The second volume of My Hero Academia's mostly light-hearted spinoff, My Hero Academia: Team Up Missions, was recently released in English, and the book opens with one of Japan's most ridiculous heroes yet, the edgelord hero, Odd-Eye.
The series is written by Yoko Akiyama, one of Horikoshi's assistants on the main My Hero Academia series, and consists of short one-off chapters dealing with a variety of characters paired up in unusual combinations. Team Up Missions may be most famous in the Western fandom so far by bringing over Melissa Shield from the film My Hero Academia: Two Heroes into the manga for the first time. As the main story has gotten darker and narrowed its focus a bit, Team Up Missions still offers some opportunities to give minor characters some time in the spotlight, even if their canonicity is debated by fans.
Chapter 4 of Team Up Missions is the first in volume 2, and sees Deku, his classmate Fumikage Tokoyami (wielder of the Dark Shadow quirk), and Class 1-B's Shihai Kuroiro, whose quirk allows him to blend into black or dark spaces, summoned to the headquarters of a mysterious hero, Odd-Eye. Despite being such an expert on pro heroes, even Deku has hardly heard of the man--something that turns out to have been a deliberate fact on Odd-Eye's part, as he believes being unknown only serves to make him all the more mysterious. Odd-Eye himself has a quirk that forces those he touches to confess to their darkest secrets, but after Deku and Kuroiro spill their embarrassing moments, it shockingly fails to work on Tokoyami.
Odd-Eye is all about appearances; his lair is dark and cave-like, illuminated mostly by candles, and he presents himself as if he's a centuries-old vampire or wizard. He refers to his sidekicks as aura of darkness and brooding isolation that's highly performative rather than authentic. Since Tokoyami and Kuroiro both have powers associated with dark spaces, they've also had the edgelord label thrown at them from time to time, making them obvious choices as proteges to further enhance his own reputation.
The pro heroes in My Hero Academia have had some issues in the past with this kind of performative behavior. Mount Lady, for example, has been shown to have a vain streak and be quick to cater to fans, while Vigilantes' Captain Celebrity waited to perform his heroic efforts until a camera crew arrived. Odd-Eye, however, is taking this to a new level, since keeping a low profile as a hero means not performing showy heroics, making his self-selected appellation of "Edgelord" both shockingly appropriate and a joke at his own expense in My Hero Academia.
