My Hero Academia: Are Heroes Allowed to Kill?

My Hero Academia is more than just a anime / manga series - it's a whole new world of superhero mythology. Series creator Kohei Horikoshi pulled from a lot of classic fan culture sources to build his world of super-powered "quirks" and the big factions of heroes and villains that result from it. With each new arc of the series (and accompanying film) Horikoshi both widens the scope and deepens the mythos of his unique superhero world view. Well, the new arc of My Hero Academia has brought all-out war between the Pro Hero and villain worlds, and the violent conflict has raised one major question about the series:

Are My Hero Academia's Pro Heroes allowed to kill? (Spoilers Follow!)

The main reason why this question is coming now, is because My Hero Academia's latest manga chapters have seen Pro Hero Hawks took drastic action to kill Twice, the biggest villain threat to the Hero army. The League of Villain member's power (to create Multiple Man-style duplicates of himself or others) was revealed to be a veritable Weapon of Mass Destruction, as Twice is psychotic one-man-army in the fullest sense. Hawks managed to strike up a genuine friendship with Twice while acting as a spy embedded in the League of Villains - which made it that much harder to kill the villain, when the time came. Hawks tried to get Twice to surrender, but proved fully capable of a brutal kill, when the villain lost control and started exploding with copies of himself.

It remains to be seen if Hawks can even make it out of the current war with the Paranormal Liberation Front alive, but if he does, there are some big looming questions about what kind of penalties he may face for killing Twice, no matter the reason. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like My Hero Academia has ever explicitly defined what the rules are about Pro Heroes and killing. Heroes try to bring villain into custody, because that's the law of th land, but we've heard nothing about what the protocol is when a villain is too dangerous and/or out of control - of which Twice was both. Meanwhile, Hawks was sent in an a treacherous deep-cover mission to help avert a civil war within Japan's quirk community, so the powers that be would probably be lenient about what measures he took for that mission to succeed.

That's all to say: there's room for My Hero Academia to treat hero kills on a case-by-case basis, where context is everything. Not to mention the optics of it all: kills on a battlefield where no on eis watching are probably treated differently than if Pro Heroes starting executing evildoers in public. That's more Stain's territory...

You can read new My Hero Academia manga chapters online HERE. The Anime is streaming the end of season 4 on Hulu, Crunchyroll, and Funimation.