It's so hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that My Hero Academia is ending.

For context, MHA is maybe the third anime I ever watched. Not counting Spirited Away and a few seasons of Pokemon, I was first introduced to anime through Attack on Titan, then decided to explore the medium more fully after falling in love with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. And the next show I decided to check out after that was, of course, this silly little superhero show that only had two seasons out at the time. So it's safe to say that My Hero Academia was one of my formative experiences as an anime fan, one of those shows that defined for me what this medium was capable of and why it was worth devoting so much of my life to. I fell in love with its charming characters, its pulse-pounding action, its deeply earnest portrayal of heroism that wasn't ashamed to be corny and heartfelt. And in the seven years since, I've continued to find new reasons to love it, even as my taste has evolved and my understanding of anime has deepened. As much as I've changed, one thing remains indisputably true: My Hero Academia is a show I'm always excited to return to.

But seven years is a long time, and the anime industry of today feels worlds away from when this show started. Smash hits like Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen have rewritten how shonen anime gets made and how fans engage with it. There's more anime being made than ever, but it's all spread so thin almost none of it gets the resources it needs to be the best version of itself. And somewhere along the line, it feels like My Hero Academia slipped through the cracks. What use does this earnest, sentimental show have in today's more jaded landscape? What use does the world of today have for heroes anymore? In a way, it's like our world has started to mirror the world of the show itself: paranoid, cynical, distrustful of the very concept of heroes that once drew us to it as surely as Deku and his classmates were drawn to All Might's seemingly eternal silhouette. And now we're staring down the end of the anime that once stood at the forefront of mainstream appeal, left to wonder what remains when the dust finally settles.

And what remains, it turns out, is one of the best goddamn anime I've ever had the pleasure of watching.

There's just no getting around it: My Hero Academia fucking rules. From start to finish, from 2016 to now, it's remained one of the most consistently entertaining, emotional, and thoughtful series to ever spring from Shonen Jump's pages. A story that effortlessly merges heartfelt sentimentality with complex moral quandaries, that deconstructs its own premise to reach the beating heart of heroism itself, that isn't afraid to call for massive, society-reshaping change if that's what's necessary to right the wrongs of our current system. And it delivers those themes through deeply rewarding personal journeys for almost all of its characters, no matter how small, and a series of no-holds-barred superhero showdowns that will have you punching the air one second and screaming in panic the next. My Hero Academia is excellent. It's always been excellent. And as it barrels headfirst into its final stretch, it's never been more obvious just how spectacularly it's going to stick the landing.

It's tricky to talk about Season 7 in isolation because unlike most seasons of MHA, it doesn't stop comfortably at the end of an arc. This is, after all, the final battle, the final showdown against One For All, the League of Villains, all their myriad supporters, and the failures of hero society itself made manifest in the lost souls they've let slip through the cracks. And with how massive the cast has grown, it's inevitably going to be a massive, sprawling affair with far too many moving pieces to comfortably wrap up in the space of a single season. So after a brief stretch of build-up to set the stakes, this season is all about climax, countless skirmishes between countless characters as UA enacts its final plan to take down OFA and rebuild their world into something better. It's all gas no brakes as plot threads from all throughout this series come crashing and tangling together, finding closure for every step of the journey we've taken to get here in the most suitably explosive and cathartic ways imaginable. And even then it only has enough time to get us to the start of the final final battle before saying "see you later" for one last season next year. But we've waited this long for the grand finale, we can wait a little more. I'll take an appetizer this fantastic en route to the main course any day.

