My Hero Academia Sticks the Landing, Claiming Its Crown Among Superhero Epics

My Hero Academia is wrapping up, and the final season doesn’t just stick the landing — it spikes it. Deku’s run from quirkless superfan to the world’s greatest hero ends on a note that pretty much cements the series as one of the heavyweights, not just in shonen, but in superhero stories period. The wild part? It almost never happened.

This almost didn’t happen

After the manga hit its climax in 2024, creator Kohei Horikoshi admitted he was on the verge of walking away from the industry before MHA ever got a shot.

"When my second serialization was canceled, I thought, 'I’ll never be able to draw manga again.' I drew My Hero Academia thinking that if this didn’t work out, I would quit drawing manga."

It worked out. And then some.

Look at the run it had

• Over 100 million copies of the manga sold worldwide.
• 170 anime episodes and four theatrical films in the can.
• A decade where MHA basically lived near the top of the anime conversation.
• The final stretch is pulling some of the franchise’s highest fan scores yet, even while Western capes are in a slump.

Why it connected (beyond the punch-ups)

MHA takes a familiar setup — a school full of gifted kids training to save the world — and actually commits to the ensemble. Think the classic mutant-school blueprint, but with the kind of character work that makes Class 1-A feel like an actual class, not just a bench of sidekicks. You end up caring about all of them, not just the poster child in the center.

The villains aren’t just cackling roadblocks either. Tomura Shigaraki is out to rot society from the roots because of childhood damage that never healed. Himiko Toga is a romantic and messy tangle of desire and repression. Stain thinks he’s purifying heroism by killing frauds. They each have motives that track — and powers that are as odd as they are specific.

Speaking of odd: the quirks. Yes, you’ve got your flyers and your strong types, but MHA delights in the bizarre. Explosive sweat? Sure. The ability to manipulate white road markings? Why not. That willingness to get weird makes the fights genuinely unpredictable.

Not just fists and catchphrases

Under the spectacle, the show pokes at bigger questions: discrimination, isolation, what justice even means when power is unevenly distributed. It doesn’t hand out easy answers. Heroes break. Some lose their quirks. Some don’t come back. All Might — the untouchable symbol — gets taken down to human size, and the story sits with that loss. And still, the series never sinks into full-on bleakness like some of its peers. The kids keep it human. The friendships and the school drama — Bakugo’s volcanic jealousy, Ochaco’s crush, late-night cram sessions between battles — are the ballast.

The last push

By the time Deku faces All For One, the show remembers exactly where its heart is. Class 1-A rallies behind their guy, chanting 'Do your best!' while staring down something they have no business surviving. Their job isn’t to win; it’s to buy Deku enough seconds to finish the job. That’s the series in a nutshell: relentless earnestness and a stubborn belief that effort matters. Plus Ultra isn’t just a poster slogan here — it’s the operating system.

Legacy, already in motion

Like One For All, the series is already handing off its torch. There’s a new Vigilantes spinoff on the way, plus a Hollywood live-action remake moving forward — with Horikoshi actually involved, which matters. And while audiences are clearly tired of a certain kind of cape story, MHA keeps pulling passion and numbers. It’s been a gateway show the way Naruto and Dragon Ball were for earlier generations, inspiring a lot of the current crop.

"Jujutsu would not exist without My Hero."

That’s Gege Akutami — the creator of Jujutsu Kaisen — tipping the cap when the manga ended. Not exactly faint praise.

So where does that leave Deku?

Exactly where he belongs: in the conversation for greatest-ever. The saga is weird, heartfelt, and unembarrassed about caring. Fitting, then, that it was born from a creator who almost quit and a kid who started with nothing. Both kept going anyway.

My Hero Academia season 8 is streaming on Crunchyroll.