7/15 Happy Birthday To Izuku Midoriya!! His Final Birthday While The Series Is Still Ongoing 😭😭😭

The FIRST DAY of class Midoriya shows up and keeps earnestly calling Bakugo a cutesy nickname and Bakugo straight up tries to fuckin fight him over something completely unrelated. And nobody even asks them how they know each other

Shinso Hitoshi: Victim of Discrimination? Part 2

Last time on DragonBall Z this overly long meta post, I talked about how fanon Shinso differs from canon Shinso, looked at the evidence for him being bullied, and contrasted that with Izuku's canonical bullying and discrimination. This time, we move from how their classmates treated them to how society treats them. This section is going to be a fair bit shorter, but let's have some fun with it anyway! If you have not read the previous post, I highly suggest go and read that first! I will be building on ideas from that post in this one! With that said, let's get started!

We have seen how Izuku's and Shinso's classmates treated them in middle school, but quirk discrimation and quirkless discrimination are societal problems in the world of My Hero Academia. That begs the question, how does wider society treat Izuku and Shinso? Let’s start with Izuku. During the scene where Izuku is revealed to want to go to UA, Bakugo does this:

How does their teacher respond to this blatant aggression and attack on another student? With silence. He never intervenes at all to stop Bakugo or any of the rest of the class from insulting and attacking Izuku. Izuku is being completely let down by one of the key authorities in his life. The teacher does nothing to reign in his other students, does not scold them for their discriminatory actions or attitude, does not even try to defend one of his students. He is failing Izuku as an authority figure and one possible conclusion we can draw from this is that he thinks Izuku is not worth defending. This is not the only time an adult authority figure lets Izuku down or devalues him for his lack of quirk. That began the moment Izuku was diagnosed as quirkless:

This panel has been much studied due to the similarity in appearance between Doctor Tsubasa here and Doctor Garaki, but that is not what I want to focus on. Instead, focus on the specific wording he uses, “there’s no hope for him.” Izuku, at the age of four, is judged by a medical doctor to have zero worth because of his lack of quirk. He is immediately discounted because of the double toe joint he possesses and the quirk he does not.

Finally, we have Izuku’s own words on what people say:

He is specifically ignoring what the world is telling him and instead keeps his head up and keeps moving forward. The implication is that society is telling him to do the opposite, to keep his head down and to give up on his dreams. Let’s contrast this with Shinso.

We sadly do not see Shinso’s quirk awakening, nor how he is treated by his teachers at his middle school. However, there is one instance where we can see how society treats him, the Sports Festival itself. In chapter 34, after Izuku defeats Shinso, we get a cut to the crowd and their thoughts on Shinso. Do they think he is a villain in the making? Are they scared of his quirk? That could not be further from the truth.

The crowd, far from viewing Shinso as a villain or dangerous, instead is praising him. One person wishes they had Shinso’s quirk (as did one of his classmates previously), another wonders why UA does not have Shinso in the hero course given how useful his quirk is for heroics. Not one calls him a villain or says he is unworthy of standing with the heroes. To summarize what Shinso’s 1-C classmates say, “he’s awesome.” I could not agree with them more, Shinso is awesome.

So, let’s conclude this meta with some closing thoughts. Shinso is a great character. I love him to death, and I have loved many stories that use the fanon ideas about him as an outcast. However, we should be careful to distinguish between fanon and canon. The two are very different things. As I mentioned at the start of last post, a big part of why I was inspired to write this long essay was because I had let the fanon version of Shinso replace canon in my head. It was only when I looked back at these chapters when Sam and I were planning how to handle Shinso in Little Owl that I realized, thanks to Sam's prompting, the inconsistency between fanon and canon. Canon Shinso has his own struggles and character that I would love to see explored in fanfiction a bit more often. He does face a lot of challenges, just that his challenges are different from Izuku's and from the challenges fanon often places in front of him. Taking canon and going in weird, fun directions with it is the entire point of fanfiction. I hope y'all have enjoyed my ramblings, I did not expect this to be quite this long, but I am a bit of a windbag!

