My Hero Academia Season 7

Episode 151

A cornerstone of my MHA stump speech has always been that it prioritizes character writing over pure action. While the battles in this show are often less complex than the caveat-riddled rules lawyering of Jujutsu Kaisen, it's always made up for it by how the fights function as narrative, providing explosive punctuation to character arcs or underlining its most important themes. However, sometimes it is just fun to get down to shonen battle basics and watch dudes hit each other hard.

Sure, there are some solid little character moments in this episode. I especially like that it's Mirio who's there to talk Deku down when he's on the edge of going berserk. While they haven't spent much time together since the Overhaul story arc, it's a nice reminder that Mirio is still Deku's senpai—and capable of passing on important wisdom even in the heat of battle. There's also an ongoing... well not dialogue, but maybe dueling monologues(?) between the previous One For All users and All For One and it does a good job of making this conflict feel important. This is the confrontation the show's world and audience have been waiting for. It's not just Deku fighting against Shigaraki but multiple lifetimes of conflict and resistance coming to fruition against an ever-enduring enemy. This is the culmination of millions of choices and lives, ready to decide the fate of the world.

In short, it's the perfect hype-up soundtrack for an episode primarily about Deku beating the piss out of Y'all For One, and boy is it satisfying. After two episodes and a change of this fleshy hulk tearing through the rest of the cast, seeing him suddenly and totally on the back foot is fantastic. With the Second's quirk being the last one revealed, everyone was expecting something big, but the way Transmission is utilized here is striking in its simplicity. It lets Deku move fast. Really fast. So fast he borderline breaks the laws of physics, landing multiple hits in the span of a nano-second and essentially making the entire fight operate on delay-based netcode. Poor Y'all For One has only ever played on silky-smooth rollback and ethernet connections, so he has no answer for Wi-Fi Warrior Deku forcing the battle outside the bounds of inertia.

It's also rad as hell to finally see this fully realized version of One For All in action. All the combos and clever setups we saw in Deku's cryptid era come back bigger and better—mixing each power to create a relentless assault that even AFO has no answers for. For the first time in his life, our big bad is on the receiving end of an unstoppable Quirk homunculus, and it's a wonderful sight to behold. It won't fix all the damage that's been done but watching Deku quite literally shine brighter than All Might ever could is as stunning a pay-off as you could want.

Is it deep or thematically complex? Not really. This episode is in some ways akin to the various movies that have been released alongside the TV anime—a rip-roaring action spectacle that gives the audience something to hoot and holler about. In that regard, it does the job perfectly.

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My Hero Academia is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.