So in essence, this season is all about taking MHA's sprawling narrative and whittling it down to its core one step at a time. And I think it's worth taking a second to acknowledge what an insane challenge Horikoshi set for himself here. With the final confrontation between Deku, Shigaraki and All For One looming, it falls to this season to make room for them by finding closure for literally every other character's story arc. Not just big supporting players like Bakugo and Uraraka, but minor characters we haven't seen in years, one-off background players we didn't even expect to see again, heroes, villains, bystanders, civilian collaborators... at times it feels like every single named character, no matter how small, is given a part to play here. And not only does this season have to resolve all those storylines in time for Deku to take center stage, it has to make those resolutions mean something. Every conclusion is a single thread in the grand tapestry that is My Hero Academia's thesis on what it means to be a hero, all intertwining and building on each other's meaning. It can't just be checking items off a checklist; the way these countless little stories resolve is crucial. And Horikoshi has to accomplish all of that without it dragging, or losing focus, or running out of steam, or rushing to get to the main event, or letting even a single one of these moving parts fall through the cracks.Say what you will, the man clearly loves a challenge.

I'd love to say he pulls it off flawlessly and this semi-final stretch is nothing but home run after home run. Sadly, I can't. As much as I loved this season, MHA's final battle has more than a handful of issues running through it, issues that would've easily tanked a weaker show if the good stuff weren't still so spectacular.

The most obvious issue is an over-reliance on flashbacks. In order to keep a lot of the final battle's biggest surprises secret, the show skips over most of the planning the heroes and villains do in the build-up so all the big twists and reversals can come out of nowhere, only to double-back and explain how those twists came about retroactively once they've landed. Which, you know, I get the instinct, I wouldn't want to sit through five episodes watching everyone make plans either. But this happens so many times, and the explanatory flashbacks are usually so long, that it starts to feel like trudging through waste-deep mud just to get through all these fights in a timely manner. Which only gets worse when the fight starts flashing back to itself, bouncing back in time to cover several different battlefields in succession. We'll finish up a massive fight between say, Endeavor and All For One, only to flash back twenty minutes earlier to see what Kirishima and Mina were getting up to at the same time the big guns were trading blows. It's flashback on top of flashback on top of flashback at a time when the story needs forward momentum more than ever, and all I can say is thank god all the stuff it's flashing back to is still compelling in its own right, or this would've gone from an annoyance to absolutely insufferable.

But the bigger issue for me comes from the main villain himself. I'm going to be blunt: All For One is boring. He's the most generic big bad imaginable, no interesting goals beyond world domination/destruction and no interesting powers beyond Be Stronger Than Everyone thanks to his infinite quirk stockpile. In a series that's always excelled at writing its bad guys and imbuing them with compelling humanity, the biggest bad of them all comes off as little more than an overpowered punching bag who always has some bullshit trump card to win every fight he's in. Which worked fine when he was still in the shadows, showing up for brief moments of horrific destruction and otherwise letting the much more compelling Shigaraki and Friends take the spotlight. But now that he's actually out in the spotlight, endlessly monologuing about being eeeeeeevil and negating everyone's attempts to stop him with all the grace of literally being handed an Everything-Proof Shield by Horikoshi himself, all that horror has rapidly leeched away. Turns out, the only thing that made him compelling was how well he he managed to hide what a lame loser he was. And now that he's over-exposed, I can't take him seriously again, no matter how many Deux ex Machinas he pulls out of his ass (Honestly, a lot of the villains feel like they're saved by the hand of the author this arc, but it's most obvious with AFO).

So there's a lot to criticize about Season 7. It's a huge, messy, ambitious climax that's trying to do everything at once, and it's no surprise it buckles under the weight of all that ambition. If I was feeling ungenerous, I could see myself calling this a pretty lackluster season of MHA overall, weighed down by all those problems that keep it from reaching its full potential.

Except.

It turns out, Horikoshi is really fucking good at endings.

