#whyyyyyy is this so long and filled with prose attempt

[codenamesazanka]

We start off the series following Deku - and quickly his classmates - into the HeroAca world. They’re all a bunch of good, plucky kids, who all tested into UA High School on hard work and merit, the model of students on track to success. With a one or two exceptions, they are as normal as can be, even with superpowers.

Most of them have middle-class families that care about them and support their academic goals, allowing them to follow their dreams of becoming Heroes. (We know at least three of them are born into great wealth) The odd ones out might be poor, or discriminated for their appearances, or come from an abusive home, but they still integrate quite smoothly into the rest of the group. Our main character, too, though he was quirkless, bullied at school, and his family doesn’t seem as wealthy as his childhood friend’s home, Deku still grew up with a loving mom, lived a with an allowance that let him indulge in obsessive All Might merchandise and memorabilia, and eventually found wonderfully supportive mentors.

The kids in Class 1A make friends. They commute to school on wide, clean streets. They study for exams - and because this is normal for them - they’re all training for near lethal combat. They’re good kids, all ready to join the elite ranks of Heroes. When they get in trouble, they get reprimanded, but the consequences aren’t life-changing, and don’t really last.

This is all the UA kids know; it’s the world they live in. This is the point of view we’re given in the first 100-200 chapters, where Heroes are overall good guys who save the day and protect the people, where the Evil Villains exist and needs to be defeated, and their harsh beat down, captured, and imprisonment is justified because, well, look at them. They’re nearly all insane and incomprehensible, bitter and full of hate - practically evil for evil’s sakes. Some of them even look like monsters. The Villains want to hurt Heroes and destroy society for seemingly no reason at all; and if there are reasons, they just can’t be justified because come on, things aren’t that bad.

It’s not until we finally start venturing outside the walls of UA that unseemly sights begin to really pop up. People with specific quirks can be exploited; some criminals consider themselves to be trash and have lost the will to live; there are quite a few loud individuals who have problems with the status quo.

It’s not until we get the Villain’s point of view that the rest of the world is revealed. My Villain Academia shows us the filthy dregs of society, all the things underneath the shiny world of Heroes. Quirks are suppressed, allowed to be used by only a small warrior class. There are hate crime cults; there are consequences that are disproportionate and permanent. People suffer from disorders, whether biological or socially induced. Kids get mistreated by the people they depend on; kids drop out of school and end up on the streets with no home to go back to.

Most importantly, there is a history to this Hero Saturated society, one that created the present structures of the world and is responsible for its conditions, both good and bad. The good is pretty good; the bad is frankly horrifying - things are indeed that bad for the people on the edges. It’s like all the cracks suddenly came together and shattered the image we’ve believed in since Chapter 1.

And there have been cracks since the very beginning. There was, of course, Todoroki Shouto’s backstory about the extremes people will go for superpowers and selfish desires, there was the commercialization of Heroics, and we get some hints of discrimination based on people’s quirks.

But there were all the small, barely noticeable cracks too: When our very first bad guy is taken away in a muzzle gag and chains like a captured animal, we nod our heads. When All Might punches the Slime Villain to pieces, everyone cheers and so do we, accepting this is perfectly okay to do to another human being in this world - especially if they deserved it, which obviously the Villain did. Hero Schools have the funds (and are justified to spend them) for giant robots being used as little more than training dummies and multiple full-scale empty cities sitting around to be turned into rubble. Bakugou is bound and chained on live TV because he threw a fit, and people saw that and hesitantly laugh, shrugging that he does seem feral after all.

Shigaraki Tomura saw that; and past the taken-for-granted amused attitudes, he saw a kid whose anger was dismissed, literally gagged to stop making noise. He saw what he knew would happen - that the media would use that as justification for why Bakugou is suspect, would call him violent and mentally unstable and wonder out loud whether he still has a future, already ready to see him not as a victim but a possible Villain. It’s why Shigaraki was able to exploit exactly that, why he picked this one kid to kidnap — and recruit.

The cracks had always been there, tiny and seemingly insignificant - one slight neglect of basic dignity there, one questionable practice here; blink and you’ll miss both. UA Kids never noticed, because this was their normal, this was the only life they knew, whether their vision was obscured by the gleaming smiles of Heroes or the cracks were background details, some spice added to keep things from looking too monotone.

We entered the world of HeroAca into a pocket of relative privilege, watching the adventures of the cream of the crop who already were living near the top. Only once we leave UA’s lush and pretty campus, past it’s giant barrier, do we finally clearly see the world in its entirety, the decaying institutions and crumbling streets; only now can we look back and see the rot had spread to the ivory tower as well - just a little, basically invisible if you just ignore it - and it’s been there all along.