This article is about the toxicity in the community and the controversies that have happened from the toxicity.
By: Kevin 11.2
A drawing of Izuku Midoriya (Left) and Katsuki Bakugo (Right), main characters of My Hero Academia.
My Hero Academia, the anime, has cemented itself as one of the most popular and well-known anime series of the 21st century. But did it become well-known for the right reasons? If you aren’t familiar with the T.V series, it covers a world where humans have developed superpowers called Quirks in the year 20XX. As more and more quirks started to appear, crime rates drastically increased, and thus the profession of Heroes was born. This superhuman society has progressed to where 80% of the population has a quirk of some kind. We follow the story of Izuku Midoriya, who falls among the 20% that was born without a quirk. His dream is to become the World's Greatest Hero, but he gets to witness the impossibility of that feat as you need a quirk to become a successful hero within this superhuman society. After crossing paths with the Number 1 hero, All Might. Our protagonist earns All Might’s Quirk and starts his journey to becoming a hero.
Like other popular shows (such as Rick and Morty, Dragon Ball, and more), My Hero Academia’s fanbase is known for its toxicity and its reaction towards controversies surrounding the anime series. The rabbit hole of the ‘My Hero Academia’ community is deep and filled with toxic waste. On Twitter, the community thrives as they have their opinions about the show are turned on full blast. In every TV show, it is common for people to create head cannons about which characters should be in a relationship. It is completely fine and normal for people to do this, but the reaction towards the author of the manga, Kohei Horikoshi, was harsh as they found out their self-created relationships will not exist in the main story. The harassment had got to the point where he was receiving death threats just for this topic. However, it doesn’t end there.
Going deeper, we get to witness the controversies behind a major character in the story’s plot. The character was the Number 2 hero and introduced as a morally wrong person. Most of the fandom did not like the character in the first place, particularly for things he has done in his past. Initially, the author had written up a redemption arc for the Number 2 hero as he grows and redeems himself as a person. But the fandom did not like how this character was becoming a decent human because of their fixed, rock-solid mindset.
Lastly, there was a situation about Chapter 259 of the manga series, where a character was named Maruta Shiga. In World War 2, Maruta was a code name for victims a part of human experimentation in WW2 Japan. This was a shock for people because the character is a doctor that is hinted at for doing such experiments. A lot of people got furious about this after finding out about it. The author has already apologized for this and stated that it wasn’t intentional because the actual meaning of the character was because he was round or plump. The WW2 reference was mainly offensive towards Japanese fans as it is something looked down on. When the news spread over Twitter, it was like igniting an atomic bomb. This situation resulted in China temporarily banning the anime series and anything related to the anime due to this situation. The Chinese companies responsible for publishing anything associated with My Hero Academia, saw the solar flares emitting from twitter and had hastily decided to ban the show.
Even though Horikoshi was wrong for using the name, I believe that it was unintentional and that he was being genuine in his apology. Horikoshi didn’t deserve to get harassed because Most of the arguments against him weren’t critical on the show and were more opinion based. After all these controversies, do you think the show is still worth watching?
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