My Hero Academia Season 8 Revealed The Most Vile Supervillain We've Seen In A Long Time

There are spoilers ahead for "My Hero Academia" through season 8, episode 7 "From Aizawa."

"My Hero Academia" is one of the biggest ongoing anime, a show that's essentially the underrated "Sky High" if it had a big budget and time to properly explore its universe. The show takes place in a world full of superheroes and focuses on a group of kids attending a high school for heroes where they learn what it means to be heroic, all while fight increasingly dangerous villains.

The current eighth and final season is one of the show's best, following the final battle to take down the big villain, All For One, whose ability lets him steal any superpower and distribute at will. So far it's taken the cumulative effort of every hero in Japan to try and defeat him, with a season full of emotions, sacrifices, big revelations, and huge fights.

Creator Kohei Horikoshi is famously a big fan of American comic books, and he snuck in references throughout the manga's run, like silhouettes of Superman, Spider-Man and even Moon Knight appearing early on. All Might, the biggest hero at the start of the manga, is clearly inspired by Superman and Captain America, while Deku is very much based on Peter Parker (including having a spidey-sense and a web-slinging power), and the first image of Deku's vigilante look was quite similar to Jim Lee's Batman on a gargoyle art.

Still, possibly one of the coolest references happened in the anime's latest episode. In it, the already despicable villain, All For One, revealed himself to be the most vile supervillain in years.

The latest episode of the show reveals that Tenko Shimura, also known as Shigaraki (All For One's apprentice and current vessel for his consciousness), had every single aspect of his life orchestrated by All For One. He didn't become a villain of his own volition, he was quite literally conceived as part of All For One's plan, as he convinced Tenko's dad to have a child, then gave that child a power specifically designed to alienate him and make him appear as a villain so he'd be filled with despair and hatred. Really, it was All For One all along.

All For One made Tenko believe he was born evil, then slowly befriended him and offered counsel to make him believe that the best way forward was to what Tenko feared people would think of him — a villain. He didn't just make Tenko a villain, he specifically created a vessel for his hatred and made sure this kid was born for the sole reason of carrying on All For One's will, like a somehow worse version of Palpatine's plan for Anakin in "Star Wars."

This utterly convoluted and evil plan is reminiscent of another extremely petty classic comic book villain: Professor Eobard "Zoom" Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, as seen on the pages of "Flash: Rebirth."

In the comic "Flash: Rebirth," it is revealed that Reverse-Flash has the ability to travel backward in time and change the past, and he is the cause of every misfortune in the life of Barry Allen, aka Flash. He killed his mom, but also pushed Barry down the stairs when he was six, caused an electric fire that burned down his first house, and left a door open so his dog would run out and get hit by a car. 

It's a cartoonishly evil moment, over the top to the point of absurdity, like All For One's reveal. Some fans may take issue with reducing a villain to being evil incarnate, especially during a storyline that's all about Deku trying to prove that Shigaraki could be redeemed. And yet, it works. What better final boss for a story about heroes than the embodiment of evil? Then there's the fact that in canon, All For One was literally inspired by comic books, particularly villains. He always wanted to emulate the super villains from the books he read. In a time when we have so many misunderstood villains in entertainment, especially in Disney and Marvel, a good old fashioned one-dimensional villain feels refreshing.

But there's also the fact that this reinforces Deku's belief about Shigaraki. We see it in the episode: despite everything All For One did to make this little boy evil, after how much he interfered and reshaped this little boy into becoming evil, it could all have been in vain. All Tenko needed was someone who reached out and grabbed his hand, to show him a different way and turn him away from evil.