My Hero Academia Creator Didn’t Plan for Ochaco to Become a Lead Character at First

As My Hero Academia crosses the five year mark in Shuesha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, series creator Kohei Horikoshi has introduced tons and tons of characters with each new arc of the manga. While fans definitely have their own favorites, one that many can agree is a bright spot of the series is Ochaco Uraraka. This young hero has stood out from the beginning as one of Izuku Midoriya’s main friends and allies at U.A. Academy, but apparently that wasn’t always the plan from the series’ creator. Mt. Lady almost took that spot.

In a recently resurfaced data page for Ochaco Uraraka included in a volume for the manga, one of Horikoshi’s notes about her is that Mt. Lady was originally planned to be the main heroine for the series but Horikoshi eventually changed it when her growing powers made him think this heroine would go in a darker direction than originally expected.

As Horikoshi states in the note, “Early on, Mt. Lady was going to be the heroine, but when it comes to a girl whose only power is growing…taking that to its logical conclusions just brought about all sorts of problems, and the character started getting pretty dark. So I changed her.”

It seems Uraraka was conceived as a direction opposite of this idea as Horikoshi noted, “I’d planned to have her with Izuku a lot, so she needed to be cheery enough to drive their conversations. She’s unexpectedly brazen and frank. Proof that there’s no hidden side to her, if you catch my drift.”

Considering how popular Ochaco Uraraka has become with fans over the years, there’s clearly been a great response to her. If Horikoshi went with his original idea for the main heroine, who knows what the series would look like now? With how far Uraraka has come across the series thus far, there are certainly plenty of fans now thankful Horikoshi trusted his instincts with this character.

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. The much anticipated fourth season of the anime will be debuting on October 12th.