My Hero Academia Season 5 — Complete Anime Review and Episode Guide
Anime: My Hero Academia (Boku no Hero Academia)
Studio: Bones
Season: 5
Episodes: 25
Aired: March 2021 – September 2021
Genre: Superhero, Action, Shonen
Based on: Manga by Kohei Horikoshi (Shueisha, Weekly Shonen Jump)
Introduction
My Hero Academia Season 5 is a season of two very different halves — one beloved for its ensemble energy and the other essential for understanding the series' endgame. The first half covers the Joint Training Battle arc, a Class 1-A versus Class 1-B competition that gives screen time and genuine development to the widest range of characters any MHA season has attempted. The second half — the My Villain Academia arc — is the most important lore and villain-focused content in the series to this point, shifting perspective entirely to the League of Villains and delivering some of the most emotionally complex storytelling in the show.
Season 5 is often discussed as the least consistently excellent of the MHA seasons up to that point — the Joint Training arc's pacing drew criticism, and certain animation quality concerns were widely noted during its broadcast. But the season's ceiling, particularly in the My Villain Academia arc, is as high as anything the series has produced. Understanding Season 5's significance requires engaging with both halves honestly.
Story Summary — Detailed, Nothing Missing
Episodes 1–12 — Joint Training Battle
The Joint Training Battle is a five-round competition between Class 1-A and Class 1-B — hero students who have been developing in parallel all series and have now reached a point where the gap between them is no longer the enormous gulf of Season 1. Class 1-B, whose members have been background presences until now, are given genuine individual characterization through their combat approaches and their specific Quirks, which range from creative to genuinely impressive.
Each round of the competition pairs teams from both classes against each other in environments designed to test rescue, combat, and cooperation simultaneously. The round structure allows the season to spotlight different members of 1-A who have received less individual attention in previous seasons — specifically Tokoyami, Kaminari, Jirou, and Shoji — alongside the continuing development of the central trio of Deku, Bakugo, and Todoroki.
The arc's most significant development is the unexpected and dramatic awakening of new Quirk abilities within Deku's One For All — the manifestation of powers left behind by previous One For All users that Deku had not previously been able to access. The floating ability that appears in the fifth round — connected to the vestiges of One For All's previous bearers — is the first indication that Deku's power is considerably more complex and considerably more expansive than anyone understood, including All Might.
The round structure produces entertaining character moments throughout — the clash of Bakugo and Shinso (the student who was rejected from the hero course on ability assessments alone but has been training with Eraserhead) is the arc's most interesting individual matchup. Shinso's Quirk allows him to control anyone who verbally responds to him, and his match against Bakugo is the most direct test of Bakugo's specific combination of power and anger management that the series has conducted.
Episodes 13–25 — My Villain Academia
The second half of Season 5 shifts perspective completely to the League of Villains and follows their confrontation with the Meta Liberation Army — a massive organization of Quirk users who believe in absolute freedom of Quirk use without legal restriction. The arc follows Tomura Shigaraki, Dabi, Toga, and the rest of the League as they face an enemy with far greater resources and numbers than anything they have previously encountered.
Tomura Shigaraki's backstory is delivered in full for the first time — the specific tragedy of his origin, the specific nature of his Decay Quirk's first manifestation, and the specific person he was before becoming who he is. The backstory is one of the most effective villain origin sequences in the series, not because it justifies what Shigaraki became but because it makes it comprehensible in the most human and most devastating way. He was a child. What happened to him was wrong. The choices he made in response were also wrong. Both things are completely true and the arc holds them simultaneously.
Himiko Toga's backstory is developed in depth — the girl who was told from childhood that her natural responses were aberrant, that the things she felt made her a monster, and who was given absolutely no framework for understanding herself except as something to be suppressed and hidden. Her attachment to Deku and Ochaco is shown to be genuinely connected to her specific emotional needs rather than simply being villainous whimsy, which makes her considerably more complex than any previous season's treatment of her allowed.
