Nightmare Fuel / My Hero Academia

Let's put a smile on that face of yours...

While this series has an overall upbeat and positive atmosphere, not only is it not afraid to explore some of the more unnerving consequences and circumstances of a world that suddenly developed superpowers over night, not unlike Watchmen, but that there are also plenty of deranged criminals with powers that are creepy enough to probably keep you up at night...

As per Nightmare Fuel policy, all spoilers are unmarked!

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Works with their own Nightmare Fuel pages:

• My Hero Academia Smash!!
• My Hero Academia: Vigilantes
• My Hero Academia: Two Heroes

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Beginning Arcs

• The story begins with Bakugo telling Midoriya to go kill himself, and the implied bullying by almost everyone else around the poor kid for being born Quirkless. It's a very systemic problem, where children such as Bakugo believe in their superiority over others thanks to their Quirks, and those without Quirks are effectively almost second-class in terms of social respect from others; a literal role reversal of Japan's social structure by being the abnormalities surrounded by their peers. And this bullying and practically being shut down from his dreams for a genetic defect (or lack thereof) effectively turns Midoriya into a Shrinking Violet and a bit of an emotional wreck that he has to work past overcoming for much of the series.
• The very first villain that Midoriya ever encounters face to face, a creepy Blob Monster with Puppeteer Parasite abilities who emerged from a sewer grate behind Midoriya. The guy referred to Midoriya as a "Medium Size Invisibility Cloak", and tried to take him over to hide from All Might. The anime makes this scene worse by showing just how invasive the control process is. And as shown by his possession of Bakugo, if he possesses someone with a Quirk he can use it.
• The Entrance Exam mentions something called a "Zero-Pointer" robot, which yields no points for its destruction and Present Mic advises the participants to not bother fighting it to avoid wasting time. During the exam, it's revealed that the "Zero-Pointer" is a Humongous Mecha that's several hundred feet tall that dwarfs the fake city the exam takes place, forcing everyone to run. Midoriya tries to book it until he sees that Uraraka is trapped under rubble and is in danger of getting crushed by the walking deathmobile.
• Whenever Midoriya hurts himself using "One for All" before he learns to control it better. The artist is a bit too good at drawing realistic torn flesh, swollen skin, and broken bone:
  • The first time he uses his Quirk, he is left with two horribly broken legs and one horribly mangled arm. The flesh is all red and bruised and the broken limbs are flopping about in the wind.
  • During the fight against Todoroki, he practically snaps all his fingers to counter strikes against him, breaks both arms and can't clench his hands anymore. Then he breaks some of the mangled bones even worse by repeating his abusive use of One For All. In the anime, it causes the already reddened bruises on his skin to become completely purple. At one point, he's unable to even move his fingers from the repeated wounding. He actually bites into his fingers so he can re-align the bones into position just to ward off another strike. Namely, he crunches down on his thumb and fires off One For All with it wedged in his teeth, causing a small jet of blood to fly out of it while it's in the corner of his mouth. Extremely cringe-inducing to watch. The sheer damage he inflicts to his hand is so severe that not even Recovery Girl can completely mend it, she's forced to put him through surgery so the shattered bone fragments can be removed from his joints, and it's enough to make her put her foot down and stop treating Izuku's reckless injuries hereafter. Midoriya's mother is watching this on live television. The poor woman must be freaking out over her own son tearing himself apart.
  • During the invasion at the training camp, Izuku is forced to use One For All at a much higher intensity than his body could possibly stand. His entire arm is left covered in scars and he is forced to wear a brace on it hereafter under his clothes. The doctor also warns him that he's risking permanent disability and a life without functioning arms, noting that every time he damages his arms with One For All, it's like firecrackers went off inside them. He's literally detonating his arms with every Smash.

U.S.J. Arc

• The Hands villain, Tomura Shigaraki. No wonder he got a full page in the manga. His Quirk is called "Decay" and it allows him to petrify and disintegrate anything he touches, causing it to crumble away into dust. He puts this ability to good use in several chilling scenes:
  • During the League of Villains' attack on USJ, Shigaraki petrifies and crushes Aizawa's elbow; you can actually see the exposed muscle tissue below his crumbling skin! Shortly afterwards, he tries to do the same to Tsuyu's face (Izuku's mental image as he sees Shigaraki reaching for her is chilling enough), though thankfully he's stopped just in time by Aizawa.
  • It seems like the students are safe at the mall, when they're swarmed by fans who saw them during the sports tournament. Izuku thinks one fan wants his autograph... it's actually Shigaraki, who takes him by surprise and gets one slight move away from turning the boy into dust. Ochaco sees them and picks up on what's going on, but at this point she can't do anything to help him. He then explains how if the police and heroes try to apprehend him, he'd be able to kill dozens of innocents before getting caught. Fortunately, Shigaraki only wanted to talk, and lets Izuku go afterwards, but what he has to say isn't exactly comforting: he gleefully, casually explains how he wants to kill All Might in order to show the world how fragile justice is while sporting an utterly horrific Nightmare Face (pictured above) drawn in a insane amount of frighteningly realistic detail that verges straight into the Uncanny Valley, making him look like a character from Berserk. Not helping matters is that as he walks away, he sports a horrific Slasher Smile.
  • During the above, we get a flashback of what we can assume is a younger Shigaraki first discovering his Quirk... as he stands over a severed hand.
  • Ochaco's reaction to seeing Deku being held hostage by Shigaraki in plain sight is horrifying and realistic as well. She split up with Deku in the mall because she was trying to get a handle on her feelings for him which inadvertently made Deku an easy target for Shigaraki. When she finds him, she sees him in a strange position with a man's hands around his neck. Her first thought is that the strange man could be a friend, but she immediately realizes that is not the case. The fact her first thoughts were the possibility that he could be a 'friend' further proves Shigaraki's point about how everyone has their guard down and think they are all safe. It wasn't until she noticed the hand around Deku's throat that she realized Deku was in danger. Her expression during that whole scenario showcases how powerless she was to do anything for Deku. Deku warned her not to get any closer, and all she could do is softly ask Shigaraki to let Deku go.
    • It also bears reminding that Shigaraki already had four fingers down on Izuku's neck all the while.
  • Much later, he displays the full potential of his ability on one of Chisaki's goons: if he maintains contact with all five fingers for a certain amount of time, the target is reduced to a pile of blood and guts.
  • Shigaraki has a nervous habit of scratching his own neck in a manner that would be disturbing even without his power; with his power he seems to be at risk of decaying his own neck by accident.
• Kurogiri's speech to the young heroes as he warps a majority of them away. Remember that even these children are training to become pro heroes, they are 15 years old and barely out of middle school. This is only a taste of the danger they will face when they are grown adults.
  Kurogiri: You will be scattered and tortured and slain.
• Nomu: mindless, rampaging freaks which look like an unholy fusion of The Incredible Hulk and Venom, and whose power nearly matches All Might's. They were once ordinary thugs, until they had DNA from multiple others injected into them, turning them into these abominations. The anime makes them even worse, as we can hear them, and the sounds they make sound like bestial roars crossed with screams of pain, showing that they're in constant agony but can't do anything. And the Villain Alliance has several of them, as if one wasn't dangerous enough.
• The anime doesn’t shy away from showing Aizawa’s bloody, mangled face as he’s making a last ditch effort to stop Shigaraki despite Nomu pounding him to a bloody pulp. Not hard to see why Present Mic was downright furious and seething as he unleashed his voice on the villains.

Sports Festival Arc

• Todoroki's backstory is, despite the lampshade hung on it to make it not as heavy, pretty horrifying. He's Endeavor's son... And the guy forcefully married Rei, simply to produce a kid with a Quirk strong enough to use as a tool to surpass All Might. After several unsuccessful attempts, Todoroki was finally born with the powers Endeavor desired. By the age of 5, Todoroki was already forced into Training from Hell, isolated from others and forced to do nothing but train his powers at the expense of his health. Meanwhile, Endeavor kept abusing Rei, and she was driven to near-madness: one day, she snapped and threw boiling water at her son, giving him his distinctive red scar. Endeavor had her locked away in a mental hospital as she was no longer needed now that he had the heir he wanted.
• Hitoshi Shinso's Quirk, "Brainwashing". People actually comment how it would be more befitting a villain (for a terrifying example, see Kilgrave). In short, he speaks to someone in a way that requires an answer (usually a question), and if someone responds, it flips a brainwashing switch in their mind if he's decided he wants it to activate. It robs the free will from somebody and Shinso can control them like a puppet, as well as make their mind go foggy so they have trouble noticing they're being manipulated. All he has to do is activate it and wait for someone to respond to something he says, and they'll be directly under his thrall until he releases them or they use the physical sensation of pain to overpower his signals to their brain. There's also no clear physical indicator of when it's active, so he can just casually trigger it and catch someone by surprise when they least expect it, even if they're not fighting; what would you do if a person asked you a question, or wanted to elicit a response from you, and every time they did, you'd have to worry about answering, like NOW? And Talking Is a Free Action, so reflexive and natural that one might slip up by accident and let themselves be pulled into the brainwashing. The anime ramps up his creepiness by giving him a nightmarish theme that sounds like a hypnotist using a ticking clock to put someone under their control, with haunting female singing in the background. However, this is lessened somewhat by the fact that he's simply Creepy Good, and outside of serious fighting, he only uses it for split seconds as a prank, admitting that he would never use it in a villain-ish way.

Vs. Hero Killer Arc

• The Hero Killer, Stain. He's established as a threat with his introduction, which has him attacking Iida's brother Ingenium and leaving him paraplegic. Not only is he a fearsome swordsman, but his Quirk, "Bloodcurdle'', allows him to paralyze a person when he ingests their blood. If he gets a single hit on you, all he has to do is lick the blade and you're helpless against his follow-up. Even after being captured, he is capable of emanating a Killing Intent strong enough to freeze everyone present with fear, including pro heroes such as Endeavor. And he doesn't stop causing problems after being locked up, as his philosophy spreads and influences many villainous Quirk-users to join the Villain Alliance.
  • Related to this is Iida's last conversation with Midoriya before going to confront Stain. He has this creepy Stepford Smiler look when he replies "yes" to Midoriya's question about friends and then turns around. Midoriya-as-narrator says that he regrets not trying harder to connect with him at that time, and we see this look of terrible resolve on Iida's face. It gives the impression that he's about to go Roaring Rampage of Revenge right into a Knight Templar territory.
• The barbaric ways Endeavor attacks the Nomu. He takes the big and brutish one — which is boasting a regeneration-type Quirk — out by carbonizing its cells so they can't regenerate anymore. The anime makes it incredibly mortifying because Endeavor just incinerates the Nomu's head in a massive jet of fire as it screeches in agony. Absolutely brutal. He also sends a spear of solid fire piercing into the head of the flying Nomu and it destroys one of its eyes.
  • Later, this same Winged Nomu is killed by Stain stabbing it through the brain right in front of a horrified Midoriya. And Word of God heavily implies that this particular Nomu may have been constructed from one of Midoriya and Bakugo's childhood friends!

Final Exams Arc

• Present Mic's Quirk description. When he was born, evidently nobody knew about the Quirk he was born with... his first crying fit made the ears of his parents and delivery doctor BLEED. Later, we see this happen for real to Jiro after several assaults to her eardrums.
• In Chapter 59, All Might likens forcibly giving a Quirk to a middle schooler trying to give an upperclassman chocolates he didn't want, which initially seems funny, but anyone who's had to take Title IX training in college will be more than a little frightened and uncomfortable since that analogy is eerily similar to the ones the training videos use for rape.
• Chapter 62 has one in the way several panels zoom in on All Might's eyes while he's at full power. Midoriya likens his expression and the pressure he's giving off to Stain, of all people.

Forest Training Camp Arc

• The League of Villains' attack on the training camp is filled to the brim with horror:
  • Despite all the precautions that Aizawa and the Pussycats took to ensure that the camp wouldn't be discovered, the League of Villains still manages to find its location and plan an attack. This is made worse by a later chapter, which raises the very real possibility that someone at U.A., either a student or a teacher, might actually be The Mole for the villains.
  • The villain's main goal for this attack? It turns out that they're aiming to capture Bakugo, and convince him to join their side.
  • Moonfish, one of the villains, is a death-row escapee strapped in black restraints from head to toe. The bindings cover his entire head and body except for his mouth, which is peeled open by hooks allowing him to speak — and to use his Quirk to manipulate his own teeth into spidery stilts and spears of bone. He's completely obsessed with the flesh of his foes, to the point where he's seen admiring one of Shoji's severed hands (thankfully, Shoji's Quirk allows him to grow new limbs).
  • Kota is a child who lost his parents to a villain's attacks. Said villain, Muscular, is one of those attacking the camp, and he's perfectly willing to attack the young boy.
    • Muscular himself is pretty disturbing in his own right. His quirk allows his muscles to grow so large they outgrow his skin. During his fight with Deku, the poor boy almost gets buried under a mass of writhing, muscular flesh.
  • Toru and Kyoka are revealed to have inhaled so much of Mustard's Deadly Gas that not only are they still in critical condition and unconscious after two days, their condition is stated to be rapidly deteriorating. Even after All For One is defeated and they miraculously recover, they're both shown to still be suffering from the aftereffects of the gas, having become incredibly weak and sickly even months after the attack. Who knows what components were in the gas that cause that much damage.
  • Tokoyami losing control of Dark Shadow after he and Shoji are ambushed by Moonfish. Tokoyami's body is almost completely enveloped by Dark Shadow (now even more aggressive and powerful due to the darkness), leaving the poor kid writhing and screaming as he tries to control it, begging Shoji and Deku to leave him behind and help their classmates instead. We even get a close-up of Tokoyami in pained tears as he fights for control over his out-of-control Quirk.
• Toga Himiko, a member of the League of Villains, is easily one of, if not the most disturbing foe in the series and basically a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant extraordinaire. To elaborate:
  • Despite being only a high-school age teenager, she's already an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer with countless unspeakably horrible kills under her belt, and due to her incredibly brutal and bloodthirsty nature, it's heavily implied that she also loves to eat and butcher them as well. It says something when Dabi of all people is unnerved by this.
  • Her view on love and how she thinks it's totally normal to want to horrifically kill and mutilate your lover. She reveals this during a rant over the course of which her face slowly changes from a relatively normal one to a cross between a Slasher Smile and a Nightmare Face.
  • Tying into the above, Himiko is sexually aroused by blood to the point of pleasuring herself to orgasmic levels, which is related with her Quirk: she can flawlessly shapeshift into any given person by consuming their blood. During the Hero License exam, she uses this ability to infiltrate the testing grounds, making her a prime source of Paranoia Fuel.
  • Adding to that, that's not even getting into the absolutely horrific body horror involving her disguises gruesomely melting away John Carpenter's The Thing-style to reveal herself underneath once she runs out of blood.
  • Also terrifying? Later on, it's revealed that Himiko doesn't just shapeshift into the persons she takes their blood away from. If the victim is a Quirk user, she will gain full access to their Quick (explained below), therefore making her even more dangerous.
  • Overall, taking away the fantastical elements from her, Toga is essentially a terrifyingly realistic and extremely violent mass murderer who essentially makes her living in grotesquely butchering and brutalizing countless innocents for shits and giggles, is eerily polite and calm even when torturing and inflicting slow, painful deaths on her victims, constantly evades of the law and overall keeps a low, everyday profile that only gives a huge amount of chilling realism to her character in the otherwise mostly fantastical setting of the series.

