Izuku Midoriya (Deku)

Who is Izuku Midoriya?

Izuku is the protagonist of Kohei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia. He grows up in a small apartment with his mother, Inko. His father works abroad and barely appears. At four, a doctor tells him he'll never develop a Quirk, and his childhood friend Katsuki Bakugo, who has a powerful explosive Quirk, starts treating him as beneath notice.

At 14 he meets All Might, the No. 1 hero and the "Symbol of Peace." All Might first tells him that being a hero without a Quirk isn't realistic. Then a villain grabs Bakugo, the pros hesitate, and Izuku runs in without a plan. That's the moment All Might decides who his successor will be. After ten months of training, Izuku eats a single hair, receives One For All, and gets into U.A. High School.

• The ninth holder of One For All, and the first to receive it with no Quirk of his own.
• Student in Class 1-A at U.A., in seat 18.
• A compulsive analyst, mumbling observations under his breath in almost every fight.
• Childhood friend and long-time rival of Katsuki Bakugo.

Personality

Izuku is kind, anxious, earnest and very hard to stop once he's decided someone needs help. He cries easily and often, and the series never treats that as weakness. His instinct to save people runs ahead of his common sense, so he gets badly hurt in nearly every arc before he learns otherwise.

He's also a nerd in the best sense. He knows every pro hero's Quirk, fighting style and ranking. In a fight, that knowledge becomes strategy. He reads opponents, adapts on the fly and finds ways to win against people much stronger than him. His habit of muttering his analyses aloud is a running joke among his classmates.

The biggest thing about him is that he wants to save everyone, not just defeat villains. It starts with Bakugo and grows into a desire to reach the people heroes usually leave behind, which ends up shaping the final battle.

The Deku name

"Deku" is Bakugo's insult. It's a reading of Izuku's name that sounds like a word for a useless puppet. When Ochaco Uraraka says it sounds like "you can do it" to her, Izuku decides to keep it as his hero name. Taking an insult and turning it into a promise is very much his style. Our guide to character development looks at how stories use arcs like this.

One For All, explained

One For All began with Yoichi Shigaraki, the younger brother of the villain All For One. All For One forced a power-stockpiling Quirk onto Yoichi. It merged with Yoichi's own small Quirk, which could pass itself on, and the result was a power that grows with each new user and is handed down by choice.

By the time Izuku gets it, eight people have built it up. That's why it's so overwhelming for a body that had never used a Quirk before. All Might, its eighth user, could use it at full power. Izuku's body couldn't handle it at first.

Smashes, Full Cowl and Shoot Style

In his first year, Izuku throws everything into single punches, called Smashes after All Might's moves. Each one at full power breaks the bones in his arm or fingers. Recovery Girl warns him that repeated damage will leave lasting harm, and his right arm ends up visibly scarred.

His breakthrough is Full Cowl. Instead of channelling the power into one limb, he spreads a smaller percentage of it evenly across his whole body, so he can move faster and hit harder without breaking anything. He starts at a small fraction of the power and slowly raises it. He also develops Shoot Style, a kick-based way of fighting, to spare his damaged arms.

The six inherited Quirks

A twist in the second half of the series is that One For All also carries the Quirks of past holders. Their personalities live on in it as "vestiges," and Izuku can talk with them and gradually unlock what they had.

Combined, these turn Izuku from a brawler into an all-rounder who can fly, sense danger, grab and restrain opponents and change his speed mid-fight.

Izuku's story, arc by arc

Entrance exam and first year

In the U.A. entrance exam, Izuku has scored zero points when a giant robot threatens Ochaco. He leaps at it and smashes it with his first full-power punch, breaking his arm and both legs. The rescue gets him in on hidden "rescue points." Early on, he beats Bakugo in a training battle with brains rather than power, and helps hold off the League of Villains at the USJ.

At the Sports Festival, he faces Shoto Todoroki, who refuses to use his fire side because of his father, Endeavor. Izuku wrecks his own fingers to keep the fight going and tells Todoroki that the power is his own. It's an early sign of the kind of hero Izuku is: more interested in saving his opponent than beating him.

Hosu, the summer camp and Kamino

During his internship with Gran Torino, an old friend of All Might's, Izuku develops Full Cowl. In Hosu he, Iida and Todoroki fight the Hero Killer Stain. When the League attacks the summer training camp and kidnaps Bakugo, Izuku and others go to rescue him. In the Kamino battle that follows, All Might uses up the last of his power to defeat All For One and retires. Before he does, he signals to the world, and to Izuku, that it's Izuku's turn.

License exam and Deku vs Kacchan

After Kamino, Bakugo blames himself for All Might's fall and figures out the truth about One For All. He challenges Izuku to a fight at night at the training grounds. It's the first time they speak honestly about their rivalry, and All Might lets Bakugo in on the secret.

Overhaul and Eri

Interning under Sir Nighteye, Izuku helps rescue Eri, a young girl being used by the yakuza leader Overhaul. In the final fight he carries Eri, whose Quirk rewinds his injuries as he takes them, so he can use One For All at full power without breaking. The mission costs Sir Nighteye his life.

Vestiges and the war

During a joint training exercise with Class 1-B, Blackwhip bursts out of Izuku without warning. He learns about the vestiges and begins unlocking the other Quirks one by one. The war against the Paranormal Liberation Front follows, with Tomura Shigaraki now holding All For One and hunting Izuku.

After the war, Izuku leaves U.A. to protect his classmates and becomes a lone vigilante, sleepless and ragged. Fans call this stretch "Dark Deku." Class 1-A track him down and bring him home, and Ochaco convinces the evacuated civilians at U.A. to take him back in.

The final battle and the ending

In the last arc, the heroes split up to face the villains at once. Bakugo is badly hurt and nearly dies before he's revived. Izuku fights Shigaraki directly, using every Quirk and all of One For All. Instead of only trying to kill him, he reaches for Tenko Shimura, the scared child All For One turned into a weapon. He ends the fight by firing the last of One For All into Shigaraki to destroy All For One from inside, and with it goes Izuku's power.

The epilogue jumps eight years. Izuku, Quirkless again, works as a teacher at U.A. His old classmates have become pros, and they pool their money to build him a high-tech support suit so he can return to hero work. The series closes with Deku back in action, the way it started: a kid without a Quirk who still wants to save people.

Relationships

Trivia

• The notebooks. His hero analysis notebooks are numbered. Bakugo throws one out a window early in chapter 1, and it lands in a pond.
• Red shoes. His chunky red sneakers are part of his look from the first chapter, and they carry over into his hero costume.
• Costume. His first costume was made by his mother, and its ears and mouthguard are a tribute to All Might's look.
• Birthday. July 15, which he shares with Mirio Togata and Ichigo Kurosaki, as our character birthdays calendar shows.
• Shonen lineage. Fans often group him with Tanjiro Kamado and Yuji Itadori: three kind boys handed far more than they asked for.

Why Deku matters to the story

Izuku is a deliberate answer to the question My Hero Academia asks: what makes someone a hero? It isn't the Quirk. He starts without one and ends without one. What makes him a hero is the impulse to run toward someone in trouble before thinking it through, and the series bookends his story with that impulse.

He's also a model of a slow, earned power-up. Unlike heroes who start overpowered, like One Punch Man's Saitama, Izuku has to learn his power percent by percent, and it costs him. That long climb, and the decision to give it all away at the end, is what keeps him one of the most-loved protagonists of modern shonen.