My Hero Academia Needs to Fix a Big Issue With Deku and Shigaraki

Deku and Shigaraki have not interacted enough before their final battle in My Hero Academia

By Nick Valdez

My Hero Academia is gearing up to bring the anime's run to an end, and it needs to make sure to fix a big problem with Izuku Midoriya and Tomura Shigaraki before it does. My Hero Academia's original manga run ended its run earlier this Summer with Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. Kohei Horikoshi's manga series lasted for ten years, and with it brought the long fight against Tomura Shigaraki and All For One to an end. Now that the anime has started to work its way through this final war between the heroes and villains, it can fix a big issue between the main hero and villain. 

My Hero Academia will continue to showcase the final fight between Deku and Shigaraki as the anime continues following the end of Season 7, and it's beginning to highlight the fact that the two of them really didn't interact as much as they probably should have before it all ends as well. While the early stages of the series painted Deku and Shigaraki as a dark mirror of one another, this fell by the wayside as the series continued and expanded the scope of the final war to include more of All For One and his desires to take over the world. 

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(Photo: TOHO Animation)

Where Did My Hero Academia Go Wrong With Deku and Shigaraki? 

My Hero Academia initially began with Shigaraki being a major antagonist to Deku as he was directly challenging him. There were a few occasions where the two interacted with one another to further paint Shigaraki as Deku's ultimate foe, and it was initially seeming as the next phase of the ultimate fight between heroes and villains. All Might and All For One's successors were going to carry the torches of their respective mentors, and Shigaraki's destructive nature seemed to further indicate that he was essentially the other side of Deku's coin. 

But as the series continued, this dynamic between the two became foggy and more complicated with additional villains and layers added on top of it all. All For One refused to concede his position, and was thrown back into the series as the main villain. It's here that Deku started to develop the idea of wanting to save Shigaraki from what seemed to be his terrible fate as All For One had manipulated the young boy to becoming the destructive villain he was today. Deku saw a young Shigaraki struggling to come up from under that manipulation and thus wanted to reach out. 

But for as good of a person that Deku is, this was a decision that seemed to come fairly quickly for him. It changed the trajectory of the series as Deku now fights Shigaraki in full force, but still wants to save him from himself. Shigaraki, on the other hand, is only further trying to destroy not only Deku but his connection to All For One as well. There's a loss of that interesting dynamic that made them such a compelling protagonist and antagonist in the first place. All because All For One refused to relent, Shigaraki was never able to reach his full potential as a well rounded character. 

How to Fix Deku and Shigaraki's Main Problem

My Hero Academia's manga thankfully fixes this issue a bit as Deku is able to see more of Shigaraki's origin, and without spoiling it for fans of the anime, it still feels kind of lacking for how much Deku wants to save him. It's a little bit too late as since the series was already so close to the end, it almost seemed as if the manga was trying to make up for lost time. With such an expanded world, Deku and Shigaraki just didn't know each other that well. Deku wants to save him simply because of his heroic nature wanting to reach out for someone in trouble, rather than it being the result of actually finding out something was deeper within him. 

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Deku discovered this all after the fact, and thus it just feels a bit incomplete. Not even mentioning All For One's role in it all as the new ultimate villain at the end of the day, and Deku and Shigaraki never really get the chance to settle their score with one another. Deku reaches out to Shigaraki, and we never get to see too much of how Shigaraki views Deku. It's that loss of potential of the kind of stories we see early on, and unfortunately it's thrown by the wayside the closer we get to the end. 

This could still all change for the anime, however. While it might be adapting Kohei Horikoshi's manga, the beauty of retrospect means the anime team could potentially add new material to further flesh out the connections between Deku and Shigaraki before their final fight comes to an end.The anime might be ending its run for Season 7 in just a couple more weeks, but there's still a clear pathway for My Hero Academia's future as it readies for its eighth and potentially final season. There's still some time. It will feel like it'll be too little too late even with additional material, but it'll be at least something that could alleviate this big issue before the anime ends too. 

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