My Hero Academia / Tropes I to Z

Tropes A to H | Tropes I to Z

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My Hero Academia provides examples of the following tropes:

I-O

• I Just Want to Be Special: Midoriya wanted to be a hero badly, but being Quirkless, it only made him the butt of jokes for not being able to let go of his dreams. He even suffers a Broken Pedestal moment when his idol, All Might, tells him he can never be a hero without a Quirk. It isn't until he attempts to rescue his former best friend from a creature he caused All Might to lose that All Might has a change of heart and allows him to inherit his Quirk.
• I Work Alone:
  • Some heroes have corporate identities and agencies all for themselves, which can be a problem when there's a limit to how much of the public eye each can have.
  • During the Provisional Hero License Exam Arc, Todoroki, Bakugo, and Yoarashi attempt to do this. It results in all of them failing the exam, with the explanation that their inability to work together is damaging to the generation of heroes focused on unity and teamwork that the faculty are attempting to create to compensate for All Might's retirement. In particular, Yoarashi and Todoroki stopping to deal with their personal issues during the fight against Gang Orca almost gets Shindo killed.
  • The Wild Wild Pussycats have been a team since they graduated over a decade ago, but they are even considered something of an anomaly in-universe because very few hero teams last more than a few years at best.
  • Midoriya, for a while, when he quits school and tries to work alone. It takes all of Class 1-A working together to catch him and talk sense into him.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Midoriya responding to Shinso during the U.A. Sports Festival despite knowing his Quirk. Everyone realizes how pointless this was. The only reason he wasn't completely screwed was because One For All turns the user into a Mind Hive, and the previous users decided to bail him out.
  • Todoroki's fist fight with Testutetsu; he keeps increasing the heat until neither of them can take it. He doesn't even think about switching to ice, which would have made the steel hard and brittle.
• The Idol's Blessing: Midoriya has no Quirk of his own until his childhood hero just happens to swing by and bestow his own powers upon the boy.
• Imagine the Audience Naked: Tamaki tries to imagine the people he talks to as pieces of food to cope with his crippling social anxiety.
• Impeded Communication: When they're attacked at USJ, 1-A's attempts to call for backup from U.A. are impeded by the machinations of the League of Villains, forcing 1-A to create an opportunity for Ida to run back to get The Cavalry.
• Impressed by the Civilian: The story opens with Midoriya, a Muggle in a world where most people have a superpower, meeting his idol, number one hero All Might. All Might tells Midoriya that without a superpower, he'll never be a hero, only for Midoriya to throw himself into battle anyway to save his friend. All Might is so impressed by this that he not only changes his tune, he makes Midoriya the successor to his own power.
• Inappropriate Pride: Monoma has a strange obsession with one-upping Class 1-A and will take every chance he gets to mock them. At one point, he manically taunts the other students over how, while multiple people from Class 1-A failed their exams, Class 1-B had only a single failure- Monoma himself. Everyone is confused as to why he's proud of that.
• Informed Attribute: In the physical tests Class 1-A take on their first day of school, all the students can outperform Midoriya due to being able to use their Quirks effectively, whereas he can't. This is despite the fact that he has undergone intensive muscle training in the preceding year and that they are physical tests, like long jump and softball throwing, which several of his classmates' Quirks wouldn't be helpful with. Though Midoriya doesn't finish in first place in any of the tests (since the one test he uses his Quirk for, throwing a baseball for distance, is the one where Uraraka has already scored infinity by making her ball weightless and throwing it into outer space), some of his classmates have Quirks that would be useless in all eight of the tests. The manga includes a line trying to justify this (Midoriya muses that he did poorly in the last two tests, especially the endurance run, because he was in so much pain from his broken finger), but that particular scene gets skipped in the anime.
• Inherently Attractive Profession: Mineta entered hero school with this mind. He believes that since heroes are cool and popular, girls will flock to him once he becomes a pro. He only learns later on that people don't admire heroes just for being heroes, but for their actions that make them heroes.
• Innocently Insensitive: During the Final Exams Arc, Ida and Midoriya give Kaminari and Ashido encouraging words for the written exams, and Todoroki tells them that it's hard to fail if they listen in class. Of course, these three are all in the class's top five, which is just rubbing salt in the wound. Yaoyorozu, who has the best grades in the class, invites them over to her house for a study session, and quickly becomes this for an entirely different reason:
  "It's like she casually slapped me with the huge difference in how we were born..."
• Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist:
  • Midoriya suffers from self-confidence issues due to the pressure of having to succeed All Might and his own lack of experience. By contrast, Shigaraki is overconfident at the start due to having a small army of Mooks and the Nomu tailor-made to kill All Might at his disposal. Midoriya's confidence grows as he continues to master One For All and learn from his peers, while Shigaraki is humbled by his first defeat at USJ and soon becomes more level-headed and calculating, downplaying this as the story goes on.
  • Downplayed with Midoriya and Bakugo. Bakugo has always been The Ace at his school. Gifted with a powerful and rare Quirk, athleticism, and the smarts to easily triumph over every obstacle laid before him, the non-stop stream of praise he received for his talents gives him an enormous ego. By contrast, The Hero, Midoriya, has always been meek and insecure due to lacking a Quirk and being mocked for it by his peers. When they both get into U.A., Bakugo is furious at Midoriya for "hiding" his Quirk and goes out of his way to try to defeat and humiliate him during the Battle Trial Arc. Fittingly enough, Bakugo is placed on the Villain team, becoming the Arc Villain. However, as the series goes on, Bakugo becomes more of The Rival than an actual antagonist.
• Intangibility: Deconstructed. As shown by Mirio, this power, which is often a Story-Breaker Power, is one of the hardest powers to use. Becoming intangible, Mirio becomes unable to breathe, hear, or see, since he is intangible to air, sound, and light. He even falls through the floor if his feet become intangible. Aside from the clear emotional scarring and how fatally dangerous this can be, this power is only useful because Mirio dedicated his life to training with it.
• Intra-Scholastic Rivalry: Class 1-B has a one-sided rivalry with Class 1-A. Due to the 1-A being at the center of a number of high-profile villain attacks, 1-A gets a disproportionate amount of attention in the media compared to 1-B. This has led 1-B, whose education has been far less bumpy, to gain a competitive streak as they try to prove that they're just as capable as 1-A. This rivalry becomes intense enough that even 1-B's homeroom teacher, Vlad King, gets unusually biased and hammy during a mock battle exercise.
• It's All My Fault: Midoriya feels that if hadn't chosen to fight Muscular, resulting in his arms being injured, he may have been able to stop Bakugo's abduction, which is what led to the Heroes raiding the League of Villains' hideout and All Might's confrontation with All For One, and resulted in All Might using up the last of his Quirk and retiring.
• Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: Activating one's Quirk in public is considered a serious offense if it's not to protect oneself or other people. On the other hand, it's often treated as a very minor crime and offenders are usually just given a warning or long lecture if they happen to get caught. That said, should someone be arrested for it, that person is named a villain. In the Vigilantes spin-off, a police officer mentions she will have to write a letter of apology for using her Quirk to free hostages. When Class 1-A are under attack from the League of Villains, Aizawa has to give them express permission to use their Quirks to enter combat, or else they'll face legal ramifications. Even using Quirks for non-combat purposes requires a license to be legal. There is also a fair bit of inequality here, as someone with a relatively harmless Quirk, or one not easily noticed might never have to worry about using their quirk in public, while someone with a flashy quirk could face serious consequences just using it once.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Has its own page.
• Jerkass Realization: After All Might cedes his place as #1 hero, Endeavor understands a bit too late that not only was everything he did was All for Nothing but, after fighting the advanced Nomu called "High End", which leaves his face with a huge scar on the same side as Shoto, he realizes that he's indeed not as good as All Might and can't be as effective as his rival, despite his best efforts. He keeps on reflecting on his life and understands that his pursuit of "winning at all costs" was empty and one-sided and only got him to completely screw up his family. Afterward, he tries his best to make amends for what he did, knowing full well that it's probably already too late for his family to forgive him.
• Jobless Parent Drama: Downplayed. Uraraka's parents run a construction company, but work has grown scarce and money-tight in the current environment. This is what motivates Uraraka to become a hero so she can support the both of them with the fat paycheck that comes with success in the industry. However, both of her parents remain cheerful and supportive despite their financial situation, encouraging her to become a hero for her own sake rather than thinking about them.
• Jump Cut: An In-Universe example where Bakugo's whole appearance in his and Todoroki's hero interview gets edited out or can barely be seen because of his vulgar language and inappropriate attitude on camera. So, after Todoroki finishes answering a question, the clip instantly jumps to another cut of Todoroki suddenly closer to the camera, clearly indicating this is where Bakugo's part was supposed to be.
• Jumped at the Call: Upon being offered All Might's powerful Quirk, One For All, and a chance to become a Hero, Midoriya didn't hesitate to say "yes" with a determined look on his face.
• Keeping the Handicap: Ida receives a scar and residual damage to his arm after his fight with Stain. Although he could have had it removed with surgery, he decides to keep it as a reminder of his past mistakes until he feels he has learned his lesson.
• Kick The Son Of A Bitch:
  • Played straight when the sludge villain attempts to hijack Bakugo's body, but since Bakugo had already spent the entire chapter up to that point being an unlikable Jerkass, it's more satisfying than horrifying.
  • Played for Laughs when Kota shoves resident pervert Mineta off the hot spring wall when he wanted to peek on the naked girls.
  • Played gruesomely straight when Shigaraki subjects Overhaul to a Fate Worse than Death where he severs his arms and strips him of his Quirk.
  • Invoked in Chapter 290, Dabi publicly exposes Endeavor's history of domestic abuse for the sake of creating the ultimate Hero. While there is a dosage of Laser-Guided Karma to this, it's painted in a more tragic light than usual, because Endeavor saw the error of his ways and was actively trying to make amends for them during the last couple of arcs..
• Kid Hero: Midoriya and his classmates are all aged 15-16, yet they get a lot more chances to be heroic than U.A. expected from first-years.
• Kidnapped from Behind: During the Forest Training Camp Arc, Midoriya learns that the villains are attempting to kidnap Bakugo. He and several other students respond by forming a group with Bakugo at the center and remaining on high alert as they walk back to the lodge. Despite this, the villains manage to kidnap both Bakugo and Tokoyami without anyone noticing.
• Kids Are Cruel: Midoriya was relentlessly bullied by all of his classmates through middle school for being Quirkless and wanting to be a hero. He was made the laughingstock of his entire class no matter what he did and his teachers did nothing to stop them.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: After he murdered the seventh wielder of One For All, Big Bad All For One found her grandson and raised him to be his successor, knowing that the next wielder of One For All would be offended and hurt by the fate of the grandson of his beloved mentor.
• Knight of Cerebus: Many of the major Arc Villains are this:
  • Stain: Not only is he literally the first villain that Midoriya and co. face in the "real world" outside the safety net of school, he is also the blood-stained wake-up call that forces the young heroes to confront the gray realities of hate, justice, and vengeance that simply cannot be quantified and defined by classical notions of "black and white" morality.
  • Tomura Shigaraki: While his first appearance doesn't suggest him being more than an emotionally brittle two-time villain, he changes significantly after the incidents with the aforementioned Stain. After his encounter with Midoriya at a shopping center, he's treated far more seriously as an antagonist, undergoing Character Development in becoming more cunning, perceptive, and even more dangerous as a fighter. His qualifications for the trope skyrocket during the Paranormal Liberation War arc, where he's been physically augmented to have frightening amounts of brute strength, to use his Decay Quirk to devastating effect, and to be a suitable vessel for the most horrible power imaginable - All For One.
  • All For One: The mastermind behind the League of Villains, mentoring the leader of said group, and the personal enemy of All Might. When he finally steps in to fight, he takes out several heroes in mere seconds. His actions continue to haunt the heroes of the world even in the present day. Though Stain makes the story much darker upon his entrance, All For One's arrival is the point where the series really goes from a somewhat light-hearted (but not without danger) Academy of Adventure series to constant life-or-death situations against people hell-bent on destroying society as we know it.
  • Overhaul: He is the first villain to actually murder major characters in the series up front. He also nearly kills several others, and introduces the prospect of Character Death to the story and how sometimes a hero can pay the ultimate sacrifice.
  • High-End: Before High-End shows up, Nomus are generally mindless muscle. Then this one brutally injures the new number one pro hero and rips apart a whole side of his face and an eye.
  • Re-Destro: Brutally demonstrates from his first appearance not only how dangerous a villain can become when properly operating below radar but also just how far they are willing to go in pursuit of a higher goal.
• Kung-Fu Sonic Boom: The clash between All Might and Nomu results in a gale-force wind that prevents anyone from getting within several meters of the fight.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Upon learning about Todoroki's Dark and Troubled Past, Midoriya says to himself:
  Midoriya: If this were a comic, he'd be the main character. This is the kind of backstory he had.
• Legacy Character: Three variants of this are present in the series:
  • The first is the passing down of a "title" from one person to another even if the characters are unrelated. Most noticeably, Midoriya becomes the ninth user of "One For All" after All Might, the eighth user, passes it on to him. In this case, however, it's the passing down of a specific superpower as well, much like the example of Ant-Man.
  • The second is a heroic legacy in a family, most prominently displayed in the Ida family. Tenya Ida's brother Tensei, in particular, is the much-beloved engine hero Ingenium, and Tenya inherits the name when Tensei is forced into retirement after being paralyzed by Stain, though Tenya has some issues getting to the point where he feels he can actually accept it.
  • The third is similar to comic book legacy titles. Kirishima wishes to become a hero like the similarly powered Crimson Riot, and so has his hero name modeled after him. He even gets a couple of spotlight chapters showing how he came to understand Crimson Riot's mentality, and near the end of them, a pro hero accepts him as worthy of the name after the courage and tenacity Kirishima has displayed.
• Legion of Doom: The League of Villains, a group of villains who team up to kill All Might.
• Leitmotif: Starting in Season 2, the anime starts to give out themes to certain characters:
  • "Bombing King", Bakugo's theme.
  • "Ingenium", Iida's theme.
  • "Kimi no Chikara" ("Your Power"), Todoroki's theme.
  • "Hero-goroshi" ("Hero Killer"), Stain's theme.
  • Additionally, "You Say Run", which is considered by many to be Midoriya's theme (though it should be noted that is it used in battles that do not feature Midoriya), has its ending notes commonly featured in many battle scenes since even the first episode, in particular gaining a lyricised version that was used for both the fourth season and second movie. It is by far the most common leitmotif in the anime, with its use cases ranging from regular battle scenes to major developmental plot points.
• Lethal Chef: According to the light novels, Yaoyorozu's mother. She means well, but she doesn't think about whether or not ingredients go together before adding them to the mix, resulting in food that is, in Yaoyorozu's own words, "unfit for human consumption". Fortunately, she can afford to pay other people to cook for her and has the sense to do this most of the time.
• Life-or-Limb Decision:
  • Aizawa performed a self-amputation on his leg to save himself from the spread of the Quirk-erasing bullets.
  • Another incident involved someone trying to stop the decay Quirk.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Nobody ever remarks nor seems to mind the fact mentioned here below, that is that some mutants look like Funny Animals.
• Little Bit Beastly: Most female characters with animal-themed Quirks are this. Male characters with animal-themed Quirks tend to look like full-on anthropomorphic animals, or at least have a Non-Human Head.
• Living Out a Childhood Dream:
  • By the end of the first chapter, protagonist Izuku Midoriya has all but given up on his childhood dream of becoming a superhero after his idol, All Might, points out the folly in trying to be one as an Un-Sorcerer in a world where Everyone Is a Super. He's moved to tears when All Might comes to apologize and offers to give Midoriya his own Quirk to give him a chance to live out his dreams.