Dabi's arc in My Villain Academia contains the seeds of the revelation that becomes explicit in later seasons — the specific hints about his identity, the hatred that motivates him, and the way his goals are both connected to and distinct from the League's broader aims. The seeds planted here will pay off in Season 6 in one of the series' most impactful moments.
The climax of the My Villain Academia arc — Shigaraki's awakening of a dramatically enhanced version of his Decay Quirk following the brutal confrontation with the Meta Liberation Army — is one of the season's most spectacular sequences and sets up the threat level of Season 6's major conflict. The League does not simply survive the Meta Liberation Army encounter. They absorb it. What emerges is something considerably more dangerous than what went in.
The final episodes establish the convergence of the emerging villains, the government-backed hero program, and Deku's developing powers as the intersecting elements that Season 6 will bring into direct collision.
Character Explanation
Tomura Shigaraki — The Made Villain
Season 5's full development of Shigaraki's backstory is the series' most important villain work to this point. The child at the origin of the villain is one of the most effectively depicted in shonen anime — specific in his situation, human in his pain, and clearly connected to the adult who emerged from that pain in ways that are both understandable and deeply tragic. Understanding Shigaraki through his origin does not make him heroic. It makes him real, which is more disturbing and more affecting.
Himiko Toga — The Misunderstood Feeling
The My Villain Academia arc's Toga development is the first time the series fully engages with the specific question her character raises: what happens when who you are is defined by society as monstrous before you have any agency over it? Her response to this definition — embracing the monstrous label and weaponizing it — is not endorsed by the series, but it is understood with genuine care and presented as a comprehensible if tragic outcome of her specific situation.
Deku's Awakening
The manifestation of new One For All abilities in the Joint Training arc — specifically the floating power connected to the vestiges of previous bearers — opens a new dimension of Deku's character arc. He is not simply developing control over one extraordinary power. He is potentially the heir to eight extraordinary powers, each one the legacy of a person who carried One For All through their own lifetime. The weight and the possibility of this is just beginning to be felt in Season 5.
Theme and Highlights
The Villain's Perspective: My Villain Academia is the series' most sustained engagement with the question of what produces villains. It refuses the comfortable answer that villains are simply people who chose evil. It shows, specifically, the mechanisms by which people who experienced genuine harm became the specific villains they are. This does not excuse their actions. It makes the world of My Hero Academia more real and more morally complex.
Inheritance and Its Weight: Deku's discovery that One For All contains the vestiges and abilities of all previous bearers adds a dimension of historical responsibility to his power that the series will continue developing. He is not simply powerful. He is the endpoint of a chain of people who sacrificed to preserve something worth preserving.
What Freedom Means: The Meta Liberation Army's ideology — absolute freedom of Quirk use — is positioned as the villain-side's distorted version of a question the hero side also struggles with: who decides who can use their power, when, and how? The series does not provide an easy answer to this question because the easy answers are not the honest ones.
Conclusion
My Hero Academia Season 5 is uneven in ways that previous seasons were not, but its ceiling — the My Villain Academia arc — is as high as anything in the series. The Joint Training arc's ensemble development is genuinely valuable even where its pacing is imperfect, and the villain backstories of My Villain Academia are essential to understanding everything that Season 6 will do. Watch it with the patience its slower stretches require. The payoff is significant.
FAQ
Q: Can I skip the Joint Training arc?
A: Not recommended. While it is the season's weaker half, it contains the One For All vestiges awakening that is important for understanding Deku's power development in Season 6 and beyond.
Q: Is My Villain Academia worth the wait through the Joint Training arc?
A: Strongly yes. Most viewers who were frustrated by the Joint Training pacing found My Villain Academia more than sufficient compensation.
Q: Is Dabi who fans think he is?
A: The answer to this question is delivered definitively in Season 6. Season 5 plants the seeds without confirming.
Q: Where to watch?
A: Crunchyroll. Both sub and dub available.
Next: My Hero Academia Season 6 Review!
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