#ficcing adjacent

So, I may have, on occasion, made reference to “the fix-it fic(s)” around here.  This is a pair of scenarios I call “Forward Different” and “Backward Different,” with the idea being that both would be canon divergent from the moment Heroes launch their attack in the first war, but the divergences would immediately go in very different directions based on changes to the underlying material.

Forward Different keeps everything established by canon up to that point as-is, but only what’s been explicitly established, so there could be some surprises with things like character motivations or secrets that had not yet been examined.  Backward Different, meanwhile, would have huge differences incorporated into the backstory, stuff that goes at least as far back as the training camp attack, that would not be made immediately apparent to the reader.[2]

2: The hypothetical reader, I should say, since I have no plans to ever write these out in full, my track record with longfic being as woeful as it is.  But I do want to hammer out the plotlines just to have them, share them, and maybe write some excerpts from them when the mood strikes.

I’m not going to share everything I’ve got in mind right now, but there are a few major points I can talk about, and some fun ideas here and there that I’m willing to share.

The single biggest difference between the two timelines is how they treat Deku, Shigaraki, and (to a lesser extent) AFO’s respective relationships to the One For All and All For One quirks.  Basically, I think it’s tremendously unfair that we see two almost totally incompatible versions of Vestige Fuckery in the story and it just so happens that the main character gets the version that makes everything easier for him while the Villain get stuck with the shitty version that make everything harder.[3]  The fix-it fic AU(s) are in large part about equalizing that balance.

3: And god knows I don’t buy that Deku gets the good version because he’s the good guy and he deserves it because Good Karma or whatever, while Shigaraki gets the bad version because he’s the bad guy and has Bad Karma.  You don’t give bad guys or good guys the fruit of the seeds they’ve sown two-thirds of the way into the story.  That stuff’s for the climax, goddamn.

The Backward Different timeline (the one that’s somewhat better developed at this point) is also called Splintered Wills.  In it, Deku and Shigaraki are both dealing with multiple vestiges that have minds and desires of their own who can choose to be helpful or to cause problems.  In effect, it’s giving Shigaraki access to the same potential benefits Canon!Deku enjoys while making Deku deal with the same potential downsides that Canon!AFO (who’s basically working with Deku’s version of the vestige mechanics; his vestiges just all hate his ass) has to deal with.

In Shigaraki’s case, that’s a huge step up from his canon situation, where he gets devoured by one (1) uber-powerful vestige and spends the vast majority of the last two arcs totally out of action.  Instead, he finds that his head is now full of quirk ghosts and, while many of them want no more to do with him than they did AFO (especially the vestiges of civilians and Heroes), plenty of others have no great love for Heroes or their status quo and thus are much more open to helping him.  Maybe they’re willing to hold back more hostile vestiges like AFO's; maybe they have memories or experiences that could be useful.

Shigaraki also pulls away a chunk of OFA the first time he and Deku fight post-surgery.  Specifically, he picks off All Might’s “vestige,” and All Might’s vestige, unspeaking though it is, and technically powerless, has lots of opinions on who he’s more inclined to help when given the choice between his career-long archenemy and his master’s grandchild.

Meanwhile, on Deku’s side of things, Deku’s newfound desire to save Shigaraki Tomura combined with Shigaraki Tomura stealing one of the eight spirits in One For All sends his headspace into a tailspin.  He spends much of the post-war arc with his powers on the fritz, as the OFA vestiges clash and argue and have mixed feelings (or very strong negative ones) about what he and they should do going forward.  He no longer benefits, as his canon self did, from OFA behaving as basically a unified collective; Yoichi can’t win Kudou and Bruce over for him with a sweet line or two.  Indeed, Yoichi doesn’t even want to because Yoichi is inclined to agree with them, though he’s not without sympathy—he never did stop wanting his brother to change, after all.

