“My goal is to make this a world where heroes have too much time on their hands.”
Keigo Takami Quotes
3 quotes from My Hero Academia, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Purchased as a child and trained into an instrument, and the only character in the setting whose stated ambition would make him obsolete. Reads as breezy; is not.
“When a person's backed into a corner, or when they're truly free, that's when they show their true nature.”
He offers two conditions, which is the interesting part, because almost everyone who says something like this offers only the first. Pressure revealing character is the standard formulation and it is the one he has personal experience of, having been bought as a child and worked under supervision ever since. Freedom revealing character is the claim he cannot test on himself and it is the one his whole stated ambition depends on — a world where heroes have nothing to do is a world where everybody is in the second condition. He is a man arguing for an experiment he has never been a subject of. The series eventually gives him a version of it and the results are ambiguous, which is more honest than the line deserves.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You were dealt a bad hand, but you can atone for your deeds and start over. Because you're a good person.”
Offered to a villain, by the hero who is in the middle of infiltrating that villain's organisation, which makes the sincerity impossible to assess and is exactly why it is worth reading closely. He has spent the arc performing warmth as tradecraft. This may be more of it. But the specific formulation (a bad hand, dealt, followed by atonement as available rather than earned) is the position he holds about himself, and he has no operational reason to reveal it. Undercover work is the wrong place to hand out your actual philosophy. The series does not resolve whether he meant it, and the character is built so that he probably could not tell you either.
Every other stated ambition in this setting is upward: be the strongest, be number one, go beyond. Hawks wants the profession to become boring, which is the only genuinely radical goal anyone articulates, and he is the character least equipped to survive the world that would produce it. He was purchased as a child and trained into an instrument. A society with nothing for heroes to do is a society with no use for him, and he knows it while saying the sentence. That is what gives the line its strange flatness. It is a wish made by someone who has correctly worked out that he is not included in it. The genre almost never permits this. Aspirations here are supposed to be self-serving in the wholesome way, the hero's flourishing and the world's improving being the same event. He is proposing his own obsolescence and calling it the good outcome.