  • In the spinoff, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Koichi Haimawari is a struggling college student and All Might fanboy who lost his chance to attend hero school after showing up late to his entrance exams due to helping a child who'd fallen into a river. But he meets Knuckleduster, a Quirkless vigilante who invites him to become a "real hero" even without a license or training. Despite his initial apprehension, Koichi joins Knuckleduster in his attempts to track down the distributor of a Psycho Serum known as "Trigger", becoming known as the vigilante, "the Crawler". And by the end of the story, he's recruited as a sidekick to American pro hero Captain Celebrity as "the Skycrawler", albeit with a boatload of issues attached like crippling debt and bad press.
  • All For One is a villainous example. He's dreamed of being a Card-Carrying Villain like the Maou the Demon King of comic books and video games ever since he was a child. After developing his Power Parasite Quirk, the first thing he does is go on a rampage, stealing Quirks from others to consolidate power and manipulate others into serving him. His Psychopathic Manchild personality has remained completely intact more than a century after he began, ruining countless lives and performing acts of mass destruction for no reason other than For the Evulz.
• Lookalike Lovers: Some of the parents both have the same sort of Quirk/appearance as their child, like Tsuyu's frog-like parents shown in the Bonus Chapter 1 and Hagakure's invisible parents shown in My Heroine Academia.
• Lost in Translation: Although they do align, for the most part, various translations have diverging interpretations of several key lines. The most egregious examples include:
  • When he first meets All Might, Midoriya asks if it was the villain Venomous Chainsaw who crippled him. All Might's response in the fan translation is, "Yeah, he wounded me but I wouldn't let that stop me." When Viz translated it, it came out as, "That lowlife? He could never do this to me."
  • Viz refers to the Number Two of the League of Villains by his original Japanese name, "Kurogiri", whereas fans have been translating his name literally as "Black Mist".
  • Uraraka's recognition of her feelings for Midoriya is handled differently. In the fan translations, she apparently resolves to push her feelings aside entirely, whereas, in the official translation, she wants to merely get them under control.
  • Hero Killer Stain has different motivations depending on the translator. According to the fan translators, it's "The word 'hero' must be restored!" or "If heroes aren't restored...!". However, when Viz translated it, it was "If I don't reclaim my hero status...!"
  • While discussing why All Might no longer works with Sir Nighteye, fan translations had All Might explain it as, "We broke up, so it's kind of awkward", whereas the Viz translation is, "For certain reasons, it's awkward."
  • Regarding Endeavor's use of niisanra; both Viz and the scanlators made the mistake of assuming that he meant Todoroki had "older brothers" when in reality Endeavor was simply saying the latter had "older siblings."^note In Japanese, it's typical to group people together under one category/majority regardless of gender. A clue-in to this a few chapters later is during a flashback wherein Todoroki watches children playing outside, assumed to be his siblings, and one of them is wearing a skirt. Several chapters later, that sibling turns out to be Fuyumi, his sister.
  • In the dub for the anime and fan and official translations of the manga, both meanings of Deku are lost, since they both involve readings of Japanese characters, which they presumably couldn't explain for non-Japanese viewers in the timeframe given. The dub fixes this by having Bakugo call Midoriya "Deku" as a shorthand for "Defenseless Izuku" while making Uraraka like the name "Deku" just because it sounds heroic and cute.
  • Bakugo's two prospective hero names, King Explosion Murder and Lord Explosion Murder, are actually examples of Steven Ulysses Perhero (being Bakusatsuou and Bakusatsuga, respectively, in the sub). Since the puns were untranslatable, the names were just literally translated.
  • The official localization of the manga has to explain why "Naito" comes immediately before a couple of names that start with "T" on the provisional exam results, as well as the point of the panel- Todoroki didn't pass the exam.
  • The English dub uses "Quirk genes" instead of "Quirk factor." In the episode the term is introduced, this isn't a big deal, but it later becomes apparent that the term refers to the physical factors that make Quirks work (such as Bakugo's sweat glands) rather than any genetic cause.
• Love Is a Weakness:
  • Gran Torino points out that Midoriya's idolization of All Might has warped his expectations of his hero and the power of One For All, hindering his combat ability by making him think of his Quirk as merely a Special or even a Finishing Move.
  • Uraraka's feelings for Midoriya start developing in earnest after the first internship, but the topic terribly flusters her and even affects her field performance, so, not long after U.A. becomes a boarding school, she resolves to get a handle on them.
• Loved by All:
  • All Might is beloved by everyone as he is the Symbol of Peace. He, of course, is a very upstanding person himself who very often inspires everyone around him to do better. So when he is forced to retire after his battle with All For One, the public is understandably devastated and can't for the life of them consider Endeavor to be a fitting replacement since he is the complete opposite of All Might's public image. He is trying to make amends for his horrible reputation, though.
  • Then right next to Best Jeanist is Hawks, and it isn't hard to see how people adore him for his easygoing nature and charismatic attitude. He is most likely to get crowded on the street and spend the time taking selfies and giving out autographs.
• Magic Pants: Zigzagged. Quirks involving transformation don't generally affect the character's clothes, as seen with Mt. Lady's supersizing power, or All Might's hero costume, which seems to magically appear and disappear as appropriate. This is justified in some cases because of Support Companies, which create high-tech hero costumes that can handle their users' Quirks. Though, for some reason, this is subverted for other characters, such as Yaoyorozu, whose "generate objects out of her body" Quirk frequently leads to Clothing Damage and/or partial undressing, and Mirio, whose phasing ability frequently causes his gym uniform, but not his hero costume^note which was specifically engineered to become permeable with him, to fall off.
• Masculine Lines, Feminine Curves: There is a trend of the male characters being drawn with more defined muscles, sharp lines, and squares (e.g., Ida, All Might) and the female characters being drawn with rounder features and curves (e.g., Uraraka, Midnight). However, this is not ubiquitous; there are male characters who fall somewhere in the middle (e.g., Midoriya, who has round features but a muscular body) or avert it outright (e.g., Mineta, whose most notable physical feature is the round growths on his head), as well as female characters who have more jagged, angular designs (e.g., Jiro).
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": This is Midoriya, Ida, Todoroki, Yaoyorozu, and Kirishima's reaction when they see All For One for the first time.
• Mass Super-Empowering Event: There was such an event in the series' history, causing most of humanity to develop "Quirks" as a result. At the time of the story proper, about four out of every five people have a Quirk, and the percentage of people with Quirks is increasing with each generation. It's also possible for non-human animals to have Quirks, but this is seemingly much rarer. However, it's also a Superpower Lottery in that many Quirks aren't particularly useful, such as the ability to stretch one's eyes out of one's head really far. Most of the time, a person's Quirk is either a variation on one of their parents' Quirks or both of them mixed together in some way. Also, a person can only ever get one Quirk, so whatever you get, you're stuck with it. Except for two Quirks that break this rule: The Hero's Quirk One For All can be voluntarily transferred to others, and the Big Bad's Quirk All For One can involuntarily take away other people's Quirks and either keep them for himself or transfer them to his minions. What the actual event is that caused this empowering remains a mystery; as far as anybody knows a baby just happened to be born with a Quirk over a century ago in the backstory, followed by more and more other people being born with them.
• Master-Apprentice Chain: Between Nana Shimura, All Might, and Midoriya, who are respectively the seventh, eighth, and ninth users of One For All.
• Mathematician's Answer: When Todoroki is asked how he somehow managed to transform his entire modern dorm room into a more traditional Japanese-style bedroom in less than a day, he replies, "I worked hard."
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Quirks themselves. Or rather, how each records the will and memories of their user, explained as similar to the pseudo-science theory that organ transplants give recipients the memories of their prior owners. This is a secret known to very few, as most Quirks die with their users unless stolen by All For One or, rarer still, absorbed into One For All. Yet the vestiges inside All For One and One For All seem very much alive and more than just memories. Do Quirks capture the very soul of a person and keep them until they're destroyed? Or are they just very convincing doubles? Is there truly a difference? The answer is never made clear, likely to afford Quirks some degree of mysticism.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • During the Sports Festival, Midoriya tells Endeavor "I'm not All Might... and Todoroki isn't you". In this case, he's calling the Hero out for using his son as a tool to outscore All Might. Midoriya repeats the phrase much later on, but to encourage Endeavor instead—in this case defending Endeavor's will to atone for his past errors and to condemn Dabi for projecting his malice onto his father.
  • When Midoriya saves Bakugo from the Sludge Villain, Midoriya claims his legs moved on their own. Much later, when Bakugo saves Midoriya from Shigaraki, by Taking the Bullet, Bakugo thinks, "My body... just moved on its own."
• Meaningful Name:
  • U.A. can be written as Yuuei, a reversal of the Japanese "Eiyuu" meaning hero.
  • Exaggerated since every character's name reflects their Quirk, appearance, and personality. Those whose names aren't directly tied to their powers or have a much more vague relation to it also hint that it might not be theirs. For example, Izuku (Nine, as in 9th user of OFA) Midoriya (Green Valley) fits with his character but not a reference to what his power does.This comes up prominently with Yuga (Excellent/Elegant) Aoyama (Blue Mountain), whose name references his ego, but not his Qurik, as he was Quirkless and Navel Laser was given by All For One.
• Medal of Dishonor: A rare example that's Played for Laughs; Bakugo's furious that he's won the U.A. Sports Festival because Todoroki didn't give his all in the final fight. He's so enraged that he has to be bound and muzzled to make him stay on the podium during the award ceremony. When All Might tries to put the medal around his neck, however, Bakugo resists by budging his nose against it and then biting into the medal ribbon so it won't go around his neck.
• Meet Cute: Midoriya and Uraraka's first encounter in front of U.A. She greets him warmly after stopping him from falling using her Quirk, and he's left speechless. They quickly get to know each other from there.
• Memetic Mutation: The kid who shouts at the reporter during the live news coverage of High End's attack to stop broadcasting despair and asks if they can't see that Endeavor is struggling to protect the civilians becomes an In-Universe instant meme after the incident. He earns the nickname "Can't ya see-kid" in reference to what he said, that particular scene starts trending on social media, and merchandise of him like printed mugs and T-shirts starts going around.
• Men Act, Women Are: While the girls do have moments of taking part in the action thanks to their careers as heroes, it should be noted that most of them barely have an impact on the major events of the storyline. A lot of their personalities fall under the bubbly, friendly nice girl trope or the "Strong Female Character" stereotype while their male colleagues are given deeper, more complex characterizations and are actively involved in the story. It also doesn't help that the girls are significantly outnumbered in the student, Pro-Hero, and villain groups.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: Zigzagged all through the series thus far. Numerically, more male characters are being killed compared to female ones (though there are also far more male characters than female ones, both heroes and villains). On the other hand, female characters who enter a battle will be fought as equals, especially in later chapters, and thus will not receive special treatment regarding physical violence.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard:
  • All Might's mentor, Nana Shimura, died fighting All For One.
  • After the raid on the Shie Hassaikai's hideout, Sir Nighteye, Mirio's mentor, dies from wounds he suffered fighting Overhaul.
  • All Might, himself, zigzags this. In the earlier chapters, Midoriya continuously sees him deteriorate as he is able to use his Hour of Power for less and less time, so when he goes up against All For One, the clash is played as All Might's final battle — because he uses up his last bit of power defeating the villain, not because he dies. But then in the Work Study Arc, it turns out that Sir Nighteye, whose prophecies have, to date, never been wrong, foresaw that All Might's days are numbered anyway... but the end of the arc proves that Nighteye's clairvoyance isn't as infallible as he believed.
• Metaphorically True: Chapter 257 ominously ends with the narrator announcing that on that day, heroes vanished from the city. At the time, it initially seems as though it's because the heroes are preparing to raid the Paranormal Liberation Front, but just under 50 chapters later, in Chapter 306, the narrator reveals the meaning of that phrase. If one defines heroes as those the people look up to, then because the public lost their faith in heroes, heroes did indeed vanish.
• Meta Twist: The brief arc centered around Star and Stripe is all about this. She is the most powerful U.S. hero with a borderline Story Breaking Power, yet she fights the villain right before his fated battle with the hero. Story conventions in both shonen manga and superhero comics dictate that she will suffer from The Worf Effect to establish the power of Shigaraki's fully powered form and put the hero in The Darkest Hours. This is seemingly confirmed when Shigaraki manages to No-Sell her strongest attacks and put his hand on her face. Then the twist happens revealing that through her Heroic Sacrifice, she destroyed a good number of Shigaraki's Quirks, severely damage his body, and buys the heroes both the time and intelligence necessary to defeat the villains.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: During the U.A. Sports Festival Arc, Uraraka is battling against the incredibly powerful Bakugo. His explosions created broken chunks of the Earth, which she then used as a trap, floating them up and then dropping them down at once in order to try and win the match.
• Middle School Is Miserable: While Midoriya's childhood wasn't exactly all sunshine and rainbows on account of being Quirklesss in a world where 80% of the populace have superpowers, by middle school just vocalizing his desire to become a hero gets every other kid in class and the teacher to laugh in his face and mock him for it. By contrast, his general opinion of U.A. is that High School Rocks, despite the immense challenges he has to go through such as his struggles to control his new Quirk, One For All.
• Mistaken for Related: Todoroki notices the similarities between Midoriya's Quirk and All Might's, asking if Midoriya is All Might's secret love child. Midoriya denies this, of course, but this confrontation over Midoriya's alleged secret father is what leads Midoriya to learn about Todoroki's troubled home life.
• Mistaken for Undead: In the second OVA, a Zombie Gas Quirk is released that turns most of the class into zombies. All Might rushes over to the scene, only to run out of time and return to his emaciated form. The girls who haven't been turned yet confuse him for a zombie and run away. When the real zombies pass by, one pats him on his shoulder reassuringly, having confused him for one of them as well.
• Modern Stasis: The setting seems only slightly more futuristic than the present day despite being at least a good four or five generations ahead (maybe). What advancements do exist seem to be linked to the training and equipping of heroes. In-Universe it's theorized that the societal upheaval caused by the sudden appearance of Quirks delayed the development of new technologies for a while until things settled down. Some believe that, had Quirks not appeared, humanity would already be in space.
• Morality Kitchen Sink: While the series has touched upon moral ambiguity in the past, the story has increasingly become this; touching on morally complex themes of penance, Create Your Own Villain, and To Be Lawful or Good among other things.
• Most Common Super Power: Many of the heroines are well-endowed.
• Most Writers Are Human: Aside from superpowers, many Quirks can also give people all sorts of mutations, such as weird skin color, abnormal body proportions, multiple limbs, animal characteristics, and more. Yet the main character, his love interest and female lead, his best friend, his two rivals, his mentor, the Big Bad, and the Greater-Scope Villain are all baseline humans, with unusual hair color being the weirdest part about them. It's somewhat subverted during the Final Battle. Tomura demonstrates his new ability to grow massive fleshy growths of hands and fingers from his humanoid body to the size of a Kaiju, even under the effect of Erasure. He states that it's because his altered body has begun moving past the Quirk Singularity, wherein his body is mutating and adapting into a suitable form to contain the immense power of the quirks inside him, and eventually, this will be the norm for all of humanity as quirks inevitably become stronger and more powerful down the generations, further transforming the next wave of humanity into forms unrecognizable to what came before them. This implies that like Quirkless people, the human body as the 'normal' template will eventually become a thing of the past.
• Mr. Fanservice: A lot of the male characters appear with their shirts off revealing very fit bodies. They often undergo Clothing Damage in combat. Mirio Togata is frequently seen naked, as using his Quirk causes his clothes to fall off, sans his specially made hero costume, revealing his very muscular physique.
