#and izuku still has an ember inside him which means ofa still has to be out there

[tnbwrites]

One last MHA meta for the road.

The epilogue was spelled out for us from the beginning. Like, we were explicitly told how it’s gonna go down.

The first thing we see is a panel about how the wind is blowing which has always been a metaphor for change, and how one small impact could change the world.

We move onto izuku and all might talking about how izuku couldn’t save Tenko’s life, but he did save his soul by shattering his hatred.

There’s a panel mentioning that what matters is what you do tomorrow, and how you continue to do your best even in the wake of great personal tragedy. The personal tragedy in this case is Izuku’s loss, he couldn’t save Tenko’s life.

Cut to Kacchan dramatically showing up right as izuku mentions the ember of ofa. Now, here’s my question: if ofa was gone for good, would the ember even still remain? I’m not sure but it’s worth noting. We are both told and shown this ember multiple times in the epilogue.

This entire page is important. It lays the foundation of hard work again, that you don’t get things easily even after the “big battle.” It also lays out the epilogue’s order of events.

We start with the Todoroki family where touya is doomed to a machine for the rest of his waning life. Then we move onto spinner who is deeply grieving Tenko’s life and has a personal vendetta against izuku now. Then ochako who is faking a smile while holding onto her grief over toga. Then onto the pain that both her and izuku are sharing over the loss of their villains’ lives.

This all culminates to a moment where class 2A shows up to comfort them both, and izuku reflects on how even in the wake of this tragedy they must always do their best to stop it from happening again for someone else.

This is also physically shown with a Tenko look-alike who was teased from the beginning. We get a moment where he is saved by the very person who left Tenko, and a moment showing that Izuku’s do-your-best attitude spurred her to action.

Now you’re thinking, “how does this show how it’s all going to end?” Well, that’s what chapter 425 was for.

Exhibit A: Mirio’s graduation speech. He gives an example that they lost a lot during that fight, and are striving to bring it back from -1 to 0. They’re not there yet, and it will take time, but that’s the goal.

They’re not at 0 if they lost the people they tried to save.

Exhibit B: Fuwa’s “taste of death” monologue. They needed to experience death to understand why they need to work hard as heroes. She’s talking about being expelled, but in Izuku’s case it’s tenko’s death.

And how did that end for Fuwa’s class? After being expelled and learning their lesson they got to rejoin UA again as students.

If izuku follows that pattern, and it does seem he’s learned his lesson from this literal death, then perhaps he too will be rewarded for his work.

Here’s where things get vague and I’m just guessing at this point. This epilogue has been deeply sad and unsatisfying. There’s no reprieve. We’re due for that, right?

What if Tenko was able to unlock the restoration part of overhaul’s quirk and rebuild himself? Wouldn’t he be able to rebuild both society and the villains? Technically he also has OFA. Wouldn’t he be able to give that back to izuku?

These rewards only mean something if the heroes work for them and continue to strive to do better in the future.

The villains also never truly got a chance to atone the way endeavor and aoyama did. Killing them wouldn’t fix this. But bringing them back to a society that has been shown to be kinder? So they can also work hard for a future that they fit into?

That feels very Plus Ultra to me!

[chickentnders]

Why Deku Won't End up Quirkless (and Why Bakugou will Give him his Quirk)

*obvious manga spoilers through 429* (and of course this is all just my opinion)

I know OFA is gone, but it isn’t completely gone, right? Izuku still has the embers of it. Well, that’s not what I’m talking about. The OFA quirk can’t be passed on again, it's gone, but there’s nothing in canon (afaik) saying that the embers can’t be used to pass on a quirk that someone already has one more time.

Bakugou was given OFA during the events of Heroes Rising, and even though he forgot the events of the movie, he still held the quirk for a brief period of time. 

This means he could have the embers of OFA still inside him.

When Bakugou dies in ch. 362, he sees All Might, but he doesn’t see the man, he sees the vestige. I thought this was just a stylistic choice by Horikoshi when the chapter dropped, but now I think it was foreshadowing. In that chapter, we see that memory of him and Izuku happy to both have gotten All Might trading cards.

In chapter 403 when All Might is near death, he also has a vision. He sees his life play out before his eyes, and when he looks back at his path, he sees lights on the ground and his narration says,  "As for what I've done? I just happened to glance back at my path. And what I saw… seemed so very significant."

