Key findings

• Episode 11 of My Hero Academia season 7 impresses fans with high stakes, teamwork, and thrilling battles.
• The episode stands out due to its lack of plot structure, which increases tension and captivates viewers.
• Light Fades to Rain is highly praised for focusing on a major event, allowing characters like Bakugo to shine, and providing an intense narrative.

Meanwhile, the My Hero Academia The anime is in its 7th season and still reaching new heights. It’s true that season 5 was a disappointment for some fans, but season 6 upped the ante and got fans excited again with the start of the final war, and season 7 capitalizes well on those successes. Now the pro heroes and villains are locked in a desperate final battle for Japan’s future, and everyone’s survival is at stake. No one knows this better than Katsuki Bakugo and the UA Big Three in episode 11, “Light Fades to Rain.”

Remarkable, “Light Fades to Rain” is not only one of the best episodes of season 7, but one of the best episodes overall. My Hero Academia. It has an impressive 9.6 rating on IMDb, making it the third best episode after “His Start” at 9.7 and “One For All” at 9.8. Fans can see exactly how “Light Fades to Rain” became such a highly rated episode by not only reviewing the events of the episode, but also judging what fans like so much about the anime’s best episodes overall.

What happens in season 7, episode 11?

Katsuki Bakugo, Pro Heroes and UA’s Big Three fight a losing battle against Tomura Shigaraki

Episode 11 of the new season is devoted almost entirely to the heroes’ desperate fight against the villain Tomura Shigaraki and his fearsome powers in the Coffin in the Sky, an aerial battlefield designed to neutralize his key assets. The context is that Deku himself was supposed to fight Tomura in this particular battlefield, only for Himiko Toga to drag him to another, faraway location, forcing Katsuki Bakugo and his powerful allies to fight Tomura as a delaying tactic until Deku can arrive. As of episode 11, Team Bakugo, as it is informally known, is still fighting. Although Eraserhead and Neito Monoma keep Tomura’s many Quirks offline with Erasure, Tomura is still a formidable threat with his natural toughness and massive clusters of hand-like growths everywhere. In short, it’s a boss fight the heroes aren’t sure they can win.

In Episode 11, the increasingly desperate Pro Heroes and students attempt to keep Tomura at bay through close teamwork, and ideally they can temporarily incapacitate him to make him an easier target for Deku when he finally arrives. To this end, Bakugo displays a whole new level of cooperation and Quirk synergy in battle, similar to the joint training exercise in Season 5. Bakugo doesn’t quite draw on the power of friendship here, but he is more humble and team-oriented than before, and the UA Big Three certainly have the power of friendship on their side. Mirio Togata, Nejire Hado, and Tamaki Amajiki do their best as longtime friends who understand each other as heroes and as people.

Tomura Shigaraki pushes the heroes further back with his immense power, making Team Bakugo cling even more to their stubborn defiance and even the power of flashbacks and self-reflection. While flashbacks are never an actual force or strategy in the universe, they are quite powerful on a meta level. Such things usually either happen right before the main character dies, thus serving as a death flag, or the flashbacks spur the hero on and give them new momentum. Episode 11 used flashbacks and self-reflection for the big three of the UA and Katsuki Bakugo alikeonly to disprove that idea by denying all four heroes the breakthrough they desired. The big three suffered another setback, and worst of all, Bakugo was seemingly killed. Episode 11 actually ended on that note, with the camera lingering on Bakugo’s likely dead form, from his bloody mouth to his empty eyes.

Episode 11 is popular because it strips away the plot armor with overwhelming stakes

My Hero Academia has stopped holding back with its punches

It’s no secret that shonen action anime, for all their power-ups and cool villains, are generous with plot armor. It’s true that Goku has died more than once, and Nobara Kugisaki apparently died in Jujutsu Kaisenbut those are exceptions. Everyone knows that the lovable leads of any shonen action series are meant to “survive” in one way or another. It’s the creator’s job to disguise that plot armor with sensible, organic twists so viewers can continue to suspend their skepticism, and generally, it works. My Hero Academia has done this many times before, from Mirio surviving Overhaul’s wrath to Deku’s small team overcoming all odds to fight Stain, the Hero Killer. Even in recent seasons, the heroes have cheated death, such as when Bakugo survived Tomura’s Rivet Stab attack with no lasting injuries. Now, Episode 11 changes all that.

The heroes have fought and even died before, but now it is becoming the rule rather than the exception, which means My Hero Academia is done with fake deaths and it’s not just about the routine anymore. The anime doesn’t pretend to threaten the heroes to create semi-serious stakes in the fights – it’s all real now and episode 11 makes that clear in a gruesome way. The situation is grim indeed when not even Mirko, Best Jeanlist and Edgeshot can defeat Tomura with the big three of UA and Bakugo’s help, not to mention fighting All For One, the supervillain elsewhere. And while it was terribly sad that Midnight died in season 6, it is even more alarming that Katsuki Bakugo loses his life Fight against Tomura Shigaraki, as such deaths “shouldn’t happen” in shonen anime like this. Such a bold, shocking move raises the stakes and lets fans know that this is no ordinary fight.

Fans of My Hero Academia prefer episodes that focus on a fight

Monolithic episodes keep the story tight and make the villain the star

Aside from the brutal stakes and eye-opening lack of plot armor, the episode “Light Fades to Rain” also received such a high IMDb rating because it does what the other top-rated episodes do: focus on a single event that steals the whole show. For plot and narrative reasons, anime like My Hero Academia must sometimes have other episodes that mix up a few plot threads and set things up, but such episodes are neither memorable nor fan favorites. These episodes are merely functional in anime, while episodes like “Light Fades to Rain” are the payoff for those set-up episodes. Stories are told through both action and reaction, and while both are important, it’s the action that draws viewers in and makes them cheer, laugh, and cry.

Such is the case in Season 7 Episode 11, where Deku’s shonen-style rival finally gets a fair chance to really shine as he fights alongside his allies against Tomura Shigaraki without any other scenes or narrative getting in the way. Since the overall story has so many plot threads and characters involved, many episodes from the past few seasons have juggled multiple perspectives, and it’s a rare treat to get a monolithic episode like “Light Fades to Rain.” If the anime manages to put the other plot threads on hold to focus on just one for an entire episode, then it’s wonderfully clear to viewers that the events in this monolithic episode are hugely important. That alone can give the episode a sense of “awesomeness,” an intuitive way for fans to realize that the content of the monolithic episode is powerful and needs to be taken seriously. This may also contribute to that high 9.6 rating.

The same applies to the other highly rated My Hero Academia episodes on IMDb for reference. One example is the final episode of season 4, “His Start,” which is dedicated entirely to the new No. 1 Pro Hero, Endeavor. Fans hadn’t yet gotten to know Endeavor as a protagonist or top-rated hero, so it was high time he took the spotlight after All Might’s retirement and showed if he could fill All Might’s massive shoes. In other words, Endeavor wasn’t a main character in the post-All Might era yet, so it was doubly exciting to see him star in a solo episode where he fought a high-end Nomu named Hood to save the day. That was the moment he finally went Plus Ultra to claim victory against impossible odds, which would set the tone for his later fights. And now, It’s Bakugo’s turn to be the star while Deku is somewhere else. and even if Bakugo took a fatal blow, at least he did his best, and that’s always worth a 9.6.