My Hero Academia Reveals How Aizawa’s Best Friend Was Killed

My Hero Academia‘s big spin-off Vigilantes recently ended a major arc exploring Aizawa’s past. Filling in this important part of his life before becoming a pro hero, the arc saw the young Aizawa grow close with Yamada (Present Mic), Kayama (Midnight), and his best friend, Oboro Shirakumo. The friends wanted to open up a hero agency of their own after graduating U.A., but Shirakumo was tragically killed when he was caught in the havoc of a big villain’s attack. But the main series’ latest string of chapters revealed that Kurogiri was actually a Nomu based on Shirakumo’s base cloud quirk.

So there was a brief bit of hope that Shirakumo potentially survived the villain’s attack all those years ago, but the latest chapter of the series put that hope to its tragic rest as it was confirmed that Shirakumo is most definitely dead in a pretty gruesome matter.

Chapter 254 of the series sees Gran Torino explain that Shirakumo’s corpse was used for the core of the Kurogiri Nomu. When asked why Shirakumo’s body was used when he wasn’t a star hero at U.A., All For One explained that it was like “dumpster diving outside of a three star restaurant” as U.A. gathers together all sorts of unique and powerful quirks. They theorize that All For One swapped out the body before it was cremated, so Shirakumo was indeed dead at the scene.

In Chapter 64 of Vigilantes, Shirakumo’s head is crushed by falling rubble during a villain attack. Aizawa didn’t think Shirakumo was dead at first as he continued to hear his best friend cheering him on as he fought this villain, but it was soon confirmed that Shirakumo had died. But with manga conventions, there was no body so there was still hope. But unfortunately, that hope has come to an end. But while Shirakumo is dead…maybe he isn’t completely gone forever?

My Hero Academia was created by Kohei Horikoshi and has been running in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump since July 2014. The story follows Izuku Midoriya, who lives in a world where everyone has powers, even though he was born without them. Dreaming to become a superhero anyway, he’s eventually scouted by the world’s best hero All Might and enrolls in a school for professional heroes. The series has been licensed by Viz Media for an English language release since 2015. My Hero Academia will also be launching its second big movie, Heroes Rising, in Japan this month.