If you count the lights on the ground, there are ten of them. The tenth one in the center has explosions around it.

A few pages later, we see All Might holding one of those balls of light as he watches child Izuku and Bakugou with their own balls of light.

This scene All Might watches is the same exact scene as Bakugou’s memory.

Two things are impossible: 1. For Bakugou to see Vestige-Might and 2. For All Might to see a memory that is NOT his own, exactly as it happened.

Remember, as All Might is seeing the two boys, they are all holding the same thing, a ball of light. But in the way this scene played out, the boys were holding All Might trading cards. If they all have the same thing, well, All Might isn’t holding his own trading card. 

If you look back at those ten balls of light on the ground in 403, the biggest one in the center has stars of light around it that look like Bakugou’s explosions. Ten lights for ten One For All holders, with Bakugou as the tenth.

The trading cards aren’t trading cards, they’re One For All.

Right before Bakugou and Izuku’s eye’s meet in 403, we see them as kids holding their cards.

Then that 10th ball of light. Then a close up of Bakugou's hand holding the trading card.

I mean…

Then their eyes meet and they pull off a very coordinated move without needing to communicate.

I prefer it from a “they just know each other that well” angle, but looking back, it’s feels more like possibly the story was trying to foreshadow something to us, like they didn’t need to communicate, because their thoughts reached each other through the OFA crystalline network.

We already have precedent for this kind of memory sharing within OFA. Yoichi showed Izuku his memories of AFO and when Izuku fought ShigAFO, their memories blend together as he transferred OFA to him.

As far as Izuku being able to receive another quirk...

If Nana gave OFA to All Might however long before she died, that means she didn’t lose Float during the transfer. Which means that OFA doesn’t take the original quirk when it’s passed on, it stores a copy. All of the other users died shortly after passing it on, so its capabilities weren’t really tested. Nobody knew that the individual quirks were stored up in OFA in addition to the power stocking, so there was no way to test what the embers would be capable of.

All Might and Izuku are the only two OFA users alive and they’re both quirkless. They have no reason to suspect that the embers could be used to transfer a quirk to someone, because they were both born without quirk factors of their own. They don't have anything to pass on and had no reason to suspect that that ember was anything more than super strength. The ember is all they have left once it’s gone.

Bakugou does have something he can pass on, he still has Explosion. Since he held OFA, there’s a good chance he still has that untouched ember of OFA that’s been lying dormant inside of him. Enough for one more use. And if he does, since OFA is a quirk meant to be passed on, I think he’s going to use that ember, not for the super strength, but as it was always intended, to pass on a quirk. To pass on his own quirk on to Izuku.

I think that’s going to be his ultimate atonement, specifically because he didn’t get a prosthetic when the doctor said, “If he’s still determined to be a hero…” and he turned it down.

Then he mentioned Izuku never had a quirk to begin with. I think this means he can't use his quirk anymore, not the way he used to. Especially since he's shown to be very similar to Mirko, who loves fighting more than anything, but he did the opposite of what she chose.

Then he cried when he found out Izuku was quirkless again—genuinely devastated—and said, “What did I do to you?”

It’s a lot of things: everything in the hospital, his little chat with Edgeshot who’s not back to normal (and the face he made at his response); the new illustration by Horikoshi where we can see his arm is still non-responsive at his side; the fact that his one line in this last chapter was asking about the ember of OFA...

It all makes me think he’s going to give his quirk to Izuku once OFA is completely burned out of him (so Izuku can’t try to give it back, because we know he would); like he's gauging how much of it is left. All Might only held onto that ember for less than a year, after holding the quirk for forty; Izuku held OFA for less than a year, it's probably going to burn out very quickly, and Bakugou probably knows this.

We already know that transfer doesn’t require the recipient to be aware, because of how it was transferred from Yoichi to Kudou, and Izuku would definitely refuse to take it if offered. It would be pretty easy, Bakugou can just spit in his food really.

And narratively, Bakugou doesn’t have anywhere left to go. His story is essentially over and ended when he finished off AFO. In fact, I think he got back up and went out with such a bang (and has gotten very little screen time since), because that was the last time he was going to pursue his pro hero dream (from the standpoint of the author, not the character, who wouldn't know how badly he'd been hurt).

