The World the Girl Saw

But he doesn’t lose One For All in a blaze of glory. He loses it for the last time as he picks up a person overdosing on some kind of drug, carrying them out of the alley they were lying in and out into a waiting ambulance. He doesn’t even know why it had to be him to go get them, why the EMTs couldn’t just do it themselves, but they said they couldn’t — so Deku went into the alley, lifted the dying addict into his arms. They were heavier than he thought they’d be. He activated One For All, lifted them with ease. And as he did, he felt that last few flickers of One For All fade and die.

All Might’s quirk. The quirk of seven other heroes before him. A quirk meant for saving, for smashing the power of All For One, and this is how it dies. Saving some addict, who’s probably just going to overdose the next day, anyway. Deku feels his lips begin to tremble, his mouth going down at the corners, and gazes down at the pavement between his feet, thinking that this is it. The last time he’ll put on this costume. The last time people will look to him to help them. The last time someone will pat his shoulder and tell him he did well, that he did something, that he mattered. And it was over something as pointless as this. Not every life is worth saving. Deku learned that the hard way.

(The voice is his own this time, and it’s harder to ignore. I sold my soul for this?)

(Yes.)

He goes back to the dorms that night and tells everybody the truth, or part of it. He lost One For All saving a life, like a hero should. He smiles while he says it. That’s what heroes do.

ii. i found a martyr in the mirror tonight

He’s invited to witness when they execute Gigantomachia. They all are. He’s not the first one of Shigaraki’s friends to die after the war. That was Dabi, Todoroki’s brother. It wasn’t on the news. Deku only found out because Todoroki told him, and Todoroki only told Deku because Deku asked. He sort of wished he hadn’t, afterward. He didn’t like seeing how miserable Todoroki looked.  

Dabi died of his injuries. He paid for his crimes the same way Toga did, the same way Twice did, the same way All For One did, (the same way Shigaraki —)(Deku doesn’t think about that.) The surviving members of the League are locked up in New Tartarus, but everyone agreed that Gigantomachia’s crimes warranted death. Everyone in charge talked a lot about how to do it humanely, but Deku’s not sure they found the right way to do it. Even if he’s sedated, gassing him to death feels wrong. Like the way someone kills an animal. Not a person.

Is Gigantomachia a person? Aizawa-sensei says he’s more like a Nomu than anything else, and Deku pretended he didn’t see Sensei’s face twist when he said it. The Nomus are all gone, supposedly. Deku’s heard rumors that the new HPSC has kept some of them alive, but he’s not important enough — anymore — for anyone to tell him the truth.

He means to go. Really. But he wakes up in the middle of the night, his entire body screaming with pain, from the outer layers of his skin straight through to his bones. Deku was healed. Everyone talked about how miraculous it was, how Eri saved him, how all of him was regrown good as new, but something went wrong. Deku hurts. It still hurts, and it doesn’t make sense. Everything is all right now. Why does it hurt?

He’s in too much pain to speak. Too much pain even to call out for his mom. He texts instead. Texts her, texts All Might, and they both come running. It’s not the first time it’s happened. They all know the drill by now, and as the pain ebbs under the dose of medication that dissolves under Deku’s tongue, he finds his voice. “Why?”

Mom reassures him that there’s nothing he did to deserve this, that it’s bad luck and that’s it, but Deku is watching All Might. All Might’s eyes are sad. “It’s not easy to be a hero,” he says, and Deku almost laughs. Maybe he is laughing. He’s crying too hard to tell. “We pay a high price for doing what must be done.”

(Do you? Did you? Are you sure you paid?)

Deku nods and squeezes his eyes shut. He sleeps through Gigantomachia’s execution and ignores his classmates’ texts asking where he is, asking if he wants to grab drinks afterward. Only a handful of them text to ask if he’s okay.

Deku texts them back with a smiley face. all good. just a rough night :)

He gets heart-reacts for that one. Deku still knows how to give the right answer.

iii. I’m scared you’ll forget me again

Deku has to figure out what he’s going to do. Being a hero was all he ever wanted, and now he can’t anymore. All Might was right, all those years ago on the roof: It takes a quirk to be a hero. Deku had one for a while. Now he doesn’t. He got to be a hero for a little while. Now he has to live the rest of his life.