For those of you who made it to the end of this, thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think and if you would like to see more stuff like this from me in the future!

Until then, ἐρρῶσθαι!

We do have reputations

at first I was voting Izuku consistently to keep bakugou from winning (I’m not even a bakugou hater, but he’s won enough popularity polls), but then when i remembered the top three all move on to the finals, and I figure izuku is pretty much guaranteed for that. So now I’m redirecting my energy to shinsou because I rlly want him to be in the top 10 illustration.

Shinso Hitoshi: Victim of Discrimination? Part 1

Shinso Hitoshi. The most popular teen character in MHA who isn’t part of 1-A or the League of Villains. There are numerous fics and stories that have him as a main character or as a major supporting character, especially considering how little he’s actually in MHA itself. Of the 347 chapters of My Hero Academia published at the time of writing, Shinso directly appears (not counting flashbacks, mentions, etc.) in only thirty-one chapters. That is 8.9% of the MHA manga. Furthermore, he is only really important to two arcs, the Sports Festival Arc and the Joint Training Arc. He is, for all intents and purposes, a minor character.

Despite his lack of appearances, though he is quite popular. In the official Japanese popularity polls, he ranked, respectively: 12th, 14th, 10th, 23rd, 17th, 24th, 10th. On Archive of Our Own, one of the largest fanfiction archives in western fandom, especially English-language fandom, Shinso’s tag, as of March 15, 2022, has been used on 31,154 fics, making it the ninth most popular character tag.

Given the popularity of the character, combined with a lack of material in MHA about him, it is no surprise that a whole spate of fanon has grown up around Shinso. However, a lot of this fanon is not based on what we actually see in MHA itself. There is one specific point I wish to focus on in this post, that of Shinso being bullied by his peers and discriminated against by wider quirk society. I especially wish to focus on this given how often Shinso’s bullying is compared with Izuku’s treatment, either saying Izuku is the same as Shinso or was not treated as badly as Shinso was for the sake of woobification of Shinso. I intend to show that this is far from the case. There is another common fanon trope I would like to look at, that Shinso was raised in foster care, but I shall save that for another post. This one is going to be long enough as it is.

Before we begin, I should note a few things. First, I want to make it expressly clear that I am not shaming people for their writing choices. I love a lot of fics with these tropes for Shinso. They’re fun and provide great drama. There is nothing wrong with using these tropes. I’m just explaining how I interpret what we see in canon in contrast to the common fanon tropes, nothing more. If you go and send this post to writers, screaming about how they are terrible for writing Shinso in a way different from how this post interprets him, you are a terrible person and I want nothing to do with you. Do not use this to harass authors just trying to have a good time.

Furthermore, I will be relying exclusively on the manga’s version of events here. I have not seen the anime myself, so I cannot judge how it changes things with regards to Shinso. I will also be relying exclusively on the official VIZ Media localization of the manga, not on any fan translations.

Finally, I must give a huge shout-out and thank you to Samcalibur, my co-author on Little Owl. I had let fanon Shinso completely eclipse canon Shinso in my mind until she pointed it out when discussing how to write him in Little Owl. This post would not exist without her. Thanks for this, Sam! With all that said, let’s get started.

The most common fanon trope for Shinso, in my experience, has been to highlight him as an outcast from his peers. This includes him having zero friends before UA, him being specifically bullied for his quirk being “villainous,” teachers refusing to talk to him because of his quirk, and, in some fics, even having his middle school put a muzzle or gag on him during class to keep him from speaking and using his quirk.

A lot of fics that go to these extremes with Shinso often will paint an equivalence between how he was treated and how Izuku was treated by his classmates and society for being quirkless. However, when we actually see flashbacks to Shinso’s past during the Sports Festival, when he is explaining himself to Izuku during their match in true battle shonen fashion, how does Horikoshi depict him?

Shinso and Izuku fight in chapters 32 through 34 of the manga, during the Sports Festival Arc. These two chapters are where the bulk of the fanon that Shinso was bullied and discriminated against come from. Do the chapters bear this out? In a word, no.