• Ms. Fanservice: A lot of the heroines wear either skintight bodysuits or skimpy, revealing outfits. Though these aren't exactly the most practical outfits for heroism, in a lot of cases, this is actually justified by the fact that several heroines, most notably Mt. Lady, are Punch Clock Heroes constantly competing with each other for media attention and sponsorships to make money, and several of the heroines actively use their sex appeal to achieve this. Plus, when the main characters get their first costumes, Uraraka discovers to her embarrassment that female hero costumes are by default made skintight unless the customer specifies otherwise...which she didn't.
• Mundane Fantastic: Quirks are ubiquitous to the point where something like a newscaster with horns on his head isn't considered anything unusual.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Sir Nighteye's Clairvoyance Quirk can only do so much in combat, and has a once-per-day limit. So, he fights his opponents with "hyper mass seals". They look like regular office stamps, but they weigh five kilograms each. That's about the weight of a large cat, and he throws them around like they're shuriken.
• Mundane Utility: For a story swarming with superhumans, the use of Quirks for everyday purposes usually tends to be for straightforward things—like Present Mic using his Super-Scream ability as a loudspeaker at the U.A. Sports Festival, Todoroki using his flame powers to light a stove, or Kaminari using his electricity powers to charge a phone. They rarely tend towards the humorously dull.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Midoriya shares this remorseful reaction with Mirio over their inability to rescue Eri from her horrible situation under the Hassaikai's control.
  • Mrs.Todoroki had this reaction right after she poured boiling water on Shoto's face.
• Nerd Hoard: All of Deku's classmates know that he is a massive fanboy of All Might. When it comes time for the class to move into their dorm rooms, absolutely nobody is surprised to see that he decorated his room with All Might posters and figurines. Deku is still a little embarrassed that he allows himself to show it off though.
• Neutral in Name Only: During the Joint Training Arc, the students of Class 1-A and 1-B are supervised by their teachers Aizawa and Vlad King while facing off against each other in a training exercise. However, despite the teachers being presumably neutral, when Vlad King takes it upon himself to commentate on the matches, he blatantly favors his own class. This prompts the Class 1-A students to start protesting for fair commentary and eventually get their wish when another teacher, Midnight, steps in.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • All For One on two occasions: first, when he foisted the power stockpiling Quirk onto his seemingly Quirkless younger brother, which led to the creation of One For All, the one Quirk that threatens his power; then later, when All For One's failed attempt to steal One For All from Midoriya removed all barriers of communication between Midoriya and the spirits of the previous users of One For All, allowing them to easily communicate with each other whenever they wish.
  • A villain-on-villain example: Twice had limited the use of his duplicating powers due to mental trauma from when he got into a fight with several of his clones, leading him to wonder if he, himself, was a clone. This also made him a bit of a coward, as his clones would be immediately destroyed after sustaining an injury; thus, if he was a clone, he could die from an injury that his allies would otherwise be able to shrug off. When the Meta Liberation Army hold his friend Toga hostage and break his arms while restraining him, however, he did not die. Now certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was the original, Twice overcame his fears and proceeded to use his Quirk without restraint, completely overwhelming the Meta Liberation Army with an even bigger clone army.
• Nightmare Hands:
  • Dark Shadow can extend his claws in this manner, which gets especially scary when he's gone berserk at night.
  • Dabi grabbing Bakugo's throat and slowly pulling him into a Warp Gate evokes this imagery.
  • During the war arc, Shigiraki develops this as an ability, made all the more horrific since every hand has his Make Them Rot powers.

• No Communities Were Harmed: Whereas Japan's 47 prefectures appear to be the same as they are in the real world, the same is not true for the municipalities therein. Among the most glaring examples, "Esuha City" stands in for Osaka (despite still being in Osaka Prefecture), and there is a "Kamino Ward" in Kanagawa Prefecture (with no mention of Yokohama, Kawasaki, or Sagamihara, which would logically contain such a ward if it existed). Tokyo is a borderline case, with more general areas mentioned in passing but specific locations being entirely fictional.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Downplayed. The manga is not, strictly speaking, averse to romance, but it has so many characters and plot threads that overt and consistent Ship Tease is practically non-existent, with only a handful of relationships getting anything close to it. Midoriya/Uraraka is teased far more than any other potential couple, but even that pairing only asserts itself through blushing and Bishie Sparkles or Love Bubbles, never escalating to flirting or physical contact (it helps that they're both too shy to initiate such things).
• "No Peeking!" Request: During the Battle Trial Arc, Hagakure starts to take off her clothes to become an Invisible Streaker to confront her opponents. Despite the fact she's completely invisible, her partner Ojiro becomes visibly distracted at the idea a girl is stripping naked next to him. Noticing his awkwardness causes Hagakure to suddenly become shy and tell him not to look at her while she strips.
• Nothing Is Scarier: When confronted by a human wall of doctors and nurses who have banded together to stop the mob of heteromorphs, the now monstrous and insane Spinner does something in his complete lack of hesitation to get through them. It's not shown at all, just his screaming face, the shocked face of one of his followers, and a stunned crowd to make it clear that something awful has just happened to a lot of people.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The series has undergone two massive game-changers so far:
  • The aftermath of the Kamino Incident ends with All Might defeating All For One. Despite his weak form being exposed, many people watching the news slowly regain their faith in the #1 pro hero and cheer him on. He finally takes down his enemy using the last of his power. He is then seen standing triumphantly and uttering the words "You're next" on national television. While many see this as a warning to all villains, Midoriya understands that All Might's time is over and, now that he's facing retirement, it's his turn to carry One For All and become the next Symbol of Peace. However, even with a new #1 (Endeavor) beginning to make a name for himself, All Might's absence has led to a crime rate spike no one has ever seen before. Japan needs more heroes than ever to take on the rising threat, which leads to U.A. and other schools to have even starting classes participate in the provisional hero license exams in hopes of passing and filling the massive hole All Might left behind. All For One's arrest also creates a power vacuum for various villain groups as well.
  • The aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War sees society completely upended in every possible way. Entire cities are reduced to rubble as a result of Shigaraki's powers and Gigantomachia's rampage, with thousands of innocent civilians left heavily injured or dead, and even more left homeless and destitute leading to the peoples' faith in heroes being broken. Numerous important characters such as Twice, Midnight, and Crust, along with dozens of other pro heroes were killed during the battle and others were left critically injured to the point of being unable to continue being heroes. Dabi, who is revealed to be Endeavor's son Toya Todoroki, broadcasts a shocking video of him recounting Endeavor's abuse of his family and Hawks' murder of Twice to the whole nation, further tarnishing his reputation and destroying the public's faith in heroes even more. Heroes begin resigning en masse due to the trauma they've witnessed and the scorn they're facing from the public, and what's more All For One leads a mass breakout of Tartarus that releases some of the most dangerous criminals that Japan had locked away, further driving the people into a panic. Soon ordinary citizens are taking it upon themselves to fight villains due to this distrust, despite having neither the training nor equipment to do so. And eventually getting to the point where they start attacking anyone who even remotely looks suspicious in their eyes.
• Not Rare Over There: The "School Festival" arc has a special blend of tea called "Gold Tips Imperial" as a minor plot point. According to Momo Yaoyoruzu's mother who sends Class 1-A some as a gift, it's an exceptionally rare tea blend. However, there's a tiny unmarked cafe down the road next to a hardware store which serves this tea blend very frequently, so much so that the villain Gentle Criminal is a frequent customer there, and winds up setting the arc's main conflict because Midoriya needed to go to the hardware store next door and both accidentally figure out each other's intentions.
• Not So Similar: It becomes a plot point that despite their similarities, All Might and Midoriya are pretty different. The latter starts to really make headway in his training when he stops just trying to copy All Might instead of doing what he's good at.
• Not What I Signed on For: Following the Paranormal Liberation War, many heroes ended up quitting after no longer handling the stress of a real bloody battle, coupled with the people's constant criticizing of them. Some of them even admitted they only signed up for the adoration of fans, which only proves Stain's point about people seeing the job of being hero as being another way of becoming a pop star celebrity.
• Numerical Theme Naming: Each of the successors to One For All so far have this motif in their names (Yoichi Shigaraki = 1st, Hikage Shinomori = 4th, Daigoro Banjo = 5th, Nana Shimura = 7th, Toshinori Yagi [kanji containing the word "eight"] = 8th, Izuku Midoriya = 9th).
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: During the fight against the Sludge Villain at the start of the series, a bystander wonders why All Might hasn't arrived yet to subdue the villain. Unbeknownst to him, All Might is standing right behind him, cursing his weakness that is preventing him from helping. Shortly after, Midoriya throws himself in harm's way to save Bakugo from the villain because he couldn't just stand there and watch him die. This statement hits All Might like a sledgehammer as that's what he's been doing and he immediately rushes in, powering through the pain of his injury to save both boys.
• Ocular Gushers: An Exaggerated Trope with Midoriya, to the extent that it could be considered his Quirk if it wasn't only played for laughs. When Ochaco is the only person willing to team up with Midoriya during the cavalry battle event of the UA Sports Festival (due to the ten million point bounty on his head), Midoriya is so moved that Ochaco gets literally doused in his tears, and after Tokoyami reveals at the end that he snagged an extra headband and was able to save them from elimination, he lets out a fountain so powerful that the force drives him halfway into the ground.
• Odd Name Out: Concerning the series installments. The manga and the anime usually feature the title of the installment at the start, but in situations where some really heavy or intense events transpire, the title will appear at the end of the installment, usually for added dramatic impact and in situations where knowing the title early spoils something important.^note In the manga only, as the anime gives a preview of every following episode and takes note that some viewers already know the source material.
• Offering a Hand: A scene of Midoriya and Bakugo as children features them and their friends marching across a log when Bakugo slips and falls several feet into the river below. He's fine, but when he sees that Midoriya came to offer him a helping hand, he takes it as a display of condescension. This particular moment soured their relationship for years afterward, with Bakugo becoming more of a bully toward his old friend.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
  • A lot of the fights in the U.A. Sports Festival Arc amount to this in the manga because they're over very quickly. However, all examples of such are completely undone in the anime, where all of the fights happen onscreen.^note Likely not included in the former medium due to time constraints; a manga may be pruned down to meet the demanding release schedule, but an anime has more time to work with and the removed content can help fill out the season's runtime.
  • Ida and Ojiro's fight against Power Loader in the Final Exams Arc. All we see of the fight is the very end, right after Ojiro makes it past the gate. The same goes for Shoji and Hagakure against Snipe.
• On the Next: In the Japanese release of the manga volumes, there would be a short little blurb and picture from whoever narrated on the back of the book (ex. All Might for Vol. 1, Midoriya for Vol. 2, Bakugo for Vol. 3, Uraraka for Vol. 4, Tsuyu for Vol. 6, etc.) detailing something that'd happen in the next volume.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • In the first chapter, Bakugo gets attacked by the Sludge Villain and held hostage before being rescued by All Might. Most of the other students at U.A. know better than to anger him by bringing it up, but civil servants and upper authorities with the academy and Hero Association still refer to him as "That kid from the sludge incident." Someone brings it up at some point during the Sports Festival, when Bakugo gets kidnapped by the League of Villains, and during the provisional hero license exam.
  • Sero is subject to a Curb-Stomp Battle courtesy of Todoroki at the Sports Festival. Given the overwhelming difference in raw power, everyone in the audience tells him, "Don't worry about it!" He moans about this later, as people continued to tell him this even after the Sports Festival ended. His classmates sympathize with him before telling him, "Don't worry about it!"
• One Person, One Power: Most people in the setting have only one Quirk; the exceptions are All For One, who can steal them, and any of the previous bearers of One For All who had their own natural Quirk as well. Most of the Nomus have multiple Quirks granted by the All For One bearer, but they're all mindless mutant clones, implying that it's dangerous or impossible to force several Quirks onto a normal human. Then there are the High-End Nomus which can hold more Quirks and retain some intelligence. Some associates of All For One can also wield multiple Quirks without being Nomus, which include Wolfram, Gigantomachia, Nine, Lady Nagant, and Tomura Shigaraki. Midoriya possesses seven Quirks without undergoing body modification, but he is on the side of heroes.
• One-Steve Limit: Played with. Although there are occasional characters with similarly pronounced names, they all have different spellings:
  • There are a villain and a police chief who both have names pronounced "Kenji", but the first uses the kanji for "health" and "magnet", whereas the second's name is written from the kanji for "dog" and "heir".
  • The series has Shota (Aizawa) and Shoto (Todoroki) and two distinct characters called Koda and Kota.
  • There are two "Kens" in the series: Takagi (Rock Lock) and Ishiyama (Cementoss). Both are coincidentally pro-heroes.
  • There are two "Ryukos", Tatsuma (Ryukyu) and Tsuchikawa (Pixie-Bob). Again, both are pro-heroes.
  • Izuku's father "Hisashi" and U.A.'s own Present Mic, whose given name is "Hizashi".
  • There are two "Rikiyas", the first being the Shie Hassaikai's giant bruiser (Katsukame) and the second being the Meta Liberation Army's leader (Yotsubashi), both villains.
  • There are two "Toyas" in the series, the first being one of the Eight Bullets (Setsuno) and the second being Shoto's eldest brother (Todoroki).
• Only in It for the Money:
  • Uraraka seeks to be a heroine just because it's a well-paying job. Although this would usually be portrayed as selfish and/or unethical, and she, herself, acknowledges how unwholesome this mindset is, she only wants the money to support her family; Ida reconstructs this by mentioning that there isn't anything wrong in looking for a well-paying job to sustain herself and her parents.
  • This is one of the many examples of "corruption" Hero Killer Stain wants to excise from the world of heroics, leaving only those who want to be heroes for the sake of saving people. Ironically enough, Stain's idol, All Might, freely merchandises his own image, as shown by the vast assortment of merchandise in Midoriya's room.
• Open Secret: Following the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, the existence of One For All has been leaked to the public due to Shigaraki mentioning it. This leads to Endeavor, Best Jeanist, and Hawks interrogating All Might about the true nature of One For All. Realizing he can't avoid the secret getting out for much longer, he tells them the truth. During a press conference, Endeavor feigns not knowing what One For All is for the sake of keeping society stable. Afterward, when Midoriya recovers, he sends letters to his class telling them the secret of One For All as well. Later on, Chapter 317 reveals that the aforementioned group widened the circle to include other top heroes such as Mt. Lady, Kamui Woods, and Edgeshot to help with the ongoing hunt for All For One and the League, with many grimly noting that as much as they want to keep One For All a secret for Midoriya's sake, the constant leaks mean that exposure may very well be inevitable.
• Organic Technology: Several Quirks give their bearer technological components that clearly should not naturally be on humans, but are seemingly organic. For instance:
  • Tenya's (and presumably the rest of the Ida family) Engine Quirk possesses radiators, mufflers, and exhaust pipes is fueled by orange juice and clogged by sugar, and requires regular maintenance. Also, at least some parts of this engine, such as mufflers, can be removed and regrown.
  • Jiro and her mother somehow have organic earphone jacks growing from their ears, which can be hardened for better sound quality but are already capable of penetrating solid concrete by the time the series begins.
  • Pretty much anything created by Yaoyorozu qualifies as this— she's capable of creating everything from cannons to ropes to sound systems from her lipids.
  • Several Quirks allow for the manifestation or growth of metal on or from one's body — Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu's Steel, Moonfish's Bladetooth, and an unnamed criminal who injects himself with Trigger can generate metallic blades from his body.
  • A Quirk simply called "Rivet", which causes Rivets to grow on one's skin, is possessed by All For One.
  • A preschooler in the Remedial Course Arc has a Quirk called "Tongue Tank", which lets him grow a cannon from his mouth.
  • Togaru Kamakiri of Class 1-B can protrude large razor blades from any part of his body.
  • Lady Nagant's Quirk, Rifle enables her to manifest a sniper rifle protruding from her right elbow, and to shape her hair strands like epoxy putty to make bullets.
