Being told by his idol that he can be a hero was the greatest thing that had ever happened in Midoriya Izuku’s life. In fact, it was so incredible and amazing that it compelled him to do something that he had been taught from an early age to NEVER do. He asked his teacher a question.
Or: Izuku decides to ask Toshinori to teach him how to use One For All while he’s cleaning up the beach. This prompts Toshinori to realize that he actually can’t really do that. So, he reluctantly calls Gran Torino and gets him to help train and supervise Izuku’s ten month American Dream Plan for entering UA.
We Are Here: The Emerald Spark
is an AU fanfic of My Hero Academia written by Lord_Raine.
We Are Here: The Emerald Spark provides examples of:
- Adaptation Name Change: Izuku's first hero name is "Sage: The Teamwork Hero", as opposed to canon's Deku.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Midoriya is much closer to Hagakure, Sero, Kaminari, Ashido, and Melissa than in canon.
- Adaptational Badass:
- Torino getting involved in Izuku's training much earlier leads to Izuku learning how to fight and use his smarts in combat with greater skill.
- Lunch Rush (U.A.'s cook) is heavily implied to have been involved in black-ops as an Underground Hero. Aizawa even lists him as a "last line of defense" for U.A.
- Adaptation Expansion:
- Melissa's mother, who isn't even mentioned in canon, is mentioned here to be an American heroine with a healing Quirk that got fatally injured but instinctively used her Quirk on herself to freeze herself, keeping her alive but in a coma.
- I-Island gets a more in-depth exposition as Melissa guides Izuku through it.
- Izuku's father is more than an office worker, going by what Gran Torino has managed to unearth.
- The same source indicates Inko is in a witness protection program.
- U.A. had not always been the paramount educational institution it is currently - it took Nezu taking the reins to transform it through his new ideas.
- Adaptational Early Appearance: Several characters appear much sooner than canon.
- Gran Torino shows up in the first chapter, after All Might requests his help in teaching Izuku.
- Hagakure appears when All Might takes him to the shooting range.
- Hatsume shows up while Izuku is cleaning up Dagobah Beach, interested in learning where he's getting the electronics stuff she's seen delivered to the recycling plant.
- Izuku meets Ashido, Kaminari, and Sero at the gaming center.
- David and Melissa Shield, and Star and Stripe show up when All Might and Gran Torino take Izuku to I-Island.
- Adaptational Job Change: Inko is here a lawyer that forms part of a firm quite famous for their cut-throat skill in bringing down pro heroes that commit crimes.
- Adaptational Nationality:
- Downplayed — Gran Torino descends from a Texan family that traveled to Japan in order to help stop Destro.
- Also, David Shield is mentioned to be of Irish descendance.
- Adaptational Superpower Change: Downplayed, but it's implied All Might can access the Quirks of the previous wielders, something that in canon didn't happen until months after Izuku received One for All.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Alpha Core A.I.s (the ones capable of actually having emotions instead of just faking them) are illegal because they always develop the dark triad and become full-blown psychopaths.
- Beyond the Impossible: When Nezu reads Izuku's plan on how he would take him down if he were a villain, he only needs to make a few corrections to make him realize it is so good he can't see a way through even at his highest level of High Specs.
- Cruel to Be Kind: It's implied Bakugo started his "discouraging" of Izuku trying to become a hero because he saw a Quirkless man being murdered by a villain after jumping in to save a little girl - and the news kept playing up the fact that the victim was Quirkless as the main reason he was dead.
- The Dreaded: Most heroes in All Might and Endeavor's generation still shake in fear whenever the name Gran Torino comes up. The idea of him teaming up with fellow dreaded Nezu to teach Izuku would be, according to the narration, enough to make them leave Japan in a hurry.
- "Eureka!" Moment: While trying to come up with a good hero name for himself, Izuku finds the sage herb, and as he goes over its meaning, he realizes the point Gran Torino has been trying to make — that he needs to be different from All Might, use his smarts, and, most importantly, work with people as a team rather than try to do everything on his own.
- Fantastic Ableism/Fantastic Racism: Discrimination against Quirkless people and people with mutant or "villainous" Quirks is given greater exposition in the story.
- The Gadfly: Gran Torino is this, much like in canon.
- Hypocritical Humor: When Melissa says that her achievements in creating two functional A.I.s is not that impressive, Izuku thinks that Melissa doesn't realize how amazing that is - when he might as well be the king of Self-Deprecation.
- Inciting Incident: Izuku asking All Might to teach him how to use One for All leads to Gran Torino helping out with Izuku's training pre-UA unlike in canon, where he doesn't appear until the Internship Arc.
- Insistent Terminology: All Might always refers to his former sidekick as "Nighteye", instead of Mirai. Gran Torino notes that it speaks volumes of how badly their fight must have gone.