So, in chapter 33, Shinso is goading Izuku to try and get him to respond again after Izuku breaks the brainwashing. He says that Izuku is lucky to have a quirk that lets him “enter the Golden Gates” that Shinso is not allowed through.

However, nowhere in Chapter 33 does he bring up the idea of him being bullied for his quirk, just that Izuku, due to having a physical quirk, has a leg up with regard to the hero course that lets him follow his dreams (the second panel comes from chapter 34, but is part of the same conversation).

So, he does not talk about his supposed bullying here. Instead, his bitterness is about how those with physical quirks are able to “follow all their dreams.” Shinso's resentment is about how the UA entrance exam is structured, not over how society is treating him or how his peers treated him. That begs the question, where did the bullying aspect come from? Given how prevalent it is in fandom, the answer is quite underwhelming. It’s a single page in Chapter 34:

It is worth noting that, by all indications, this is an entirely internal flashback. Izuku himself is never actually told about this. Only Shinso and the audience are privy to this information.

This page is at the heart of the entire fanon about Shinso’s bullying, and it is incredibly underwhelming. To me, this does not read as someone who was horrifically bullied. This is standard First Day of School talk. I can see how Shinso would find this being constantly brought up annoying, but it is not bullying. This is the equivalent of having a odd name and having every joke about it memorized by fourth grade. Speaking from experience, yes, that is annoying, but it was not bullying. Hell, one of the students even flat out says they are jealous of Shinso’s quirk.

There is also a common point in fanon where Shinso is an outcast in 1-C for his quirk. However, this point is not just unsupported by canon, it is actively contradicted by it. We see some members of 1-C after Shinso’s loss to Izuku. Here’s what they have to say to him:

Far from viewing him as an outcast, they’re proud of him! They call him the “shining star” of General Education. They think he is “awesome!” and they’re elated that he went so far. This is not what you say to an outcast you are afraid of, this is what you say to a classmate you respect and think highly of! Quite simply, there is little to no evidence that Shinso was bullied for his quirk, and certainly not for the fanon concepts of him being a complete outcast due to it. There is no chance that the Shinso of canon was muzzled to keep other students safe from him as some fics claim. By all indications, Shinso was accepted by his peers, both in middle school and in Gen Ed at UA.

For contrast, let us look at Izuku’s experiences, to which Shinso is often compared.

We see Izuku’s middle school days mainly in two places, Chapter 1 of MHA and the bonus two-part story Deku and Bakugo Rising, which is included in Volume 2 of My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions. Let’s first look at Chapter 1 of MHA itself.

So, when does Izuku being bullied for being quirkless start? Page 1.

Let’s make note of two specific things on this page. First, what Bakugo says to Izuku. “So Deku, the quirkless wonder, thinks he can play hero, huh?” Let me draw your attention to two pieces of information here. First, even at this early stage, Bakugo has already coined the nickname of Deku, meaning “useless,” here. He is already calling Izuku worthless and useles. Second, he is calling out Izuku’s quirklessness and him for “playing hero.” This shows that the bullying is both because of Izuku being quirkless and for him having the try to stand up to people with quirks, to "play hero," against his betters, those with quirks. Then he punches Izuku in the face while his longhaired friend hols Izuku's head in place, both of them using their quirks. However, that’s just Bakugo and his cronies. Bakugo Katsuki, as shown throughout MHA but especially in recent, has a specific complex vis a vis Izuku. What about Izuku's other classmates later on? Did they also lightly tease him the way Shinso’s classmates did?

Well, here’s how they responded to the idea of Izuku applying for UA’s heroics program:

The entire class laughs at him, mocking him for the entire idea of someone like him, someone quirkless, could be a hero. It gets even worse a couple panels later:

There’s a lot to go into here with this panel, because there is some very striking visual storytelling going on here. First, the entire class is framed as a single mass, distinguishable only by their various quirks. This contrasts them specifically with the quirkless Izuku, whom they menacingly loom over. Izuku is on the ground beneath them, showing how he feels below them, framing them as villainous and him as small and weak. The only light spots in their silhouettes is the repeated word “heh,” showing they are still laughing at him. Finally, the word balloon. It is not tied to any specific person, not even Bakugo. Instead, it’s presented as the unanimous words of the entire class. They’re specifically asking him, mocking him, “what can you even do?!” with the word “do” specifically bolded. They are telling Izuku that he is completely useless, that he can’t do anything. This is bullying and discrimination. This is not the light teasing Shinso received.

