WARNING: The following contains spoilers for My Hero Academia Season 5, Episode 15, "One Thing at a Time," now streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation and Hulu.
With My Hero Academia's Joint Training arc having concluded, the ball is firmly in Class 1-A's court once again. Right now, Izuku Midoriya, Shoto Todoroki and Katsuki Bakugo are all interning with the flame hero Endeavor to boost their budding hero skills further. And Endeavor is proving to be just the coach they needed.
While Endeavor has a well-earned poor reputation for his fierce temper and tyrannical parenting, he is genuinely trying to repent for all these wrongs, showing his nurturing side at last. Now he's taken over All Might and Gran Torino's roles as a teacher to share his practical wisdom with his three interns. As Season 5 of MHA is proving, Endeavor is much more than a brute -- he's also a smart thinker.
How Endeavor Hones Deku, Shoto & Bakugo's Quirks
It takes more than sheer Quirk firepower to serve as a dependable Pro Hero in My Hero Academia. Even All Might himself needed smarts and finesse with his power, and Endeavor is insightful enough to see what each of his three interns are capable of -- and what they still need to practice. Thanks to his and Rei's Quirk marriage, Endeavor understands how his son Shoto's dual-element Quirk works, while Katsuki Bakugo's Explosion Quirk is roughly similar to Endeavor's own.
Izuku's Quirk is also fair game. Endeavor knows exactly how to coach these boys and hone their abilities, and it's not just any teacher who can do that. Shoto, Izuku and Bakugo have had some great coaches before and covered a lot of ground in their training, but even so, Endeavor is noticing all sorts of new ways these Quirks can be improved further.
That kind of insight makes it clear Endeavor is more than a brute-force fighter in My Hero Academia. He is an expert on the nature and application of Quirks, especially those that operate similarly to his own Hellflame Quirk, and Shoto and Izuku are eager to learn (though Bakugo is getting defensive). For example, Endeavor is urging the boys to use parallel processing to juggle every factor that goes into Quirk usage, comparing it to how a person coordinates several processes at the same time to drive a car.
With the exception of natural geniuses like All Might, a trainee hero must learn one thing after another, using their knowledge and abilities in parallel as each skill is added to their inventory. When a new driver gets behind the wheel for the first time, they're mentally juggling a dozen rules at once while constantly learning new ones, and Quirks are no different. Not even Aizawa or Gran Torino said anything about this, but it's exactly what Izuku and his classmates needed to hear -- and it's all thanks to Endeavor's savvy teaching methods.
How Endeavor Navigates The City & Runs A Pro Hero Agency
Aside from his sharp insights into Quirk usage, Endeavor is also a remarkably smart and street-wise hero in other ways, like detecting, tracking and cornering criminals. If Endeavor relied on brute force alone then many crafty villains and criminals would escape his grasp, but he's smarter than that. Endeavor knows how to compress his fire into narrow, intense beams to rapidly accelerate his body to pursue fleeing criminals. He is now urging Bakugo to try something similar, an analogy to the AP Shot technique.
Endeavor has also honed his senses and intuition to know exactly when and where a villain is active, and pursue them without hesitation. He found a fleeing criminal before Izuku and the others even realized what was happening, using his fire and his knowledge of the city to limit the villain's escape routes and corner him with ease. It takes some serious tactical thinking to do that, but Endeavor made it look easy.
Furthermore, Endeavor has proved highly adept at handling paperwork. Unlike vigilantes, who make their own rules as rogue agents, My Hero Academia's Pro Heroes are government-sanctioned professionals with agencies to match. The deceased hero Sir Nighteye was like a typical Japanese salaryman with a Quirk -- complete with a stamp as a weapon -- and Endeavor is no different.
It takes serious smarts to keep such a massive organization with dozens of employees running so smoothly. Endeavor was also able to puzzle out Hawks' hidden message about the Meta Liberation Army with impressive speed, demonstrating his deductive skills. Clearly, Endeavor is just as comfortable in the office as he is on the battlefield.
