"What was your big dream, back when you started UA?"

The question comes in the later half of an afternoon patrol, both of them perched on top of a high building in the shopping district of Shizuoka City. Izuku had stopped to admire the sun hitting the buildings just right, allowing his intern a moment to catch her breath while pretending he totally isn't monitoring her. He has to protect what little pride his interns have, after all.

"What do you mean?"

Mika kicks her legs from where she sits on the ledge of the building, looking out at the city below. "My classmates all have these big goals. They talk about them a lot, and Sensei says we have to have some kind of solid motivation in order to make it through UA. So I was wondering what yours was."

Izuku tilts his head in thought, considering.

"Hm...I wanted to be a hero like All Might," He admits."I wanted to arrive on the scene with a smile and have people feel safe, because I was there. And uh. Well I kind of got all that before I graduated, so. Goal met."

"Huh..."

Mika leaves it, for just a moment. Probably thinking over all the war footage.

"Do you have a new one? Now that the first one is done with? Though I guess every adult has career goals, like my mom gunning for a promotion..."

Izuku's next answer is instantaneous.

"Sesame Street cred."

Mika's legs stop moving.

"...what?"

"Sesame Street cred," Izuku repeats. He does not break his gaze from the horizon so he can at least pretend he's being an adult right now. "The ultimate way you know you've made it is by being invited to guest star on Sesame Street. All Might was on twice."

"Your big career goal is...to be on a children's puppet show?"

"You don't understand this because you're young but every single person who is ever invited on to that show has been thrilled. It's the highlight of people's careers. The ultimate honor. The literal only ranking higher than that is working with The Muppets."

Mika stares at him and he knows she still doesn't quite understand it.

"I feel like you're lying to me."

"I'm really not. You can ask around."

"A puppet show for toddlers," she emphasizes, and okay. He's being judged. Super unfairly, even.

"It's a very good puppet show!" Izuku defends. "It teaches important lessons! All Might's second appearance was him teaching kids about how to cope with people who have chronic health issues! I cried!"

"You cried because you saw a pigeon with one eye yesterday," Mika points out.

"I have a big heart with a lot of feelings."

"About puppets."

Chapter 13 is HERE

Fic summary: Twenty years ago, Midoriya Hisashi walked out on his wife and Quirkless child. Three days ago, Midoriya Inko received a phone call informing her of his demise and when his funeral would take place.

Sometimes you're a 25 year old war veteran, making a difference one day at a time in a post-All For One Japan that's still feeling the repercussions of your high school days. Other times you're simply the forgotten child of a deadbeat, left to clean up your father's messes because he was too much of a coward to take any responsibility.

And now, you're a full time big brother, because the biggest mess left behind was the child your father replaced you with.

Chapter summary: There is a tendency for parents to view their children not as their own person, full of depth just like anyone else, but as an extension of themselves. Of their legacy. Of their worth as a person. An infant is dependent on their parents for every facet of care, so it's easy to forget--easy to let that acknowledgement drift away in a sea of teaching this child the basic lessons on how to live in this world, how to talk, how to walk, how to participate in life alongside everyone else. Every lesson is the parent imparting their own wisdom upon the child in the hopes the child will become the vision the parent imagines of what a proper person is.

But, then, it always comes as a surprise when the child is no longer dependent on the parent for lessons. And the truth comes in the form of the child developing opinions their parents don't agree with.

Do you have any advice for making background characters like the ones you featured working at Dekiru agency? The way you write your characters makes them feel so 3 dimension and leaves me wanting to know more about them!!!

(It won't let me send my ask through my side blog I post about my fanfic on which is why I'm sending anonymously lol)

So the thing is the sidekicks kind of already existed. For years. I pulled them from my OC universe to make things easier for myself. But the principles of creating one from scratch and picking one out of a lineup remain the same, so here’s the process:

1: Look at the role you need. What exactly is needed in this spot?

In this case, Deku needs sidekicks. He needs fellow heroes who work under his command but are competent enough they don’t need him to carry them entirely and can fulfill duties without him being present. Crucially, these are going to be secondary characters, so we need sidekicks who will fit comfortably into that slot and can weave in and out of the story easily whenever they’re needed for something.

2: Interest and entertainment value

So you know what you need, but if we filled these spots with generic young heroes who are good at their job they would be something of a drag for readers to deal with. Characters need to be interesting. Characters need to keep a readers interest whenever they’re present so that the scene doesn’t slow to a crawl whenever they appear.

