The Villains of My Hero Academia: The Society That Manufactures Them
August 2026's special episode reopens the wound: in My Hero Academia the villain is almost never born, but made. We use labeling theory to understand why the social reaction creates the deviant, revisiting Shigaraki, All For One, Dabi, Toga and Overhaul.
The special episode that My Hero Academia premiered in August 2026 did not come to celebrate the heroes: it came to remind us where their enemies came from. And that has been, since the very first chapter, the most uncomfortable argument in Kohei Horikoshi's series. In a world where 80% of the population is born with a power called a quirk, society doesn't just hand out capes and medals: it hands out labels too. It decides who is a hero, who is an ordinary citizen and who, for having the wrong power or being born in the wrong place, is a suspect from birth. The villains of MHA don't fall from the sky. Almost always they are children whom that distribution left out.
It's worth saying before we begin, because it's the line that separates criminology from excuse-making: to explain is not to exculpate. Understanding why an abandoned kid ends up destroying cities does not erase the victims nor justify the destruction. But it does force us to look at the other side of the equation, the one that hero stories prefer to ignore: what role society's reaction played in manufacturing the monster. For that there is a classic tool, labeling theory.
// The reaction creates the deviantLabeling: you aren't born a villain, you're named one
In 1963, the sociologist Howard Becker published Outsiders and turned criminology's central question on its head. Until then it asked what was strange about the offender; Becker asked what was strange about the society that singles him out. His thesis is devastating: deviance is not a quality of the act, but the consequence of a group applying rules and labels to whoever breaks them. The same power is heroism if it belongs to a student at U.A. High and a public threat if it belongs to a kid from the slums. The conduct can be identical; what changes is who holds the power to name.
Edwin Lemert had earlier refined the mechanism with two concepts that in MHA play out in slow motion. Primary deviance is the first act, often minor or involuntary. Secondary deviance comes afterward: when the person, treated and punished as a deviant, takes on the label as an identity and begins to behave accordingly. Between the two operates the self-fulfilling prophecy that Robert Merton described: a false definition of the situation provokes behaviors that end up making it true. Call a child a monster for long enough and you will have taught him to be one.
The label as prophecy
Labeling doesn't claim that society invents crime out of nothing, but that the social reaction (the stigma, the exclusion, the treatment as dangerous) pushes the person who receives it toward the deviant career. In MHA that process has its own names: the quirk that frightens, the surname that shames, the neighborhood no one escapes.
// Five case filesThe villains the world of heroes let fall
The League of Villains is not a club of the born-evil: it is a catalogue of the system's failures. Let's review five cases, each a distinct variant of the same label-making machinery. In their case files we develop the full criminological profile; here we leave the key to each one.
Tomura Shigaraki is the purest example. Before being the leader of the League he was Tenko Shimura, a child with a destructive power that terrified even himself, raised in a family broken by the cult of heroism and abandoned, in tears, on a street where no hero stopped to help him. Society didn't make him a villain all at once: first it let him fall and then, when someone else picked him up, the ending was already written. His case is textbook secondary deviance, the label turned into identity. We detail it in his Shigaraki case file.
All For One is the other face: not the victim of labeling, but the agent who exploits it. He doesn't wait for society to reject a child; he seeks out the rejected, gathers them and reprograms them. He embodies what Becker would call the inverted moral entrepreneur, the one who turns another's stigma into raw material for his own power. Where the system opens a crack, he slips his hand in. His architect's profile is in the All For One case file.
Dabi, really Toya Todoroki, translates labeling to the family sphere. Son of the number-one hero, he was raised as a project and discarded as a defect when his body couldn't withstand the power his father wanted to pass on to him. Labeled as the family's failure, he becomes literally the fire he was conceived to be: self-fulfilling prophecy made flames. His revenge is a mirror held up before the heroic institution. His story, in the Dabi case file.
Himiko Toga was born with a quirk her surroundings considered monstrous: the need to drink blood. Instead of help she received the mandate to fake normality, to repress what she was until it exploded. Hers is the by-the-book case of deviance amplification: the more she was treated as a danger to be hidden, the more she became that danger. Her key is in the Himiko Toga case file.
Overhaul (Kai Chisaki) closes the circle from above. An orphan raised in a declining yakuza clan, he doesn't want to destroy the society of quirks: he wants to cure it, to erase the powers he considers a disease. He is the villain who has internalized the system's own logic of purity and exclusion so deeply that he takes it to the extreme. His alternative order is born from the same disgust at difference that produced the others. We analyze him in the Overhaul case file.
Five villains, one and the same machinery
- Shigaraki
- Childhood abandonment: the label becomes identity (secondary deviance).
- All For One
- The agent who gathers the rejected and reprograms them into weapons.
- Dabi
- Labeled as the family failure: the prophecy is fulfilled in flames.
- Toga and Overhaul
- Stigmatized quirk and logic of purity: exclusion taken to the extreme.
// Why it mattersThe mirror MHA holds up before us
The strength of My Hero Academia lies not in its villains being likable, but in their being avoidable. Each one points to an exact spot where a society obsessed with heroes failed a child: the one who cried in the street, the one who didn't fit in at home, the one who only needed not to be treated like a monster. Labeling reminds us that the institutions that claim to protect us also produce categories, and that whoever hands out the stigma shares part of the responsibility for the outcome.
Explaining the origin does not erase the harm
None of this absolves Shigaraki of his victims nor Overhaul of his crimes. Labeling theory does not look for the innocent: it looks for prevention. If the social reaction pushes toward the deviant career, then early intervention, the absence of stigma and a real second chance are not softness, they are the only policy that cuts off the prophecy before it comes true.
What MHA understands about its villains
- The series' criminological thesis is that society manufactures its villains through discrimination, abandonment and exclusion.
- Becker (Outsiders, 1963): deviance is not a quality of the act, but of the social reaction that labels it.
- Lemert and Merton explain the mechanism: the label becomes identity and the self-fulfilling prophecy makes it real.
- Shigaraki, Dabi and Toga are variants of the same process; All For One exploits it and Overhaul takes it to the extreme of purity.
- To explain is not to exculpate: understanding the origin serves to prevent, not to erase the harm done to the victims.
Sources · further reading
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. The Free Press.
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior. McGraw-Hill.
- Merton, R. K. (1948). The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193-210.
- Merton, R. K. (1968). Social Theory and Social Structure (enlarged ed.). The Free Press.
Preguntas frecuentes
Does My Hero Academia say the villains aren't guilty?
No. The series, like labeling theory, distinguishes between explaining and exculpating. It shows that abandonment, discrimination and exclusion push many characters toward villainy, but that does not erase responsibility for their crimes nor the suffering of the victims. The point of understanding the origin is to prevent, not to justify.
What is labeling theory applied to MHA?
It is the idea, formulated by Howard Becker in 1963, that deviance lies not in the act but in the social reaction that singles it out. In MHA it can be seen when the same quirk is heroic in a U.A. student and dangerous in a kid from the slums: society decides who is a hero and who is a villain, and that label ends up shaping the conduct of whoever receives it.
Why is Shigaraki the best example of a manufactured villain?
Because his case shows the complete sequence: a child with a power that terrified him, a family broken by the cult of heroism and an abandonment on the street where no hero stopped. Treated as a threat before committing anything, he ended up taking on that label as identity. It is secondary deviance and the self-fulfilling prophecy taken to the extreme.