Izuku Midoriya and Ochaco Uraraka became a couple in chapter 431 of My Hero Academia, which shipped with the final volume on 4 December 2024. They became a couple again on screen in episode 171, which aired on 2 May 2026. Twenty-one months, three releases and one deliberate decision by the author sit behind that, and the schedule is the part fans keep arguing about.
Kohei Horikoshi has said he avoided romance through the main story on purpose. What he did instead was hand the romance to the epilogue, and the epilogue arrived in pieces. The manga ended, the volume added a chapter, and the anime then adapted that chapter seventeen months later. Each release sold the same moment again.
When did Deku and Ochaco become canon?
They became a couple in chapter 431, published in the final volume on 4 December 2024, four months after the last regular chapter. Chapter 430 had closed the series on 5 August 2024 with an eight-year timeskip and no romance resolved. The anime then adapted the extra chapter as episode 171 on 2 May 2026 and showed the two of them starting to date.
| Release | Date | What it added |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 430, Weekly Shonen Jump double issue 36-37 | 5 August 2024 | Final chapter. Eight-year timeskip. No couple resolved. |
| Chapter 431, final volume | 4 December 2024 | Izuku and Ochaco together. Shindo and Tatami Nakagame confirmed. |
| Episode 171, anime | 2 May 2026 | The same chapter animated, with the two of them beginning to date. |
Read that table as a release schedule rather than a story. The same emotional beat gets a date in August 2024, another in December 2024 and a third in May 2026. A reader who followed the manga weekly and a viewer who only watches the anime did not get the same ending, and neither of them got it on the same day.
Horikoshi said he was avoiding romance
In an interview quoted by GameRant, Horikoshi explained the gap. Romance, he said, is “a very strong stimulus”, and once it is in the story “that’s all anyone is going to talk about”, so he kept it out on purpose. He added that leaving it out entirely would have been dishonest for a school setting, and that he chose to handle it in an epilogue “like a postscript of sorts”.
That is an unusually clear answer from a manga author, and it settles most of the argument. The romance was not forgotten, rushed or cut. It was placed last, after the plot had finished, because the plot was about saving people and he did not want to compete with it.
The cost is visible in the table. A confession that lands in a postscript has no room to be tested. There is no arc where the two of them are together and something goes wrong, no chapter where the relationship has to survive a fight. The story states the outcome and stops, and readers who wanted the middle section were never going to get it.
Why the anime had to do it again
An anime that catches up to a finished manga stops being an adaptation and becomes the last place the story can still move. Episode 171 did what the chapter could not do cheaply: it showed the two of them dating, in motion, with voices. The anime had the advantage of knowing how the story ended before it animated the middle.
That is the same reason remakes and late adaptations keep getting made, which I wrote about when the new Naruto anime was announced. A finished story is a safe thing to produce. The risk sits on the other side, in the parts nobody has animated yet.
For viewers, the practical result is that the anime is now the fuller version of the ending. For readers, the manga’s last volume is still the first version. Both are official. Neither is complete on its own.
The second couple nobody argues about
Chapter 431 also confirmed that Shindo and Tatami Nakagame had been together for a long time. The pairing had been mentioned earlier in My Hero Academia Ultra Analysis, and the extra chapter settled it in a conversation between Mina Ashido and her friends, who told her the two had been dating all along.
That reveal is the cleaner piece of writing. It arrives as gossip, which is how a class of teenagers would actually find out, and it needs no panel of confession. It also does not depend on the main character, so it does not have to carry the weight of a finale.
It is also the kind of detail that starts canon arguments, and this site has been through one of those before, over how many Sun Gods One Piece actually has. The difference here is that the author answered directly instead of leaving a gap for readers to fill.
What I would push back on
I have not read My Hero Academia in full, so I am going on the chapter dates, the episode date and Horikoshi’s own answer. From those, the decision looks correct and the delivery looks clumsy. Correct, because a story about saving people did not need a romance competing for attention at the end of every arc. Clumsy, because the same beat was sold three times over twenty-one months.
There is a defence of the clumsy part. Manga publishing runs on volume sales, and an extra chapter in the final volume is a normal way to give buyers something the weekly readers did not get. The anime then has to adapt it, because skipping it would leave the adaptation with an ending the manga no longer has. Every step is rational. The sum still feels like a story being rationed.
The thing I would watch next is how the anime handles whatever comes after episode 171. If the franchise keeps adding epilogue material, the ending will keep moving and the arguments will keep restarting. If episode 171 is the last word, then 2 May 2026 is the date the story actually finished, whatever the chapter said in 2024.
