An Appreciation of My Hero Academia and What I’m Watching Next

A couple of months ago, I was watching an episode of My Hero Academia when I thought to look something up. Sure enough, I was within a few episodes of the end of Season 5 - meaning that I was about to run out of episodes to watch.

The manga continues on, of course, but the next anime season begins in October 2022. Without realizing it - just watching and enjoying the series over time - I’d managed to finish all the available anime episodes.

Looking back, I understand how it happened. My Hero Academia is very easy to watch. Without a lot of dramatic cliffhangers or extreme violence and intensity, it’s an example of modern shonen at its finest. There are exciting action scenes, comedic scenes, and believable character development in a school setting that somehow manages not to be boring.

School stories aren’t my favorite, particularly the slice of life ones. The school in My Hero Academia is a training academy for teen heroes, so it’s not the usual high school hijinks. The students are put through actual life-threatening exercises from the beginning, and we get to know the core group pretty quickly.

Besides the main character, Midoriya, there’s the fierce Bakugo with his permanent outdoor voice and over the top reactions, the loyal Uraraka, earnest Iida, the lively Kaminari and Kirishima, and so on. The obvious comparison would be with the early seasons of Naruto and its shinobi academy, and they are similar, and for more than the obvious reasons.

My Hero Academia’s ensemble of characters, in their group dynamic, is the most engaging I’ve seen in a shonen anime since Naruto. I think the modern setting factors into that. Whereas Naruto is set in a ninja village following a great war, and the village is a rather grim place where enemies could attack again at any time, My Hero Academia’s present-day urban environment is more relaxed, even though villains with their evil use of their “quirks” are definitely dangerous.

At first, UA High is a commuter school, but eventually the students move into dorms on campus. The "found family" dynamic really kicks in then. What I especially like is that everyone accepts everyone else. You know that they would save even Mineta, the standard-issue annoying little perv, if he was in danger, because he’s one of the family.

My favorite character is Shoto Todoroki. His quirk is that he’s half cold, half hot - literally. He can eject ice as a weapon from his right hand, and fire from his left hand.

Shoto comes from a troubled family, one of those families that looks perfect from the outside but is broken on the inside. His father, Endeavor, is the No. 2 hero in Japan, after All Might. What the public doesn’t know is that Shoto’s mother has been institutionalized for years in a psychiatric ward ever since she burned Shoto with boiling water, leaving him with a red scar on his face.

She was sent over the edge by Endeavor, who was physically and mentally abusive to her and to their children, including little Shoto. In a moment of panic, she burned Shoto, thinking that he was Endeavor coming towards her.

After Izuku Midoriya, I would say Shoto and Bakugo are the second main characters. Together they add some spice and interest to a cast that is headed by a somewhat bland Izuku as the protagonist.

So... I’ve caught the My Hero Academia bug, like many other anime fans. But the anime won’t be back until October, so what can I watch in the meantime?

I’ve noticed that Crunchyroll has a few recent BL offerings. One of those is the awkwardly-named The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window, a supernatural mystery series.

From the site: “Mikado Kousuke, a young man working at a bookshop who seems normal at first glance, is actually the owner of a peculiar ability to see eerie things. One day, Hiyakawa Rihito appears in the shop where Mikado works. Hiyakawa declares that it must be destiny as the job he has come to do is none other than an exorcism! When Hiyakawa discovers that Mikado can see spirits, he forces Mikado to help with the exorcism. He then requests that Mikado continue to work with him, but...”

The series is rated pretty highly at 4.5 stars overall. True, the number of people voting is small, but then we BL fans are a select group. ;-)

The second BL series - or actually, it looks like a one-off - is Yes, No, or Maybe?

This one also has an overall good rating, but reviews that indicate a lot of triggering stuff in terms of sexual consent issues. I’ve seen Level-C and Ai no Kusabi so nothing can shock me in that regard, but that was back in the day. We’re in a more woke era these days, even where yaoi is concerned. I’m not sure about this one... may watch it, or may not.