(What life?)

(Shut up.)

(Is this it?)

(The voice used to go quiet on its own. Now Deku has to kick it out himself. Shut up.)

His classmates text every so often — not him, just the groupchat. They’re all busy trying to climb the sidekick ranks, trying to turn their provisional licenses into real ones, and they’re always texting photos of their work. Of silly graffiti they find or Stain cosplayers who are still running around or villains they’ve caught in compromising positions or who look funny tied up. Deku doesn’t have anything to text back. Nothing about his life feels worth it.

(What life?)

(I told you to shut up.)

Sometimes Deku wonders if he’s being haunted. If somewhere in the swapping back and forth of One For All, he wound up with some vestige of Shigaraki in his head. But he feels like Shigaraki would be meaner. Angrier. He’d sound more like Kacchan and less like Izuku, some silly little kid who thought it didn’t take a quirk to be a hero. Some kid who’s too naive to understand that Deku did what he had to, that that’s what makes him a hero. Made him a hero. He isn’t one anymore.

He isn’t a hero, can’t be a hero. He needs a job. Deku chokes down a few painkillers, puts on normal clothes, and drags himself to a career counselor. They recognize him. Everyone recognizes him. But the counselor doesn’t say anything, and that’s sort of a relief. “What sort of career are you interested in pursuing?”

I want to help people. The answer almost pops out of Deku’s mouth, and he forces himself to swallow it. Sometimes people can’t be helped. Sometimes killing them is what ends their pain. “I don’t know,” he says instead. “Maybe something in hero support. I know a lot about that.”

“That’s certainly an option. You have a lot of expertise there,” the counselor says. “I can think of several companies that would be interested. They’re still rebuilding their staff after the PLF purges.”

Deku forgot about that. Maybe on purpose. He doesn’t like thinking about how many people wanted the quirkless pushed to society’s edges. How many people secretly wanted people like him to be wiped off the map. “Maybe. Are there other — um —”

“UA is looking for a student teacher in the heroics department,” the counselor says, and Deku’s stomach drops. “You’d need to undergo a little more education — they require at least a basic certification —”

“That,” Deku says at once. “I’ll do that.”

When he applies for the job, he writes Deku on the application. When he registers for the certificate program, he signs up as Midoriya Izuku.

iv. I always win (I always win)

Midoriya dreams about it sometimes. Being a hero. That’s not anything new. He’s done that since he was old enough to understand what a hero is. It’s what’s in the dreams that’s changed. Before, Midoriya dreamed about the fantasy of being Number One. Now he dreams about reality, and reality is broken limbs and dripping blood. Reality is cities crumbling before his eyes. Reality is dust and blood on his hands. Reality is burning the last of his strength on some drug addict who’s probably dead by now.

Midoriya can’t forgive Shigaraki for doing this to him, but maybe he should have a little more sympathy for the addict. After all, he’s gotten kind of familiar with painkillers himself. It’s easy for him to get a prescription. Everyone understands. Midoriya reads articles about drug-seeking chronic pain patients and wonders if they’ll still understand fifteen years from now, when he’s still alive and hurting just as much as he does today.

It shouldn’t be like this. He won. He gave everything up to do it, and what did it get him in the end? His groupchat with his classmates is mostly silent. He has a feeling there’s another one, one he’s not invited to. He’s not invited to hang out with the other teachers at UA, either — they still see him as a kid. A dumb, reckless kid, who did what all of them put together couldn’t. Who made the hard choice.

(The wrong choice.)

(Shut UP! I saved his heart. What else was I supposed to do?)

Saved the rest of him, you stupid fuck. Maybe it’s Spinner’s voice in Midoriya’s head. Spinner knows that Midoriya won, but he doesn’t think Midoriya’s a hero. He’s rotting in Tartarus, right alongside the other two surviving members of the League, and he’s probably going to die there. You won. So what? You still think you’re a hero?

Midoriya knows he’s not a hero. But he was a hero, wasn’t he? He must have been. The hero wins in the end. No matter how the story went.

Midoriya thought it would feel better. Winning, being a hero. Both. But it’s lonely instead, just like it used to be, and this time, he doesn’t even have his daydreams of being a hero to keep him company.

v. when I see scars, that’s all they are

“Those look crazy, Deku-sensei,” one of the students says, staring wide-eyed at Midoriya’s bare arms. Midoriya knew he shouldn’t have worn short sleeves. “Are they all from your surgeries?”

