Warning: Spoilers for My Hero Academia Chapter #427

Chapter 427 of My Hero Academia featured an easy-to-miss cameo by a character that fans have seen before in its news report segments, hinting at just how villains are born and how they could be stopped earlier. Ironically, this character had an inadvertent hand in creating Tomura Shigaraki due to her over-reliance on heroes in the first place.

The chapter opens with a news report about who Tomura Shigaraki was, interviewing people on the street about what they think. While most are random civilians never seen before, one of the women, the 70-year-old housewife, has shown up. In fact, she first appeared in chapter 237, as an old woman who came up to young Tenko Shimura not long after his Decay Quirk manifested and his family was slaughtered. However, she became scared of Tenko and left him, assuming “the police or a hero or somebody” would come and help the boy sooner or later.

The following page is the one that contains the line, “If only, back then, someone, anyone, had reached out to help.”

Someone Could’ve Stopped Shigaraki Earlier, and It Was Her

My Hero Academia Proves Villains Are Best Stopped Early

The old woman says to the news crew that she “can’t help but wonder if they couldn’t have stopped him sooner.” Ironically, she herself was the first person who could’ve put a stop to Shigaraki’s creation by actually helping him instead of getting scared and running off. Shigaraki was just a kid, and didn’t know what he was doing; this woman was an adult who saw a kid in trouble and decided it wasn’t any of her business to get involved, instead setting it aside for someone else to handle… only no one else ever did.

This moment highlights the fact that the best way to stop a villain is to prevent them from becoming villains in the first place. The best way to do that is to reach out to those who need help and provide that assistance. This can be accomplished in a myriad of ways, but the most important is to take personal responsibility for the suffering that one can see right in front of them. The woman’s excuse for not helping young Tenko was that she didn’t want to be late for work, but that’s clearly all it was: an excuse. The least she could’ve done was call the police directly, but she didn’t even do that.

Villains are created based on how they’re treated by society. If society ignores them, or even shuns or scorns them, they’re naturally not going to feel very attached to society as a whole. Instead of cutting these people in trouble out and isolating them, they need to be brought in and cared for. This applies to more than just Shigaraki–Spinner, Toga, Twice… most of the League of Villains wouldn’t have become villains if society hadn’t isolated them. By including this subtle detail in these final chapters, My Hero Academia is reminding fans that villains can be stopped early, but it’s up to us to create a society that helps people who fall through the cracks before that point.