Hideout Raid Arc

• The League of Villains' leader, All For One, bearer of his eponymous Quirk:
  • Let's start with his appearance, which was so badly messed up by All Might that the places where his eyes used to be are covered up with a mass of scar tissue and pumps are sticking out his neck. Needless to say, the page image of Shigaraki might have some competition.◊
  • His Quirk allows him to steal other Quirks, rendering his victims powerless while increasing his own power. When he does this to Ragdoll, Tiger discovers she's been stripped naked and her mind is in a haze. The loss of her Quirk is visually represented by the fact that she herself is stripped, and looks nothing short of date rape.
  • His first aggressive move, which establishes him as a deadly force of total annihilation compared to how strong other villains are. In the span of not even a second, he does something — so fast, that it's impossible to react to — and is powerful enough to turn an entire high-rise complex to a smear. Outdone by the fact that in the anime, his very first attack on-screen kills the power to the city blocks nearby and the whole area goes dead dark, and cinders rise up from the area All For One completely obliterated, looking like he barely even moved beyond levitation.
  • One of the additions/edits made to Chapter 88 in the official volumes was an extreme increase to the detail of the face reveal for All For One. Also, when Midoriya mentions "seeing death", a formerly black panel is now a vision of all the kids dead and bloodily splattered all over the alley. The anime only manages to amp it up to even scarier heights by turning the blood red and keeping the monochrome for some truly jarring and dark imagery.
  • The anime also gives All For One a Leitmotif fittingly titled The Power Of All For One that can best be described as "Nightmare Fuel in music form". The theme begins with a melancholy piano score that highlights his disarmingly charismatic nature, as if it's lulling you into a false sense of security. But soon enough, the piano is accompanied by an absolutely haunting One-Woman Wail that reminds you that something truly demonic lurks beneath his charming facade. All in all, the theme is quite fitting for one titled as the Symbol of Evil and truly sounds like death itself. The sheer despair this theme conveys about the chances of defeating All For One is such that many fans nickname it You Can’t Run (the name a twisted counter to the series' general theme You Say Run), as in “There is no hope for you heroes, you can’t run and you are going to die”.
  • Not only can he use the Quirks he's stolen for himself, but he can actually combine them, allowing him to do some rather horrific stuff: during his fight against All Might, he combines no less than eight different Quirks to turn his arm into a gigantic monstrosity made up of metal rivets, spears of bone, hypertrophied muscles, and multiple smaller arms (extremely similar to AKIRA, one of the series' main influences according to Horikoshi himself, no less). Not only does the resulting clash with All Might's fist cause a massive shock-wave that makes it look like a nuclear bomb just went off, but he uses another Quirk to reverse All Might's own punch and destroy his right fist. All this while he's nowhere near his prime, meaning that he was even MORE dangerous than that in the past!
  • Volume Origin gives us a brief glimpse of him in his prime, and it's even worse. He is fighting Nana with... Something... We have no idea on what it is or where it came from, it's just some giant thing that is a mess of flesh and features attacking Nana alongside All For One. If that isn't bad enough, after All Might and Gran Torino leave the island the fight was taking place on is outright vaporized. And none of these get elaborated on, leaving just what they were or what exactly happened unknown.

Provisional Hero License Exam Arc

• Shishikura Seiji, a Shikestu High student introduced during the Hero License arc. His Quirk, Meatball, is nasty: he can freely manipulate flesh, both his own and others'. This allows him to transform other people into potato-shaped mounds of flesh with their body parts all over the place, all while they're completely immobile and at Shishikura's mercy. By the way, they can still feel pain in that form. Thank goodness he's not a villain, just a jerk.

Shie Hassaikai Arc

• Chapter 115 shows what a disturbed individual Twice is. We also don't know if he is real or just a clone (with the real one being dead). The chapter also shows Dabi burning some thugs alive. Not to mention the villain group that does... something... to a bunch of thieves.
• Chapter 133: While Eijirou's Unbreakable is nothing short of awesome, it is also deep in the uncanny valley with his skin and hair literally turned into cracked crystals. His teeth are like that of a dragon, and his eyes are also cracked crystals. He looks even uglier than some villains at this point. It even becomes worse if you know what harlequin-type ichthyosis is.
• Kai Chisaki, also known as Overhaul, and yet another horrifying villain:
  • His Quirk, which is also named Overhaul. Simply by touching something or someone, he can disassemble it at the molecular level, resulting in a quick, gruesome death or at least severe bodily injury should he use it on a human: Magne learns this firsthand when she tries to attack him: her upper body bursts like a balloon, leaving only her legs behind. He then proceeds to make Compress' arm explode with a single hit.
  • His Quirk can not only disassemble things, but also reassemble them in their original form afterwards. He mainly uses this on Eri, a young girl whose blood can be used to manufacture a Quirk-erasing drug. This process, which has probably been performed on the child thousands of times presumably against her will, is described as being extremely painful. Over time, Eri simply accepted her role as a provider of blood, and learned to not react to pain. And since Eri couldn't have been older than two or three when she was dumped on the Hassaikai, she's been spending practically her entire life being continuously murdered and brought back from the dead. The fact that she's still sane after all of this is nothing short of miraculous.
  • Mirio's usual bright expression dropping to near rage while fighting Chisaki, who casually admitted to the above, is also frightening. It confirms that Mirio is dealing with a total monster who would do more than harm a child for his own goals.
  • Chisaki has no qualms about killing his lackeys when they displease him, such as when one of them fails to prevent Eri from escaping. He does this right in front of Eri, and it's implied she's seen multiple such deaths.
  • Disassembling and reassembling things is a disturbing enough power on its own, but Chisaki eventually reveals the biggest, most horrific applications of his Quirk: if he uses his power on himself and someone else at the same time, he can fuse himself with another person, with the result being a Humanoid Abomination whose strength is much greater than before. And if that person has a Quirk, he can use their Quirk as well as his own. His fusion with Shin Nemoto results in their faces and masks combining, while merging with Rikiya Katsukame turns him into a building-sized monstrosity with multiple arms and an exposed skeleton.
  • Izuku and Mirio's first encounter with Chisaki is laced with horrible tension, as it's obvious the man is growing annoyed with their suspicions about his activities. Suddenly, he directs them into an alley... The conversation becomes less casual and Mirio flips Izuku's hood mask over him because the fear on his face from recognizing the man standing in front of him is too easy to read. When it becomes clear Deku doesn't want to leave Eri, Overhaul, with narrowing eyes, rears up and begins to take off his glove, with full intent on killing them discretely. Eri, the little girl, immediately pushes away from Midoriya and rejects further help to stop him from carrying this out, as she's clearly seen what Overhaul's willing to do to keep her from escaping. A horrifying example of how her father has learned to control her with fear.
  • The news hits Izuku and Mirio extra hard, because they had no choice but to leave Eri until more information and evidence was laid out to warrant her rescue and the Hessaikai's arrest. In a cruel sense of Irony, they reevaluate their roles as heroes who save many people, because of their failure to one child, and they promise to fix this.
• The revelation that Nighteye has used his power on All Might before and predicted that the path he's currently on right now will lead him straight to his demise... an an unspeakably gruesome one at that. Worse, that prediction was no recent assessment. It was from several years ago and is due to transpire in about a year or two's time. All Might believed his final battle would be with his arch-nemesis All For One, and in a sense, it was, but as his super-powered self. This implies the one thing Izuku did not want to hear, and gives him a massive sense of guilt weighing on his shoulders: the act of giving One For All to him will be directly responsible for his idol's death, because he will not be able to fend off whatever threat comes up that will exact the murderous deed.
• In a Call-Back to the moment Izuku feared Shigaraki was drawing a gun, Tomura reaches into his longcoat in front of Overhaul, and even though he isn't reaching for a weapon, the apparent bloodlust in the way he slowly takes this action is still quite measurable. The very gesture is enough to make a pair of experienced Yakuza lackeys, Mimic and Chrono, draw their guns and point them squarely at his head, with Mimic's reaction being especially manic.
• Chronostasis explains that the Eight Bullets of the Hassai Group, the titular enforcers of the Hassaikai, aren't given masks for bragging rights among the organization as his personal entourage. Really, to be given a mask means you are actually now one of Overhaul's pawns whom he considers expendable, you must protect his life at all costs, and he doesn't want to breathe the same air as you because you might contaminate it. Worse yet, the people chosen for this job are generally death seekers and/or drowning in despair, some of which even tried off themselves at some point. In other words, people who want to die take up jobs where they're likely to actually die. And they somehow find a sense of purpose and camaraderie out of it. Talk about Dysfunction Junction.
• Apparently, Overhaul once blew apart Rappa and reconstructed his body in the same instant. The visuals are lovely: within the span of a second, Rappa's entire upper body, head included, was reduced to a mass of blood and shredded flesh, and immediately reconstructed. Rappa is a guy whose Quirk gives him bullet-like punches, with power and speed enough to overwhelm Kirishima's Hardening Quirk and put a Pro Hero like Fatgum on the ropes. And Overhaul only needs to touch you with a single finger. This also indicates that he can reverse what he does to the people he offs if he acts quick enough, but only if he wants to. Rappa is essentially pulling a Hisoka in that he joined a villainous group just to see if he could beat the boss one day, and like Hisoka, died and came back in trying to do so, only multiplied several instances over. Oh, and that disassembly-reassembly business? It's happened six times already, and way too fast for Rappa to even know what hit him, just that he was okay one second, and the next, he was gone. He's tried to beat Overhaul, but keeps losing. The only reason Rappa's still alive and kicking is because Overhaul needs his brute force around. Fat Gum is appropriately freaked out, as it took everything he and Kirishima had just to temporarily knock down and slightly injure Rappa.
• Toga sneaking up on Rock Lock then drawing a knife and sinking it into his chest from behind while hushing him. Then, just as quickly, casually ingesting his spilt blood, shape-shifting into his form and looming over Aizawa with a maniacal expression of bloodlust as Rock Lock.
• After Aizawa binds Toga, she gives him the foulest look ever. A high-schooler, a perky chick turned villain who doesn't seem all that threatening and has never looked the part 100% yet, gives him a demonic once-over that is right up there with Stain's hellish gaze. Right before stabbing him, too. Oh, yes, she takes after her idol VERY well....
• Eri's Quirk, which is capable of rewinding various things, including rewinding a Quirk Factor to the point where it's nonexistent. This Quirk first manifested when Eri rewound her own father out of existence, causing her mother to proclaim she was cursed. Deku nearly suffers the same fate after defeating Chisaki, and was only saved by timely intervention from Aizawa.
• Overhaul's fate at the hands of the League of Villains. They quickly kill Snatch, a pro hero. Shigaraki and Mr Compress amputate Overhaul's arms taunting him for being a hypocrite. Shigaraki leaves, telling Overhaul that he would now be helpless. While Overhaul can usually reconstruct his body, he needs his hands to activate the Quirk. Without his hands, Overhaul's Quirk is useless. And the villains also steal the Quirk erasing bullets.

Remedial Course Arc

• Chapter 166 introduces a rather unnerving concept in the form of the Quirk Singularity. Put simply, it states that Quirks will continue to grow stronger and more complex with each new generation as different types of Quirks mix together. The scary part is that human bodies won’t evolve fast enough to keep up with these new abilities and people will be stuck with insanely powerful Quirks that are completely uncontrollable. It’s regarded as a crackpot theory in-universe and granted the man who proposed it, Kyudai Garaki, isn't exactly the most trustworthy source. But there are signs sprinkled all throughout the story (Bakugo being a Child Prodigy, Present Mic’s comments that the Masegaki Primary School kids are much more efficient at using their Quirks than he was as a child, pretty much everything about Eri, and the first One For All user mentioning how “singularity is approaching") that make it clear this is going to be a big problem in the near future.

Pro Hero Arc

• High-End. First of all, the fact that he's capable of speech and rational thought is disturbing enough due to it showing how advanced the Nomus have become, but then there's the climax of his fight with Endeavor, where he brutally maims the latter's face and claws out his eye. Thankfully, Endeavour doesn't lose his eye, although he gets a nasty scar, disfiguring him forever.

Joint Training Arc

• We get a glimpse into the pasts of All For One and his brother, during the chaotic time when Quirks were first appearing. All For One played the part of a hero bringing order to the chaos, taking power away from those who abused it or didn’t want it. However, he didn’t bother to stop the bloodshed that ensued when the victims turned on their now powerless attackers, who were forced to join him if they wanted to live, or that he gave the victims Quirks to fight back. All he cared about was gaining loyal followers who would do whatever he wanted, something only his brother could see and was powerless to stop. Everyone else revered him and did whatever they thought he wanted, which included attacking a group who refused to join All For One.
  • In the recent chapters, All for One is implied to somehow be able to listen in on Midoriya's visions of his predecessors.
  • Bakugo draws parallels between Deku and All For One's abilities and wonders if they are somehow connected. All Might is not pleased by the implications.
• The Quirk of Class 1-B's Kinoko Komori (or Shemage) is rather terrifying. Basically, she releases spores that can make mushrooms, any type of mushroom, grow anywhere and EVERYWHERE. This includes people. It downright terrifies Mineta, who wasn't even participating in the match, who compares it to a horror movie. Oh, and Kinoko's spores can also make mushrooms grow in people's lungs, causing them to choke like what happened to poor Tokoyami. Plainly put, this girl can easily grow any kind of poisonous mushroom wherever her spores touch, anywhere from eyes to the inside of a person's body, making her Quirk outright deadly.
• Iida gets a new power-up technique, yay! To obtain it, however, he had to rip the mufflers of his engines out of his legs so new ones can grow. His brother Tensei outright said the process is a super painful but a necessary tradition to get stronger.
• Setsuna Tokage's Quirk. Holy moly is that Body Horror personified. Setsuna can divide her body into pieces that she can move around at will, all the way up to 50 pieces. That means up to 50 body parts floating around independently, which is plenty creepy. In hindsight, it's a shame she was not seen during the training camp's game of hiding in the woods and use their Quirks to scare the other class, as Setsuna would've been a natural at it, what with hands and arms, eyes, her mouth, her whole head just floating around, her headless body walking around, dividing herself in half so it's just a pair of legs walking or a torso dragging itself around, the possibilities are as numerous as they are scary.
• Right in the beginning of the fifth match between 1-A and 1-B, Midoriya attempts to use "Shoot Style" on Monoma, only for his arm to begin to explode into a mass of black tendrils. Midoriya begins writhing in pain and despair while the black tendrils are acting out of control, destroying the buildings and attacking both team 1-B and his own teammates. The entire time Midoriya desperately pleads his Quirk to stop. The situation becomes bad enough that All Might begs Aizawa and Vlad to stop the match.
  • Chapter 213 reveals it is the Quirk of a previous bearer of "One For All", "Black Whip". Its normal use is to grab objects and/or capture people at a distance, but it went out of control because it's amped by the "stockpiling power" aspect of "One For All" and responded to Midoriya's anger at Monoma.
  • While this power is unleashing itself, Midoriya isn't just panicking like he reasonably should be, but feeling pain. Extreme amounts of pain, practically screaming at his own body and Quirk to cease as it continues to escalate. Whether it's the backlash of One for All activating the Black Whip so violently, or his lack of control over the tendrils causing his own body excess amounts of pain, now he doesn't just have One for All to worry about — if this initial incident is anything to go by, he could end up crippling or even killing himself, his classmates, or both of them by a complete and utter freak accident with no warning whatsoever.