“I did have a lot of surgeries,” Midoriya admits. “But no. They aren’t all from that.”

“Which ones aren’t?”

Midoriya made himself a promise, when he picked up a full-time homeroom class: He’s never going to sugarcoat heroics. He’s going to tell his students exactly what they ask, every time, and he’s not going to leave anything out. “Mainly this one, right here. I got it from a villain during the war.”

“Which villain?”

“She didn’t have a name.”

A villain name, anyway. No villain name, because you weren’t a real villain, not the way the rest of the League was. No murders, no violent crimes, but you were the last member of the League to be apprehended, and you fought like a demon. Harder than Shigaraki had, in the end, and Midoriya couldn’t figure out why. Later he found out that you loved him, and now when he looks back, he wonders if you weren’t trying to make Midoriya kill you, too.

You’re in Tartarus now, just like the others, but you left a mark on Midoriya. Or five of them. He tried to restrain you, and you bit his arm like some kind of animal and raked up his skin with your nails, clawing and sinking your teeth in every time Midoriya struggled to get free. They had to tranq you to get you off of him.

He tells the students that, watching their eyes widen. Lesson time. “What should I have done differently?”

He’s expecting the kids to have to think about it a little bit. They don’t hesitate for even a second. “Killed her,” one of them says, and Midoriya’s stomach lurches. “A lot of the League died. She should have, too.”

“No,” Midoriya says sharply, and the students startle. “Killing a villain is the last resort. If you have to kill a villain, it means you’ve failed.”

“But you killed Shigaraki,” one of the students protests. “You didn’t fail.”

(Yes, you did.)

(I know.) “It’s true that I won the fight,” Midoriya says. “But being a hero isn’t about winning. It’s about saving people.”

“Sure, but — not everybody, right?” It’s one of the more thoughtful students asking the question, and she looks nervous. “Some people don’t want to be saved. Shigaraki wanted to destroy everything. You couldn’t save him. Nobody could.”

Spinner’s book gets banned every so often, but Midoriya keeps a few copies around, and his students have read it. Spinner got a lot of things right, but he didn’t know the whole truth. He didn’t know how Shigaraki became Shigaraki. How much of Shigaraki’s life was built by All For One, shot through with All For One’s lies. Shigaraki wanted to destroy everything, yeah — everything that had hurt him, everything that had hurt his friends — but when Midoriya smashed through his defenses, he saw something else in Shigaraki’s heart. Before destruction, before All For One, there was something else Shigaraki wanted, something he still wanted. To be a hero. For the villains. For his friends. For the people no one cared about but him.

“Right,” one of the other students says. “You saved his heart. That’s what was important.”

Midoriya didn’t save Shigaraki’s heart. He destroyed it. And he breaks his own rule, too. “I did everything I could,” he say, and the lie settles into his chest with the guilt that’s lived there for years. There’s a lot of guilt. It has a lot of company.

vi. five minutes in and I’m bored again

Midoriyadoesn’tlike parties. He’s been to a few by now, but he never feels quite at home. Things are easier when he’s teaching, surrounded by kids who just ask the question instead of dancing around it, kids who aren’t thinking about Midoriya’s feelings at all. Midoriya would rather people just said it. Hey, Deku. You killed a guy because it was easier than saving him and pretended it still counted. How are you doing? Then Midoriya wouldn’t feel like he was trauma-dumping when he told them the truth.

And what’s the truth, really? I hate my life. I’m pretty sure I have a painkiller habit. It’s a good thing I don’t like alcohol, because the likelihood that I depress my central nervous system and accidentally kill myself by mixing the two is low. Sometimes I hear their voices in my head. Whose voices? Shigaraki’s. Spinner’s. Anybody’s. Everybody I screwed over. Everybody I let down. That’s me. How are you doing?

He’s not going to say that. Not in the middle of somebody’s birthday party. Whose birthday is it, anyway? Aizawa-sensei’s, he thinks. It’s not Present Mic’s, or Present Mic would be wearing the birthday hat. Present Mic slings an arm around Midoriya’s shoulders. “Want to see something fun? Come check out what your old homeroom teacher is up to.”

