My Hero Academia is a shonen anime--meaning that the show is aimed at boys right around their teen years. By most standards, it would be filed alongside shows like Dragonball Z and Naruto. 130 episodes in, though, it's clear now that this show is less like a shonen anime or the typical cape comics that helped to inspire it, and more like Prime Video's ultra-mature, ultra-violent superhero-deconstruction series The Boys. Not because it’s trying to be transgressive and gritty, but because it’s trying to get us to think a little more deeply about the implications of superherodom for the world.

My Hero Academia is set in a world where most of the population has developed what the show calls "Quirks," or genetic evolutions that essentially act as superpowers. We come in nearly two centuries after this phenomenon first began, during a time when superheroes are as commonplace as police officers. However, while heroes might be venerated now, the show often hints at a time when quirks were less accepted.

The show follows a young high school student named Izuku Midoriya (hero name Deku), a superhero nerd who wants more than anything to follow in the footsteps of the world's greatest hero, All Might. There's just one problem: Midoriya is one of the 20% of people who were born without a quirk. The series begins as a wish-fulfillment show, as Deku inherits a superpower from All-Might and has to learn how to use it as he attends a school for aspiring superheroes, U.A. Hero Academy.