My Hero Academia season 4 may not be in its most action-packed arc right now, but the back half of season 4 run is still doing some interesting things with the fluffy filler material from the manga it’s now forced to work with. The latest episode of the My Hero Academia anime, “Relief for License Trainees”, we see the students of U.A. and their rival school Shiketsu High – the ones who didn’t pass the Provisional License Exam – given an impossible task: to earn the respect of a group of young school children that have unruly attitudes, and dangerous quirks.
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In fact, the latest My Hero Academia episode uses the test of the current generation’s comparison to the younger one, in order to reveal crucial threat that’s been looming over My Hero Academia‘s mythos, all this time. That threat? To boil it down to simplest terms: The generational evolution of quirks is a process that’s slowly but surely spiraling out of control.
Warning – My Hero Academia Season 4 Episode 17 SPOILERS Follow!
While U.A.’s Shoto Todoroki and Katsugi Bakugo team with Shiketsu’s Camie and Yoarashi to wow the young class of kids, Shiketsu’s Seiji Shishikura is in the stands with U.A.’s teachers, discussing the looming danger in quirk evolution: The Quirk Singularity Theory!
What we basically learn is that in a society of superpowers, when two superpowered people get together and produce a child, that child will more than likely manifest an even more powerful quirk than his/her parents. However, even though that younger generation of quirk will be more powerful, the child who possesses it won’t necessarily be able to control that massive power. Such is the case with the children shipped in for the Provisional License test: their quirks are each powerful, but they have little to no means to control them, and little mind on how to use them responsibly and with proper restraint and discipline.
This problem with quirk evolution may be a small problem right now, but it’s all leading to something big: namely, Quirk Singularity. That doomsday theory basically posits that after so many generations of quirk evolution, we will one day reach a point where an entire new generations quirk powers spiral out of control completely, leading to some kind of worldly calamity.
So, even of the Pro Heroes maintain order in the world, they still lose on a long timeline.
My Hero Academia was created by Kohei Horikoshi for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 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.
