My Hero Academia Set New Record For Gender-Swapping Characters

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In the early planning stages of My Hero Academia, series creator Kohei Horikoshi recognized it was important to have gender diversity among the students in the hero course, but he wound up with a little problem: he designed a lot more boys than girls.

As a series set in a school, Horikoshi knew going in that he'd have to design a lot of characters to fill out the classrooms—and that's not even counting adult characters such as faculty and pro heroes. As the series has continued, there's been the need for other classes at U.A. High, students from other schools, villains, family members, and so on, to the point where there's more than 300 characters at present. Needless to say, creating that many characters, most of whom need special hero or villain costumes in addition to normal clothes, took a lot of time. Some characters, like Mount Lady, were originally designed for one purpose (she was meant to fill Ochako's role as a student) but then recycled for another.

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InMy Hero Academia's initial batch of characters in class 1-A, there are six girls (Momo, Ochako, Tsuyu, Toru, Mina, and Kyoka Jiro) and 14 boys, so the gender ratio is a bit uneven. Initially, it was even more unbalanced, and Horikoshi recognized that this was a problem in the making. Instead of starting from scratch and coming up with all new characters, he opted for a simpler solution: make some of these male characters female instead. According to character profiles in the second collected volume of My Hero Academia, Toru Hagakure and Tsuyu Asui were both originally sketched out as male characters. It seems the decision to flop the genders of these characters was largely due to the