A lot of characters in My Hero Academia end up as the butt of the fandom's jokes, be they famous heroes, infamous villains or up-and-coming student.
Students
- No matter how badass he gets, some fans (and haters) will just never forgive Midoriya for being timid and Prone to Tears, portraying him as a paper-skinned crybaby who bursts into floods of tears at the slightest provocation and happily accepts all of Bakugo's abuse without a single word of complaint. In fact, one meme regarding Midoriya's character was that his Character Development in the first two and a half seasons of the anime amounts to him realizing that he has legsnote .
- A lot of Bakugo's haters enjoy portraying him as this in fan-works, having him be a raging and whiny Narcissist with a Small Name, Big Ego complex who is repeatedly subjected to brutal karma, even if it sometimes goes too far. Some of his haters also enjoy bringing up his less-than-stellar track record, particularly how he has yet to defeat any major villains on his own. The fact he sat out between half or two-thirds of the series' Final Battle (or being more specific being Only Mostly Dead, which is a detail that has its own discussion) and beats All For One… who is mere seconds away from being done in by his Deadly Upgrade and completely worn down from fighting almost literally the whole rest of the cast may or may not be of help.
- Mineta frequently gets hit with this. He spends most of his time as a hero crying and whining for someone else to save him, his perverted schemes against girls frequently blow up in his face, and his "supposed" high intelligence comes off as an Informed Ability, since despite getting a 5/5 in intelligence, after Yaoyorozu's 6/5, he places 9th in the class, after characters with 4/5 and even a few with 3/5 scores. The fact that he's widely considered The Scrappy of the entire series for those exact reasons doesn't help.
- Although Ojiro isn't really disliked, a lot of fans will make fun of him for having a pretty lame Quirk- basically a tail that serves as an extra limb- and being a rather "boring" character who doesn't do much in the series.
Pro Heroes
- Endeavor gets a reputation as this similar to Bakugo. Although he's far from incompetent (canon shows he's not only an effective detective, but also an actually good mentor, his Training from Hell for Shoto notwithstanding), it's common to see him portrayed in fan-works as a pathetic Heroic Wannabe who is constantly whining about how he's Always Second Best and subjected to truckloads of karma. It's also somewhat common to portray him as a negligent Bumbling Dad who can never gain his children's love and respect.
- Death Arms tends to be treated as a joke by the fandom, at times being held up as a shining example of a terrible hero. While he and Kamui Woods chew out Izuku for his actions against the sludge villain, Kamui Woods goes on to have some extremely impressive moments, even joining the Top 10 later on. Unlike him however, Death Arms only has a couple cameos before he retires from working as a Pro Hero due to the growing negativity against heroes. Not helping matters is that he has the least valid excuse amidst the heroes present for letting Bakugo suffocate while he watched*.
- Star and Stripe is often seen as a transparent plot device to nerf Shigaraki before the the final battle by using her final "order" to not only deny Shigaraki the Story-Breaker Power "Last Order," but also force him to discard an unspecified number of the Quirks stored within All For One. Worse still, the nerfs are viewed as arbitrary, as delaying Shigaraki's deadline only became an issue right before she was introduced, and his number of Quirks is vague before and after she allegedly ravages his reservoir. By the final battle, Shigaraki is still nearly unstoppable, making her sacrifice feel pointless.
Villains
- Tomura Shigaraki initially started off as this with many joking about him being a "villain wannabe" or that he's trying too hard to be evil. His rather odd-looking character design was also the source of many jokes. However, this later diminished when he seriously Took a Level in Badass and became a much more threatening and competent villain. More affectionately, his obsession with video games is also a frequent source of jokes about him behaving like a stereotypical gamer, which especially took off after a flashback in chapter 371 had him mention playing League of Legends, a game with a notoriously toxic playerbase.
- Spinner, who has a mediocre Quirk and tries to imitate Stain so much that he even dresses like him. He's often portrayed as nothing but a mook due to never winning a fight on his own* and generally being little more than a follower with no goals or aspirations of his own. The fact that he looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle doesn't help.
- Mustard, for having a Weaksauce Weakness (he isn't even immune to his own Quirk) and being taken out rather easily while not contributing much to the story.
- A few fans actually think of Overhaul as this, since his whole villainous operation was shut down fairly quickly and he rather idiotically thought the League of Villains would just bow down to him after he killed one of their members, making him look somewhat incompetent as a result. This wasn't helped when he made a reappearance in future arcs, where he's shown to have suffered a complete mental breakdown due to his incarceration in Tartarus and acts as nothing but The Load to Lady Nagant.
- All For One began getting this reputation later in the series due to perceived Badass Decay with him showing his true colors as a Psychopathic Manchild prone to tantrums as well as his increased Bond Villain Stupidity. It does not help that a lot of his plans are seen as Ass Pulls, leading to fandom jokes depicting him as telling Blatant Lies about absurdly convoluted and unlikely happenings he could not have possibly foreseen or counted on somehow being secretly part of his plan in a desperate attempt to save face. His fight against All Might during the war certainly didn't help, with many people pointing out that the so-called Demon Lord Greater-Scope Villain was only surviving his battle against a crippled man without a quirk (albeit, a well-equipped one) because he was constantly regenerating. It only got worse once he turned into a baby then a fetus. It go so bad the community had called him “Fraud For One” or “L for One” to mock him.
Other Characters
- Kotaro Shimura is often called "the worst parent in the entire series" (which is saying something), thanks to his desire for control of his family backfiring hard on him by inadvertently creating the series' Big Bad, as well as making the monumentally stupid decision to hit his son with a garden tool after he just saw him kill the rest of the family, naturally leading to his death.