Meta Liberation Army Arc

• Chapter 218 gives us quite the frightening scene. The Detnerat CEO killing his own secretary for bad mouthing Destro's ideology. After dropping a few hints that he is on board with that ideology, he sees his secretary ignore it and call it shit, prompting the man to, in a friendly manner, ask if his secretary has no family or is dating anyone (so as to see if he is someone no one will miss), and after seemingly in a friendly manner put his arm around the other shoulder, only for them to start choking him until his neck snaps and the secretary's body falls to the ground. This is the first time in the manga where we have a villain killing someone completely innocent on-screen and it is painful.
  Miyashita: It hurts! President! Sto- it hur- *snap*
  • It's even more unsettling that he actually and tearfully regrets killing him, but still continues pursuing his goal of following in Destro's footsteps.
• If you were ever wondering why Shigaraki wears all those hands when he clearly doesn't need to for any practical reason, Chapter 222 gives us the answer: they're all that remains of his family after he developed his Decay Quirk, meaning he inadvertently caused them to disintegrate into nothingness when he was barely a preschooler. What's more, his Quirk was previously unheard of, so his family didn't even anticipate something like this happening. Just recalling the fragments of these memories causes the poor boy to vomit, and the only reason he doesn't seem so traumatized to this day is because All For One stepped in and taught him how to direct his feelings of anger and emptiness towards the rest of society, turning him into the twisted sociopath that everyone knows him as today. Yikes.
• In Chapter 223, the Meta Liberation Army sends a message to the League of Villains by cutting off all of the fingers on one of Giran's hands and leaving them at spots associated with the League's activities. And a composite panel shows how, when shown together, the fingers were left in such a way as to represent the Liberation Army's hand signal. Even though Giran's deleted his client list, the MLA possesses an IT firm that can easily recover the data, which means he lost one hand's worth of fingers for nothing.
  • Or for that matter, how the MLA can trace the League's phone call and track down their location using satellites, ready to tip off the heroes at a moment's notice. Bear in mind, this can happen to anyone.
  • Special mention has to go to how they have over 100,000 copies of their manifesto reprinted or how they have over 116,000 loyal followers ready at their beck and call.
• Chapter 224 has the distinction of being an Evil Versus Evil situation with the League against the Liberation Army. This also means that the League have free reign to show just how lethal they are, which Shigaraki brutally demonstrates by disintegrating a pair of Liberation Mooks as casually as someone swatting a fly.
• Chapter 225:
  • Chitose Kizuki's Quirk lets her turn anything she's touched into a mine, including the blood of her own subordinates! And how do we find out about that last bit? Toga tried to drink some to blend in with the crowd, only for said blood to explode inside her body.
  • Details of Toga's backstory are revealed. According to Chitose, Toga is the eldest daughter of her family and had a relatively normal life. Her classmates even described her as "a bright, reasonable girl." Then she suddenly disappeared after her middle school graduation ceremony. Flashbacks show Toga wearing a mask with her classmates, laughing as one of them (who looks a lot like Deku) appears to be fighting and bruised, which causes the mask to break a little. The next flashback shows a bloody safety blade and the mask shattered, a smile on Toga's face. It's easy to imagine what happened.
  • At the end of the chapter, a bloody Himiko gives one hell◊ of a Slasher Smile, saying she's living normally.
• Chapter 226:
  • We get more details on Toga's backstory, and they continue to be horrific. When she was a child she was fascinated by blood due to her Quirk, leading her to kill birds and proudly display the bloody bodies to her parents. In response her parents tried to suppress her Quirk and counselled her against it, leading her to a psychotic break in middle school when she couldn't take it anymore and attacked one of her classmates to drink his blood with a straw while crying with joy.
  • Adding to the above, remember the case of Identical Stranger in the last chapter, that led to the symbolic image of her "mask" breaking? That was the same incident. Toga's first victim was someone who was a dead ringer for Izuku. Just like that, Izuku seemingly having replaced Stain in her heart too easily has far more credence, and the potential depths of her fixation for our protagonist has now become several ordinances more chilling.
  • Toga using Uraraka's power, which she obtained thanks to consuming her blood, to send Lady Curious flying into the sky, then crashing into the ground.
  • Notably, she seems confused at first that she's using Uraraka's Quirk before realizing that by imitating how someone uses their Quirk, her Transform can mimic the Quirk of the person she's transformed into. Toga's turned from just another member of the league to potentially the most dangerous of its members.
    • The whole time, however, Lady Curious is just laughing as she declares this will be the best headline yet.
• Chapter 227: Inspired into fanatical fervor, a crowd of 30 or more charges at Shigaraki. With a single swift motion of his hand, he disintegrates all of them. Within but moments, thirty men and women — even children, as some of them seemed quite young — were reduced to dust. You can even see the first man, the one whose face he actually touches, begin rotting away in painfully exquisite detail.
  • Additionally, as noted by Spinner, Shigaraki didn't need to touch everyone in the crowd. The disintegration effect spread from person to person, meaning there are truly horrific implications for how Shigaraki might be able to apply his Quirk in the future.
  • With this comes a similarly horrifying implication. This battle is allowing the League to avoid falling into the pit of never getting stronger and just like the U.A Kids, they're extending their Quirks.
• The Quirk of Tomoyasu Chikazoku of the MLA, aka Skeptic, is revealed: Anthropomorph, an ability that can turn any object of the right size into a lifelike remote-controlled puppet. Like the Paranoia Fuel its wrong use implies wasn't enough already, Skeptic uses it to create and send a group with the same exact face as Twice against him, reawakening his trauma of the clones he created with his own Quirk killing each other.
• Toga might not be the nicest person, but it's still harrowing to see a bunch of Skeptic's puppets beating on her while she's bloodied and unconscious, especially when she wakes up and starts struggling weakly while one of them is twisting her head for a Neck Snap. And that Neck Snap they try isn't the typical quick kind we see, but one puppet holding her body in place while another grabs her head and twists it like the lid of a jar until her spine starts to pop. Few of the serious fight scenes in the series are pretty and bloodless, but this is a level of prolonged brutality we didn't even see with Stain.
• Chapter 230:
  • Twice is unleashed and his own clones keep multiplying themselves and swarming, literally covering the streets around the point of origin. Taken singularly they are easy to kill but their sheer number cancels this disadvantage, and the MLA soldiers they meet are simply overwhelmed. Even funny moments with this horde feel unsettling, as Compress witnesses when the Twices reach him. Giran wasn't joking when he said that, if Twice wanted, he could take over Japan.
  • Shortly after, many Twices are destroyed by the attacks of the MLA's ice user. In doing it, he also destroys several buildings of the city and kills even some allies, while rambling about the Social Darwinist ideals of the MLA. Dabi, while still trying to hide behind a boisterous face, he's clearly afraid, also because his body cannot sustain his own flames well.
• Chapter 232 shows just how powerful Shigaraki's Quirk is when he disintegrates an ENTIRE building in just a few seconds!
• Chapter 233 has the fight against Re-Destro quickly turning bad for Shigaraki, as he loses half of his left hand. And Re-Destro intends to keep on the Fingore, as he looks about to pluck away the remaining two fingers.
• Throughout the Meta Liberation Army Arc, the members of the Army show a level of fanaticism and zealotry that is downright chilling; they show zero compunction about throwing their lives away for a meaningless Zerg Rush, allow higher ups like Lady Curious to use them as living weapons, and talk about the League Of Villains as human sacrifices for their cause. This isn't simply some terrorist group, it's a cult, and its numbers are in the tens of thousands. Say what you want about the Shigaraki and Co., but it's probably for the best they're decimating these guys before they have a chance to begin whatever their actual long-term plans are.
• Chapter 234 is one long one as the consequences of Re-Destro's attack are shown to affect Shigaraki's psyche. Ironically Shigaraki barely seems to even register that his left hand has been crippled; what he cares about is that the hand that grasps his left wrist, the one that belonged to his sister Hana, was destroyed in said attack. The trauma of that loss causes Shigaraki's mind to shatter as he remembers his Dark and Troubled Past and the audience are treated to several different Nightmare Faces that Shigaraki pulls including one wherein, due in part to the motion lines as he rapidly flies towards Re-Destro, cause Shigaraki's face to resemble a zombie. Not to be outdone Re-Destro powers up his Quirk to Liberation 80% causing his body to contort and bulge until he becomes demonic like in nature. He then releases an attack that tears through several city blocks in an attempt to kill Shigaraki.
• Chapter 235, appropriately titled "Tenko Shimura: Origin", shows a flashback that explains why Tomura came to be. His father hated heroes because his mother, Nana Shimura (All Might's predecessor) was away on hero duty and when she died, he came to believe that heroes abandon their families in order to do their duties. He beat Tenko at the mere mention of wanting to be a hero to his sister. His sister Hana supported him and his dream, however...but then one day, his father demanded to know who broke into his office and saw the picture of Nana Shimura. Hana broke down into sobs and told on Tenko, resulting in him getting another beating. And when his Quirk activated, well, he was holding onto the family dog with both hands...
  • The fact that Tenko's father, Kotaro, hated heroes because his mother had to abandon him to keep him safe is similarly to Kota when his own parents die to protect innocent lives is very chilly. If this chapter is given us anything, is that Kota would ended up like Tenko's father as an adult if it wasn't for Izuku.
  • Also, the most important matter is that neither Tenko's mother or grandparents stepped in and protected him from his father when the man was beating him up in front of the entire family! This just shows how controlling and abusive Nana's own son had become. It's one way that a man's wife and children are afraid of him, it's another when his own in-laws are afraid as well.
• Chapter 236 features graphic images of how Tenko accidentally killed his family. Since the Decay Quirk was still in its primitive stage, it reduced people to gory chunks of meat (which in hindsight explains why their hands were still intact).^note In the anime, this is shown as them turning gray and cracking apart… but then turning into a mess of distended flesh and a pool of blood shortly thereafter And when Tenko saw his father after the latter hit him with the weed whacker, he pounced on him with murderous intent and killed him.
• So much in Chapter 237 which is appropriate considering that it is the chapter where Tenko finally makes the transition and becomes Tomura Shigaraki.
  • The chapter starts with Tenko wandering around the city dazed and confused after killing his family and in need of help and guidance. Notably while many people take one look at him and pretend they don't see him. We find out why when an old lady goes up to Tenko and asks him if he is alright; Tenko has deep sunken in eyes and a strange serene smile on his face. While someone definitely should have helped him it's not hard to see why most of the bystanders pretended to not notice him after seeing that face.
  • Watching All For One slowly distort and corrupt young Tenko's mind so that he can impart the same warped morality on his young ward that he himself has. AFO tells Tenko that concept such as "a conscience" and "laws" are just things that people use to manipulate the world how they see fit and encourages Tenko to do whatever he feels like to make himself feel better and actively encouraging him to murder people. As we find out later on in the chapter all of this is so he can warp Tenko into becoming his "Symbol of Fear" to counteract All Might.
  • Finding out the origin of the last five hands Shigaraki wears on his body. While his face, upper arms, elbows, and wrist hands all come from his family the two that hold onto his shoulders and the two under his armpits were taken from a couple of thugs Tenko murdered to signify the beginning of his journey to becoming a Symbol of Fear. The last one, the one that holds the back of Shigaraki's head? A random hand that AFO got to replace the one Tenko had accidentally destroyed. This raises a lot of disturbing implications about where AFO got that hand... And in later chapters, it is implied that that particular hand belonged to Nana Shimura. AFO really went out of his way to defile her identity.
  • Just seeing Tenko, who is still a little boy at this point, wearing his completed villain costume is just disturbing, arguably even more so than his adult self wearing it, especially since the hands dwarf his body and face at this point.
  • After the flashback is over, Tomura Shigaraki, now fully embracing his role as a Symbol of Fear, crushes his father's hand and declares to Re-Destro he doesn't need it anymore, fully abandoning his former identity.
    • The anime adds another disturbing layer: Tomura's voice actor finally drops the pitch in his voice, moving it from a nasally wheeze into a proper case of Evil Sounds Deep. He hardly even sounds like the same character; it's clear that Tomura has leveled up from the manchild he used to be, and become a real leader.
      Tomura: These are no longer necessary.
  • A couple of non Shigaraki ones also happen in this chapter:
    • We see Gigantomachia tearing through the Liberation Army and Twice clones like they were made of paper. The League are in complete shambles as they realise, to their horror, that Gigantomachia wasn't even fighting seriously with them up to now and is now barrelling towards their boss...
    • We cut back to the fight between Dabi and Geten and see that Dabi is now discharging large amounts of smoke from his body likely meaning that he burned off even more of his remaining skin with his Quirk.
• Decay was always one of the deadliest Quirks in the setting, but in the finale of Shigaraki and Re-Destro's grudge match, Tomura shows just how powerful Decay is when he's no longer holding back — and unleashes a wave of decay that reduces a large part of the city to a crater, laughing insanely as he does it. Re-Destro was forced to amputate his legs to survive the power. Just... how is Midoriya supposed to fight that?

Endeavor Agency Arc

• Chapter 250 features the debut of the villain Ending, an ex-convict who has it out for Endeavor. He decides to kidnap Natsuo and tries to get Endeavor to kill him, on threat of murdering Natsuo if he doesn't. His Quirk allows him to control road paint, turning such a mundane thing into a weapon that can easily fling cars in the air.

