Manga review: My Hero Academia volume 5 by Kōhei Horikoshi
It took me about an hour to read this. My grandma bought me it on walmart.com I think? First time read, although I have watched the anime. The genres are adventure, science fantasy, and superhero. It was published in 2016.
Class 1-A listed in most to least favorite:
Asui, Aizawa, Todoroki, Tokoyami, Bakugo, Ashido, Jiro, Ida, Kirishima, Koda, Shoji, Yaoyorozu, Aoyama, Uraraka, Sato, Hagakure, Ojiro, Sero, Midoriya, Kaminari. (The main characters are All Might, Bakugo, Ida, Midoriya, Todoroki, and Uraraka.)
The thing about M.H.A. is that it'd be so good if it wasn't so bad. That is to say, it has potential— there are good bones, if you will. But it doesn't follow through and has too many issues to be considered good in the way it could be.
Points about the story:
- Ashido vs Tokoyami isn't shown in the manga sadly. Although, it didn't play much of a part in the anime either.
- I really enjoy the fight between Bakugo and Tokoyami. It's nicely done, I appreciate how it shows (one of) Tokoyami's weakness and Bakugo's smarts. And the part where Bakugo grabs Tokoyami's beak is really silly to me. He's immediately like "I surrender 🧍♂️"
- It has Shoto's backstory, which is abuse (relatable). I find it strange that a lot of people, namingly pro heros, seem to know about that to some extent, yet the first person to try and help him is his classmate whom he declared war on. Showcases how the hero world functions, I think.
- Mineta literally should not have been a character to begin with. It's lazy and bad character design that's used as an excuse to sexualize almost every woman character and show blatant sexual harassment. It's not exactly that I hate him but that I hate the premise of his character. If his quirk or his actual personality had been fleshed out even a little bit this would be different but he exists only to give the author an excuse to flaunt his misogyny.
- Sad thing number two is that all Uraraka wants is a better life for her parents, which makes her put her happiness to the side for the sake of saving and making money.
- Stain's appearance largely relies on ableism to be scary.
- The character's appearances in the manga are a little more realistic than in the anime, so that's nice.
- The explanation of why Bakugo wasn't holding back against Uraraka feels kind of like the author is scared of his audience. It's a fighting match, they should both be expected to fight. It isn't very unrealistic that someone might say that, but the scene wasn't "this guy is wrong, look at Aizawa tell him off" it was more "please don't be mad at me, here's why." Lots of telling, not enough showing.
- Tsuyu doesn't get much... page(?) time here, but it's forgivable because Aizawa and Present Mic get a bit more than usual.
Since each volume is pretty short, I think I'm gonna do these tests for all of the manga series I've read so far, I.E. volume five and the volumes leading up to it. It passes all of them except the Ali Nahdee test, sick dog test, and Vito Russo test because there aren't any indigenous women, disabled people, or queer people. It passed the Deggans test because all of them are Japanese but it's notable that all of them are also light skinned.
6/10, I cautiously recommend. Here's the Wikipedia for the book.
