Although it won’t surprise anyone to know that the latest Weekly Shonen Jump behemoth will be returning for another season of anime, when it comes to My Hero Academia’s highly anticipated fourth season, there’s an awful lot to look forward to.
The fourth season by Studio BONES based on Kohei Hirokoshi’s manga was already confirmed at the end of this year’s third season, and now we’ve finally got a concrete start date for its broadcast – October 2019, which puts it in the Fall season of next year and makes it the first big title to be announced for that timeframe.
And I’m sure that it’s going to make a big splash indeed. That’s not just due to the truly gargantuan, global fanbase that it has built up over the years either, but because the arc that the series will start off by adapting is by far one of the best in the series’ history.
I’ll refrain from giving too much away in the interests of letting anime-only fans enjoying the events of the story as they come, but the “Pro Hero Intern Arc” saw Horikoshi changing up a lot of the series’ established narrative conventions in the original manga. Instead of simply focusing on the main character Deku, the arc saw focus shift to several different stories experienced by several different characters during the events of the arc, leading to some serious character development and more than a few characters becoming much more popular than they were previously.
The arc is also considerably more restricted in scope, focusing on one long string of battles consecutively and simultaneously, which allowed Horikoshi to explore some of the match-ups in much greater detail than previously. All of this really reminded me at the time of something you’d see more in Hunter x Hunter than your typical My Hero Academia arc, which is definitely a testament to how much Horikoshi has improved over the years.
Tying all of this together is the excellent villain of the arc, who while isn’t the best of the series by a long shot, still provides an excellent presence of menace and, well, villainy that looms large over the events of the entire arc. His abilities are seriously cool as well – which provides some serious stakes for our heroes to overcome.
With that, there’s plenty of stuff to look forward to in this fourth season of My Hero Academia – although I’m sure the series’ mega-fans don’t need me to tell them that. It’s unclear whether or not this season will run for two cours like the previous two seasons, but there’s certainly enough material to do so – although this will leave Studio BONES seriously short for the probably fifth season. So we’ll just have to wait and see on that one.