo's Starting Line". Similarly, Chapter 1 is titled "Izuku Midoriya: The Origin". Chapter 39 is titled "Shoto Todoroki: The Origin". Chapter 62 is titled "Katsuki Bakugo: The Origin".
  • An odd callback of sorts. For the results of the second popularity contest, Horikoshi drew the top 10 most popular characters in a fantasy style, with medieval clothes and weapons. Later, he drew other characters in the same style as side art. For the third ending of the anime, all the characters appear in their medieval outfits from before in a medieval setting completely unrelated to the actual story. The fourth popularity poll revisits this theme, with multiple characters updated versions of the costumes (reflecting either the increased mastery of their Quirks or, in All Might's case, his permanent De-power) and characters making the top 10 for the first time getting their own medieval fantasy outfits.
  • During the USJ Arc, it's joked that Class 1-A thought the "Unforeseen Simulated Joint" stood for "Universal Studios Japan". In Episode 52, the joke is repeated when Aizawa leads Class 1-A to the school's TDL, the "Training Delicatessen Land", which Midoriya, Uraraka, and Ashido mistake with "Tokyo Disney Land" and wonder if a mouse is angry at them.
  • Another callback to the USJ Arc happens when the heroes lure All For One out into the open, throwing their forces at him and his army using Kurogiri's Warp Gate much like how the League of Villains initially attacked Class 1-A at the beginning.
  • In the beginning, Midoriya says “this is the story of how I became the world’s greatest hero”. Before the climax arc, he repeats the line with a change. “This is the story of how we all became the world’s greatest heroes”. It shows how Class 1A has become very much a team and likely reflects Midoriya accepting that he can’t come through this alone like he tried to shortly before.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Dabi to Endeavor, while broadcasting it all for the public to see.
• The Call Put Me on Hold: This is the basic premise of the manga. Since Midoriya's future self is narrating the story, it's known that he becomes the world's greatest hero. He just got a Quirk ten years later than everyone else.
• Calling Your Attacks: Most pro heroes and even some villains do this. This is justified since, as pointed it by Mt. Lady in Chapter 241, in a world where heroes are both crime-fighting vigilantes and superstars adored by the population, representation is everything. Ultimate moves are the heroes' calling cards that not only represent their brand but also show the public and their fellow heroes what they are capable of.
• The Cameo: Characters from Horikoshi's other work, Oumagadoki Doubutsuen, can be seen in various chapters. Chapter 36 has Shishido and Toytoy appear in the bleachers. Uwabami appears in Chapter 48 as the heroine Yaoyorozu and Kendo intern with for a week.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': While modern society has done its best to adapt to Quirks, it's done so by becoming strictly rule-bound. While for the most part, things run smoothly, you have occasional hiccups like Midoriya and a few of his classmates getting penalized for getting into an unlawful fight with a villain.
• Capepunk: The story takes place in a world 20 Minutes into the Future where roughly 80% of the world's population has some kind of superpower referred to as a "Quirk". Being a superhero is a legitimate career option that requires a special education course. Hero jobs also vary depending on what area a person decides to specialize in, such as crime-fighting, disaster relief, team support, etc. The entire business is heavily regulated and up and coming heroes typically seek employment at agencies run by senior heroes in an attempt to make a name for themselves. The series focuses heavily on themes such as what it takes to be a superhero, the importance of society having a positive view of them, and why anyone would want to be a hero in the first place. Although (almost) Everyone Is a Super, most people are not superheroes or supervillains, because most Quirks aren't particularly useful for crime or the fighting thereof; even the Superpower Lottery winners still require intensive training to reach their full strength. It also takes a hard look at what it would take for someone to be the Big Good in a world of superheroes, the dangers of having a single person be the symbol of hope and heroism, and just what would happen if that person were suddenly unable to continue to fill that role with no suitable replacement. It also looks fairly closely at the consequences of limiting peoples' freedom to maintain social order in the advent of superpowers and the various ways that might cause people to rebel and become either villains or vigilantes, and the social prejudices inherent in people being born with powers that are unsightly, inhuman, or have historically been used for "evil."
• Cape Snag: In the English dub, Aizawa, getting away from a group of reporters, wonders how All Might manage to get anything done with the media "stepping on his cape".
• Captain Fishman: Being the diverse industry that it is, there are plenty of pro heroes who specialize in ocean rescue and crime fighting. The biggest examples displayed are Oki Mariner Crew, a naval-themed Super Team of heroes that Tsuyu joins as part of her internship, led by the Sea Rescue Hero: Selkie.
• Cast from Calories:
  • Yaoyorozu can create anything by manifesting it from her body fat. As such, she becomes a Big Eater to compensate.
  • Sato's Quirk, "Sugar Rush", gives him super strength from eating sugar. However, when he crashes from his sugar rush, he not only de-powers, but his intelligence also temporarily decreases.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Subtle, but every character has their own distinguishable facial features. For example, their eyes.
• Casting Gag:
  • Japanese version:
    • Kōki Uchiyama voices a villain that is bred practically since birth to be an all-powerful ruler. Are we talking about Shigaraki or Meruem?
    • Jun'ichi Suwabe, once again, voices a stern and pragmatic hero that scoffs at idealism and early on outright tells the young protagonist that he's unsuited to be a hero.
    • The A-Rank villain Muscular is sadistic, menacing, and has a missing eye. Muscular's Japanese voice actor, Kosuke Takaguchi, voiced Wolf O'Donnell in Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Zero, who fits this description to a T.
  • English version:
    • This isn't the first time Justin Briner was cast as the teenage, Genius Bruiser protagonist of a shonen series meant to be a successor to the original World's Best Warrior. That said, his stint as the Dragon Ball Z Abridged version of Son Gohan was merely a Call-Forward until the Buu Saga was adapted, which, unfortunately, never panned out due to DBZA's cancellation in February 2020.
    • All Might tells Midoriya that One For All was a Quirk that could be "passed down for generations".
    • David Wald once again voices a character who can turn his body into steel and consumes a steady diet of iron.
    • Hiroshi Tameda, the "can't you see" kid, looks a lot like Natsu Dragneel in the anime. Funimation evidently noticed this and cast Todd Haberkorn as his voice.
  • Latin American Spanish dub:
    • Orlando Noguera, All Might's Latin American voice actor, already had experience voicing mighty men, as he voiced Superman in Superman: The Animated Series.
• Cat Fight: In one omake, Mt. Lady and Midnight get into one on a televised panel after the former snipes at the latter's age.
• Cathartic Chores:
  • After his anticlimactic and unsatisfying win at the Sports Festival, Bakugo brushes his teeth extra vigorously while screaming at the germs in his mouth to die. Then again, it's implied that this isn't out of the ordinary for him.
  • When Bakugo and Midoriya are assigned to clean the dorms, Bakugo screams at everyone to give him their trash and is incensed when he discovers that they all have huge bags of it to throw out. Mineta then teases Bakugo for leaving a windowsill dusty, prompting him to scream at Midoriya for not cleaning properly. Bakugo is also pissed because Midoriya went around one day before asking for the others to give him the trash and nobody gave him anything.
• Central Theme:
  • Legacy. Almost every main character, hero and villain alike, is being influenced by the legacy of someone who came before them, which influences their characters. The series is largely about the transition from one generation of heroes and villains to the next, and how the legacy one generation leaves behind influences the generation that follows:
    • Midoriya and Bakugo are both trying to live up to the legacy of All Might, but have different ideas about what that means, leading to their rivalry.
    • Shigaraki is doing the same by trying to become a successor worthy of All For One.
    • Todoroki had his father's legacy unwillingly forced upon him, and is trying to create an identity of his own.
    • Several members of the League of Villains, like Dabi and Spinner, were inspired to become villains by the legacy Stain left behind.
    • The entire Meta Liberation Army is trying to carry on the Legacy of Destro.
  • Individualism vs. Collectivism. The manga explores themes of law and order on the one hand and freedom and license on the other. For example, you have occasions such as hero interns getting punished for getting into unlawful combat with a villain, even in self-defense, and the League of Villains attracting members in no small part with the promise of freedom to do whatever you want. There are even instances where the rules meant to create good heroes have caused certain forms of social stratification (U.A.'s hero exams are heavily geared towards those with Quirks directly capable of violence) and of course the allure of freedom and power and how it sometimes pulls in people who really shouldn't be heroes at all.
  • The advantages someone is born with vs. what they earn through hard work, and the danger of confusing the two (and confusing what someone can be born with and can earn through hard work).
  • Another more subtle one is mental barriers, how they affect people and overcoming them. If you believe something is possible for you, it will be:
    • Midoriya struggled with people telling him all his life that he could never become a hero, causing him to believe so as well until his chance encounter with All Might.
    • Bakugo on the other hand spent his entire early life breezing through school on his way to becoming a great hero, only to realize how far out of their league he is when he saw Todoroki curb stomp his opponents during their first combat training.
    • Both All Might and Midoriya are capable of pushing themselves to what is described as "more than 100%" if needed, which may or may not be the direct influence or a side effect of One For All.
    • Todoroki refused to fight with his father's fire Quirk, putting him essentially at half strength, because of how much he hates being compared to him, and once Midoriya knocked some sense into him during the Sports Festival, he was able to get over his daddy issues and fight at full strength.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The manga operates in this pattern, usually having a lighthearted arc followed by a darker arc. This becomes especially noticeable following the Hideout Raid Arc. This dark arc is followed by the more lighthearted Provisional Hero License Exam Arc, which is then followed by the even darker Internship Arc and the even lighter U.A. Cultural Festival Arc, with the lighter arcs all starting off with breather episodes.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Early chapters paint Todoroki with a rather Anti-Hero/Ambiguously Evil vibe that never appears again: he is unwilling to kill a villain less out of moral decency and more out of preservation for his reputation, and for that, doesn't even try to save the villain, just tells him to get out of the ice soon or else he would tarnish Todoroki's reputation. Then his Dark and Troubled Past comes to light which explains why he behaves so grimly, and Midoriya yanks him out of his grudging state. Also, at the beginning, his left half is always encased in ice. Following the USJ Arc, however, he stops doing this, and no one comments on it.
  • In early chapters, Yaoyorozu was more outspoken and prone to Brutal Honesty, such as when she chided her classmates for believing that Aizawa would expel them on the first day, or when she criticized everyone besides Iida in the Heroes vs. Villains exercise. In later chapters, she rarely says potentially offensive things unless she's being Innocently Insensitive.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Even without explicit strength-enhancing Quirks, there are still plenty of characters with notably insane physical ability gained via hard training, with guys like Mirio Togata blitzing opponents in conjunction with his Intangibility, his mentor Sir Nighteye throwing around "Hyper Density Seals" with enough force to crater the clone of an equally opposing villain into a wall after easily tripping him up, and Stain being capable of either maiming or killing several Pro Heroes when his sole power involves paralysis via blood ingestion being just a few examples.
  • Also of note, said clone? It's of Kendo Rappa, a Blood Knight whose quirk simply allows him Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs via extreme shoulder rotation. It might have allowed him to attack at a superhuman velocity, but it still allowed him to severely injure a Pro Hero and his sidekick when both of them had Quirks geared specifically towards defense.
• Cheer Them Up with Laughter: Bakugo, who Hates Everyone Equally, surprisingly tries to light up the mood after Class 1-A's teacher Aizawa threatens to expel nearly all of them — both the students who carried out an unauthorized, dangerous mission to rescue said jerk, Bakugo, plus the other students who knew of their plan but didn't stop them. So, as a form of gratitude, Bakugo drags Kaminari behind a bush and fries his brain with
  • his Quirk so Kaminari would start acting like an idiot and make everyone laugh.
• Chekhov's Gun: Ragdoll's Search Quirk is taken by All For One between the Forest Training Camp Arc and the Hideout Raid Arc. In Chapter 275, the Quirk was given to Shigaraki during his enhancement, and he uses it to locate Midoriya and One For All.
