My Hero Academia’s latest episode featured the long-awaited re-match as Deku showed off his current mastery of One For All against the larger-than-life villain known as Muscular. With the fight ending in quite a surprising fashion, fans might have missed an easter egg that pays homage to another major anime franchise in Neon Genesis Evangelion. While the nod doesn’t see Deku or Muscular hopping into their own giant mech suit, it does make reference in a clever way to one of the famous Eva units.
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My Hero Academia hasn’t crossed over with another anime franchise via a television or movie project, but the heroes of UA Academy have fought against the characters of Dragon Ball, One Piece, Yu Yu Hakusho and other Shonen franchises. In the video game Jump Force, Deku, All Might, and others made their way into the fighting game to present a story that saw countless anime heroes and villains clashing for the first time. Shockingly enough, we did witness All Might teaming up with none other than Marvel’s Merc With A Mouth, Deadpool, in the first manga series for Wade Wilson in which the two teamed up to fight against the Mad Titan Thanos.
My Hero Evangelion
With the arrival of the latest episode, Muscular mentions that he has “12,000 layers” of his muscle armor, which is actually the same number of “plates’ that help to make Asuka’s Eva Unit the force of nature that it was when she assisted the organization NERV in fighting the extraterrestrial threats known as the angels:
The creator of My Hero Academia, Kohei Horikoshi, had even stated in the past that he was a big fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion, documenting his love of the series via an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump in which he stated:
“Finished Eva with Akutami-San. I couldn’t have done it alone, but the power of two is amazing!”
Following the arrival of the movie Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon A Time, the future of the Eva units is anyone’s guess as creator Hideaki Anno hasn’t confirmed that a new series and/or sequel movie is in the works.
What do you think of this ingenious anime crossover? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the worlds of anime superheroes and Evas.