Paranormal Liberation War Arc

• Chapters 253-54 reveal that not only Kurogiri is a special breed of Nomu, he's been created using the body of Oboro Shirakumo, a classmate and close friend of Eraser Head and Present Mic during their UA days, who lost his life during an internship to save a group of kids. A young man who died as a hero has been denied his rest in peace and been turned into a villain. Beside the emotional devastation for his old friends, and the suspicion by Gran Torino that All For One also engaged in grave-robbing for his sick experiments, the implications of how far the gallery of horrors created by AFO and the Doctor could go are chilling. Several fan theories about Nomu and other monstrosities actually being people from the series' past in general, don't seem too wild anymore. To further add to the emotional punch, when Aizawa attempts to push Kurogiri into recalling his previous life, we are treated to an haunting image of the black mist arranging itself into the shape of Shirakumo's face, with even some stitches notable on his forehead — presumably the point where the boulder that killed him struck.
• When Ujiko said that Shigaraki was going to be experiencing four months of Hell, he was not kidding at all. While the operation to grant him the power that the doctor promised him seems to be going even better than planned, what we actually see of the procedure is just downright disgusting. Numerous tubes and wires are sticking out of his spine and head, while a bigger mechanical tube thing is operating on his midsection which has been completely torn open, all accompanied by copious amounts of blood. Perhaps the most disturbing part of it all is that not only is Shigaraki fully conscious for the whole thing, he's actually laughing as it's being done to him.
• Chapter 260 provides the lovely new gallery of disturbing Nomus at the Doctor's direct disposal. Including a giant whale-one that got another Nomu as its tongue of all things. Remember, each and every single one of these things, used to be people before this.
• For all he seems like a carefree jokester, Hawks can be downright chilling when he wants to. During his confrontation with Twice in the Liberation War Arc, he has no trace of his goofy and relaxed persona, instead being cold, stoic, and completely serious. We see him from Twice's perspective with a Face Framed in Shadow as he looms over the pinned down villain, and is never anything but calm even as he completely crushes Twice physically and emotionally. The only thing that kept him from murdering Twice in cold blood was Dabi's arrival, even after admitting that he likes Twice and wants to rehabilitate him. This man has an ice-cold pragmatism that he hides behind a seemingly silly attitude.
• Chapter 266: Hawks takes drastic measures to prevent Twice escaping by stabbing him through the neck with one of his sharpened feathers. Even if it was a moment of last resort on Hawks' part, the efficiency with which he carries out the task is pretty horrific for someone whose job is supposed to be protecting people and inspiring hope.
  • This is also the first time that a hero is shown killing someone. There have been Nomu fatalities in the past and All Might clearly thought he smashed All For One's head in at one point but we have never seen a hero deliberately kill a villain up until now.
  • There's a small moment where Twice's clone stabs a hero in the back of the head to save Toga and Mr. Compress. It's a rather grisly death for a background character.
• While Dabi is no slouch in the chills department, when he realises that Hawks has killed Twice, the normally level-headed villain goes borderline berserk, unleashing a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on the weakened hero with a terrifying Slasher Smile.
• Chapter 270: All For One's plan for Tomura. He predicted his defeat so he made arrangements to ensure that Tomura would continue his work. First, All For One had his original Quirk replicated and swapped it. Then he tasked Dr. Garaki to implant Tomura with the original All For One Quirk when Tomura had proved his worth. And at the worst possible moment, Tomura awakens. One-For-All immediately detects him and begins screaming to Deku that he's awake. Izuku can sense the imminent danger several miles away.
  • It is implied that one of the disembodied hands from Tomura's set belonged to Nana Shimura. Just goes on to show how far All For One went to defile her death and legacy.
  • Shigaraki, before waking, is seen in some kind of bizarre Mental World — and its just as creepy as you'd expect, looking like something you'd get if you blended M.C. Escher with Junji Ito: we see Shigaraki standing on a crumbling platform hovering in the sky, while a sideways city is shown crumbling to dust, presumably under the effects of Decay; disembodied hands float all around him, and massive outstretched hands stick out of the streets of the crumbling city like buildings. The ghosts of his dead family appear to him, some of them downright giant, and All For One himself appears looking like a living shadow that Shigaraki then walks into.
  • We learn that Oboro Shirakumo's death was not an accident, but planned by Kyudai Garaki. Even more horrifying was that the intended target was Shota Aizawa, or more specifically, his Erasure Quirk.
• Chapter 272. Shigaraki awakens. And his first order of business? Unleash a massive wave of Decay that utterly obliterates everything and everyone around him. And the Decay spreads all the way from the hospital to the city where Midoriya and the Class 1-A students are. The heroes are forced to beat a full-scale retreat and some of them such as Crust (who sacrifices himself to save Aizawa from being caught in the decay) don't make it out alive. Shigaraki has truly become a force of utter destruction. This famous quote is what best describes the entire situation, "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
  • There's a hero whose standing right next to Shigaraki when he finally wakes up. We don't see what happens to this man, but we do know that he was at ground zero of Tomura's massive Decay Wave.
• Chapter 273.
  • You thought Shigaraki's Decay Quirk was scary before? It's gotten worse as it's evolved. There's nothing left of the area anymore but a giant crater!
    • Shigaraki's added an Akira-esque cape to his wardrobe. If you look closely, you'll see it's the same one that was being worn by the unlucky Pro that was next to him in the lab. Not only did Tomura kill this man, he took a part of his outfit as a trophy.
  • Himiko's powers have gone through an evolution as well. The way her body reforms from a pile of sludge and her demonic eyes glares at the heroes as she says they're in her way, you know she's become a monster. And then there's the lovely little moment where Gigantomachia's massive hand rises up out of the ground behind her.
  • Shigaraki casually laughing as he sees Endeavor charging him. With all the power he has now, it shows how dangerous he is now if he can casually look at the current #1 hero with no issue.
• Chapter 274: Shigaraki can not only sense Quirks from far but he also used it to find One for All and is currently seeking Izuku as a result.
  • Specifically speaking, remember when Ragdoll got her Quirk stolen by All for One? Turns out he gave it to Shigaraki, meaning now a VILLAIN has the ability to observe up to a hundred people from afar, and knowing their weak points.
• Chapter 275: Shigaraki catches up to Midoriya and Bakugo and we're treated to a scene of them crumbling under the effects of Shigaraki's Decay — or would, if not for the timely arrival of Gran Torino.
  • Gran Torino ceases to refer to Shigaraki as a person, instead choosing to describe him as a "thing" or a creature. It's out of fear more than anything else, as he saw firsthand what Tomura can do with his new powers.
• Chapter 277: Shigaraki calls Midoriya his brother and demands he give him One For All. Shigaraki suddenly realizes that was not him, but the memory of All For One speaking through him. Shigaraki then does something incredible: he rejects All For One, saying he no longer needs him anymore. At this point, he's pretty much rejected everything: his past, his family, even his mentor. He has become a true monster now. And that smile he makes when he declares this would make the Joker proud.
  • The last page of the chapter shows Mt. Lady struggling to keep Gigantomachia from running to Shigaraki's aid, and even with her Gigantification Quirk activated, he still towers over her like a mountain of pure muscle. It's clearly taking a lot of effort for her to even keep him still, to the point where she grits her teeth hard enough to chip a tooth. If she can't hold him back, all hell is going to break lose.
• Chapter 278: For as awesome as it is to see Class 1A stand their ground, the fact remains that they're about to be swarmed by an army of bloodthirsty PLF soldiers, a group of villains that already cornered them once before at the Training camp, and the walking disaster that is Gigantomachia. Needless to say, this is not going to be an easy fight for them.
• Chapter 280: In response to Endeavor saying he lacks conviction, Shigaraki quotes his birth father's words, "All you heroes! You hurt your families only to help others!" Shigaraki realizes his father was right and that he does have conviction.
• Chapter 281:
  • Shigaraki badly wounds Gran Torino. Even worse is before that, Torino has a flashback to when Nana Shimura sends her son to the orphanage for his own protection. He knows now that for all her good intentions, it resulted in the creation of the monster that would be her grandson.
  • Both Midoriya and Ryuku have Shigaraki bound and captured, but he has one more secret weapon: Overhaul's Quirk-erasing bullets made from Eri's Rewind Quirk. And his intended target to shoot the bullet with? Eraser Head.
• Chapter 282:
  • Shigaraki fires the bullet at Aizawa with such force that it twists his leg and Aizawa is forced to amputate it to stop the bullet from erasing his Quirk, and because his gaze is no longer focused on Shigaraki, he's finally free to use all of his newfound Quirks.
  • And then there's the chapter's ending which shows Gigantomachia closing in on the city, meaning that Yaoyorozu's plan to put him to sleep has completely failed. To underscore how horrific this is, Miyagi gives a Long List of the cities in Gigantomachia's path, meaning that thousands, if not millions of lives are at risk.
• Chapter 283:
  • While we have seen Midoriya get angry in the past, this chapter takes the cake as he glares at Shigaraki with a murderous expression and Berserker Tears.
  • Shigaraki has been given immense strength and power but the treatment that makes his capable of fully handling it is not complete as he's been awakened earlier than planned. It starts to show as suddenly a bloody seam appears over his right side, so large his right arm almost falls off.
  • An even more monstrous Gigantomachia, now sporting very long claw-like fingers as one of his many Quirks, tears through inhabited areas just to reach Shigaraki. While most of the villains on his back look silent and upset, Dabi is having the time of his life, further showing how deranged he is underneath his stoic exterior.
• Chapter 285:
  • After Shigaraki is burned alive by Endeavor's point blank Prominence Burn, it seems that the fight is finally over... or not. Shigaraki's weakened state gives All For One's lingering consciousness the opportunity to take control of his body. He promptly impales Endeavor with black shadowy tendrils from his back. Then he goes after Midoriya, only to have the attack blocked by Bakugo.
  • Hell, how Shigaraki looks after being burnt. He starts to look like All For One at this point with his many burns.
• Chapter 286:
  • This chapter provides us with many Nightmare Faces from both Deku and Shigaraki, from his eyes with tiny pupils, from Izuku’s pissed off face with pure white in them, and from him chomping down on All For One’s tendrils, all the while he’s crying Berserker Tears over Bakugo’s sacrifice, it’s made apparent he is not someone you want to be furious. Meanwhile, Gigantomachia is charging to Shigaraki, and as more of All For One's will takes over Shigaraki, his grinning face can be seen inside Shigaraki's skull after Midoriya leaves a huge crack in it!
• Chapter 287:
  • All For One's Nightmare Face as he mocks Nana Shimura and his brother for entrusting One For All in the hands of an inexperienced boy. During his rant, he talks about the strange phenomenon of people inheriting an organ donor's personality after a transplant surgery, which is why he has the memories of the people whose Quirks he stole from and why he can see and talk to his brother now thanks to the All For One and One For All Quirks.
  • How does Tomura react to seeing Nana Shimura? He just calmly tells her he hates her too.
  • Himiko wanting to meet with Midoriya and Uraraka.
• Chapter 288:
  • Uraraka and Toga have their first encounter since the League of Villains attacked the summer training camp. Toga is able to lure Uraraka away from the other heroes by impersonating an old woman and shouting that her husband needs help being evactuated. She then corners the young hero in an abandoned house and takes her sweet time "catching up" while preparing to strike. Not only does this imply that Toga killed an elderly woman to get a chance to talk with Uraraka, her words to the young hero are rather chilling:
  Toga: It's been forever, Ochaco. I was hoping to chat with Tsuyu too. Because Tsuyu's my sweet and precious friend. And with Izuku. I love him when he's all beat up, which is like, always! He's so cool! I love how cute you are too, Ochaco. I wanna be just like you. So tell me... *pinning Uraraka to the floor with a knife* What do you wanna do to me?
• Chapter 290:
  • After several years, Dabi finally reveals his true identity: Toya Todoroki, Endeavor's long lost eldest son. And while many saw the reveal coming, it still left a terrifying impression.
    • Dabi washing way the black dye and revealing his naturally white hair, which is implied to be the result of stress from the abuse Endeavour put him through. Coupled with his scarred face, it gives him an almost deathly appearance.
    • More of Dabi's burn scars are shown in his video confession: his entire right arm seems to be covered in burnt flesh, and there is a huge stream-shaped patch in the middle of his abdomen. Almost like someone drew a giant torch over Dabi/Toya's body.
    • Dabi's entire monologue as he gleefully reveals that he had been hounding Endeavor from the shadows this entire time, all the while doing a demented little dance on Gigantomachia's back. He even reveals that he was the one who sent Starservant and Ending after him and laughingly explains that his original plan had been to kill Shoto, his own youngest brother, before their father got bumped up to #1. It truly demonstrates how absolutely unhinged Dabi truly is. The scene is even more frightening in the English Dub of the anime, thanks to a nightmarish performance from Jason Liebrecht, who truly captures the sheer madness in Dabi's voice.
    Dabi: Oh man. I didn't expect this. I'm starting to have fun! I wondered "how I could make you suffer? How I could ruin your life?!" Ever since I burned up, it's all I thought about! As a kid, I didn't know why I existed! I'd cling to Natsuo, bawling my eyes out! But you didn't know that, did you?! At first, when I realized your little puppet Shoto was complete, I figured I'd kill him! But then you unexpectedly became the Number One Hero! Who would've guessed, huh?! I was suddenly so invested in your happiness! Can you believe in Kyoushu I was actually afraid you were going to die?! I lead Starservant and Ending to your doorstep. Did they make you feel like a big shot? Must have been a heavy burden to achieve your dream after so long. But you were soothed by public adoration, weren't you? Is that why you finally decided to try to bond with your children? Just keep looking towards the future and you could be a better man?! What, nothing to say? WELL ALLOW ME! The past never dies... YOU WILL REAP EVERYTHING YOU'VE SOWN! Enji Todoroki, let's fall together! Come and dance with me in Hell, won't you?! Well?! SPEAK UP, DAD!
    • It's especially harrowing from Enji, Rei and Shoto's perspective: a member of your family, whom you know trained to be a hero, comes back to you after years of absence, but he is completely unrecognizable, in the worst way imaginable. Shoto, Enji and Rei's Stunned Silence is a perfect reaction. And as messed up as Enji used to be, he actually had a good reason to push Toya away, as using his powers to be a hero would have likely doomed him to an early grave. Instead of a dying heroic son, he got a dying villain hating his own family and ready to drag them to hell with him.
• Chapter 291:
  • Though it wasn't originally shown, Hawks grisly murder of Twice is now on full-display for the reader and the general public in Dabi's pre-recorded confession. This moment is made even more unsettling as visible blood spills from Twice's wounds and mouth the moment Hawks stabs him in the back of his throat.
• Chapter 292:
  • Despite Best Jeanist's successful efforts, Dabi burns away the cables with a terrifying grin and the panel that shows it has wavy edges, portraying how hot Dabi's flames are, almost as if he was a demon summoned from Hell. What's even worse if that in the close-ups of his face while Shouto confronts him, his scars are extending. Dabi has been using his fire almost non-stop since Chapter 265 and since he is still hellbent on killing Endeavor, it's becoming increasingly possible that Dabi may not survive this arc...
• Chapter 295:
  • Deku realises that he has awakened the Fourth User's Quirk, Danger Sense. This Quirk manifests as a stabbing sensation in the head whenever it senses an incoming peril, and takes a toll on the bearer. Given the hazardous nature of hero careers, this is not good.
  • All For One commandeers Tomura Shigaraki's body and orders the Nomu to carry him away. In doing so, he abandons many of Tomura's trusted associates, claiming that to be Tomura's punishment for losing to Deku and Endeavor. One of them happens to be Gigantomachia, All For One's most devout follower. This goes on to show that All For One is a heartless sociopath that does not care for anyone but himself. Gigantomachia and Tomura Shigaraki are no exceptions, either.
• Chapter 296 deals with the immediate fallout of the war.
  • We get to see first hand all the damage the war caused to the cities. The carnage is abominable, with entire cities being utterly destroyed and countless civilians injured or outright killed. The entire thing looks like a scene straight out of a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
    • One scene has a little boy trapped under some debris begging his sister to run and save herself as she desperately tries to free him. Thankfully, Uraraka and Tsuyu come to rescue. In the same scene, a horribly bloodied and beaten man begs Uraraka to find his wife, who's trapped in the crumbling building.
    • One nameless hero overlooking the destruction outright contemplates finding a new job. It really underscores the level of destruction this war had wrought and the immense pressure that heroes are under.
  • The students finding Midnight's corpse. We don't even see the full extent of the damage, but what little we do see is broken, mangled and absolutely covered in gore. And that doesn't help many other heroes as well died too during this event.
    • An even more terrifying detail about Midnight’s death is how... ignominious it is, which is made much more apparent when you go back to older chapters. In any other arc, the death of a character as relatively prominent as Midnight would be a major focus point. Sir Nighteye had an entire Final Speech after an epic Heroic Sacrifice and had an entire chapter dedicated to his sendoff; Crust went out in a Dying Moment of Awesome by saving Aizawa, and his death was the highlight of its chapter. Even the Sand Hero Snatch went out fighting both Shigaraki and Dabi and left Dabi with some hard-hitting words that clearly affected him. By contrast, this chapter's main focus is on the overall fallout of the war, with Midnight's death essentially a 2-3 panel footnote that happens not even halfway through. Nemuri Kayama was a part of the story since essentially the beginning. She was one of the three "main" teachers of UA alongside Aizawa and Present Mic. She had entire segments dedicated to her backstory and her personality. She was one of the main focal characters in Vigilantes. In the end though none of this matters and she ends up being just another statistic, one of the many casualties of Shigaraki's insane hatred and ambition. That is how far the consequences of this arc reach.
  • The public is openly voicing their disdain for Endeavor and are openly doubting his ability to be the No. 1 Hero. Dabi's plan is coming to fruition. Society's faith in heroes is crumbling and it couldn't come at a worse possible moment.
  • The chapter ends on a very ominous note. As if all the destruction, death, and tragedy wasn't bad enough, All For One orders the High End Nomus to free his original body from Tartarus. The Symbol of Evil is going to be free. The fabled Tartarus Prison Break that many fans have anticipated since the end of the Hideout Raid Arc is finally happening... at the worst possible moment for the heroes. With so many heroes injured, incapacitated, or outright dead, who can possibly stop the High End Nomus from breaking All For One out of Tartarus?
    All For One: Why do they assume tomorrow will come for them? No, I won't grant them a moment's rest. Because it's my turn now. And my turn... Will never end. Hear me, my tireless Nomu... It's time to free my real body.
  • The simple, unspoken fact that none of this was supposed to happen. Shigaraki was supposed to die when Mirko destroyed his tank and interrupted his regeneration. Even Garaki knew this. Instead, Shigaraki's pure, burning hatred for the hero society that failed him allowed him to survive what should have been impossible to, which in turn empowered Gigatomachia to make a beeline towards him, which resulted in the biggest massacre of heroes and civilians since the days of All For One in his prime.
• Chapter 297 begins the Tartarus Prison Break as with the heroes incapacitated, the guards at Tartarus are completely helpless to stop All For One, who takes advantage of the Psychic Link between his body and Shigaraki's to shut down the security system with Radio Waves and free the inmates. Among the villains freed are Overhaul (who seems to have suffered a nasty case of Sanity Slippage), Moonfish, and Muscular, the latter two who make their return by slaughtering some of the guards when they try to stop them. Kota Izumi's worst nightmare has been freed and he is now working with Japan's #1 Villain, who now has a veritable army of the worst criminals in Japan and is ready to unleash them all on the unsuspecting populace. And just to hammer home how bleak things look, the chapter ends with All For One making a rather chilling Call-Back to one of Midoriya's most iconic lines in the series:
  All For One: This will be the story of how I become the greatest demon lord of all!
• Chapter 298:
  • The chapter picks up where the previous chapter left off as All For One makes good on his word not to give the heroes a moment's rest. Merely six hours after freeing the inmates from Tartarus, All For One sends his new recruits to attack seven other prisons, freeing inmates from six of them. All For One's army is growing and with the heroes still reeling from the fallout of the war, there is little anyone can do to stop him.
  • The chapter ends with all of the students and heroes recovering from their injuries... all except Midoriya, who is not only in pretty bad shape due to overusing One For All, but is now in a coma and there's no telling when or even if he'll recover.
• Chapter 300:
  • The chapter continues to show just how far society's faith in heroes has fallen. When the Cider House Gang (the same gang Bakugo and Todoroki stopped when they got their licenses) begin to rob a store, they are attacked by a group of civilians armed with Support Gear. However, due to their lack of training, the ensuing fight causes horrific collateral damage. People are becoming desperate to the point that they are resorting to vigilantism and taking matters into their own hands, which is exactly what Re-Destro said would happen. The villains are succeeding in their plan to destabilize society.
  • Remember Stain, the Hero Killer? The very first villain Midoriya fought in the series? He's Back!... Having escaped Tartarus thanks to All For One's jailbreak, Stain returns to his hideout to retrieve his trusty katana, ready to pick up where he left off. And with society's faith in heroes at an all-time low, he might get a few more followers to his ideology.
• Chapter 301:
  • Dabi's Evil Gloating about making his father suffer and the gleeful anticipation of his public statement is driven home by his evident Lack of Empathy extending even to his mother and his siblings, as well as some very harrowing imagery of a drop of blood sliding into the next panel, which shows the Todoroki residence. A fitting metaphor for the terrifying situation the family is in.
  • Imagine your eldest son becoming so unstable that he, with his equally as unstable fire powers, tries to harm his baby brother (and mother, who's holding him) right in front of the rest of the family in a Moment of Weakness.
  • Hell, the face on Toya when he realizes what his little brothers were born for evoke pure existential dread. While Rei can only give off a weak smile after Natsuo and Shoto are born, Toya knows full well that they're intended to become one of Enji's heirs to his hero legacy and hates it.
  • The full-page spread of baby Shoto wailing while Rei, Enji, and Toya look on. With Rei's exhausted face, Enji's almost surprised sense of pride, and Toya's anxious face coupled with Shoto's wide, black hole of a mouth, it truly looks like this moment was the catalyst for all the horror that happens afterwards.
• Chapter 302:
  • The look on Enji's face when Rei says that he's not a hero and is running away from his problems. He looks like he wants to hit her for talking back at him like that, but he knows she's right.
  • The face Toya makes after blaming Rei for being another reason why he thinks Enji considers him a failure. It's on par with Shigaraki's freak-out faces. And it gets even worse from there.
  • In what is probably the most explicit depiction of domestic abuse in the series, we see a scene of Enji screaming at Rei (who is lying on the ground in a way that implies that he just struck her) for not stopping Toya from training. Shoto is in between them, begging him to stop abusing her, all the while Fuyumi and Natsuo are huddled in a corner crying. To add to this, Enji is wreathed in shadow with nothing but his eyes glowing, which is replicated in a later shot where he looms over a saddened Shoto with a rather obsessive glare, which looks equally as harrowing.
  • The Sekoto Peak incident is shown in full, and the epitome of every parent's worst nightmare. The fire, for one, was an accident, only occurring when Toya's flames went out of control as he cried about his dad not coming for him. Toya was not only unaware of how much his emotions could control his flames, but screeching in pain when he realizes he's burning and can't put himself out. And this is with his newly discovered blue flames, which are hotter than standard red flames. Endeavor realizes too late where his son went, and when he arrives to the scene he discovers a fire so large a whole chunk of a mountain is scorched and Toya practically vanished. And all he could find of his firstborn son are pieces of his jawbone.
• Chapter 303:
  • Shigaraki's actions have exposed the name of One For All to the media. If the villains dig deeper, Deku and other secret keepers (All Might, Bakugo, Recovery Girl, Gran Torino, Principal Nezu, and Tsukauchi) are in BIG trouble.
  • The Hero Public Safety Commission is apparently crippled, its leadership either out of action or dead. Combined with Heroes resigning left and right, the government unable to bring in heroes from other countries, and their leadership out of the picture, any heroes left are going to be undermanned, badly coordinated, and out-gunned all around, and the situation is nowhere near over.
• Chapter 304:
  • It is revealed that One For All gradually depletes the life force of its wielders. Only Quirkless wielders like All Might and Izuku are immune to this drawback. The scariest part is that none of the users knew of this when they were alive and only learned it when they compared notes with All Might's research. With the declining number of Quirkless humans and the rapid evolution of One For All, Izuku is fated to be the final user of One For All. Meaning he HAS to defeat All For One no matter what.
  • Even if Midoriya found a Quirkless person (especially one who shared a similar heroic core personality to him), they could never handle all the power One For All has accumulated over the years. One For All has essentially become a time bomb at this point.