Midoriya heard rumors that Eraserhead can’t hold his liquor, but apparently they’re not rumors. Aizawa-sensei is out back behind the bar, crouched down on the ground in a position that can’t be comfortable with a missing leg, talking to a fluffy black cat with yellow eyes. “Shou,” Present Mic stage-whispers. “Shou, who’s your friend?”

“Go away. You’re scaring him.” Aizawa-sensei looks up. His one remaining eye is blurry in a way Midoriya recognizes, one that’s made of more than just alcohol. Maybe it’s not that Aizawa can’t hold his liquor. Maybe it’s more that he’s mixing it with pills. “His name is Cloud.”

“Cloud?” Present Mic’s voice goes sharp in a way Midoriya wouldn’t have expected. “Bad call. Pick something else.”

“He’s Cloud,” Aizawa insists. He tries to pick up the black cat, as it swipes at him. “Go away. You’re being rude.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll go away. But show Midoriya the damn cat.” Present Mic throws up his hands. “You and your damn clouds. You just can’t let it go.”

He shuts the door behind him, hard enough that Midoriya, Aizawa-sensei, and Cloud all jump. The cat bolts, or tries to, and that’s when Midoriya sees that it’s limping. He blocks its way carefully, shrugging out of a jacket he doesn’t care about it and scooping it up. It swipes him, too. Not that he cares. “Here, Sensei. Are you going to take him to a vet?”

“In the morning.” Aizawa’s voice blurs, just like his vision. He cradles the cat in his arms. “I have to go to this fucking party.”

Some part of Midoriya is still surprised at hearing teachers swear. “I mean, it’s your party. You can leave whenever you want. And, um —”

He hesitates. “Spit it out,” Aizawa says dully. “What?”

“You shouldn’t mix alcohol and painkillers. It could kill you.”

“If it kills me, it kills me,” Aizawa says. “I should have died a long time ago.”

“Sensei?”

“You could have had a better Sensei. He was always better than me. Than both of us. More of a hero than anyone.” Aizawa’s voice takes on a miserable, mocking tilt. “Shigaraki got him instead. What a fucking waste.”

Hearing Shigaraki’s name when he’s not expecting to always throws Midoriya off. Especially right now. He looks down at the black cat with yellow eyes, then up at Aizawa. “Kurogiri?”

“His real name was Shirakumo,” Aizawa says. “He’s gone.”

He’s gone. Kacchan killed him while he was trying to protect Shigaraki, same as Kacchan killed All For One. Kacchan’s going to be mad about it forever — he killed two villains to Midoriya’s one, and Midoriya’s the one everyone remembers. If Kacchan’s losing sleep over it, or anything, Midoriya doesn’t know about it. He hasn’t seen Kacchan in a year or two.

But Kurogiri. He remembers Kurogiri. Midoriya gets to his feet and walks away. He runs into Present Mic just inside and grabs his arm. Present Mic laughs, affronted. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t leave Aizawa-sensei alone,” Midoriya says. “He’s not just drunk. There’s pills, too.”

Mic’s face goes white. He yanks his arm free of Midoriya’s and storms out the back door, and Midoriya adds another name to the list of people he hurt when he killed Shigaraki. Not just Spinner, not just you — his teachers, too, because their friend died trying to protect Shigaraki from Midoriya. Sometimes Midoriya wonders if anyone’s really happy.

Everyone else. The ones who didn’t kill anybody. The ones who don’t know the truth. They probably are. Midoriya took the hit so they could keep smiling, just like All Might did. And Midoriya wants to be like All Might, still. He doesn’t want to be like Eraserhead.

It’s probably too late for that. Midoriya might have both eyes and all his limbs, but he lost something on that battlefield, too. Even if he wanted to find it again, he wouldn’t know where to look.

vii. I’m not sure if anybody understands

“What do you mean?” Izuku asks, and Hawks makes a questioning sound into the phone. “You let her out?”

“No choice. Her sentence was up, and we couldn’t hit her with anything harder than an accessory charge,” Hawks says. He yawns. “Shigaraki might have been an omnicidal maniac, but he moved hell and earth making sure we couldn’t tie his girlfriend to anything with a heavy sentence. She’s out. She’s been out for two years.”

