After-Thoughts Rant: Some characters in My Hero Academia should not be in U.A.

Okay, so since I've been heaping a lot of praise onto My Hero Academia, I think it's time I point out a flaw that I didn't initially notice because I didn't know who all the characters were. However, now that I've watched the first season around 4 times, I've read all of the flavor text that's been on-screen, and I have an idea of who is who and who has what power, let's talk about something that doesn't make any sense now that I have the time to rant about it.

Several characters in U.A.'s Hero Course should not be in U.A. at all. However, before I get into that, I want to give a little background on some reasons characters could make it to the Hero Course and why I don't find it likely that some of these characters could have.

Okay, so first is getting into U.A. at all. At least for the Hero Course, there are two parts: a written exam and a physical quirk exam. I believe the physical exam is worth a lot more points than the written exam and here's why: let's take a look at Hitoshi Shinso.

Hitoshi Shinso's Quirk is the ability to mind control those that respond to him verbally. As Aizawa stated during his match with Izuku, his quirk was not suited to the test because it didn't have much in the way of physical damage. If Shinso failed because of poor scores on the written portion, I think it's fair to say he would've been left out completely instead of being put in General Studies.

And this leads me to three characters in U.A. in particular who I believe should not have made it through the entrance exam when Hitoshi Shinso clearly didn't: those are Koji Koda, Tooru Hagakure, and Minoru Mineta.

Koji Koda has had very little screentime in the anime so far and, initially, due to the look of his face, I thought he had some sort of earth or durability quirk like Kirishima or Cementoss. However, looking further into him, his quirk is the ability to command animals. That quirk is worse than useless in the entrance exam in terms of physical damage and combat power, not to mention he doesn't seem like the type to enjoy fighting anyway.

Tooru Hagakure is invisible. That's it. She's just invisible. There's no way that quirk would allow her to get into U.A. because it has no damage potential.

Edit: I've seen some offer the defense that character who's quirks are not battle focused could have gotten in on sheer physical conditioning. One way to support this is the ranks on the Quirk Apprehension test during Season 1 where the ranks place Midoriya at the bottom with one score that is slightly greater than Bakugo's, Mineta at 19 who had the highest score in Side to Side Jumps, and Hagakure who's score is not known but who made rank 18. The problem with this is that in Season 2, before the Sports Festival we see Hagakure struggle to perform a single pull-up. In fact I could go on a whole rant about those ranks but for now, if Hagakure can't do a single pull-up, despite being relatively small and slim figured, I would say physical condition is not how she beat the entrance exam.

The same can also be said for Mineta's sticky balls. I can accept that they worked in the USJ because of his teamwork with Asui and Midoriya. But what about when he's fighting on his own, how would that have worked? He's too much of a coward for them to have worked for very long, and again, his power is not suited to fighting in general.

Then there's the quirk apprehension test, which has problems with its rankings. Koji Koda is ranked number 11 by Aizawa in that test, which I think is dumb, but I can accept that because he is big and muscular and it's possible that by sheer size and strength he was able to overcome the ones below him.

We are also shown Mineta's great score in side-to-side jumping. However, Hagakure should have come in last place, and here's why. Her current place is 18, right above Mineta, who is right above Izuku. Mineta's score in side-to-side jumping was the highest of anyone in the class, we can assume, and Izuku's ball toss was exactly the same as Bakugo's. This means that, for her to have gotten above both of them, she had to have had a total physical score that is high enough that these two scores individually are canceled out, which I find really hard to believe due to the strength of Izuku's throw and Izuku's physical condition in general.

Remember, though Izuku is still a fifteen year old, his physical training with All-Might made him quite physically powerful, even without One for All. His physical condition is lower than a lot of the other students but only because those students have quirks they can rely on. Iida might be faster but that's only with his Engine quirk. If he and Izuku had to fight one on one without quirks, Izuku would have a fair shot at dealing some damage. The same is true for many of the other students. Hell, even Bakugo, who was the big-shot in the middle school he shared with Izuku was so because of his Explosion Quirk and not due to his actual physical capability.

Even as strong as Izuku is, though, it is entirely possible that his condition would still make him weaker than the students that are significantly bigger than him. Kouji Kouda, Rikido Satou, and Tenya Iida are all physically bigger than Izuku is so it's possible that Izuku would struggle to overcome any of them in a pure non-quirk one-on-one battle. However, for the students that are relatively the same size, specifically Bakugo, Todoroki, Kirishima, and Kaminari, the only one Izuku would physically have a small chance of beating if no one was using Quirks would probably be Kirishima just because of how buff he is.

Of course the rebuttal to that is going to be that the quirk assessment test was to test how strong everybody is with their quirks and not without and that's really it, though. For characters like Bakugo and Shouji, who have quirks that augment their physical performance, physical condition isn't as much of a factor. However, Hagakure's quirk does not improve her physical performance, it just keeps her from being physically seen.

What this means is that, for her to be two full places above the bottom, her physical condition by itself has to be better on the whole than the combination of scores the lower two got with Quirk Augmentations. And again, Izuku's ball throw was the same as Bakugo's distance wise, which doesn't mean he'll get as high as Bakugo but it does mean that saying her score is enough to overcome Izuku is the same as saying that her overall condition is stronger than Bakugo's by enough that that one score would still cause him to lose.

This wouldn't bother me so much if there wasn't an easy way to fix this but there is. The easy solution would be remove Mineta and Hagakure altogether, as their quirks are not going to get them very far anyway, reduce the number of actual students in the Hero Course from 40 to 38. Then, take one student from Class 1-B and move them over to Class 1-A.

As for which one, well, I would personally go with Ibara Shiozaki for a few reasons. Firstly, her name is listed on the Top 10 list of Applicants to the Hero Course in terms of Entrance Exam grade, which means she already most likely had her design and power set figured out. Secondly, by moving a female over to Class 1-A, it will make the male-to-female ratio a bit better, which doesn't really matter to me but it was a priority for the author, so point number 2. And number 3, of the Class 1-B students that are introduced in Season 2, Ibara is one of the only ones that doesn't really seem to have any beef with the 1-A students, so moving her over will affect her story less than if the author moved over, for example, Tetsutetsu who was also present on the Top Ten Grades on the Entrance Exam.

Of course, we can really only remove 2 of them to keep the number even but, as for what we do with Koji, that's relatively easy I would say. Just give him an Earth Centric Power, like Cementoss, and have that be the reason he's number 11 on the Quirk Assessment Test.

He already looks like he has a deep connection with stone and, if we look at the tests, we can look at how his performance might have improved with each use of his quirk:

1. On the fifty meter dash, he could pull a rock out of the ground to knock himself forward to cover the distance in a relatively short amount of time.
2. On the Gripping test, he could use his quirk to amplify how hard he grips by affecting the metal he's gripping.
3. For the long jump, he could do relatively the same thing he did for the fifty meter dash.

Is this a lot? No, but it justifies his position as 11 much better than his current quirk does and it also falls in line with his design a lot better.

My main question for this is simple: why can I look at this and notice this relatively early in the series, while this series is overseen by an author, several designers and editors, and even publishers, and still allow this stuff to get by?

That's all for now, have a wonderful day.