Dark Hero Arc

• Chapter 307:
  • The giant villain Midoriya mentioned in the previous chapter? It's Muscular. And oh boy, we see his true power. While he originally didn't look destructive at first, this chapter truly shows it as he was able to literally jump from miles away and destroy a building with his Quirk. In addition, thanks to his sadism and cruelty, he was able to effortlessly defeat Shindo.
  • Deku in 307 with his damaged mask. While it is awesome, it is downright scary to see Deku from being a kind, merciful hero to downright intimidating when he's cradling an unconscious Shindo. This is a giant reminder that Deku has completely changed and is not hesitant to show any kind of mercy to Muscular.
  • To further add onto this, Deku officially has gained Glowing Eyes of Doom just like All Might (later revealed to be part of the mask's design). This adds a new level of intimidation to Deku's new look and actions as the previous Symbol of Peace was pure Nightmare Fuel in the face of villains.
  • Despite the mask, Muscular manages to recognize Deku's voice, and he is delighted.
• Chapter 311:
  • A sniper (the female prisoner from Tartarus) working for All For One found Izuku, telling him she's going to take him and that if he doesn't comply, she'll shoot off his limbs. And there's someone else with her. It's Overhaul, still missing his arms.
  • The sniper's Quirk allows her to form a sniper rifle coming out of her elbow, which is portrayed here as a Lovecraftian Superpower. The way the skin, muscle, sinew, and bone form the gun is downright disturbing.
  • During his drive in his car, All Might (who was fretting about his protégé keeping healthy, mind you) suddenly sees Deku's GPS go out. He begins rushing to Deku...only for a grenade to get launched at him. The next panel shows an explosion and leaves the Symbol of Peace's fate in the air.
• Chapter 314:
  • While there were subtle hints throughout the story that the HPSC wasn't as clean as it was made out to be, Lady Nagant's backstory exposes just how corrupt it truly is under the surface. The Commission would order Nagant to assassinate potential threats to Hero Society (from villains, to heroes whose actions would've tarnished the public's view on heroes, to regular people who simply were simply talking about going against the establishment) even before they actually commit crimes, depriving them of due process or the right to a fair trial. Despite her obvious misgivings about committing such deeds, she complied with them for the sake of Hero Society even as the guilt began eating away at her to the point that she began developing PTSD, at one point hallucinating seeing the blood of her victims on her hands when approached by her fans. Eventually, she hit her breaking point during a disagreement with the President of the Commission where he coldly dimisses her concerns as a Necessary Evil and not-so-subtly threatens to have her killed if she attempts to walk away, leading to Nagant killing the man. She was then sentenced to Tartarus with the official story of her killing a fellow hero in an argument being used to cover up the scandal. The idea that a government agency would start summarily executing civilians because they might be potential threats is the ultimate Paranoia Fuel.
• Chapter 315:
  • Lady Nagant empowering her rifle to shoot faster shots, causing the rifle to swell grotesquely. Body Horror at his finest. Similarly, the shots of Nagant's rifle getting broken by Izuku's Manchester Smash are not pretty. The barrel is shattered nearly at a 90 degree angle twice over — bearing in mind that the gun is basically her own arm, and it's hard not to wince a little at seeing it so mangled by Izuku's attack.
  • Lady Nagant learns the hard way why making a deal with the Symbol of Evil is never a good idea. Midoriya defeats Lady Nagant and she is impressed with his heroism. Just when it seems that Midoriya succeeded in saving her and was about to convince her to fight alongside him, cracks begin to emerge across Nagant's face and she violently explodes. Turns out when All For One gave the Air Walk Quirk to Lady Nagant, he also secretly implanted a failsafe which would trigger in case she failed him or betrayed him, something she was unaware of. The last shot we see of Nagant is her badly burned body (to the point that it looks like her face is blown apart and one of her feet is twisted nearly 180 degrees backwards) as she is caught by Hawks. The scene really underscores how ruthless All For One is. The moment you fail him, or prove to be no longer useful, you're discarded like trash.
    • The cracks on Nagant's face that appears as she's blowing up bear a similarity to the cracks left on the 4th's face after he died from One For All breaking his body. It's unclear if All For One used an additional Quirk inside Nagant or an effect from one of his stockpiled abilities, but if it's the same cause of death, then All For One somehow has the ability to induce a Phlebotinum Overload in those he grants extra Quirks to, somehow maintaining a connection to the 'loaned' power and being able to push it to the point that it causes the same phenomenon that would have killed the other users of One For All if they hadn't perished at his hands first. The implication is made stronger by the fact that All For One somehow seems to be aware of everything that's happening in Nagant's fight, despite being nowhere near it, implying that he can somehow watch and monitor those who have taken extra Quirks from him and, if need be, dispose of them with a thought. Accepting AFO's offers of power had always been framed akin to a Deal with the Devil in the past, and this extra dimension to the control it brings him over those who accept just makes the comparison more apt.
    • In addition to everything above, All For One's comments imply that this was the outcome he was planning for all along when he sent Nagant after Izuku. Her ignorance of Izuku's multiple Quirks — something All For One would have been well aware of, his vestige counterpart having witnessed him using them in battle — implies that All For One deliberately withheld the information from her, just so they she'd be unprepared and lose to Izuku in a straight fight. Nagant wasn't sent after Izuku because she was an experienced assassin with a massive list of kills and impressive combat abilities, she was sent to die in front of him because she was a Hitman with a Heart that Izuku would be compelled to try and redeem after realising that she wasn't as bad as her past actions made her seem, only for All For One to demonstrate the futility of trying to save a Tragic Villain like Nagant in the end, in turn making a point about the futility of the young hero's desire to save Tomura. The battle for One For All is one of emotional willpower, not physical superiority, and All For One is putting in the effort to try and break Izuku however he can before the rematch to make it easier for him to steal the Quirk, no matter how cruel or heartless his schemes need to be for him to achieve that goal.
• Chapter 316:
  • Izuku, Endeavor and the rest are lead to the old Creature Rejection Clan mansion, and find a pre-recorded message for Izuku himself. After taunting him over Nagant's fall to Villainy. After this, he brags about how he plans to wear down Izuku's spirit, little by little until he breaks under the pressure and horrors he says. To really nail it home, All For One proceeds to reveal he's now focused on Midoriya, and what's more, hasn't been able to stop thinking about Izuku since he was locked up. With a chilling call back to All Might's declaration of "You're Next", he proceeds to blow up the mansion with all the heroes inside. The idea that, in some way he could've planned all this out and had taken the steps to prepare his own unique way to break Izuku is terrifying in it of itself.
• Chapter 317: Izuku is no longer smiling and is relentlessly moving forward to uphold his ideals, even coldly distancing himself from All Might of all people. The final panel of Izuku walking in the rain is spine-chilling: his costume is tattered and covered in filth and gore. His shoes and gloves resemble claws, and there are dark tentacles around him. He genuinely looks more like Hero Killer Stain than a comic book hero.
• Chapter 318 introduces us to another Tartarus escapee named Dictator. His Quirk, Despot, allows him to control the bodies of others via strings, with the victims fully aware of what's happening but unable to break free. He uses this to sic a horde of civilians, some armed with support gear, on an exhausted Midoriya. The entire scene resembles a zombie horde attacking a helpless victim.
• Chapter 320 features Izuku giving Ojiro a particularly wild Death Glare with his Glowing Eyes of Doom from close up after the latter wrangles him with his tail, the paneling shown from Ojiro's perspective to showcase how menacing and frightening Izuku looks to his friends right now. It's also crossed with Tearjerker, as Izuku is simultaneously expounding why he can't return to UA, no matter what they say — AFO will be coming for him and his dear classmates will be just collateral damage to him in the process of wresting OFA away from Izuku. His frenzied desperation is plainly evident, and the flashbacks to Gran Torino, Aizawa and Bakugo getting maimed and brutalised in front of Izuku by the AFO-possessed Tomura showcases just how bad a toll the knowledge that the heartless Sociopath will be coming for him no matter who gets in his way has taken on Izuku, who is far from being the greatest hero in japan who can defeat him, and little more than a young boy who feels he has no choice but to face him — alone — so nobody else gets hurt, again demonstrating his own inability to consider his own wellbeing before others. The fact that this is still part of AFO's greater plan to grind him down physically and mentally for their rematch sells how outmatched and overwhelmed Izuku is when faced with the task of facing an opponent who is infinitely stronger, more experienced and ruthless than himself — and moreover, one that no adult can actually protect him from, with AFO's machinations having stripped away the illusion of security and comfort not only from Izuku, but with every other person in Japan right now.
• The facial expressions Stain makes in Chapter 326 once again shows that even his emotional state can be genuinely terrifying as he goes on a rant on how the man he sees before him can't be the All Might he knew and gave people hope.
• Chapter 328 adds another layer of urgency to the already tense situation by revealing that rather than two months, Shigaraki will be fully complete in three days. The heroes have only three days to stop Shigaraki and All For One before he becomes fully complete.

Star and Stripe Arc

• Chapter 329:
  • All For One revealing to Spinner that he has allies all over the globe, raising his threat level significantly as he is not only a danger to Japan, but to the entire world at large. He also reveals that contrary to what fans believed, his attempt to steal One For All is just the mid goal. This adds a new feeling of dread to the story as fans will be left asking "What is All For One's true goal?"
  • America's #1 Hero, Star and Stripe arrives in Japan and ready to greet her is none other than Shigaraki, sent by All For One to not only get rid of a potential obstacle to his plans, but to steal her Quirk, which begs the question: What Quirk Star has that would make All For One send his most powerful fighter to take it?
• Chapter 330:
  • We learn what Star and Stripe's Quirk is and why All For One wants it so badly. Her Quirk, New Order, allows her to impose a new rule on anything she touches after calling its name. In other words, her Quirk effectively allows her to control reality itself. And she puts it to lethal use during her battle with Shigaraki, opening the fight by removing the air around Shigaraki to suffocate him and later imposing a rule that his heart would stop if he moved. It's little wonder All For One wants her Quirk. If that's what it can do in the hands of a hero, imagine what it can do in the hands of a madman like him.
  • Throughout the battle, Shigaraki is suffering something of an identity crisis as he struggles with the vestige of All For One taking control of him. And we get a rather grotesque sight of the vestige of All For One merging with Shigaraki. All For One says that the merge is 97 or 98% complete and that Shigaraki's seething hatred for everything will result in a new being entirely, one that is neither Shigaraki nor All For One. It's at this moment Star and Stripe realizes with horror that that's the reason her Quirk is not working on him anymore. The chapter then ends with both Shigaraki and Star and Stripe engulfed in a massive explosion.
• Chapter 331:
  • The good news is Star and Stripe survived. The bad news is that the situation has gotten so out of hand that her superiors have no choice but to launch a missile strike at Shigaraki just to have a possible chance of winning against him.
• Chapter 332:
  • Shigaraki / All For One survives a literal nuke and we get a shot of him bursting out of the explosion as his body rapidly regenerates, making him look like an extreme example of Body Horror. He clamps his hand around Star and Stripe's face and activates Decay. Might this be the end for America's #1 Hero?
• Chapter 333:
  • Good news? Star performed a Heroic Sacrifice by applying one last rule to her Quirk, causing it to attack The Shigaraki-AFO fusion. Bad news? This leaves the audience watching as All For One freak out for the first time, panicking. After so long seeing All For One as a refined genius planner, it's genuinely disturbing to see him in a bloodthirsty Villainous Breakdown as he rushes to dump New Order onto someone else. He might still somewhat have his wits about him, but it's clear that underneath his veneer of refinement and cultured villainy, All For One is a massive Sore Loser who has no compunctions doing anything to win — or more specifically, anything to get back at those who actually manage to severely inconvenience him, difficult a feat as that might be to achieve. The only reason he can't get back at Star is that she's already dead, but he makes it very clear that he'd make her pay for this humiliation if she was still around. And sooner or later, Izuku is going to have to do one better than her and actually put a stop to him — and All For One has made it very clear that he will turn his full ire and sadism on the boy should he actually come close to achieving that feat.
  • The worst part is that with Star & Stripe's death, all the heroes around the world are ordered to pull back despite their reluctance to do so. War is coming and at this point, it's every man for himself.

