My Hero Academia Sakuga MAD - New Normal, Searchlight, Bakemono, Gift

MHA holds a special place in my heart for sure, as it’s probably the first shonen that I’ve been there for from the start and seen to its end. It may not be the best battle shonen out there, but it’s packed full of fun, hype and emotional moments that I can’t help but love it even with the reputation the community had. Although I did have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the production of the series. The first 3 seasons were directed by Kenji Nagasaki and had a solid baseline of quality involving lots of CAD from Yoshihiko Umakoshi and Hitomi Odashima and hype moments from Yutapon, Shuu Sugita, Hakuyu Go, etc. . However after that point, a lot of that strong baseline of quality went towards the movies with the show changing directors and we started to see the effects of producing 1 movie and a 2-cour anime each year, with it being the most noticeable in season 5 part 2 and season 6 part 1. Lack of polished art, lots of more stills used, the hype episode director Setsumu Doukawa being nowhere to be found, Norimitsu Suzuki spreading himself thin on so many episodes to save the action of this war arc, it wasn’t great. Having said that, there was new talent in the key animation and AD departments that were getting better and better over the seasons (Jason Yao, Kohei Hirota, Akira Iwamoto, Angelkade, Nami Fujii, Mao Tsunoda, Noriko Morishima, etc.). Couple that with Naomi Nakayama taking over as series director, Motonobu Hori and Masayuki Otsuki as highlight episode directors, and Umakoshi appearing so often as an AD, the series would bounce back production wise (although I still wasn’t a fan of the Gearshift episode), and it all culminated to season 8 which has arguably the best produced episode in the franchise and is arguably the best produced season of the franchise. It was a season worthy of being anime of the year and the recent “More” episode was so much fun to see how everyone’s been after so many years. For the song selection, I wanted to best capture the spirit of MHA, and I knew I wanted to use New Normal by DISH// and Searchlight by Kiro Akiyama from the start. Not only have these artists done MHA songs before but something about the energetic vibe of them scream MHA to me even more than the songs they did for the series. For the third song I wanted something a lot more serious and dark, so I went with Bakemono by BLUE ENCOUNT (same band that did Polaris) and I think it worked really well. The only thing is I thought I would only need 3 songs but season 8 had too much to pack in, so I ended it off with a heartfelt song that was already used in MHA (Gift by Vaundy) which I think fit the moments we see of Deku with Uraraka and Deku with Bakugo and All Might. I was debating on using Iseijin by Vaundy instead but I think this worked well and I may save Iseijin for another MAD.