-Story-
For an anime I once hailed for being a refreshing entry in the shonen genre, this season is anything but. The Overhaul arc dedicates 17 of it's 25 episode season to a series of small battles interrupted by flashbacks about characters we barely know or care about. The pacing is crushed by these constant backstories, thrown in during the middle of a fight scene just because. It was a drag to see these coming, and the temptation was strong to skip through the entire episode until we got back to the plot. By the time we got to the final fight with Overhaul, I couldn't pin down his motivations, nor did I care when Deku inevitably beat him while spouting the same rhetoric. Instead of learning to overcome his limits, or developing into more of a hero, Deku can fuck up his body all he needs without consequence (thanks to Eri) and get off scot free.
I appreciated the second arc for being a much smaller story focused on the students' lives at UA as they prepare for their cultural festival, but it becomes split with another story and neither are given the chance to shine. "Preparing for the festival" is reduced to "talking about preparing for the festival" and I can't even remember what Gentle and La Brava were doing in their sections.
-Characters-
As I mentioned above, there is a lot of time wasted on characters we didn't need. A whole episode is dedicated to Tamaki's backstory, a character we've only seen briefly up to that point, and only see briefly throughout the rest of the season; he didn't merit this development.
An even bigger offender is Nighteyes. He wasn't important before season 4, then he was shown for a few episodes, and then he dies. It's hard to say his tragic death matters when the show and the characters move past it pretty fast. Nothing has changed between pre-Nighteyes, and post-death.
The biggest tragedy in this season was MHA itself. The series has fallen victim to the typical shonen tropes I once thought it would avoid. The flashy fights and feint fallouts were not enough to save it from being missable experience.