U.A Traitor Arc

• Chapter 335:
  • Shigaraki is still in unspeakable pain from New Order ravaging his Quirks and his body. Imagine the worst kind of agony you can suffer and not even a hospital or surgeon can stop it...
  • The traitor among UA seems to have been revealed by All For One's comment that he has massive contingency plans, a spy being one of them. This person is so convincingly innocent and deeply rooted in UA that no one suspects them.
• Chapter 336:
  • The symbolism of All For One, his face now more clearly defined than ever before, reaching down beyond the paneling, his hand hovering over the traitor's head, sells how much control he has over them and how impossible it is to defy him. It's not just the traitor's own life that's endangered, but that of their parents as well, who introduced them to All for One in the hopes that he'd allow their child to overcome their Dream-Crushing Handicap and become a hero. Instead, all that decision has resulted in is the traitor developing an intense self-loathing complex and the downfall of society as they know it, demonstrating why nothing good ever comes out of accepting All For One's offers, just as his brother warned about.
  • Worse, the way the traitor and their parents word their conversation, its implied that All For One killing them is a complete certainty if they defy him, not just a very likely possibility. Given he earlier demonstrated the ability to remote detonate Lady Nagant through what is implied to be the extra Quirk factor he gave her, its heavily implied that the traitor is themselves under a similar restriction — and maybe even their parents as well. The slightest hint of disobedience, and not just them, but their loved ones will instantly die. It's no wonder that the traitor has followed All For One's orders even as they vehemently disagree with them.
• Chapter 337:
  • Whilst the chapter clarifies that the Traitor likely doesn't have an explosive countermeasure stored inside them, the methods All For One used to ensure their compliance aren't much better. He had a subordinate of his, who'd recently surrendered to the police, kidnapped not long after they were let out of prison, brought before Aoyama's parents, and then gruesomely killed him, personally, right before their eyes, as a 'demonstration' of what would happen to them if Aoyama failed in his duties or they tried to lie to him. The extent of his reach and the depth of his cruelty is abundantly clear, and the Aoyamas are near-paralysed from terror just remembering the scene, with a panel of the bloody corpse by All For One's feet punctuating their sheer terror of the Devil they made a deal with.
    Mr. Aoyama: Wherever we run, he'll find us, and make us face our doom!
  • Overlapping with Tearjerker, but it's clarified that Aoyama didn't actually mind his Quirkless nature too much, but because his parents were from wealthy backgrounds, they feared the social stigma that came attached to their child being labeled as Quirkless, enough that they agreed to an arrangement with All For One, even if the Quirk bestowed upon Aoyama was a poor fit for him, invested money in getting him support gear that could allow him to withstand the power, heaping upon Aoyama mounting pressure to succeed as a hero in order to repay them for all they'd done for him, even as the demands All For One made of the family slowly undercut that dream. It's clarified that Aoyama had no idea of the repercussions of him passing along the information at first, only that he mustn't be found as suspicious, and that he only became aware of how serious the situation was when his family were in too deep to back out, leaving him no choice but to continue, despite his guilt, for their sakes. Notably, Bakugo, one of the students that was most deeply affected by Aoyama passing along the information, shows no anger towards him, only melancholy remembrance of his own bullying of the Quirkless Izuku, recognising the common societal issues that stigmatised them both, and which each student found different ways of dealing with. Beyond All For One's own manipulation of the public's dependance of Quirks and being seen as 'special' it's clear that the social pressures to 'conform' to the majority was as great an influence upon driving Aoyama to betray them.
    • Worse, it's made clear that, should that truth be revealed to the public, Aoyama would always be seen as a Villain, despite his reluctance for follow All For One's orders, much like Endevour's own mistakes are haunting him despite his genuine attempts to atone for his actions. The social label of a 'villain' is one that is harmful in ways that are hard to recover from and Aoyama would have no choice but to live the rest of his life with that Mark of Shame, forced on him by the actions of others and his own fearful compliance for the sake of his loved ones. Izuku's offer to Aoyama to become a Double Agent against All For One is as much allowing his friend a chance to not be defined by the labels others give to his character as it is a chance to turn the tables on the Manipulative Bastard.
  • All For One even gloats to Dabi about how disposable Aoyama is to him, noting that his long-term plans have fully taken in account the possibility that his spy would be exposed and can proceed regardless, with the only emotion he has towards their success or failure is sadistic amusement towards the family's efforts to remain useful to him, even comparing them to a cheap disposable 100-yen lighter that gets thrown away in the trash once it no longer works.
    All For One: They're less like friends and more like disposable tools. And I say hip hip hooray for any slight excitement they can inflict.
• Chapter 338:
  • Tsukauchi points out that, even though it doesn't seem like Aoyama has a remote detonation trigger in him, it's still not a 100% guarantee that he doesn't, and until they can be sure, they need to keep him isolated and away from the other students in case he explodes for some reason, to minimize the resulting damage as much as possible. All Aoyama can do is silently be lead away in tears, fully aware he's still a danger to his classmates even though he wants to help them and be a hero alongside them.
• Chapter 341:
  • The Reveal that Dabi managed to swipe a vial of Twice's blood during the Paranormal Liberation War Arc. Remember that Hawks killed Twice precisely because his Quirk made him too powerful and dangerous to be kept alive. And now a vial of Twice's blood is in the hands of Toga, who has the ability to use the Quirks of anyone she transforms into. The Heroes are in for a really uphill battle.
  • A brief scene of Tomura's recovery process is partially witnessed and the results... are not pretty in the slightest. Spinner approaches the darkened cave where Tomura's screaming in agony in their underground hideout, and gets close enough for the light to illuminate what appears to be a massive fleshy growth spreading out over the cave walls◊ like Meat Moss, its various protrusions resembling fingers. Spinner is shocked speechless at the unnatural sight before the organic horror is sucked back into the darkness, revealing Tomura curled up in agony over his left hand...which is showing the nubs of what appears to be his lost fingers re-growing out of it. This implies that Tomura is overtaxing his hyper regeneration abilities to forcibly override the one limitation of the Quirk — that it cannot heal already-lost body parts if the used has lost them prior to gaining the Quirk — in order to use his Quirk's full potential against Izuku in their rematch. Tomura's one weakness of his advanced Quirk was that he could only use its most destructive abilities with his un-maimed hand, so seeing him devote such effort into forcing his Quirks into preforming an action that it shouldn't be able to, sells how determined Tomura is to win their next fight, no matter the cost. Even beyond the ability of Hyper Regeneration to help hold his body together regardless of what abuse it endures, it's Tomura's sheer willpower that makes him basically unstoppable in a fight, regardless of how he comes out looking in the aftermath.
• Chapter 342:
  • All For One is revealed to have snuck in several pawns of his inside the residential area with orders to destabilise the thin promise of peace and safety presented therein and "fan the flames" until Izuku is again forced into the hostile and chaotic world outside. This highlights again the sheer menace that All For One brings against Izuku, that's he's able to plan ahead to relentlessly corner and pressure the young hero no matter where he goes in order to leave him as shaken and off-balance as he can before he comes for him to steal One For All, punctuated by All For One's Slasher Smile cloaked in darkness as his pawns set about achieving those orders.
  • The fact that All For One still has Pawns or followers willing to do his bidding even in a Crapsack World that his actions caused. Aoyama at least had the excuse of not knowing how bad things were going to get, but these people have lived through the hellish landscape that the cities have devolved into and are actively choosing to destabilise one of the few places of safety left under his orders. It's left unclear if it's genuine loyalty towards the villains' cause or fear of All For One that motivates them, but as long as there are people willing to follow his plans, Izuku will never be safe, no matter where he goes.

