Boku no Hero Academia is certainly a series where lots of noisy and exciting things happen.  It’s full of booms and bangs and shouts – but often, it’s the easily overlooked moments that strike me as the most interesting.  One of my favorites from last week was when Aizawa-sensei answered Joke’s query about why he didn’t warn his kids about the “crush U.A.” tradition by telling her “Sorry, but we have to think further ahead.”  It summed up the essence of Yuuei beautifully, but even at the time I read it I thought it came off as kind of condescending.  So I was delighted when Fukukado-sensei said exactly that in response – I always love it when an author shows he completely gets it like that.

There are a lot of permutations to this small, quiet exchange so easily lost in the kerfuffle of the provisional license exam.  In this instance I think both teachers are in the right – sure Eraserhead was being a little arrogant, but if you’re U.A., you have no choice but to think that way.  You’re not being paranoid if everyone really is out to get you, and if you’re part of Yuuei, everyone really is out to get you.  Villains, other schools, anti-hero activists and bureaucrats – Yuuei is the only target that really matters.  And if this licensing exam proves nothing else, it certainly proves that.

That’s not all it proves of course, and one of the other things is that U.A. students really do need to stick together.  It’s not a matter of martial spirit or shounen tradition or school pride – it’s about surviving, and it will be no less true once this exam and their school careers are over and they’re out in the world at-large.  The smartest among the opposition students, like Shindo You (Kasuya Yuuta) – the Ketsubutsu top dog who Bakugo snarled at last week – understand this, and proioritize splitting the Yuuei students apart above attacking them directly.

Meanwhile, as Kacchan and Todoroki continue to wait things out on their own, Shiketsu’s Inasa-kun reveals why he was the top-scorer on the Yuuei entrance exam.  Using his wind quirk he takes out 120 students in one fell swoop – and passes himself in the process, becoming the first to do so.  It might be noted that he’s acted on his own rather than in concert with his classmates, who he hardly needed in order to pass – but the counter would be that in taking out all those applicants, he’s done his classmates a huge service by thinning the field.

Isolated, Deku is winged, one of his targets struck by Utsushimi Camie (Chihara Minori, really great here).  Camie shows quite an interest in Deku, and indeed she already knows a fair bit about him – more than she could possibly just from watching the U.A. sports festival on TV.  Her quirk is a strange one, allowing her to seemingly appear and disappear at will – and later, to appear as Uraraka, convincingly enough to fool Izuku at first.  She, too, appears to be acting on her own – no other Shiketsu students are about as she confronts Deku.

Deku has learned an important lesson from his experience at the Pussycats’ training camp – there’s a reason why you’re supposed to take care of your own oxygen mask before anyone else’s.  But he’s still himself, and he still saves “Ochako” when it appears she’s going to be injured in a fall – even half-suspecting she might be an imposter.  Eventually he’s reunited with the real Uraraka and Sero, but Ketsubutsu shows up in force just at that moment – and the clock is ticking, with 54 students now having passed the test.  Teamwork and cooperation may be the key to success, but it’s not enough simply to survive – at some point you have to attack to progress, and for a group of Yuuei students preoccupied with survival, time is running out.