Izuku Midoriya (Deku) from My Hero Academia has a unique soft and empathetic voice and gets emotional and super excited at moments. In this article, we’ll overview Deku’s voice and give tips on making a decent voice impression.

Raise the pitch of your voice

My Hero Academia, as the name of the anime show suggests, consists of characters from academia, which means they are young. In season 1, Deku is supposed to be 14 years old. Therefore, Deku’s voice is high-pitched as it would be for anyone at that age and you’ll probably need to raise your pitch a bit to match it.

Controlling your pitch is easier if you manage to relax your throat muscles. So before attempting to raise the pitch of your voice, try yawning and stretching the upper part of your body. It’ll get you in the right condition.

Once you’re nice and relaxed, try to increase your pitch by focusing on speaking from the upper part of your face mask. It’s a mental thing where you concentrate more on speaking from the upper part of the head. Essentially, you will still be speaking using your mouth and throat but the mental image helps.

Also, you can practice varying your pitch with the ‘ahhhh’ sound. While making the sound continuously, change the pitch from higher to lower and vice versa. Don’t just focus on the high pitch; go all the way up and down. Learning to push your pitch to both ends will help you control it better and understand where different pitch voices resonate.

Sound empathetic

Deku is a selfless character and very empathetic towards others.

Therefore, it suits to sound understanding when conveying his character. Typically, he’s never angry or judgemental but rather passionate, especially when defending others or pursuing his goals. While doing his voice impression avoid strong reactions to others flaws.

Become soft-spoken and breathy

Deku is a very soft-spoken character, it’s a part of him being so empathetic. To achieve a soft voice, try to add more breath to it. You’ll have to push more air than necessary when speaking. It’s also called decompressing your vocal cords as they no longer use air to vibrate and create a sound.

The other way to look at it, is try to make your throat slightly more lax than usual. It will help get some air through vocal cords without vibrating them.

Sound excited

As it’s similar with most teenage characters in anime, Deku is no expectation and gets super excited and emotional at some points. He doesn’t necessarily sound excited all the time but rather gets into these bursts of emotions whereas he starts to speak all fast and super emotional. Obviously, it’s very common during intense moments such as fights but he’s also quite quirky and awkward around the girls as well.

So if you can, introduce some awkwardness and shyness into your voice impression of Deku.

Mumble once in a while

Deku is constantly overthinking and gets into these weird tantrums where he starts to think loudly. In these cases, he mumbles very fast. It’s often hard to understand what exactly he’s mumbling out. To do that, you must speak fast and start each new word without significant pauses. It’s a good idea to occasionally incorporate some mumbling into the voice impression.