• Origins Episode: Chapter 59 explains the origin of One For All. Chapter 193 revisits the same story and fleshes it out.
• Our Humans Are Different: Before the beginning of the series, humanity began to develop "Quirks", natural superpowers that range from glowing to shooting fire to growing wings. Quite a few Quirks result in people having monstrous forms or animalistic traits. This radically changed the definition of what it meant to be "human", leading to a period of unrest and strife as people struggled to figure out what to do about Quirks. By the present day, 80% of humanity have a Quirk, whereas 20%, like Midoriya, are born Quirkless.
• Out-Gambitted: The heroes manage to do this to All For One in the lead-up to the final battle. He thinks his mole inside UA combined with his plans within plans means victory is assured...so the heroes allow him to believe that while they meticulously lay a plan to turn the tables, taking advantage of his inability to understand bonds and selflessness as well as his gigantic ego and sadism. As a result, when All For One thinks he's about to call checkmate on the heroes, he's caught completely off guard and falls into their trap.
• Outfit Decoy: Midoriya throws articles of his costume out of a smokescreen for Lady Nagant to shoot at thinking they may be him. After multiple shots, Midoriya is able to determine her location and ambushes her from a nearby building.
• Overly Long Hug: Endeavor pulls Bakugou and Natsuo into a long hug after rescuing the latter from a villain who wanted to be killed by the Flame Hero. Natsuo is stunned into silence by the gesture, while Bakugou is so annoyed that he wriggles his way out so he can start surveying the damage caused during the chase.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Shinso criticizes the entrance exam to the Hero courses at U.A. for being biased towards combat-oriented Quirks, making it difficult for Weak, but Skilled students like him to be recognized compared to the likes of Class 1-A, who get tons of attention. This is acknowledged by several characters, with Aizawa agreeing that the test is unfair, and some Pros seeing the potential in Shinso and his Quirk.

P-T

• Papa Wolf:
  • Do not try to harm the students of U.A., because that will earn you the wrath of All Might. And it will be even greater wrath if Midoriya is the harmed student.
  • Aizawa is no slouch in this department, taking on pretty much the entire League of Villains by himself to protect Class 1-A until Shigaraki unleashes Nomu on him.
• Passing the Torch: Deconstructed:
  • Midoriya inherits One For All from All Might, but it's an incredibly destructive power, All Might is a miserable teacher, and Midoriya doesn't have the natural aptitude for it, so the poor kid spends lengthy amounts of time in the hospital and almost completely ruins his arms.
  • Todoroki is a heroic Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb meant to surpass All Might as the #1 hero because his father, the #2 hero Endeavor, never could. The efforts involved in breeding Todoroki have left misery in their wake, with Todoroki heavily scarred over one eye and his mother in a mental hospital.
  • Ida is asked to carry on the Ingenium name from his brother, but the circumstances of the original Ingenium's retirement are so traumatic that Ida nearly gets himself killed in a failed revenge attempt.
  • Once All For One is locked away and All Might loses what's left of One For All, both pass on the torch to their juniors, Shigaraki and Midoriya, respectively.
• Past-Life Memories: Of a sort. Starting in Chapter 192, Midoriya has a dream about the previous users of One For All, including Nana Shimura, and the first-ever user confronting his brother, All For One.
• Patchwork Kids: The Quirks in Todoroki Shoto's family seem to be tied to hair color. His mother is An Ice Person with white hair. His father is a literal Fiery Redhead. Shoto can produce each power from opposite sides of his body and has multicolored hair: white on his ice-making right side, and red on his fire-making left side. Two of his siblings have white hair flecked with bits of red, implying that they got more ice than fire.
• The Perils of Being the Best:
  • The final hurdle in the U.A. Sports Festival obstacle race is a minefield, which means whoever is in first place is at a disadvantage — they have the maximum chance of encountering one of the mines.
  • The festival then punishes the winner of the obstacle race by declaring a cavalry battle; every team is assigned the total number of points earned by its members in the race, and the first place position is awarded a whopping ten million points,^note Second place earns a measly 205 points, by comparison making it the biggest target of all. Midoriya, who holds this position, very briefly experiences the combined enmity of everyone in the competition, which All Might was hoping for as a taste of what being the #1 hero is like.
  • U.A. is acknowledged as being one of the top hero schools in the country. As a result, it's a tradition during the provisional hero license exam that other schools will gang up to try to take down its examinees. In addition, the fact that the U.A. Sports Festival is nationally televised months before the exam means that the other schools will know far more about the U.A. students' abilities than the U.A. students will know about those other students. Of course, Aizawa doesn't tell his class this.
• Personality Powers: Characters will frequently have personalities and interests that perfectly mirror their Quirks. For instance, Jiro's Quirk gives her a pair of earphone jacks on her ears that she can plug into speakers to project deafening amounts of noise, reflecting her parents' background as musicians.
• Perspective Flip: In Chapters 88 to 90, it makes it appear that Sensei is a hero for the villains, stopping an all-powerful foe (All Might) so he could save his beloved pupil.
• Phlebotinum-Proof Robot: Hitoshi Shinso's Quirk, Brainwashing, allows him to control humans who verbally respond to a statement he makes. It's implied that the reason he failed to enter the Hero Course at U.A. is because the robots that are fought in the entrance exam were immune to his power.
• Plot Archaeology: During the Forest Training Camp Arc, it's revealed there is a traitor within U.A. acting as a mole to aid All For One. This plot point was then ignored for several, real-time years. It's not until Chapter 336 that it's finally revealed the traitor is Aoyama, who was forced to work for AFO and quickly sides with the heroes upon discovery, feeling crushing guilt for all he's done.
• Plot Tailored to the Party:
  • Invoked by the faculty during the Final Exams Arc; the students vs. teachers matchups are explicitly designed to address some of the students' weaknesses and help them grow as heroes:
    • Midoriya and Bakugo vs. All Might is to see whether they can set aside their differences in the face of overwhelming adversity.
    • Todoroki and Yaoyorozu vs. Aizawa is for Yaoyorozu to improve her split-second thinking and action (and by extension her self-confidence) and to challenge Todoroki's tendency to use brute force by having them go against the Power Nullifier close-combat fighter Aizawa.
    • Jiro and Koda vs. Present Mic is because although all their Quirks revolve around sound, Present Mic is powerful enough to cancel out direct usage of Jiro and Koda's Quirks. Thus, the students have to find creative ways to use theirs.
    • Tsuyu and Tokoyami vs. Ectoplasm is to challenge Tokoyami's tendency to rely on Dark Shadow to do the fighting for him, since Ectoplasm's clones can get close with no problem, and to see how well Tsuyu can emotionally and physically support her partner.
    • Ashido and Kaminari vs. Nezu is because these students tend to act first and think later; this is challenged when they go up against an intelligent villain who can effectively take advantage of this and outsmart them.
    • Sato and Kirishima vs. Cementoss is meant to test how the students will react to a battle of attrition, pitting their powerful yet time-limited Quirks against a villain able to produce an endless number of defenses.
    • Ida and Ojiro vs. Power Loader pits two heroes who rely on firm footing (for movement and combat) against a villain who can disrupt the terrain. In light of Ida's confrontation with Stain, it's also a test of his judgment as to whether to fight or flee, considering the parameters of the scenario, and whether he can achieve his objective with minimal loss or sacrifice.
  • Also deliberately invoked in the raid against the Paranormal Liberation Front. Since the main characters are all technically still just students, the heroes are only willing to bring ones with a specific purpose to the front lines, and immediately pull them back when that purpose is fulfilled. Kaminari is there to counter a villain with an electrical Quirk, Tokoyami destroys a hidden passage out of the mansion, and Komori and Honenuki neutralize the crowds of lower-level mooks.
• Police Are Useless: Subverted. Heroes act as a rapid response to disasters and criminals with powerful Quirks whereas the regular police continue to have jurisdiction over day-to-day matters and the investigative side of crime fighting. Also, in Chapter 95, after All Might finally loses One For All for good, and with the League of Villains becoming stronger, the police chiefs realize they need to institute serious reforms to adapt to the emerging supervillain threat.
• Portmanteau: U.A.'s name is one, being a portmanteau between the words "Yuusha" and "Eiyuu". In Japanese, both words can be used to refer to a hero.
• Post-Injury Desk Job:
  • Ragdoll goes from an active hero to someone who supports her team with desk work after she loses her Quirk to All For One.
  • All Might also takes to teaching permanently after using up the last embers of One For All to take down All For One at Kamino.
• Poster-Gallery Bedroom: We see several of these after the U.A. students are moved into on-campus dorms. Midoriya's is filled with All Might memorabilia as befits his fanboy nature, Kaminari's has games and fun stuff, and Ojiro's is very plain.
• Powered Armor: All Might gets a badass set in chapter 396.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Chapter 168 reveals that Aoyama suffers from this; much like Cyclops, his Navel Laser can leak out if there's not a lens to keep it under control. In addition, his body is ill-suited to his Quirk, and when his stomach is crushed by the laser... the "incontinence" part of this becomes quite literal.
  • Daruma Ujiko reveals that this isn't an isolated case. As more and more Quirks mix together they become more complex and more powerful. However, the human body isn't evolving quickly enough to handle it, and the younger, up-and-coming generation of superhumans is already showing that control is becoming more and more difficult. This would eventually lead to a phenomenon known as the Quirk Singularity Point, the point where the human body can't handle Quirks, which will cause widespread problems. Even All For One doesn't want this to happen.
• Power Nullifier:
  • Aizawa's "Erasure" Quirk, which temporarily disables the Quirks of people he looks at.
  • Eri's unnamed Quirk, which "rewinds" humans in some unclear capacity, including the ability to completely destroy the Quirk Factor of any person her tissue comes into contact with by reverting their genetic evolution to a point before humans had Quirks. Tamaki gets hit by a bullet infused with her DNA which makes him lose his Quirk for about a day, whereas poor Mirio gets hit head-on by a perfected bullet meant for Eri, completely destroying his ability to use his Quirk.
• The Power of Glass: Starservant, a minor villain during the Endeavor Internship Arc, can manipulate glass. He can also change its consistency from solid to liquid. He hatches a plot to "destroy the darkness" he sees plaguing society by creating a giant glass orb, but Endeavor handles him fairly easily.
• The Power of Lust: Mineta's realization that he wants to be a hero so he can feel up a woman is what spurs him to beat Midnight and pass his final exam.
• Power-Up Food: Tamaki's "Manifest" Quirk makes any food he eats into this, as he can make aspects of that food (such as octopus tentacles from eating takoyaki, bird talons from poultry, and an entire swordfish) manifest on his body.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Overhaul's Quirk canceling drug operation is powered by Eri's blood/tissue, and that he harvests the material until she dies. Then he uses his Quirk to bring her back to life and start the process all over again.
• Power Profit Potential:
  • Discussed, defied, and implied, when Todoroki asked why Yaoyorozu didn’t make clothes for the gang. She insisted that they buy clothes so as not to damage the economy — though this is somewhat hypocritical, given that her family got their great wealth through their quirks.
  • Yu Hojo's previous boss wanted to take advantage of Hojo's Gemstone Assault quirk, but the crystals were useless and Yu was discarded because of it.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The Meta Liberation Army Arc is shifted to be after the Endeavor Intern Arc in Season 5 of the anime, intending to act as a climactic closer for the season.
• Prequel: The Vigilantes series takes place several years before the start of the main series. In Chapter 6.5, it's revealed that the series takes place before Midnight and Aizawa become teachers; Midnight mentions she will be working at U.A. next year.
• Pretentious Latin Motto: U.A. is one of the top educational institutions in Japan, and its motto is "Plus Ultra", Latin for "Further Beyond."
• Psycho Serum: The "Trigger" drug, first seen in Vigilantes and later ported over to the main series, massively enhances the power and potency of weak Quirks; in Vigilantes, it turns a man with a Quirk that gives him a lizard-like appearance into a Pterodactyl-like humanoid, and in the Internship Arc, it's capable of giving someone with a minor matter manipulation Quirk the ability to mold an entire building like it's putty. The "Psycho" part is downplayed in the main series, but in Vigilantes, it seems to drive people who have taken the drug berserk.
• Punny Name: Many of the characters have a name that hints at the Quirk they have or their personality.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • The first Heroes vs. Villains training exercise (Midoriya/Uraraka vs. Ida/Bakugo) ends up as this for Midoriya and Uraraka. Although they won by the conditions of the exercise, Ida and Bakugo were practically uninjured, whereas Uraraka ended up heavily nauseous and Midoriya was straight-up hospitalized. This is acknowledged in-universe.
  • All Might's final battle against All For One. Even though All For One is defeated and put into prison, All Might permanently loses One For All and his true form is revealed to the public. The age of All Might is over. Lampshaded when one police officer says that given that All For One was defeated but the League of Villains escaped, the battle is basically a draw, but a colleague says even that is too optimistic considering the loss of All Might.
  • After All Might's retirement, Endeavor gains the #1 hero status. He is unhappy with it because he did not earn it. He never bested All Might, who went out in a blaze of glory, more popular than ever after defeating All For One, and their ultimate match will now never happen. Plus, he realizes that all he did to his family to surpass All Might is now completely pointless.
• Quality over Quantity:
  • During the Forest Training Camp Arc, to show how much the League of Villains have become a more serious threat than they were in the attack on USJ, they send a team of 10 skilled and experienced villains instead of the mobs of random thugs that were used previously.
  • During the provisional hero license exam, over a thousand entrants are whittled down to about one hundred in the space of the first round alone. This is invoked by the proctors, who are trying to bolster the number of effective heroes against the recently surging League of Villains.
• Raised by Rival: After he murdered the seventh wielder of One For All, All For One found her grandson and raised the boy to be his successor, knowing that the next wielder of One For All would be offended and hurt by the fate of the grandson of his beloved mentor.
• The Real Heroes: Downplayed. Although he doesn't deny that the heroes are the ones who make the biggest difference, after initially telling Midoriya that he can't become a hero without a Quirk, All Might says there's still plenty he can do if he wants to dedicate his life to saving people. He advises Midoriya to join the police force, saying that it's a fine profession that doesn't get the credit it deserves due to heroes overshadowing them. He also describes his costume designer as his hero, for constantly supporting his heroics.
• Reconstruction: The series basically is one of battle shōnen. Where the titles in that genre tended to get darker and/or weirder in the last two decades, My Hero Academia goes back to the basics of the formula, with simple but well-defined characters and stakes, and a healthy dose of brightness and optimism, while still addressing the issues of the characters and the world it's set in in a fairly nuanced manner.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Zigzagged all around. Several heroic figures possess red eyes, and some of them are perfectly nice people, like Kirishima. Some, however, are depicted as being quite dangerous and scary despite their heroic status, either due to their appearance (Gang Orca), their attitudes (Bakugo and Mirko), or due to their Quirk's power (Tokoyami and Eri). Then, of course, there's Shigaraki, the series' Big Bad, who also possesses red eyes and longs to destroy everything he can.
• Red Herring: Chapter 88 reveals that Shigaraki's real name is Tenko Shimura, which carries the implication that he's a relative of All Might's mentor, the previous One For All user. Given Shigaraki's obsession with the hand that he calls "Father", that means that Shigaraki's father was All Might's mentor, right? Not quite. Chapter 91 reveals that the name of All Might's mentor was Nana Shimura, and the following chapter clarifies that she was Shigaraki's grandmother.
• Reference Overdosed: Horikoshi is a big fan of superheroes and Western movies, especially Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which causes the story to be filled with Shout Outs to these movies. Although much rarer, there are also quite a few shout-outs to video games.
• Reforged into a Minion: The Nomu is implied to be a species of Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb created by giving individuals Quirks too powerful for their bodies, then inflicting Body Horror and With Great Power Comes Great Insanity on them.
