My Hero Academia doesn't take place in Musutafu
I may have posted about this before, but I wanted to make a dedicated post about this. It's commonly known in the Western fandom that 'Musutafu' is the city where UA is located, where Izuku and Bakugou and the Todorokis live, and where pretty much anything important happens. It's basically MHA's equivalent of Gotham from batfam fanfics.
Except, I'm certain this is false, and I have evidence.
For starters, Musutafu is mentioned in canon sources I believe just twice: first in the dust cover from the Japanese volume 2,
where Backdraft is doing an advertising campaign for the city's fire department. (Photo credit @ shibuyasmash on twitter)
Secondly, it's the name of the middle school where Kirishima and Ashido attended.
(Photo taken by me, from volume 16)
I did check and the kanji are the same in both sources, so it's definitely the same Musutafu and not two different places. The school is certainly named after the city it's in.
However- and this is the smoking gun: Kirishima and Ashido are from the Chiba prefecture, placing the city of Musutafu in Chiba.
But Izuku, and the rest of the origin trio, live "around Shizuoka prefecture".
(Photos taken by me, of the Ultra Analysis supplementary book)
And while the two prefectures are close by, putting our protagonists (and UA) in Chiba would be a bit of a stretch.
(From Wikipedia, edited by me)
Actually, if you consider the anime canon, season 7 gave us a location for UA, which matches pretty well with the evidence so far.
(From MHA season 7)
I've pointed to it right there, on the coast near the western edge of the Shizuoka prefecture.
(This isn't super relevant to the issue at hand, but not a lot of people realize that UA is near the coast- you can see it in this shot from the second season 7 opening, and I think you can also see the ocean from a window sometime in season 1 or 2 when Izuku is talking to Uraraka.)
(From MHA season 7)
So basically, to wrap things up, I don't believe it's possible that Musutafu is the name of the city where the main events of My Hero Academia take place. The name is barely mentioned in canon sources, and when it is it's somewhere else entirely. My guess is the misonception started early on in the fandom's infancy and spread quickly, especially among fanfic writers. And since canon never really gave us a city name, there was no reason for the fandom to give that up.
But what does it matter? This is such an entrenched misconception that the wiki claims it to be true, and I'm sure if I went to go edit it it'd just be put right back. I've talked to people about this before, and one writer's response basically amounted to "cool, but everybody's expecting Mustafu so that's what I'll continue using".
I guess this is just one of those little inconsequential things that annoys me for no good reason.
(Please go check out this Twitter thread- this is where I learned of this and I'm basically just summarizing the thread here. That one goes into much more detail.)
