English Dub Review: My Hero Academia “Our Brawl”

Overview (Spoilers):

The fight continues despite Deku’s quirk going berserk. Deku attempts to go quirkless for a part of the fight but eventually regains confidence in himself again. He leaves everything else to Uraraka and the rest of his group while he deals with Shinso. 1-A comes out on top again and wins the competition overall.

Our Take:

Studio Bones just continues to impress with how they’re animating this arc. I touched on it a bit previously but I remember reading this part in the manga and had a hard time following. I have enjoyed this arc way more than when I read it, same with some of the previous arcs. Some things just lend themselves better to animation and I think this was one of them.

With this episode, it marks the end of the joint training arc and I was really happy with most of it. A lot of smaller characters got some bigger moments. We also just learned about more of Class B in general. Getting to see more of Pony, Setsuna, and of course, Monoma is always a treat. Class A still dominated more than I would have liked but they do have some of the best potential heroes so it makes sense.

I know the writing of female characters has a long way to come but there were things in this episode that I think was really positive. Deku clearly relies on and trusts Uraraka, even telling her that he knows she can handle Monoma. Ashido was also included in that as Deku was putting his trust in his teammates. Unfortunately, that also includes Mineta. I have to be honest I don’t really like Mineta.

I get most anime have that pervy character trope but he just gets too annoying. It also seemed like he was getting a tiny bit of development. He stepped in to protect Ashido and it seemed like he did so simply cause she was a teammate but then we find out it was all an excuse to hopefully touch her boobs. Just kind of annoying to me, I know some people love Mineta and he does have his bright sides. To be fair I did enjoy how it showed that he was being tactical with the placement of his grape balls to be most effective in battle.

The next arc has some big shoes to fill with how well this one turned out. It went a little more by the books than I would like but was still enjoyable and there was some actual tension as to who might win which was nice. My Hero Academia shows that it is one of the shounen juggernauts for a reason.