It's always an open question how much a mangaka plans for their story's finale. Especially in Shonen Jump, where series are pushed to run for as long as they're profitable, even the best-laid plans for an ending can be led astray. Sure, not every story needs a full roadmap laid out from the start, but when you ask an audience to invest so much time into your work, making them feel like it was all worth something at the end can make all the difference in the world. And what's become clear in My Hero Academia's final stretch is that Horikoshi was prepared for everything. I don't know exactly how much he had planned, but whether he had lists of notes written out from chapter 1 or if his story sense is just that good in the heat of the moment, he somehow managed to pull off the impossible: he delivered on every front. He took that staggering tapestry of intertwining story threads and made each and every one of them sing. Every single character you've been following for all these years, whether you've cheered them on from day 1 or forgot they even existed, is sent home in triumph and leaves such an indelible mark on My Hero Academia's soul that I can no longer imagine the show without them.

Like, fucking hell, where do I even start? Endeavor somehow becomes one of my favorite characters as he completes one of the single greatest redemption arcs of all time! The forgotten kids of class 1-B showcase why they deserve to share the spotlight once and for all! An unexpected return from some of the most delightful villains fighting for justice! Jiro and Tokoyami drawing blood from the devil himself! Mina facing her trauma head-on and triumphing over it! Even Ojiro and Shoji, who've had basically nothing to do the entire series, somehow pull off a genuinely fantastic fantasy racism subplot in the space of a single episode! Lemillion! Aizawa! Aoyama! FUCKING KATSUKI BAKUGO! There wasn't a single episode that didn't leave me screaming with glee at least once. Seeing all these characters I've known for so long coming together and raising their voices in a single harmony was cathartic on a level I didn't even know was possible. These aren't just a bunch of kids anymore; they're heroes. They're heroes in the truest sense imaginable, raising a burning fist in a dark world and refusing to let the embers die, rekindling a fading flame until it can blaze back to life brighter than ever. And seeing their stories brought to a close with such overwhelming passion made every frustrating flashback or boring AFO monologue suddenly as unimportant as a speck of dust on the wall.

And then there's Uraraka.

Jesus Fucking Hell, there's Uraraka.

Ever since I first watched this show back in 2017, I've been in love with this girl. I've cheered for her, I've cried with her, I've put my faith in her oddly paw-like hands as she's grown from a sweet and bubbly girl to someone who understands the true value of that compassion. But after this season? After her final confrontation with Toga? There's just no denying it anymore: Ochako Uraraka is one of the single greatest shonen heroines of all time. Her relentless, unstoppable, defiant kindness in the face of the world's cruelty is the single most inspiring force in this entire damn show. And it's that unyielding love, that refusal to reject the humanity even of her worst foes, that saves the world in a more profound way than All Might or Deku ever could. In her heartbreaking showdown with Toga, we don't just see the salvation of one lost girl; we see the way forward for ALL of us, everyone blinded by hate or ignorance, everyone who turned a blind eye to the cracks in this seemingly perfect system. All Might might be the Symbol of Peace, and Deku might be the champion of hope, but Uraraka is the raw, bleeding heart that makes this world worth fighting for. And seeing her and Toga find each other, choose each other, save each other against all odds, left me sobbing harder than this show's ever made me cry before. To think the show that inflicted Mineta upon us could pull off a story of queer acceptance and love this unfathomably beautiful.

But that's been the magic of watching My Hero Academia for so long. For all its stumbles, it's a series that's always gotten back on its feet, a series that's never stopped trying to go beyond Plus Ultra. And if there's one thing season 7 proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that this long, long journey was absolutely worth it. This story is coming to an end not with a whimper, not with a bang, but with a goddamn fireworks shower that fulfills every promise it ever made. Between this and Attack on Titan, I really picked the perfect starting points to my anime adventure, series that would grow and change with me but never lose the wonderful spark that made me fall in love with them in the first place. And just as my faith in Attack on Titan was proven right by its all-timer finale, My Hero Academia has rewarded my investment with a spectacular final arc that, despite its issues, will cement this series as one of anime's most enduring triumphs. All that's left to do now is wait for the final season to bring it all home. I've spent so much of my life with this show; now, at last, it's time to bid it farewell. And I can't wait to share that experience with you all as I say goodbye to my anime-fan starting line, one last time.