My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, the second stand-alone film in the My Hero Academia series, features a shocking moment towards the end of the film that presents some contradictory facts about One For All, the “quirk,” or superpower, that can be freely transferred from one person to another. Based off of the manga series by Kohei Horikoshi, My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising poses some questions about One For All that are left unanswered by the end of the film.
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising follows Izuku Midoriya (Justin Briner) and class 1-A from U.A. High School after they’ve all passed their provisional hero license exams. Recruited for the Hero Work Recommendation Project, all twenty of the aspiring heroes are hired by the Heroes Safety Commission to run a hero agency on the peaceful Nabu Island, which is in need of assistance after all of the resident heroes retired. Successfully running the hero agency without any supervision, Izuku and his classmates enjoy undertaking real hero work solo until the villain Nine (Johnny Yong Bosch) and his powerful companions appear on the island intent on stealing the quirk of a young boy named Katsuma Shimano (Maxey Whitehead).
As Izuku and his classmates, including Ochaco Uraraka (Luci Christian), Shoto Todoroki (David Matranga), and Katsuki Bakugo (Clifford Chapin), attempt to protect Katsuma and his sister Mahoro (Dani Chambers) from the villains, Izuku is forced to make a tough call and decides that the only way to defeat the villains and save everyone on the island is to transfer his quirk, One For All, over to Bakugo. Not only does the scene boast one of the most shocking twists featured in My Hero Academia, but it also further develops the burgeoning friendship between Izuku and Bakugo, who were formerly bitter rivals. While the moment is essentially a cherry on top of a pretty solid film, My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising’s scenes featuring the power One For All, including the climactic ending, raise some questions about how the quirk can be inherited.
How Did Izuku Transfer One For All To Bakugo?
While the basic origins of One For All has been divulged in the anime series, there is still a lot of mystery surrounding the quirk, including the identity of all of the past wielder’s of One For All and the minutiae of how the ability actually works. In the first season, All Might (Christopher Sabat) chooses Izuku Midoriya to be his successor as the “Symbol of Peace.” After training for ten months to be physically capable of inheriting One For All, All Might gives Midoriya a strand of his hair to swallow, explaining that One For All can only be inherited by ingesting the current wielder’s DNA. Once Midoriya eats the hair, it takes his body a few hours to process it, and he only has access to the ability during his U.A. High School entrance exam. In My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, all of the former rules about the process of inheriting One For All seem to be disregarded.
During the scene when Izuku transfers his quirk to Bakugo, the two simply touch hands and One For All appears to be passed on to him instantly. In comparison to Izuku’s experience, Bakugo never ingests any of Midoriya’s DNA and no time limit prevents him from using the quirk right away. While it isn’t made clear in the film, one possible reason for the inconsistency could be that Bakugo already has a quirk of his own. Unlike Bakugo, Izuku was quirkless when he first inherited One For All, and while his body needed the extra time to allow the quirk to manifest, Bakugo was able to use the quirk instantly, since it was strengthening his own quirk, not giving him a new one.
However, it is not so easily explained how Bakugo is able to inherit One For All without first swallowing some of Izuku’s DNA. As amusing as it would have been to see Izuku try to convince Bakugo to eat his hair and might have resulted in a chorus of “Shut up, you damn nerd!” the climax of Heroes Rising aims for shock value over practicality by letting this one inconsistency slide.
Can One For All Be Stolen?
During the sophomore season of My Hero Academia, it was previously revealed that the quirk One For All can only be given willingly and not be taken by force. After Izuku faces the hero-killer Stain, All Might explains to Izuku that even though Stain ingested some of his DNA, the villain didn’t inherit One For All because the quirk can only be given if the bearer intends to pass the power on. In Heroes Rising, however, the ability belonging to the villain Nine challenges some of All Might’s previous statements regarding One For All’s vulnerability.
In Heroes Rising, Izuku faces the idealist Nine, a super-villain who underwent quirk enhancement experiments that allows him to steal and store up to nine individual quirks. When Nine and his crew attack Nabu Island intent on stealing the cell activation quirk from Katsuma, there is a scene where Izuku fights Nine solo. When Nine analyzes Izuku’s quirk and tries to steal it for himself, he discovers that he’s unable to take it because there are multiple quirks within One For All, specifically traces of the individual quirks that formerly belonged to past bearers of One For All. Nine’s inability to steal One For All, however, seems to arise from a technicality.
The only issue that seems to prevent Nine from stealing Izuku’s quirk is the fact that Nine can only store nine quirks at a time, a fact which is made obvious through his namesake, and while he didn’t have room to store all of the quirks held within One For All at that given time, it still would have been possible to steal it had Nine had the vacancy. With this is mind, it begs the question whether One For All can be stolen by someone with a “quirk-stealing” ability, such as the main villain All For One.
Can One For All Be Inherited More Than Once?
After Izuku and Bakugo defeat the villain Nine, Izuku apologizes to All Might for giving Bakugo One For All, since it means that he himself may no longer be able to use the quirk that All Might passed down to him. Once One For All begins to activate within Izuku’s body in the form of glowing red streams, it’s made clear that Izuku is still the current bearer of One For All for two possible reasons. First, Bakugo fell unconscious before his body had time to process the new quirk, and second, the past bearers of One For All allowed the quirk to remain with Izuku. While the end of Heroes Rising provides a swift and logical solution to the problem, the reasons explaining why Bakugo didn’t fully inherit One For All seem like a cop-out, especially when considering an alternative resolution that might have lended the film a stronger ending.
Since one of the principle rules associated with One For All is the concept that it has to be given willingly, one resolution that would have nicely bookended Heroes Rising— a story about two rivals finding mutual respect for one another as heroes and friends— is to have Bakugo come to the realization himself that he should return the quirk to Izuku. Sacrifice for the sake of someone else has never been something that Izuku struggles with, so when he discovers that defeating Nine and saving every citizen on Nabu Island could only be achieved by giving his quirk to his rival Bakugo, it was a requirement, not a decision.
If Bakugo had fully inherited One For All by the end of Heroes Rising, it would have provided the character with a similar opportunity for growth and self-sacrifice, since keeping One For All for himself would not only give Bakugo the kind of power that could help him achieve his goal of becoming the number one hero, but it would’ve also removed his greatest competition in one-fell-swoop. This ending, however, would have only been possible if there weren’t any preexisting restrictions preventing the quirk from being inherited more than once by the same person. While this alternative ending might have made for a more compelling story overall, it would have posed more problems concerning the inheritance of One For All than could have been resolved in a ten-minute long conclusion.
While My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising may have left some questions unanswered about the quirk One For All, they most likely won’t be answered in any future films since a statement from Horikoshi revealed that this will probably be the last My Hero Academia film. Luckily for fans, the specifics concerning the quirk is a topic that isn’t isolated to the plot of Heroes Rising and will most likely be addressed within the anime series in the future.
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