Izuku doesn't have a quirk. That's the long and short of it. After being told his whole life he can't be a hero, General Education at UA is the best he can hope for, right? Wrong. Dead Wrong. So super wrong that his best friend from Gen Ed, all of Class 1A and a whole mess of Pro Heroes are going to prove to him how wrong he is. Izuku has the makings of a hero, and his lack of a quirk only throws those qualities into starker relief. After all, who wants to be as strong as All Might when you can be the cleverest hero in the business?
Heroics and Other Things That Don't Require Superpowers is a My Hero Academia fanfic by TheNarator
, who is also known for writing Prince Of Heroes. It can be read on Archive of Our Own here.
The fic concluded on April 9th, 2021.
This fanfic provides examples of:
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In canon, Izuku and Present Mic have a standard student-teacher relationship. Here, he's Izuku's main parental figure.
- Death by Irony: All For One dies from getting his Quirk stolen.
- Deconstruction Fic: Deconstructs Bakugou as a character and the role he supposedly plays in the narrative by having his personality meet with the realistic standards and expectations that a famed school for an inherently public-serving role would have... and fails at basically every turn.
- His raw physical and intellectual talents are suitable, but his values and priorities are so completely contrary to the actual purpose of the job he's training for and the interpersonal demands necessary to be good at it that he fails to impress anyone once class begins—not his classmates, not his teachers, not the staff.
- After he crosses the line by refusing to cooperate with Izuku in the USJ when lives are on the line, the staff decide to hopefully prove a point by testing his qualifications as a hero student on his own terms; if he thinks he's more worthy of being in the Hero Course than Izuku, he should prove it with the thing he's best at: combat. Per their predictions, he fails even at that—partially due to being controlled by his sadism and rage, but also partially because the rest of 1-A goes out of its way to help Izuku train to beat Bakugou, because Izuku is everything Bakugou is not on a social level and he's naturally networked himself into the supportive relationships the class has formed with each other, while Bakugou scorned his desired future coworkers and any attempts they made to support him.
- He doesn't get his behavior ignored or tolerated while being handed continuous chances to finally decide to begin improving his behavior. After all, he's occupying a highly coveted place in a prestigious training course and there are other candidates more amenable to the goals and demands of the job who can take his spot. After failing to prove he can function as a hero to his teachers or even prove himself worthy of the course on his own terms, Bakugou is booted to Gen Ed because it's clear that, despite his talent, he is not willing to put his issues aside and do what is needed to function in the role of a hero, at least not at this time. Instead of working on his issues, he tries to get back in through the Sports Festival, and after that fails, withdraws himself from the school.
- It also deconstructs the common idea that if Bakugou is given serious consequences or isn't compromised with and dealt with gently, he will become a villain and cause serious problems. We eventually find out that Bakugou did try to become a villain, but the same flaws that made him a terrible hero student made him terrible at surviving villain society as well. He was so obnoxious, combative, and uncooperative that when he tried to join All For One that the latter decided Bakugou was less useful than his quirk and simply took it and abandoned him. Bakugou made so little impact as a villain that he has no presence in the narrative after leaving UA to become one and barely warrants a mention at the end.
- Fatal Flaw: Bakugou can't get along with others for his own good, which erodes the good will of the teachers and staff around him, convinces them he isn't yet suitable for the Hero Course, and eventually costs him his enrollment at UA altogether. His inability to cooperate with anyone even implicitly seems to have ruined his attempted villain career, as even All For One found him too obnoxious to deal with and simply took his quirk and left him for dead.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: All For One is revealed to be Izuku's father.
- The Mentor: Present Mic forms a special mentorship bond with Izuku. Sir Nighteye proves a far more toxic version of this.
- Point of Divergence: All Might never meets up with Izuku again to offer him One For All. Izuku joins the Gen Ed department instead, until a mishap brings his notebooks to the attention of the staff, who offer him a position in the support course—with his entry test being what he observes from attending the USJ.
- Related in the Adaptation: Along with being Izuku's father, All For One is also the father of Toga and Twice, making them and Izuku siblings.
- Secret Test of Character: The Bakugou vs. Izuku duel. In reality, it was done so the UA staff could see what Bakugou would do when put up directly against his victim, and help Izuku gain the confidence he needed to believe he belonged in the Hero Course. The all-or-nothing wager over one of them getting Bakugou's place in the course was a bluff. Nezu considers Bakugou fundamentally unsuited for Heroics and always intended to expell him from the course; if Bakugou won, Nezu would just wait for Bakugou's next infraction to expell him—and there would be a next infraction, given his behavior. Nezu would then move Izuku up to the Hero or Support Course regardless, as long as Izuku performed decently enough at the Sports Festival for Nezu to get away with it.
- Slave to PR: Minor example. After the match between Bakugou and Izuku, Nezu privately admits to Aizawa that he believes Bakugou was and is unable to meet Hero Course expectations and should have never been admitted to the school, and that while Bakugou's behavior is a problem, it's worse given what course he managed to get into. Nezu admits he's using Bakugou's behavioral infractions as an excuse to move him to Gen Ed, so as to avoid the embarrassment of admitting their admission process messed up. Moving him to Gen Ed also appears more merciful and less like they're trying to cover up a mistake.
- Super Breeding Program: Along with the canon example of Quirk Marriages, All For One spent twenty-five years creating over a hundred children with women to create useful quirks for him to take from them, with Dr. Garaki diagnosing them as quirkless afterwards.