Finally, on Funimation, there’s Sasaki and Miyano. This series is getting weekly episode reviews at Anime News Network which is unusual for a BL title, so I’m intrigued.

From MyAnimeList: High school student Yoshikazu Miyano is saved from a group of bullies by Shuumei Sasaki. Miyano is - secretly - a fudanshi, a boy who is into boy’s love. When Sasaki discovers this, surprisingly, he doesn’t judge, but instead enjoys the boy’s love manga that he borrows from Miyano. (I assume things proceed from there. ;-))

With Tricornered Window and Sasaki and Miyano, I have enough for a personal BL fest in my home, lol.

Finally...

You may have wondered why I haven’t mentioned Attack on Titan’s final cour - the end of the series - given my coverage of the series over the years.

Yes, I will watch it. The series is so violent and brutal that I have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it. It’s like an assault that you steel yourself to withstand. I can’t put it off too much longer though, because I don’t want to come across spoilers on the internet.

Anime fans are the best. Seriously, even though it’s been a year since the first cour, I haven’t read any spoilers at all for the final cour of the series. But that can’t last forever, so I’ll definitely be steeling myself soon to watch the end of Attack on Titan.

Supporting the Industry - What I Did in May 2013

FINALLY MY SMUT DVD HAS ARRIVEDMy Ai no Kusabi - The Space Between DVD finally arrived from Right Stuf in May. This is the DVD release promised by Media Blasters back in December. I haven't had the chance to watch it yet, but am eagerly looking forward to it.

I was happy to hear that Digital Manga has finally released vol. 8 of the light novel series. I was the editor for vols. 7 and 8 and know that fans have been waiting for the end of the story.

Also, as of May, as I mentioned in my last post, I am subscribing to two anime streaming sites. I'm now an Anime Network subscriber as well as a Crunchyroll subscriber, so at minimum $13.90 of my money will be going to support the industry each month. =D

Ai no Kusabi - New OVA Series

I read recently at ANN that Media Blasters will release the 2012 OVA series of Ai no Kusabi in December.

I actually hadn’t heard there was a 2012 version. I recall seeing an episode of the 1992 OVA series featuring Kaneto Shiozawa as Iason Mink and Toshihiko Seki as Riki some years ago. That series is still much loved among yaoi fans, but fans also seem to love the new 2012 series. So I’m looking forward to this release.



I’m currently editing Ai no Kusabi, vol. 8, the latest in the novel series by Rieko Yoshihara.

Ai no Kusabi is set in a futuristic universe where an elite class known as “Blondies” rules over other humans. Iason Mink, a Blondy, finds himself captivated by a dark-haired “slum mongrel” hustler named Riki. In the course of the story, Iason captures Riki twice and makes him his “pet” or sex slave.

From the illustration above, you might think that Ai no Kusabi has deviant sex dripping off of every page—but oddly enough that’s not the case. There’s sex in the story all right, but Yoshihara is more interested in examining her world of Blondies, aliens, underclass humans and other beings in terms of the power struggle between levels of society.

First published in Japan in 2001, Ai no Kusabi is emblematic of a kind of story you’d probably never see from an American writer mainly due to the racial overtones. (Iason Mink is actually more cyborg than human, but I don’t think that helps.) It’s hard to picture an American writer feeling free to write a story about a “blondy” subjugating “dark-haired” humans. Many of the “pets” are also under-18 teenagers, another reason why Ai no Kusabi is controversial.

My own view is that political correctness should never stop creators at the front end. By that I mean that writers should be able to write what they want and face whatever criticism comes after the fact, but let writers—and artists—have the run of their imagination first.

I won’t argue that Ai no Kusabi is for everyone—obviously it isn’t—but I will say that I envy the freedom that Japanese writers and artists have to write whatever they feel like writing and seemingly without some of the self-limiting “PC” constraints that give American writers pause. I don’t know whether it’s due to Japanese cultural insularity or just that anything goes in boy’s love, but even if I never wound up using it, I wish I had that freedom.