The following contains spoilers for My Hero Academia Season 6, Episode 8, “League of Villains vs UA Students”, now streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu.
My Hero Academia’s Tomura Shigaraki, Midoriya’s arch-nemesis, utterly hates and despises Hero Society. He will crush everything, and anything in his way, to see the world collapse. Like all villains in My Hero Academia, Shigaraki has his reasons for fighting, but whether his motivations are justifiable is up for debate.
The short answer is no — the primary rationale for this being that endangering the lives of innocent civilians is morally wrong and unjustified. Shigaraki has been acting in precisely that way. He wants to end all heroes, regardless of the cost in human lives. However, due to his early childhood experiences and those of other villains, Shigaraki’s hatred of heroes and the hero system does have some valid basis.
Shigaraki’s Hate Towards Heroes and His Past
Tomura Shigaraki’s hatred for hero society is primarily based on his own experiences. He blames Hero Society for how he and other villains turned out. For one, he hated the fact that his father abused him for wanting to be a hero, and no heroes saved him from this torment. Then, he accidentally activated his quirk and killed his family members, with nobody to save him. Civilians minded their own business while saying things like, “A hero will come.”
In the end, it was All For One — a villain — that helped him, whereas the heroes never gave him the time of day. Shigaraki’s mind was twisted by the media to think that heroes were there to solve all social issues, and he was let down. Shigaraki never fully realized that heroes can’t always be everywhere and solve every social issue there is in the world. And so, this traumatic childhood of heroes never showing up when he needed them and the apathy of civilians are the catalysts and reasons for him to destroy the hero society.
Shigaraki’s Hatred Is Justified — To a Degree
Shigaraki may have weak reasons for fighting, but his hatred for Hero Society is rather reasonable. Endeavor is a good example of someone who has done evil things, but is still regarded as a hero. Endeavor treated his children and wife horrendously; using his wife to procreate many times to try to create a perfect specimen that had the quirks of both him and his wife. When they had Shoto, he completely ignored the rest of his children. His wife was eventually admitted to a mental health hospital, and Shoto was scarred for life due to the actions of Endeavor. Yet, hero society still hails Endeavor as a hero rather than a villain, and he rose to Number One Hero even though many people in My Hero Academia knows what he did to his family.
His hatred for the civilians of My Hero Academia is also understandable. Quirkless civilians in the world of My Hero Academia are overly reliant on heroes to the point that they will not act to help or save others, not even a child — as seen in Shigaraki’s own past. This mirrors real life as the reason bystander effect occurs is because of a perceived view of responsibility, that it’s not one’s job to help others or that someone else will help. However, in the world of My Hero Academia, the bystander effect is likely more prevalent to the fact that media and people openly depend on heroes to help them.
What Shigaraki fails to understand is that there will always be heroes in his world. There are people with all sorts of quirks who would use those them to engage in immoral acts such as crime and violence. There will always be people that will stand up to evil acts. This is why Shigaraki’s fight to destroy Hero Society is unjustified. Even if Tomura Shigaraki does destroy the entire hero system there are villains with morals and a sense of good inside, who would still act to help or save others as heroes would.
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