About Quirklessness in MHA (and why it still bugs me)
I’ve been thinking about how quirklessness is handled in MHA, and I think the issue isn’t that the story changes direction. It’s that it never really reconciles what it starts with and what it becomes.
Because the story does start with quirklessness. That’s not just a detail, it’s the foundation. Izuku Midoriya lives in a world where power decides value, and he has none of it. So the story begins with a pretty simple question: "Can someone be a hero even without a quirk?". And early on, it really feels like the story is willing to sit with that question, reflecting on limits, effort, exclusion, and on our protagonist wanting something that he is basically told he isn't allowed to have. You see it in how Bakugo treats him, in how people dismiss him, and in the moment where All Might tells him outright that he can’t be a hero. And later, the entrance exam also reinforces it, it being that, a person without quirk, and even specifically without a battle quirk, isn't really in the picture of this world.
As the story expands, that question starts to fade. It shifts into the OFA vs AFO conflict, bringing in themes of legacy, power and responsibility. That escalation makes sense, especially for a shonen, but the problem is that original question doesn’t grow with it. Instead, it gets left behind, and the story stops asking whether a quirkless person can be a hero. And the thing is, that shift doesn’t inherently require abandoning the original question. The larger conflict and the idea of quirklessness aren’t mutually exclusive, and the story could have continued to explore both at the same time instead of letting one fade out.
Once Izuku gets power, the question changes. Now it’s not about whether someone like him can be a hero, it’s about how someone with massive power is supposed to use it, like we see in the Sports Festival and the internships. It becomes a different story. Not a bad one. Just not the same one we were given (at first glance) in the beginning.
And yeah, a counterpoint to this is that Izuku still earns it. That he works harder than anyone else and proves himself as a Hero. And sure, that’s true. But that only matters after he’s already been let in the system. Before that, there is no effort that gets a quirkless person through. So it stops being about effort and becomes about permission. Even outside of formal structures, that assumption shows up in how people respond to him. Apart from All Might briefly suggesting a different path like being a cop, no one, not his mom, not his middle school teacher, heck not even a random classmate, actually redirects Izuku towards another way of contributing. The response isn’t “find another path”, it’s “give up”, which narrows his future rather than possibly reshaping it.
And what really stands out is that the story almost connects quirklessness as exclusion with the idea that heroism is really about access and permission, but it doesn’t quite do it. Izuku goes from being completely excluded to standing right in the middle of Hero society. At U.A., with teachers like Aizawa, who operate at the top of the system, surrounded by students with all kinds of amazing quirks, he sees how the system works from the inside. That should matter. That should lead somewhere in terms of how Izuku and the story reflect about quirklessness in Hero society. But it doesn’t really go there.
Even when characters like Shinso show up, someone who is told his quirk is not suited for hero work, the focus is more on him as an individual than on what that says about the system itself. And when you actually look at it, the line between a weak quirk and no quirk is not that clear. Aizawa relies on skill and gear and Shinso on strategy and training. Even the license exam shows that teamwork and awareness matter just as much as raw power. So at some point it stops feeling like it’s about ability and starts feeling like it’s about permission.
And that’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Quirklessness is treated like exclusion from the start. Izuku is mocked, dismissed, told not to even try, and it feels like the world has already decided people like him don’t belong. But the system behind that is never really challenged. It just stays there while the story works around it by giving him power. So the rule doesn’t change. There’s just an exception.
And this seems to be a pattern in the story. All Might starts quirkless but only becomes the Symbol of Peace after getting OFA. Aoyama is given a quirk that hurts him to use. Melissa Shield represents quirkless contribution through technology, but only through rare access and resources. Even support gear suggests quirkless heroism is possible, but only if you already have the means to get it. There are ways around the system, but they all depend on being exceptional in some way. And don’t get me wrong, looking at superheroes from a general POV, it’s obvious that all of them are exceptions, but the difference between the exceptions in MHA and in Marvel and DC, for example, is that in MHA the exceptions are structurally produced, while in superhero comics they often come from accidents or chance events that could, at least in theory, happen to anyone.
You can see this even more clearly when quirked characters lose their quirks, as seen with All Might and Mirio. All Might becomes quirkless after passing on OFA, and while the story acknowledges that change, it never really sits with what it means for him to exist that way. Instead, his role narrows almost entirely to mentorship, with the focus on what he used to be. The story doesn’t really delve on the idea that he could continue functioning as a hero through experience and support equipment, and it never treats a quirkless All Might as something that could operate in the field through technology. Instead, it resolves that possibility in a much more limited way with the armored suit during the final battle, presenting it as a one-off exception rather than something the narrative had been building up towards or something established as a consistent method of operating in heroics. Something similar happens with Mirio, who loses his quirk and still continues to act as a hero for a while, which could have been a real opportunity to explore quirkless heroism in practice. But that idea gets cut off when Eri restores his quirk, instead of following through on what that situation could mean. So even when the story brings up quirkless heroism directly, it doesn’t really build on it and it ends up circling back to restoring or compensating for power instead.
That pattern becomes even more noticeable when the story eventually brings Izuku back to that same position. By the end, he returns to being quirkless, which creates a clear point of convergence with the story’s original premise. At that stage, the narrative doesn’t need to fully develop a new arc around quirkless heroism, because it's the ending (duh), but it could have at least implied what that reality looks like after everything that has happened. Instead, the story once again turns to an exception. Through advanced support equipment that effectively replicates his former abilities, Izuku is able to continue operating in a way that resembles his powered self. But rather than expanding on what quirkless heroism might look like in general, this reinforces the same pattern seen throughout the story: access to heroism still depends on extraordinary circumstances, whether that’s inheriting a rare power or having access to equally rare technology.
So even at the point where the story basically circles back to its starting condition, it doesn’t redefine the rule, it simply finds another way around it.
And the weirdest part is that the story never really settles on what a hero even is. It introduces different definitions over time, but they don’t replace each other, they just pile up. At the start, heroism is tied to the system, public image, rankings and recognition, as seen through characters like Mount Lady. Then it shifts to Izuku and All Might, where being a hero means saving people without hesitation (save to win), acting on instinct regardless of the outcome. And later, through Bakugo and Endeavor, it explores the idea of winning in order to protect (win to save), where strength, victory and being the best are what make that protection possible. All of these can be valid parts of what heroism is supposed to be, and the story clearly wants to present them as such. But they each prioritize something different, recognition, instinct or victory, and the story never really brings them together into a single, coherent idea of what being a hero actually means. Because of that, heroism itself stays unstable, and there’s no clear standard to measure someone against, which is exactly what makes the question of whether a quirkless person can be a hero so difficult to answer within the story. And while the story does seem to lean more towards a “save first” kind of heroism by the end, especially in how Izuku deals with Shigaraki and his emphasis on reaching out to people, it still doesn’t fully resolve the earlier contradictions between these different definitions.
So it doesn’t feel resolved. It just feels displaced.
To be fair, the shift into a larger conflict does allow the story to explore legacy and responsibility in a way the original setup probably couldn’t carry on its own. But it also means the story never really follows through on its first question, that it brings it up, comes back to it sometimes, but never commits to it in a structural way.
A version of this story probably wouldn’t even need a different plot. It would just need a different focus. One where quirklessness isn’t just a starting disadvantage to move past, but something that keeps shaping how the world is understood.
And that’s what bugs me. Not that the story changed. But that it never really decided what its first question was worth. Especially considering how important it was to Izuku in the beginning.