My Hero Academia: Vigilantes Deserves Its Own Anime

By Evan Valentine

If there is one thing My Hero Academia has taught us, it is that being a hero is hard. From your days as a trainee to your last as a pro, no part of superheroism is a breeze. My Hero Academia has shown that truth through Izuku, and of course, manga readers have explored other sides of heroism with help from some spinoffs. None of these spin-off manga series has been bigger than My Hero Academia: Vigilantes as the prequel is one of the best entries in the franchise. And honestly, it is really about time somebody somewhere gave us a My Hero Academia: Vigilantes anime...!

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes premiered two years following the introduction of the story that brought us the heroes of UA Academy, exploring a very different part of the universe that didn't follow the students of Class 1-A, but instead focused on vigilantes such as Crawler, Pop Step, and Knuckle Duster to name a few. These heroes operated in the shadows and dealt with problems that Deku and his friends rarely found themselves facing and giving fans a new style of storytelling that explored the seedy underbelly of hero society outside of the purview of One For All and All For One.

Another major aspect of Vigilantes that needs to be shown in an animated series is its flashbacks. Besides following Crawler and his crime-fighting allies, the series also takes the opportunity to explore the past of several major characters in the realm of the main series, most specifically characters like Eraserhead, Present Mic, and Midnight. In the latest season of My Hero Academia, we were able to see Aizawa and Present Mic come face-to-face with the upsetting truth that their former best friend, Oboro Shirakumo, had been transformed into a high-end Nomu. Oboro himself was now the guardian of Shigaraki, sporting the name Kurogiri and being brought back from the dead in order to fight for All For One's goals.

In My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, we are able to see the relationship between Aizawa, Present Mic, and Oboro form, seeing their early days as students within UA Academy as they worked to master their Quirks while also planning to open a hero business of their own one day. The revelation of Kurogiri's identity hits that much harder if you are aware of the background that Oboro had with his heroic friends, and it is something that is lost for those who did not follow this spin-off story. Vigilantes receiving its own anime wouldn't just give us more stories within the world of My Hero Academia, it would fill in some pivotal gaps when it comes to the lives of some of the franchise's biggest players.

Do you think we'll one day see Vigilantes get an anime adaptation of its own? 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 world of UA Academy. 

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