We see this bullying on an individual level in Deku and Bakugo Rising with Bakugo’s two unnamed friends. In that story, set in Izuku and Bakugo’s second year of middle school, the two friends of Bakugo steal Izuku’s hero magazine and mock him for reading it (apologies for the weird look of these pictures, VIZ does not have scans of this online, so I had to take pictures of the physical volume for it):

They specifically mock him for wanting to be a hero when he is quirkless. Bakugo himself underlines this point a panel later, saying “since he’s quirkless, dreams’re all he’s got.”

I have reached the image post limit for Tumblr, so I will have to split this post here. Next time, we will deal with how society treated Izuku and Shinso and close out this very long meta!

Until then, ἐρρῶσθαι!

i read the hp books in elementary school and I’ve been into them ever since, but I’ve only recently really ventured into the fandom space online. And there are so many random ships, which ik any fandom will have, but like when I stumble across something like Ron x Blaise I’m like… idk how yall came up with that one but more power to ya (I assume it’s just to be a companion ship with Drarry). And theres the whole marauders fandom which is very interesting. I haven’t read all the young dudes or anything but props to them for forming a whole fandom around a bunch of characters that die and/or are mentioned only by name.

Fandom is so funny because Aizawa and Mic have mostly consistent fanon alien designs. Like everyone seems to agree that is aizawa was an alien he would be a 6-legged cat creature (often with a scarf that is an addition appendage on his body) and he’s married to Mic who is some sort of yellow bird-like thing. Who was the first to invent 6 legged cat aizawa because that design is so funny to me.

how it feels to ship tododeku in 2024

from what I know, very similar to a british scone but a little flakier and maybe softer? It’s also served savory or sweet

Like BakuDeku has ALWAYS been the #1 ship I think, (I think even in the English speaking fandom? It’s always been the top ship on ao3), but it was still smaller than it has become since deku and Bakugou’s relationship has improved/deepened in the manga/those two characters have become even more of a central focus. Also I don’t read it manga and I’m not even caught up with the anime, this is just what I sense. Anyway, bakudeku has always been popular, but even more so in recent years. When I first got into mha (probably 2021?) bkdk felt a lot more avoidable if it wasn’t your cup of tea. Obviously every individual person had their fav ships, but the majority of people I saw had a sort of fanon roster of ships, I’ll call the tddk roster. Deku was the Todoroki, bkdk want happening bakugou he was paired with kirishima. this was much closer to when the sports festival and bakugou’s rescue happened, so some pivotal moments for those relationships were more fresh in people minds, as was bakugou being a bully (bkdk pivotal moments just continue to happen one dyer teh other for the whole series…).

I’m stressed about planning a trip because it had different moving parts. I threw up over it but the trip was only one of the factors. I need to apply to colleges but I don’t want to leave home. I love my mom, and I don’t want my parents to die. I want t forget about the trip I’m stressing about but I can’t even find any good tddk fanfiction to read. What happened to tddk we used to be a proper fandom. I swear I see more people on tiktok hyping up SEROROKI than tddk. Which, nothing inherently wrong with seroroki, its cute and all just not my thing personally. But. tddk used to be like the 2nd or 3rd most popular ship. I feel like it’s been bumped down. And people can choose their preferred ships off of whatever they want but I swear some new chapter drops and everyone forgets about what happened earlier. Again, nothing against kirimina, perfectly fine ship just not my fave. But where did it come from? Thai fandom was krbk this, tddk that, now its bkdk everything. It’s kind of interesting how the major ships for each character has changed, it’s just that what seems to be the new normal aren’t the ships I was used to in the fandom, so it throws me slightly.