Okay, so this is what i thought happened in my hero academia before I watched any episodes or read any of the manga:
Okay, so first and most importantly, i didn’t realize that almost everyone in society had superpowers. i thought that powers were:
all transferrable, so any superhero could pass their power on to someone else. or have it stolen if they were hurt badly enough or killed.
rare enough to make superheroes a sort of protected and privileged class compared to everyone else. they tended to live in a world with just. different rules than the rest of society. a lot more bloodthirsty to start, but also, they could get away with a lot of shit because they were so powerful.
so anyway, the only legal way to become a superhero was through the hero academy. so hero hopefuls, who largely didn’t have powers (explosion kid was a notable exception where i was like—was he one of the rare ones born with it, or did he kill someone and steal their power???), would all go to this school and get training for being heroes, and then when they graduated, if they were good enough, they’d get recognized by a current hero who would declare them their successor and pass their power on to them so they could take over as the next eraserhead or all might or whatever (those were the only two names i’d heard).
so the goal while at the hero academy was to stand out and catch the eye of a hero, preferably of The One You Wanted to pick you, but if you were desperate enough any hero would do. and you could get their attention through student on student fights, on rare occasions sanctioned fights with superheroes, and also through team ups and interning with superheroes while in school. but the thing is. powers are rare enough that only a couple kids in any given year would get picked to be someone’s successor, so it was pretty commonplace for students to hurt or maim or kill other students to take them out of the running for a power, or to get heroes’ attention.
there was also another way you could get powers—you could beat someone powered in a fight, and if you hurt them badly enough or killed them, you could steal their power for yourself. this is largely how villains ended up with powers.
you could also be born with powers, but this was SUUUUUUPER rare, so there was just like one or two kids that already had powers, and that afforded them special privileges at the hero school. explosion kid was one of them, and he had it out for the main character.
at one point, i was also confused on whether the main character was one of the powerless hero hopefuls all fighting against each other and trying to get the attention of the strongest hero, or if he had actually beat the strongest hero in a fight and stolen his power somehow. but i was pretty sure it was one of those.
and then i watched the first three minutes of mha and i was like. ohhhhhhhhhhh. so none of that was real.