• Required Secondary Powers: Deconstructed, Reconstructed, and everything in-between. Some quirks have this built-in, while others lack it entirely. A large part of a person mastering their quirk comes from learning how to exploit this or account for its absence.
  • Quirks don't work without the "Quirk Factor", which is the physical mechanism through which the Quirk functions; this can be anything from nerves being able to move a tail, to Bakugo's Nitro Sweat letting him spark explosions, to the pads on Uraraka's fingertips being the mechanism for her canceling gravity. Aizawa's Erasure Quirk functions by temporarily disabling the Quirk Factor of the person he's looking at. Eri's Quirk, meanwhile, seems to be that her blood and other tissue actively attacks the Quirk Factor of other Quirk bearers, with the possibility of destroying it completely if her blood is administered in high enough doses.
  • Invoked in the case of One For All; Midoriya has immense power, but not the immense toughness required to properly handle it, so heavy blasts rip him apart like firecrackers going off inside his limbs.
  • Some Quirks require the body to be able to handle them, and if the body can't it often causes Power Incontinence for the user and needing special gear just to handle it. The Doctor speculates this is because Quirks are actually "software" whereas the human body is "hardware", and the hardware isn't evolving enough to keep up with the software.
• Restricted Rescue Operation: Because only licensed heroes are allowed to use Quirks to take down criminals, Class 1-A struggle with rescue missions for the very real fear that they'll be expelled or arrested, and so will never become pro heroes. This severely limits the mission to rescue Bakugo, as a majority of the class doesn't even want to go, two of the ones with useful abilities are incapacitated, and the ones who go have to do whatever it takes to stay within the law.
• Retool: The series is based on a one-shot manga Horikoshi drew titled My Hero. The main character of the one-shot is named Jack Midoriya, and he's a salaryman selling gadgets to superheroes. The hero Snipe is from the one-shot.
• Retroactive Idiot Ball: When Midoriya first receives One For All from All Might, his body naturally has a lot of difficulties adjusting to suddenly having a powerful Quirk, leading to him repeatedly breaking his bones while attempting to use it properly. It's eventually revealed that like Midoriya, All Might used to be Quirkless as well, and secretly used a variety of support equipment while his body was getting accustomed to it. Naturally, this begs the question of why All Might never considered looking into any support equipment for his successor until after Midoriya sustained injuries serious enough to risk permanently rendering his arms unusable. This pretty much piles on the fact that All Might may not be the best teacher for Midoriya if he forgot an important detail like that.
• Revenge Is Not Justice:
  • Ida became a hero after he became his brother's successor when he was attacked by Stain and forced to retire. When Ida finally met Stain face to face, he ignored an injured hero and tried to attack him. During their fight, Stain chews Ida out for his need for vengeance and then drives in the nail further by stating that Iida's actions are the furthest thing from being a hero. In an inversion of this, when Ida admits to these criticisms, Stain seemed unable to accept that he had gotten through to him.
  • Seemingly averted later after the reveal of Mic and Aizawa’s friend being Nomu-fied. Present Mic says he wants to find where the Nomu are made and “have a karaoke contest”. In other words, he wants to unleash the full power of his voice Quirk, which is capable of doing some serious damage. He likely wants to stop any more Nomu being made, but there’s a revenge undercurrent as well. He also beats the doctor who made the Nomu and mentioned targeting Aizawa to a bloody pulp.
• The Reveal:
  • All For One reveals that Shigaraki is the grandchild of All Might's mentor, the previous holder of One For All.
  • Midoriya can use six Quirks due to One For All.
  • Dabi's true name is Toya Todoroki, the supposedly deceased eldest son of Endeavor.
  • Aoyama is the U.A. traitor.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: The first two seasons are mostly constant action and focus on the criticism of a world where superheroes are a common profession. The next couple of seasons have a lot more lighthearted school life scenes, which include showing off everyone's dorms and preparing for a school festival.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • When Bakugo and Uraraka are paired up to do battle in a tournament, Bakugo keeps a heavy hit in reserve in case Uraraka, whom he knows is friends with the ever-wily Midoriya, has some sneaky trick up her sleeve. He's right about the sneaky trick, though Uraraka actually declines Midoriya's help before the match and the idea is wholly her own. Midoriya sets him straight in the next chapter.
  • Todoroki observes that there's a connection between All Might and Midoriya, and correctly deduces that their Quirks are the same. He then concludes that Midoriya is All Might's illegitimate son.
• Ripped from the Headlines: Gentle, a villain introduced in Chapter 170, commits crimes solely for online viewership and hits, acting as a commentary on outlandish YouTube behavior.
• Rocket Jump: During the U.A. Sports Festival's first event, Midoriya launches himself into first place by stockpiling land mines and then detonating them all at once, using a fragment of robot armor as a blast shield and platform. He then does it a second time.
• Rogues Gallery: As a series about superpowered humans who can undergo official training to become superheroes, the series naturally has a list of recurring villains, most of whom are members or allies of the League of Villains. This list includes All For One, Kurogiri, Hero Killer: Stain, Shigaraki, Giran, Dabi, Toga, Mr. Compress, Magne, Spinner, and Twice.
• Rotating Protagonist:
  • Played with. Though Midoriya is always the protagonist, the group with him seems to vary. The rest of the main cast, Ida, Uraraka, and Todoroki, are prone to fall in and Out of Focus depending on the situation, such as Ida being out of focus in the USJ and Forest Training Camp Arcs, while receiving the spotlight during the Field Training Arc, or Uraraka being out of focus during the Field Training and Hideout Raid Arcs. Bakugo is the only other character who is consistently prominent. The Tritagonist is All Might, who acts as Midoriya's mentor and plays a major role as a legacy character.
  • Secondary characters sometimes get to receive some focus, such as Tsuyu and Mineta (besides others such as Yaoyorozu, Jiro, and Kaminari) in the USJ Arc, Tokoyami and Hatsume during the U.A. Sports Festival Arc, Tsuyu, Mineta, Jiro and Koda in the Final Exams Arc, Shoji and Tokoyami in the Forest Training Camp Arc, and so on. Kirishima receives a lot of attention, such as in the USJ, Forest Training Camp, Hideout Raid, and Internship Arcs, bordering on being an Ascended Extra.
  • Even Shigaraki gets this, becoming the Villain Protagonist of the Meta Liberation Army Arc, as it focuses on his goals and aspirations, but most importantly, what was the 'one bad day' which made Tenko Shimura into Tomura Shigaraki.
• Running Gag:
  • Kirishima and Tetsutetsu being way too similar to each other:
    • They have very similar Quirks. The narrator even uses the exact same wording when describing their Quirks.
    • They get matched together in the tournament, which ends with a Double Knockout.
    • They became sidekicks under the same hero during the internship period.
    • They even share the same birthday.
  • Midoriya getting excited while watching and analyzing fights and constantly muttering to himself without realizing it, much to the annoyance of those around him.
  • Ida shoehorning an Aesop into everything U.A. makes the students do.
  • In the anime, every "Next Episode" segment will feature one character trying to give the preview with Midoriya, and usually they'll freak him out in the process. A scene from the next episode will be mentioned where someone/a group will have something happen to them, and then the episode will close with both Midoriya and the character doing the recap giving a rousing cry, "Go beyond! Plus Ultra!" However, if the episode is of serious nature, it will feature a more traditional recap that defies this format.
• Sand In My Eyes: Aizawa and Yamada go to Tartarus to learn more about the Nomu. They meet one made from a student they were friends with in Class 1-B. Aizawa tries to urge the Nomu to fight but it doesnt work. He is obviously crying afterward but blames it on his ever-present Quirk-induced dry eyes.
• Save the Jerk: Deconstructed. Bakugo and Midoriya's relationship has always been defined by these moments, in which Bakugo gets himself into danger and Midoriya rushes to help him. Bakugo, meanwhile, is a jerkass to Midoriya throughout the series, remaining an arrogant hothead even after he mellows out and gets some Character Development. That said, Midoriya's insistence on saving Bakugo not only puts himself (or his friends) in unnecessary danger, but it also offends Bakugo; he perceives the help not as a selfless act of charity, but as a show of superiority. In fact, Bakugo started bullying Midoriya in part because Midoriya tried to help him once.
• Scarf of Asskicking:
  • Aizawa uses an otherwise impractically long scarf made of steel wire alloy woven with carbon nanofibers to kick ass.
  • Hitoshi Shinso undergoes training in this technique from Aizawa to help him (successfully) try to transfer into the Hero course, which results in him fitting this trope just like Aizawa does.
• School Rivalry: The top two Hero Schools in Japan, U.A. and Shiketsu, have a known rivalry as they both compete to be the absolute best school in the country. Students from both schools are well known for their strength and skills, with many of them often going on to become high ranking Heroes in society.
• Scooby Stack: Season 3's "special episode" has Ida, Uraraka, Tsuyu, and Midoriya stacked up like this while looking around a corner at a mock crime scene. Unusually, there's also a shot of the stack from behind, showing how it's possible—Ida, who's much taller than the others, is on top, with Midoriya crouching at the bottom, and the other two squeezed in between them.
• Screw Destiny: Played with. Throughout the Work Study Arc, Nighteye predicts the deaths of All Might, Midoriya, and even himself. When Nighteye gets wounded during his battle with Overhaul, there's a Hope Spot that Midoriya prevented his death, but Nighteye later dies from his wounds in the hospital. However, Midoriya successfully changes the future predicted by Nighteye wherein Midoriya dies and Overhaul escapes with Eri.
• Sdrawkcab Name:
  • A variation. The "U.A." in U.A. High School can be pronounced "Yuuei", which is an anagram of Eiyuu, the Japanese word for "hero".
  • Detnerat is "Talented" backward and spelled with an "r" instead of an "l".
• Secret Test of Character:
  • Downplayed with the U.A. entrance exam. The stated purpose is for the applicants to show off their abilities by fighting giant robots. Though the examiners are indeed looking for those who have great strength or ability, they are also looking for those who put others before themselves. Midoriya passes despite having gotten no points in the combat portion of the exam for this reason, because he saves Uraraka from a rampaging robot that, while massive and threatening, is not worth any points.
  • Ida seeing these everywhere even when there might be none is a Running Gag.
    • The catalyst for this might have been the entrance exam - Iida believes that Midoriya saved Uraraka because he saw through the test (he didn't), and as Iida considers Midoriya a rival, he might be attempting to get ahead on any other secret tests.
    • After another of these from Ida, Aizawa once thought to himself "[he]'s so useful", indicating that there really isn't an ulterior teaching motive in most cases, and Iida's just paranoid.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: One possible weakness of Sir Nighteye's power is his pessimistic attitude clouding his foresight and making him see a Bad Future every time he uses it. It's only after Midoriya's Determinator attitude brings him around that he realizes that the future isn't set in stone. Unfortunately, he dies shortly afterward.
• Semiaquatic Species Sailor: The pro hero Selkie's Quirk gives him the powers and appearance of a humanoid spotted seal. He and his team patrol the ocean, performing search and rescue operations and fighting modern-day pirates.
• Sentenced Without Trial: All for One gets sent straight to Tartarus with no trial after the battle with All Might. It's highly unlikely he'd have been found not guilty, given he's a mass-murdering psychopath, but it still counts.
• Serious Business: Thanks to it serving as a staging ground for up-and-coming heroes to showcase their talents and attract sponsors, the U.A. Sports Festival has grown to have a larger national audience than the Olympics.
• The Seven Mysteries: Before inheriting One for All, Midoriya mentions that All Might's Quirk is one of the seven great mysteries of the world. What the other six are is yet unknown.
• Shaming the Mob: In Chapter 323, a band of hostile citizens demands Midoriya leave the U.A. campus, fearing that Shigaraki will pursue him despite Best Jeanist trying to tell them they don't have much of a choice. Uraraka points out that while she understands their fears, Midoriya has been trying his hardest to stop the villains' threat so they can feel safe, that his power is vital in stopping All For One, and asks the citizens to take a good look at him at his current ragged form to prove her point.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl:
  • Midnight's current costume is an extremely thin, extremely tight bodysuit with a dominatrix outfit on top of it. Her previous outfit was a braless corset-leotard with a weapon harness that doubled as a string bikini top, which caused a law to be passed regulating how much skin a costume can expose. She still argues against this law, citing the fact that certain Quirks work better with skin exposed.
  • Hagakure has no qualms about running around naked, with her hero costume being two gloves and shoes (and no actual clothing). This makes sense, as she is permanently invisible. Amusingly, she does get embarrassed when seen "undressing" (taking her gloves off) but has no qualms about cheerleading without panties on or attending physical ed events topless.
• Shared Signature Move:
  • Most everyone in the Iida family share the same Engine Quirk, and they're also a prestigious hero family. As a result, they also share a similar fighting style and Special Move, known as "Recipro Turbo". Tenya's older brother is even the one who explains how he can make the move stronger and faster, once he decided he was old enough to know.
  • Midoriya, having inherited his Quirk from his mentor All Might, emulates several moves from his predecessor. These moves are rarely used because of the heavy blowback on Midoriya's relatively weak body, but should the situation call for it, he can channel attacks every bit as powerful as his idol.
• Ship Tease: There's a subtle shade of this between Momo and Todoroki in the series and the "Ennichi Festival" CD Drama. In general, Momo greatly admires Todoroki and sees him as someone strong and capable whom she aspires to be like and he respects her intelligence and tenacity, helping Momo to get over her insecurity. In the CD Drama, the two happen to come to see the festival and hang around a little enough to see the fireworks together. Uraraka and Hagakure who thought they saw Todoroki there ask him if he really was there and after he answers yes and Momo enters the classroom the two are blushing about it, implying they know that something happened between the two.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • Ida gives one to Stain when it looks like the latter is about to kill him. He doesn't care what Stain thinks of him or the heroes he's attacked. Stain is still just a criminal who hurt his brother. This is immediately followed by Midoriya rushing in and Smashing the Hero Killer in the face.
  • All Might gives a seething one to All For One's lengthy, disingenuous tirade about how All Might ruined everything he was trying to cultivate and took down his comrades (whom he saw as only means to his end, by the way).
    "Shut up! That's what you do. You toy with people's very lives! You break them! You steal from them! You take advantage and manipulate them! You sneer at them, when they're just trying to live everyday lives! And for that, I can't forgive you!!!"
• Sidekick Graduations Stick: Becoming a sidekick is supposed to be a stepping stone towards eventually running one's own hero office.
• Significant Name Shift: Midoriya's childhood bully, Bakugo, refers to him with the insult "Deku" throughout the series, meaning "useless" - until Bakugo's character arc leads him to the long-awaited apology; at this moment and ever since he refers to Midoriya by his real name.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: During the battle against All For One, Monoma copies Warp Gate to separate the villains by teleporting them vast distances apart. Unfortunately, Midoriya is yanked through the wrong portal by Toga, stranding him miles from U.A., where he's supposed to fight Shigaraki. Midoriya requests a portal to just send him to the correct battlefield, only to learn it can't be done because Monoma, who can't use multiple powers at once, is busy using Erasure to prevent Shigaraki from using his Quirks, and the villain has suddenly grown numerous fingers. So if he stops to create a portal, Decay will activate and kill everyone there.
• Single-Power Superheroes: Most people only have one Quirk, so someone with more than one power like Todoroki is considered unusual.
• Situational Hand Switch: Midoriya had a habit of breaking the bones in his limbs because of the volatile nature of One For All in the early parts of the story. He's forced to eat and write with his other hand while the bones in one arm heal (with a lot of thanks given to Recovery Girl's Healing Hands).
• Skewed Priorities: Aizawa accuses the upper management of U.A. of having this, as the test for acceptance into the hero department favors people with battle-oriented Quirks. This means that people with incredibly useful Quirks but who don't have any way to battle robots will fall through the cracks and at best only be accepted into the General Studies course. That said, it is possible that if someone shows themselves to be useful, a General Studies student can get a transfer over to the heroics course. This is likely why Aizawa takes in the most recently noted victim of the test, Hitoshi Shinso, and trains him in his own fighting style to help with the attempt to get into the hero course.