“Two years?” Izuku’s heart sinks. “Do you know where she is?”

“Nope.” Hawks pops his lips on the word, and the smacking sound snaps Izuku’s temper like a rubber band. “We lost track of her about fifteen hours after we let her out. A little later than we thought, honestly.”

“You let her out even though she’s a flight risk?”

“A risk for what?” Hawks laughs. “She’s not any kind of threat. You know what her quirk does? Lets her play red light, green light with finding stuff. I’m surprised they even let her into the League of Villains.”

You were in Shigaraki’s last visions, right along with the rest of the League. You and Spinner lasted the longest, and even after Spinner crumbled away, you were still there. You weren’t real, just some piece of Shigaraki’s imagination, but Izuku remembers feeling like you were looking at him. Staring him down. Memorizing his face, so you could find him later and finish what Shigaraki started.

You did a lot of damage to Izuku for somebody with a useless quirk. “Is anyone looking for her?”

“Her? No.” Hawks’s voice turns serious. “I know you’ve been out of the game for a little bit, but I wish you were back in it. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than some dead supervillain’s girlfriend. We could use you.”

“If I had a way back in I’d take it,” Izuku says. “Thanks for telling me what happened.”

He hangs up the phone, feeling worse than he did when he picked it up. He was hoping he could talk to you. Prisoners in Tartarus don’t get a choice whether they want visitors, so you’d have to at least see Izuku. And he could talk to you about what happened. About Shigaraki, because if anybody in the world knows part of the truth, it’s probably you. He needs to know if he was right. If there was really no choice.

Why does he need to talk to you? He already knows what you’d tell him, even if he’s never heard your voice. You’d say that Shigaraki wasn’t some soulless monster. That he wasn’t a monster at all. That he was a person who deserved a chance to live, even if he didn’t think he wanted one, and that Izuku’s a murderer for taking that chance away. Did Izuku ever even offer it? He held out a hand to Shigaraki, but did he mean it? Was he listening? Did he even care?

No. Izuku remembers All Might’s lectures about saving to win, winning to save, and remembers that he only got it half right. He won the war. But he’s not a hero. He never was.

Izuku knows that. He doesn’t need you to tell him — and still, he wishes he could hear you say it. He wishes there was one person in the world who knew the real story, who could look him in the eyes and tell it to him straight. You’re gone, off the edge of the map with no one even looking for you. Izuku wonders what you went looking for. Whatever it is, he hopes you find it.

viii. I still wake up, I still see your ghost

Izuku smiles as his classmates help him suit up. They never forgot about him. Why did he think they would? They fought a war together. They became heroes together. Of course Izuku’s still one of them. And they got him a suit like All Might’s so he can do the work he was meant to do the whole time. What is he supposed to do except smile. This is where he belongs.

And so what if Kacchan is back to calling him Deku? So what if Izuku feels sick to his stomach when Kaminari tells him to strike a “smash” pose so he can snap a photo? So what if he can already feel an ache in his bones, and he already knows exactly what’s going to hurt tomorrow? Izuku’s one of them again. The rest of it doesn’t matter.

The suit is heavy as he follows his friends out onto the street for his first patrol in eight years. Izuku’s kept in shape, but maybe not as much as he thought, given how the suit’s weighing him down. He’ll have to ask All Might how he handled the one he wore into the final battle. And he’ll probably have to start working out for real.

But in the meantime, he can test the suit’s capabilities. Speed. Strength. Flight, and that’s the one Izuku’s missed the most – Float, Shimura Nana’s quirk, the one that should have been Shigaraki’s. He pauses for a moment, lost in thought, and Kacchan urges him along. “Hey, Deku! See if it works already! It won’t be a real victory for me if I beat you in a faulty suit.”

“Right,” Izuku says. Deku. It’s been a while since someone called him that. He didn’t really miss it. “Okay, um –”

He activates the suit’s flight capabilities and launches himself skyward, with more than a few of his friends following along. Even if Izuku’s body is worn out, he’s got muscle memory, and he remembers how to artificially direct power, this time using the suit instead of One For All. He jumps from rooftop to rooftop, leading the way for a little while, and then he has to stop to catch his breath for a second. His chest feels tight.