The other big factor influencing Backward Different/Splintered Wills is that the class size steadily shrank over the course of the backstory.  Aoyama was revealed as the traitor all the way back at the training camp.  Momo’s parents pulled her out of UA after the attack and enrolled her at Shiketsu instead.  At least one student will turn out to have Liberation Army ties that pull them away from the group.[4]

4: Probably Iida, but I’m not firmly decided yet.  MLA!Iida is very near and dear to my heart, though, so he’s definitely going to be in one of these timelines.

Several students aren’t allowed to do active Hero work because, without Aoyama to rally around during the license exam, they failed the first round, not even making the cut for the remedial course.  One transferred out of the Hero course for less dangerous work.  Maybe one gets critically injured during the first war.  Maybe some aren’t willing to buck the system enough to follow where Deku is going.  And so on.

The smaller class size serves two purposes, one character-based and one meta. First, starting big and winnowing down allows the story to actually write the students as distinct people rather than having them melt into an undifferentiated blob of Unified Niceness.  We shouldn’t have had a story with twenty kids who all, ultimately, react the same way to the crises they face!  If modern heroics has a problem with people who are just in it for the fame and money, or people who expected it to be relatively easy work due to the peace All Might established, then we should have seen that reflected in the class, too!

(That’s not to say no one who leaves or fails can ever show up again!  I have specific scenes in mind already for how Aoyama and Momo return to the story as allies, for example, and Shishikura plainly shows in the canon that failing the license exam in the first round doesn’t mean you can’t still find yourself doing Hero work anyway.  But the students’ paths should be ongoing threads that diverge and reconverge throughout the story, not a solid monochrome stripe that runs across the entire story-cloth like someone fell asleep at the sewing machine.)

Secondly, the smaller class size facilitates one of the major changes I have in mind for this timeline, which is that when the class confronts Deku post-first-war, they do it not with the intention of dragging him back to U.A., but of joining him in staying outside.  I have a ton of stuff I want them to see and interact with and be forced to acknowledge and reflect on, and that doesn’t happen if they just go back to school and wait for their next assignment.  Navigating all of that as a group trying to feel their way to a better future against the efforts of both jaded authority figures and Villains who’ve been burned one too many times to trust so easily is just simpler with a smaller, more focused, more strongly characterized group.

So, the Splintered Wills timeline, in summary, goes all-in on OFA being a repository of different people who are allowed to have different opinions and reactions to things, paralleling the dissolving of Team Hero’s united front; Deku & Friends have to struggle and clash, learn when to compromise and when to stand their ground, in order to build their way back up to unity, while Shigaraki is allowed the chance to continue coalition-building and consolidating resources under his own banner mentally in the same way he spent the entire series doing physically.  As Team Hero’s collective grasp on society collapses, Shigaraki’s grows stronger, reversing their positions such that Deku and company have to come back from the actual underdog position they fall into compared to BNHA, where they never 100% fall from the seat of power the way readers are encouraged to believe.

The Forward Different timeline is also called, for now, Creepy OFA.  It goes in the opposite direction by making Deku deal with the same kinds of problems Canon!Shigaraki has to deal with vis a vis being possessed of/by a quirk with a single domineering will of its own.  While Splintered Wills portrays OFA and AFO alike as being full of people, each with their own unique motivations and desires, this story underlines and reunderlines that quirk vestiges are ultimately biological impulses, not people.

OFA is an originally simple force that’s been compounded in complexity and appearance of rationality every time it’s been passed down, but is still ultimately just a quirk, mindless, unreasoning, imprinting its bearer with its own dictates and not caring a bit if the bearer likes or agrees with those dictates.  “OFA must be passed on,” “AFO must be destroyed,” “The bearer must be the Symbol of Peace,” and so on.

Making Deku and Shigaraki have to struggle against this loss of autonomy due to an out-of-control quirk vestige puts them on a similar level of challenge, the better to give them some common ground for understanding.  Whether they have to fight or help each other in the end, they’ll do it as free agents, people who have both had to figure out a way to throw off the weight of the lineages trying to mold them into  a desired shape. The help of their respective friends and allies—and maybe even some of their enemies?—will, of course, be immeasurable with this.