• Skyward Scream: Midoriya lets out a couple of epic, war-like ones at the end of his ten months of Training from Hell, standing atop the pile of rubbish after having it all cleaned from the Dagoba beach.
• Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Some people have animal-like attributes which may not be directly related to the nature of their Quirk. They may be a Little Bit Beastly, have a grafted-on animal part such as Tokoyami's bird head, or resemble a natural animal with human intelligence, such as U.A.'s principal Nezu or various members of the police force.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Besides the series having pretty dark moments and tackling some serious issues, My Hero Academia is heavily idealistic, albeit not without acknowledging that the heroes does have flaws.
• Smart Jerk and Nice Moron: Bakugo and Kirishima have this dynamic. Bakugo is the irritable Genius Bruiser who constantly pushes others away with his desire to be the best at everything, whereas Kirishima is a Book Dumb Nice Guy who is one of the few people able to tolerate Bakugo's attitude. This becomes a plot point when Kirishima is the only one Bakugo will willingly accept help from when Midoriya and the others are trying to rescue Bakugo.
• The Speedster:
  • The Iida family prides itself on its speed, having spawned a long line of heroes all bearing the name "Turbo Hero: Ingenium". Their shared Quirk, "Engine", causes engine-like structures to be built into their arms or legs, allowing them to use it for propulsion for nearly unrivaled speed among heroes.
  • Gran Torino, All Might's mentor, specializes in assailing opponents with his speed and maneuverability. His Quirk, "Jet", allows him to propel jets of air from his feet, allowing a senior citizen like him to leave craters in the floor from his kicks and pounce upon villains with uncanny speed. To obfuscate this, he walks around with a cane in public, only to toss it away when it's time to fight. All Might even introduces him as "the veteran faster than the eye can see".
  • Hawks, the Number Three (and later Number Two) Hero, is also famous for his speed, introducing himself as Japan's fastest hero. His Quirk, "Mighty Wings", lets him fly fast enough to comfortably patrol large spans of the country in a single day, and his arrival is always heralded by a gust of wind because of how fast he's moving. He easily outpaces other people with specialized Super-Speed Quirks.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • The school's name is frequently translated as Yuuei, but the students are often seen wearing school uniforms with the letters U and A on them (which works as a sort of acronym for "Yuuei"). The Viz manga also uses "U.A." when naming the school.
  • There's some confusion as to whether the name of All Might's former sidekick is "Sir Nighteye" or "Sir Knighteye".
• Spider-Man Send-Up: Naturally has a few influences:
  • In terms of backstory and personality, Deku has several similarities to Peter: both were scrawny nerds who became Action Heroes thanks to a twist of fate. They feel that it's their responsibility to use their powers to save others, even at severe cost to themselves. They're also both extremely close to their mother figures and suffer from being Born Unlucky. Horikoshi has stated that Spider-Man is his favorite comic book hero and one of his primary inspirations for My Hero Academia as a whole, particularly Midoriya's philosophy that a hero is someone who saves others and reassures them in times of crisis. In Chapter 210, he gains the Quirk "Blackwhip" which fires black tendrils that mimic the black Spider-Suit and Venom. The fact that the tendrils appear to be created out of dark electricity brings to mind Miles Morales' ability to fire electric "venom". After Deku works on getting the Quirk under control, he can use the tendrils to grab objects and swing around much like the wall-crawler with his webs. Later, during the war with the Paranormal Liberation Front, he realizes that he developed a Spider-Sense from the quirk of One for All's fourth user.
  • Tsuyu Asui, a.k.a. Froppy, whose Quirk allows her to "do whatever a frog can" and who, indeed, can stick to surfaces and crawl along with them like a spider, and Hanta Sero, a.k.a. Cellophane, who uses his tape power to swing around and stick people to things.
  • In the spin-off, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, the main character, Kouichi Haimawari, a.k.a. "The Crawler", takes this even further. His Quirk, Sliding, has him have to go on all fours and slide along the ground like a water bug and later in the series he finds out he can stick to objects as well. What's more, he's a college student, lives in a shanty-like dwelling where his partners freeload constantly, and usually is a Butt-Monkey as much as Peter Parker is.
• Spin-Off:
  • My Hero Academia Smash!! is a Yonkoma parody of the main series.
  • My Hero Academia: Vigilantes is about a trio of unlicensed do-gooders trying to end the trade of a Psycho Serum drug while operating outside the law, and takes place a few years before the main series.
  • My Heroine Academia,^note Watashi no Hero Academia, with "Watashi" being a feminine pronoun vs. "Boku" which focuses on Class 1-A's female students.
  • Team-Up Mission is a series of episodic side-stories where the hero students get to team up with one pro hero agency for a mission to help them gain more experience in the field in addition to their internships.
• Starstruck Speechless: Midoriya is starstruck when he meets his lifelong idol, All Might, for the first time. He's only able to gape and Squee until All Might reveals that he signed Midoriya's notebook, snapping Midoriya out of his stupor as he repeatedly bows and thanks him for it.
• Stealth Pun: Despite the lack of Quirks, the fantasy universe seen in the popularity poll and ED3 still shows the cast as heroes.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: Played with, but not exactly straight. Characters are named after the powers they have, but because Superpowerful Genetics is in play, it ends up being more of a case of Family Theme Naming on the part of the parents, although it's worth noting that a child has the chance of inheriting only one of the parents' powers, meaning there's a 40% or so chance of this being the case and another 40% of it being a subversion. The remaining 20% is when the child inherits both powers, so the name can be varying degrees of meaningful. This is without considering Quirkless people. That said, there are two legitimate examples in Izuku Midoriya and Toshinori Yagi (All Might), whose names follow a Numerical Theme Naming that coincides with their One For All (a power that they earn instead of being born with) successor numbers.
• The Stinger: After the end credits for Episode 88, the last episode of the fourth season, Midoriya has a dream in which he sees the previous users of One For All. He sees All For One forcibly giving his brother the Quirk, hears someone say "So you're the ninth," then accidentally destroys part of his room with one of his six hidden Quirks. It's followed by a title card reading, "to be continued 5th season."
• Suicide Dare: In the first chapter, a particularly cruel Bakugo suggests that Midoriya should kill himself and hope to be reborn with a Quirk. Midoriya is rather upset, wondering what would have happened to Bakugo if he had taken him seriously. This action never ends up being mentioned again, and Horikoshi has said that Bakugo wasn't intended to be that terrible of a person.
• Summon Bigger Fish: While trying to tame Gigantomachia with a month of very little progress, Shigaraki learns that the Meta Liberation Army took Giran hostage and threatens the League of Villains to come retrieve him or they'll tip off the top-ranking pro heroes of their whereabouts. If they try to stage a rescue, they'll have to fight the MLA's large factions. Since Gigantomachia is still hell-bent on killing Shigaraki and knows exactly where he is at all times, he plans to show up to rescue Giran as agreed, but wait until Gigantomachia arrives at the location as well and let him fight the MLA first until he's weakened.
• Super Breeding Program: In Chapter 31, Todoroki explains the idea of Quirk marriages, marriages planned with the express purpose of maximizing a Quirk via the children of the couple. There is no guarantee that a child born this way will have the desired Quirk mixture, however; Todoroki himself is the product of such a marriage and has three elder siblings who didn't inherit the equal mixture of fire and ice Quirks that he has.
• Super Costume Clothier: In this world where nearly everyone has a super power called a Quirk, creating superhero costumes, as well as a variety of other equipment to support them, has become its own massive industry. Consequently, hero schools like UA feature Support courses alongside their Hero courses and business and individuals exist who do this either as their main profession or on the side. Specific examples include teacher Power Loader and student Mei Hatsume of UA's its own Development Studio, David Shield and his daughter Melissa who own the the biggest costume design firm on the planet, and on the villains side Giren provides the costumes for the League of Villains on top of his scouting duties. There's also the company Detnerat which provides items and costumes to Quirk users be they heros or just civilian quirk users [[spoilers:and to people of any morality through black market leaks.]]
• Super-Empowering: The Quirk All For One, in addition to stealing Quirks, can also give these Quirks to other people, though it doesn't always end well for the recipient.
• Super Hero Origin:
  • The concept is referenced in Chapter 1, which is titled "Izuku Midoriya: The Origin". The title evokes American superhero comics, such as Batman: Year One.
  • Interestingly, Chapter 39 is titled "Shoto Todoroki: The Origin". The character's history is shown in previous chapters, which suggests that the events of Chapter 39 cause the character to start becoming a true superhero. It occurs again in Chapter 62, titled "Katsuki Bakugo: The Origin".
  • More than 150 chapters later, Shigaraki gets his own villainous origin story in "Tomura Shigaraki: Distortion".
• Superhero Team Uniform:
  • Wild Wild Pussycats all wear matching cat-themed outfits in different colors as part of their team's theme. Notably, this is in spite of the fact that none of them have cat-related Quirks, such as Tiger's Pliabody, Mandalay's Telepath, or Pixie-Bob's Earth-flow.
  • Kota Izumi's parents, known collectively as the superhero team Water Hose, wore identical outfits consisting of a red vest, white shoulder pads, and a visor with a snorkel.
• Super Registration Act: A fully functional type D, with the government funding the heroes.
• Superhero Prevalence Stages: Since Everyone Is a Super in the series, besides the rare Quirkless individual, this is a Late Stage by default.
• Superhero School: U.A. is the most prestigious of these, but there are others out there.
• Superhero Sobriquets: Most of the heroes shown, in addition to their name, have a title in the form of "x Hero", such as "Flame Hero" for Endeavor or "Erasing Hero" for Eraser Head. Though All Might doesn't have one, he is also known as the "Symbol of Peace". When choosing their names, most of Class 1-A get in on this as well.
• Superhero Speciation: The major characters all have unique Quirks. The only exceptions among the main cast are Kirishima and Tetsutetsu, who are so alike in terms of powerset, personality, and other traits that it's a Running Gag.
• Superior Successor:
  • There's an In-Universe popular theory about the concept of this that is mentioned during the Remedial Course Arc, called the "Quirk Singularity". The idea is that Quirks will continue to mix together and deepen, gradually growing in complexity and strength with every successive generation, until they reach a point where nobody will be able to control them anymore. There are actually several examples of this in the series already, such as Todoroki's "Half-Cold Half-Hot", Bakugo's "Explosion", and, of course, "One For All".
  • The theory is mentioned by name in Midoriya's dream at the start of the Joint Training Arc, and by the First User no less, who states that "[they're] far past the Singularity now." Towards the end of the arc, the meaning of this statement is revealed: Midoriya's predecessors have stockpiled enough power to allow him to access and use their Quirks, all of which One For All has been stockpiling with each generation. While this implies that mastering One For All will be far more difficult than originally thought, and will have far-reaching consequences if he fails to do so if he does, he'll be more powerful than all his predecessors, All Might included, could have ever hoped to be.
• Superpower Lottery: A natural consequence of the diverse nature of Quirks, as they can range from having an extra limb to possessing a reality-warping power:
  • The biggest winner is All For One, who can steal Quirks, which can then be granted to others or be combined to perform devastatingly powerful attacks which are impossible to perform with only one Quirk.
  • One For All, which ironically is derived from the aforementioned lottery winner, is your standard Lightning Bruiser powerset at first glance. But considering it was capable of defeating said lottery winner, albeit with a hefty dose of Heroic Willpower, it's a strong contender for the top spot. Additionally, it can stockpile other Quirks of previous wielders and significantly augment them. Midoriya is the first user to inherit all six Quirks.
  • Todoroki effectively has two Quirks in one, with a Quirk that lets him control ice and fire. It's also deconstructed in that his father forced his mother to bear children specifically to breed lottery winners.
  • Aizawa's Erasure can be this. So long as Aizawa doesn't blink, an individual within his gaze has their Quirk(s) suppressed, temporarily turning even someone whose Quirk renders them nigh unstoppable into a Quirkless individual. This means that even characters like AFO are essentially not immune to it unless the target has a very specific Quirk that could counter or prevent the effect (it doesn't work on passive mutation Quirks, for example). Aizawa's power can be crucial in surviving otherwise hopeless battles. For example, during the Paranormal Liberation War, it is Aizawa's Erasure that suppresses Shigaraki's boosted Decay from literally killing everyone in seconds.
  • Kurogiri/Blackmist's Warp Gate Quirk is simply Mass Teleportation. But it's so rare and too damn useful to find anything else, and simply having this Quirk secured him a Vetinari Job Security in the League of Villains. Turns out it was much easier to make this Quirk by mixing a bunch of different ones together like a Nomu, one of which being the late Oboro Shirakumo's body and Cloud Quirk as a base.
  • Twice's Double allows him to clone any subject (living or not) of which he knows the exact measurements. The Quirk has several limits in that he can only manage two clones at a time and each subsequent clone is weaker than the original or the previous clone. Cloning himself, however, bypasses both of these limits due to the clones possessing the same Quirk. This creates an endless loop of clones creating more clones, potentially resulting in an entire army of them. Giran notes that Twice's Quirk could easily allow him to take down an entire country by himself. This is subverted, however, in that clones are not necessarily obedient and possess the same sense of individuality as the original. Attempting to clone an army of himself at some point resulted in a massacre that left Twice mentally broken and unsure of whether he was the original Jin Bubaigawara.
  • Overhaul's power is Touch of Death and Healing Hands in one package. He can simply touch his target and blow them up, or touch his underling and heal them in an instant. It also works on nonliving matter, allowing him to fight à la Edward Elric. To top it off, he can even deconstruct both his underling and his own body, then become a fusion of the two. However, he needs his hands to be able to do this, which the League of Villains realize and teach him the very hard way.
  • Hitoshi Shinso plays with this. On paper, his Brainwash Quirk would be a Story-Breaker Power in other stories. In practice, its non-combat nature made him fail the entrance exam and get stuck in General Education.
  • Star and Stripe's power is New Order, which allows her to reject rules of reality and impose her own. Quite possibly the single most powerful Quirk in the whole series, and the very definition of a lottery winner.
  • Subverted with Dabi. His Cremation is noted to be even stronger than Endeavor's, making him the most powerful fire user in the series so far. Unfortunately, he lacks the Required Secondary Power to properly wield it, making it just as much a danger for himself.
  • Animal-themed Quirks in general fall into this. While on the surface seeming underwhelming compared to others, a person with an animal-themed Quirk effectively has multiple powers rather than just one like most people. To note, two of the top ten heroes in Japan have animal-themed Quirks, and are extremely effective.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Children of superpowered individuals will inherit the Quirk of either of the parents. Sometimes, the child may even inherit both the father's and mother's Quirks. There is also the possibility of the child not inheriting anything and ending up Quirkless.
• Surprise Party: In the Light Novel side story, School Briefs, Class 1-A throws a surprise party for Ida. He's so dutiful and uptight that he completely forgets that it is his birthday and fails to see through his classmates' obvious attempts at hiding the party from him, believing that he instead must have done something wrong to get them all to avoid him all day.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In episode 39, the class all use the school's swimming pool together. The more obvious perverts fantasize about the girls wearing bikinis. When the female students arrive, they're in their school-provided swimsuits like the boys, with it being pointed out that since it's the school's pool, they have to wear uniforms of some kind, much to the dismay of some of the boys.
• Systematic Villain Takedown:
  • The League of Villains starts slowly taking this route since instead of a single arc, they lose members rarely, but every few arcs. In the introduction of the modern incarnation of the league, Muscular, Mustard and Moonfish are arrested, and after that in the Internship Arc, Magne is killed by Overhaul, and in the Paranormal Liberation War Arc, Hawks kills Twice.