  • As the Final Battle continues, a massive storm starts forming over Japan due to the sheer intensity of the battle. Inasa and Tokoyami both take advantage of it later on, as its the exact environment to let them use their powers at their strongest.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • While the #2 hero Endeavor makes his official debut in Chapter 28, he appears in Chapter 1, where he's shown on a jumbotron/advertisement billboard in the background, as unsuspecting scenery. He makes another cameo in Chapter 3 during All Might's reflection on U.A. High.
  • Yaoyorozu got second place in the class representative elections by having two votes: one of her own and the other from someone who's never revealed. At the time, it was irrelevant, but after she goes into Heroic Self-Deprecation and becomes a Broken Ace, finding out that the person to vote for her was Todoroki revitalizes her confidence in herself enough for her to get them to pass on the end of terms test.
  • Kirishima shows up several times in Chapter 3, though he's impossible to find unless you've read Chapter 144 and learned what he looked like before getting into U.A.
  • In the Final War arc, a few flying craft are seen upon the reveal that UA High was converted into a Floating Island and are circling it, yet they mysteriously vanish partway during the battle against Shigaraki. Chapter 367 reveals that they're actually Star and Stripe's renegade teammates who decided to stay in Japan for a while and help Midoriya get to UA High by acting as tether points for Black Whip to act as a slingshot.
• Cherry Blossoms: There's an incredible amount of cherry blossom symbolism in this series. When All Might announces that Midoriya can be a hero, cherry blossoms fall to represent the blooming of a new hero. Notice the cherry blossom trees in the background of the first opening between Midoriya and Bakugo representing the blossoming of rivals that will spur each other to greater heights.
• Childish Villain, Mature Hero:
  • Izuku Midoriya and Tomura Shigaraki are the series' most focal protagonist and antagonist respectively and are heavily contrasted by how they're mentored by the most powerful hero/villain of their time and are built up to be the symbol of peace and evil. Outside of their alignments, Midoriya is known for being a polite, humble, considerate, and mature boy for his age whereas Shigaraki is akin to a childish, petty brat, though this is because he suffered a tragic past that mentally damaged his perspective on the world and his mental psyche, and nonetheless ends up developing into being a more mentally sound and calculative individual.
  • By extension, Midoriya and Shigaraki's predecessors, All Might and All for One are the symbols of peace and evil and the most powerful hero and villain of their time respectively. Most of Midoriya's personality traits are inspired by All Might, who is just as wise, compassionate, and level-headed. All for One initially appears to be a subversion, looking to be more mentally sound and calculative than his apprentice was until the end where it's revealed that All for One is even more immature, insane, and childish than Shigaraki could ever be shown to be, being a petulant Psychopathic Manchild whose ultimate motivation for being a supervillain stems from reading comic books when he was a child and was an extreme fanboy of its villains (especially the Maou the Demon King ones), so all he wants is to become one to show how this kind of villain would go in reality to the point where he outright rejects the fact that the villains lost, making him a delusional chuunibyou, of all things, and throws destructive temper tantrums when things don't go his way, which also makes him a massive Sore Loser. All of this comes to a head when Shigaraki calls him out for using him and the League of Villains he's founded as disposable tools for accomplishing his childish goals before ripping his metaphysical vestige apart from the inside out.
• Chore Character Exploration: After the disastrous dinner at their house, Fuyumi and Shoto are cleaning up the table while talking seriously about their feelings on Endeavor. It's not exactly covert, as everyone else manages to overhear them, but the core of the scene is a serious and raw moment between the siblings.
• Christmas Episode: Season 5, Episode 13 (Episode 101 of the series overall), appropriately titled "Have a Merry Christmas!" takes place on Christmas. Oddly enough, the episode aired in June.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: This is quite common. All Might mentions that all the top heroes' stories include some iteration of "My body moved before I could think" when it came to their first acts of heroism. Midoriya doing the same at the beginning of the series is what wins him All Might's respect. Deconstructed a bit, in that the series recognizes how toxic this mindset can become, and actively chastises students for leaping in to help without considering the consequences of what they're doing. With Midoriya in particular, Aizawa stops him, reminding him that if he fails and gets hurt, he becomes one more problem for the pro heroes to worry about and another factor complicating the situation. "If you can't save yourself, you can't save anyone else" is a common theme.
• Circle of Shame: Midoriya is repeatedly subject to this in his backstory, as everyone considered him a loser or weirdo for not being born with a Quirk and laughs in his face whenever his dream of becoming a hero gets brought up.
• Clark Kent Outfit: Many of the cast are curvier or more muscular than their civvies and school uniforms indicate; even some of the hero costumes are baggy enough to disguise what shape the heroes are in.
• Climax Boss: Several over the course of the series, often tied in with someone's character arc:
  • Midoriya is the Sludge Villain, where he proves that he has the heart of a true hero despite being Quirkless.
  • Todoroki is Midoriya, who manages to put him on the road to embracing his fire powers as part of himself and overcoming his father's abuse.
  • Ida is Hero Killer Stain, who forces him to face the fact that he has put his selfish desire for revenge over the greater good.
  • Bakugo is All Might, forcing him to put his pride, anger, and rivalry with Midoriya aside in order to accomplish his goals.
  • All Might is All For One, who forces him to exhaust all of his remaining reserves of power in order to defeat him and forces him into retirement.
  • Shigaraki's is Re-Destro, whose destruction of his family hands leads him to remember his lost past and let go of his attachment to it allowing him to embrace joy and rage in order to push his Quirk to never before seen heights.
• Close on Title:
  • Episode 23, "Shoto Todoroki: Origin", has the title appear at the very end of the episode after Todoroki uses the fire half of his Quirk to defeat Midoriya and beginning his first steps to becoming a hero, and not being defined by his hatred of his father.
  • Episode 88, "His Start," has the title card come up after Endeavor's victory over the High-End Nomu, which truly establishes him as the #1 Hero, just before the end credits.
  • Chapter 285, "Katsuki Bakugo: Rising" appears at the end of the chapter, which concludes with Bakugo Taking the Bullet for Midoriya.
  • Chapter 300, "The Hellish Todoroki Family, Part 2" appears at the end, when the rest of Endeavor's family, including Rei, who was unable to face him until now, comes to his room to talk about Toya.
  • Chapter 306, "The Final Act Begins," appears at the end, when Midoriya has left U.A. to protect his classmates from the villains that are after One For All.
  • Chapter 386 has its chapter number appear on the penultimate page, and its title "I Am Here" on the next and final one, at the same time as All Might gives a Title Drop after pulling a Big Damn Heroes.
• Clothing-Concealed Injury: Five years prior to the main story, All Might suffered an injury that destroyed one of his lungs and most of his stomach, which left behind a scar. His clothing is designed to hide the scar from the public's eyes.
• Color-Coded Characters: Impressively, the anime's website manages to give a unique associated color to each member of the quite large cast. From the students alone:
  • Midoriya: Mint.
  • Bakugo: Coral.
  • Uraraka: Hot Pink.
  • Ida: Indigo.
  • Todoroki: Cyan.
  • Tsuyu: Green.
  • Mineta: Purple.
  • Kirishima: Red.
  • Yaoyorozu: Crimson.
  • Tokoyami: Cool Grey.
  • Kaminari: Yellow.
  • Aoyama: Metallic Gold.
  • Jiro: Warm Grey.
  • Ashido: Pink.
  • Shoji: Sky Blue.
  • Ojiro: Silver.
  • Sero: Orange.
  • Hagakure: Light Blue.
  • Sato: Goldenrod.
  • Koda: Tan.
  • Other notable examples include All Might with Gold and Aizawa with Dark Grey.
• Coming of Age Story: The manga as a whole plays as this to Midoriya, since he grows from a wimpy, shy kid to the world's greatest hero.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Invoked by the League of Villains during their raid on the USJ; while the majority of villains are rough-and-tumble thugs, they've been saving Nomu specifically for All Might. This is invoked again during the Forest Training Camp Arc when they send in a squad of specialists instead of the army of thugs they tried the first time.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Each arc seesaws the stakes of the storyline based on each antagonist:
  • Introduction Arc: Bakugo is a Nominal Hero in training, with a history with the protagonist and while loving All Might, he likes fighting and destroying his enemies. He's a bully who takes pleasure in toying with and hurting Midoriya during their fight and is his most direct Foil.
  • USJ Arc: Shigaraki is a Psychopathic Manchild who uses video game metaphors all the time. He's an admitted villain who has big goals and despises All Might, unlike Bakugo. Furthermore, he isn't active in the forefront, as he prefers to let his minions do most of the fighting, and uses an Elite Mook made specifically to counter All Might because he is admittedly outmatched. The minions in question are random thugs who are more or less beaten by the students thanks to a lack of foresight. At worst, they are delayed until the pro heroes arrive to stop them.
  • U.A. Sports Festival Arc: Todoroki is the main antagonist of the arc. He's a hero in training. Unlike Shigaraki, he's also much more stoic and composed than the previous antagonists. Also unlike them, he is outright shown as someone sad deep down and instantly befriends Midoriya once the arc is over. In contrast, Endeavor is the first hero to showcase how corrupt heroes can be.
  • Field Training Arc: Stain is a villainous Well-Intentioned Extremist that kills heroes that don't befit his ideals. The difference between him and Shigaraki is spelled out by Midoriya at the end of the arc – unlike Shigaraki, Stain has an ideal and an objective to follow, while Shigaraki simply wants to see the world burn. Or, disintegrate.
  • Final Exams Arc: The teachers play the antagonist of the arc. The difference here is that they don't mean any harm to the protagonists and are only trying to test them in hopes of the students overcoming their weaknesses and foils.
  • Forest Training Camp Arc: The Vanguard Action Squad is a group of murderous criminals that get together under Shigaraki's command. While instructed to break the protagonists' feeling of security, they are very happy to murder people just for the fun of it and are much more competent than the original formation of many untrained thugs of the League of Villains.
  • Hideout Raid Arc: All For One, the actual Big Bad of the story, steps out of his hiding spot to take the center stage. Unlike those before him, he has no interest in anyone or anything but All Might and is much Older and Wiser than the teen/twenty-something villains of the League. He's also immensely more powerful and the fight against him is a Wham Episode in itself and the end changes the storyline. As an Arch-Enemy, All Might, Midoriya, and the previous One For All wielders, all know how much of a legitimate threat this one villain can be.
  • Provisional Hero License Exam Arc:
    • Yoarashi is The Ace of another school, with personal beef against Todoroki. Unlike the antagonists before him, he's genuinely nice to everyone else most of the time and is a loud and boisterous guy with huge respect for heroes and heroes in training of all kinds. He's also capable of making amends to Todoroki — and later, Endeavor — after a while.
    • Gang Orca is a pro hero who poses as a villain in the exam. Like the teachers in the Final Exams Arc, he and his allies are not meant to actually harm the participants but act as walking obstacles in their attempt to rescue citizens.
  • Internship Arc: Overhaul is a Yakuza with intention of taking over All For One's spot as the head of organized crime. He lampoons Shigaraki for not having any plans and ambitions to do the same while showcasing he has an organized and long-term plan to achieve his own goals. He's also much crueler than prior villains as he happily tortures and mentally abuses a little girl with the intention of creating his anti-Quirk serum. This isn't the part Shigaraki takes issue with.
  • U.A. Cultural Festival Arc: Gentle and La Brava are a duo of quirky, lovable Anti Villains with tragic backstories and broken dreams. They commit non-lethal crimes with the intention of gathering a fanbase and showing the errors of the heroes while having a much nicer relationship with each other than the prior Bad Boss or lonely type antagonists before them.
