My Hero Academia: How Did the Manga End?

Full spoilers ahead for chapter 430 of My Hero Academia and the final arc of the anime.

Kohei Horikoshi wrapped My Hero Academia on August 5, 2024 with chapter 430, published in Weekly Shonen Jump. After almost a decade of weekly serialisation, the ending hit and the discourse hit immediately after. Here is what actually happens, plus why this is one of the most divided shonen endings in recent memory.

What happens in the ending

Deku defeats Shigaraki and All For One in the final battle. He loses One For All in the process, returning to being Quirkless. Bakugo, who was killed in chapter 362, is revived thanks to Edgeshot's self-sacrifice (Edgeshot uses his stretching Quirk to manually restart Bakugo's heart by thinning himself to repair Bakugo's wounds from the inside).

The epilogue jumps eight years into the future. Deku is a teacher at U.A. High. His old classmates have become the new generation of Pro Heroes, with Dynamight (Bakugo), Shoto, and Uravity all established. Society has rebuilt. Deku, despite no longer having a Quirk, has been given a powered suit by his former classmates that lets him fight crime as a hero again.

Why the ending divides fans

Two main reasons. First, the Bakugo revival. Edgeshot saving Bakugo was foreshadowed since the previous arc, but the execution still struck many readers as undoing one of the manga's most weighted character deaths. The argument is not that the foreshadowing did not exist; the argument is that the death should have been allowed to stand.

Second, the eight-year epilogue. Deku regaining a hero career through a powered suit reads to some readers as the manga walking back its own thesis. The series had spent significant page time arguing that Deku's sacrifice in becoming Quirkless was meaningful. Giving him the suit so he can be a hero again is read by critics as a hedge.

Defenders point out that the suit is explicitly a gift from his classmates rather than something he earned, and that the epilogue's focus is on Deku as a teacher first and a hero second. Both readings are defensible.

What the anime adaptation looks like now

The Bones anime adaptation finished season 7 in October 2024, covering up through the Final Act arc. Season 8 was announced and is scheduled to adapt the final battle and ending. As of mid-2026, season 8 has begun airing and is faithfully adapting the controversial finale beats.

Whether the anime can make the ending land more cleanly than the manga is an open question. The animation is helping with the emotional weight of the Bakugo scene. The epilogue's structural issues are harder to fix with adaptation alone.

Our take

We rate it as a flawed ending to a series that earned a better one. The thematic ambition was there. The execution of the last forty chapters had to absorb too much: tying up All For One, resolving Shigaraki's arc, the Bakugo death, the Quirkless conclusion, and the time skip. Any one of those could have been a full arc. Combining them produced compressed scenes that read like outlines.