It’s been a long road to this point, with the thread of the League of Villains and the artificially made Nomus starting all the way back in episode 8 of the anime’s first season. It would have been easy to simply forget about them and introduce new and better villains — though we have gotten new and stronger villains with every new story arc — but “My Hero Academia” smartly kept going back to Shigaraki, the young would-be villain and his gang of misfits, murderers and friends, and the mystery of the Nomus. The show has continuously added to this mythology, tying it to the story of its world’s greatest hero, All Might, and his biggest enemy, All For One.
This culminated last season, with Shigaraki forming and leading the Paranormal Liberation Front, a group of super-powered individuals looking to break the hero system and make a society where those with the strongest powers are in charge. An attack on hero society has been a long time coming, especially since the show introduced Stan: the vigilante Hero Killer who fought to unmask the hypocrisy of heroes becoming fixated on sponsorships and money rather than doing their job.
In many ways, the sixth season of “My Hero Academia” feels like the culmination of years’ worth of stories, bringing to a head the collision course of Shigaraki Tomura and his army of villains, and the heroes who have been preparing for the return of organized villains for a while. When the season begins, the heroes are preparing for an assault on the villains’ headquarters, and it feels like the portal scene in “Avengers: Endgame,” with every single hero we’ve ever met on the show, and a bunch we hadn’t met before, all prepared to fight.