  • Remedial Course Arc: The kids of Masegaki Elementary School are a new generation of superhumans with a superiority complex, serving as antagonists for the ones who had previously failed in the provisional hero license exam. The students can't defeat them like normal villains, they can't baby them, and can't allow the brats to beat them. Instead, they use their Quirks to appeal to the kids and inspire them.
  • The Pro Hero Arc has a High-End Nomu called Hood, not unlike the Nomu in the USJ Arc. Unlike the one in USJ, Dabi sends Hood for wanton destruction and just happens to run to Endeavor and Hawks. Hood becomes an obstacle for Endeavor to overcome to prove he is worthy of becoming the new #1 pro hero and to confront his past.
  • Joint Training Arc: Class 1-B (and Shinso) serve as the "antagonists". Unlike 1-A, their classes and training never got interrupted by villain attacks, save for one occasion, and managed to progress at the intended level. Their battles have no serious consequences, and the fight was all about comparing their growth against fellow schoolmates.
  • The Meta Liberation Army Arc: The eponymous army, led by Re-Destro, are a domestic terrorist organization that wants to abolish all government regulations on Quirk usage so that people can use them however they desire. Interestingly enough, this arc doesn't even see them confront any of the heroes we've seen throughout the series, and instead the main conflict is between them and The League of Villains since they see the League's growing notoriety as a threat to their plans.
• Contrived Coincidence
  • Midoriya and Mirio stumble into Eri and Overhaul during a simple patrol. The brief encounter still allows them to bring enough information for the police and heroes to eventually organize the raid on the Shie Hassaikai mansion. Had they passed in front of that alley a few minutes earlier or later, they'd have not even learned of Eri's existence.
  • The Midoriya/Gentle Criminal fight happens because of three events that are plausible individually, but are unlikely to all happen over the course of a few days:
    • Yaoyorozu received an expensive tea in a care package from home.
    • Midoriya accidentally clicked on a link to a Gentle video where he talks about the teas he favors and how he chooses blends based on what kind of job he's planning to pull.
    • Midoriya crosses paths with Gentle while they're both out shopping, and Midoriya notes that he'd just bought the same expensive tea that Yaoyorozu got from home.
• Conveniently Empty Building:
  • Discussed. During the Heroes vs. Villains training exercise, both Bakugo and Midoriya lose standing for firing off massive blasts while indoors. The U.A. kids are taught from the very beginning to avoid property damage whenever possible because this isn't in play, and the series itself often shows civilians in buildings during times of crisis. In the Final Exams Arc, Midoriya and Bakugo even get points added for limiting damage from their actions to the buildings that All Might has already destroyed rather than compromising the buildings that are still standing.
  • During the climax of the Internship Arc, Overhaul goes on a rampage and damages many of the occupied houses around him and Midoriya, with one panel even showing a mother protecting her infant from falling debris. Midoriya uses a 100% kick to get Overhaul into the sky and away from the people.
  • Zigzags throughout the Paranormal Liberation War Arc. Many citizens are evacuated during the battle, but others aren't so lucky.
• Cracks in the Icy Façade: Shoto Todoroki was first introduced as a cold, aloof and emotional distant boy with hates his father and is limiting his potential with his quirk in order to spite him. He reveals to Midoriya before their match in the Sports Festival that the reason he hates his father his because he's an Abusive Parent who put him through Training from Hell while simultaneously beating his mother until eventually, the mother snaps and throws boiling water on his face giving him his scar. Then, during their match, Midoriya in response, Midoriya calls him out for not going all out like everyone else just to spite his father and how his powers are his and his alone. This sparks him to be more willing to use both sides of his quirk, including his fire side, as well as try to be an overall more open and caring person. This even pushes him to (begrudgingly) accept help from his father to learn how to hone his fire side, and later on even give him the chance to be forgiven for his actions once he finally starts his redemption.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Ultimately, the world of My Hero Academia boils down to this. The world population is 80% Quirk'd, meaning they have superpowers of some sort. These people can go to school to train to be heroes like All Might. As well, many of these heroes are revered for their acts to the point where there's a rating system that places the popularity of these heroes. When you dig deeper, you find the darker side. The remaining 20% of humanity are Quirkless, are looked down on by those with Quirks, and are denied a chance to be heroes because they would never "catch up". Even if you have powers, they may be pathetic or even "bad", meaning you could be looked down on for having undesirable powers. And those with perceived "dangerous" Quirks end up being demeaned as being fit for a villain and/or are forced into suppressing their Quirk, sometimes without proper help in controlling their quirk or having a healthy outlet to indulge their instinct. As well, many of the heroes out there aren't in it to make the world a better place, but for fame and fortune. And the over-reliance on these heroes has led to society becoming generally apathetic towards the suffering of others, as it is expected that a hero will come and fix everyone's problems no matter what. Not to mention that there are deranged people who're more than willing to use their Quirks to hurt people for any slight provocation. In fact, it's mentioned the present time of the manga is the stable society built decades after Quirks started appearing. The first few years were complete chaos from utter lawlessness as no one knew how to handle things at the time, allowing criminals to build their empires (one of which was All For One) and fighting in the streets with superpowers was a natural occurrence.
  • Lady Nagant's backstory shows us the very dark and bloody work it took to uphold the bright hero-led society. At a very young age, she was made an assassin for the Commission. Her job was to kill not just villains, but heroes that threatened to tarnish the public's view on heroes, often for just petty crimes or in some cases people who had just talked about going against the establishment. It took a very heavy toll on her mental state and she ended up killing the Commission's President. It is implied the crime she got sent to jail for was not because she killed heroes, but because she knew too much.
• Create Your Own Hero: All Might and Midoriya's Quirk "One For All" was created by a villain who could give and take Quirks. The villain gave a Quirk to someone who already had one, which led to One For All's formation. The users of One For All all opposed the villain, and the villain was eventually defeated by All Might.
• Create Your Own Villain: The biggest problem of a superhuman society is that many villains are shoved headfirst into becoming criminals because of the overly restrictive laws and societal norms they have to abide under clamping down on how they use their Quirks and their lives in general. Factor in the different forms of Quirk discrimination, government corruption, the destructive nature of Quirks themselves, and completely irredeemable monsters like All For One exploiting the issue and you have millions of oppressed individuals lashing out at the world that created them.
• Crippling Overspecialization: It's acknowledged a few times that the entrance exam to get into U.A.'s Hero Course is overly geared towards combat-oriented Quirks, leading to people like Shinso who have powerful Quirks that just happen to be useless in this particular test.
• Crisis Catch And Carry: Happens on several different occasions during the Forest Training Camp Arc:
  • Mustard's gas attack renders many of the students unconscious, leaving their peers to carry them to safety. Of particular note is Todoroki, who spends the entire arc with Tsuburaba on his back, even while fighting against Moonfish.
  • Even though he is injured from his fight with Muscular, Midoriya still tells Kota to get on his back, so that he can take him to safety. Then the two of them meet up with Aizawa, and Aizawa carries Kota back to camp.
  • After saving Midoriya from Tokoyami, Shoji comments that Midoriya shouldn't be moving around in the state he is in, and spends the rest of the arc carrying him.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Implied. All For One claims that the way Nana Shimura died was "Just pathetic". He gave one of her hands to Shigaraki to replace one of the hands he destroyed, which was his own father's.
• Crying a River: In one episode, Mama Midoriya was so proud of what Deku did in the past, that she cries Tears of Joy. Deku was also proud. And then they cry enough tears to flood the room offscreen and cause a huge waterfall.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Todoroki does this at least three times. The first is against Ojiro and Hagakure during the Battle Trial, when he freezes them along with the entire building, enabling him to seize the bomb without any resistance. The second is against a group of villains during the USJ Arc. The third is against Sero during the U.A. Sports Festival tournament, with whom he freezes with one massive attack.
  • The match between Denki Kaminari and Ibara Shiozaki ends in a matter of seconds. Shiozaki's vines easily block out Kaminari's electric attack, and then she uses those vines to immobilize him.
  • Tokoyami provides one against Moonfish during the Forest Training Camp Arc after Dark Shadow goes out of control.
  • In Chapter 87, the combined pro hero and police force utterly decimates the League of Villains and rescues Bakugo without a hitch, completely preempting Midoriya and his friends' plans to rescue him.
  • In Chapter 88, All For One returns the favor by kidnapping Bakugo again, ambushing the police force with a fraction of the Nomu army, and taking out several pro heroes who were at the Nomu factory in less than a second with the No. 4 hero Best Jeanist among them.
  • Mirio delivers one to the entirety of Class 1-A, taking the whole class (except Todoroki, who declined to participate, and Bakugo, who was still on house arrest) down within the span of few minutes, including beating all of the long-ranged fighters in less than six-seconds.
• Cursed with Awesome: Many quirks are shown to be dangerous initially but, with practice, can be used to help instead of hurt. Zigzags with Blessed with Suck since they can be detrimental to both users and those around them.
  • Thirteen's Black Hole is capable of disintegrating anything up close, but can uss it to destroy debris for rescue purposes.
  • Eri's Rewind can potentially heal or reverse effects from anyone she touches, but using it for too long can erase the person.
• Curtains Match the Windows: There are many characters in this series whose hair color is identical to their eye color, especially among Class 1-A.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • Zigzagged during the entrance exam. Uraraka is trapped beneath heavy rubble when a massive hazard bot suddenly appears in the middle of U.A.'s practical exam. She manages to escape under her own power while Midoriya is busy demolishing the robot and gets to rescue him before he faceplants from fifty stories up.
  • Invoked by the HUC (Help Us Company), who are professional damsels in distress. This is justified as their role is to judge an aspiring hero's ability to handle the situation during crises, and they have terrifying eyes for details in this case.
  • During the Internship Arc, Eri is held captive within Overhaul's HQ. She did find a way out on her own but goes back because she feared Overhaul would kill the first people she met outside. Recusing her then becomes a driving force for Midoriya and Mirio.
• Darkest Hour
  • If Chapter 300 isn't this, it comes damn close. In summary, the raid on the Paranormal Liberation Front ends in a Pyrrhic Victory at best. Though the PLF is effectively eliminated and the League of Villains is left scattered and at its lowest point, Gigantomachia has been stopped only *after* running a path of destruction through several cities, and many pro heroes have been killed or seriously maimed in the fighting. To make things worse, Endeavor's past abuse of his family and Hawks' killing of Twice is broadcast all over the world ruining not only their reputations but the image of heroes in general. Public opinion of heroes falls to rock bottom, with many pro-heroes deciding to quit amid the backlash, and civilians stealing support items and resorting to vigilantism. And even worse is that All For One takes over Shigaraki's body and masterminds a mass prison break out of Tartarus and several other prisons, freeing not only himself but every villain Midoriya and his friends had ever apprehended, including Stain, Muscular and Overhaul.
  • Later Midoriya lives his own worst moment. after Lady Nagant gets blown up in front of him, and All For One taunts him with a Dark Reprise of when All Might told him "You Are Next", his mental state slips. Leaving even All Might behind, he spends the next days alone, fighting villains with no rest and saving people who are however afraid of him as his increasingly damaged costume gives him an unsettling appearance. He ends up so weakened physically and mentally that he can barely stand without the help of Blackwhip, and nearly lets a villain send mind-controlled people to lynch him. Luckily his classmates come just in time and proceed to convince him to return to UA.
• Deadly Sparring: During the Joint Training Arc, Class 1-A and Class 1-B perform a training exercise in which they split into teams and try to capture as many of their opponents as possible before a time limit runs out. Everything is going fine until Midoriya faces off against Monoma and becomes enraged by his taunts, suddenly manifesting a new Quirk which creates massive, destructive tendrils that instantly go out of control and attack the other students. Everyone is horrified as Midoriya can only scream at the other students to run and hope he doesn't harm them. Luckily, Uraraka can get Shinso to brainwash Midoriya and end the attack.
