Talentless Nana Is a Mind-Boggling Blend of My Hero Academia and Death Note

There are very few shows that portray the events from the villain’s perspective. It is not hard to imagine why that is, since it is quite risky to go against the well-established norm of telling the story from the heroes’ standpoint, which almost always works. So, there is little incentive in going the other way, but some shows have done it and have had remarkable success. The most popular when it comes to anime being Death Note. But these are very few, and outliers are not the right example to follow since there are too many failures that try the same thing and go unrecognized. However, when the creators of Talentless Nana faced the same dilemma, they were brave and confident enough to choose the less trodden and riskier path.

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However, it would be wrong to assume that Talentless Nana seems to have taken inspiration from Death Note only. Since the story takes place in the context of a high school for superpowered students, it would quickly remind anime fans of My Hero Academia. Talentless Nina appears to be a weird and exciting blend of these two popular but different shows. 

Episode 1

The government, considering the threat to humanity, organizes training for superpowered teenagers on a remote island. After their training is concluded, these teenagers will have to fight to protect society from the enemies that wish to take it under their control. Like Izuku from My Hero Academia, Nanao Nakajima, a student with no powers, is bullied by his classmates. However, a new student named Nana Hiiragi, a mind reader, helps him realize that he has powers and is only suppressed because of his inferiority complex. Nana’s analysis works, and Nanao finally finds out he has powers when he protects his classmates from an accident. Much like Eraserhead in My Hero Academia, Nanao, too, can cancel everyone else’s superpowers.

However, at the end of the episode, Nana reveals that she is the non-powered character responsible for killing everyone on the island. Nanao’s characterization has taken care of all the details to make it seem that he is the protagonist until the truth is finally revealed. It turns out Nana’s ability to mind read is nothing more than deductive reasoning and cold reading.

Episode 2

The First Episode of the show will give the viewers the false notion that Talentless Nana is quite like My Hero Academia until the twist. The second episode shows signs that it might have been inspired by Death Note and its protagonist Light Yagami to be specific. Nana, just like Light, is brilliant and has strong deductive skills. Light used to believe that he was killing people for the greater good, which is what Nana thinks that she is killing all the powered superheroes for. 

Episode two reveals how, when the people with powers first started appearing, they suddenly grew in number. But they soon lost control of their abilities and ended up killing millions of people. The government understood the necessity of keeping things in control before something like this happened again. They concluded that the world would be better off if all the superpowered teenagers were killed before realizing their true potential and caused havoc. 

However, Nana has a challenging task ahead of herself since she is unaware of how the students’ powers might evolve in the future. So, she has to be mindful of everything that she does. Nana made a very detailed plan before she killed off Nanao. She ensured that Nanao’s powers would not save him from the fall off the cliff. While investigating his disappearance, Nana tries to understand Yohei’s abilities, and through observation, she understands that he can go in the past and change the present. Nana understands that it will be challenging to get rid of Yohei since he might go in the past to change the outcome of his death. So, she has a huge task ahead of herself, Yohei should be killed before he gets to know of Nanao’s death, but his death after Nanao must not raise suspicion on Nana.

Episode 3

If episode 2 was not enough to draw comparisons with Death Note, the third removes all doubts. A fellow exchange student who got to the island simultaneously as Nana investigates his sister’s disappearance. Kyoya Onodera’s sister disappeared mysteriously, and he wants to find out what happened to her. He is very suspicious of Nana, and she, too, realizes this. He is socially awkward, so he has trouble making friends. Even though he doubts Nana, others trust her since she is so friendly and kind to them. They instead suspect Kyoya. 

He asks Nana a lot of questions that put her in a spot. So, she then decides that she has to get rid of him as soon as possible before even knowing his powers. She is surprised to find out Kyoya is immortal, so the only person she could have used for his killing was Nanao, but he died. This episode clearly shows many similarities with Death Note as it portrays the same cat and mouse chase. Kyoya is quite like L and Nana, just like Light pretends to be kind and caring. 

What Next?

Until now, the show has impressed a lot of people; it has twists that very few people would be expecting. The characterization is done remarkably well, but there is one question that still needs answering. Where will the story go from here? Will it be like Death Note, a thrilling game of wits? Or will we see it transition to resemble My Hero Academia again? It is tough to say that we will have to wait where the show goes from here.