‘My Hero Academia’ Delves Into Uraraka’s Origin Story

The latest arc of My Hero Academia has felt relatively smaller in scale to past arcs so far, but the latest set of chapters have seen a major shift in the Joint Training arc as Midoriya’s One For All has gone haywire.

The previous chapter saw Ochaco Uraraka surprisingly jump in to save Midoriya from his chaotic quirk, but before the latest chapter rejoins the two, it explores a bit of Uraraka’s origin and why she wanted to be a hero in the first place.

When Uraraka first discussed her desire to become a hero was fueled by the fact that she wanted to help her parents out with money, but Chapter 212 really got to the root of the why she felt money would help her parents. She explains that as a child, her parents always looked exhausted and it was rough on all of them because of it. When she first saw a pro hero in action, she noticed how even her parents’ expressions changed.

Uraraka loves seeing people happy, so she felt it was natural to become a hero herself to help those were in trouble, and thus having those same pained expressions. But watching Midoriya fight over their time at U.A. had her thinking about her own role as a hero, that because it felt natural to her she wasn’t working hard enough.

When she sees Midoriya working so hard to become a hero when the world is out to get him, she then decided to become a hero who protects the heroes when they need saving. This explains why she ended up jumping into the fray to help Midoriya when his One For All quirk started exploding out, and put herself in harm’s way.

The Joint Training arc has provided more exploration into the other students of Class 1-A and 1-B, which has been a big success considering the narrowed focus of the previous few arcs, and hopefully more of Uraraka’s inner feelings will be explored later down the line. By the end of the chapter, she and Shinzo work together to stop Midoriya’s rampaging quirk, and it proves that Uraraka is growing just as well as they are.

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 super 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.