Yuga Aoyama revealed as the traitor in My Hero Academia

My Hero Academia spoilers focusing on the fairly recent reveal of the All for One spy inside UA who turns out to be Aoyama.

Initially we were led to believe that it resident invisible girl Toru Hagakure that was the traitor after she appeared in a panel while AFO was talking about his mole.

But it turns out this was all a red herring and it was another of Izuku Midoriya’s classmates, Yuga Aoyama who was the spy. And Toru was merely eavesdropping on the conversation between Aoyama and his parents.

And he’s definitely tormented by the fact that he has to constantly do this report to All For One, who was waiting for his signal whenever the class would be isolated and would be easy to attack such as early in the manga and anime when Deku first met Shigaraki.

And through the succeeding pages we find out that Aoyama was quirkless when he was younger and his parents managed to contact All for One who gave him his quirk, which was that crazy navel laser. During this chapter we also see that AFO forced Aoyama to do inform him of the class movement and any other important intel.

Toru is shocked with this and looks for somebody to help or to pass on the intel. Lucky for her she comes across Deku who confronts Aoyama and subsquently capture him and his parents. During the confrontation with the faculty and his classmates, Deku offers his hand of friendship to Aoyama but they are still guilty of collaborating with the enemy. Later we see that the good guys use this to their advantage to weed out the League of Villains and AFO in the open and in their own terms.

They use Aoyama family to contact AFO to give them the location of the students including Deku but they are able to get past AFO’s quirk to find out the truth through the use of Shinsho who temporarily joins the heroes albeit without a real license to operate and looking very much like Spider-Man to some effect.

Overall, when this came out, it had a good shock. Aoyama never really stood out and the fact that most of us forgot about him in the different arcs of the My Hero Academia manga and anime means that Kohei Horikoshi knew what he was writing when he set this up a long time ago. Plus it also paints a good symmetry between Deku and himself; both of them coming from the same background getting their dreams while having this different self-image along the way.

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