He’s been famous the entire story since chapter one and the entire world watched him take down the most villainous villain to ever villain on live TV. He wanted to be the strongest, but by now he knows that it’s never going to happen for him the way he wanted, and being the person to finish off AFO (with everyone’s help) is probably the highest he could ever go. He’s achieved the dream that he had at the start of the story to the best of his ability. And at the end, his dream shifted to wanting him and Izuku to keep competing at each other’s side forever, but Izuku being quirkless makes that impossible. 

But Izuku being quirkless again is what makes it possible for him to do for Izuku what nobody else but him can: pass his quirk onto him. I think that's why the way to defeat ShigAFO was to give away OFA. Izuku had to be quirkless for the story to end the way it started, but to reverse their roles.

By now, Bakugou’s grown a lot, and for quite a while in the manga his story has shifted to be about Izuku first and foremost, so I think this would be the equivalent of him finally taking that hand that he slapped away when they were kids.

And I kind of think this was what Horikoshi intended from the start, maybe? I know he said something about Heroes Rising being the original ending, I dont know about you, but I never take authors literally and prefer to let their work do the talking. That said, in Heroes Rising, the two boys pass a quirk between them, so this kind of ending would fit. I don’t know the exact quote, but Horikoshi also said something along the lines of hoping Bakugou’s ending would make people who like him and dislike him both happy. I feel like giving up the thing that defines him, his quirk, would do just that.

It's hard to argue that Bakugou hasn't atoned if he gave up the thing that had given his entire life meaning to the quirkless loser he bullied.

If you think about it, Izuku was always copying Bakugou at the beginning of the story, it went on for quite a while until he really made OFA his own. If Bakugou can’t use his quirk anymore, or can’t use his arm anymore the way he used to, and he wants Izuku to not be quirkless, he’s the perfect person to get it. He already knows all of Bakugou’s moves from years of watching him, he learned how to move like him, and his Explosion quirk is the one he’d admired his whole life. I can't imagine Bakugou would want his quirk to go to anybody else, and I think if he had the chance to give Izuku his dream back, after having crushed it for so many years, telling him he could never be a hero, he would take it in a heartbeat.

And then the final point: Endeavor. Bakugou is a parallel to him, but he had his eyes opened and started trying to atone much earlier in life. Endeavor went off the deep end very early in life; he reached the number two spot by twenty, realized he couldn't surpass him, decided to get married, try to have a baby, and by twenty-two Touya was born. Unwell behavior. Bakugou also came to this realization and ShigAFO drove it home even further: he will never surpass Izuku and he never could have surpassed All Might (nobody could, aside from the person he pass OFA onto, and despite meeting All Might the same day, he wasn't the one chosen).

In 426, Endeavor said that he had planned to retire after the final battle was over and that he’d spend every day watching Touya. Hero work was the thing that gave Endeavor pride, it was the only thing that mattered in his life, when his family should have been the most important thing. He gave up the thing that gave him meaning to finally focus on what was important, even if it was too late.

For Bakugou, it's not too late. The thing that defined him as a person his entire life, from the moment it manifested, was his quirk. If he’s a parallel to Endeavor, and if he has an ember of OFA inside him, it would make sense that he’s going to do the same thing and give up the thing that got between him and what mattered most: his friendship with Izuku.

And I think it would be a perfect end to their story if Katsuki ended up quirkless, while Izuku got an amazing quirk; and if the boys who were friends, turned bully and victim, could go back to being normal friends like when they were little.

Do you think Bakugou will give Explosion to Izuku? Do you think he's going to give him his quirk and finally tell Izuku the thing he's always wanted to hear from him, "You can be a hero"?

Do you think Deku will become the first quirkless pro hero instead? (I’d love this, but considering it keeps getting reinforced that you can’t be a pro hero in the MHA universe without a quirk (Mirio taking a sabbatical, Ragdoll, Grandpa Fist), idk… (even though Bakugou genuinely thought Izuku got into UA without a quirk and Izuku had hoped to get into the hero program without a quirk))

Do you think Bakugou could become the first quirkless pro hero?

And here are the ten lights:

(I posted this on Tumblr before, if it sounds familiar, but I think I rambled too much so I just condensed it. Apologies for redundancy ^_^;)