WARNING: The following contains spoilers for My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, in select theaters now.
My Hero Academia is known for wearing its references on its sleeve. Many of the series' principal heroes and villains pull from western comics and superheroes as disparate as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Tintin. The anime's second spinoff film, Heroes Rising adds to this in its main, Quirk-collecting villain, Nine, whose incredible powerset, world-domination plans and specially selected band of devoted acolytes seeking to make his vision for a new world a reality are strongly reminiscent of X-Men supervillain, Apocalypse.
But Nine isn't alone. His top henchman, the cigar-toting Chojuro Kon, aka Chimera, may also remind fans of another classic character from another classic franchise; one who originates from the same part of the world as the hit anime: Godzilla.
Chimera's Kaiju Transformation
Making his anime debut in Heroes Rising, Chimera doesn't quite fit the kaiju bill on first glance. As his villainous alter ego's name indicates, Chimera is an amalgamation of various animals: the body of a blue wolf, the talons of a bird of prey and the tail of a reptile. Even in the superpower-dominated world of My Hero Academia where it's not unusual for Quirks to severely augment one's physical appearance, Chimera claims his animalistic look makes him an outcast.
His fire-breathing powers don't exactly help, either, inviting further comparisons to the kind of beast that requires pitchforks and calls to be slain. It's for this reason that Nine was able to easily recruit Chimera to his cause, promising him a world where only the powerful are allowed to rule.
It's not until Chimera -- going in for Round Two against a group of Class 1-A's strongest during the film's action-heavy third act -- is forced to kick things up a notch that the Godzilla parallels also become clear. As it turns out, fire-breathing and anthropomorphic animal parts aren't even the villain's final form. When enraged, he can grow in both size and monstrosity -- tipping the human to beast ratio over until he becomes spiny, winged and incapable of communicating much more than deafening roars.
His fire-breath also gets an upgrade in this form, becoming more of a concentrated energy beam. All his opponents can do is hide for cover as the beam blasts away the landscape around them, as we've seen Godzilla do to Tokyo time and time again in the King of all Monsters' own movies. While the iconic kaiju's signature attack is radioactive rather than purely heat-based as Chimera's is implied to be, the visual impact is very much the same.
Chimera's Frosty Defeat
Once Todoroki figures out that the best way to fight fire is, well, not with more fire but with ice, the connection between Chimera and Godzilla only strengthens. While Iida, Tsuyu and Kirishima distract the powerful villain with a flurry of attacks, Todoroki waits for an opening so that he can get as close to Chimera as possible. When that happens, the dual-powered hero lowers his body temperature as much as he can before shooting ice directly down his foe's gullet.
Eventually, Chimera becomes so cold that he freezes over entirely, finally bringing an end to his rampaging. Those who know their Godzilla lore will recognize this as one of the more successful methods of bringing the titular monster's own rampages to an end. "Anti-nuclear cold weapons" played a large part in 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, and later again in the 2016 reboot, Shin Godzilla, to name just two. And just to prove the effectiveness of the technique, both films serve, in their own way, as possible final chapters for Godzilla.
Series creator, Kohei Horikoshi, has shown his love for Godzilla before by playfully remixing his characters with the tokusatsu classics' own. Perhaps the reference in Heroes Rising is another pointed one, or perhaps Todoroki himself is something of a kaiju historian.