僕のヒーローアカデミア / Boku no Hero Academia / My Hero Academia season 3

The third season of BnHA just ended, and honestly it feels strange. In many ways, this show is a successor to the big Shounen Jump series of the past – Naruto, Bleach, HunterxHunter. As such, it doesn’t really suit coming out in seasons. The story isn’t designed that way and there’s no real hook to the season openers or the season finales. Plus we had to have much of the first episode taken up by recaps. I’d much rather the show could be continually produced every week like those other titles – as long as there wouldn’t be too great a dip in quality and we didn’t have to descend into filler hell. Maybe that’s just too much to ask for.    

    

Which is not to say that Boku no Hero Academia is lacking in quality. It’s a great shounen show full of interesting characters, inventive powers and some great humour. Yes, it’s still as derivative as it ever was, with training arcs, tournament arcs and more and more concepts we saw years ago in Naruto or decades ago in X-Men, but everything is done so well, and centred on such likeable characters, that it never feels tired or recycled.

This season follows our academy class through some pretty significant changes. The kids go to a training camp where they get attacked by the villains, acquitting themselves pretty well but ending up letting Bakugo get kidnapped. That leads to a rescue operation that intriguingly subverts some expectations for shounen manga and has Midoriya-kun learn the lesson that trying to play the hero and face up to your foes can often be totally self-destructive, whereas running away and letting your elders and betters take care of it tends to be the better strategy. 

This chain of events, though, leads to the most important part of the series, awkwardly in the middle of the run. All Might faces his nemesis and the puppetmaster of almost all the bad guys un the shown One for All, and in their showdown the big bad realizes that All Might has passed on One for All and is essentially running on fumes. It's a pivotal moment, especially as it unfolds with the world watching, and the final result is that All Might s revealed to have lost his powers and will no longer be the sole protector of the world. In a society with heroes at the very centre, this has vast repercussions as the populace loses their sense of security under a fittingly almighty protector. 

The rest of the season is essentially the fallout from that event. The kids enter another exam, to get their provisional hero licences, but there's a shift in the mood. This isn't just about the kids working their way up the ranks - there's a power vacuum now and people are uncertain and liable to lash out at the system that's supposed to protect them if they feel it's showing cracks. These kids won't just continue carefree student lives if they get these licences, they'll be on the front lines against villains out for blood. And then awkwardly appended on the end before they go off for new, more serious internships, they meet the top students at the academy, including some weird guy who looks like Lucas from Mother got buff.

So in the end, my biggest complaint here is that adapting an ongoing Jump show in seasons makes for unsatisfying pacing and weird cliffhangers, like introducing Overhaul but having no development at all for him. But that being the worst thing I can say about a show means there’s really not a lot to complain about here. BnHA does what it sets out to do fantastically, with a rich and varied cast, a likeable protagonist, great setpieces, an intriguing world, beautiful fluid animation and flawless voice acting. It’s not breaking any new ground, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the most fun things to watch right now – anime or otherwise.