• Deadly Upgrade: One For All as many know is an inheritable Quirk, passing down its stockpile of Quirks from person to person. However, one major problem occurs if passed to a user with an existing Quirk, the strain of One For All takes a toll on the user's body on top of their own and they are fated to die young. As a testament to that, Hikage Shinomori, the fourth user and the second longest user next to All Might, died at 40, but the official statement says he died of old age. All Might, who's had One For All for at least 40 years, realized that One For All is optimal when passing on to a Quirkless user, thus Midoriya was the best choice to inherit One For All. But then this leads to the next flaw concerning One For All, seeing that Quirkless people are already a rarity and dropping more and more, Midoriya may be One For All's final successor.
• Deadpan Door Shut: In the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War, Shoto and his family visit Endeavor at the hospital he's recovering at. When Shoto opens the door to see Endeavor crying over how his poor parenting resulted in his eldest son Toya becoming the mass murderer Dabi, Shoto feels awkward due to never seeing his father act like this before and slams the door shut again. His sister Fuyumi has to grab him by the collar to make him enter the room.
• De-power: A chilling threat in a society where nearly everyone is a Differently Powered Individual:
  • Aizawa has the power to depower others for as long as he avoids blinking.
  • All For One can steal Quirks, resulting in this happening to his victims.
  • Overhaul and company are working on drugs that stop a person's Quirk factor. They've made bullets that stop it temporarily, but it's implied they're developing a permanent depowering version. They succeed, using the first batch to depower Mirio Togata, a student who was said to be the closest to taking the position of #1 hero.
• Decon-Recon Switch: The story deconstructs several tropes normally used in the action shonen genre, to the point of becoming a Deconstructor Fleet at a point, but it overall reconstructs the genre.
• Deconstructor Fleet: Has its own page.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The feared 0-point robots in the entrance exam are later reused as obstacles in the Sports Festival race, where several students are easily able to handle them. Discussed by the proctors, who point out that the robots not being treated as hazards to be avoided has a different psychological effect on the kids.
  • There is more than one Artificial Human Nomu, but the first one is the most refined of them all, as it is made to defeat All Might. Later ones are not as strong and can easily be taken down by the likes of Endeavor and Gran Torino.
• Designated Girl Fight: Subverted. All the girl-on-girl fights that happen throughout the series are largely incidental and have little to do with the fighters' sex. The U.A. Sports Festival tournament especially subverts this completely.
• Determinator: The "You can accomplish anything if you try hard enough and never give up, no matter the personal cost" mindset is played as destructive, as the main characters suffer great injury because of it. For example, Ida sustains nerve damage in his arm, whereas Midoriya suffers permanent damage to his arms as a result of going all out against Muscular. On the other hand, it's played straight depending on the situation - Uraraka goes all out during her fight with Bakugo at the Sports Festival, which impresses the audience and lands her many internship offers, and Bakugo considers her a Worthy Opponent, while Mirio devotes his life to mastering his Difficult, but Awesome Intangibility Quirk. He ends up as one of the Big Three at U.A. and is considered good enough to be a pro hero already.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: In Kirishima's backstory, he witnesses Ashido talking down a destructive villain by lying to his face, and the villain leaves peacefully after thanking her. Later it's revealed that said villain is Gigantomachia, All For One's bodyguard and most powerful lieutenant.
• Differently Powered Individual: By the time the story takes place, these represent the majority of the population, with a whopping 80% possessing some type of Quirk. Most simply continue to live ordinary lives, though, with only a small number becoming full-on superheroes or supervillains. This is inverted with Quirkless people, individuals with no superpowers who make up only 20% of the population.
• Dirty Coward: Upon the end of the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, with thousands of civilians either dead or homeless from Gigantomachia's rampage, hundreds of heroes retire and quit shutting down their agencies. This is especially notable that not only do they give up, but they quit right when people need them now more than ever. One of them was Yoroi Musha, one of the top 10 heroes, who retires solely to avoid criticism and because he only became a hero for the fame and attention.
• Double-Edged Buff: Mirio Togata's Permeability Quirk comes with a lot of downsides. While he's completely untouchable with it active, he can't breathe or see while intangible because light and air pass through him. Walking becomes nigh impossible because he'll simply sink into the ground, and he's violently ejected out of any material if he tries to rematerialize while inside it.
• Double Standard: During Bakugo and Uraraka's fight, many spectators start booing the former for not going easier on a girl. Aizawa immediately calls them out for this; this is the same audience who were fine with the three other male vs. female matches, including a boy who could shoot lasers against a female opponent. The only difference is that Bakugo is an unlikable jerk, therefore the audience assumes everything he does is to bully his opponent. Not only that, but he calls out the crowd for assuming that Uraraka needs going easy on, and reminds everyone that for Bakugo to underestimate her would be a severe mistake and insult.
• Downer Beginning: The story opens with a scene of a four-year-old Midoriya getting the crap kicked out of him by Bakugo before being left, beaten, and bruised while noting that "All men are not created equal." The story then jumps to his last year of middle school, where he's mocked by his entire class, has one of his prized notebooks scorched and thrown out a window, and is nearly murdered by a villain in the span of a few hours. After that, things seem like they'll get better when Midoriya meets his idol, All Might, only to be told that he can't become a hero without a Quirk, grinding all of Midoriya's hopes and dreams into fine powder. Even after he rushes in to help Bakugo (to no avail, mind), Midoriya still gets chewed out by the heroes and is ready to resign himself to a life of mediocrity. After all of this, this is finally subverted when All Might chases him down to apologize and tell him the five words he wanted to hear his entire life: "You can become a hero."
• Downer Ending: The Paranormal Liberation War arc. The war results in massive property damage, the loss of many heroes, and countless civilians coming to harm. Shigaraki gets away, now fully under the control of All For One who proceeds to cause a mass evasion of villains from Tartarus and several other prisons; in a matter of days vast areas of Japan are reduced to lawlessness and people are forced to gather in shelters. Dabi's broadcast, combined with the disastrous outcome of the battle, succeeds in shaking the public's faith in heroes to the core, and many other heroes crack under pressure and quit.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Shigaraki damaging Aizawa’s sight and gouging out one of his eyes. Aizawa was one of the biggest defenses against Shigaraki’s decay, but now his Erasure quirk is greatly impaired. He can tag team with the quirk copying Monoma, but Monoma has his own limitations and isn’t nearly as effective as Aizawa before his injury. It makes dealing with Shigaraki that much harder.
• Dualvertisement: In the run-up to the anime's third season, a series of ads were produced to promote the Japanese release of Avengers: Infinity War, where All Might asks the members of Class 1-A which Avenger they admire the most. For the record: Midoriya admires Captain America, Bakugo admires Iron Man,^note Well, he says it's less admiration and more respect Uraraka admires Black Widow, Ida admires Doctor Strange, Todoroki admires The Mighty Thor, and All Might himself admires The Incredible Hulk.
• Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: At the opening of the USJ Arc, All Might powers up to deal with a variety of relatively minor crimes on his commute to U.A. Because of that, he ends up burning through most of his daily limit before even making it to work. This means that he doesn't have much power left to fight with when the League of Villains makes their debut and he has to fight the impact-absorbing Nomu. Forcing himself past his limits to win the fight accelerates the weakening of his powers considerably.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The second opening and ending of Season 4 both serve as early showcases for several characters way before any of them will show up. In the opening, Hawks, Gentle, and La Brava all show up before being properly introduced. In the ending, this includes a young Mirko playing volleyball in gym class, younger versions of Gentle and La Brava in school, as well as Takeshita side by side with Gentle, a young Hawks being trained by the government, and Natsuo in a picture together with Fuyumi.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The early characterization of several characters is highly different from what becomes of them in later chapters:
  • Midoriya is shown to be pretty resentful towards Bakugo at the outset of the story because of Bakugo's bullying in the first chapter, albeit not resentful enough that he wouldn't risk his life to save him from the Sludge Villain. This is a stark contrast to the later Midoriya, who still admires him and is optimistic that he can still be friends with him.
  • In the first chapter, Bakugo always wears a smug grin on his face. Since then, he's been a Perpetual Frowner whenever he's not in a fight. This is justified, because in the first chapter he is surrounded by his friends and practically revered, and every other chapter after that challenges his ego either directly or indirectly and puts him in a situation where he has to change in order to be accepted by most of the class. Bakugo also seems to be more concerned about his reputation early on, calling out his friends for smoking because doing so could damage his chances of enrolling at U.A. Later on, Bakugo largely doesn't give a crap about the opinions of others and frequently does stuff that would frankly embarrass any educational institution.
  • Also in the first chapter, Bakugo's antagonism towards Midoriya is far more extreme than in later chapters, with him going as far as telling him to jump off a roof. Horikoshi would later regret including this scene, claiming that it makes him sound like a much worse person than he intended, and later chapters ignore this incident.
  • A lesser example is Ida. At the U.A. entrance exam, he is rather severe towards Midoriya and has a rather severe expression the entire time. Though he and Midoriya quickly become friends on the first day of school after the former apologizes for how he acted, Midoriya is initially unhappy to learn that they're in the same classroom. His hairstyle is different at first, initially being an undercut style. Shortly after school begins, it has grown into a more generic hairstyle.
  • Though it is partially because he is regularly Off-Model, Koda looks fairly different early in the manga. Early on, his looks emphasize his Rock Monster traits more heavily, but as the story goes on, he begins to look less ugly and more nervous, fitting his personality more.
  • Tsuyu and Mineta seem to be part of Midoriya's circle of friends, as they work together at USJ and they are the only ones apart from Uraraka and Ida to visit him while he is hospitalized during the U.A. Sports Festival. After that, they don't spend all that much time with Midoriya compared to his other classmates and are at best acquaintances; Tsuyu spends most of her time with Uraraka and the other girls, whereas Mineta is is usually seen with Kaminari and the other boys. Although during Midoriya's battle with Class 1-A in Dark Hero Arc, both of them mention that they do consider him as a friend. Mineta in particular admires Deku's bravery a lot and Tsuyu gives him a speech that Class 1-A won't leave him alone.
  • Tsuyu seems to get along with Mineta despite his perverted behavior, as she legitimately praises his skills during the USJ Arc, they work together during the Sports Festival, and they visit Midoriya during his aforementioned Sports Festival hospitalization. Now, she, like the rest of the girls in Class 1-A, can't stand Mineta due to his perverted behavior. Although, she still uses "-chan" part for him which means she at least accepts him as a classmate, just like the rest of the class.
  • The first time it was seen in action, Recovery Girl's Quirk was shown to be capable of quickly curing horrific injuries with no strings attached, as Midoriya's mangled arm and legs were brought back to how they were in a matter of seconds. Over time, however, it's been stated and shown to have more and more limits and drawbacks (as Midoriya's scars show); otherwise, it'd have lowered the stakes too much.
  • Bakugo freely using his Quirk in school comes as this in light of how future arcs would showcase and put a lot of emphasis on public Quirk usage being heavily regulated: only those with a hero license are allowed to use their Quirks in public, and doing so without one is considered a serious offense. Not only does this law play an important part in several arcs, but a whole villain organization exists with the sole purpose of taking down this regulation. Even ignoring Japan's attitude towards bullying, it's weird that no teacher called Bakugo out on using his Quirk so freely at the beginning of the story.
• Easily Swayed Population: The populace of Japan. If the aftermath of the heroes' raid on the Paranormal Liberation Front is any proof, all it took to make them turn against their devoted protectors was one slanderous broadcast from Dabi about Endeavor's past life. This is despite one part of Dabi's broadcast (the claim that Hawks murdered Best Jeanist) being immediately proven a lie when Jeanist showed up seconds later to fight Dabi and Shigaraki on live TV. Which surely should've left the public at least wondering how many of Dabi's other claims were also lies. They decide to take support items into their own hands, and in doing so, end up causing more harm to the city than good; heroes are scorned and belittled, and some are even shamed into retirement. The most harrowing sign of this is that they vandalized All Might's statue in Kamino with a sign about his neck reading "I AM NOT HERE".
