My Hero Academia: Winners and losers of Episode 80

After last week’s bizarre, relatively uneventful episode, this week’s My Hero Academia sees a surprising turn for Aoyama that’ll throw fans for a loop.

Have you ever seen that video “Don’t Hug me, I’m Scared“? This episode of My Hero Academia was like that; there was such a hard pivot between the first and second halves of it that the result was true hilarity. This dissonance in themes that results in one of the weirder episodes of the season is a welcome one, though, and makes up for the lackluster happenings of last week.

Let’s get into it!

Winners

Camie Utsushimi

After some unnecessarily perverted sequences, we finally learned what Camie’s quirk is! She can create full-fledged illusions, although they don’t last for an indefinite amount of time. The quirk is obviously a powerful one, and in this particular situation, she used it in order to aid with creating a beautiful display of auroras that had all of the kids completely mesmerized. Clearly it’s a powerful quirk that is not to be trifled with, unlike her character that was treated almost purely as an object up until now (no, I’m still not over this).

Super Slides

Do you know what’s objectively awesome? When you’re a kid — with your confidence not yet thrown into the dumpster due to the trials of adulthood — and you experience that high of being on a playground, doing as you please. One of those staple playground activities is, of course, the slide. Oh, those lovely slides (with the exception of the occasional static death shock).

This episode of My Hero Academia not only featured a slide but a super ice slide with flame-engulfed hoops bordering it. I want to just give a shoutout to slides, man. This episode was the antithesis of the Michael Jordan meme!

Enji Todoroki / Endeavor

Another surprise in this episode was the sudden growth for Endeavor — the current no.1 hero and father to Shoto Todoroki. When it comes to pro heroes, Endeavor has been shown to be the least likable. He’s a tremendously atrocious father and a bit of a bully, which is a stark contrast to All Might, who has always been the one that the public truly adores.

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By the end of this episode, however, Endeavor makes a vow to his son to be a hero that he can actually be proud of, and is seemingly intent on trying to be a symbol similar to the one All Might was.

We love a toxically masculine dude showing some growth! Endeavor is an interesting character, and I’m curious to see where the future of My Hero Academia takes him.

Cheese

That’s right, you heard me. Cheese, perhaps one of the great concoctions this world has ever produced, is a winner this week. Yuga Aoyama, who is usually treated like the comic relief amongst the students of Class 1-A, saw a surprising amount of time on this week’s episode. This is because he decided to turn Episode 80 into a borderline psychological-thriller, stalking Midoriya for reasons unknown. Of course, this whole thing turned out to be hilarious in retrospect, as it turns out Aoyama was only trying to tell Midoriya that he understands what it’s like to have a quirk that’s incompatible with your body. Now they’re friends!

But the way in which Aoyama attempted to get this message across was, shall we say, questionable. Firstly, he just abruptly shoves a stick of cheese into Midoriya’s mouth for no apparent reason. Then, later that night, he leaves a trail of cheese outside Midoriya’s room that spell’s out “I know”.

What is this, The Conjuring? Aoyama is out here giving the poor kid a heart attack. But seriously, major kudos to the diary product known as cheese. It has an incredible usage rate, and I can’t say I remember it being utilized in such a way like this before. Points for creativity, I suppose.

Losers

Minoru Mineta / Grape Juice

In all honesty, there weren’t actually any major losers in this week’s episode. Unless you hate anything having to do with kids or horror movies, Episode 80 was a delightful one. So, instead, I’m going to my old fallback option of hating on Mineta — the bane of my existence and the wholesome joy that is My Hero Academia.

There’s a brief moment in which the class starts talking about the potential of teaming up with each other once they graduate, which is all fine and wholesome. During this, Mineta actually gets roasted to a crisp when Ashido essentially says that he’s useless (she also says this to Kaminari, but I’ll ignore that for now).

Anytime anyone ridicules Mineta and lands him in the slums of the loser section where he rightfuly belongs is a win in my book. Am I being too hard on Mineta? Nay, I say I’m not being hard enough. Ashido, you rule.

As always, remember that you can tune in every Saturday for new episodes of My Hero Academia on Funimation and Crunchyroll followed by breakdowns here on Hidden Remote.