The biggest failing in my hero academia is the heroes inability to recognise a failing in its own practices. Aka, heroes are blind to the failings of hero society. Pro heroes and heroes in training alike cannot understand how having a society dependent on heroes inherently creates prejudices as well as inaction in the society.
In chapter 281 Shigaraki said “heroes have been pretending to protect society, how many times in the past throughout multiple generations have they turned a blind eye to things they couldn’t protect? Or silently swept the filth of society under the rug. It’s been building up so frivolously” during this speech there is a flashback to him, a wreck on the streets, with someone passing by thinking “soon, someone, a police officer or hero or someone will come help you” he then continues by saying “The resulting rot emanates from within and decay ensues. It's the small accumulation of this rot, the trash being coddled by being protected all the time. The roleplayers who only serve to spoil a meek society. The destruction that will ensue, is merely a result of all the reckless grandstanding you’ve accumulated. That’s how the muck gets cast out, that's how they break and retaliate. That's how it loops back again. And again. And again. Simple right? You don’t need to understand, in fact you’re incapable of understanding, that's the dichotomy of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’” and endeavor just replied “thanks for your monologue but you’re already dead” and deku says “I can’t forgive the likes of you”.
They never stop to consider what he said, to them it's just the psychotic rambling of a villain, someone to be beaten and then forgotten, someone who never received an education per traditional standards and thus has no valid opinions on the world.
Heroes existing has given way to a mass application of the bystander effect where before it meant that if there are more people in a situation people are less likely to help because other people will probably help instead, this time the citizens stop helping other people because they assume a hero will come in and do the saving so they don’t need to do anything. This goes back to that cut in of Shigaraki’s speech when a lady left him in the streets saying “someone else will help you”. Hero society stripped the citizens of their individual drive to help others because now helping others has become a career and ceased being a moral and empathetic obligation
Hero society has also created the idea of “heroic” versus “villainous” quirks. This in turn created a whole system of bullying and shaming people who have stereotypically villainous quirks simply for being born regardless of how they act and behave. This distinction between heroic and villainous quirks is what allowed Bakugou to be praised for his quirk and put on a pedestal despite a god complex that caused him to bully and suicide bait other students while simultaneously causing Shinsou to be bullied, ridiculed, and ignored for having a villainous quirk even though he was a quiet dork who likes coffee, cats, and wants to be a hero.
This is also the reason why I don’t agree with Shinsou being placed in the dekusquad, as previously mentioned, deku cannot see any failing in the hero society. He idolized everything that the hero society stands for and would take a “don’t let other people dictate how you live” approach to shinsou rather than addressing the fact that Shinsou was hurt because the hero society perpetuates stereotypes and the bystander effect it creates prevented anyone from stepping in to ever help Shinsou.
Similarly Deku doesn’t seem to believe that hero society failed by allowing Endeavor to be the number one hero despite what he knows endeavor did to Shouto and the rest of his family. The story basically says “yeah he's a bad person but he's also a good hero so the fact he hurt his family shouldn’t matter” this is why the top three all go to endeavors agency to train, It falls into the category of how hawks killed twice and despite the fact that we all loved him as a character and he had a good personality he still hurt people and needed to be stopped. Endeavor should also be stopped but he won’t be because hero society doesn’t care that he did something bad as long as the good he does outweighs the bad.
I’ve said it before and I'll say it again though, hero society is to blame for many villains including Shigaraki. Shigaraki could be a non issue if someone had stepped in to help, be it a random person on the street or a hero. If he had been helped, if this society had more kindness and less bystander, then many of the issues that shigaraki faced or prejudices that he gained, would never have happened to him, the same applies to the majority of the villains in the story. Many of them were not inherently bad, unlike H.H.Holmes who said "I was born with the very devil in me, I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of an intellectual man to be great. The inclination to murder came to me as naturally as the inspiration to do right comes to the majority of persons.". The villains in My Hero Academia are products of their surroundings, hurt, ignored, ridiculed, shamed, and discarded. They were broken and in trying to put the pieces back together they realized they couldn’t quite do it right, society had stolen a couple of their most important pieces, and they wanted to take those pieces back from the ones who took it. So they banded together and they wanted things to change, they didn’t want to hurt people they merely wanted people to stop hurting them.