So that’s when we look at what character dynamics would be fun and interesting?

When I was selecting the sidekicks I basically held them up like paint swatches next to Izuku and thought about what the resulting interactions would be like. How would they work together? What kind of conversations would they have? Crucially, how funny would this be overall? That last point is extremely important to me because a lot of my storytelling choices are bit based. Fullmetal Alchemist trained me to balance comedy with character and I stick to it because levity makes the drama hit better when it’s finally implemented.

And that’s how we wind up with choices like Party Animal, who is an absolute tank of a hero who outstrips Deku’s stamina but is also literally a big dumb dog. He brightens any scene he’s in with his himbo behavior and unpredictable dialogue that could go in any direction. He’s immensely entertaining while fulfilling his role and readers overall seem to love him every time he does show up. Your characters are meant to be fun for readers to read and for you to write, so they have to be able to carry the scenes they do feature in and not detract from them too much to be worth it.

However, they also can't be scene stealers too much, which leads us to point 3.

3: Scaling

This is the part where I think most authors screw it up. There's tons of OC guides out there that tell you to give them flaws, make them relatable, give them imperfections, but the most important thing of all when making an OC is that they have to be scaled appropriately and assimilate into the setting.

Let's look at Hinata for a bit. She is one of our main characters. She carries multiple scenes by herself with Izuku elsewhere and half the narrative of the fic is all about her. But she is, pointedly, not the center of the universe. Izuku is the only canon character who centers her as a major focal point in his life, which makes sense because he is her parent now, but for every step you take away from him....Hinata isn't all that important at all. Notice how when Izuku's friends ask about her and inquire things they're doing so the way a real life person asks about their friends kid--interested, because their friend needs support, but this isn't a big deal to them personally. Hinata is just their friends kid. They have lives and things going on outside of her and she doesn't factor into anything beyond being their friends kid. Yagi centers her a bit because she's the closest thing he has to a grandchild, but he's not suddenly involving her in every bit of his life.

This is the secret sauce to successful OCs. Hinata is a child civilian who exists outside of heroics. She is unimportant to the wider world of HeroAca. And that's okay. I love and adore her immensely and I want people to love her too but she exists on a small scale in this universe, and writing her this way means she assimilates to the setting in a way where she fits in perfectly among the canon cast.

Your characters cannot stride in and totally overpower the canon cast. They cannot steal the show in a way that sidelines the canon cast. They cannot break the rules of the setting just because you think it's cool. The more they blend in and become indistinguishable from a canon character you would actually find, the brighter they shine and that's how you learn to write good characters in the first place. Understanding how they weave together to form a believable world and believable relationships.

So going back to the sidekicks, all of them are extremely interesting and there's some very dramatic backstory attached to them but honestly? They're just Izuku's Sidekicks From Work in most of the scenes they're ever in and that's the entire point. Kill Your Darlings talks about having to remove parts of the story you love to make it flow better but one must also understand Scale Your Darlings to keep yourself from souring audiences on your characters by walking in and dumping their backstories and how cool they are to try and force the readers to immediately think they're great.

There is, however, an opposing strategy you can use. The @gallusrostromegalus method where you break the scale entirely. Gallus does this fun trick where they destroy the scaling of any series they write for by making the entire cast several degrees more unhinged as a baseline, and once the new normal has been established where everyone is patently insane and pulling off the most buckwild characterizations imaginable, an OC wielding what would normally be base breaking or audience polarizing power can walk in and it doesn't stick out at all. It slots right in with all the other bullshit. I love it. Gallus scales up by magnitudes while I scale down. On that note read Gallus's work if you want to have a good time.

Both of these methods however do take a lot of skill to actually pull off, I've been grinding at this for years to get to this point and I still worried a lot when I started posting bad miracle that this was going to flop and the OC presence would scare off most potential readers. So keep working at it! It'll take a long time to get good at it but that's the fun of creation!

15 year old Midoriya Izuku, just got into UA, wakes up in a strange bed in a strange apartment. The quirk deaged him 10 years, mentally and physically.

How does he react? How does Hinata react?

"So there's a code for that."

Hinata blinks, surprised, and freezes with her rice halfway to her mouth. "Really?"

"Oh yeah," Izuku says, like he's talking about the weather. "Time dilation Quirks are super useful for getaways so it's never surprising to have them pop up. There's a protocol in place and everyone's taught it for when it inevitably happens mid-mission."

