Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I will always be Lemillion!”
Mirio Togata Quotes
2 quotes from My Hero Academia, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Mirio Togata’s protection of Eri has to be read alongside his earlier decision to leave her with Overhaul. ComicBook’s December 2019 account of the fourth-season anime describes him restraining himself and Midoriya at their first encounter, then reproaching himself afterward. When a bullet aimed at Eri gives him another decision, he puts himself in its path, loses his Permeation Quirk and continues fighting. Our reading is that this sequence tests more than readiness to endure pain. It asks whether regret about a missed rescue can become protection when waiting is no longer an acceptable answer. His training matters here: the report describes skill developed over years before it describes the loss of his power. Continuing to fight after that loss does not mean preparation was unnecessary. It means some of what he learned remains usable when his circumstances change. There is also a limit to making the sacrifice into an absolute ending. ComicBook’s later account, published in December 2022, identifies Eri’s trained Rewind ability as the means of restoring his Quirk. Recovery does not make the danger unreal or erase the period without his power. It does prevent this scene from proving that heroism requires a loss that can never be repaired.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“As long as that girl can't smile...I can't let this go!!”
The threshold he sets is absurdly low and that is the point. Not until she is safe, not until the organization is dismantled — until she can smile, which is a condition no hero agency has a procedure for and no ranking system rewards. He is standing in front of a man who can disassemble people with a touch, having decided that the acceptable end state is a child's facial expression. Compare it to how the professionals in the same arc define success, which is arrests and containment, both of which are achieved and neither of which fixes her. The series is quietly arguing that the measurable version of rescue and the real one are different jobs, and that only the amateur in the room is doing the second.
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Said after losing the quirk the name was built on. A million was the number of people he intended to save with it, so the hero name is a unit of measurement for a capacity he no longer has, and by any reasonable accounting he is now claiming a title he cannot deliver on. He keeps it anyway. What makes this land rather than read as denial is that the series does not restore him quickly or treat the claim as symbolic; the name sits there as an unpaid invoice. Identity in most stories is something you discover. Here it is something he refuses to let an injury renegotiate, which is a smaller and more stubborn thing.