- Lifesaving Misfortune: Izuku's Quirklessness may have caused him to be at the bad end of heavy discrimination, but it also made people that would have been all too happy to exploit his analytical skills for ill overlook him.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: How Nezu got rid of the lab personnel that experimented on him and of the assassins trying to kill him.And if nobody could ever prove that the tragic deaths of most of the lab personnel and several government sanctioned assassins were anything besides accidents, then that was entirely somebody else’s problem, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Nezu.
- Mundane Utility: One of the teachers at I-Academy has the ability to move and manipulate plastic, but only with the same strength it would take to do so with his hands. He uses it to become an amazing surgeon and to filter microplastics out of water and soil.
- Oh, Crap!: U.A.'s teachers' general reaction when Nezu states he intends to teach Sage.
- Psychological Projection: All Might tells Izuku that the reason he initially told Izuku to have "realistic dreams" was because he was seeing his young, Quirkless self in him, and so gave Izuku the answer he wished someone had given him at that age.
- Reassignment Backfire: Afraid of what Nezu could do with his super-intelligence Quirk, the Japanese government and the HPSC gave him a hero license and packed him off to become U.A.'s principal, expecting this to both distract him and limit his ability to cause trouble. Instead, Nezu was able to use his position to involve himself in the field of politics and power, something that made them regret their "brilliant" idea.
- Refuge in Audacity: Torino says he's intending to escalate things to Nezu when no agency or company working on analysis will bother to consider checking on Izuku's work. His idea: have Izuku write down an analysis on Nezu, along with an analysis on how to deal with Nezu if he were a villain, and send that to Nezu. All Might goes even more corpse-like than he normally is.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: During the Dawn of Quirks, a drug-trafficking cartel that had taken up to kidnapping and selling people with interesting Quirks attempted to kidnap a Texan kid with a powerful Playing with Fire Quirk, only for him and his entire family - who was well-beloved in the region - to die in the subsequent fighting. Thousands of people from not only Texas, but from outside the region, banded together and returned the favor by attacking Mexico City, butchering the traffickers and freeing all their captives before executing the druglord.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When Nezu details how he intends to make everyone watch Izuku's analysis of him, Recovery Girl just leaves. The only reasons the others don't follow are that (a) Recovery Girl is the only one that has tenure and (b) they are too afraid of what Nezu might do for not being there.
- Shipper on Deck: Torino decides to ship Izuku with Melissa Shield.
- Shout-Out:
- Izuku and Melissa play a game that mixes Alien and Dead Space.
- One of the companies preparing stuff for the next year's I-Expo is the Big Mountain Research and Development Center, or 'Big MT'.
- There's a large-sized arc reactor in I-Island, and one of Melissa's A.I.'s sounds British like J.A.R.V.I.S.
- So Proud of You: After Izuku speaks of what's in the Suicide Dare entry, All Might tells Izuku that he's proud of him for being a hero even in the worst day of his life.
- Stern Teacher: Back when he was an U.A. teacher, Torino was prone to use personalized punishments for his students, in order to break them out of their less heroic behaviors. While he never expelled anyone, he's the teacher with the most voluntary transfers out of U.A. in the history of the hero academy - with more transfers than everyone else combined.
- Suicide Dare: Izuku mentions how his classmates were leaving funeral flowers on his chair, as well as Bakugo's "swan dive" comment.
- Superhero Packing Heat: Torino mentions that, back when he was young, many heroes used weapons, and the only reason he didn't was because he couldn't aim at the speeds he usually flies off. He intends to teach Izuku to at least learn how to use them.
- Take That!: Torino's complaints on All Might's schedule are pretty much things that happened to Izuku in canon.
- Teen Genius: When Torino gets his hands on Izuku's hero analysis notebooks, he marks them as professional-level analysis. This is one of the reasons he decides to modify All Might's schedule, as he wants Izuku to become a true Genius Bruiser.
- When Izuku is taken off Aldera and put on an online homeschooling course, he blazes through six weeks' worth of schoolwork in a week.
- Ungrateful Bastard: As Izuku learns, the government of Japan chose to never acknowledge the work of the vigilantes that helped stop Destro's terror campaign in spite of how vital their effort was.
- Wham Shot: Torino's message to Izuku telling him to tell Melissa about One for All and how he's going to "inherit" it from All Might.
- What If?: Here, All Might already knows about how someone with two Quirks will die faster, which informed his different efforts in seeking a successor.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
- A recurring theme is people telling Izuku that he's much smarter than what he claims to be.
- When Melissa shows Izuku her smart matter gauntlet, Izuku tells her that the idea is amazing, because it would not only work as a universal armor system for heroes, it would also allow her to become a hero as well. Melissa breaks down crying as Izuku inadvertently becomes the first person to believe in her dream to become a hero.
