My Hero Academia has been keeping us excited with each new season since it debuted in 2016. Now that season five has officially been announced, there are a lot of possibilities for how the next season could go, which just keeps the series in the forefront of viewers’ minds.
But there are also a lot of anxieties involved in long-running TV series, especially anime, since they can often become weaker as the series goes on. Here are five reasons we’re excited to see what’s going to happen in season five and five reasons why we’re nervous about it.
10 Excited: New Power For Deku
The season five teaser in the last episode of season four shows Deku having a dreamed conversation with the past users of One For All (which feels only a little bit like Aang communing with the past Avatars). When he wakes up, he finds that his hand is glowing with some mysterious new ability that’s left unexplained. The opportunity to see Deku leveling up in season five will be a really fun experience, since we’ve seen him slowly coming to master his new Quirk throughout the first four seasons.
9 Nervous: Joint Training Arc
The Joint Training Arc is likely where the next season will start off, since it’s the next arc in the manga. The arc sees classes 1A and 1B teaming up again in order to train against each other.
While this could definitely be fun, since there will be lots of opportunities to see everyone a little stronger than they were the last time everyone was all together, there’s also a feeling of retreading old ground, since the students have seen a lot of combat and done a lot of things since the last time they were competing against each other.
8 Excited: Tomura Shigaraki’s Backstory
Tomura Shigaraki has been the most consistent villain of My Hero Academia so far in the series, but viewers don’t actually know very much about him as a character, outside of his major motivations. This arc will likely show some more of what Tomura is plotting and will also give us more information about where he comes from and what led him down the path that he is on. Getting to know the real motives for why he’s so eager to destroy the world is a great thing to look forward to in a superhero story.
7 Nervous: Fewer Superhero Shenanigans
The student will certainly have to deal with some big bads in season five, but for the most part, the focus will be on training and generally being in a school environment.
That means less opportunity to see them using their powers out in the field or seeing them actually helping people. It also lowers the stakes for the characters, since there won’t be as much mortal danger involved in just competing with their classmates.
6 Excited: School Antics
On the other hand, the main characters are all students learning how to be superheroes. Most shonen anime have a cast of pretty young main characters doing their best to get stronger, and the school setting puts them all in one location where they can work together and compete against each other to hone their skills. These are often pretty fun arcs to watch and will probably mean match-ups between characters that haven’t yet gone up against each other.
5 Nervous: This Could Be The Final Season
My Hero Academia is immensely popular, and the popularity hasn’t really seemed to fall off much. But there still is a sense that five seasons of an anime can feel a little long in the tooth.
The series ending after five seasons wouldn’t be the first time that a shonen anime ended before the end of the official series (looking at you, Bleach), but it would be a huge bummer to not get to see everything get wrapped up, if this does turn out to be the last season.
4 Excited: Supporting Characters
Part of the fun of having the students all back together in a school setting is that there aren’t as many distractions in the form of supervillains, working, and studying to keep the characters apart and to therefore keep us focused on a small group of characters, with Deku at the center. This likely means we’ll get to spend a lot more time with the supporting characters who have fallen to the wayside in the last season. Hopefully, this means more backstory and character development for everyone.
3 Nervous: Dangling Plot Threads
Season four left a lot of things up in the air when it comes to what happened to villains like Tomura Shigaraki or even Gentle, and there’s still the hidden threat of All For One lurking in the shadows.
The season will already have a lot going on, and it seems unlikely that there will be space to get back to all of the characters that haven’t gotten real closure; going an entire season without seeing big bad All For One, for example, would be a pretty big bummer. Leaving so many plot threads unresolved could make this season a bigger letdown.
2 Excited: Endeavor As The New Number One Hero
With All Might’s powers officially going kaput after his last battle with All For One, he can no longer fight as a hero and therefore has stepped down as Number One Hero. This has left space for Endeavor to take his place. It’ll be exciting in season five to see him really step into the role and to see if his attitude changes at all toward his son and toward the idea of being a hero in general.
1 Nervous: Pacing
There’s a lot of manga material that could be used in season five. While the series has been pretty good about pacing so far and, despite representing several chapters of the manga in one episode of the anime a lot of the time, the storylines haven’t felt rushed. Still, there is a lot of ground to cover, and there’s always the concern that this is the season where pacing could be an issue, especially considering the focus on the students training at school. The need to get through that story and making sure to sow the seeds of later plot issues could mean really jam-packing things into this season.