• Elaborate University High: U.A. has buildings devoted to teaching and classes, dorms after it becomes a Boarding School, an Olympics-sized sports stadium, and several city-sized complexes that are used for hero training. This is partially justified by one of U.A.'s teachers literally manipulating cement as much as he wants,^note given the Everyone Is a Super setting, it stands to reason that construction got a lot easier but the school's incredibly large property is still highly unrealistic for a Japanese city.
• Elemental Fusion: Shoto Torodoki, who can manipulate fire and ice, develops a special technique he calls "Phosphor" which is a white cold fire that freezes anything. He develops this specifically to douse Dabi's flames, who are significantly hotter than what Shoto (or anyone for that matter) can achieve.
• Elemental Motifs:
  • Midoriya and All Might possess a light motif as holders of One For All. Each of the lights that appear in their mind while tapping into the Quirk represents a previous wielder. The anime frequently depicts All Might and Midoriya standing in front of a blinding light with their back to the viewer, showing their roles as the current and future Hope Bringer. Sometimes they're even shown emitting light from their fists as they're punching someone. The future shown in the Batman Cold Open of Season 2 has Midoriya's punch coincide with the rising of the Sun, seemingly illuminating the world in the process.
  • Conversely, Shigaraki and All For One are heavily associated with shadows and darkness. Their lair is a dim, secluded bar, they both dress in all black, and both of them are evocative of the unsavory underside of hero society. Even Kurogiri, their personal attendant who can create warp gates, has them step out of the murky black fog as they're being transported.
• Elemental Personalities:
  • Shoto Todoroki's Quirk lets him produce vast streams of ice and fire. At the start of the story, he exclusively uses his ice powers to spite his father, resulting in him being cold, stoic and fixated on becoming a hero without using his fire powers. But once Midoriya forces Todoroki to realize that his fire powers are his own, Todoroki begins to defrost, showcases far more warmth and empathy while retaining his burning passion to become a hero.
  • Denki Kaminari possesses an electricity Quirk and is constantly the life of the party. Goofy, a Casanova Wannabe, and constantly energetic, doesn't always think things through but manages to make fast friends with his classmates because of that same energy.
  • Fumikage Tokoyami's Quirk, Dark Shadow, is a Living Shadow with a mind of its own. Tokoyami himself is rather brooding and seems to suffer from Chuunibyou, to the point that his room is extremely dark and he keeps occult items lying around it.
  • Inasa Yoarashi is a Shiketsu student with a powerful air manipulation Quirk. He's extremely lively and gregarious along with being a little airheaded, apologizing for transgressions by bowing his head so low that he bashes it against the pavement. His name is also associated with wind storms, and he showcases a bitter and vengeful side to him regarding his distaste for Todoroki's and Endeavor's attitudes.
  • Dabi possesses an extremely powerful and self-destructive fire Quirk with flames even hotter than Todoroki or Endeavor's. Whereas Todoroki's acceptance of his fire powers is reflective of his growing warmth and empathy, Dabi's flames burn him and are illustrative of his obsession with destroying Endeavor and everything he holds dear. Dabi uses them carelessly to torch his enemies and actively tries to cause as much mayhem as he can. As Todoroki's lost older brother, Toya, his obsession began when he was tossed aside as a failure in his father's eyes, with Toya's ambitions and frustrations resulting in him lashing out against the "perfect" Shoto.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Quirk advantages are a concept that's been there since the first chapter. They're often basic like the wood manipulator being weak to fire, or the shadow beast user being weak to anything that can produce reasonable light. Some are more subtle though, like the Quirk eraser having a disadvantage against mutants, whose Quirks tend to be permanent alterations on their bodies (and thus can't be turned off).
• Enemy Exchange Program: The Big Bad's Quirk allows him to steal, store, and transfer Quirks. He employs it to steal both powerful and support-type Quirks from the heroes and his criminal rivals. Then, he either keeps them for himself or gifts them to his underlings as a reward. As of lately, he has taken on reinforcing corpses with all sorts of Quirks to create mindless Nomus. This trope is kind of lampshaded in the Quirk's name, which also serves as the villain's alias: All for One.
• Enemy Mine: The League of Villains is not a fan of Overhaul and the yakuza, and during the Internship Arc, Toga and Twice openly sabotage the villains, helping the heroes' rescue operation.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • Todoroki, having recognized the similarity between Midoriya's powers and All Might's, but not knowing about the fact that All Might's power can be deliberately passed down, asks Midoriya if he's All Might's illegitimate child.
  • In an anime-only episode, a group of students has to solve the mock murder of a villain, played by All Might, killed by one of his hostages. When Tsuyu checks All Might, he laughs because the movements tickle him. Tsuyu assumes All Might simply broke character. Everyone realizes too late, only after All Might has disappeared and escaped, that the villain was Playing Possum all along and All Might's moment of Corpsing was a deliberate clue they all missed. [[Invoked]]
• Epileptic-Friendly Filter: The screen is darkened when All Might shows up to fight the sludge monster at the beginning of the series, and again in multiple occasions such as whenever Present Mic uses his Quirk or in many fights involving Todoroki (such as his fights against Bakugo and Midoriya in the school festival).
• Eternal Villain: All For One has been the setting's Symbol of Evil and Big Bad to every user of One For All, from the first wielder, his younger brother, all the way to Midoriya himself. Over time, much effort has been spent trying to accumulate enough power to take him down for good, and not one has succeeded as of yet and a number of them have died at All For One's hands.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones:
  • All Might's strength is only rivaled by his kindness and he rarely uses excessive force in his fights. But his Arch-Enemy, All For One, is so utterly vile that All Might tried to cave the villain's face in the duel that crippled both of them.
  • Overhaul, the leader of the Shie Hassaikai, is so vile that the chipper Mirio and the compassionate Midoriya want nothing but to beat him to a pulp when they realize he's repeatedly abusing a little girl for his own gain.
• Everybody Is Single: The only characters who are confirmed to be in romantic relationships are the parents. Not a single U.A. student has been confirmed to be in a relationship or has ever been in a relationship. With students in the hero course so focused on becoming heroes, the series places way more emphasis on friendships and teamwork than romance. During the rare times romance is brought up, it's usually thought of as a distraction to hero careers. That said, they are all first years at a new school, most of them not knowing each other before entering U.A., so it makes sense they haven't immediately hooked up with each other.
• Everyone Is a Super: By the time the series begins, 80% of humanity has some kind of Quirk, and it's noted that Quirklessness becomes less common with each generation; it was relatively common when All Might was young, but Midoriya is the only student in his middle school without a Quirk. That said, most humans aren't superheroes. Inverted with animals, with only a rare few obtaining Quirks and fewer have the kind of intelligence it takes to refine them. The principal of U.A. is one such animal.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Many villains don't understand the virtue of self-sacrifice and attack heroes just so they could use their Quirks as they see fit, with no regard for the consequences of their actions.
• Evil Is Cool: Stain is seen as this In-Universe, but this is deconstructed. The manga shows how damaging the concept can be to society, especially to young people, since the attention Stain gets from the media encourages already troubled people such as Toga and Dabi to become full-time villains and follow in his wake. This is also troublesome because even if these villains are cool, they are still evil, and his publicity resulted in people buying merchandise of him and Kaminari even praising him around Ida, whose brother Stain permanently crippled.
• Evolutionary Levels: Apparently, people with Quirks lack a joint in their pinkie toe. It's explained that this joint is vestigial in humans, and therefore anyone without it is part of a new stage in evolution.
• Evolving Credits:
  • In the closing credits of the first three episodes of the anime, Midoriya is seen running in his middle school uniform. Once he makes it into U.A., he wears his high school uniform instead.
  • Happens a lot in the closing credits of the sixth season of the anime, generally reflecting the some of the characters' arcs:
    • The episode where Hawks is forced to kill Twice replaces the footage of Shigaraki looking at a town that gets demolished with a shot of Toga and Twice hugging, presumably in the Yakuza headquarters, followed by a shot of Toga sitting alone, now mourning Twice's untimely demise.
    • The episode where Bakugo takes an attack meant for Midoriya from Shigaraki replaces the same shot with a shot of a young Bakugo fallen into a river while a young, worried Midoriya offers him a hand, asking him if he's okay, which was a turning point in Bakugo's character, as his inferiority complex made him lash out at Midoriya. This shot is followed by a shot of a now teenaged Bakugo, in his hero costume (sans the mask) accepting Midoriya's help, signifying him actually being concerned for the well being of his childhood friend, which is a reference to this.
    • The episode that reveals Dabi's identity also replaces those two shots: first one with a cheerful Toya Todoroki showing his flame Quirk, second one with the now grown up Dabi gleefully using his Quirk in a similar manner.
• Exact Words:
  • Important during All Might's fight with Nomu:
    All Might: He said your power was shock absorption, not nullification! That means there's a limit to what you can take, right?!
  • During Star and Stripe's fight against Shigaraki, she uses her New Order Quirk to impose a rule upon him: "If Tomura Shigaraki moves at all, his heart will stop." However, this fails, because All For One was in the process of merging his consciousness with Shigaraki, making them into a new person who doesn't count as "Tomura Shigaraki" anymore.
• Eye Scream: Aizawa getting his eye gouged out by Shigaraki clawing his face in an attempt to blind him and render him quirkless. The manga scene looks rather painful for Aizawa to say the least.

F-H

• Fake-Out Twist:
  • In chapter 191 of the manga/episode 90 of the anime, Hawks, the number 2 ranked hero in Japan, is shown meeting with Dabi of the League of Villains, revealing Hawks to be The Mole. Once the meeting is finished, the next scene is Hawks recalling how the Heroes Public Safety Commission asked him to spy on the League, meaning he's actually a mole for the good guys.
  • The end of Chapter 335 sets up Hagakure as the U.A. traitor by way of an Answer Cut when All For One talks about the "friends" he can use. However, the next chapter reveals the real traitor.
• Famed In-Story:
  • Most pro heroes are famous to varying degrees, with All Might being the most famous of them all (in Japan, at least). In fact, within the system that ranks heroes, public approval ratings are even directly taken into account.
  • Because of its large national audience, students of U.A. have the chance of making their name known across the whole nation at the U.A. Sports Festival.
  • Even compared to other U.A. students, Midoriya's class became famous after they were able to repel a villain ambush during one of their lessons. It actually caused them to overshadow the other U.A. students at the above-mentioned Sports Festival as the media and audience paid more attention to them.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • When Quirks first began to emerge, people who developed them were ostracized by society à la X-Men, but now that the majority of people in the world have powers, it's the powerless who are at a disadvantage. Even those who have odd appearances as a result of their Quirks aren't notably discriminated against unless they are in rural areas with conservative views of "normalcy", save for a rare faction that discriminates against "mutant" type individuals.
  • Chapter 171 reveals the existence of a villain known as Destro, who is or was the leader of the "Metahuman Liberation Army", suggesting that at some point, those with Quirks fought back against those who ostracized them in the early days of powers coming into existence.
• Fantastical Social Services: Strict laws against the unsanctioned use of Quirks are in place to mitigate potential havoc. Since most people gain their Quirks by the age of four, parents can take their children to Quirk counselors to help them acclimate to their abilities and use them responsibly.
• Fat Flex: All Might describes his superpower to be similar to this. Just like a normal human can puff their chest to look stronger, he too can redistribute his body's energy output to turn from a skinny bloke to a superhuman form. However, doing so puts a heavy strain on his body, even more so after he got a lung ripped out in battle and so has had his transformational time halved.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: This is pretty much the mentality of how a lot of the villains operate. They don't like living in a time where you can be arrested for simply using your Quirk or have a much harder time committing all the havoc and villainous acts they want to accomplish. As such, they wish to change the system to suit their own means.