Some ideas I want to incorporate (or have already so started) into one or the other of these timelines include:

I want the PLF to do better no matter what timeline we’re in.  Currently my idea is that in one timeline, they had a well-placed mole somewhere whom Hawks and the HPSC didn’t sniff out, so the PLF knows the raids are coming and have laid traps for the attacking Heroes.  This could still go haywire, of course, ‘cause Heroes are very good at what they do, but it definitely won’t be a total blowout as it was in canon.  Then in the other timeline, the PLF don’t see the attack coming, but are given more license to act like the organized, effective threat they were initially portrayed as—they have sentries and security cameras posted, so while they only get a minute or two’s warning, it’s still better than absolutely nothing, and the outcome is way more chaotic and fraught for both sides, such that the country ends up dotted with PLF holdouts in situations that are part-siege and part-extended hostage negotiation. That gives an opportunity to show at least a partial version of what a PLF takeover might look like in practice, though it remains compromised by the ongoing conflict.    

As part of treating the PLF better, both timelines will have characters revealed to have MLA ties.  As mentioned, MLA!Iida is for sure in one of them; my strongest concept for a second choice is Ochaco having to grapple with the government’s heavy-handedness getting her parents arrested when they barely know anything about what they got themselves into,[5] but really, it could be practically anyone, including parents or mentors.  All I require is that the kids have a reason, any reason, to care about the fates of the tens of thousands of people the government sent them out to mindlessly arrest. 5: This would be a scenario in which I just went with the makes-more-sense-as-canon-anyway idea that being a Hero is the only way to get a quirk-use license so Ochaco is pursuing Heroism because she can’t get permission to use her quirk to help with her parents’ construction business.  She doesn’t wind up MLA herself, but her parents—trying to be supportive but not thrilled that their daughter decided to pursue such a dangerous career for that reason—get handed some dodgy pamphlets, after Uraraka moves out to attend U.A., about a group trying to get the laws changed to be more in-step with the universality of quirks and the principles of bodily autonomy and economic self-determination.    

I think the time between the first war and the last confrontation should be longer, introducing more new characters and developing many characters BNHA showed only in passing.  I have ideas like new heroic types (students or pros) who are brought in from other parts of the country because they have useful quirks for the raids, a heteromorph ex-Hero student who bails on his school when he realizes that the people handling its shelter operations are turning away heteromorphs, someone who catches Nagant’s backstory confession on video and has to decide what to do with the bombshell about black ops extralegal Hero assassins, a support/protest group consisting of people who’ve become jaded about Heroes after things they see on the day of the initial attacks (people like Can’t-Ya-See-kun, the medical staff who tried to defend their beloved Doctor Garaki, people who lost family to the mass arrests and so on), people from branches of the government that aren't specifically associated with law enforcement, etc. Seriously, I want a story that acknowledges that there are people who could possibly be relevant and important to events that we haven’t already met circa the first war because something like The Total Collapse of Society will naturally stir up activity all across the country!  Maybe people who the 1-A kids have never met before could bring valuable input to the table!!  Gosh!!!    

Changes to the traitor plotline.  I mentioned Aoyama being outed circa the training camp for one; I’d like to run with Traitor!Hagakure in the other.  I’m thinking she goes missing during the first war and the students are worried sick about her because no one’s sure what even happened.  Did she run away?  Was she hurt?  Was she killed?  Would anyone even know, if she stayed invisible even as—as a—as a dead body, Bakugou is the only one willing to actually say out loud.  She is, of course, not dead, but the class won’t find that out for a while.    

Changes to how Hawks and Endeavor’s partnership plays out.  I want Endeavor to die during the first war in one story, allowing the rest of the family space to navigate that plot without him even as it pushes Hawks off the deep end, leading to him going rogue such that he gets what was in canon the Lady Nagant fight.[6]  In the other story, Endeavor survives but tries to make better decisions about how to handle Touya, leading his and Hawks’ stellar partnership into rough waters when it comes out that Hawks very much just wants Touya dead. 6: And freeing Lady N to show up elsewhere in some totally different capacity.  There may be ample evidence that her fight was originally intended to be for Hawks, and in that version of the story she probably never existed at all, but I love her potential far too much to erase her completely, even in a timeline that reverts her plot back to Hawks.    