Final War Arc

• Chapter 343: All For One finally decides to confront Izuku to steal One For All From him... and his intended plan is absolutely horrific considering the age of his adversary.
  • Firstly, he uses Izuku's trust in his classmates to have Aoyama lure him to an isolated area, making dead certain through search that none of the active heroes or his classmates are nearby them and can interfere before appearing before Izuku himself, decked out in another Cool Mask and suit that resembles his getup at Kamino, invoking the same aura of menace and 'certain death' that he casually projected back then — but this time focused all on Izuku. He mocks Izuku for his naïveté whilst digging the knife in deeper about Aoyama's betrayal, revealing, he thinks, to Izuku that one of his closest classmates sold him out out of fear of him, and now he's got him exactly where he wants him. If facing down the man that crippled All Might twice and personally killed most of his predecessors right when he's fully prepared to 'fight' him wasn't enough...
  • All For One then summons all the villains and allies on his side to the scene. All of them. This includes Tomura, Dabi, Toga, the Near High-ends, as well as whatever remaining members of the PLF are available along with miscellaneous villains attracted to his side as faith in heroes was slowly crumbled away. All for the express purposes of ganging up on one lone child whilst he's isolated and can't call for aid, and then beating him to a pulp or worse. Even if he will one day be the World's Strongest Man, this is compete overkill and done more for hammering it into Izuku how hopeless his situation is. All For One needs his spirit broken as much as his body to maximise his chances of stealing One For All, and if his plans had gone off as intended, Izuku would have been emotionally devastated by Aoyama's unexpected betrayal, then driven past the Despair Event Horizon by All For One's army attacking him all at once. Again, Izuku is a child. A young kid only 16- to 17-years-old, and All For One's end goal was to drive him into a despair-filled death against impossible odds whilst he's cut off from everybody who would want to protect him, showcasing his utter malevolence. Luckily, All For One's inability to grasp positive emotions meant that Izuku and the rest were able to turn the ambush back on him by summoning The Cavalry to ambush the villains in turn, but the fact they so accurately predicted All For One pulling such a move shows they knew he'd go that far against Izuku just to hurt him as much as possible before killing him.
• Chapter 347:
  • Shigaraki grows a mass of fingers larger than a building that are not the result of a Quirk. Instead, he explains it's the Quirk Singularity, his body is adapting and mutating to accommodate the power inside him and it eventually has to happen to all of humanity once Quirks inevitably become too powerful and complex to be controlled. Everyone is horrified to then realize that Erasure is the only thing stopping Decay from spreading through each of Shigaraki's thousands of fingers, and the second Monoma blinks, everyone will die.
  • Despite Toga coming at him with a knife to stab him, Midoriya's Danger Sense isn't working. The reason for this? Toga is attacking Midoriya out of genuine love. Imagine how twisted her morality has to be for that to work. Also, the fact that this Blue-and-Orange Morality is a natural result of the Quirk she was born with as well as years of attempting to suppress her urges. Is it any wonder why society had no idea how to deal with her?
• Chapter 348 picks up where the previous chapter left off with Toga confessing her love for Midoriya. Of course, her distorted view on love means that she wants to drink his blood and become him. Understandably creeped out, Midoriya rejects her advances and Toga, obsessed Yandere she is, takes it as well as you expect. Seeing Midoriya's rejection as a sign that the world will never accept her, Toga goes completely off the deep end, deciding that if the world will reject her, she'll reject the world. And to punctuate her new change in mindset, Midoriya's Danger Sense finally goes off, signifying that Toga no longer sees Midoriya as a lover, but someone she wants to see dead. Doubles as a Tear Jerker.
  Toga: (To Uraraka) Oh? You haven't been on my mind. Not anymore! I thought that maybe I had a shot with Izuku, but nope! I'm over all that now! The world rejected me, so I reject the world!
  • Making the above even scarier and more upsetting is the fact that she has a vial of Twice's blood. Meaning that at any point, she can use it and activate the Sad Man's Parade. And with how unstable she now is, this does not bode well.
• Chapter 349: Dabi declares that he is looking forward to finally getting to kill Shoto, and as he says this, his fire power is increasing to dangerous levels and it shows when his flesh starts to melt right off his skull.
• Chapter 350:
  • We finally found out what happened to Toya after he burnt himself in the forest. He was rescued by All For One who later resurrected him using a technique similar to how he created the Nomu. However Toya, fueled by anger and hate, broke free and tried to return home, only to see from his hiding spot the shrine dedicated to him and Enji training Shoto. In Toya's mind, this meant his family moved on without him, resulting in his anger and hate focusing on one thing: revenge against the family who replaced him.
  • Dabi's flashback reveals that All for One had backups of kids like Tenko Shimura/Tomura Shigaraki to act as his vessel if Tomura somehow failed. These kids are shown to be raised in what appears to be an Orphanage of Love... presided over by a muscle-bound man wearing an apron with a cutesy, smiling sunflower mask on, creating a creepy image that visually demonstrates that the place was just a prison based on lies, and that the kids would be forced into compliance if they proved uncooperative with their fate.
    • Creepier than that is Toya's reaction. Having spent 3 years in a coma, he's mentally still a 13-year old. Upon being told he'll never see his family again, and thus never gain the recognition from Endeavor that he so craves, Toya's reaction is a hate-filled 'shut up' to All For One, trying to manipulate him through a monitor, telling the Diabolical Mastermind that he will never be trained by any other man but his father before burning the whole building down to escape, endangering or possibly killing all the other orphans there in order to get what he wants. Many of those orphans were shown to be excited about Toya joining their family and never did anything but be kind towards his comatose body, but Toya is shown to be running away from the blazing building without so much as a backwards glance at their fate. Garaki himself, of all people, notes that Toya was already 'festering away inside' from his obsession with Endeavor, showcasing that there was something deeply wrong with him even as a young child before he embraced the identity of the villain Dabi. All the murders, manipulations and pain caused by Dabi's actions have no connection to All For One — it's all the actions of a disturbed teenager, angry and determined to make the world around him burn to spite everybody else.
  • All For One's rescue of the young Toya. There's no forewarning of his arrival, no indication that he's aware of his situation. Just the image of All For One casually striding towards his charred body from out of the blazing flames surrounding them, as casually as if he were walking in the park. Garaki says than he and All For one were on the lookout for 'twisted raw material' that could serve as his next vessel, and the parallels between this and Tenko Shimura's 'rescue' make it clear — All For One somehow had an extensive information network to keep tabs on those who could serve his plans, able to monitor them without a hint that they were being observed, and step in to 'save' them, appearing as a saviour in their time of need to foster their loyalty, all to further his own goals and one day become an immortal Demon King. This tactic appears to have been so successful down the years that Garaki finds Toya's case notable as one time where they failed to manipulate a target.
  • The scariest part is Garaki notes, even with how they put him back together, Dabi should be long dead by now. He's only still alive because he hates his father that much he's holding his body together. This combined with the imagery used for Dabi makes him come off as a Revenant Zombie rather than a human being.
  • Even worse, when he fights Shoto at full power, Toya burns nearly all his remaining flesh away and looks like an extra crispy devil whose flames are strong enough to repel Endeavor's sidekicks, other heroes, and even his little brother. At this point, he's sacrificed his own body just to show he can surpass his family, and it's all but stated that no matter what Shoto does, Toya has simply destroyed too much of himself in his quest for vengeance to be saved anymore.
• Chapter 356: All For One completely snaps after Jiro, Hawks, and Tokoyami shatter his life support mask. We're greeted to the lovely image of All For One's self in the vestige world trying to eat the other Quirks like a feral animal while in the real world he unleashes a gigantic explosion of darkness in all directions while, for the first time in the series (from the original All For One), screaming in visible rage and fury.
  All For One: WRETCHED PESTS!!
• Chapter 357: It seems as though Endeavor has finally done and killed All For One in a climatic Prominence Burn, even confirming that he has no pulse as he clasps his charred corpse in his hands... then All For One begins talking again, stating plainly if he really believed he wouldn't have had one last ace up his sleeve in the event of this: Eri's Rewind, replicated from the Quirk Erasing Bullets stolen from Overhaul, used as a last ditch effort on himself in his dying breath, despite knowing the risk of Cessation of Existence, just to spite the heroes by giving them an even harder fight than they believed as All For One's body begins regenerating back to its prime before All Might crippled him, with his eyeballs returning to give a frightening Death Glare coupled with an ear-to-ear Slasher Smile.
  All For One: What makes you think heroes were the only ones prepared to risk their lives?
• Chapter 362: Bakugo has overdone himself so hard that his Quirk has started to backfire on him. The sweat that couldn't exit his palms build up and leaks out throughout his body, causing explosions all over his body. The final nail in Bakugo's coffin comes when Shigaraki impales him through the heart causing it to explode from the built-up sweat. The final shot of the chapter has him dead, with a gaping wide hole where his heart would be, with everyone staring in horror.
• Chapter 363: The Final War officially reaches its Darkest Hour:
  • Best Jeanist confirms the worst: Bakugo is no more. His heart is an unrecognizable mush and his pulse is totally gone.
  • Dabi reveals that he survived Shoto's Phosphorus attack by copying its technique and his first rule of business upon recovering? Burn the Sidekickers to ash. Burnin stays behind to buy Shoto and Tenya enough time to escape.
  • Skeptic returns and reveals that he now has control over his company satellite, giving him complete control over the battlefield. He also revealed that he jammed the communications inside the U.A. Fortress, which is why the heroes can't reach out to each other during the battles. He also sends Dabi directly to the location of Endeavor, who is down an arm and almost certainly overheating at this point.
  • The two League infiltrators inside U.A. return, and they seem ready to make a move. At the same time, they seem very interested in both the Todoroki family and the kids from the Masegaki School that are hiding alongside them. One can only fear what these people's intentions to the poor kids might be.
    • Oh wait, Skeptic states exactly what their intentions are: Extermination. According to Skeptic, absolutely no one willing to believe in heroes can survive by the end of this for their 'new world' to be realized.
  • All for One is fully recovered! And now he is ready to show his recovered strength against the heroes that are barely standing on the Gunga Mountain battlefield.
  • And it must be remembered, the reason that the final battle has gone to hell, why the heroes haven't already taken down TomurAFO and pulled off their divide-and-conquer stratagem as planned? All because of Toga yanking Midoriya into the wrong battlefield purely on reflex. It wasn't a counter-plan on any of the villains' part, not even AFO; Toga just had a Yandere moment at the worst time conceivable. It's simultaneously galling and chilling to think that the villains really are so strong that they can gain such an upper hand from something so asinine.
    • Really, that's the most terrifying part of this. How the villains, riding on pure willpower and emotions, are repeatedly tipping the scales in their favor. Dabi is explicitly stated to be surviving entirely on The Power of Hate for years. Toga's Yandere tendencies have led her to maim and murder others out of love, at least until recently when one too many rejections sent her remaining sanity down the drain and turned her to into full-fledged homicidal rage. Skeptic is so hell bent on realizing Re-Destro's ideals that he plans to kill everyone in the shelters just for putting their faith in the heroes. Even AFO is perfectly willing to sacrifice his original body just to ensure TomurAFO has less to deal with in his conquest of the planet. The fact that hate and desire can motivate people to such extreme is absolutely chilling.
• Chapter 364: How bad is the situation across the world during the battle? Really bad.
  • The President of the United States and many world leaders have pretty much accepted defeat and are making plans to negotiate with Shigaraki as soon as the battle ends. All for One's goal of having the entire world being dependent on him seems to be closer than ever.
  • Washington has been overrun by riots. One of the protesters is carrying a sign saying: "WE ARE ALL FOR ONE."
    • What is both scary and Tear Jerker, is the fact that these people are not doing this out of fanatical loyalty to the villain. Star and Stripe, the world's greatest hero now that All Might retired, went to fight against Shigaraki and lost. To the world, if she couldn't stop that monster, no one can. And since they don't know about Midoriya or One for All, they just abandoned all hope that someone will save them.
  • All for One's Thanatos Gambit. He knows that using Rewind will eventually reduce him nothing, but is more than glad to play this card if it means to take every single hero possible with him before that happens. He is very confident that Tomura and his other consciousness will finish the job after his original self is gone.
• Chapter 365: Combined with Tear Jerker, the Tenko aspect of Shigaraki becomes despondent and enraged seeing the heroes going through so much to save the apparently dead Bakugo, since when Tenko himself had needed help the most after accidentally killing his family, no heroes or anyone else helped him or even acknowledged him, pretending not to see him. He even regresses to child-like state repeatedly screaming that Bakugo is a "toy" he'd already broken. This causes him to remember how he felt abandoned by his family, and fleshy facsimiles of his dead relatives begin to emerge from the mass of his mutated flesh as the chapter ends.
• Chapter 366:
  • With his Quirks sealed by Erasure, Shigaraki's body is unable to heal itself from the damage inflicted by the heroes, forcing it to mutate into a new form suited for defense. And it is truly a sight to behold. Try to imagine his old costume, but made entirely of his own flesh, bones and blood with his left arm mutated into a hulking hand with the fingers made from the faces of his family. His strength has increased tenfold as well as he swats aside the heroes trying to attack him with a simple backhand. And when Mirio tries to stall for time by trying to attack Shigaraki, he just tells the boy that he's not worth it. Thank God Midoriya finally made it to the battlefield.
  • Swap out the fingers on Shigaraki's new body for spikes and he looks very similar to Doomsday. Here's hoping he's not as effective...
• Chapter 370:
  • The sheer amount of troops the villains have brought to bear against the heroes in their attempt to free Kurogiri. The army is composed of the remnants of the Paramormal Liberation Front as well as Heteromorph civilians who support their cause, amounting to 15,000 troops total. Meanwhile the heroes have only 200 troops in total with Rock Lock, Present Mic, Koda, and Shoji leading the charge. Our heroes are truly in for an uphill battle.
  • Doubling as a Tear Jerker, Spinner's condition in this chapter is truly sight to behold. All For One granted him multiple new Quirks and made him stronger, but those Quirks are taking a severe toll on his mind to the point that he's become little more than a drooling, mindless brute who's barely able to string complete sentences together. It's both horrifying and heartbreaking to see the lovable Stain fanboy become essentially Gigantomachia #2.
  Spinner: Dun... know... wut... he... saying. Ever since All For One... gave me power... head getting... fuzzier. Whatever. Me just... do wut... me told.
  • We are given hints of Shoji's backstory and it doesn't paint a pretty picture as we see a young Shoji with his face bandaged up. And the chapter ends with a reveal of his real face for the first time in seven years, revealing some scarring and what appears to be a Glasgow smile, the juxtaposition of both panels indicating he too was a victim of discrimination to the point that somebody tried to cut off his jaw when he was younger.
• Chapter 371 fully elaborates on Shoji's backstory and it's equal parts tragedy and Nightmare Fuel. It turns out that he grew up in a racist backwater town and faced horrific discrimination due to his arms, at one point getting beaten up by a mob of people, resulting in the scars he bears today. The reason he wears the mask is both to hide his scars and to avoid people believing he seeks revenge. Even worse, the reason he was attacked by the mob in the first place? The next chapter reveals that it was because he dared to rescue a little girl from drowning. Really hammers home how bad Shoji's life was that a single act of kindness resulted in him being disfigured for life.
• Chapter 372:
  • Despite the best efforts of the heroes and Shoji's sincere pleas to the rioters to consider how this assault will inevitably breed more reasons to hate and persecute hetromorphs like them for future generations to suffer, It all comes to naught. Even after losing his exchange with Shoji and his mind devolving the more he uses his power, Spinner manages to pull enough of himself together to repeat his broadcasted 'Call to Action' that motivated his followers in the first place, drawing upon even more of his multiple quirks to the point that he looks like little more than a raging monster, covered in spikes and dripping blood from his self-inflicted injuries. He and the rioters continue onwards towards the hospital, the situation getting dire enough that the defending police feel they have no choice but to draw their firearms on the assaulters, the sound of shots firing being heard, possibly hitting or killing several people before Spinner tears into the hospital, gruesomely crushing a policemen underfoot as he does so. It truly feels like the Darkest Hour for the heroes and officers who only want to protect the innocents from the fires of anger All For One has weaponised.
  • However, Spinner and his followers are confronted by the one obstacle none of them could have foreseen — the hospital staff, nurses and doctors united, both human and heteromorph, blocking the path to the ward where Kurogiri and the other patients are held, holding hands and unarmed, their faces quietly showcasing their resolution not to move and expose those under their care to the danger the assault is bringing down on them. The sight brings Spinner's followers up short. Spinner himself however, has his mind too degraded by the strain of his Quirks, uncomprehending of anything besides his desire to help Tomura, and.... doesn't. The result isn't shown, just a panel of Spinner's Followers looking on in horror, one of them dropping their weapon on the ground in shock.
• Chapter 373:
  • The aftermath of Spinner's rampage through the doctors is still unshown, but the reactions of the witnesses speak to how horrible it is. They're gone from a bloodthirsty crowd of rioters to a collection of people suffering from shock, several of whom are on their knees and struggling to cope with what they're witnessed. Even with the risk of being seen as cowards or traitors for turning on their previous allies and supporting Shoji, the horrors they just witnessed, and the thought of innocent patients getting subjected to that, is enough to make them all resolutely side with Shoji to stop the violence escalating anymore. The pig-man heteromorph is visibly shaking and crying as he begs the others to stop, but his and the other's collective Thousand-Yard Stare makes it clear they're more scared of what Spinner did being repeated than they are of being turned on by a legion of angry rioters.
• Chapter 374: The entire chapter is nothing less that everything going catastrophically wrong for the heroes, in a reversal of fortune on par with them successfully luring the villains into a trap in the first place.
  • It starts with an otherwise-unrelated public news broadcast, revealing that the gathering storm clouds that have be brewing over Japan's skies are being caused by the massive heat spikes generated by the fights against the villains combining with the low-pressure system in Japan to create an enormous inferno cumulonimbus cloud that could potentially ride the jet stream and adversely affect the weather in North America. The panelling makes it clear that Endeavour, Shoto and Dabi's massive blazes are the main perpetrators of this phenomenon, and the reporter cites the butterfly effect when remarking on how far-off events are capable of resonating around the world to devastating effect thanks to the unprecedented power Quirks are capable of generating by the present day, wondering if situations like this were inevitable from the very first moment they appeared. It's a harrowing look at how dangerous the full potential of evolutionary superpowers are, and an indicator that whilst All For One's grand designs to Take Over the World are a threat that must be stopped, the world itself may inevitably be heading towards a similarly ruinous future anyway just from the sheer unprecedented growth in the powers that emerge with every generation.
  • Speaking of Dabi, his relentless drive to successfully kill himself through his own flames as a means of spiting Endeavour with his self-destruction have left him at the apex of his Body Horror issues thus far, with his lips burned off completely and everything below the jawline being exposed muscles and rapidly-charcoaling flesh. Dabi can't even move properly anymore, keeping the heroes at bay by generating all-encompassing heat strong enough to scorch Shoto despite his fire-resistance, but unable to physically walk towards him, it being clear that standing upright is the only thing he can reliably manage to to anymore. When he decides to head to Gunga, he has to do so by propelling himself from flames at his feet, hot enough to melt a building by accident as he crashes into it, his body haphazardly flopping around he does so, moving more from the force of his fiery hate towards his father than any physical strength left. Burnin even Lampshades that his current state goes way beyond moving through pure willpower and notes that he should already be charcoal from his self-damage, perplexed at how relentlessly he can stave off death for the sake of spiting others. And despite all his injuries, Dabi's inner monologue indicates he was still confident in killing Shoto despite the damage, only deciding against it because doing so and reaching his father would prove more taxing that his body could endure. His insane willpower to kill as many as he can to spite his father has turned Toya into a relentless flaming demon that will not die until its objective is achieved and it's clear that there's no longer any turning back for him physically or mentally. And just when it appears that there's at least a Hope Spot that he'd exhaust himself trying to fly to finish off his father due to the distance...