  • For a Story Arc example, the 8 Bullets of the Shie Haissakai. The 8 are members of a Yakuza group that are specifically described as being expendable, and their job is to delay the heroes just enough for their boss to flee. Unlike most examples, instead of the 8 members being taken down one by one, they're actually dealt with in small groups since they seem to organize themselves in units. Tamaki takes out three that work as a unit called Garbage Trio, Fatgum and Kirishima work together to take down the Shield and Spear duo, Rappa and Tengai, Mirio takes out a duo of Deidoro and Nemoto. Rikiya is the only one to work alone. The other three members of the Shie Haissakai, which are the leaders Mimic, Chronostasis, and Overhaul are also taken down separately in order of their importance to the group.
• Taking the Bullet: In Chapter 285, Bakugo knocks Midoriya out of the way of Shigaraki's attack, getting impales in the process.
• Taking Up the Mantle: The premise of the series is Midoriya's mastering the Quirk "One For All", and thus becoming the new Symbol of Peace like All Might.
• Tanuki: A flashback to Kirishima's middle school days features a student who resembles a tanuki and has a Quirk that can temporarily turn leaves into money, referencing various folktales where tanuki turn leaves into money to trick people. Some bullies try to force him to turn leaves into money for them until Ashido steps in to defend him.
• Talent vs. Training:
  • Deku is part of the small percentage of the world who was born without a Quirk. However, he was bequeathed the One For All Quirk by his idol All Might. Deku's smarts and dedication to improving himself enable him to utilize One For All to its full potential and then some, allowing him to hold his own against extremely powerful, naturally-born Quirk users like Bakugo and Shoto.
  • All Might and Deku are contrasted in this way when it comes to using One For All. Unlike Deku, All Might very quickly got used to using One For All at maximum power. However, since All Might never struggled with the Quirk, he never got to receive visions like other users. This meant his knowledge of the Quirk is incredibly limited compared to Deku who had a much more difficult path to mastering One For All but was able to unlock potential that All Might never realized.
• Tea Is Classy:
  • Yaoyorozu is The Ojou, a well-mannered and sweet young lady from a very rich family. Fittingly, she is an avid tea drinker. When she first offers her mansion for a study session, she asks her classmates what type of tea they like and mentions that her family prefers luxury tea brands Harrods and Wedgwood. After the school converts to dormitories, she is seen preparing and serving tea for her classmates when they are all together.
  • Saiko Intelli, a student at rival hero school Seiai Academy, has a quirk called IQ which allows her to boost her intelligence by drinking tea. Most of her screen time sees her sitting in her team's fancy HQ sitting primly in a chair as she drinks tea from a delicate china cup.
  • The Arc Villain of the School Festival Arc, Gentle Criminal. While not wealthy himself, he is a well-groomed man who fancies himself a Gentleman Thief. He also has a fondness for tea and favors the same exclusive tea brand Yaoyorozu had previously served the class.
• Theme Naming: Horikoshi loves to give his locations the names of planets from Star Wars.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • During Todoroki and Sero's fight in the Sports Festival, Todoroki wins the match by freezing Sero in a gigantic mountain of ice half as big as the stadium they're fighting in.
  • During Star and Stripe's fight against Shigaraki, she manipulates the air into a figure of herself, but 1000 times bigger, to stun him with a gigantic fist and Shockwave Clap, then manipulates the fighters' laser fire into a laser spear that keeps Shigaraki pinned down... which still isn't enough to kill him due to All For One giving him a ridiculous Healing Factor, so she calls in an intercontinental missile barrage to reduce him to atoms.
• Thinking the Same Thought: All of Class 1-A have similar responses to the proposed hero names, such as thinking that Ashido's proposal of "Alien Queen" sounds lame.^note In the English dub, they're all shocked Midnight rejected it right after accepting Aoyama's "I Cannot Stop Twinkling" with a minor tweak.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Inverted early on. All of the first pro heroes shown off are rendered utterly unable to help in the second battle against the Sludge Villain because the situation is a perfect storm of conditions that render all of the otherwise well-rounded heroes completely useless or otherwise too occupied to fight, forcing them to wait until All Might arrives. This allows Midoriya to demonstrate he has the heart of a hero.
• Time to Unlock More True Potential:
  • This is what happens to Midoriya in the Field Training Arc, with the retired hero Gran Torino as his mentor. From this point forward, Midoriya is actively tracking an exact percentage of how much true potential he has currently unlocked.
  • All students from Class 1-A are later trained to develop new techniques and special moves.
• Title Drop: Title of Hero Academia, or Hero Academy by extention, is dropped now and then, which symbolizes that the school you attend to is npt just a place to learn, but a home to grow.
• To Be Lawful or Good: A major source of conflict in the story is the fact that only pro-heroes are officially sanctioned to handle Quirk-related threats. As a result, people, even heroes in training, can be charged and severely punished for trying to save others or simply defending themselves using their Quirks without a proper license, as it would be legally described as vigilantism. This comes up on multiple occasions in the story, such as the USJ Arc where Aizawa has to give his class express permission to defend themselves to avoid the legal ramifications of fighting villains without a license.
• Tournament Arc: The U.A. Sports Festival, where classes compete to be noticed by sponsors. It even transitions into one-on-one battles for the top sixteen participants from the Human Cavalry event.
• Tracking Device: During the Forest Training Camp Arc, Yaoyorozu manages to create one and have it implanted onto the Nomu that was chasing her and a schoolmate. This winds up crucial to the police's plans.
• Training from Hell:
  • Deconstructed in Todoroki, who was subjected to this at least since he was five years old, and it was shown to be a horrible experience for him that broke him mentally. It turned out even worse for Toya, one of his elder brothers (his only sibling whom his father considered worth training at all), so much he was presumed dead but actually became Dabi who plans revenge on Endeavor.
  • Played straight with the class's summer training camp, which was intended as this. One of the very first parts of it is using their Quirks near-constantly to increase how far they can go before their respective Heroic RRODs kick in.
• Transplant: A few characters from Oumagadoki Doubutsuen, Horikoshi's first work, show up as pro heroes (Uwabami, Sakamata) or make cameos in the series.
• Troperrific: Deconstructed. Plenty of superhero tropes are used and always showcase the realities that come with them. Self-proclaimed heroes are a staple in comic books, but here they're seen on the same levels as criminals due to the unlicensed use of their powers. Superpowers aren't just godly abilities, they're physical traits that must be trained, and will have an equally powerful repercussion. Being a hero includes gaining popularity, people will capitalize on it, and having an eye-catching costume now has practical use in marketing. A Kid Hero is normally treated on the same level as an adult one, while here the students are treated as children and only get more involved once they're in their late high school years. The list goes on.
• A True Hero: This is the Central Theme of the entire series, centering around Midoriya, who idolizes All Might and is chosen to be his eventual successor. In their world, Everyone Is a Super who has a sort of superpower and this has led to a social system where the most skilled and powerful of those people become known as "heroes". However, most of these heroes are only in it for wealth, fame, or glory and are not all that interested in helping others or saving people. All Might and Midoriya are both held up as shining exceptions to this, and many people, even some villains, consider them to be the only "true" heroes.

U-Z

• Understatement: Sero's statement, "A little much, don't you think...?" to Todoroki who basically froze him with enough excess ice to be visibly seen from outside the stadium, as in covering roughly one-half of the stadium's open roof, in Chapter 34. Not surprisingly, many of the spectators were shocked and none of them could blame Sero for losing to Todoroki's attack.
• Unexpected Kindness:
  • Downplayed with Bakugo, who's almost perpetually Hot-Blooded and hot tempered. His moments of kindness always shock the other characters even if he does them with an attitude, such as when he chose to win his round of the Joint Training Battle not through his power alone, but by protecting his teammates. When he saves Jiro from Kamakiri's attack, she's startled by the act, despite that he did it by kicking her out of the way. He also has one when Midoriya goes rogue, apologizing for being a Jerkass to Midoriya so often before.
  • Gunhead is a muscular, combat-oriented hero with a mask and gloves that look like gun muzzles. When Uraraka interned with him, she expected him to be tough and mean. Instead, he was quite warm to her when teaching her self-defense and patrolling techniques, earning a surprised reaction from her.
• Universal Group Reaction: In one of the School Briefs light novels, the boys from Class 1-A and 1-B participate in a pillow fight to decide what they will have for dinner tomorrow. One of the rules is Quirks are not permitted, but Bakugo quickly finds a loophole- Quirks can't be used on purpose but there's no penalty if they're activated unintentionally. This results in everyone using their powers with diminishing subtlety and justifying them as mistakes. When questioned as to what they're doing, the boys shout "it was an accident" in unison.
• Unsuspectingly Soused: Sakaki Deidoro, one of Overhaul's henchmen, can induce this in people with his Quirk "Dead Drunk", (“Sloshed” in the English translation) causing a feeling of intense dizziness and disorientation akin to having consumed a large amount of alcohol. Unfortunately for them, Mirio's Permeation Quirk means that he's constantly experiencing vertigo, allowing him to No-Sell the effects of this Quirk.
• Verbal Salt in the Wound: Todoroki makes a sardonic remark to remind his father that he will now have a permanent scar similar to his:
  Todoroki: That's a bad scar. [loudly slurps soba while staring at him]
• Versus Character Splash: Used multiple times during the training exercises between Class 1-A and Class 1-B.
• Versus Title: Several chapters/episodes focusing on specific battles are named using this.
• Vibration Manipulation:
  • The Provisional License Test has one of the opposing students, Yo Shindo, whose Quirk is Vibrate. He can vibrate anything he touches and his Required Secondary Powers give him some ability to resist Gang Orca's ultrasonic attacks.
  • Nejire Hado can convert her own vitality into energy and release it in the form of spiraling shockwaves.
  • Hawks can sense vibrations with his feathers, enabling him to track down people via their heartbeats or their breathing.
• Viewers Are Goldfish: Starting with the second half of Season 2, a Boss Subtitles appears when a character with a Quirk appears onscreen for the first time in an episode.
• Vigilante Injustice
  • After his brother Tensei was crippled by the "Hero Killer" Stain, Iida takes matters into his own hands and resolves to strike down Stain even if it means going outside of the law forbidding the use of Quirks to subdue villains without a license. But Stain himself calls out Iida for this, pointing out that Iida is so fixated on the idea of revenge against him that he completely ignored the injured and helpless hero Stain was busy attacking. In addition, Iida's actions forced Midoriya and Todoroki to come to his aid to save his life, making them break the law and nearly getting all three of them expelled from U.A. for engaging in vigilantism.
  • Vigilante mobs spring up following the disastrous results of the heroes' attempts to foil the Paranormal Liberation Front's attempts to uproot all of Japanese society that lead to a severe drop in public opinion of heroes. These mobs believe that only they can protect themselves, but soon begin attacking anyone they believe is remotely threatening looking, including innocent mutants, and are fleeing the chaos themselves. These mobs also cause enormous property damage due to their reckless Quirk use while also being wholly unequipped to handle more hardened villains and shunning the heroes who do come to help.
  • The spinoff, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes takes a softer stance on this. The protagonist, Koichi, primarily does public service as like picking up trash and giving people directions because he enjoys doing it. But using his Quirk to do so is technically breaking the law against public, unsanctioned Quirk use, but his actions are so harmless that he usually gets a slap on the wrist and a scolding at worst. But he begins increasingly running afoul of the law as he gets into much more dangerous situations with Knuckleduster and Pop Step, with others pointing out that he's not trained to handle dangerous situations and risks making himself a casualty with his actions. While Koichi's actions ultimately help more than harm, he becomes the target of several villains and needs to be bailed out repeatedly by trained heroes.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind:
  • One of the most dangerous things about the League of Villains is how much they actively defy this. They are constantly growing stronger and more deadly as the story goes on, often in a way that darkly mirrors Midoriya and the other students developing into better heroes. Despite the fact they have been consistently losing members due to the efforts of heroes and other villains trying to subvert them, the various trials by fire they have been forced to undergo pretty much force them to get stronger and learn lessons just so they even have a chance at survival, with the Meta Liberation Army Arc in particular focusing on them developing new skills and techniques as well as overcoming mental barriers they were facing in their development.
  • Muscular has always been an incredibly dangerous foe who only got defeated when Midoriya pushed himself to his limits. However, being freed from prison to do what he wants for a few weeks only lets him get back to his initial strength. When he challenges Midoriya again, who has gotten even more capable both physically and tactically, he doesn't last very long.
• Villain Respect: Many villains, most prominently Stain and those who share his ideals, admire All Might for being a hero for the right reasons while despising many other heroes they feel have sold out. Stain goes on to acknowledge Midoriya for the same reason.
• Villainous Legacy: The relationship between All For One and Shigaraki.
• Villainous Rescue: In Chapter 55, Stain rescues Midoriya from a Nomu that tries to fly off with him.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: In the setting, villains are proactive troublemakers whereas heroes react to keep them in check. Several arcs are kicked off through the actions of a villain.
  • One exception, though, is the Paranormal Liberation War arc, in which the heroes attack the villains before they can put their plans into action.
  • Discussed in Chapter 336. Bakugo notes that the villains can evade capture and have the opportunity to make the first move in the next battle, so the heroes will have to do everything in their power to prepare. Ultimately, the heroes lure All For One into a trap with the help of the U.A. traitor.
• Warrior Therapist: Played With:
  • One good pep talk while battling will hardly solve years of internalized issues, such as what happens between Midoriya and Todoroki. Although the former does help the latter overcome some issues with his Abusive Parents, he still has a long way to go to fully recover, he is still dealing with trauma, and comparing him to his father is still his Berserk Button. On the other hand, Todoroki grows to respect Midoriya deeply for what he tried to do, treating him as his first friend and a close ally to be called upon, which pays off during the Internship Arc when Midoriya calls him in for backup against Hero Killer: Stain.
  • Midoriya attempts to help Bakugo by getting into a pointless brawl with him to let him vent his frustrations and sorrow over being indirectly responsible for All Might's retirement. Although it ultimately helps, the two are still having an unsanctioned fight on campus and Aizawa would technically have to expel them for it. Instead he places them under house arrest, making them fall behind in class as punishment.
• Weredragon: Ryuko Tatsuma — Ryukyu is a friendly woman whose Quirk is "Dragon" (allowing her to transform into a dragon at will).
• We Will Not Have Appendixes in the Future: People with Quirks apparently don't have an extra toe joint. Those who do, like Midoriya, are born Quirkless.
• Weak Boss, Strong Underlings: Nezu is an indeterminate small animal whose Quirk is Super-Intelligence. As such, his value mostly resides in being The Strategist rather than a frontline combatant. Nezu is the principal of Japan's best hero school, so his employees and students often possess Quirks with more obvious offensive potential. One of the teachers is the current number one hero and Big Good, All Might.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 13, which starts as a regular lesson-of-the-day chapter, turns into a life-and-death situation at the end when the League of Villains reveal themselves to the students.
  • Chapter 88: All For One finally makes his move.
  • Chapter 92: All Might's true form is revealed to the world and Shigaraki is revealed to be the grandson of All Might's deceased mentor Nana.
  • Chapter 161: Although the mission is successful, it ends on two bittersweet notes. Eri is quarantined due to her out-of-control Quirk and fever, so she won't be better or have full control of her Quirk soon. Sir Nighteye, whom Midoriya and Mirio went to for work-study, dies from his injuries but not before seeing them changing their future and seeing All Might again one last time.
  • Chapter 193: Midoriya has a dream where he witnesses the pasts of All For One and his brother, the first user of One For All. After he's seen getting his Quirk, the first user turns to Midoriya and acknowledges him, telling him that he'll learn more when he breaks his limits, revealing there's far more to One For All than All Might let on.