It’s not the only weird thing Izuku feels. He feels like he’s being watched, and a memory flashes through his head – a memory of a vision, of eyes that burned through him. The foreboding hits a second later. He glances over his shoulder, expecting to find you there, holding a gun or a knife, ready to make him pay for what he did to Shigaraki. But it’s not you. All Izuku sees is a mirage, a wavering figure. One that looks like Shigaraki Tomura, smiling.

That’s not right. That can’t be right. He wasn’t – the foreboding grows heavier, and Izuku stumbles back. Something isn’t right. More than Shigaraki, more than the weight in his chest and the leaden sensation in his limbs – and then he hears the voice again. The one that’s haunted him all these years, and finally, he realizes who it belongs to. It’s not Shigaraki. It’s not Spinner. It’s not even Izuku’s own voice.

It’s yours. (I wish –)

Izuku stumbles again, falls –

“Hey, Deku!” Kacchan is leering down at him, and Izuku blinks upwards. His backside hurts. So does his leg, like someone kicked him, which wouldn’t be a surprise. Kacchan likes to use his quirk, but he doesn’t let it limit him. “What the hell are you doing down there? Get up!”

Kacchan hasn’t talked to Izuku like that in – no, he’s always talked to Izuku like that. What is Izuku thinking? He must not be, or else he wouldn’t say this: “I fell because you tripped me.”

“I didn’t trip you! It’s not my fault you’re too useless to walk in a straight line,” Kacchan sneers. His UA first-year uniform is crisp and clean, like Izuku’s was until a few seconds ago. It’s their first day at UA. “You might just be in General Studies, but that doesn’t mean you get to embarrass me. I don’t want anyone finding out that I went to the same school as a loser like you.”

“We both got in, fair and square. We’re not in the same course,” Izuku says. “Can’t you just –”

“Just what, Deku?” Kacchan’s fingers spark with his quirk, but Izuku knows better than to watch them – it’s Kacchan’s foot to keep an eye out for, and he’s drawing it back. “That’s what I thought. Get up, Deku, or I’ll –”

“Hey.” A shadow falls over them both. “Cut that shit out.”

The voice is raspy, soft, and there’s something familiar about it. Something familiar about the trainee hero’s face, too, when Izuku looks up at him. Of course there is. Izuku knows everything there is to know about All Might, and that means he knows what All Might’s protégé looks like. He knows his name, too. “Endgame?”

“That’s me,” Endgame says to Izuku. He smiles halfway, but when he looks to Kacchan, his eyes are cold. “If you go around calling everyone who’s not you useless all the time, you’ve come to the wrong school. You don’t get to treat other people like trash just because you’ve got a flashy quirk.”

Kacchan’s eyes bulge. “I got in to UA, fair and square! My score was the highest!”

“You fought some robots and you think that makes you a hero. You’ve got a hell of a long way to go,” Endgame says. He turns away from Kacchan and crouches down next to Izuku. “Are you good?’

“Um, yeah.” Izuku says that, but he’s not so sure. He feels weird. Like he’s been here before and he hasn’t, all at once. “I’m fine. I just fell.”

“I saw him trip you,” Endgame says. Izuku’s face burns. “Listen. If you made it here, you deserve to be here, just as much as he does. It takes a lot more than a quirk to save people.”

Endgame’s being so nice. Izuku wants to cry, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know why he feels so awful. “I’m not in the Hero course. Just General Studies.”

“So?” Endgame says. He doesn’t have eyebrows, but he looks skeptical all the same. “There are a lot of ways to save somebody, if that’s what you want to do.”

He straightens up, but leaves one hand extended to help Izuku up. His hands are partially gloved, and Izuku hesitates for reasons he doesn’t understand. Endgame’s smile tilts. “I’ve got my quirk under control,” he promises. “But I’ll leave a finger up.”

The hand Izuku takes grasps his with four fingers, and pulls him to his feet with surprising strength. “What’s your name?” Endgame asks. “I’m pretty sure it’s not Deku.”

It’s not Deku. “Midoriya Izuku,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you, Endgame.”

Endgame nods. “Nice to meet you, too. I have a second. I’ll show you where the General Studies classes are.”

