#last week kicked my butt here's wonderwall

[plusultraetc]

I saw a post about this a hot minute ago and I'm so mad I can't find it BUT. While I LOVE Present Mic as a popular radio personality, there isn't really that much concrete evidence to support that idea. (Which, to be fair, there isn't a lot of concrete evidence about the careers/public perception of a lot of pros outside of All Might, Endeavor, sorta Hawks, etc., so you can pry that headcanon out of my grasp with a crowbar and so on.) That being said, I think a really fun angle to explore re: Present Mic as a radio host-pro hero-UA teacher (that I may or may not have the bare bones of a fic about👀) is the idea that Mic debuted as a very successful hero and entertainer, and experienced pretty steady growth in both aspects of his career for a few years before he took a teaching position at UA.

Hero rankings are based on incidents resolved, and can be damaged by taking any amount of time off (such as when the Wild Wild Pussycats took, what? A couple of months off from hero-ing? and their ranking plummeted by several hundred places). Teaching is time consuming; it's the kind of job that often necessitates 'bringing work home' with you in the form of grading, lesson planning, etc. Obviously it would cut into Mic's focus on his hero work and his radio show, and obviously that would affect not only his actual ranking but how much attention his career/persona garnered. After all, there is an influx of new heroes every single year when hero courses across the country graduate. It takes work to stay relevant in this universe.

So now I'm thinking of like. Present Mic but with the level of fame/popularity of a celebrity who was big a handful of years ago, but you don't hear so much about anymore. Like, yeah, they're still active, and still have a (often very dedicated) fanbase, but they've kind of been shuffled out of the spotlight a little bit. This also makes his lackluster reception at the entrance exam so much funnier imo, because those students would have been like 8-9 when he stopped just doing hero/radio stuff and started teaching, but they're teenagers now and Present Mic is sooo not in anymore.