Did Kirishima Say “The Power to Smile in the Face of Fear”?

No. "The power to smile in the face of fear" is not a Kirishima line, and no version of it appears in My Hero Academia's manga or anime.

The verdict

Fabricated, and caught here the same way as the fake Momo quote: this site briefly published it, went looking for the episode during our August 2026 verification pass, and found that there is no episode. It came from the same aggregator ecosystem, it was deleted, and this page exists so the next person searching for it gets an answer instead of another copy.

Why this fabrication chose Kirishima

Invented quotes are not random; they get attached to the character whose brand they flatter. Kirishima's arc genuinely is about fear and the performance of courage, so a sentence gluing smile to fear reads plausibly in his voice to anyone who half-remembers the show. That is the mechanism to distrust. A fabricated line survives by being a caricature of a real arc, and the more accurately you can guess a character's themes, the more suspicious a themeless summary sentence should be.

What he actually says

The verified line this site carries is from Season 4, Episode 72: "It doesn't matter what your Quirk is if you've got a chivalrous heart!" — and our commentary on it argues it is his least interesting sentence, because the arc around it is harsher than the slogan. His strongest material is the confession that he froze, the shame of standing still while someone else moved, and none of that fits on a poster, which is why the aggregators had to invent something that did.

The pattern worth learning

Both fabrications this site has caught in My Hero Academia share a shape: a character's arc, compressed into a single aphorism the character never needed to say, because the story was already saying it. When a quote reads like the moral of the character instead of a moment from the character, check it before repeating it. The verification process is public, and the searchable version of the check takes about five minutes: exact phrase, quotation marks, and see whether anything with an episode number ever comes back.