U.A. Entrance Exam Arc

Quirkless Deku receives One For All from All Might and enters U.A. High School to become a hero.

The Entrance Exam Arc is the origin of My Hero Academia's central premise and the first demonstration of the series' emotional intelligence — a story about a boy told he cannot be a hero who becomes one anyway, not through a lucky power awakening but through a deliberate choice that impresses the greatest hero alive. Izuku Midoriya has been Quirkless in a world where superpowers define social status since childhood, and his dream of becoming a hero like his idol All Might has been told to him, again and again, that it is impossible. The arc's emotional engine is the cruelty of that impossibility — the casual dismissal by doctors, teachers, and even the person Izuku admires most when All Might himself first advises him to abandon the dream. Then the encounter with Katsuki Bakugo trapped by a villain becomes a pivot point: All Might watches Izuku run toward danger without a Quirk, without training, without any rational basis for hope, and recognizes in that moment the quality that truly defines a hero. All Might chooses Izuku to inherit One For All — the stockpiling Quirk passed down through generations — and the subsequent ten months of brutal physical preparation transforms Izuku's body into something capable of withstanding its power. The UA Entrance Exam itself, where Izuku saves Ochaco Uraraka from a zero-point robot at the cost of destroying his own arms, is a sequence of pure shounen catharsis: the moment the series earns its premise through the simple argument that heroism is a choice, not a superpower.