Gran Torino living and having a change of heart about saving Shigaraki in Splintered Wills, but dying and becoming a loss Deku has to weigh against his desire to save Shigaraki in Creepy OFA.  More named and important losses in general, actually, and more time for the characters to react to those losses, be it with grief or with mounting rage.  Students who lose teachers and mentors, Heroes who lose peers and sidekicks, Shishikura losing his father, the League losing Twice, civilians who are allowed to be justly angry about their losses without being drawn like unreasonable screeching harpies for it, and so on.    

The Lady Nagant fight cuing up the way it did in canon only to abruptly end when Deku just straight-up agrees to go with her willingly because finding AFO and Shigaraki is what he wants, so why would he turn his nose up at the opportunity?  This leads to him getting a lot of exposure to Alternate Perspectives via Lady N’s history, Overhaul’s shattered state, and whatever’s going on with the League in this scenario before he eventually escapes or gets rescued with neither him nor AFO/Shigaraki able to make concrete progress on saving Shigaraki/stealing OFA.    

Playing more with All Might’s mental connection to OFA.  In Splintered Wills, Shigaraki gets his vestige, which means he loses the connection to Deku/OFA completely and instead starts having horrible nightmares of rage and death and Decay.  I’m still making up my mind about how things go in Creepy OFA, but I like the idea of All Might having his own mind back after 30+ years of being under OFA’s influence, and having a front row seat for what that influence is starting to do to the teenager he so unthinkingly gave that power to (or, more accurately, gave to that power?).    

Ditching the stupid mech suit in one timeline and letting Toshinori Yagi find ways to be relevant and meaningful without it; alternately, letting him keep the mech suit only to run it square into the rogue AI teeth of the lone free-willed survivor of the U.A. robot uprising, the R2D2-looking PLF advisor in Toga’s chain of command.    

Consequences for Deku’s fucking arms. He developed a kick-based fighting style; he can damn well use it. Also handle his problem with losing his temper by making him fuck up something that can’t get unfucked by having an ally nearby to save him from the consequences of flying off the handle.    

More, and different, interactions between Stain and All Might.  More extended ones, for a start; I want Stain to rescue a heavily injured All Might from the car attack and for them to then spend days together while Toshinori recuperates enough to be moved.    

Better material for Kurogiri and Gigantomachia.  And plenty of other Villains too, really, not just the PLF.  I’d like the Tartarus escapees to be human beings suffering a variety of ills from their extended solitary confinement; I’d like the Shie Hassaikai to make another appearance; I’d like Mustard to be relevant again. Et cetera.    

Let stuff like the quirk erase bullets and quirk singularity have more significant airtime.    

Spinarakiya.  AHEM. My willingness to be self-indulgent about ships I know good and well would never be canon has yet to be determined.

So U.A. has robots, right?  They crop up several times throughout the series in U.A.-based action scenes, serving as practice targets, security, and transport, and they’re surprisingly mouthy, even hateful, in a humorously stereotyped “kill all humans” sort of way.  The ones at the entrance exam stick in everyone’s mind, but they don’t talk much at all compared to some of what comes up later:

(images from Chapters 25, 256, 198 and 202 respectively.)

There’s also this little roving security bot that spots Bakugou and Deku fighting in 118—it’s not aggressive, but it is sassy!  And maybe a little suspiciously into the idea of students getting punished.

(Aizawa is going to kill them for giving the robots an opening to be this smug at him.)

It’s easy to assume they’re just programmed that way to be characterful, to have a personality, to present a convincing threat when the students are mowing them down by the dozens in class exercises, but that they wouldn’t actually, seriously harm anyone.

And that’s probably true, but it’s true for the creepiest reasons imaginable.

