My Hero Academia Creator Celebrates Bakugo’s Big Season 5 Episode With Explosive Sketch

My Hero Academia‘s creator celebrated Katsuki Bakugo’s big spotlight episode for Season 5 with a fierce new sketch. The fifth season of the series is now midway through the first cour, and it’s tackling the Joint Training arc of the original manga series. Three matches between Class 1-A and 1-B have taken place as it has resulted in one win, one loss, and a tie between the two classes. This meant that the fourth match carried the most weight in terms of deciding who could ultimately win the exercise, and that’s the perfect amount of pressure for Bakugo.

Bakugo led Class 1-A’s team in the fourth round against a team led by Class 1-B’s Setsuna Tokage (who is one of the recommended students enrolled in the Hero Course), and it was one explosive showing for the fiery young hero. To celebrate this big standout episode, series creator Kohei Horikoshi shared a new sketch for this big match between Bakugo and Tokage’s groups:

Episode 97 of the series pit Bakugo against Class 1-B, and both 1-B’s students and fans were surprised to see how much Bakugo has grown since the end of the fourth season. He’s onto his own heroic goals at this point, and it goes to show that while the main focus has been on Izuku Midoriya this whole time, Bakugo has been growing just as much on the sidelines.

This greatly resonated with fans as Bakugo has become aggressive, but not as outwardly violent and prickly as he had before. The match showed how Bakugo’s willing to work with others and fully put his trust in his classmates, and that’s far removed from the Bakugo we had come to know from the first four seasons of the series. Now it’s just a matter of seeing how far he’ll go for the rest of the season.

If you wanted to check out My Hero Academia’s fifth season for yourself, you can currently find new episodes on Crunchyroll, Funimation, Hulu, and airing on Adult Swim’s Toonami programming block Saturday evenings. But what did you think of Bakugo in the newest episode? How are you liking the fifth season so far? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or you can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!