• Felony Misdemeanor: In the first chapter/episode, Kamui Woods claims that a purse thief is "pure evil". Although the thief did use his Quirk to turn into a giant monster, damaging infrastructure and endangering bystanders, he's still very much on the lighter side of villains compared to some other baddies that are introduced later, especially when you consider that Mt. Lady, a superheroine, causes similar amounts of property damage in the process of apprehending him and is applauded for it.
• Fictional Disability:
  • 20 percent of the population is born Quirkless, having no superpowers to call their own. While they can still go about a mundane life without a problem, Quirkless people like Midoriya are magnets for bullying and scorn and are heavily discouraged from trying to become heroes.
  • In Chapter 168, it's revealed that some people have Quirks that aren't compatible with their biology. For example, Aoyama's Navel Laser can seriously injure him from overuse, which he claims is from a birth defect but actually comes from being born quirkless and having a body not suited to the quirk he was given. This also explains why nobody batted an eye when Midoriya kept severely injuring himself in the earlier story arcs.
• Filler:
  • In the anime, there are moments here and there of Adaptation Expansion, such as getting to see the U.A. Sports Festival fights that are off-panel in the manga, with many confirmed canon such as Yaoyorozu's fight with Tokoyami. However, episode 19 of Season 2 is technically the first true filler episode that delves into some of the post-Sports Festival internships of the U.A. students while Midoriya recovers in the hospital following the fight against Stain. One noteworthy internship that's given the spotlight here is the one for Tsuyu, which shows the entirety of the mission she's on dealing with a group of villains on a naval ship. These events, at least in the case of Tsuyu, are a case of adaptation expansion/canon too, as they're all referred to as occurring in the manga, just offscreen. It's still technically filler, though, in that unlike the U.A. Sports Festival, no manga events take place in the episode with it.
  • Season 3 opens with a swimming competition between Class 1-A that's never in the manga in a long Shout-Out to Free! (funnily enough, not only does Iida look exactly like Rei Ryugazaki, they even have the same voice actor in the dub). The episode, however, has comparatively less fanservice than what's usually seen in this situation, which is lampshaded when Kaminari and Mineta try to check out the girls in bikinis, only to find out that they're wearing full-body swimsuits; if anything, the fanservice comes from the male characters who only wear shorts. Said episode also serves as a recap for the previous two seasons.
  • Also in Season 3, a few segments are added for the Provisional Hero License Exam Arc that isn't in the manga. One showcases Todoroki vs. a class of ninja-themed students. The other pits a team of Yaoyorozu, Tsuyu, Jiro, and Shoji against an all-girl squad led by a hyper-intelligent strategist.
  • Probably the straightest filler episode in the entire series thus far occurs in Episode 20 of Season 3 which serves partially as a backdrop to promote Two Heroes and partially just to have fun with six of the most significant/popular members of Class 1-A (the main five and Tsuyu) as they try to solve a hostage situation/Locked Room Mystery. The anime lampshades how blatant it is in the prologue when a confused Midoriya points out to All Might that they are supposed to be in the middle of getting their provisional hero licenses while All Might just tells him to ignore it for now and have some fun.
  • Season 4 begins with a filler recap episode, this time involving a freelance journalist, Taneo Tokuda, coming to interview Class 1-A about their new dorm life. The recap aspect of the episode is heavily downplayed, however, as it focuses more on Taneo secretly searching for All Might's successor.
  • Season 5 opens with another filler recap episode, which, at least in the anime, marks the first time Bakugo ever interacts with one of U.A.'s Big Three, Tamaki. The episode shows a training exercise where the Class 1-A students must fight the remaining Big Three members while rescuing Mirio, who plays the role of a Distressed Dude.
  • Season 5 has an episode during the Endeavor Internship Arc that shifts focus to Uraraka and Tsuyu's internship, which serves as a prelude to the third movie.
• Final Battle: Officially kicks off in Chapter 343, with Midoriya and Aoyama luring All For One and his new army of villains to an abandoned parking lot. They proceed to spring their trap on them, with Monoma copying Kurogiri's Quirk to launch the heroes' counterattack, employing the initial strategy used against Class 1-A in the series' first battle, USJ, as a Call-Back.
• Fire/Ice Duo: Invoked by Endeavor, who wanted a child with a strong Quirk, and so sought out a woman with a strong ice Quirk to complement his fire Quirk and trapped her in marriage. She eventually gave birth to Shoto Todoroki, who can generate fire from his left side and ice from his right. However, rather than simply being a case of Combo Platter Powers, the fire and ice explicitly serve as Required Secondary Powers to each other, allowing Shoto to regulate his body temperature, and thus sidestep the drawbacks of overusing one power or the other.
• The First Superheroes: in-universe, the beginning of the "Quirk" phenomenon among the people is believed to lie with a single baby born with the power to glow. Following this birth, other people around the world started gaining powers too, and, by the time of the story proper, about 80% of the global population have powers, while the remaining 20% do not have any powers at all.
• Five-Man Band Concert: The School Festival Arc couples a variation of this trope with Dancing Theme. Izuku, The Leader and the main character, is not part of the band but is one of the dancers. Instead, it's The Lancer who is part of the band because he turns out to be a talented drummer. The band itself is comprised of Jiro (voice and bass), Momo (keyboard), Bakugo (drums), and Tokoyami and Kaminari (guitars). They all play "Hero Too" as their School Festival class presentation.
• The Flame of Life: The remnants of the quirk One For All still within All Might are described by Arch-Nemesis All For One as dying embers. Visually, they're represented by an image of a dying, sputtering flame which a weakened All Might is huddled over, struggling to keep it lit while he finishes his task of defeating All For One.
• Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras: Subverted:
  • Outside of costume, the majority of major characters are very plain-looking, ordinary people and are no different from civilians. Even characters like Ashido, Shoji, and Hagakure have trouble standing out due to plenty of people having Mutant Quirks or sub-mutations. A lot of extras are also given colorful hair and unique designs that make them look like important characters.
  • In-costume, background, and minor heroes and hero students are just as eye-catching as the cast, even more than some such as Jiro, Kaminari, and Koda.
• Flaw Exploitation: The final exams are redesigned into this after the incidents involving the League of Villains. The teachers pair up students against the teacher who can best force them to deal with their weak areas.
• Floral Theme Naming: In a separate case from the usual Meaningful Names of Quirk users, each of the manga-original Quirkless characters have names that reference trees/plants somehow.
• Flying Brick:
  • Surprisingly, for a traditional superhero story, there are very few running around, although this is most likely due to how Quirks work. Although a Quirk can grant more than one power, it's rare for one to grant completely unrelated powers, meaning flight+strength+speed+durability is a rare sight. Most heroes are lucky to have just one of those qualities and have to rely on teamwork and ingenuity to win more often than brute force. It's one of the reasons All Might, having three out of four of those classic traits (sans flight), became so exceptional.
  • A few of the rare straight examples include Captain Celebrity in the Vigilantes spinoff (whose exact Quirk is considered a national mystery much like All Might) and Nana Shimura, though only through supporting her natural flight Quirk with One For All's strength. Endeavor also somewhat counts since he can propel himself with fire, though he usually doesn't bother flying much since it can quickly drain his firepower or contribute to unnecessary overheating.
• Food-Based Superpowers:
  • Sato's Quirk, Sugar Rush, revolves around him consuming a lot of sugar and gaining a temporary boost of strength and energy.
  • Tamaki Amajiki, hero name Suneater, can transform his body based on any food he has recently eaten. He eats beef, he turns his hands into hooves. He eats squid or octopus, he can transform parts of his body into tentacles. His mentor, Fat Gum, makes a point of giving him swordfish meat just before they take part in a raid of the Shie Hassaikai's stronghold.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • In general, Midoriya's narration says at the very start that this is the story of how he became a great hero. So, assuming he isn't lying, we can assume he succeeds in the end.
  • Midoriya's narration in Chapter 46 indicates that something bad will happen to Ida. It does
• Formula with a Twist: The series revitalized the shonen genre in the early 2010s by introducing a rich and interesting new world that the protagonist needed to fit himself into, rather than said world revolving around said protagonist. While Midoriya does possess one of the strongest Quirks imaginable, simply becoming powerful isn't what he's after. Midoriya's journey is to learn and understand the complex and flawed system of a world where Everyone Is a Super so that he becomes A True Hero which truly helps people and makes the world a better place. His struggle to become a better hero, in addition to improving his powers over time, is what makes the story truly stand out.
• Four Lines, All Waiting:
  • There's the main plot, which is society attempting to raise a new generation of heroes.
  • Midoriya is struggling desperately to become All Might's replacement as the Symbol of Peace without dying along the way.
  • The League of Villains is trying to remake society in its own image while grooming a new leader to answer the Symbol of Peace.
  • Character Focus continually jumps around, from Todoroki to Ida to Kirishima, with major characters All Might, Bakugo, and Uraraka flitting in and out along the way. Horikoshi very much wants to give all the characters what focus he can and repeatedly laments all the characters he hasn't yet been able to focus on.
  • Minor plot-lines are mentioned or brought up every now and then within the latter parts of the manga, this includes the Traitor Theory, the Quirk-erasing bullets, the Todoroki family drama, Mirio's lost Quirk and the attempts to retrieve it and so on.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Some of the poster scenery in Season 2 is directly ripped from the volume covers of the manga.
  • The third opening has a shot of Ida looking towards the camera, and the smile of his brother reflected in the lens of his glasses.
• Freeze-Frame Introduction: Starting from halfway through season 2, every episode introduces every single character appearing in that episode with a still frame including the character's name, hero/villain description and Quirk. This applies only to the original broadcast (and simulcast) airing: the Blu-ray version of the series (which is also used for the foreign dubs) removes the subtitles, mainly because in a format where the viewer is allowed to watch multiple episodes one after the other reintroducing the exact same characters over and over every 25 or so minutes would feel kinda redundant.
• Fridge Logic: In-Universe. Midoriya belatedly realizes that since he can produce blasts of air at just 20% of One For All's power, then All Might wasn't using 100% of his power all the time while in his muscled form. If he was, he'd create a hurricane every time he moved.
• Friendly Rivalry:
  • The most notable pair is Kirishima and Tetsutetsu. They're both at odds about having very similar Quirks, but soon become friends after they first tie in the Sports Festival's tournament.
  • Bakugo starts out as just The Rival, but after he miserably fails the Provisional Hero License Exam and after figuring out that Midoriya has All Might's Quirk, he starts to mellow out a little towards Midoriya.
• Frog Men: Tsuyu and her family are all notably frog-like.
• From Bad to Worse: Every chapter after 290 comes off as this, as we see the collapse of heroes as people become more polarizing towards them, Tartarus becoming a wreck which allows the most dangerous prisoners to escape, citizens unable to defend themselves as crime rate begins to rise, and many heroes are beginning to resign out of frustration and disappointment in their system, and the list goes on and on and on.
• From Hero to Mentor: All Might is still the number one hero in the rankings when the story begins, but he knows already that it's only a matter of time before his injuries take him out of the game for good, so he actively seeks out a protégé and finds Midoriya to pass his power on to. He then functionally retires to teach and eventually leaves heroing completely to focus on educating.
• From Zero to Hero: Izuku Midoriya starts off as a Quirkless teen who can only dream of becoming a hero in a world full of them. After being recognized by his lifelong idol, All Might, he gains the powerful quirk One For All, giving him a chance at becoming the number one hero. Although he has to keep training his newfound power, he gets plenty of opportunities to fight villains and save others.
• Generational Trauma:
  • The legacy of One For All can be considered an ongoing passage of generational trauma as many Past Holders gave up their lives and endured multiple hardships in the war against All For One. Examining the recent three, Nana Shimura had to give up her child to social services after losing her husband to the monster only to die by his hands a short time later. Her successor All Might was forced to train at an early age while becoming the best hero he can be to honor his master's sacrifice. And while he did create an Era of Peace after "killing" All For One, this ultimately resulted in a failing body and his friendships stifled. And when it was Izuku's time, not only did he have to deal with breaking his body every time he uses One For All but he also picked up on the same self-sacrificing tendencies as All Might.