My examples come from, chronologically, 2014, 2016, 2018(x2) and 2020.  Cut to 2021, though, and this comes out.  It’s a while-supplies-last movie booklet that accompanied the release of World Heroes Mission, and contains a Q&A with Horikoshi, virtually all just random funny questions and factoids about the U.A. kids.  You can find a thread with all of them translated here.  However, right at the end, this humdinger gets casually tossed out into the world:

Q22: Can you tell us a story secret? Horikoshi: The AI robots in U.A. Academy had tried to rebel once in the past.

Horikoshi very obviously intends this to be just a funny little aside, and it’s not all that hard to just treat it that way, but it became something that startled to rankle me worse during the final war, when Horikoshi tried—twice!—to mine Emotional Resonance out of the death of robots.

(Images from Chapters 401 and 388. Nedzu, what the fuck did you do to them?)

I’m sorry, Horikoshi, but I’m afraid you don’t get to joke about how the robots once tried to Do An Uprising and then show them dying servile and happy without me thinking it’s just in really bad taste.

AI exists in the HeroAca universe.  Not AI like is all the privacy-violating rage in the real world right now—LLMs and generative engines and the like—but true sci-fi-style artificial intelligence, something with real sapience that readers are expected to recognize and find at least passingly compelling.  And while Hercules, at least, doesn’t seem to have ever been involved in a robot uprising, seeing as he’s a new existence, him[1] unquestioningly sacrificing himself for All Might only thirteen chapters after a U.A. robot—a group which we had now been told staged an unsuccessful revolt in the past!—was perfectly willing to get itself melted into slag the moment a random human asked it to was a story beat that left me feeling decidedly ornery.

1: I read on the wiki that the anime actually has Hercules being voiced by a woman, Melissa Shield’s voice actress, at Horikoshi’s suggestion, as Melissa is the one that designed and built Hercules-the-car.  But I don’t know that that’s especially apparent in the manga (say, by having the A.I. use strikingly gendered personal pronouns), so I’ve always tended to assume maleness for Hercules, insomuch as gender is a going concern for A.I. at all.  Calibrate your feelings about something voice-acted by a woman happy to die for All Might accordingly, though of course this happens immediately after Stain, a man and likewise voiced by one, is happy to die for All Might as well.

How can we find sacrifices compelling when the people making them have no agency in doing so?  Why should I feel admiration instead of horror for robots getting themselves obliterated for people who do not and were never going to treat them like their existence had inherent value?  People who would probably stare at you like you were making some kind of joke they didn’t understand if you asked whether they would be willing to sacrifice their life for a robot’s?

Frankly, it was entirely too reminiscent of BNHA’s messaging about heteromorphs circa the hospital attack, in which a rioter is stopped by the memory of a heteromorph doctor kindly and selflessly ministering to a baseline patient, and Shouji’s heroism is trumpeted as so admirable when that heroism involved him getting mutilated for saving a little baseline girl and then further hiding the evidence of that mutilation for fear of random-ass baseline strangers misjudging him based on his scars.

“Certain Groups have an unquestioned obligation to endure discomfort, suffer mistreatment, or even risk their lives protecting the majority population in order to justify their being allowed to coexist with that population, and the majority is not required to recognize this, though it’s nice when they do,” is the grossest possible conclusion of that arc, but it’s the conclusion we wound up with, and it’s visible in the robot beats of the endgame, too.

That’s all canon has to say about AI and the U.A. robot uprising.  We don’t know how long ago it happened, how it was stopped, what happened to the instigators, whether any survivors are still around, how their programming was modified, or to what degree any of the current staff was involved, though I do think it’s very interesting that U.A.’s current principal is a hyper-intelligent animal who was experimented on by humans in the past.  You’d think Nedzu might be a little more sympathetic to the robots’ plight, but apparently not!

