Boku no Hero Academia

[neflight86]

Those are completely different things. Nen and Chakra is a power system, like DB's "Ki". Bounties are an arbitrary power measurement, like DB's "power level".

They are different, but they serve as forms of measurement. Arbitrary or not, they can be compared to provide a frame of reference in a given matchup. Who had more 'Nen' capacity in Netero Vs. King Ant in the Chimera arc? We knew going in which side could brute force and which had to be more tactical about it because it was clearly communicated to us beforehand, and I would argue made the fight richer. You could do lots of weird things with nen, but there being a quantity of it is such a handy tool for the audience's benefit.

Tools like jobbing and quantifiable power systems are useful to set the tone and guide expectations of the audience. In MhA, often enough I am left to decipher the likelihood of victory solely on other metrics like 'who is going to around in this story longer', or 'who is important to the narrative?' which are not engaging ways to predict the outcome of a fight.

They're dangerous because they're targeting our kids or threatening world order.

That is correct, long and short. I get lost in the weeds because I'm trying to view them (the villain progression) through the shounen lens. I meant to say that I'm not convinced on an individualistic level that these villains are particularly threatening. Characters acting that way are certainly a dangerous element that society should not bear. My confusion stems from being unable to place their relative capability. Due to the nature of quirks in MhA, it feels like it wouldn't take much to simply 'introduce' another enemy with the same or greater danger. Since so many people are running around with powers, all it takes is for the author to decide that a random person has a super powerful quirk and we have a new arc. That is true of any work of fiction, and I trust the author to not simply go hog wild, but since there is no rarity or understood limits on quirks conceptually, the possibility is always looming.

I don't quite understand where this is comming from.
Obviously All for One is the strongest and most dangerous villain.
He can basically own every single ability and thus has always an answer to someone he goes against.

Other than that, we aren't really told who is the strongest or most dangerous villain in this show.
The rest are just villains who have the criminal energy to be a villain. It doesn't matter how dangerous they are compared to someone else. It was never truely about the ability potential. It has always been about what the individual achieved with their ability and how he used it and what he wanted to do with it.

Stain for example killed a lot of heroes with his ability. Thus he is a dangerous individual because he uses his quirk to kill heroes/people.
That's it.

The same goes for Overhaul.
He is elusive and cunning and it was more about him staying in the "legal" area and the heroes had to find some dirt, so they could invade his hideout.
His ability wasn't what was dangerous, te technology he achieved by torturing the small girl is what made him a potential threat to all heroes and people in general.
And we've seen what that technology did. We have multiple heroes that are now without any powers. Including Lemillion.

I never felt like that the story told me "you have to fear this guy because he is super powerful" - aside from All for One of course.
The Villain group, in my eyes, isn't even actually truely powerful. As mentioned earlier Toga seems to be average at best and the whole group itself more like a "villain-training-group". The opposite of UA, so to say.

Good points. Allow me to revise my original statement. Aside from AfO, the rest of the villains seem like random people who happen to have criminal intent (as you mentioned, it's what you do with your ability). That isn't bad inherently, and makes the show more 'realistic', if anything, as that is how the real life criminal element acts. My disconnect is that these villains are propped up with entire arcs of events and they feel like 'drops in the bucket' of what could happen to the superhero society if people begin to riot or act up en mass. The (villain) abilities are even impressive, but the world building hasn't suggested that there aren't tons more people with even more broken powers that should be more worrisome.

My problem is that I am measuring this by traditional shounen standards when this is less and less a traditional shounen story- that is good because not everything needs to rehash the same story arc. I'm just still adjusting (5 years in).