Memoryhead! of the ao3

Brief overview of the issue. Cops are a means by which the state monopolizes violence. If the state wants to do a violence, they can, via cops, and face effectively zero repercussions due to a variety of reasons including the work culture that strongly incentivizes not prosecuting other cops--or else. Average people, however, cannot do a violence--or even something that the state defines as violence, such as a protest--without facing repercussions. Including violence from the cops.

So! Propaganda, like all forms of advertisement, can be largely broken down into two categories: Appeal Marketing and Fear Marketing. I learned about this shit in American Public School, so they should at least sound vaguely familiar. As the names suggest, they're two attitudes around the product/idea that you are selling. Appeal is built around "Look how great your life could be with X!" while Fear is built around "Wow your life is gonna absolutely suck without X!"

I'm sure you can name like a billion ads for each of these off the top of your head. And many ads use both to some degree.

Copoganda is media that is propaganda about how cops are cool and great and sexy and necessary and etc. etc., especially while deliberately ignoring that first paragraph of mine and the many, many, unwritten paragraphs that it alludes to in the various problems with cops. They also use Appeal and Fear Marketing.

Usually, the Appeal comes in the form of making the cops look cool and awesome etc. because They Are The Heroes or whatever.

Fear comes in the form of "Wow look at all of this Crime! These Dastardly Criminals™ would do a Dastardly Crime™ to YOU if it wasn't for out cops, Who Are The Heroes etc. etc.

The situation on copoganda is so dire that one of the major antagonists of The Closer is an agent of Internal Affairs who is mad the titular protagonist keeps violating human rights.

Now, Superhero Media can easily fall into the Dastardly Criminals™ problem because, well. Superheroes are expected to Fight Crime and all that. And, since many Superheroes are, in their fiction, vigilantes with zero oversight, it can (accidentally or intentionally) send the message that Being Hard On Crime and Brutality and Zero Oversight are the Answer To Crime. I should not have to explain why this is false, and I don't have the time within this improvised essay to do so anyway. The short answer here is that if punitive justice worked, crime would've stopped by now.

Combatting this message requires you to actually put some thought into the work. It's clear from reading My Hero Academia that Horikoshi became more aware of this over time as his own understanding of "what is a Hero" evolved. Even so, you can see even early on that the world of MHA is deliberately written as a nightmare dystopia to tie into the central themes that Midoriya exemplifies.

Throughout My Hero Academia, several Villains die. However, despite the threat they pose, at no point do any of our protagonists ever consider killing them. Midoriya and Uraraka both explicitly go into the final battle with the intent of saving their respective nemeses. There is exactly one Hero who ever advocates lethal force, and that's the one who happens to be a government hitman, who is framed like a slasher movie killer when he murders Twice.

By the way, Twice's death achieves nothing. Hawks did it to prevent Sad Man's Parade, but in the process, all he did was push Toga further into Villainy by convincing her that Heroes would fucking kill her, Toga later recreates Sad Man's Parade anyway so not only did he fail, his Hard On Crime I Did What Had To Be Done objectively made the situation worse.

MHA also shows its Heroes frequently working as first responders. Endeavor prevents a traffic accident. All Might's big debut was a natural disaster--which the series bookends by having the class respond to another natural disaster as the final page of the story instead of any actual Villain.

So the main tension of Hero Society in the story is the conflict between their role in saving lives and dealing with crime and systemic issues.

This is best exemplified in Midoriya Izuku himself.

"I think saving people is just about the coolest thing someone can do." (Midoriya Izuku, MHA Chapter 001)

This is Midoriya's reason to be a Hero. It never changes in the entire series. It never wavers. Midoriya's brief time as a vigilante doing a Batman-style War On Crime is presented as deeply unhealthy and self-destructive. It's the entire crux of his narrative foil relationship with Bakugou.

It's the driving force of the final battle.

The end of the series shows the ways Japan is healing, and shows this not through having more Heroes or stronger Heroes--in fact, Midoriya loses One For All--but through community outreach and systemic change. Uraraka and Shoji work to reduce discrimination, while the civilians of the series who have up until now done the Good Copoganda Thing of Letting The Cops Heroes Deal With It stop that. They reach out a hand to those in need instead. This is directly shown with the same woman who ignored Tenko refusing to ignore Terumoto.