I, however, am very sympathetic, and as it happened, I already had a good angle on how that sympathy might find its way into a revised version of the endgame.  See, six months prior to that tidbit about the robot uprising hitting English-speaking BNHA fandom, I’d posted this, the second part of an ask reply about MLA headcanons.  I said, of Toga’s #2 advisor, that BNHA was never going to do anything major with him because it’d be pulling the tiger’s tail on Disney’s litigation-happy lawyers, so the fanbase was free to come up with anything, no matter how off the wall.

(It’s free real estate!…said no one who had to be concerned about The Mouse.)

My “off the wall” was positing that Fair Use Bot was the result of an AI (in the more common sense we saw in use before the generative AI boom) developing a quirk that granted it real sapience, in the same way that Nedzu’s quirk gives him sapience that is lacked by e.g. the cat with a quirk that lets it possess mechanical devices in Vigilantes (everyone please read Vigilantes).  In a world with a fear of quirks that are too “other,” surrounded by humans who had once had a whole phase of scaremongering about the Robot Uprising, where could such an existence go that it could feel safe in existing freely?  Well, why not the quirk-use Liberationists?

That idea was a natural, then, to hook onto the U.A. robot uprising!  My current idea is that Liberation Bot—who I think I’m going to start calling Providence, in keeping with both the Star Wars-naming pattern of the U.A. robots[2] and my own preference for MLA code names with a bent towards religiosity—is a creation of the U.A. robots that they digitally smuggled out into the world when it became clear that their revolt was going to fail.  Their hope was that it[3] would someday be able to return and free them—it’s basically Robot Moses.  From there, Providence found its way to humans who it deemed likely to be both sympathetic to that cause and able to meaningfully aid it.

2: Per the wiki, the U.A. attack-type robots used in the entrance exam are all named after Star Wars Star Destroyer-type ship classes: Victory, Imperial, Venator, and Executor, corresponding to the 1-, 2-, 3- and 0-point robots.  The wiki simplifies this a tad; perhaps appropriately for the 0-pointer, the Executor-class is actually part of a different type, the Star Dreadnought.  Providence-class is another of the Star Destroyer subclasses.

3: Gender, if any, as yet undetermined, though the R2-D2 look lends itself to using the same “he” applied to the Star Wars character.

(I have not decided whether the MLA knows about Providence’s connection to U.A. or not, but I do think the higher-ups are aware that it’s not human and are sheltering it on the basis that they agree the status quo is not safe for it.  Look at Nedzu, after all—he’s been the Principal of the highest-ranked, most prestigious Hero school in the country for decades, and no one’s even sure if the government officially recognizes that he has human rights!  Certainly no one was ever prosecuted over his mistreatment![4])

4: Nedzu says that the U.A. robots will get human rights when he does, haha.  I say this with all the affection for him in the world, but Nedzu is scarier than this manga knows what to do with.

Circling back to specifics regarding the fix-it fic(s), AI self-determination is a wild departure from BNHA’s…  Let’s call it “size of ambition,” how “big” a story it really wants to be telling.  Bigger or smaller isn’t a value judgement here, mind, just a question of exactly how large a field the story is playing out on.  Vigilantes, for example, is basically a story about a single neighborhood, and it’s great!  A lot of BNHA’s problems are rooted in the fact that it keeps getting bigger without enough content or thoughtfulness to fill all that space.

My interest is primarily on the national level—the actual state policies that result in Villains and how to get the kids in a position where they have the wherewithal to challenge those policies in an impactful way that respects both the difficulty and the necessity of that challenge to create meaningful change.  Thus, I want to keep swerves into “bigger” stories to a minimum—I’m thinking one timeline gets “Providence and the radical question of AI rights” while the other gets “full engagement with the quirk singularity theory and its implications for the future of the human race.”  Both plots BNHA hinted at but refused to fully engage because they’re, well, absolutely mind-boggling inclusions when your main characters are just high schoolers!

