Why My Hero Academia Didn’t Explore Each of the One For All Users

My Hero Academia is gearing up for its grand finale, and the creator has no plans to explore more of One For All’s past vestiges any time soon! My Hero Academia will be coming to an end in just two more chapters, and the manga is now working its way through a special epilogue arc exploring how Izuku Midoriya and the others are doing following everything that happened in the war against All For One and Tomura Shigaraki. But this also means there are a number of stories that fans would want to see that will never likely reach the manga’s pages. 

This especially includes everything that happened in the past during All For One’s prime and the struggle against One For All’s past users. My Hero Academia has dropped a few teases of their big moments here and there in the series prior, but My Hero Academia series creator Kohei Horikoshi revealed in an interview with Viz Media that he actually intentionally left out those backstories. While he has detailed origins for each of the past users, he left it all out to instead spark the readers’ imaginations. 

My Hero Academia Won’t Explore More of One For All’s Past

When asked whether or not there were characters he didn’t get the chance to fully explore, Horikoshi instead revealed he intentionally left out more of One For All’s past inheritors’ stories, “It’s not quite about not getting the chance, but I have characters and backstories that I created but didn’t include in the story. For instance, I have detailed stories for the previous inheritors of One For All. I intentionally left these out.” When asked if he wanted to draw these out, Horikoshi answered, “No, not at all. Rather than drawing out all the well-thought-out backgrounds and episodes, I wanted to hint at those elements instead.” 

As for why, Horikoshi compared the idea to an element of letting imaginations fill in the blanks from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, “For instance, in Terminator 2, John Connor becomes a leader in the future, and Schwarzenegger’s character is sent from that future world. But there aren’t many depictions of the future itself. Because the future isn’t depicted in detail, the viewers’ imaginations expand, and I thought that was really great. So, I wanted to create something like Terminator 2.”

My Hero Academia’s manga will be ending in two more chapters, and you can catch up with either Viz Media’s digital Shonen Jump library or Shueisha’s MangaPlus service.