  • Shigaraki Tomura's origin also counts after he's revealed to be Nana Shimura's grandson. After Nana gave up her son (Kotaro) to child services, Kotaro developed a strong hatred for heroes and made a strict rule for his family to never bring up heroism in his household. He'd even go as far as to beat his son Tenko (Shigaraki) who openly expressed a desire in becoming a hero. But the ongoing abuse he endured mixed with the development of his Decay Quirk would result in Tenko killing everyone in his household, including his father. This led to him becoming homeless, ignored by everyone around him, and then groomed by All For One into becoming a Symbol of Fear to terrorize modern hero society.
• Geodesic Cast: Due to its large cast, the series divides the characters depending on their similar roles in the story and as contrasting Foils:
  • The main guy: Midoriya and Shigaraki.
  • The Heart: Uraraka, Nejire, Mt. Lady, Uwabami, Bubble Girl, and the Darker and Edgier Toga.
  • The "mentor" who's there for the main guy (respectively): All Might and All For One.
  • The Animal-Themed Superbeing or at least has Animal Motifs: Tsuyu, Tokoyami, Spinner, Mirko, Gang Orca, and Shoji.
  • The Class Rep: Both Iida and Yaoyorozu for Class 1-A, Kendo for Class 1-B, Nagamasa Mora for his class at Shiketsu High, (and the Canon Foreigner Sekigai for her Isamu High in the 2nd OVA).
  • The Ace: Todoroki, Bakugo, Yoarashi, Honenuki, Tokage, Hawks, and Best Jeanist.
  • The Klutz or the Book Dumb: Kaminari, Camie, Tetsutetsu, Sero, Aoyama, Kirishima, and Mina.
• Genius Loci: Played with. During the Work Study Arc, the main characters invade the base of operations of the Haissakai group. When they get to the group's underground base, a man using the name of Mimic uses his Quirk to fuse himself with the underground facility, turning it into a sentient maze and being able to control the place to separate and attack the heroes.
• Genre Mashup: A Shōnen story in a Superhero setting.
• Given Name Reveal:
  • Two notable ones, both involving Tomura Shigaraki:
    • The first is that his real name is Tenko Shimura. As in, Nana Shimura, who was All Might's mentor and Tenko's grandmother.
    • The second is that the name Shigaraki actually belongs to All For One, who gave it to him after taking him under his wing.
  • Another one comes from Dabi, who turns out to be Toya, the missing Todoroki sibling.
• Glasses Curiosity: During the dorm room contest, it's revealed Ida has a shelf full of spare glasses. He considers this to be completely normal, much to Uraraka's amusement. It's not directly addressed, but attentive viewers may notice that for the rest of the competition, both Uraraka and Ashido now each wear a pair of Ida's glasses.
• Golden Snitch: In the second round of the U.A. Sports Festival, Midoriya is the snitch. His point value of ten million is greater than the rest of the students' points combined. Unlike most examples, the game didn't completely devolve into an all-out war for his 10,000,000 point headband, because there were openings for four teams to make it to the next round, and several teams decided it would be more worthwhile to go after other sources of points with less competition.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: A recurring issue with the heroes is they often fail to understand a person's motivation in becoming a villain:
  • Present Mic is outraged at Dr. Ujiko for using his genius to develop technology for the villains and make the world a worse place to be. Dr. Ujiko on his part, is simply, eternally grateful to All for One who believed him, and funded his research after he was ridiculed by the scientific community in the past.
  • The biggest, most tragic, however, is Hawks, who infiltrated the League and befriended Twice while acting as a mole. He promised to spare Twice and would even help him start a new life, not understanding that Twice's motivation for villainy isn't so easily defined. Twice told him to sod off, forcing Hawks to kill him.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars:
  • Scars of heroic characters tend to be out of the way or subtle — Kirishima and Aizawa have little nicks near their eyes, Nezu has a thin stripe that runs over one of his eyes, and Vlad King has a faint X-shaped scar over his cheek. Eri has faint scars along her arms and legs, but they're rarely seen. Midoriya's arms and hand are Covered in Scars, but they're slashes that are covered most of the time. The exceptions are Todoroki's prominent burn mark, which could qualify as an Evil Scar, but is still far less severe than Dabi's burns, and All Might's horrific scar courtesy of All For One, which, though covered most of the time, still wouldn't look out of place on a villain's body.
  • Meanwhile, villainous characters often have larger and more grotesque scars — Dabi's body is nearly covered in horrific, dark burn scars, Muscular's got a giant slash over his missing eye, Twice has a very prominent, vertical, stitched-up scar that runs across his forehead, and All For One's face is entirely covered in scar tissue.
• Goo It Up:
  • The Sludge Villain from the first arc is composed of a greenish-gray sludgy substance and can use it to attack.
  • Mina can create slime that can vary between being slippery and acidic.
• Gotta Pass the Class:
  • Before the summer training camp, Aizawa says that everyone must pass their final exams to come. Cue a Hard-Work Montage of the students studying. Although some people eventually failed, Aizawa clarifies that everyone gets to attend the training camp, but the ones who flunked have to attend additional classes during the camp.
  • To gain more experience at an internship, the students of Class 1-A and 1-B are required to pass a special exam to earn their provisional hero licenses, which are usually reserved for second and third-year students. By the end, all of the U.A. students pass except for Bakugo and Todoroki, who are subsequently forced to go to remedial classes for makeup in the winter and subsequently fall Out of Focus as a result.
• The Grappler: Uraraka spends her one-week work study with the hero Gunhead to learn some close combat techniques. She picks it up quickly enough that grappling and disarming maneuvers are now her go-to attack, using them to cuff Thirteen, disarm Toga, and defeat several members of 1-B throughout her various battles.
• The Greatest Story Never Told:
  • In Chapter 56, Midoriya, Todoroki, and Ida have survived Stain's onslaught and even rescued Native, but tales of their heroics can never be told since they committed a violation of performing superheroics without any license; If word got out, they would have to be punished. However, it's downplayed in that at least a few people know the truth, including the chief of police, who personally thanks them for capturing the Hero Killer.
  • Much later, Midoriya gets in a fight with Gentle Criminal, a petty villain attempting to break into U.A. to gain attention, because even though he's not that dangerous and doesn't intend to harm anyone inside, the school is on high alert due to the resurgence in villain attacks and if any report of a possible threat was detected, they'd have to shut down the school and end the cultural festival going on at the time. When teachers arrive at the aftermath of the fight between them, Gentle says he just stumbled while Midoriya says they had a bit of a dispute. This is downplayed in that the staff realizes quickly what happened, but they decide to keep quiet so that the cultural festival doesn't have to be shut down.
• Greek Chorus:
  • During the U.A. Sports Festival, commentary on the matches for the benefit of the audience switches between the official commentators (Present Mic and Aizawa), the other students, and the visiting heroes.
  • Bakugo and Midoriya are the second pair to finish their final in the manga; afterward, Midoriya commentates on the rationale and strategies of the remaining matches alongside Recovery Girl. Since the anime changes things so that the pairs go one at a time, Midoriya still watches the matches but is joined by some of his classmates after they finish their finals and before he takes his.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: During the students vs. teacher final exam, All Might swings Midoriya down onto a charging Bakugo like bringing down a hammer on a nail.
• Grouped for Your Convenience: U.A.'s students are grouped based on their field of study. Hero course students are kept in classes A and B, general course students in classes C, D, and E, support classes in F, G, and H, and management classes in I, J, and K. Given the nature of the story, Class 1-A tend to get the lion's share of the focus whereas the general, support, and management course students tend to fall to the wayside.
• Hair Color Dissonance: Several characters who seem to be black-haired (e.g., Midoriya, Ida, Tsuyu) have unnaturally colored highlights (mint, dark blue, teal, respectively), but sometimes they will be drawn with their hair entirely on those colors, making it hard to identify their actual hair color.
• Hair-Contrast Duo:
  • Wimpy nice guy protagonist Midoriya has dark, green-tinged Messy Hair, whereas his Foil, the hot-tempered, asocial Bakugo, has light blond Shonen Hair.
  • The lazy, slovenly, black-haired Aizawa to the upbeat and energetic blond Present Mic, as well as the heroically blond All Might, with whom he forms a The Cowl / The Cape contrast.
  • Deadpan Snarker Jiro has dark hair, whereas her Vitriolic Best Bud, the overall sillier Kaminari, has spiky blond hair.
  • Mirio Togata is a cheerful, energetic, and outgoing boy with neat yellow hair while his best friend the quiet, serious, and calm Tamaki with messy Indigo hair.
• Hammy Villain, Serious Hero: Downplayed. While not a villain, Monoma is an antagonist for Class 1-A during the Tournament Festival and Joint Training arcs, and is extremely hammy, prone going on long, ranting monologues and bouts of maniacal laughter whenever he appears. He stands out even against the most energetic Class 1-A students, especially when provoking them, to the point that people wonder if he's just insane.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • The manga starts off with one: Not all men are born equal, and inherently, some are born with an advantage or disadvantage over others. The rest of the manga runs along these lines and makes it clear that from birth, some were born with the deck stacked against them and those who were born with the deck in their favor, and sometimes, people have privilege in some things and not in others.
  • The harsh truth dealt to Midoriya throughout the first chapter is that sometimes dreams don't come true no matter how much you yearn for them. Without a Quirk, he had practically no hope of becoming a hero, and everyone from his teachers to All Might told him in no uncertain terms to give up on his dream and go find more realistic employment.
  • Of the unconventional but real variety, and more of a message than a proper Aesop. When Uraraka mentions feeling shame of her unwholesome reason for being a hero, since she is Only in It for the Money, Ida, however, mentions that there is nothing wrong with it, since she is just looking for a way to sustain herself and her parents, and it's okay to look for a job just because it pays well. In fact, Midoriya suggests that Uraraka's motives are more grounded in reality than his desire to become a hero.
  • The plot-line about Endeavor's relationships with his family ends with one: There is no right answer to whether you should forgive your abuser. Fuyumi decides to forgive her father and attempts to bring her family together. Natsuo blows up at his father and refuses to listen to him. Shoto reserves his judgment, stating that he is not forgiving him, but he is acknowledging that Endeavor is trying to change and that people do change. Even Rei acknowledges that, although she does not want to see him again, that he is making an effort. None of the characters are portrayed as being in the wrong and Endeavor acknowledges that all of them are entitled to the reactions they had. He even tells Natsuo that it's fine not to forgive him, and has a new home built for his wife and children, partly for their safety and partly because he believes they would be better off without him.
  • If society continuously ostracize, beats down and mistreats a group, they will eventually act against it. Several of the villains are people who had terrible luck, made a few mistakes, and aren't fundamentally bad people, or turned into bad people by years of mistreatment for things that were fundamental to them (Toga with her quirk, Twice with his debt, Spinner with his appearance, and even, impliedly, Magne's gender identity), and were there less bigotry or more of a willingness to help them fit in and integrate, none of them would have turned to villains.
• Headbutting Heroes: Heroism is a corporate affair, so there's an undercurrent of competition between various heroes and their agencies for the public eye and the business that provides; professional heroine Mt. Lady makes her debut by "kill stealing" from Kamui Woods in the very first chapter, for example.
• Heal the Cutie:
  • Midoriya, as a Cheerful Child, was an ecstatic fanboy of All Might but was brokenhearted to find that he would probably never get a Quirk, dashing his dreams of becoming a hero. He is regularly mocked and bullied in his class for not having one, and when he meets his idol, he is told again that he should give up. When he acts to rescue his former bully, he is chastised by the public for rushing in without a Quirk and gives up on his dream. However, All Might, moved by his selflessness, decides to choose him as the next vessel for his Quirk, and Midoriya's journey to finally realizing his dream begins.
