Personally, I have no problems with shonen manga having very common themes like rivalry, friendship and dreams etc. or having sort of childish humor. (If the gag talks more about the character I'll like it anyway.)
Some people like to despise shonen manga, saying something like kiddies shonen blah blah blah but I think there's potential for shonen manga. I love one piece, first part of naruto, dragon ball and hunter x hunter. I think if you tell a story well, even when the themes of the story may seem generic, it still can be a great story.
However Hero Academia isn't one of them.
Hero Aca has really good character designs. All characters look unique and match their own personality even when some of them are just background characters.
There is a wide range of characters in the main cast and all of them have interesting supernatural abilities (quirks). Quirks always match one's personality. That makes the characters feel more grounded.
And most of them have likeable and unique personalities that make you side with the characters when shit hits the fan.
However, the greatness of Hero Academia ends right there. (at least for me)
It's just way too spread out on its characters.
It's trying to talk about too many characters without going in depth with any of them except for a few. (Deku, Todoroki and All Might). A lot of the characters(like Ochaco, Eraserhead) can be interesting but none of them had their backstories explained or took a major lead in any of the arcs.
This simplistic characterisation for the main characters can be a great thing for long running shonen series. Main characters don't get fully developed in the early stage of the story so don't end up being static due to the length of the manga and ultimately harm the longevity and the quality of the manga.
Well it works for Hunter X Hunter.
Hunter x Hunter has a similar case before chimera ant arc. It has amazing villains like Hisoka, Phantom Troupe while the main characters have very little backstories but just interesting enough to get you root for them. In Chimera ant arc, Gon took a huge turn with his character and we can still see he's changing and learning more in the future. It isn't like One Piece where the bond between the crew is already so huge after timeskip. It doesn't show anymore about them when they sacrifice for their friends. And the story has been becoming more and more stale. (This can be controversial but hey, that's just my opinion.)
But that doesn't work for Hero Academia.
Villains aren't very well developed in this manga.
Like, their ideals(what exactly they hate about the heroes except they are smiling and can't save everyone), how they come up with their ideals (backstories), what's the relationship among them, those things don't seem very well told.
Main characters aren't as well developed than that in HxH either. In HxH, we've seen a main character went on a big revenge arc. We learned about Kurapika's goal and his way to achieve his goal, and how Gon and his friends react to that. While Gon, Killua and Leorio weren't getting a whole lot of character development. We still have something to think about the characters.
In Hero Aca, we just got a really short revenge arc for Tenya which is way more underwhelming than that in HxH.
You can go for a simplistic characterisation. But you gotta have good villains and one to two good main characters.
Not many shonen manga has truly great villains, but without even well developed main characters, the story just ends up feeling empty.
I don't understand why people hate Naruto with a passion but end up loving this manga. Naruto's part 2 (shippuden) had gone downhill and ninja war arc was shit. But its exam arc was actually good with a range of well defined characters like (nenji, hinata, lee, shikamaru, sakura and naruto himself), and a big interesting overarching plotline.
While some people may claim that Hero Academia's main weakness is its generic story, I tend to disagree. You can have a very generic structured tournament arc but still have a very good story by making the characters interesting. Just having characters with different/opposite personalities clashing each other, seeing them learning from each other and becoming stronger in terms of skills and mentality can be fun as hell like what I've mentioned about Naruto.
Up until chapter 92 in Hero Academia, I still don't see there are many memorable character moments for the characters except Todoroki and All Might. I still hate that the author tried to make the main cast saving the most unlikeable and annoying character in the manga which doesn't build up the emotion at all.
With a lot of similar traits with Naruto's, I just don't see Hero Academia have come close to its predecessor, not to mention having surpassed it. I'm passionate about shonen manga. Maybe I'm just a jaded old man who can't appreciate new shonen. Feel free to discuss with me by leaving comments in my profile if you think I'm wrong.
