Warning: spoilers ahead for My Hero Academia chapter 333!
Fans went reeling the moment All For One triggered the self-destruct quirk inside the reformed villain Lady Nagant after Deku had just gotten through to her, but My Hero Academia now has a more tragic character who just went through a more heart-wrenching experience: the number-one American hero Star and Stripe.
My Hero Academia hasn't been pulling any punches with Star and Stripe ever since her introduction. She's continually portrayed as a massively flawed individual whose selfishness and obvious disdain for others make her more of an antihero, even a villain, than an actual hero. Star and Stripe especially went too far when she ordered the use of American missiles in Japanese airspace without the country's approval; an airstrike that eventually makes contact with Japan (and misses All For One). But then mangaka Kohei Horikoshi made a sudden shift when Star and Stripe surprisingly sacrificed her life to protect her comrades, a selfless act that seems to have led to her death as of chapter 333. This is especially unexpected since, up until this point, she essentially used those same brothers in arms as just a means to further her glory.
Lady Nagant resonates with fans because she's a tragic figure who was only compelled to hunt down Deku because hero society had betrayed her trust by using her to cover up the sins of heroes with deadly force. She eventually defected and dedicated her life to dismantling the society she once served so faithfully. Lady Nagant had also initially refused All For One's mission to collect Deku, and only accepted once he guilt-tripped her into believing that her revenge against hero society would never be accomplished so long as Deku roamed free. Deku later seemingly achieves the impossible by convincing her to atone for her sins and come back to the society that betrayed her - moments before All For One triggers the bomb inside of her. Luckily, Lady Nagant survives and proves her allegiance to the heroes by sharing intel that she hopes will put All For One at a disadvantage, though the villain had planned on her betraying him and gave her bad information.
Star and Stripe is more tragic than Lady Nagant because it's highly likely that she will die where the latter survived. Last-minute redemptions are heart-wrenchingly bittersweet as they force the reader to imagine what could have been, which, in every instance, is a better existence than that of their former lives. Readers who mourned Lady Nagant only dealt with these feelings for a week until the next chapter proved the antihero survived. For Star and Stripe, fans are expected to grapple with these difficult emotions indefinitely.
Despite being a villain and trying to take down Deku, Lady Nagant was always likable. She didn't exhibit any maliciousness beyond what was expected of her as an assassin. Meanwhile, there was initially little to like about Star and Stripe. She was powerful and fought for good but had no redeeming qualities on a personal or philosophical level. She was, in many ways, more villainous than Lady Nagant, even at the assassin's worst. Star and Stripe's decision to sacrifice her own life for her brothers in arms, contradicting her earlier unappetizing statements about them, suddenly put her in a new light that readers only got to experience for a moment before All For One's utilization of Tomura Shigaraki's Decay quirk causes her to disintegrate. Star and Stripe's death is yet to be established in My Hero Academia, but the fact that half her face has decayed makes it highly unlikely she'll survive, showing her good qualities only moments before a grisly death without the possibility to explore them further - an advantage Lady Nagant will ultimately have.
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