English Dub Review: My Hero Academia “Prepping for the School Festival is the Most Fun Part”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Class 1A starts putting together their musical act, as each student is broken up into teams, with one team on instruments, one on dancing, and another special effects. However, Deku also meets with All Might in order to commence with his training of One For All: keeping at 20% for extended periods and controlling bursts of air. Meanwhile, Gentle Criminal and his assistant La Brava continue setting their sights on the festival in order to make their mark in villain history, and Eri arrives at the festival.

OUR TAKE
We’re still in the early stages of an arc, especially one that seems like it will be pretty lax in nature, so naturally not a whole lot happened in this week’s episode. The main highlight would most likely go to the assembling of Class 1A’s game plan of putting on a concert, which is all kinds of fun comedy and shenanigans that are character centric in nature, even with some surprises that stood out like Bakugo being really good at the drums, and some not very surprising like Aoyama wanting to be a disco ball. It also puts more focus on Jiro as this arc’s center, more or less, as she’ll be taking literal center stage for the performance. How much that will lead her to be in the fights to come is another matter, but we’ll get back to that.

Gentle Criminal and La Brava also get a bit more fleshing out this time, as we learn more of Gentle’s nature as a villain. Like Stain, Overhaul, and the League of Villains, Gentle is himself a reaction to the established norms of heroism in this world, fighting against it by having each of his heists and crimes send a specific message or draw attention to an unnoticed injustice, even if it is a minor one like selling expired pudding at a convenience store. It also looks like he doesn’t care very much if his message is received by that many people overall as long as it’s out there, though that may just be a calm veneer in the face of unwanted obscurity. Even so, it looks like he and Brava are in for a big heist as they’re going after UA High School during the festival. Boy, these kids can’t catch a break.

And we have some slight progress on Deku better controlling One For All, though minor compared to other steps forward. It’s a bit odd seeing him control this skill so well in the movie and then seeing him only starting it here, but even if it’s out of order a bit, it’s good to know that something good and useful comes of this part. From what I’ve heard about future developments in the manga, this is nowhere near the levels of complexity that is explored of One For All and its legacy, though I imagine that’s pretty far off in the anime adaptation. For now, we continue with this rather low stakes arc as we inch closer to the end of the season.