Izuku doesn’t walk into his first day at UA by himself. He walks in next to a real hero-in-training, somebody who graduated from UA already, somebody everyone already knows. Endgame introduces Izuku to his new homeroom teacher personally, then turns back to Izuku. “I’ll probably see you around. But in case I don’t – good luck. Do your best.”

That sounds familiar, too. Like Izuku’s heard it before. “I will,” he says, and as Endgame smiles and turns away, a weight lifts off Izuku’s heart.

Endgame’s right, he decides, as he introduces himself to his classmates. He might not be in the Hero course, but there are a lot of ways to save a person. Izuku can learn them. He can be what people need him to be, and maybe this time –

(this time?)

Regarding Deku and his classmates’ presence on the battlefield, one of the things I’ve talked about in the past is “spotting a series its premise.”  That is, if you’re going to get anywhere in a story, you have to allow it its basic scenario or you might as well not bother with it at all.  In BNHA, that basic scenario is “Hero Academy.”  The idea of a school for heroes is presented as something cool and positive, and if you can’t deal with that at all without starting to talk about child soldiers and police states, then BNHA was never going to be the series for you.

BNHA plays its premise of a school for Heroes with fantastical optimism, so it suddenly diving for a “realistic” ending, one grounded in a deeply pessimistic view about redemption and rehabilitation, is an active betrayal of its own tone and themes because its author lacks the courage to follow through on what his main character wants to believe.  By “wants” here, I don’t mean that Deku has some kind of independent life and desires to believe something his creator won’t let him act on.  Rather, I mean that Deku’s in-universe characterization and actions should be harmonious with Deku as a narrative device and embodiment of the story’s overall message.

Based on Deku’s presentation through the first war arc, he should have stuck to his guns about saving Shigaraki!  He should have been willing to defend Shigaraki against All For One and Hero Society and Shigaraki’s own fatalism!  Instead, though, he cowered in the face of all of them.  He didn’t just fail to save Shigaraki; he actively killed Shigaraki.  The tension (which had always existed in Deku) between his admiration of the Hero System and his innate, overwhelming drive to save should have resolved in favor of saving, not in favor of upholding a status quo he knows to be riddled with problems!

And that being the case, of course he should have been on the front lines.  He’s the main character and it was the last battle!  Where else should the main character have been?  The trouble with Deku being the focal point in the final battle isn’t that it turns him into a child soldier; he was always that because it’s inherent to the premise of BNHA and the structure of young adult adventure stories more broadly.  The trouble is that the story fails to convincingly justify his presence under its own previously established standards.

Like, if you look at how U.A. is stated to normally approach its classes, it’s obvious that the situation with Class 1-A is the result of unprecedented challenges!  I’m totally willing to roll with that as part of spotting the series its premise!  It’s when the series stops being able to justify 1-A’s role in events that my acceptance of the scenario starts breaking down.

Let me go over that in some more detail:

Internships: Per the story, internships are heavily chaperoned and focused on light work, really just dipping a student’s toes into what a normal day in the life of a Hero looks like, including all the non-combat procedural stuff and the social angles of endorsement deals and the like.  Even a hardass like Gran Torino states that his intention is to take Deku to someplace where “minor crimes” are common, not to plunge him right into the deep end.  Indeed, a fight breaks out, he firmly orders Deku to stay on the train.  When Deku pursues, the first Hero who notices him tells him to follow police instructions and get to safety.  It’s obvious that the focus is on a safe first-time experience—it’s even observed later on that the internships basically treated the kids as “guests,” and they weren’t allowed to do anything dangerous.

Work Studies: These aren’t even supposed to be offered to first-years.  The only reason they are is that Class 1-A has been repeatedly targeted and thus, amidst a very divided staff opinion, U.A. made the choice to offer them to the first-years to better prepare them for the increasing danger and uncertainty that is both targeting them personally and becoming more prominent in a post-All Might world.  U.A. personally vetted agencies offering work studies before approving them.  These are more dangerous, but still strictly overseen, carried out with as much caution as can be managed for a job that inherently carries with it life-or-death risk.

So far so spotting-the-series-its-premise.  The problem starts kicking in harder once the war arc rolls around.  There are hundreds and hundreds of active Heroes in the country; I simply do not believe that the planners of the raid on the PLF needed e.g. Juzo’s earth-molding when they could have tapped Pixie-Bob for hers, or Tokoyami’s darkness-boosted strength when they could have just used Midnight to flood the staircase Re-Destro was using with sleeping gas.

