Between the Panels

SPOILER ALERT ! If you haven’t had a chance to watch the most recent season of My Hero Academia, but intend to and you don’t want spoilers, you may want to stop reading now. For years there has been suspicion of a traitor within UA. We now know this was, in fact, the case. And the traitor was none other than Mr. Can’t Stop Twinkling himself, Aoyama . To this point little more than a source of awkward comic relief, Aoyama’s betrayal of his fellow classmates hits like an emotional freight train, particularly in understanding all the nuances of what led to it in the first place, which I will not spoil here. But what hits even harder is the immediate love, grace, and forgiveness the rest of Class 1A show their troubled comrade almost instantaneously. Their willingness to move past the betrayal and still embrace him as their comrade and fellow hero is a display so stunning as to almost come off as unrealistic. Who could ever look past such devastating betrayal so quickly and with such pat