"Huh." Hinata wrinkles her nose, thinking. "What should I do, then? If it happens to you?"

"Code 1985. Call someone like Tenya, or All Might, and tell them Code 1985. They'll take it from there," Izuku instructs while poking at his fish, finding a bone he missed while cooking it. "Time dilation or displacement can go in a ton of directions so just stay calm, there's a protocol to fall on. Not that I think you'll really need it, but it's good to be prepared."

Famous last words, Hinata thinks, but doesn't say. Instead she eats her dinner and drifts off to the next conversation topic.

.

God fucking dammit.

"Of fucking course," she mutters, staring at her teenaged brother who's panicking and trying to hold up sweatpants that are too big for his smaller body. Sure it took a few months, but here they are. Just like she thought would happen. This bloodline must be cursed or something for him to be such a chaos magnet.

"I-I'm sorry, I just--I went to bed in my own apartment, and now I'm--" Younger Izuku stutters out, turning in circles as he looks around an unfamiliar home and panic clearly taking over all rational thought.

"This is your apartment. You got hit by a time dilation Quirk, sit down on the couch before you drop your pants," Hinata orders. She must seem pretty mad because he immediately does so and clams up. Hinata walks back to her room to grab her phone, scrolling through her contacts list and debating who to call before settling on the option that will work fastest.

"Hinata? Is something wrong?" Tenya's groggy voice greets her.

"We got a Code 1985," Hinata replies. She patters back to the living room, keeping an eye on the younger Izuku who is staring at the collectibles with wide, star filled eyes. "He's been turned into...hold on--yo, how old are you?"

"Um--15?"

"He's 15."

"...WHEN at 15?" Tenya asks her, suddenly a thousand times more awake and serious.

"What's happening in your life right now? What are you supposed to be doing today?" Hinata tilts the phone down to ask her brother, who snaps back to attention nervously.

"Going to school? I just--I just started at UA, we're supposed to have our first lesson with All Might today. Actually--if this is my apartment is he around? I see photos--"

Hinata turns away and completely tunes out his nervous rambling, going back to Tenya. "First week of UA classes."

"Oh god." There's the sound of rustling, and Hinata can tell he's rolling out of bed to try and throw some clothes on. "Do NOT let him leave. I'll be right over. No Quirk use either, if he actually has One For All right now."

"Is that possible?" Hinata asks, eyeing the boy on the couch. He's muttering to himself and fidgeting up a storm, a far cry from the footage she's seen of him in his prime with that Quirk.

"He's either been shrunk to his teenage body or they've swapped places, these Quirks can be tricky, so it's a toss up. Keep him there and don't move."

"How much am I allowed to tell him?" Hinata asks, knowing Izuku probably has a thousand questions lined up for the nanosecond she gets off the phone.

"Nothing. You're a civilian, so you have no authorization. Use that loophole until I get there and can assess things."

"Got it. Breakfast will be ready when you get here," she agrees, then ends the call with a sigh. "Ingenium will be here within a half hour."

"INGENIUM is coming to my APARTMENT!?" Izuku shrieks.

"Stop yelling, we have neighbors."

"Oh, right, sorry." Izuku shrinks down, ashamed and flushing red, before his eyes dart back up toward her. "...um. Not to be rude but. Who are you?"

This is exactly why she asked Tenya. This subject was hard enough the first time they met.

"I'm your kid. And you screwed up the chore chart today so now I have to make breakfast." Hinata passes by him to go to the kitchen, leaving him gaping on the sofa. Since he's left her in the breakfast lurch she doesn't feel too bad. Fuck it. She's making shakshouka today. She deserves a treat.

It takes a full two minutes after she's started pulling out the eggs and tomatoes before the Izuku in the living room comes back online.

Chapter 15 is HERE

Fic Summary: Twenty years ago, Midoriya Hisashi walked out on his wife and Quirkless child. Three days ago, Midoriya Inko received a phone call informing her of his demise and when his funeral would take place.

Sometimes you're a 25 year old war veteran, making a difference one day at a time in a post-All For One Japan that's still feeling the repercussions of your high school days. Other times you're simply the forgotten child of a deadbeat, left to clean up your father's messes because he was too much of a coward to take any responsibility.

And now, you're a full time big brother, because the biggest mess left behind was the child your father replaced you with.