  • Eri is introduced as a quiet, traumatized little girl after accidentally killing her father and being tortured by Overhaul to make anti-Quirk bullets. Midoriya and Mirio make it their personal mission to make her smile again, and using friendship, treats, and The Power of Rock, finally help her to become the Cheerful Child she was meant to be.
• Heartfelt Apology: Showing how much he matured, Katsuki Bakugo offers one to Izuku Midoriya in front of everyone with his head hung low and everything for all the bullying he put the latter through. He even addresses Midoriya by his given name for the first time. Midoriya responds by giving an apology of his own.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • When Skeptic is about to hack into the security system of U.A. during the Final War Arc, he finds only one small roadblock - turns out former video-uploading villain, La Brava, has been recruited specifically to stop him. Naturally, Gentle is not far behind, as he's there to save U.A. from freefalling, having previously restrained all of the convicts from the prison he was locked up in.
  • Also joining forces with the Heroes is Lady Nagant, who stops Shigaraki from using Decay in the nick of time.
• Hellhole Prison: Tartarus is a prison that's reserved for the most dangerous villains. From what has been seen, prisoners are locked in a cell, are extremely monitored, and have gun turrets (at least for All For One) ready to shoot them at any suspicious move without anything to do but stare at a wall.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic:
  • If a main character wears more covering headgear than a Domino Mask or goggles, the very first hit said character takes in a fight will blow it off. Always. Special mention to Midoriya himself, who takes over a hundred chapters to wear his mask(a simple cloth hood that covers his face but offers no protection whatsoever) again after it gets blown apart by Bakugo in their first training exercise, even after it's repaired.
  • Sero does wear his helmet. However, you can see his face through the glass when his facial expressions need to be seen. Otherwise, it's completely black.
  • With Ida it's played with. When in full uniform, he does wear his fully covering helmet, yet during the fight against Stain, which is his biggest battle yet in uniform, the helmet comes off.
  • Mirio has to discard his helmet to make use of his Quirk. Normally, when he goes intangible, he'll drop right out of his clothes, but his hero costume has his hair woven into it to avert this (his Quirk will treat it as part of his body, since some of it is). But, his helmet isn't made of cloth, so that can't work with it. One wonders why he bothers with the helmet at all since he literally can't use it.
• Hero Academy: U.A. is a Superhero School for those in the Hero Course, but it's this for those in General Education, Management, and Support, as these courses don't teach kids how to be heroes but rather other skills that would help them survive in a superhero-filled setting.
• Hero Does Public Service: Discussed. Most prominently with All Might's Wax On, Wax Off training approach with Midoriya, having him clean up a beach in addition to his physical training, and some other heroes believe that hero work involves more boring, unglamorous work, too (like Fourth Kind making Tetsutetsu and Kirishima pick up trash on patrol).
• Hero Insurance: It's present, but there is a limit, as enough property damage can cause hero offices to go bankrupt, so the destruction of property is discouraged.
• Hero of Another Story: Following the U.A. Sports Festival Arc, it's implied that Shinso has been training, in the background, to become a hero in his own right; one appearance has him a fair bit more muscular than he was previously, and it's mentioned that he seems far more intense.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Class 1-A is this to the other classes. Despite all the danger they got into, the fame that they get causes the other classes to look at them with disdain, believing the class to be cocky and to enjoy the fame of surviving against villains. This is especially true regarding their plan for the U.A. Culture Festival, where two general department students disparage their good intentions within earshot of Bakugo.
  • The League of Villains wish to invoke this on U.A. by staging attacks to undermine confidence in the school and its most famous graduate, All Might. As Shigaraki remarks, every single media outlet quickly spins their attacks in the most damaging way possible.
  • Dabi invokes this on his father Endeavor near the end, broadcasting his rant about being abused as a child. Endeavor did deserve it, but it does tarnish his hero image.
• Heroes "R" Us: Heroes can set up their own professional agencies complete with sidekicks and other assistants to help them in their duties ranging from stopping villains to rescuing civilians to even filing paperwork. On a governmental level, there is the Hero Public Safety Commission which is in charge of managing the interactions between heroes and regular members of society, as well as overseeing the laws and regulations of the Hero industry. They are also in charge of other functions such as administering the Provisional License test for up-and-coming heroes, as well as coordinating heroes and police forces for criminal investigation purposes. The aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War sees the HPSC as mostly defunct when a double of Re-Destro that Twice made slaughters a majority of their high-ranking staff, and as a result severely hampered the possibility of Japan receiving outside assistance from other nations since they aren't around anymore to file the proper aid requests.
• Heroic Build: Most male heroes, including the teenagers of Class 1-A (except Mineta), are built like brickhouses. Midoriya's initial training is to develop this before applying to U.A.
• Heroic Fantasy: Not the manga itself, but two pieces of manga bonus art depict the characters as heroes adventuring in a medieval fantasy setting. This is expanded on in the second anime season's second ending, as well as one chapter in the light novels.
• Heroic RRoD: Although Quirks grant a user power, they're not infinite and often can cause harm to the user if either used excessively or not used properly:
  • Midoriya can't control his power output, so his bones break every time he uses One For All. By Chapter 47, he's trying to find a way around this.
  • Uraraka can't overuse her gravity power or she'll get violently nauseous or dizzy, as she has a weight limit.
  • Kaminari's charge reserves have a limit and if he uses too much, he'll be in a state of unparalleled stupidity.
  • Mineta can't rip out too many sticky balls or his scalp will bleed.
  • Aoyama's navel laser can't be overused or his stomach will crumple or be crushed.
  • Aizawa has to maintain unblinking eye contact to nullify other powers or it won't work. He also can't stare for too long because he has dry eyes.
  • Ida can overclock the engines in his legs for a single burst of incredible speed, after which he can't use his powers again for a while. In addition, his engines seem to be literal mechanical engines, with parts such as temperature regulators which can break.
  • Todoroki can suffer frostbite from using his ice powers unless he uses his flame powers to regulate his body temperature. The reverse would happen if he overused his flame powers and didn't regulate his temperature with his ice powers; his father Endeavor's body begins to overheat from continuously using big attacks during a tough fight, and he muses that this is exactly why he strove to create a child with both fire and ice powers.
  • Bakugo needs sweat to generate his explosions. If he can't sweat, he can't make an explosion. He discusses this in Chapter 38, pointing out that every Quirk has some kind of limit. Bakugo designed his costume specifically to help him collect sweat to amplify his explosions. His wrists also aren't immune to the kickback from the explosions he makes, so if he overdoes it, he could also injure himself by straining his wrists.
• Heroic Wannabe: Many pro heroes treat their profession as a way to achieve fame and celebrity status, often forgetting the meaning of the word "hero". Midoriya, despite initially being Quirkless, is probably more of a hero than most of them, which is why All Might chooses him as his successor in the first place. This type of person is also the main target of Stain's attacks.
• Hidden Depths: Bakugo, of all people, took music lessons as a kid, and knows how to play the drums so well that it impresses Jiro, who grew up in a house of professional musicians.
• Hidden Purpose Test: The U.A. entrance exam is one. Midoriya assumes he's failed after scoring zero points on the practical exam portion. However, All Might reveals to him in a video that there is an additional scoring system, which the teachers give points based on how much they help others out. He scores sixty points in this system, which is more than enough to pass because the teachers were impressed with how he rushed in to save Uraraka without any regard for his own safety when he saw her foot was pinned down by some debris, despite the robot he defeats being worth zero villain points. All Might tells Midoriya it'd be extremely hypocritical of them if they fail him after the heroism he shows off in the face of danger, something a bonafide hero has to deal with every day on the job.
• Hijacked Destiny: Sir Nighteye accuses Midoriya of having done this, as All Might picked him instead of Mirio, a more experienced and powerful candidate whom Nighteye had been grooming to succeed All Might as the Symbol of Peace. Following Overhaul's defeat and Mirio sacrificing his Quirk to protect Eri, Midoriya is inclined to agree and tries to give One For All to Mirio as Nighteye wanted, but Mirio flatly refuses.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The user of All For One ultimately created his own opposition when he forced a Quirk that could stockpile power upon his brother, the original owner of One For All. This combination of power means that each successor of One For All becomes more powerful than the one prior, with the ultimate goal of defeating All For One.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Exaggerated when Class 1-A is trying out singers for their Culture Festival performance and Mineta's attempt is literally just shrieking.
• Homage:
  • It is a distinctly Japanese take on Western-style superheroes. There are even color pages that resemble superhero comic covers, such as the one seen on this page.
  • All Might is one to the Flying Bricks of the Golden and Silver Ages.
  • Stain is very obviously based on the style of darker and edgier antihero that was popular in Western comics in the '90s.
• Hotter and Sexier: The anime in general tends to have more fanservice, with more liberal use of both Male Gaze and Female Gaze.
• Hourglass Plot:
  • Midoriya grew up being mocked and bullied for dreaming of becoming a hero despite his lack of a Quirk, whereas Bakugo was always showered in praise for his powerful Quirk. When they get into U.A., however, Midoriya quickly earns a lot of friends and respect thanks to him being a nice and friendly guy, whereas the rest of the class can barely stand Bakugo's mean and arrogant personality.
  • At the beginning of the Work Study Arc, Shigaraki and the League of Villains are beaten and humiliated by the Shie Hassaikai, a much more organized and ambitious organization, whose leader Overhaul dismisses them as a complete non-threat. In response to this, the League steps up their game, proving themselves to be just as dangerous and capable, whereas the Shie Hassaikai begins to fall apart as their plans are foiled. Shigaraki and Mr. Compress put the exclamation point on this at the end of the arc, by each removing one of Overhaul's arms, permanently robbing him of the ability to activate his Quirk and getting revenge for his murder of Magne and taking of one of Mr. Compress's arms in the first chapter of the arc.
  • The longer the Internship Arc goes on, the clearer it becomes that Shigaraki and Overhaul are becoming similar to each other. Shigaraki shows that he actually can plan ahead, keep a cool head and be subtle by turning Overhaul's demands of using Twice and Toga into an opportunity to sow chaos. Meanwhile, Overhaul is forced to deviate from his plans by improvising, turns angry when things don't go his way, and ultimately has to rely on pure brute strength to fight Mirio and Midoriya.
• Hufflepuff House:
  • Aside from the Heroics department, the main focus of the series, U.A. also offers General Education (i.e., regular high school education), Support (gadget engineering), and Hero Management (hero managers) classes. Shishou is the only prominent Gen Ed student, whereas Mei is the only prominent Support student.
  • Class 1-B, the other hero class of U.A., is more or less a glorified Hufflepuff House, with only three or so prominent characters (Tetsutetsu, Kendo, and Monoma). Or, so it initially seems; the Joint Training Arc is largely dedicated to showing that the 1-B students are just as powerful, skilled, and driven as those in 1-A—they simply happen to be the hero class that doesn't include any of the main characters.
• Hybrid Power:
  • Present given that Quirk inheritance is a thing, and sometimes children might inherit a mixture of both of the parents' Quirks.
  • Endeavor invoked this directly; he had children with a woman with a strong Quirk in the hopes of siring a Superior Successor with a powerful combination of both of their Quirks, to negate his own weakness. With the youngest of his four children, he succeeded.
• Hybrids Are a Crapshoot: Dabi inherited a much stronger version of his father's fire powers. However, he inherited his mother's resistance to ice. So every time he uses his powers, he risks severely injuring himself, and when we first meet him, much of his flesh is falling off.
• Hypocritical Humor: After Kota decides that he doesn't want to hang around the U.A. kids, acting rude and like he's above their "cheesiness", Bakugo, of all people, is the one to comment on his specific brand of trying to act mature.

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