My Hero Academia’s Biggest Flaw is What Eiichiro Oda Has Avoided in One Piece Since 27 Years

My Hero Academia is often touted as one of the best hero-trope anime and manga. But is it really? Kohei Horikoshi has undoubtedly created a superb good vs. evil plot, but over-focusing on the battles makes the characters themselves suffer.

Other than a select few main characters, fans know next to nothing about the backgrounds of others. The cast of My Hero Academia is so big that Horikoshi hasn’t been able to give the characters a flair for life outside of UA. But even series with a huge number of characters can have good characterization, and Eiichiro Oda proved it decades ago in One Piece.

Kohei Horikoshi has Badly Skimped on the Characterization in My Hero Academia

My Hero Academia suffers from a severe case of bad characterization. To put it simply, characters exist just to have big pow-wows, and outside of the hero vs. villain struggle, almost nobody has a life. Do these teenagers only exist to fight dangerous villains? Do they not interact with their parents or friends? Do they even have any hobbies outside of developing their quirks for battles? All of these questions are bound to haunt you if you are a My Hero Academia reader/watcher.

Outside of their classes and battles, almost none of the characters are shown to have a life outside the UA. Rather than a school, it almost feels like a military base where students are stripped of their bare connections to humanity for the sake of creating ruthless soldiers who can bare their fangs against villains.

This makes the characters in My Hero Academia extremely one-dimensional and monotonous. The love for characters is developed among fans only once they can know their actual lives, outside of the trope they have been reduced to. However, My Hero Academia characters have been stripped of a life outside of their academy.

The only time Kohei Horikoshi has given characters a background story is when it is directly related to the plot or will serve as a tragic story. Rather than creating a huge roster of characters who remain unexplored, Horikoshi could have created a small number of characters who could be explored properly. It seems like the characters exist only to fight or to provide comic relief.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is Proof that Kohei Horikoshi Has No Excuses for Not Elaborating My Hero Academia Characters

The first excuse that often comes to mind when Kohei Horikoshi does not expand on the lives of his characters is that there are simply too many of them. However, this is a flimsy excuse at best. Consider One Piece, where there are probably as many characters as the number of chapters in the manga, if not more. Yet, fans know about the backstories of every Straw Hat pirate and even those who do not belong to the main crew. Pick up any random character from One Piece and fans are bound to know some extra tidbit about them.

One Piece has many filler episodes that show the behind-the-scenes life of the Straw Hat crew. Even in the original manga, these characters have been fleshed out so much that fans could recognize them just from the way they breathe. In My Hero Academia, fans don’t even know who Deku’s father is. Shouto’s family show up only to act as proof of how messed up Shouto, Dabi and Endeavor’s relationship is. And the only extra thing that is revealed about Bakugo is his ability to cook and curse simultaneously.

For Kohei Horikoshi, life outside of UA doesn’t exist. In fact, in an interview with Viz Media, right before the manga ended, the author made it extremely clear that he will not provide any spinoffs of side stories on the characters. According to Horikoshi,

So far, it must be abundantly clear that whatever My Hero Academia lacks is because of Kohei Horikoshi’s conscious decision to leave out details. But did it ever occur to him that these left out details might be the one that fans are craving?

My Hero Academia and One Piece are available to read on Viz Media and the anime are currently streaming on Crunchyroll.