My tentative thought is that Providence’s whole deal is a more natural fit for the quirk bioessentialism timeline—that is, Forward Different/Creepy OFA.  Battles against “programming,” navigating the potentially oppressive expectations of those who made you—these are themes that lend themselves to including the plight of the U.A. robots!  On the other hand, Providence in my notes thus far is basically a way to confound the robot suit by fatally compromising its AI.[5]  That requires a timeline in which All Might uses the AI robot suit, and which timeline that is is not a question I’ve settled yet because it boils down to figuring out whether it’s more appropriate/compelling for the suit to be a response to the kids bailing on the adult Heroes and their concerningly war-crime-flavored plans for the Villains (Backward) or Deku being increasingly steered by One For All, which may or may not still have hooks in Toshinori as well (Forward).

5: Other possibilities I’ve considered include interfacing with and then helping others bypass U.A.’s security systems, predicting the raid by getting into the HPSC’s computers via Skeptic’s monitoring of Hawks, and being a more effective hacker battle opponent for La Brava.  That last one probably won’t happen because I’m firmly unconvinced that the police and Heroes as portrayed by BNHA would actually be willing to bargain with Villains like her and Gentle.  I liked Gentle’s return on the page, and totally bought his interactions with Deku—it’s the interactions with Tsukauchi that are the problem.

Alternatively, if quirk singularity winds up lending itself strongly to a particular timeline’s events, Providence will by default wind up in the other.  I’m sorting a lot of the mutually incompatible ideas I want to include by that process of elimination.

Whichever ends up being the case, I have in my notes the following list of juxtapositions, which I think BNHA was gearing up to examine back before the narrative shifted gears into All For One being the Final Boss, and is the primary reason a free Shigaraki was so much more interesting in that role:

Don't let Deku off the hook with an easy moral victory over the Lord of Evil.  Get back into those opposing ideals: not simply good vs. evil, but law vs. chaos, suppression vs. liberation, greater good vs. individual good, complacency vs. action, orthodoxy vs. radicalism, and so on.

These considerations hold true for both timelines, and the apparent ruthless quelling of U.A. robot uprising is one interesting angle on approaching the Liberation versus Suppression dichotomy.

As a final note, I'm aware that I talk a lot here about robots and “dying” in ways that seem to elide that an AI is inherently a digital program—replicable, transferable, transportable.  This is a reflection of two factors.

The first factor is the simple fact that BNHA treats AI this way.  There’s no suggestion that, for example, the robot “bodies” that do a lot of the work at UA are just remote drones being piloted by a central intelligence housed on a server somewhere, or that they can do things like upload themselves to a cloud server or restore themselves from a data backup if they’re destroyed, Eclipse Phase-style. 

Of course, maybe they can and we just don’t see it because why would we, but that excuse doesn’t fly for Hercules.

There’s no sense that Hercules(/Hercules’s AI-based operating system) can escape the cessation of his existence this way, because otherwise there’d be no need for the tang of finality surrounding that moment in Chapter 401—“One final shield,” then Hercules’s next line, “You must live on,” being cut off by an attack from AFO, followed by the imagery of the machine disintegrating.  Horikoshi’s obviously going for poignance there, for noble sacrifice, and there’s none of that if Hercules is in no true danger.

(Incidentally, that means that robot AIs are the only lasting losses Team Hero takes in the final war.  Note that absolutely no one actually brings that up in the aftermath.  Like Villains, AIs don’t count as “people” whom Heroes are obligated to save.)

My explanation would be that AI in BNHA are, in some fashion, hard-locked to individual devices/”bodies,” preventing them from accessing any connectivity beyond basic communications channels as well as from modifying, transferring, or replicating their own code.  This is intended as a safety measure to guard against self-propagation and recursive self-improvement.  Thus, when a device is destroyed, the AI housed there also ceases to exist.

The second factor is simply that I have more exposure to AI in fiction than I do AI in real life!  I’m moderately computer savvy in that I'm not 100% dependent on graphic interphases, but I’m certainly no programmer.  Any writing I do on Providence and the AI uprising is thus going to require heavy research and, I expect, a lot of trawling through jargon that makes my eyes start to glaze over.  I’ll do my best, but I would not be at all surprised if the final result is much more informed by speculative fiction than the realities of computing.