  • All For One's preparations come around to screw the heroes over in the worst possible way. He smugly reveals to Endeavour and Hawks that he banked on Spinner's Undying Loyalty and genuine friendship with Tomura as a backup plan, having secured a micro-device within the burned remnant of Nana's hand that successfully transmitted his orders to Kurogiri anyway once Spinner placed it on his face, hoping it would rouse Kurogiri like it did to Tomura before, which the Diabolical Mastermind twisted into serving his needs. Far from helping Tomura's body from the beatdown Izuku's unleashing on him, Kurogiri instead opens portals to the various battlefields, freeing the Villains from their individual fights and allowing All For One to proceed with his original intent of ganging up on Izuku and overwhelming him with superior numbers and powers once more. This leads to Dabi successfully teleporting straight to Endeavour with plenty of gas left in the tank to finish them both off in one last destructive blaze, beaming a massive Slasher Smile with what's left of his face as he prepares to immolate the weakened top hero.
  • But Dabi's not even the most dangerous new arrival. Kurogiri opens a second portal...revealing two copies of Twice, creepily saying Hawk's name in a sing-song voice as they emerge from the darkness like a revived zombie army Back from the Dead, revealing that Toga managed to successfully unleash the Sad Man's Parade against the heroes and leaving their fates uncertain. Worse, the second clone is ominously staring at a broken piece of Tsuyu's costume clutched in its hand, implying that the never-ending army successfully overwhelmed the heroes...and now its primed to do the same to the forces on the mainland, unrestricted by distance or any time limitation thanks to Kurogiri's portals. All For One taunts Hawks that this outcome was all of his own making — by targeting Twice as a priority target, he stoked the Ire in Toga's heart against the heroes, motivating her to use the Sad Man's Parade for as much destructive Revenge against the establishment as she can achieve, the very outcome Hawks aimed to prevent by killing Twice. Now he's got a front-row seat to the chaos being unleashed against everybody... and more importantly, Toga's intent on killing him with her limitless duplication above all the others. The chapter ends with Hawks screaming in terror that somebody has to kill the Twice clones now before they're overwhelmed.
• Chapter 375: The visual of Gunga Mountain as the location is flooded with Twice clones resembles a skull. The aura of death in the air has returned with at its finest.
• Chapter 379 has Shigaraki fully retaking his body back from All For One, complete with the lovely visual of Shigaraki's fingers erupting from All For One's mouth and body as Shigaraki himself breaks free. Once again, Horikoshi proves to be the master of Body Horror.
• Chapter 381: While awesome, Tokoyami letting loose his new Ultimate Move, Abyssal Black Ankh: Light of Baldur, is terrifying to behold as we get to see the full unrestrained power of Dark Shadow. All For One suddenly goes from smug and composed to sheer panic as two gigantic red eyes appear behind him. Cue a Kaiju-sized Dark Shadow rising up behind All For One before pounding him into the dirt.
• While things seemed to be going well for the last couple of chapters, Chapter 385 is where everything takes a turn for the worse.
  • Mt. Lady, Machia and Dark Shadow continue their relentless attack against All for One, and at first it seems to be working, only for the villain take the upper hand, slicing Mt. Lady in the stomach and knocking Machia and Dark Shadow with a single laser beam attack.
    • Kirishima and Shinso were on top of Machia during the fight, meaning they problably got caught in the crossfire.
  • All for One's appearance is a sight to behold, the man looks like a flayed corpsed with no legs, which means if it wasn't for Eri's Quirk, he would be beyond dead at this point.
  • The moment All For One manages to turn things around, the battle cuts to black... And then it shows the aftermath of the battle, with Hawks and the surviving heroes look near dead at this point (With Tokoyami in particular being one of the few shown in the aftermath and he's in horrible condition), and without confirmation it's very easy to believe some did die. And for even worse news, All for One takes this opportunity to steal the Winged Hero's Quirk, meaning now he has a way to get to U.A. faster than before, with Mineta's intervention being the only reason why he didn't steal Dark Shadow from the unconscious Tokoyami. Although, it's clear he will have a nasty surprise when he finds out that Tomura took his body, meaning that All for One is not as safe as he believes so.
  • All of this really just sums up the battle with All For One so far: While the heroes have to put everything they have into keeping the Symbol of Evil down at all times, with all the power he has, all that All For One needs is a single opportunity, just a mere moment to capitalize on... And just like that, all the effort the heroes put into stopping him in that moment could be burned away. The cut to black before the aftermath is shown feels more like a Gory Discretion Shot of to hide how badly the heroes he fought got annihilated than just a skip ahead in time.
  • All For One allowing a news copter to view the aftermath as he leaves the scene paints a grim picture for everyone watching live in the evacuation shelters, including the people who tried to drive Midoriya away from U.A. After being convinced to allow heroes to rest and put their faith in them, they see that their role in assisting them may just be all for naught and they themselves will suffer as they feared... right before All For One's agents within the crowd begin sabotaging one of the shelters as the roof begins to take damage.
• Chapter 386 picks up where the previous chapter left off as things continue to get worse for the heroes.
  • It's revealed that due to Dabi copying Shoto's Phosphor technique to keep fighting, he has been compressing the heat within him to dangerously high temperatures. If Dabi isn't defeated in ten minutes, he will explode and obliterate everything within five kilometers (three miles). Even worse, thanks to All For One's spies sabotaging the evacuation blocks, some of the civilians, including the Todoroki family, are right in Dabi's blast range.
    • Arguably worse, Tsukauchi theories that this is not a Contrived Coincidence, but rather Dabi intentionally trying to destroy the shelters and incinerate the civilians within at the same time as he kills his father, as Skeptic had the opportunity to inform him of the route the shelters were taking away from UA. Even moments from death, that Dabi would spend his last few moments trying to hurt innocents who have done nothing towards him underscores the depths of his malice, that he's committing to hurting others with the flames he insists are an extension of his father's own in the epitome of a Spiteful Suicide.
    • On top of that, a large amount of League and other villains are in the blast radius, with Toga being practically right next to him. While Tomura and All For One might be tough enough to tank it (while Tomura was able to survive an ICBM, it still severely damaged him and the projected blast would be much more powerful), Dabi is fully willing to kill all of his former allies without any remorse.
  • As if things couldn't be get any worse, All For One is closing in on Shigaraki's position and with the heroes occupied with other battles or outright unable to fight, there seems to be no one to stop him... save one. All Might. Armed with nothing but a mech suit, All Might prepares to face his lifelong nemesis, now rejuvenated and far more unhinged thanks to Shigaraki's hatred affecting him, fully aware that he is likely marching towards certain death. Upon seeing All Might, All For One flashes an absolutely unholy Slasher Smile, relishing the chance to kill his mortal enemy once and for all. Remember Nighteye's prediction that All Might would die an unimaginably gruesome death at the hands of a villain? Looks like that prediction is about to come true...
• Chapter 387 adds even more fuel to the fire on Dabi's self-inflicted Body Horror as he finally reaches its limits: The man looks and acts like a outright Demon Infernal. His face has completely devolved into a blackened skull with whatever's left of it melting off, his bones visible though the rest of his body, and when he causes his own right arm to explode upon launching a massive Elemental Punch at his father, the insides of his stump show that underneath his completely charred skin is just pure heat and fire. But worst of all is that the damage he's dealt to himself has caught up to his mind, devolving it to a point where he starts speaking like a child, eager to show his father what he can do with his Quirk or asking Natsuo to play with him.
• Chapter 391: While Dabi's self-destructive efforts to incinerate everything at Gunga was ended, the heroes are still being overwhelmed by Toga's Twice Doubles, which she has dubbed Sad Man's Death Parade. The clones have become so numerous that they are washing over the heroes as if they were ocean wave. It becomes clear if Toga isn't stopped her rampage will spread beyond Gunga. The worn-out Todoroki family and the beaten down heroes who fought All for One are the closet ones near Toga. We see Hawks, who is now Quirkless mind you, preparing for battle. With Toga's mentality that all heroes must die and her anger towards Hawks for killing Twice, it paints a bleak picture what could happen to Hawks if Toga's clones find him.
• Chapter 392:
  • Toga capturing and preparing to kill Tsuyu right in front of Uraraka. While it's revealed to be another of her clones, given how unstable and full of hate and rage Toga is right now, it wouldn't be too out of character for her to pull a stunt like that.
    • The Reveal that the clones are drinking the blood splattered on the battlefield and disguising themselves to sow chaos and discord among the heroes is prime Paranoia Fuel. As Kamui Woods points out, with the clones causing confusion on the battlefield, there's no way to stop Toga if they can't tell friend from foe. Also, the facial expressions the clones make, particularly the Tsuyu clones, are downright unnerving.
  • Toga stabbing Uraraka in the stomach while ranting about how Uraraka and heroes like her get to live comfortable lives while she remains despised and rejected by society. Uraraka may be wanting to reason with Toga, but she is clearly not in the mood to listen.
• Chapter 393:
  • While watching the battle between Uraraka and Toga, the reporter, upon seeing Toga's powers grow stronger, says into the microphone that the Quirk Singularity Doomsday Theory, with Quirks growing stronger with no way to be controlled, might actually be true all along.
  • Toga's demeanor throughout the confrontation is a sharp contrast to how she's behaved up until this point. Gone is the lovestruck, disturbingly bubbly girl, replaced by someone driven by a seemingly insatiable rage. All the "love" she harbors for her enemy is gone, leaving behind a scorned young woman with little more than the death of her enemies on the mind.
• Chapter 394 has this one symbolic panel◊ depicting Ochako as a kid and Toga as a horrifying Humanoid Abomination that looks like she came straight out of a Junji Ito work.
• Chapter 407: All For One's backstory. Jesus CHRIST. To elaborate, All For One and Yoichi are revealed to have been the twin children of a prostitute, who didn't realize that she was pregnant and had what she assumed to be hard warts growing from her arm. The babies inside her — specifically All For One, almost seeming to act on an instinctive desire to endlessly "take" whilst still in the womb — drained her life away before she died from giving birth to them beside a river, and All For One apparently activated his Quirk on instinct to steal what he needed from the body, showing that even taking her life wasn't enough for him. He absorbed and refined the 'warts', revealing them to be a quirk, using them as claws to hang onto his mother's corpse. Before rats could come and eat from the corpse and the newborns, the babies got washed away - but not before the utterly nightmarish image of a baby All For One gnawing at his dead mother's breasts to get nutrients, having growing the "horns" from his jaws like a vampire's fangs to suck what he could out of the corpse, whilst giving an absolutely enraged Death Glare, as if angered his mother isn't giving him more to sate his desire. All as a newborn.
  • From there, we have a timeskip showing All For One attacking a group of what appears to be mercenaries, growing sharp tendrils from his entire body and stabbing through them all. It is showcased that as a child, All For One went around killing people and stealing their Quirks almost everyday. He would often beat up his brother Yoichi for opposing his actions.
  • The narration heavily implies that All For One might well have just been evil since he was born, and possibly before that. Not in the sense that Toga had her bloodlust as a side effect of her Quirk, but in the sense All For One was a born Sociopath, plain and simple. Whereas most characters' backstories serve to give them some kind of humanity, All For One's effectively makes him seem even more inhuman.
    Narrator: The child was imbued with hubris and a disrespect for others from the moment of his birth. He viewed all within reach as his own possessions.
  • After a few years, a teenage All For One confronts Yoichi, and reveals that he killed and stole the quirk of the light baby, appearing to be jealous of how many followers he had gathered. He then goes on to explain, in a dissonant tone, how Yoichi's own comics had inspired him to become the villain.
  • We also get a hint of how Yoichi died. When All For One sees the second user leading Yoichi away, he begins ranting obsessively over how Yoichi is his - and then we cut to a scene of Yoichi's hand alone on the floor, sliced off and there amidst splashes of blood. Yoichi was killed by his own older brother, and it wasn't pretty.
• Chapter 408 continues giving us insights on All for One's depraved backstory.
  • Two months after Yoichi and Kudo escaped, All for One tracked them and the resistance fighters they were with and killed Yoichi when he tried to escape, his anger over seeing his "possession" holding the hand of somebody other than himself causing him to apparently lash out on instinct before he realised what he was doing, blowing Yoichi's body into pieces that then fell into the rushing sewer waters around them, leaving no trace behind of his only family but the bloodstains covering himself and Kudo. Worse still is All For One's reaction. He just....stops completely, sporting a stone faced emotionless expression with a slight smile on his lips, hinted to be simply the way his face defaults to when he's utterly overwhelmed emotionally and cannot externally compose himself. It's clear that Yoichi's death was an accident in a moment of pure irrational jealous anger, one that All For One, hitherto The Unapologetic, actually regrets immensely, but his own stunted emotional maturity merely highlights how monstrous he is at this. Rather than break down or emote in any capacity, All For One simply freezes, unable to process or understand what he's feeling at what just happened, so confused by his own natural sorrow and guilt at losing his first "possession", his only family, that he doesn't do anything to stop Kudo's rebel unit fleeing before him. It contrasts against Kudo's own sorrow-filled gaze filled with disgust and loathing at the arch-villain, equally disturbed by his senseless murder as he is, but more capable of natural human empathy and acting on it. The narration even notes that All For One's Empty Eyes are very much this In-Universe, highlighting how they cannot reflect Kudo or anybody else, just like their owner cannot see outside of himself, a solitary monster who's just cut off the only outside connection he ever possessed to another. This absolute confusion and inability to understand that he does regret Yoichi's death later manifests into All For One's mania with absorbing his brother's Quirk, utterly focused on reclaiming the only remaining piece of him even if he doesn't comprehend why fully. And to make things even creepier, he kept Yoichi's hand with him as a keepsake, and you finally begin to understand how his obssession with hands was passed on to Tomura.
  • All for One takes Evil Is Petty to whole new degree. You thought him tracking down Tenko to corrupt him villainy only for years later to steal his body just to spite Nana and All Might was bad? All for One hated Kudo so much, that after killing the Second User, he tracked down every single member of his bloodline and killed them as well, which clarifies, in a horrific way, that Bakugo and Kudo are not actually related.
  • The flashbacks about All For One's war against the One For All users. In one instance, he cut the sixth user, En, into two halves. We also see a panel of his fated battle with All Might. The Symbol Of Peace, who is usually smiling, charges towards All For One with the intent to kill, and punches the bastard so hard in the face that his head literally explodes with gore.
  • Realizing Bakugo might have inherited the will of Kudo (the Second User of One For All), All For One snaps and is so enraged by this reminder of the person he despises so much, that he uses all his Quirks at once in an effort to both kill Bakugo and get to Tomura before his time runs out. The end result can best be described as All For One becoming a massive, horrific misshapen mass of flesh, limbs, mouths, and boy, this series is no strange to Body Horror, but this form definitely takes the cake, making him similar to Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist, with hundreds, maybe thousands of screaming faces coming out of it as he prepares to attack. Even worse is it's all but stated this is a Suicide Attack, even with Rewind (as the damage to his body will revert him to an infant), showing just how enraged All For One is that he's willing to die just because he hates Kudo that much.
    All For One: Omni-Factor Release: All For One Goal!
• Chapter 410:
  • All for One's final end is visceral. With his last ditch attack thwarted, he has been soundly defeated by Bakugo, and yet he still defiantly fires a Last Breath Bullet at him even as Rewind has reduced him to an infant. Not only does it fail, Bakugo has to counterattack, giving us the lovely image of a literal baby being blasted by explosives. And it doesn't stop there as the inevitable finally happens; Rewind finally claims his life, and we're not spared the imagery of All for One regressing to a newborn, then to a fetus, then to an egg cell, and finally... to nothing. It may be a Karmic Death for the most depraved villain in the series, but... yeesh. It was only theories and implications before, but actually seeing the ramifications of overusing Rewind firsthand is a stern demonstration of how dangerous Eri's Quirk really is.
  • Prior to the Final Battle, the heroes discussed which villains represent the bigger threats to deal with, and most of them agree that Shigaraki definitely surpasses All for One as the most dangerous enemy in the field. All for One is a Psychopathic Manchild that wants to Take Over the World, Shigaraki is an Omnicidal Maniac that will stop only after he achieves complete annihilation of the entire world. Said guess is proven right when Shigaraki reveals that with his improved Decay, he can destroy an area of over 378,000 kilometers with a single touch. What's even worse is the fact that Decay can travel through the ground, which means not even the underground shelters could escape. Estimates indicate that if Shigaraki is let loose, he will destroy the entirety of Japan in one week. It's an Evil Versus Oblivion situation, and Shigaraki is the Oblivion.
  • Shigaraki manages to briefly touch Midoriya during their fight. At first it seems to be okay, he failed to dust him... only for Banjo to reveal the horrific twist: Shinomori is no longer inside One for All. Shigaraki stole Danger Sense! That attempted Facepalm Of Doom wasn't Shigaraki trying to Decay Izuku, it was Shigaraki learning how to use All for One. Now, not only does Midoriya needs to fight without the help of one of his most valuable Quirks, but said Quirk is now in his enemy's arsenal, meaning now he can easily predict and dodge his attacks. Shigaraki taunts Midoriya by asking him how much longer he thinks he can last now, and it's something even the audience has to wonder.
• Chapter 418 seems to be built off of a massive Hope Spot for both the characters and the audience, with Izuku finally managing to reach the inner Tenko within and get him calm enough to just talk, with the fingers of Shigaraki's body fading away and giving everyone a chance to sigh in relief ... and then Shigaraki flashes to a memory of his father that he knows is not his own. And at once, the ground underneath both Izuku and Shigarkai crumbles to reveal the giant face of All For One, who swallows Shigaraki whole and derides him as a pathetic successor as he grows to near Kaiju levels of height over the child form of Izuku. The vestige of All For One is still around without Tomura's hatred to push him down ... and Izuku, who was forced to sacrifice all of the vestiges, is now left to face him alone.
  AFO: Such a foolish vessel! Losing in a battle of wills to some kid? To this absolute nobody? Striving for strength, yet invariably weak! Tenko Shimura, you pathetic imbecile ... not once in your pitiful life ... has any choice been your own!
• Chapter 419:
  • The monstrous vestige of All For One gives a massive Breaking Speech to poor Tomura/Tenko that outlines just what a Manipulative Bastard he really is. Everything that befell Tenko in his childhood, from Kotaro being an Abusive Parent to Tenko accidentally killing his entire family? All According to Plan, with All For One engineering an entire Trauma Conga Line solely to create someone that runs entirely on hatred and misanthropy, casually taking away every chance Tenko had for a normal life just to carry out a grudge. This causes Tomura's vestige to shatter in despair now knowing that his entire life's misfortunes were just a tool for All For One, leaving his body open for the taking.
  • Both Izuku and All For One are knocked back into reality, with the latter now resembling a dessicated zombie who still has Tomura screaming inside of him... until All For One silences what's left of him with another hand on his mouth. Izuku tries to get back up to fight... only for nothing to happen. He looks down in horror to see that his arms are gone. The destruction of his arms in Tomura's Mental World really did affect him in reality, leaving him helpless while the reincarnated All For One prepares to kill him... until the heroes arrive.
    • It's hard to overstate just how horrifying it is to see Izuku in this condition. Throughout the manga, he's been warned over and over and over that the strain One For All puts on his arm muscles could eventually rob them of all functionality, and even as he's refined his control over that explosive power, Izuku's still done lots of damage to them in his battles... but no one ever thought they'd basically explode like this.
• Chapter 420
  • In a flashback, Kurogiri had been shown to have gone completely catatonic after Aizawa and Mic out of the battle. Even after reawakening him, the gaseous zombie is shown barely stringing words together. Aizawa, despite saying that there was still a piece of Shirakumo inside the thing, admits that All For One's machinations have irreversibly corrupted the former hero in training. Makes you wonder what happens to Kurogiri after everything's said and done.
    • Mixed with Tearjerker. Mic starts the chapter furiously beating the unresponsive Kurogiri, screaming that relying on this thing was a terrible idea from the start and that they should put it down the second they get back, outright wanting to do it himself. While pretty reasonable considering everything, it's still unsettling seeing Mic intent on killing what's left of his best friend himself rather than risking having his heart torn out again.
  • Aizawa checks if it's only been a few minutes since Izuku's arms were destroyed before pulling something from his pocket to fix them: Eri's horn, cut off by Eri herself. And Ectoplasm helped! It really says a lot about how dire things have gotten when a child is self-mutilating herself to give the good guys a chance.
  • Right before however, Deku muses on how he was sure that Shigaraki had destroyed All For One's vestige, and that with his original body's Death by De-aging and his own smashing of Tomura's core of hatred should have left the monster Deader than Dead. And yet not only is he back with seemingly no explanation, he's taken the spot of Big Bad back from Shigaraki completely, sealing him away in his own mind.

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