However, there’s still a bit of an acceptable handwave in that we have started to see the corruption and desperation of the HPSC—a number of the adult characters comment on it being kind of Weird and Sus that the HPSC is ramping up combat training for high schoolers, especially first-year high schoolers.  The anime adaptation goes out of its way to note that the students’ involvement in the war was hidden from the media, further emphasizing that the HPSC’s actions are intended to be read as over-the-line and suspicious in ways that the internships and work studies were not.

But that all goes completely off the rails for the second war.  The story wants us to believe that all the HPSC’s corruption was neatly dealt with by Clone!Re-Destro murdering the President (as if she wasn’t succeeded first by a man who also took part in the child assassin program and later by one of the actual child assassins).  Suddenly the kids of 1-A are cornerstones of the battle plans, with the only feeble handwaves given being that the first war reduced the number of Heroes drastically (but somehow didn’t impact any of the Heroes we’re actually supposed to care about beyond Midnight) and that the kids have extended experience with fighting the League (equally absurd; if it was just the experience, they should have tapped the kids for their knowledge during the planning stage, not the actual battle).

It’s obvious by this point that the only reason the endgame is rotating around the main characters is because they are the main characters, not because the admirable adult Heroes the story tells us we’re supposed to be rooting for have actual justification to put those kids in that position.

Now, I talked earlier about treating Deku as a character because he is one, so what’s the problem with accepting his presence because of his role rather than trying to examine the realism of the situation?  Well, the problem is still the same: the story is trying to sell us one thing (realistic explanations for the kids’ presence that respect the prior worldbuilding and don’t undermine the good guy chops of their whole side) while providing us with something else (transparent contrivance that shrinks the scope of the world while doing nothing but undermining their good guy chops).

If the story had Deku stick to his principles on saving Shigaraki, to the point that he was willing to depart from the entire professional structure that was telling him he couldn’t, then it would be perfectly reasonable for him to have to fight Shigaraki one-on-one!  Indeed, he have had to, and worse, he might have had to fight off his own erstwhile allies too.  Conversely, if he’d stood up to the planners of the war and convinced them to believe in his intentions regarding Shigaraki, the same way he did the prior bearers of OFA,[2] then it would also make sense for him to be the central point of the battleplan.

2: Give or take the shamelessly easy out Horikoshi took by having Yoichi convince Kudou and Bruce rather than making Deku find a way to do it.

But Deku doesn’t do any of that.  He passively lets himself be steered into a confrontation with a guy he wants to help but refuses to defend against others’ violence or to engage with honestly.  The battle arena for Shigaraki is literally called, in-universe, the Flying Coffin; all the planners wanted to do at that point was kill Shigaraki.  Deku never even whispered a protest, never so much as asked for a chance to talk to Shigaraki before firing up the electrical field.  So not only do I not believe the Heroes' justification for putting Deku here, I don't believe Deku as-established by the story should have let himself be put here. The only Watsonian explanation is that Deku is a much lesser Hero than I thought he would be, and yet the story is still trying to convince me that he's this amazing Hero whose “mad” “drive to save” “eclipses all common understanding.”

You, anon, can’t tell me I have to credit Deku for doing the bare minimum when the story is telling me he changed the world.  You can't tell me I have to see him as someone who might start realizing his society is fucked up and perhaps will start trying to do something about it when to the bitter end all he could talk about was about how he planned to Bring It All Back, with all talk about doing things better falling to characters as minor as Mirio or Jirou.  You can't tell me it makes sense that he failed when the story is frantically trying to spin his failure into a feel-good success.

Deku being sad about killing Shigaraki for approximately a day and a half does not negate the story depicting Deku's defeat of Shigaraki as him literally punching the sunshine back into a stormy sky.

Deku told me that this was the story of how he became a great Hero, he told me that for him being a Hero meant saving people, and then he failed to save the person his whole arc was leading him to save.  And then he had the gall to tell me that the point of the story wasn’t about him becoming a great Hero after all, it was actually about “reaching out to help,” regardless of whether that reaching out is actually successful or not!