  • Chapter 213 is by far the biggest plot twist: Midoriya will eventually manifest six extra Quirks that originally belonged to previous One For All users.
  • Chapter 270: It's revealed that All For One had the Doctor duplicate his Quirk and already gave the original to Shigaraki, who's just woken up! And Midoriya can somehow sense this happening.
  • Chapter 290: Dabi is revealed to be Toya Todoroki and Endeavor's crimes toward his family are exposed to the world.
  • Chapter 296: Essentially The Bad Guy Wins. Sure the heroes manage to waylay the villains, including capturing the Paranormal Liberation Front. But Shigariki, Toga, Dabi, and Spinner have escaped thanks to Compress's efforts. The aftermath reveals multiple deaths of both civilians and heroes, including Midnight. Some surviving heroes start to become disillusioned and people begin to doubt the heroes efforts due to this incident and Endeavor's secrets coming out. All For One, pleased at the outcome and now having Shigaraki's body under his control, plots to have his main body broken out of prison.
  • Chapter 297: All For One succeeds in breaking out his body from Tartarus, releasing not only him but former criminals like Overhaul, Muscular, Moonfish, and more notably, Stain. As well as other dangerous criminal Quirk users as well.
  • Chapter 304. One for All has an unintended side-effect in that it causes Rapid Aging in its bearer unless they are Quirkless. Given the expected disappearance of Quirklessness within a generation, Izuku might be the last chance Heroes have of stopping All For One once and for all.
  • Chapter 306. Midoriya leaves behind letters to all his friends telling them about One For All, then leaves U.A. to protect them from Shigaraki and All For One.
  • Chapter 336. Aoyama is revealed as the traitor inside Class 1-A.
  • Chapter 419 is one of the biggest wham. Long story short? EVERY SHITTY BIT of Tenko Shimura's childhood has been engineered by All For One. His original Quirk? Stolen and replaced with a subpar copy with incomplete power set to reconstruct (implied to be Overhaul's), solely to promote destruction. His family? All For One has been subtly encouraging his father's strict ways and disdain for heroes. Hell, it is implied that Tenko Shimura's very conception has been influenced by All For One, since 'heroes cannot be relied on, only family'. And with Deku getting into Shigaraki's mind and weakening his psyche, All For One's vestige re-emerges and regains control.
• Wham Line:
  • In Chapter 117:^note For context, although many people notice that Midoriya's Quirk is very similar to All Might's since Midoriya keeps the circumstances of his Quirk a secret, Bakugo is the first to figure out how Midoriya got it
    Katsuki Bakugo: [to Midoriya] You got your Quirk from All Might.
  • In Chapter 161:
    Recovery Girl: [regarding Sir Nighteye] Sadly, he won't make it to see tomorrow.
  • Chapter 209, not so much for what is being said but for who's saying it, and the implications it has:
    All For One: I can hear my little brother's voice.
  • Chapter 213 has one that manages to turn the entire story on its head:
    Do you get it, kid? Now you have six Quirks to discover.
  • Chapter 239 manages to shake the status quo for all future conflicts:
    Re-Destro: [to Shigaraki] The Meta Liberation Army is now yours to command.
  • Chapter 270 gives us two of them from the doctor:
    You're Kurogiri's friend, aren't you? Back then...I really wanted to get my hands on Erasure instead.
    He (All For One) took a duplicate of his Quirk for himself, and gave the original to Tomura Shigaraki.
  • Chapter 290 drops a bombshell that would come back to haunt the top hero and stain hero society as a whole.
    Dabi: [to Shoto and Endeavor] I have a great name. Call me Toya.
  • Chapter 304 gives a sense of urgency to the story as a whole:
    Get it now, kiddo? You might be the last wielder of One for All.
  • Chapter 418 reveals how far All For One went to secure his goals:
    All For One: 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!
• Wham Shot:
  • In Chapter 210: Midoriya is about to launch an attack using his Delaware Smash finger flick, only for his arm to suddenly explode with black lightning, similar to the energy given off by All For One.
  • In Chapter 336, Hagakure overhears a conversation between unseen individuals who are up to no good. A two-page spread reveals that her classmate Aoyama is part of the conversation, proving that he is the U.A. traitor.
  • Chapter 386: As All for One makes his way towards Midoriya, All Might intercepts him in his fancy sports car while holding a briefcase. All Might utters his catchphrase as if challenging All for One, while his briefcase and car starts transforming, Tony Stark-style, presumably into a Powered Armor.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?:
  • Not every Quirk is suited for heroic purposes. Even though most of the population have Quirks, heroes tend to be winners of the Superpower Lottery.
  • The legendary One For All itself used to be a spectacular case. When it first appeared, being able to be passed to someone else was its only effect; it didn't actually do anything, and its wielder was thought to be Quirkless.
  • Mei Hatsume's Zoom Quirk only allows her telescopic sight, so it's useless in the fighting round. Instead, she uses it to help with her gadgets. As such, she can only go so far in the fighting phase of the Festival. All she can really do is show off her gear to any company interested in hiring her later. Once she is satisfied, she forfeits the match, giving Iida a win despite humiliating him.
  • Inverted in Shinso's case. His Quirk is Mind Control, which would have been a Story-Breaker Power in other stories, but given its lack of direct applicability to combat, he failed the entrance exam and got stuck in General Education, a fact that others have commented upon.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Zig-Zagged all over the place. While quirks grant many people superpowers, others can change in appearance, though whether they possess the traits or abilities their appearance represents may vary. These "heteromorphs" can face discrimination or harassment if they appear more animalistic at best and monstrous at worst, and some radical groups have been said to resort to intimidate or attack those who don't appear human at all. Not everyone suffers this depending on where they live, but some are motivated to change this view in the past, for better or worse.
  • This drove the lizard-like Spinner into isolation and eventually driven by Stain's ideology to join the League of Villains, hoping to topple Hero Society that rejected him.
  • When the villain crisis skyrocketed after the Paranormal Liberation War arc, vigilantes began seeing a few heteromorphs as threats and shelters denied most entry. One very tall woman, resembling a tail-less fox, was attacked by these individuals before Midoriya saved her and de-escalated the situation.
  • Shoji's face was revealed to be badly scarred after he was attacked by more human inhabitants of his old village. The crime? For saving the life of a more human child. He had since moved on from that incident but has been wearing a mask after; not out of shame, but from the risk of others thinking he held an old grudge.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • In Chapter 38, Midoriya tears into Todoroki when he realizes the latter is shivering because of his own ice and is still refusing to use his flame powers to defy his father, Endeavor. Midoriya points out that all of the other students are trying their best and giving everything they've got to win; Todoroki deliberately holding back like that is an insult. The chapter ends with Midoriya challenging Todoroki to unleash his full power.
  • Ida gets one from Stain for being more concerned with avenging his brother than with saving the pro hero Stain was about to kill. As a result, Ida is forced to come to terms with his own selfish and unheroic behavior.
  • Chapter 112 is called "What the Hell Are You Doing", and the title is quoted verbatim by Midoriya when Todoroki and Yoarashi can't stop arguing long enough to defeat Gang Orca during the provisional exam, and have managed to put another examinee in danger. They snap out of it.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…:
  • All Might's fighting ability essentially amounts to punching things really, really hard. Even when the villains create the first Nomu with the abilities of shock-absorption and regeneration as a hard counter to his physical strength, All Might eventually figures that since Nomu's power is to absorb shocks, not nullify them, all he has to do is keep spamming punches, harder and harder, until he goes beyond the limits of Nomu's ability. Once he does, he promptly punts Nomu into the stratosphere.
  • Midoriya also suffers from this for a while, partly because he's still working out how to use his power after inheriting it from All Might, and partly because he's hung up on imitating All Might, whom he idolizes. For the first two-and-a-half series, his fighting style consists entirely of full-power punches and Finger Pokes of Doom that break his bones from recoil. By the time he develops a fighting style of his own that makes better use of his legs, it's practically out of necessity, because his arms are already heavily scarred and any further breaks could cripple him for life.
  • This is a recurring theme in the series. Students with powerful, combat-oriented powers tend to develop very narrow combat strategies, which characters like Stain and Aizawa take advantage of by getting in close/nullifying their powers and taking them down with regular martial arts. It's for this reason that U.A. High School's teachers emphasize creativity with powers and taking Boxing Lessons for Superman.
  • Dabi has exactly one fighting strategy: set everything in the vicinity on fire. This pretty much always works for him, but it takes a heavy toll on his body and when his opponent has more sophisticated tactics, he can’t do much to counter them.
• The Whole World Is Watching: Thanks to news crews, the fight between All Might and All For One during the Hideout Raid Arc is televised to the entire world. While this means everyone gets to see All Might defeat one of the world's most evil villains, it also lets everybody learn about All Might's Power Incontinence, and ultimately witness his final loss of his powers. It marks the definitive point in the series where his successor Midoriya must take up the mantle as the Symbol of Peace.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: A Zigzagged example. Towards the story's conclusion, it's revealed that a large portion of All For One's plan hinges around successfully stealing and subjugating One For All at last, both for its immense power and as a symbolic victory over his younger brother. To that end, despite being a No-Nonsense Nemesis, he absolutely refuses to kill the current holders and lose it forever, instead devoting his efforts towards working out a way to overcome its resistance to him, even as the holders get stronger over the years and more of a threat to him and his plans. However, he has no problems with killing said holders if he's verified that they'd passed the quirk on, in this way contributing to One For All's Master-Apprentice Chain throughout the generations. When the Final Battle kicks off, Tomura instantly tries to destroy the assembled heroes arrayed against them with his decay, only to be thwarted by the All For One vestige within him because Izuku was in the line of fire, and he didn't want the quirk's 'container' to be destroyed until after he'd successfully stolen it.
• Workout Fanservice:
  • At the end of Midoriya's training to condition himself enough to handle One For All, there's a long shot of him sweaty and shirtless with his new lean musculature as evidence of his efforts to get into U.A.
  • Particularly in the anime, during Season 2 Episode 2, shows several of the characters working out, with Todoroki's being a particularly fanservicey one, since he wears only a muscle shirt to train.
  • Bakugo in the Season 2 opening has been considered this.
• World Limited to the Plot: The story is set solely in the scope of Japan (extending to any villainous plot to Take Over the World, or vaguely similar plots translating to "Take Over/Destroy Japan"), the outside world is only very rarely alluded to (almost entirely in backstories at that), it's never indicated how the rest of the world manages Quirks, and how the events of the story exist on a global scale is never mentioned at all. Excluding non-canonical material, everything outside of Japan only seems to exist tangentially, and otherwise is ignored for the purpose of the general story. This gets somewhat subverted in the lead-up to the climactic showdown with the league and All For One. Despite their best efforts, the fallout of the Paranormal Liberation War sees society across the country undergoing a breakdown as civilians lose faith in heroes, and a large number of those not killed in the fighting end up quitting from the mounting pressure and relentless public criticism, which combines nastily with the rise in villains alongside the mass breakup of several of the country's prisons that All For One orchestrated. Such a chaotic situation causes other countries to start mobilizing to prepare to send international aid to resolve the crisis, and even America's one #1 hero, who considers herself All Might's disciple, cuts through the red tape and just takes off for Japan without authorization... only to be intercepted by the All For One—possessed Shigaraki in the skies before she can reach the shores. Precisely to Avert America Saves the Day, All For One has been having his contacts and allies in the various countries of the world stir up trouble and causing internal disputes to prevent aid being sent to Japan during this stage of his plans, and whilst it costs him, he successfully kills Star and Stripe in the ensuing battle, convincing the rest of the world's leaders to avoid sending their own heroes out during their own internal crises and isolating Japan from further aid.
• World of Ham: The world of My Hero Academia is ridiculously intense in general:
  • All Might very rarely acts not hammy, even when in his true form and vomiting blood all over the place.
  • At least 80% of Bakugo's dialogue consists of angry screaming, Ida sometimes vibrates himself like a cellphone out of pure eagerness, and Aoyama manages to be so over-the-top flamboyant that even the class's girls can correctly guess how gaudy his room is.
  • The Wild Wild Pussycats always employ an Ass Kicking Pose and In the Name of the Moon motto whenever they introduce themselves.
  • Even the normally cool and rational Aizawa tends to start class by slamming open the classroom door.
  • Uraraka's parents greet her by running towards her like ferocious beasts, literally scaring her eyeballs out.
  • Midoriya and his mother tend to cry literal rivers.
  • Ashido can stop bullying with the power of breakdancing.
  • When asked about suggestions for what to do for the upcoming cultural festival, Class 1-A replies with literally explosive enthusiasm.
• Writers Cannot Do Math:
  • Being Quirkless is treated as rare enough that it has to be explained to people. As it's repeatedly stated that 80% of humanity now has some form of Quirk, however, the actual ratio of Quirkless individuals should be about one out of every five people - a minority, but hardly as rare as the series would otherwise seem to indicate. Justified a little bit by the fact that Quirklessness is getting rarer every generation, and the 80% statistic includes the whole population, so it's unusual for someone Midoriya's age would be Quirkless. It's implied he's the only one in his whole school who is, so it's fair that people would be confused and need to get a little more explanation or take a few seconds to process it. Even All Might mentions that his own Quirklessness wasn't nearly as big of a social issue as Midoriya's, just because it was way more common in his generation than it is in the new one.
  • According to the teacher roster All Might reads at the end of Chapter 5, Aizawa is said to have expelled 154 students in his time as a U.A. teacher. According to Vigilantes, Aizawa has not been a teacher for more than four or five years, so with 40 students per year in the Hero Course, leading to about a total of 160-200, he probably would have expelled the vast majority of his students. Then it turns out that this is only "technically" true. Chapter 254 reveals that although Aizawa did expel his students, it was only on paper as they later re-enrolled. At least one of his former students is even thankful to him because it helped them grow.
• Wrong Context Magic: One For All is unique among Quirks in the setting. Right from the start, it's the only Quirk known to be passed down to a chosen successor rather than inherited from a parent. It also grows stronger with each successive generation, which does not happen with normally inherited Quirks. It was created artificially when the villain All For One gave his brother a Quirk that stockpiles power and it combined with that brother's then-unknown ability to pass on his Quirk. One For All is the only Quirk immune to All For One's power. Midoriya is able to unlock secret abilities of One For All that are completely exclusive to him such as interacting with spirits of past wielders, accessing their memories as well as being able to use their Quirks which are drastically stronger than they originally were.
• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Stain and Shigaraki's "competition" turns out to have been this, set up by the real Big Bad. No matter what happened, Stain would be seen as being part of the League of Villains. This would connect his actions to theirs and give them a kind of publicity and legitimacy.
  • The confrontation between All Might and All For One. If All For One kills All Might, that's fantastic, but even when he gets defeated and put in prison, All For One feels that he came out ahead because he knows that it will motivate Shigaraki to grow stronger and more capable as a villain. Even more so, since All Might used up the last of One For All to defeat him, and the Symbol of Peace was forced to retire.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After a pitched battle between Endeavor and the strongest Nomu yet, Endeavor finally manages to defeat it at a horrific cost to himself: his left eye is nearly torn out, he's very badly injured, and his stamina has been completely burnt out through torching the Nomu with Prominence Burn. Yet, he wins. And then Dabi shows up.
• Yonkoma: My Hero Academia Smash!!, written and drawn by Neda Hirofumi, takes this format.
• You Watch Too Much X: In the dub of Episode 107, after Gran Torino has Aizawa come to Tartarus to appeal to the part of his old friend Shirakumo that lives on inside Kurogiri, Aizawa asks, "Do you think our connection will lead to a miracle? You've been watching too many movies."
• Zombie Apocalypse: Parodied in the anime OVA Training of the Dead where Fujimi has a zombie virus Quirk and unleashes it on both his own teammates and a good portion of Class 1-A, causing all those who are infected to become mindless zombies. They all get better.

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