Warning: Contains spoilers for Shy episode #1.Crunchyroll’s new superhero anime SHY has only just started, but it already works to fix one of My Hero Academia’s biggest problems. SHY is set in a world where superheroes from across the world came together to prevent a Third World War, and ever since then, an era of peace has been established. In the present, Unilord, the leader of the world’s heroes, has called for the heroes to come together to face an emerging threat, and at the center of it all is, naturally, the titular protagonist of the anime, Japan’s hero, Shy.
SHY has an interesting premise for a superhero story, and one thing to take away from it is that it fixes one of the biggest problems with My Hero Academia. With SHY and My Hero Academia both revolving around superheroes, there’s naturally a lot of overlap between their ideas and overall themes, even if the execution isn’t necessarily the same. One idea, in particular, is already being executed far more effectively in SHY than it was in My Hero Academia, and it highlights both how My Hero Academia fell short in one area and how different a story SHY is going to be: the international scope.
SHY Uses All Of Its World’s Heroes, Unlike My Hero Academia
The way that SHY fixes one of My Hero Academia’s biggest problems is using heroes from all around the world in its story. One major criticism of My Hero Academia has been a lack of focus on characters or worldbuilding outside of Japan, the final arc even going out of its way to keep the few international heroes in the franchise uninvolved. SHY, meanwhile, quickly establishes an international scope of its story with Shy being friends with the Russian hero Spirits and Unilord calling on all the heroes of the world, so it’s already avoiding My Hero Academia’s problem of only focusing on Japan.
With how quickly SHY establishes that its story will progress on an international level, it allows itself to tell a much bigger tale than My Hero Academia. As big as the stakes get in My Hero Academia, having everything be limited to Japan often ends up making things feel weirdly small, but with SHY taking an international approach from the start, it’ll be easier to convey how big its central conflict will be. It’s not inherently bad for My Hero Academia to limit the scope of its story, but it’s understandable why people would criticize it for that, so it’s nice to see that SHY won’t encounter those same critiques.
Why My Hero Academia’s Scale Is So Small (& Why SHY Is Avoiding That)
My Hero Academia focusing solely on what happens in Japan certainly puts it on a smaller scale than SHY, but that’s easy enough to explain. After all, My Hero Academia is (or should be) a story about the students of Class 1-A, so it tries to focus on the threats and developments surrounding them. To a certain degree, it makes sense that characters and story elements from outside Japan haven’t been brought in. More practically, having to work out worldbuilding on a larger scale than just Japan could take up an incredible amount of time and chapters, so it makes sense that Kohei Horikoshi would try and avoid that.
As for why SHY can so easily focus on things outside of Japan, that simply comes down to its presentation. SHY appears to be styled as a more traditional superhero story with things like secret identities and superheroes being uncommon. Heroes taking on global threats are very common in those types of stories, so in that regard, it makes sense for there to be a focus on international characters and conflicts. All of that helps SHY both avoid My Hero Academia’s criticism for ignoring everything outside Japan and establish its own identity, and it will be interesting to see what else it does with that as it airs on Crunchyroll.
SHY releases new episodes Mondays on Crunchyroll.