My Hero Academia

Episode 63

So let's formally meet U.A.'s Big Three:

• Mirio Togata—Buff Tintin
• Nejire Hado—friendly ditz who doesn't seem to have much of a filter
• Tamaki Amajiki—purple-haired Sasuke with profound social anxiety

All three of these kids are a real shot in the arm. They're incredibly enthusiastic (or at least two out of the three are) and they bounce off of the 1-A students really well. They're the kind of devil-may-care goofballs that could easily strain a lesser series, but My Hero Academia can keep adding color upon color to positive results. It should come as no surprise that Mirio is the one to steal the show, however. When his boisterous greeting falls on deaf ears, he says "Screw it! Let's have a fight!" and suddenly it's a sparring match between all of 1-A versus a single opponent.

Mirio's Quirk is Permeation, which we got a glimpse of it last week. He can move his body through solid objects, including people, the floor below him, and his own clothing. The demonstration of his power is a lot of fun, and he wipes the floor with the entire class while buck naked, but the big lesson that the show is trying to push this week is that his Quirk is very unimpressive on its own. When he re-solidifies his body while overlapping with other mass, his body will get forced out of that space like a video game glitch. The amount of training and experience he's had to undergo just to do really basic actions is immense.

Mirio is a product of hard work, a very common message in these kinds of shows, though his Quirk is straddling the same fine line as Midoriya's One For All where the "hard work" part hardly feels like it factors into the story as much. I'd be lying if I said being graced by his presence hasn't made me suddenly want to get down and do a bunch of push-ups, however. Permeation seems like a cool power all the same, and it's clear that there are a million fun applications for it that are impressive from a combative stance, as well as being visually interesting. This whole sequence keeps the entire cast awake and on their toes.

I think something that the Big Three really offer this show is a more detailed hierarchy of strength, which otherwise used to just boil down to pros and students. Mirio and company are a riot, and there's a sense of unity and camaraderie between them that implies many more stories left to be told. They're a new bar for the 1-A students to reach for, but more importantly they're a new chance for the audience to plug themselves into this world. If you were a hero in training, how far would you take it? Mirio's swagger pries on that exact part of my imagination.

Elsewhere in the big picture, just to round the season out with a little more meat, we begin to develop the new storyline. A new villain group led by a man named Overhaul is crossing paths with the League of Villains, and we very briefly touch on the man who was once All Might's very own sidekick. We don't have a lot to go on with either of these guys as of this episode, sadly.

So that's a wrap on season three. As always I'm trying to wrap my brain around how good this series has been at encapsulating the Shonen Jump formula with so much freshness and sincerity, but it was also this season where I most found myself in awe of its thematic ambitions. It really wants to bend the definition of heroism into new shapes, and I'm going to be rooting for it all the way as it does, and as underwhelming as the License Exams were compared to the arcs before them, I came out of them appreciating the experience as a stepping stone for our fledgling heroes. As for this episode in particular, it does have to be noted that this is more of an introduction to things to come than a showstopper in its own right, but I found it electrifying nonetheless. I love these new characters (especially Mirio), and the series' fervor still lingers even when we're just warmly strolling our way into a new arc.

Rating: A

My Hero Academia is currently streaming on Funimation and Crunchyroll.

Sam Leach records about One Piece for The One Piece Podcast and you can find him on Twitter @LuckyChainsaw