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Five Thoughts On My Hero Academia‘s “Win Those Kids’ Hearts”

By | February 3rd, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

Welcome back friends to this week’s coverage of the greatest superhero anime, My Hero Academia! This week, we have a little more focus on the provisional training exam arc that Shoto and Bakugo are going through, as well as some development between key characters behind the scenes. Let’s get right to it!

1. Caimie Secret Origin
This week, we’re re-introduced to the character Caimie who we’ve actually never seen before. But wait, wasn’t she in the last provisional training exam arc, you might ask? Well, no, that was *checks notes* Toga from the League of Villains who had morphed into Caimie to try and get at Izuku. Interestingly enough, we find that Caimie’s personality is so generally vague and hard to understand. So much to the point that Toga found her the easiest to replace way back when because people would generally take anything Caimie said for the truth since it was so obtuse to understand. Poor Caimie!

Nonetheless, she’s back for real this time and works as a fun relief character, especially as she fawns over Shoto with such a deadpan mannerism. I do hope that the show develops her character in interesting ways!

2. All Might and Endeavour
The show deals with some of the older characters well in this episode, specifically the original number 1 and 2 heroes All Might and Endeavour. It’s been interesting to experience the world of MHA as post-All Might, especially as we’re constantly reminded of the slow resurgence of high-crime statistics. Finally having Endeavour get the chance to talk about it with All Might is really great, however, especially considering Endeavour’s massive ego and thirst for the number one spot, either through himself or through his son.

Having such an ego be brought so low to acknowledge the world is changing for the worst makes him a super compelling character in this episode, and having All Might respond completely on his level is kind of touching. It also implies that the two had a greater friendly rivalry in the past, which is just good character writing.

3. Problem children
The provisional exam was alluded to in the last issue as being something even more difficult than the last one that took place, and so, of course, the show decided to slip the rug out from under all of us and have the gang deal with some problem school kids. It makes this episode feel particularly filler-y but it does make for a bit of fun as the heroes come across something that they can’t initially punch their way out of.

I also love that Present Mic is still here and couldn’t sit still long enough without shouting out in joy, so he decided to jump down into the arena and volunteer himself as a stand-in commentator. His character has been one of the most consistently delightful over the entire series.

4. Failed attempt
The gang of Bakugo, Shoto, Caimie and the hot-headed nice guy Inasa all try to manage the chaos of these rampant children in their own ways, each to little avail. The kids that deal with Caimie either swoon over her or torment her out of jealousy, and I love how ambivalent she remains to it all. It’s also quite hilarious to see how quickly the kids’ caretaker is willing to give up on and discount the effort that the gang is putting in as the kids are so wildly chaotic. However, we get a few neat individual attempts from each of the heroes.

Bakugo tries to weed out who is the top dog of the kids who must be secretly manipulating the rest and demands to beat them up until compliance. Shoto tries to connect with them on a personal level by approaching them (to which the girls swoon at) before boring them with a monotone retelling of his life story.

5. If you can’t beat ’em
Once we find out that none of this is working, we see that there is a head honcho kid of sorts behind the scenes, who laughs and scoffs at the gang’s attempts towards success. After the boss’ short internal monologue, we find out that the kids are not only problems because of their personalities, but because they have wildly overpowered quirks to boot! I love that the show is playing with the wider idea of quirks in such a relatively low stakes way, which does a lot for Bakugo and Shoto’s character and ego arcs.

The kids decide that the gang is pretty lame at using their quirks, and the gang decides they’ve had enough of the kids, so naturally they start to go head to head in a fight! Teenagers versus babies! Will either side really win?

That’s it for this week’s relatively light-hearted affair! Feel free to comment on how you felt about more screentime for our freshly-minted good boys Bakugo and Todoroki, or what your looking forward to in the coming arcs!


Rowan Grover

Rowan is from Sydney, Australia! Rowan writes about comics and reads the heck out of them, too. Talk to them on Twitter at @rowan_grover. You might just spur an insightful rant on what they're currently reading, but most likely, you'll just be interrupting a heated and intimate eating session.

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