#but i am trying hard to keep rei's character in the bounds of canon accuracy

[lgbtlunaverse]

There's a few "league gets adopted by Rei / Rei takes care of the league" fics out there and I love them dearly even if i have to admit that they're all quite unrealistic, mainly because they tend to paint Rei as a better parent than she actually is. Sort of what happens to aizawa in fanon, too, completely accepting and eternally affectionate. The "comfort" in hurt/comfort personified. I get why this happens, it hits like a truck watching people who were denied parental affection finally get it.

But, as always, with fanon tropes, there is a part of me that's melancholic for all the potential that gets left behind. Because there's a kernel of truth in these fics that i'm sad isn't highlighted enough, there's something that could draw rei to the league outside of one of them being her literal thought-to-be-dead son or some nebulous perfect motherly instinct. And that truth is: Rei is not an amazing parent. Her faults are mostly of inaction, and the whole thing with Shouto was due to the abuse she suffers herself. But she has- and she knows this- failed her childen as a mother.

And what that gives you is a woman with a deep massive guilt over failing to be there for her kids when they needed her. She believes one of them died and it was, in part, her fault. Shouto she can reconcile with, but Touya, she thinks, will be a wound that never heals. And why wouldn't you, as a fic writer, use that?

What i'm saying is, if you were to- in the right circumstances- throw a traumatized child also failed by their parents her way. (Perhaps, say... a child rejected by her parents explicitly because of her quirk, wink wink?) And it reminded her just of how much she herself had failed as a mother, specifically because she was too scared to do anything, then she would absolutely want to take care of that child. She just wouldn't be all that good at it. Really, she'd be terrified to even try. But she'd want to try. And wouldn't that make for a story worth telling, one that could be just as cathartic in the end as the 'perfect mom takes care of her new murder children' fics?