MHA/BNHA/whatever you wanna shorten it to may just have the best representation of women I’ve seen in a shounen series in a long time.
Like yes, the first female character we meet is Mount Lady, but the instances where female sexuality is on display isn’t really presented in a way where it’s actually supposed to be luring in men. Mount Lady’s kinda shown to be a less-than-admirable hero because she’s image obsessed. You have Midnight with her straight-up dominatrix thing and they even call her an “explicit” hero or something of that nature, but she seems to just kind of be rolling with her powers and in control of her image and a competent superhero.
Even Yaoyorozu (the girl with large breasts displayed above) winds up in this internship with a professional female hero who’s just like “you’re cute, you could make a lot of money doing sponsorships” and she is CLEARLY very unhappy with it.
And the guys are not terrible towards the girls either. Midoriya and Uraraka’s mutual attraction is totally adorable and not perverted at all. The boys in the class all get along with and are friends with their female classmates and there don’t really seem to be cliques along gender lines or anything. The dudes in general aren’t perving on the girls, and the one character who does is basically near-universally hated in the fandom and usually painted pretty despicably in the show itself.
Women are just presented as people. They’re human beings who have different interests, experiences, and personalities. They’re individuals. And yeah, the male characters in general still get more focus, and it’s not perfect (the current arc brings both the boys and girls along on an adventure, then kinda sidelines all the girls into one group while the dudes get all the focus and moments to shine, which is some BULLSHIT), but it’s better than a lot of the stuff out there.
My favorite anime is One Piece. I fuckin’ love it. Have for years. But as I’ve grown older I’ve REALLY come to hate how women are portrayed in it. They’re often shown as weak and fragile and needing to be rescued. Male characters almost never fight female characters, and when they do it’s usually the bad guy so he can hurt women and show how evil he is. All the female character designs are “big tits, wide hips, everything else is rail-thin and make sure to expose as much skin as possible” unless the character is meant to be ugly, and a woman’s ugliness is either a sign of evil or used for comedy, or both. And a lot of other stuff I’ve seen in the anime world is not much better, especially in the shounen arena.
My Hero Academia is great for a lot of reasons. Imaginative power sets in both the shounen and superhero genres. An intriguing plotline. Likable characters with unique and recognizable designs. Badass action. I know “doesn’t degrade women” should be standard operating procedure and not deserving of a medal, but it’s just one more point in this series’ favor. Kohei Horikoshi has really made something awesome with this series, and if you haven’t watched/read it yet, I heartily encourage you to do so and see what all the buzz is about.
